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)
New robots
New robots reduce human error in life science labs
Andrew Alliance, a Swiss company that makes liquid-handling robots for life sciences labs, just closed a $14 million C-round. It's the latest evidence of a relatively new trend toward automation in the hard sciences, which have been slower than many other industries to embrace automation technology.That may seem odd. Laboratories are high tech places, after all, and in an era when burger joints and construction sites are embracing robots, it seems obvious that lab managers would be ahead of the curve.But labs tend to be governed by a difficult combination of intense regulation, budget constraints, and longstanding tradition, all of which have forestalled the forward march of automation. With a ready supply of grad students and interns willing to work impossible hours for little or no pay, there hasn't been a compelling labor argument for additional automation in many academic settings, where future scientists and researchers learn the ropes. And because labs often fall under the … [Read more...] about New robots reduce human error in life science labs
Meet Smithsonian’s new robot docent
Why bother with a human docent when a robot could give you a guided tour? Last week, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, revealed its new employee -- an interactive robot named Pepper.The four-foot-tall humanoid robot was created by Softbank who donated 30 robots to the museum last year. "By interacting with museum visitors and providing insight on different exhibits, Pepper will help guide their educational experience through the Smithsonian that they otherwise might have missed out on," Steve Carlin, chief strategy officer of Softbank Robotics, said in a statement on April 24.Pepper is programmed to answer commonly asked questions and tell stories. The robot can react and make gestures, and is equipped with an interactive touch screen. To entertain museum visitors, Pepper often dances and poses for selfies, which will undoubtably attract a crowd."We're eager to experiment with how Pepper can help us support docents and educators in the vital work they do while … [Read more...] about Meet Smithsonian’s new robot docent
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