Boston Dynamics AI Institute wants to merge AI with robotics

In the coming decades, robots will gradually move out of the industrial and scientific worlds and into daily life, in the same way that computers spread to the home in the 1980s. Kismet, a robot created in 1998 at M.I.T.’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), recognized human body language and voice inflection and responded appropriately. Since then, interactive robots have become available commercially, and some are being used as companions for senior citizens.

As TikTok videos generally last less than a minute, they can collect massive amounts of data and accomplish peak personalization faster than other social media applications. The combination of AI and robotics has the potential to revolutionize work responsibilities across various industries, from automating routine tasks within factories to introducing flexibility and learning capabilities into tedious applications. The potential uses of AI in robotics are vast and varied, making it an exciting field to explore and understand. Read on to learn more about robotics and AI, plus how you can play a role in the future of this important industry. From self-driving cars, customer service and healthcare, to industrial and service robots, AI is playing a critical role in transforming industries and improving daily life. Although there have been concerns about the potential of AI and robotics to make some aspects of human work obsolete, the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that this technology will create 12 million more jobs than it terminates by 2025.

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AI provides techniques enabling robots to process sensor data, understand context, plan actions, interact with humans, and learn new tasks without explicit programming. Companies are continually investing in Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and their related autonomous robotic systems to increase productivity and efficiency across many industries. These robots utilize Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, computer vision as well as sensors to navigate through unknown environments independently while executing tasks proficiently.

• As we venture into the potential of a transformed world that AI and robotics have to offer, it is vital to comprehend their joint role along with any risks or limitations involved.
• Brain Corp’s proprietary technology makes AI robots adaptable and flexible so they can navigate unstructured environments like warehouses and store floors.
• For example, AI-based inferences of persons’ feelings derived from face recognition data are such an issue.
• They can also be used for training astronaut crews before missions launch , or even just maintaining equipment already located up in orbit around Earth – something that could prove invaluable during future voyages we take off-world .
• The global poor predominantly work in agriculture, and due to their low levels of income they spend a large shares of their income on food.

Designed to ensure safer skies, “Air-Guardian” blends human intuition with machine precision, more symbiotic relationship between pilot and aircraft. MIT engineers develop a long, curved touch sensor that could enable a robot to grasp and manipulate objects in multiple ways. The realistic model could aid the development of better heart implants and shed light on understudied heart disorders.

Robotics and AI

The robots work alongside humans to make workplaces more flexible and efficient, using 3D sensors to detect objects or people nearby and, if necessary, slow or stop. The robots have been used on car assembly lines to handle heavy lifting while human coworkers perform more delicate tasks. Apptronik builds robots that are designed with dexterity and safety features that enable them to function alongside human workers. The company uses technology like machine learning to develop humanoid robots that can handle difficult-to-fill jobs in industries like logistics and construction. Like most social media applications, TikTok also uses a “social graph” to provide recommendations to users based on the pages they follow and the videos they like.

Robotics is a branch of engineering and computer sciences that includes the design, construction and operation of machines that are capable of performing programmed tasks without additional human involvement. At its core, robotics is about using technology to automate tasks while making them more efficient and safe. Efforts of publicly supported development of intelligent machines should be directed to the common good. The impact on public goods and services, as well as health, education, and sustainability, must be paramount. AI may have unexpected biases or inhuman consequences including segmentation of society and racial and gender bias. These need to be addressed within different regulatory instances—both governmental and nongovernmental—before they occur.

A particularly fast and enthusiastic development of AI/Robotics occurred in the first and second decades of the century around industrial applications and financial services. Whether or not the current decade will see continued fast innovation and expansion of AI-based commercial and public services is an open question. This will require numerous rounds of negotiation concerning AI/Robotics, comparable with the development of rules on trade and foreign direct investment. The European Union would have a strong interest in engaging in such a venture, too. Robots are increasingly prevalent in human life and their place is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years (van Wynsberghe, Chap. 20).

As an artifact and not a natural reality, the AI/robotic entity is invented by human beings to fulfill a purpose imposed by human beings. It can become a perfect entity that performs operations in quantity and quality more precisely than a human being, but it cannot choose for itself a different purpose from what was programmed in it for by a human being. The researchers needed to ensure that both the humanoids and humans were safe and to be the middle-person between the two, the Robot Constitution steps in.

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The company’s flagship product, M.52, is a commercial, all-electric autonomous mower that uses semantic awareness, 3D mapping, precision localization and planning control to operate. Whether the singularity (or another catastrophic event) occurs in 30

or 300 or 3000 years does not really matter (Baum et al. 2019). Perhaps there is even an astronomical pattern such that an intelligent

species is bound to discover AI at some point, and thus bring about

its own demise. Such a “great filter” would contribute to

the explanation of the “Fermi paradox” why there is no

sign of life in the known universe despite the high probability of it

emerging. It would be bad news if we found out that the “great

filter” is ahead of us, rather than an obstacle that Earth has

already passed. These issues are sometimes taken more narrowly to be

about human extinction (Bostrom 2013), or more broadly as concerning

any large risk for the species (Rees 2018)—of which AI is only

one (Häggström 2016; Ord 2020).

• Integrating AI is key to enabling robots to operate intelligently in uncontrolled, real-world environments.
• Programming the car

  to drive “by the rules” rather than “by the interest

  of the passengers” or “to achieve maximum utility”

  is thus deflated to a standard problem of programming ethical machines

  (see

  section 2.9).

• Torero (Chap. 8) addresses AI/robotics in the food systems and points out that agricultural production—while under climate stress—still must increase while minimizing the negative impacts on ecosystems, such as the current decline in biodiversity.
• Over the past two decades, the field of AI/robotics has spurred a multitude of applications for novel services.

In the future, the researchers plan to improve the system by adding more degrees of freedom and reducing the robot’s volume. “With co-training, we are able to achieve over 80% success on these tasks with only 50 human demonstrations per task, with an average of 34% absolute improvement compared to no co-training,” the researchers write. The new system developed by Stanford researchers builds on top of ALOHA, a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for collecting bimanual mobile manipulation data. This new system comes against the backdrop of an acceleration in robotics, enabled partly by the success of generative models. The new technology developed at the institute will benefit Hyundai, which has divisions working on self-driving cars, “ultra-mobility vehicles” that can travel through terrain that would stop today’s vehicles, and new kinds of electric aircraft.

Miso Robotics

These intelligent machines include self-driving cars, autonomous drones, humanoid robots and autonomous farming equipment with applications for a variety of industries from retail and healthcare to agriculture and defense. They make use of sensors, computer vision technology, machine learning and other AI technologies to perform functions like navigating warehouses and sorting recyclables. Companies, including the large corporations developing and using AI, should create ethical and safety boards, and join with nonprofit organizations that aim to establish best practices and standards for the beneficial deployment of AI/ robotics. Appropriate protocols for AI/robotics’ safety need to be developed, such as duplicated checking by independent design teams. The passing of ethical and safety tests, evaluating for instance the social impact or covert racial prejudice, should become a prerequisite for the release of new AI software.

In addition to such “ethical concerns”,

new technologies challenge current norms and conceptual systems, which

is of particular interest to philosophy. Finally, once we have

understood a technology in its context, we need to shape our societal

response, including regulation and law. All these features also exist

in the case of new AI and Robotics technologies—plus the more

fundamental fear that they may end the era of human control on

Earth. A warehousing robot might use a path-finding algorithm to navigate around the warehouse. A drone might use autonomous navigation to return home when it is about to run out of battery. A self-driving car might use a combination of AI algorithms to detect and avoid potential hazards on the road.

Risks of manipulative applications of AI for shaping public opinion and electoral interference need attention, and national and international controls are called for. The new technologies must not become instruments to enslave people or further marginalize the people suffering already from poverty. Basically robots are instruments in the perspective of Sánchez Sorondo (Chap. 14) with the term “instrument” being used in various senses.

A central aspect of learning from experience is the representation and processing of uncertain knowledge. In the absence of deterministic assumptions about the world, there is no nontrivial logical conclusion that can be drawn from the past for any future event. Zimmermann and Cremers (Chap. 3) also point to results of “reverse mathematics,” a branch of mathematical logic analyzing theorems with reference to the set of existence axioms necessary to prove them, to illustrate the implications of machine learning frameworks.

Certain robots—such as telerobots—are entirely non-autonomous as their functioning needs to be controlled via human operators. The basic definition of AI revolves around enabling machines to make complex decisions autonomously. The hardware and software tools based on AI can solve complex real-world problems by analyzing vast quantities of data and finding patterns not visible to humans in it.

This means there will often be

a trade-off between privacy and rights to data vs. technical quality

of the product. Robotic devices have not yet played a major role in this area, except

for security patrolling, but this will change once they are more

common outside of industry environments. Some technologies, like nuclear power, cars, or plastics, have caused

ethical and political discussion and significant policy efforts to

control the trajectory these technologies, usually only once some

damage is done.

Given the recent trend of training control AI systems across different datasets and morphologies, this work can further accelerate the development of versatile mobile robots. CloudMinds operates robots with a secure cloud network — or ‘cloud brain’ — that possesses natural language processing, computer vision and other AI abilities. The company’s Cloud Pepper leverages this technology to hold conversations with human customers in multiple languages while the Cloud Delivery Robot relies on its cloud brain to navigate different environments and map efficient routes. Both camps sympathise with “transhuman”

views of survival for humankind in a different physical form, e.g.,

uploaded on a computer (Moravec 1990, 1998; Bostrom 2003a, 2003c).

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