I never particularly enjoyed home improvement anyway.
Algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn have been developed.
“They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks — putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more — without pre-programmed details about its surroundings.”
“The key is that when a robot is faced with something new, we won’t have to reprogram it. The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it.”
In 807 the caliph in Baghdad sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popped out of small windows, rather like an Advent calendar
The on-going substantial improvements in the dexterity of the robots, the capabilities of the “tools” that are used to “grab” each case or item, and most importantly the great gains in the robotic control systems have solved nearly every operational problem
Amazon Warehouse Automation Challenge. As with everything, Amazon are cheapskates. The price money is just $25k, hardly appropriate for this. For how it is in those warehouses, check out fulfillment 2019-05-21: USPS Tests Self-Driving
For this pilot, the human driver will handle the truck on surface streets, but TuSimple is already looking to a second phase of the pilot, where the robot does all the work. Meanwhile, it’s 400-person team is working to expand the robot’s operating envelope. The system can handle high winds, night driving (handling high beams was a pain), and rain, while ice on the road remains “a nasty problem.” If it never succeeds, the postal service has a team of mules up for the task.
Suddenly the world has been thrust into a crisis with 3 interesting aspects:
A huge upswing in demand, and delivery companies are falling way behind.
A sudden desire to not have a delivery driver touch packages, and drivers don’t want to interact with people.
The roads in some areas have become almost deserted due to lockdowns.
What a glorious opportunity this could have been for the road based delivery vehicles. While they have not yet reached the safety level needed to do full time operations with no human on board in regular traffic, it’s quite possible that they can do it on mostly deserted streets. Particularly if low speed operations can be tolerated on those streets. However, even if that’s true, since nobody anticipated this, nobody has worked to build proof of that level of safety.
The ability to deliver anything in an Amazon warehouse on short notice will be a very attractive product. The cost of robot delivery will be low enough to be bundled in with Amazon Prime. If you can get anything in one of those giant Amazon warehouses in 30 minutes, that’s scary news for the rest of retail.
this is interesting from a design perspective: what assumptions are no longer true and can be revised for a better experience? Passengers face one another, allowing for a more social experience. The interior is spartan, not the overcrowded complex dashboard of current cars and some robotaxi designs. Just a small display and charging port. The seats mix taxi goals (ease of cleaning and able to handle heavy use) with car design. The electric vehicle design allows a low center of gravity, and combined with wheels moved to the corners of the vehicle, a more flexible interior design with more space for the same footprint. Each wheel can also turn independently, allowing for an 8.6m turning radius. In many cases, it will not turn at all, when it wants to change direction of travel, it just changes. The vehicle is narrow and short enough, given that, to handle streets and driveways that might be a challenge for wider vehicles. Airbags are integrated into the special seats and their enclosing walls for extra crash safety.
Outside of London is a massive supermarket—one that customers cannot enter. Instead it’s dedicated to fulfilling online orders. It’s filled with an upper-level cartesian grid swarming with over 2000 wheeled robots that zoom around in the X- and Y-axes. Beneath the robots’ wheels, each square of the grid is filled with up to 21 milk crates loaded with grocery products. The ‘bots can suck these bins up through their bottoms, then zip them over to the periphery, where additional sorting ‘bots pick-and-package them.
Last week, the California DMV granted us our permit to operate our robotaxi autonomously on public roads. This weekend, we hit the road! It marked the first time in history that a purpose-built robotaxi—with no manual controls—drove autonomously on open public roads with passengers.
In 2006, DARPA studied cockroaches as a robotics platform. They soon learned that cockroaches have a mind of their own, and will ignore implanted directions (via electrical stimuli) after ~30min. this makes them unsuitable for spy missions, but it triggered interest in the neurobiology community as a new model organism.
Cockroaches have a simple body plan, and have their processing spread around the body. With some basic surgery, a cockroach can be turned into a robot by attaching the antenna to current, you can make a cockroach go left/right
The first workshop for building your own cyborg was this weekend. my specimen didn’t pass final QC because i didn’t secure the antenna cables securely enough, and the cockroach disconnected 😦
“In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic”—as well as in the cracks of otherwise inaccessible archaeological sites. We need to send machines capable of not exactly of replication, but something more like budding or fruiting, using 3D printers. Imagine a robot being sent into “the wreckage of a nuclear power plant,” for example, where it encounters a stairway it had not been anticipating needing to climb. For the moment, it’s stuck. So what does it do? “The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 