Spot, Boston Dynamics’ famous robot dog, dutifully follows my every command. The machine traipses forward, then automatically scrambles over a raised bed of rocks. I make it side-step. I command it up a flight of stairs, which it tackles with ease. It meets its match when I steer it at a medicine ball, though; it […]
In order to understand how a gait looks, though, the robot needs objective data, not subjective judgements. So the researchers used algorithms that analyzed videos of the people walking, with each person’s image overlaid by a skeleton with 16 joints, including at the neck, shoulders, and knees. Then, they used deep learning algorithms to get […]
Read MoreRobots are well-suited for the kinds of repetitive skill-building activities that would quickly wear down a human teacher. They can’t totally replace human interaction (yet), but they may be able to augment it. “There’s evidence to support the idea that social robots can help with skill development in children,” says Kate Darling, a research specialist […]
Read MoreIf the age of the coronavirus is anything, it’s surreal. And one of the most surreal things yet is happening at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where help has arrived not from extra human medical professionals, but in the form of famous Boston Dynamics robot dog Spot, now traipsing around with a tablet […]
Read MoreWhat you see when Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot does a backflip or its Spot dog robot fights off a human and opens a door is incredible hardware engineering, to be sure. But what you don’t see is the wildly complex underlying code that makes it possible. What comes so easily to you—OK maybe not backflips, […]
Read MoreModern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. In the United States, where consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, commerce has come to a standstill as people […]
Read MoreIn their experiments with Hamilton and three other subjects, the team found that after doing the grafts, the nerves that control the thumb interacted with this new muscle just as they would if the person still had their thumb. “We know the intent—in that case, to flex the thumb—just like the nerve and muscle interacted […]
Read More“Extracting information out of those 1,000 signals in an analytical way—it’s very, very hard to do,” says Ciocarlie, who developed the system. “I would venture to say that it’s impossible without modern machine learning.” Courtesy of Columbia University Machine learning comes into play when they’re calibrating the system. They can stick the finger on a […]
Read MoreHyundai is solving and robots are evolving, but first: a cartoon about parental phone tracking. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Spot the robot dog trots into the big, bad world You’ve probably […]
Read MoreThis autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least. BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know […]
Read MoreUnder the watchful eye of a microscope, busy little blobs scoot around in a field of liquid—moving forward, turning around, sometimes spinning in circles. Drop cellular debris onto the plain and the blobs will herd them into piles. Flick any blob onto its back and it’ll lie there like a flipped-over turtle. Their behavior is […]
Read MoreHuman babies don’t seem to make a good amount of sense, evolutionarily speaking. They’re helpless for many years, and not particularly helpful either—they can’t pitch in around the house or get a job. But in reality, these formative years are critical for training nature’s most remarkable brain: With the simple act of play, children explore […]
Read MoreIt’s become a veritable rite of passage for humans settling into their first apartments: Assemble a piece of Ikea furniture from a cryptic set of pictures without having either you, or the item in question, fall apart. What better way, thought researchers at the University of Southern California, to torture teach robots to manipulate the […]
Read MoreWhen humans and robots cross paths, the results aren’t just frustrating—the autonomous car, say, that’s too shy to turn left—they can also be fatal. Consider last year’s Uber crash, in which the self-driving algorithms weren’t coded to yield to an unexpected human jaywalker. At the WIRED25 conference Friday, Anca Dragan, a professor who studies human-robot […]
Read MoreIn what will go down as one of the greatest robotics experiments ever, a few years back researchers in Japan let a robot loose in a mall and watched how kids reacted. Far from the sense of wonder you might expect from children, the mood soured into a sense of concern for the next generation, […]
Read MoreIn 2021, a rocket is scheduled to lift off from French Guiana carrying the largest space telescope ever made. Known as the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers will use this beast of an observatory to study everything from habitable exoplanets to the formation of the first galaxies. JWST is the first mega-telescope of its kind […]
Read MoreThirty-foot robots are printing actual rockets, a popular game has vanished, and a marathoner has done the (nearly) impossible. Here’s the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s Headlines Massive, AI-powered robots are 3D printing entire rockets […]
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