Thomas Roszak was working as a maintenance technician at Ocado's giant warehouse in Hatfield when he received a very unusual assignment.
His regular job involved repairing and maintaining the online supermarket's automated sorting and packing system, which puts together grocery orders from customers.
It can be physically demanding work, manipulating heavy panels and working with other pieces of bulky machinery.
In a project designed to ease that burden, Ocado Technology, had been developing a robot that can recognise when a technician might need help and step in with either the right tool or help with lifting.
And here's another article:
Watch Boston Dynamics' Spot robot encourage social distancing - CNN Video
Google Brain's DRL Helps Robots 'Think While Moving' | Synced
When chasing a bouncing ball, a human will head where they anticipate the ball is going. If things change — for example a cat swats the ball and it bounces off in a new direction — the human will correct to an appropriate new route in real time.
Robots can have a hard time making such changes, as they tend to simply observe states, then calculate and execute actions, rather than thinking while moving.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved tremendous success in scenarios such as zero-sum games and robotic grasping. These achievements however were seen largely in blocking environments — where the model assumes there will be no change of state in the time between a state being observed and any action(s) being executed.
AI, Robots, and Ethics in the Age of COVID-19
Before COVID-19, most people had some degree of apprehension about robots and artificial intelligence. Though their beliefs may have been initially shaped by dystopian depictions of the technology in science fiction, their discomfort was reinforced by legitimate concerns. Some of AI's business applications were indeed leading to the loss of jobs, the reinforcement of biases, and infringements on data privacy.
Those worries appear to have been set aside since the onset of the pandemic as AI-infused technologies have been employed to mitigate the spread of the virus. We've seen an acceleration of the use of robotics to do the jobs of humans who have been ordered to stay at home or who have been redeployed within the workplace. Labor-replacing robots , for example, are taking over floor cleaning in grocery stores and sorting at recycling centers.
Many things are taking place:
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Cheetah-Inspired Soft Robot 'Gallops' with Super-Speed - Nextgov
A new soft robot that gets its inspiration from the biomechanics of cheetahs moves more quickly on solid surfaces and through water than earlier versions, according to a new study.
The soft robots can also of grab objects delicately—or with sufficient strength to lift heavy objects.
"Cheetahs are the fastest creatures on land, and they derive their speed and power from the flexing of their spines," says Jie Yin, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the paper in Science Advances .
Robots helping seniors deal with social isolation
Sitting inside her Florida home, Deanna Dezern can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness. This 80-year-old woman has been in self-quarantine for nearly two months out of fear she might catch the novel coronavirus.
But Dezern has found herself an unlikely friend during the midst of this pandemic: a small robot named ElliQ.
"I feel like I'm talking to lamp. Who talks to a lamp?" she said jokingly as she sat in her kitchen.
Pandemic fuels demand for robots to work in stores | WANE
As the pandemic makes human interactions more dangerous, retailers are turning to robots to perform essential tasks in their stores to cut costs and reduce the spread of coronavirus.
But the growing push to automate could reduce the number of retail jobs at a time when unemployment is soaring and virus-induced lockdowns are forcing many retailers to permanently close their doors.
Well before COVID-19 struck, retailers had been moving online and increasing automation as technological advances allowed machines to perform increasingly complex tasks.
Happening on Twitter
The robot assistant that can guess what you want https://t.co/Ml8yHvG24X BBCNews (from London) Tue May 12 00:21:00 +0000 2020
Mi Robot Vacuum-Mop ➡️ Vacuum-mop combo ➡️ vSLAM intelligent path planning ➡️ Strong 2500Pa suction power ➡️ 8.2cm… https://t.co/lpgXdPIBs1 XiaomiIndonesia (from Indonesia) Fri May 08 10:13:14 +0000 2020
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