It looks like a telescoping grabber tool attached to a hat stand, but it could be the future of home robotics. Meet Stretch, the first device from Hello Robot, a startup founded by former Google director of robotics Aaron Edsinger and Georgia Tech robotics professor Charlie Kemp, that came out of stealth today after three years in development.
Stretch is not a consumer robot that's ready to roll into your apartment and start doing the dishes, but rather a research platform that Edsinger and Kemp hope will lay the groundwork for home automation in the years to come.
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Amazon fulfillment center features robots working alongside employees | Fox Business
Amazon announced plans Wednesday to open a new fulfillment center in Pflugerville, Texas, where some employees will work alongside robots .
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The retail giant is expected to launch the new 820,000-square-foot site in 2021 and bring more than 1,000 jobs with a starting wage of $15 an hour to the area, according to a press release.
"We’re appreciative of the people of Texas for so warmly embracing Amazon into the community," Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s vice president of global customer fulfillment, said in a Wednesday statement.
GoPro for Beetles: Robotic Camera Backpack Developed for Insects and Tiny Robots
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a tiny camera that can ride aboard an insect. Here a Pinacate beetle explores the UW campus with the camera on its back. Credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington
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Typical small cameras, such as those used in smartphones, use a lot of power to capture wide-angle, high-resolution photos, and that doesn’t work at the insect scale. While the cameras themselves are lightweight, the batteries they need to support them make the overall system too big and heavy for insects — or insect-sized robots — to lug around. So the team took a lesson from biology.
"Alexa, go to the kitchen and fetch me a snack" | MIT News
MIT researchers have developed a representation of spatial perception for robots that is modeled after the way humans perceive and navigate the world. The key component of the team's new model is Kimera, an open-source library that the team previously developed to simultaneously construct a 3D geometric model of an environment. Kimera builds a dense 3D semantic mesh of an environment and can track humans in the environment.
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A 3D dynamic scene graph of an office environment. The nodes in the graph represent entities in the environment (humans, objects, rooms, structures) while edges represent relations between entities.
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NUS researchers gives robots intelligent sensing abilities to carry out complex tasks |
VIDEO: This novel system developed by computer scientists and materials engineers from the National University of Singapore combines an artificial brain system with human-like electronic skin, and vision sensors, to make... view more
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Picking up a can of soft drink may be a simple task for humans, but this is a complex task for robots - it has to locate the object, deduce its shape, determine the right amount of strength to use, and grasp the object without letting it slip. Most of today's robots operate solely based on visual processing, which limits their capabilities.
Dubai Health Authority deploys robots to disinfect facilities | Healthcare IT News
The robots – created by the Danish company, UVD Robots – are part of the emirate's drive to use smart technology, where possible, in the disinfection process in order for it to be "thorough, efficient and less time-consuming".
The sterilisation process coincides with the return of DHA's regular diagnostic and therapeutic services for patients.
Project manager, Kholoud Abdullah Al Ali, who is leader of DHA's Dubai Future Accelerators team, said that the robots use ultraviolet-powered sterilisation whilst scanning all rooms and corridors in its facilities. Each robot can complete "exhaustive" sterilisation of a room within 10 to 15 minutes, she added.
Should Robots Pay Taxes? | PCMag
COVID-19 means the US delayed this year's federal tax deadline to July 15; if you've procrastinated, it's time to get to it . But while tax collectors will only accept payment from humans in 2020, will we soon be sending tax bills to robots, too?
That's the question posed by Jordan Harrod , a medical engineering and neurobiology PhD student at Harvard by day and YouTube creator by night. On her channel, she digs into geeky topics like whether it's possible to make artificial intelligence speak and the aforementioned android taxation.
Japanese robot to clock in at a convenience store in test of retail automation | News | 1450
TOKYO (Reuters) - In August, a robot vaguely resembling a kangaroo will begin stacking sandwiches, drinks and ready meals on shelves at a Japanese convenience store in a test its maker, Telexistence, hopes will help trigger a wave of retail automation.
Following that trial, store operator FamilyMart <8028.T> says it plans to use robot workers at 20 stores around Tokyo by 2022. At first, people will operate them remotely - until the machines' artificial intelligence (AI) can learn to mimic human movements. Rival convenience store chain Lawson <2651.T> is deploying its first robot in September, according to Telexistence.
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