Robots

We usually associate robots with modern western technology. Similarly, many readers of science fiction believe that sci-fi stories featuring androids only took off in the mid-twentieth century after Asimov’s I, Robot. They would be surprised to know that ancient India had a rich literature featuring stories about robots. In fact, there were enough of these stories that according to Signe Cohen, the “robot tale” forms a genre of its own in ancient Indian literature. These stories were in Sanskrit. Many were translated…

Human skin is soft and stretchy and has millions of nerve endings that sense heat and touch. This makes it a superb instrument for detecting and responding to the outside world. Engineers have been working to reproduce these abilities in a synthetic version for the past 40 years, but such attempts have always fallen fall short of the versatility and adaptability of living skin. Now, however, new research is adding more abilities and complexities to bring this field closer to its ultimate goal: an electronic skin, or…

Robots, like humans, are unable to see through obstacles. Sometimes they need a little help to get where they’re going Robots cannot see past barriers, much like humans. To reach where they’re going, they occasionally require a little assistance. Rice University engineers have created a technique that enables people to assist robots in “seeing” their surroundings and doing jobs. A unique approach to the age-old issue of motion planning for robots operating in surroundings where not…

Subsurface oceans on gas giant moons are some of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth. NASA has now awarded funding for a project to develop a swarm of small swimming robots that would explore these alien oceans for signs of extraterrestrial life.Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are basically big icy balls, with global oceans underneath a thick frozen outer shell. Scientists have long hypothesized that conditions in those waters could be prime candidates for harboring alien life, with…

According to a NASA proposal, swarms of tiny swimming robots could search for alien life on other worlds, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.<span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Automation enhances industry, but it's harmful to the mental health of its human co-workers. A University of Pittsburgh study suggests that while…

NASA is working to develop a swarm of cell-phone-sized swimming robots in a bid to bolster its exploration and dig deeper for signs of life on distant planets. These Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) robots are being designed with the ability to swim in oceans covered in thick layers of ice, while looking for evidence of life. SWIM relies on miniaturised robotics and is the brainchild of robotics mechanical engineer Ethan Schaler from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.  “My idea…

Sales of workplace robots worldwide are growing steadily after a recent slowdown in growth due to the pandemic, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics, an industry group. Sales of “collaborative robots,” meaning robots that work in the same physical space as humans without necessarily assisting them directly, grew 6 percent worldwide in 2020, compared with 0.5 percent for all industrial robots over the same period.Last week Amazon unveiled a new mobile robot, called Proteus, that has its own…

But GPT-3 suffers from several problems that researchers are working to address. It’s often inconsistent—you can get contradictory answers to the same question. Second, GPT-3 is prone to “hallucinations”: when asked who the president of the United States was in 1492, it will happily conjure up an answer. Third, GPT-3 is an expensive model to train and expensive to run. Fourth, GPT-3 is opaque—it’s difficult to understand why it drew a particular conclusion. Finally, since GPT-3 parrots the contents of its training data,…

For years, computer scientists have warned of the perils artificial intelligence (AI) poses in the future, and not just in the sensational terms of machines overthrowing humanity, but in far more insidious ways too.  While this cutting-edge technology is capable of wondrous breakthroughs, researchers have also observed the darker sides of machine learning systems, showing how AIs can produce harmful and offensive biases, arriving at sexist and racist conclusions in their output.These risks are not just theoretical. In a…