Respect where respect is due: we humans may be mighty, but there’s still a foe that regularly dodges our best efforts to kill it: the fruit fly. Over millennia of evolution, fruit flies have adapted to burn their pursuers with enviable agility. Now researchers have built a robotic doppelganger that can twist and bank with astonishing speed. With two pairs of wings beating 17 times a second, it has a wingspan of over a foot and weighs just an ounce. Called DelFly, it can hit speeds of 15 miles an hour and switch directions in an instant, just like the real thing. This new robot could be a boon both for the understanding of the dynamics of insect flight, and for developing flying machines unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Like a real fruit fly, DelFly lacks a tail, which aircraft rely on for stability when cutting through the air. The downside, though, is that a tail compromises maneuverability, by introducing a lot of drag if you’re banking and the air is no … [Read more...] about A New Robotic Fly Dips and Dives Like the Real Thing
New robots
Robots recreating anatomy: Tennova showcases new robotic joint replacement technology
Gallery: Robots recreating anatomy: Tennova showcases new robotic joint replacement technology +3 more photos CLEVELAND, Tenn. — Half a millimeter can make or break a successful joint replacement. "When something doesn't fit perfectly, it doesn't feel right," said Dr. Lee Radford, an orthopedic surgeon at Tennessee Valley Bone and Joint. Radford said he became fascinated with total joint reconstructions during his residency, completing a one-year fellowship and mastering the robotic-assisted surgical approach for knee and hip replacements. So when he came to the region, he pushed to bring that same technology to Tennova Healthcare-Cleveland. "I get a CT scan ahead of time, which allows me to custom fit the components to the actual patient's anatomy, as opposed to putting them in the way that we conventionally did, which is cutting on averages," Radford said. "The idea is that we can recreate the anatomy to give you a better-fitting, better-feeling knee or hip replacement." … [Read more...] about Robots recreating anatomy: Tennova showcases new robotic joint replacement technology
Zume Pizza adds new robot pizzaolo (and human president)
California-based Zume Pizza, which is on a mission to combine craft pizza making with automation and big data, just announced the addition of a smart new pizza-making robot named Vincenzo.The tech upgrade comes on the heels of Zume's nearly $50 million in venture backing last year. With that kind of cheese, the company appears well-positioned to take a slice of the $33 billion U.S. quick-serve pizza market.In addition to announcing the new robot, Zume also named a new president, Rhonda Lesinski-Woolf, a Harvard MBA who cut her teeth at Del Monte Foods.Vincenzo is actually a robotic arm from ABB with some pizza-specific training. The robot monitors pizzas in Zume's 800-degrees ovens and determines when the crust "hits peak par bake perfection."Utilizing its six-axis mobility, the robot then removes the pizzas and indexes them in a 27-shelf pie wrack, which is loaded onto a delivery vehicle. Zume's predictive analytics tell the robot how to optimally array each pizza based on the … [Read more...] about Zume Pizza adds new robot pizzaolo (and human president)
Lost in Space’s fancy new robot looks like a heavy metal Demogorgon
The most iconic character from the 1960s TV series Lost in Space wasn’t any of the humans on board the Robinson family spacecraft, but rather the talking robot that would famously yell “Danger, Will Robinson!” whenever Will Robinson was in, uh, danger. But while the classic iteration kind of looked like a space trash can, Netflix’s new TV series reboot has decided to go with something a bit more humanoid. The latest trailer for the upcoming show does feature the bot’s classic line, but when it’s delivered, it actually comes as a bit of a shock. Oh, that’s the robot? Okay, cool. The massive monstrosity sort of looks like the monster from Stranger Things mixed with cover art for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Netflix announced it would reboot Lost in Space in 2016. The original show aired on CBS from 1965 to 1968, following the Robinson family and their misadventures in space across 83 episodes. An attempt at reimagining the show as a movie franchise … [Read more...] about Lost in Space’s fancy new robot looks like a heavy metal Demogorgon
DeepMind’s new robots learned how to teach themselves
The minute hand on the robot apocalypse clock just inched a little closer to midnight. DeepMind, the Google sister-company responsible for the smartest AI on the planet, just taught machines how to figure things out for themselves. Robots aren’t very good at exploring on their own. AI that only exists to parse data, such as neural networks that decide whether something is a hotdog or not, have relatively little to concentrate on compared to the near-infinite number of things a physical robot has to figure out. To solve this problem DeepMind built a new learning paradigm for AI-powered robots called ‘Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X).’ This new paradigm gives robots a simple goal like ‘clean up this playground’ and rewards it for completion. According to a DeepMind blog post: The auxiliary tasks we define follow a general principle: they encourage the agent to explore its sensor space. For example, activating a touch sensor in its fingers, sensing a force … [Read more...] about DeepMind’s new robots learned how to teach themselves