Lifeboat Foundation

Power sensors for distribution networks have inspired a $77-million DARPA program to build a suite of automated cyberdefenses for power grids.

Who knew; maybe the answer was in the shoes.

A slick walking gait makes the DURUS humanoid robot even more efficient.

Continue reading “DURUS Brings Human-Like Gait (and Fancy Shoes) to Hyper-Efficient Robots” »

PARC is a Xerox company that has received funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program.

The ICARUS program aims at creating a prototype air vehicle that has the potential to deliver small payloads in an autonomous manner to targeted locations and then disappears after the task it completed. PARC in cooperation with AeroVironment Inc. plans to produce particular materials and the air delivery system that can be made to disappear through a project within ICARUS that is referred to as On-Target Delivery and Disintegration Upon Stress-release Trigger (ONLY-DUST).

The project focuses on producing complex structures that are majorly firm during flight and storage, and at the same time permits reliable on-demand transience. It is possible to potentially scale up the DoD applications of the demonstration system because of its association with AeroVironment Inc., a leading company in unmanned, small aerial vehicles.

There are three buckets.

There are three buckets of jobs right now, and each one will be affected by artificial intelligence. So says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and a director with Starbucks, during a conversation on Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Colorado.

The first bucket, Shih says, are the jobs that almost certainly will disappear as AI and machine learning technologies continue to evolve and become more prevalent. This includes things like drivers (thanks to autonomous vehicles), lower-skilled manufacturing jobs (humans out, robots in), and certain research functions (paralegals, etc.).

By the 2020s, he tells Playboy, he expects medical technology to be at a point where nanobots will help out our immune system.

Prepare for a brave new world of hot robot love.

Nice chime on QC.

Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs’ Fund IV (TEF), a $100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space.

Saxena is also the chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio branch and Chairman, SparkCognition an Austin based cognitive security and safety analytics company.

Continue reading “Manoj Saxena talks Artificial Intelligence with Gigaom” »

Using pneumatic pistons and servos to power robots makes them fast and strong, but also bulky and extremely heavy. No one is going to mistake ATLAS for a real human being. To eventually create humanoid-looking robots like the Terminator we need to mechanically replicate every part of the human anatomy—starting with the muscles.

Researchers at the Suzumori Endo Robotics Laboratory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology started with an artificial human skeleton that was then covered in bundles of multifilament artificial muscles. Like real human muscles, the multifilament bundles contract and expand when an electrical current is applied, and by controlling different groups of these muscles at different times, the skeleton’s arms, legs, and head can all be made to move similar to how a real human can.

Continue reading “The Freaky Artificial Muscles on this Human Skeleton Are the Future of Robotics” »

Scientists genetically engineered and 3D-printed a biohybrid being, opening the door further for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence.

By Lisa Calhoun