Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley has found a way to get a robot to mimic an activity it sees on a video screen just a single time. In a paper they have uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, the team describes the approach they used and how it works.

Robots that learn to do things simply by watching a human carry out an action a single time would be capable of learning many more new actions much more quickly than is now possible. Scientists have been working hard to figure out how to make it happen.

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The 90-pound mechanical beast — about the size of a full-grown Labrador — is intentionally designed to do all this without relying on cameras or any external environmental sensors. Instead, it nimbly “feels” its way through its surroundings in a way that engineers describe as “blind locomotion,” much like making one’s way across a pitch-black room.

“There are many unexpected behaviors the robot should be able to handle without relying too much on vision,” says the robot’s designer, Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Vision can be noisy, slightly inaccurate, and sometimes not available, and if you rely too much on vision, your robot has to be very accurate in position and eventually will be slow. So we want the robot to rely more on tactile information. That way, it can handle unexpected obstacles while moving fast.”

Researchers will present the robot’s vision-free capabilities in October at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots, in Madrid. In addition to blind locomotion, the team will demonstrate the robot’s improved hardware, including an expanded range of motion compared to its predecessor Cheetah 2, that allows the robot to stretch backwards and forwards, and twist from side to side, much like a cat limbering up to pounce.

The concept of an invisibility cloak sounds like pure science fiction, but hiding something from view is theoretically possible, and in some very-controlled cases it’s experimentally possible too. Now, researchers have developed a new device that works in a completely different way to existing cloaking technology, neatly sidestepping some past issues and potentially helping to hide everyday objects under everyday conditions.

We see objects because light bounces off them in a particular way before landing on your retinas, and they get their colors by reflecting more light of that particular color. The basic concept of cloaking objects involves finding ways to disrupt that process and build them into devices or metamaterials.

Marvin Minsky was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence and co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory.

Abstract for scientists

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Bottom of the barrel white collar jobs will all probably be automated by 2025.

When Google introduced Google Duplex, its AI assistant designed to speak like a human, the company showed off how the average person could use the tech to save time making reservations and whatnot. What wasn’t touched on was the possibility that Duplex may have a use on the other side of the line, taking over for call center employees and telemarketers.

A report from The Information suggests Google may be making a play to find other applications for its human-sounding assistant and has already started experimenting with ways to use Duplex to do with away roles currently filled by humans—a move that could have ramifications for millions of people.

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Preparations are underway for first-ever trip to the Sun, a new resupply mission arrives at the International Space Station, and our Dawn spacecraft captures close-up photos of dwarf planet Ceres — these a few of the stories to tell you about This Week at NASA!

https://wisechase.tv/the-bugs-that-reverse-damage/

German automaker Daimler is the 1st foreign company licensed to test its autonomous vehicles in Beijing.

July 6 (UPI) — German automaker Daimler is the first foreign company licensed to test its autonomous vehicles in Beijing, the company announced on Friday.

With the certification, the maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles can begin road tests of self-driving cars in Beijing, “a metropolis with unique and complex urban traffic situations,” a company statement said.

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