The UN holds a robot press conference about the state of AI

The AI for Good global summit hosted by the U.N. tech agency invited a panel of robots and their creators to a press conference to answer questions from reporters.

At the AI for Good 2023 global summit, a panel of robots and their creators sat in front of the press to answer journalists’ questions on topics such as job automation, artificial intelligence (AI) leadership and collaboration with humans for a better future.

… Altogether nine robots were in attendance, including Sophia, who serves as the U.N. Development Program’s first robot innovation ambassador, a robot healthcare service provider named Grace and a rock star robot called Desdemona. — Read More

#robotics

Robots learn to perform chores by watching YouTube

Learning has been a holy grail in robotics for decades. If these systems are going to thrive in unpredictable environments, they’ll need to do more than just respond to programming — they’ll need to adapt and learn. What’s become clear the more I read and speak with experts is true robotic learning will require a combination of many solutions.

Video is an intriguing solution that’s been the centerpiece of a lot of recent work in the space. Roughly this time last year, we highlighted WHIRL (in-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning), a CMU-developed algorithm designed to train robotic systems by watching a recording of a human executing a task.

This week, CMU Robotics Institute assistant professor Deepak Pathak is showcasing VRB (Vision-Robotics Bridge), an evolution to WHIRL. — Read More

#observational-learning, #robotics

Air Force colonel backtracks over his warning about how AI could go rogue and kill its human operators

… An Air Force colonel who oversees AI testing used what he now says is a hypothetical to describe a military AI going rogue and killing its human operator in a simulation in a presentation at a professional conference.

But after reports of the talk emerged Thursday, the colonel said that he misspoke and that the “simulation” he described was a “thought experiment” that never happened. — Read More

#dod, #robotics

Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Soccer players can tackle, get up, kick and chase a ball in one seamless motion. How could robots master these agile motor skills?

We investigated the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) for low-cost, miniature humanoid hardware in a dynamic environment, showing the method can synthesize sophisticated and safe movement skills making up complex behavioral strategies in a simplified one-versus-one (1v1) soccer game.  Read More

#reinforcement-learning, #robotics

The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.

Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.

The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a “robot.” Read More

#robotics

Oh Great, They Put ChatGPT into a Boston Dynamics Robot Dog

“IT HAS AI NOW.”

As if robotic dogs weren’t creepy enough.

A team of programmers just equipped a Boston Dynamics robot dog with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Text-to-Speech voice modulation, allowing it to literally speak to them and answer their questions. Read More

#robotics

Google goes beyond ChatGPT and shocks the world

The new age of robots is upon us

It turns out, one of the most-coveted questions in AI has recently been answered.

Imagine an AI tool that is capable of playing hundreds of video games at a supreme level. And I’m not referring to a robot trained to be great at chess, or at checkers, or League of Legends.

I’m talking about a robot that’s amazing at all of them. Read More

#reinforcement-learning, #robotics

ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities

This paper presents an experimental study regarding the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT [1] for robotics applications. We outline a strategy that combines design principles for prompt engineering and the creation of a high-level function library which allows ChatGPT to adapt to different robotics tasks, simulators, and form factors. We focus our evaluations on the effectiveness of different prompt engineering techniques and dialog strategies towards the execution of various types of robotics tasks. We explore ChatGPT’s ability to use free-form dialog, parse XML tags, and to synthesize code, in addition to the use of task-specific prompting functions and closed-loop reasoning through dialogues. Our study encompasses a range of tasks within the robotics domain, from basic logical, geometrical, and mathematical reasoning all the way to complex domains such as aerial navigation, manipulation, and embodied agents. We show that ChatGPT can be effective at solving several of such tasks, while allowing users to interact with it primarily via natural language instructions. In addition to these studies, we introduce an open-sourced research tool called PromptCraft, which contains a platform where researchers can collaboratively upload and vote on examples of good prompting schemes for robotics applications, as well as a sample robotics simulator with ChatGPT integration, making it easier for users to get started with using ChatGPT for robotics. Read More

#chatbots, #robotics

NASA Turns to AI to Design Mission Hardware

Spacecraft and mission hardware designed by an artificial intelligence may resemble bones left by some alien species, but they weigh less, tolerate higher structural loads, and require a fraction of the time parts designed by humans take to develop.

“They look somewhat alien and weird,” Research Engineer Ryan McClelland said, “but once you see them in function, it really makes sense.”

McClelland pioneered the design of specialized, one-off parts using commercially available AI software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, producing hardware he has dubbed evolved structures. Read More

#robotics

Stunning AI Robot Shows How It Will Replace Humans

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#robotics, #videos