The world’s most successful home robot, the Roomba, is getting some new skills. The robotic vacuum cleaner is gaining a camera and image-processing software that will let it find its way around an area as it cleans.
Up until now, the device from iRobot has relied on a rather simple approach to navigation. It moved more or less randomly, using sensors to change direction whenever faced with an obstacle or the top of a set of steps. This gets the job done, but it’s hardly very efficient or intelligent.
Los robots están dando un impulso a la productividad en todas las fábricas del mundo. ¿Significa esto menos puestos de trabajo para los seres humanos?
Distintos países están adoptando los robots a diferentes velocidades; parte del más rápido crecimiento se da en Asia, particularmente en China. Pero si los robots son los autómatas que acaban con los empleos, cómo los caracterizan algunos, uno debería estar viendo máquinas por todas partes y una mayor pérdida de puestos de trabajo. Pero no es así de simple.
Elon Musk has been fairly outspoken about the rise of AI and robots, and their potential negative impact on humans. Last year he said:
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.”
AI takes many shapes, and often is only embodied in lines of code running complex machine- and deep-learning software. But in the popular imagination, the threat from AI comes from humanoid machines, i.e. robots, which use their machine strength (and software-powered artificial intelligence) to subjugate their former overlords.
If you’ve ever needed to know how to tie a bowtie or fix a strawberry daiquiri, you likely ended up on a website like WikiHow for step-by-step instructions. Surprisingly, some robots are now doing the same.
The future of free-wheeling automated yard work took a step closer to American consumers on Wednesday after U.S. regulators gave robot maker iRobot technical clearance to make and sell a robotic lawn mower.
The Bedford, Massachusetts-based company, known for its robot vacuum cleaner Roomba, has designed a robot lawn mower that would wirelessly connect with stakes in the ground operating as signal beacons, rising above the ground by as much as 24 inches (61 cm).
Automated grass-mowers have spread across Europe in recent years. In the United States, iRobot told the FCC its competitors only offer hands-free mowers that require underground fences or other elaborate setups.
Roomba has a new friend. Researchers have developed a robot that can help clean the kitchen.
In a paper presented at Robotics Science and Systems in Milan in July, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe how they taught a Kinova Mico robot arm to help people do the dishes. The key, apparently, is slowing down and letting human team members take charge. “We want robots to follow our lead, or at least plan their actions with an awareness of ours,” says Bilge Mutlu, associate professor of computer science, psychology, and industrial engineering and an author of the paper.
One of the more fascinating sights of an autumn evening is the flocking behaviour of starlings as they lurch and swoop in extraordinary demonstrations of aerodynamic synchronisation.
It turns out that these complex displays come about as a result of a simple set of rules that govern how the birds fly relatively to each other. Indeed, this flocking has been relatively straightforward to simulate on computer for many years.
But it has never been repeated with flying robots or ground-based ones for that matter, for two reasons. First because nobody has built robots with the same agility and speed. But even with less agile robots, the task is tricky because of the second reason: there is no easy way to control such a flock.
If you visit Softbank’s flagship store in downtown Tokyo, you may be greeted by a charming, slightly manic new member of the staff: a gleaming white humanoid robot that gestures dramatically, cracks odd jokes, and occasionally breaks out dancing to music emanating from its own body. If you laugh at these antics, and the robot can see your face, it will quite likely giggle along with you.
Robotic surgeons were involved in the deaths of 144 people between 2000 and 2013, according to records kept by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And some forms of robotic surgery are much riskier than others: the death rate for head, neck, and cardiothoracic surgery is almost 10 times higher than for other forms of surgery.
Robotic surgery has increased dramatically in recent years. Between 2007 and 2013, patients underwent more than 1.7 million robotic procedures in the U.S., the vast majority of them performed in gynecology and urology. “Yet no comprehensive study of the safety and reliability of surgical robots has been performed,” say Jai Raman at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and a few pals.
There are a growing number of multi-function robots on crowdfunding sites. While some, such as JIBO, may strike consumers as too robotic to warm up to, others, like the Personal Robot, may be rejected as too creepy because of their attempts to seem human.
