AI Technology & Industry Review
In the new paper DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley leverage recent advances in the Dreamer world model to enable online reinforcement learning for robot training without simulators or demonstrations, establishing a strong baseline for efficient real-world robotic learning.
In the new paper Large-Scale Retrieval for Reinforcement Learning, a DeepMind research team dramatically expands the information accessible to reinforcement learning (RL) agents, enabling them to attend to tens of millions of information pieces, incorporate new information without retraining, and learn decision making in an end-to-end manner.
In the new paper Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly, a research team from NVIDIA and the University of Washington introduces Factory, a set of physics simulation methods and robot learning tools for simulating contact-rich interactions in assembly with high accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.
A research team from ETH Zurich and NVIDIA proposes a training framework that enables fast policy generation for real-world robotic tasks — training time can be reduced by multiple orders of magnitude using massive parallelism on a single workstation GPU.
Researchers from Robotics at Google propose reformulating behavioural cloning using implicit models and show that this simple change can lead to remarkable improvements in performance across a wide range of contact-rich robot policy learning.
A Nvidia research team presents Isaac Gym — a high-performance robotics simulation platform that runs an end-to-end GPU accelerated training pipeline. Compared to conventional RL training methods that use a CPU-based simulator and GPU for neural networks, Isaac Gym achieves training speedups of 2-3 orders of magnitude on continuous control tasks.
According to statement on February 12, Chinese AI chip unicorn Horizon Robotics announces a third time series C financing.
The research develop machine learning methods that enable virtual agents (such as avatars from a computer game) to communicate non-verbally.
Recent footage shows agricultural robot co-developed by National Research Institute Agricultural Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, and automobile parts manufacturer Denso harvesting apples in Japan’s orchards.
Spanish startup Alias Robotics and ElevenPaths are to set up the world’s first lab dedicated to cybersecurity for robotics in Munich.
Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced it will launch a logistics robot that accurately recognizes randomly piled luggage utilizing AI in 2021.
CoRL 2020 kicked off yesterday and runs virtually through November 18. This year saw 475 papers submitted, a 20 percent rise over 2019.
ABB announced an investment of RMB 1 billion to build a new robot super factory in Shanghai, which began construction in 2019.
The market size of physical and interactive social and entertainment robots is expected to hit US$3.7 billion by 2023.
Former Sony executive Ken Kutaragi, known to be the “father” of PlayStation, has been named CEO of Ascent Robotics.
Cheetah Mobile has successfully deployed 8,000 AiM Robots (AiM: Attract, interact and Mindset) in 962 shopping malls across 33cities in China.
The Nigerian government announced a plan to establish the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Nigeria (CFAIR).
Researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Facebook Reality Labs, and Facebook AI Research have unveiled a state-of-the-art monocular 3D hand motion capture method, FrankMocap, which can estimate both 3D hand and body motions from in-the-wild monocular inputs with faster speed and better accuracy than previous approaches.
Facing a shortage of seasonal workers and rising labour costs, kiwifruit growers may get some relief from robots equipped with a new AI-powered fruit detection system.
Covariant last month secured a US$40 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures to push its total funding to US$67 million.
Google teamed up with researchers from Synthesis AI and Columbia University to introduce a deep learning approach called ClearGrasp as a first step to teaching machines how to “see” transparent materials.
Synced Global AI Weekly January 19th
Synced Global AI Weekly January 12th
In a scene that looks like it came from a science fiction movie, a pair of robot arms twist and turn overhead as they serve shoppers in Huawei’s new SOTA staffless Wuhan Optics Valley retail outlet.
Synced 10 AI Failures of 2019
In an exclusive interview with Synced, the 56-year-old professor shared his thoughts on humanoids, human nature, human-robot interaction, knowledge and intelligence.
A new paper from researchers at the University of Bristol, Telecomm ParisTech and Sorbonne University introduces a multi-layer, silicone “SkinOn” membrane that mimics the layers of human skin.
After running the industrial robot operating system startup “Cobot” for three years, founder Miao Li has decided to axe 98 percent of the company’s “fancy services” and just focus on drug logistics and sorting mushrooms.
The MIT researchers’ novel method can speed up the grasp-planning process from more than 10 minutes to less than a second.
Synced Global AI Weekly October 20th
We’ve lost the brain race, but humans still have unmatched dexterity, right? Wrong. OpenAI’s humanlike five-fingered gripper Dactyl just single-handedly solved a Rubik’s cube.
In an attempt to unlock the science behind hugs, a team of researchers from Arizona State University slapped wearable sensors on 33 humans and collected data on their more than 350 huggings with the humanoid remote-controlled robot “Baxter.”
Based on users’ votes, IEEE Spectrum also compiles rankings of today’s Top Rated, Most Wanted, and Creepiest Robots. Join Synced as we take a stroll through the uncanny valley and meet the world’s top-three creepiest robots.
Artificial intelligence can help companies navigate a global human resource market that is projected to reach US$30 billion by 2025, due in large part to technological proliferation.
A group of researchers from ETH Zurich have introduced a robotic system that can perform animation of real-world string puppets, aka marionettes.
In the late 2000s Fortune Global 500 healthcare companies ramped up AI deployment in the industry, from in-hospital diagnosis and treatment to drug supply chain and out-of-hospital scenarios.
Respected AI pioneer and visionary Nils John Nilsson passed away early this morning at age 86.
In a YouTube video released today, Spot looks a lot more like a workhorse, harnessed up and hauling a box truck up a hill.
After eight-months of development efforts, the “Open AI Five” exacted their revenge today against one of the world’s top teams in a highly anticipated best-of-three 5v5 Dota 2 showdown in San Francisco.
Robots pitching politics, charities, sales, surveys, and scams of every stripe and in every tongue. Increasingly that’s the voice on the other end of a global citizen’s next incoming telephone call.