Category Archives: Robotics

Most of todays robots operate in isolation. The coordinated motion of tens of robotic arms in manufacturing plants, hundreds of wheeled robots on warehouse floors, or thousands of drones in night skies is no different: Each of those robots is unaware of its conspecifics and obeys orders issued by a central computer that leaves no room for unexpected interactions or unsolicited initiatives of the individuals, not to speak of emerging collective behaviors.

Robotic and biological individuals, however, have limited energetic autonomy, strength, perception, and decision-making abilities when taken on their own. The transition from solitary individuals to societies has been described as one of the eight major transitions in the evolution toward higher levels of biological complexity (1). There is ample evidence from biology that self-organized groups of individuals with limited capabilities can act as super-organisms that are more robust to individual failures and more resilient to environmental change and that can carry out more complex tasks and build more complex structures.

Computer scientists have taken inspiration from principles of biological self-organization among interacting agents with limited capabilities, loosely labeled as swarms, to devise distributed and adaptive algorithms capable of solving complex, noisy, and changing computational problems (2). The more recent field of swarm robotics shares similar scientific roots and ambitions (3), as described by

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From individual robots to robot societies | Science - Science

A ROBOT is defined as an autonomous machine that can sense its environment, compute to make decisions and interact with the real world.

Recently, a video from Boston Dynamics highlighted the features of robots Atlas, Spot, and Stretch dancing to the song, Do You Love Me.

This viral video captures the essence of the advancement in the field of robotics and showed the dexterity of multiple robots in a music video.

In Malaysia, the picture that comes to mind when one is talking about robots, is an automobile production line a line of coordinated autonomous robots working precisely to weld and assemble parts that would otherwise take hundreds of skilled workers to achieve.

The adoption of robots by the automobile industry such as Proton and Perodua has proven the viability of using robots in the manufacturing process.

Another established use of robots is in the warehousing or material handling section where fleets of robots are used to move and manage huge stocks in the warehouse.

One good example of robot warehousing is the facility set up by Mr DIY for e-commerce fulfilment early this year.

Robots are also increasingly being introduced into households and the most common use of robots at home is the robot vacuum. The vacuum uses sensors to avoid objects while moving around to clean the house.

These are just some of the notable examples of how robots are used in our country. Depite that, we have barely even scratched the surface of the potential robotics holds in local industries.

The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has created greater awareness on the importance of automation as the way forward.

Due to the dependency on human labour, production capacities of factories shrunk when restrictions were imposed on the number of people allowed at the workplace.

The government recently launched the National Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Policy and the use of emerging technology. Robotics was emphasised in the policy.

Indeed, there is enormous potential for growth in industries that are labour intensive. The agricultural sector is an example where the use of robots for planting, weeding, harvesting, and packing, can improve productivity.

More research and development must be conducted locally to ensure that the robots developed are able to fulfill the needs of the countrys many industries.

In a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum on the Future of Jobs 2020, 73% of companies surveyed in Malaysia said they would be adopting the use of robots (such as non-humanoid industrial automation and drones) in the next five years.

This will undoubtedly lead to a shift in the demand for new skill sets in the workforce and create new job opportunities.

Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) has started to work on projects related to robots and automation to ensure that advancements in the fields of robotics can be adopted for practical use locally.

Talents in the field of designing, building, commissioning, and maintenance are crucial in robotics. Knowledge in mechanical, electronics, programming, control system, and artificial intelligence are essential to those planning to work with robots.

We must be prepared and equipped with the right knowledge to adapt to a future where the use of robots will be increasing pervasive.

This article is contributed by Danny Ng Wee Kiat, a lecturer at the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering & Science (LKC FES). Registered with the Board of Engineers Malaysia, he lectures at the varsitys Department of Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering. His research interest is in the field of robotics and engineering. His area of speciality is robotics and automation. He holds a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering (Hons) from Multimedia University and Master of Engineering Science from UTAR. The views expressed here are the writers own.

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> Topic: Increased use of robots and automation An impending feature for future industries

> Language: English

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> Objective: To share the current trend of using robots and automation in industries

> Presented in three parts: The evolution of robots; robots and automation in industry; and the future of robotics

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THE RISE OF ROBOTS - The Star Online

A team led by University of Maryland mechanical engineering Professor Ryan Sochol has created a soft robotic hand agile enough to manipulate a game controller.

A team of engineers at the University of Maryland has built a three-fingered soft robotic hand that is sufficiently agile to be able to manipulate the buttons and directional pad on a Nintendo controllereven managing to beat the first level of Super Mario Bros. as proof of concept, according toa recent paper published in the journal Science Advances. The same team also built two soft robotic turtles (the terrapin turtle is UMD's official mascot) using the same multimaterial 3D-printing process that produced the robotic hand.

We traditionally think of robots as being manufactured out of hard, rigid materials, but the subfield of soft robotics takes a different approach. It seeks to build robotic devices out of more flexible materials that mimic the properties of those found in living animals. There are huge advantages to be gained by making the entire body of a robot out of soft materials, such as being flexible enough to squeeze through tight spaces to hunt for survivors after a disaster. Soft robots also hold strong potential as prosthetics or biomedical devices.Even rigid robots rely on some soft components, such as foot pads that serve as shock absorbers or flexible springs to store and release energy.

Harvard researchers built an octopus-inspired soft robot in 2016 that was constructed entirely out of flexible materials. But soft robots are more difficult to control precisely because they are so flexible. In the case of the "octobot," the researchers replaced the rigid electronic circuits with microfluidic circuits. Such circuits involve regulating the flow of water (hydraulics) or air (pneumatics), rather than electricity, through the circuit's microchannels, enabling the robot to bend and move.

Although this solution is ingenious, it brings its own set of challenges. These include the high cost (clean room facilities are required) and time necessary to fabricate those microfluidic systems and then integrate them with the system as a whole."Recently, several groups have tried to harness fluidic circuits to enhance the autonomy of soft robots," said co-author Ruben Acevedo. "But the methods for building and integrating those fluidic circuits with the robots can take days to weeks, with a high degree of manual labor and technical skill."

As an undergraduate, Acevedo worked in the lab of University of Maryland mechanical engineer Ryan D. Sochol, who was interested in moving beyond having to manually connect fluidic circuitry components to soft robots in favor of embedding these functions directly in the soft robotic systems. His team found the answer in PolyJet 3D printing, in which several different layers of materials are stacked on top of each other. The printer sets down one liquid layer, lets it solidify, then sets down the next layer, and so on.

YouTube/UMD A. James Clark School of Engineering

"The incorporation of materials that differ in rigidity serves to enhance performance by allowing the material properties of specific features to be tailored to complement desired functionalities," Sochol et al. wrote in their paper. Components like diaphragms and O-rings must be able to deform during operation, so a soft rubber-like material was used to make them, while a more rigid, plastic-like material was chosen to make components that need to be stable (fluidic channels, access ports, and structural casings, for instance). Finally, the team used a water-soluble material to serve as scaffolding during the printing process, which was then removed from both the exterior and internal voids and channelsfirst by dissolving the stuff with water, then manually removing whatever scaffolding material remained.

Microfluidically controlled soft robots typically require distinct control inputs for every independently operated soft actuator. By integrating the fluidic circuit, the UMD team could operate the hand by varying the pressure strength between low, medium, and high. In other words, a single source of fluid could send different signals just by changing the pressure so that each finger could move independently.Even better, the one-step 3D-printing process for the hand and the two turtle-botsencompassing soft actuators (moving parts), the fluidic circuits, and robot bodytook a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

The team tested the performance of the robotic hand by having it play Super Mario Bros. To make Mario walk, the team used a low pressure, so only the first finger pressed the controller. The researchers used a medium pressure to make Mario run and a high pressure to make the hand press the correct button on the controller to get Mario to jump.

YouTube/UMD A. James Clark School of Engineering

As for why they chose Super Mario Bros., Sochol told Scientific American that it was the very first Nintendo game he had played as a child. But the choice wasn't just a matter of nostalgia. The timing and specifics of the game are well-established; the robot hand simply needed to time its responses in accordance with the preprogrammed moves. And there are actual consequences for failure: a single mistake will cost Mario a life. The hand performed so well, it was able to successfully beat the first level of the game in less than 90 seconds.

"We are freely sharing all of our design files so that anyone can readily download, modify on demand, and 3D printwhether with their own printer or through a printing service like usall of the soft robots and fluidic circuit elements from our work," said Sochol, who estimates that printing one's own soft robots would cost about $100 using the team's software on GitHub."It is our hope that this open source 3D printing strategy will broaden accessibility, dissemination, reproducibility, and adoption of soft robots with integrated fluidic circuits and, in turn, accelerate advancement in the field."

DOI: Science Advances, 2021. 10.1126/sciadv.abe5257 (About DOIs).

Listing image by University of Maryland

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This 3D-printed soft robotic hand beat the first level of Super Mario Bros. - Ars Technica

Robotics is one of the major disruptive technologies helping multiple industries and organizations to boost productivity efficiently and effectively with moving, gripping, cleaning, and lifting objects. The world has already seen the development of multiple types of robots ranging from big industrial ones to micro-robots for assistance in the manufacturing, automotive as well as healthcare sectors. Recently, scientists and Robotics engineers have discovered that suction cups can be used in Robotics and their mission was also successful. Lets explore how suction cups in Robotics introduced wall-climbing robots into the world.

It has been observed that multiple robots are assisting human employees in some horizontal areas such as a body, object, water, floor, etc. But there are vertical failures when the robots are climbing high walls of tanks, dams, or boilers. Researchers have infused magnets into the robots for climbing walls made of certain metals. But the robots fail to climb walls that are made of stainless steel, aluminum, glass, and so on. Yet, multiple industries use these materials to build tanks and boilers with high vertical walls. Thus, human employees tend to risk their lives for manually cleaning these walls regularly.

That being said, researchers and scientists have introduced suction cups in Robotics for building wall-climbing robots to protect these human employees from a hazardous environment and occupational injuries. These modern robots can adhere to a surface through the functionalities of suction cups. Implementing suction cups in Robotics is helping robots to reach impossible places efficiently and effectively. Suction cups do not require a vacuum pump or reducing weights and power consumption of robots for specific purposes. Multiple companies are filing for patents in implementing suction cups in robots an actuator can depress the suction cups in a direction of a vertical surface where the outside of the cup is made of a friction coefficient low material that enables the cup to slide. Industries can utilize these wall-climbing robots to detect small stress cracks in the boilers or tanks.

A New Zealand-based Robotics company known as Invert Robotics is developing wall-climbing robots with the help of US$8.8 million financings from an agtech firm Finistere and Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley. Some researchers and scientists at Zhejiang University, China have developed wall-climbing robots to stand on any kind of surface through a vacuum suction unit. Gecko Robotics is utilizing robots to inspect and detect any thickness, cracks, or other degradations inside tanks, boilers, pipes, and so on with magnetic adhesion. Simon Fraser University in British Columbia utilizes Van der Waals forces for robots to climb walls efficiently with a dry adhesive and a silicon-like polymer that enable adhesion without any chemical or energy.

Researchers Xin Li and Kaige Shi from Zhejiang University have utilized water and centrifugal forces to overcome the surface restrictions with a rotating ring of water. It usually fails to be on the surface due to the flow of air from the atmosphere into a vacuum zone. They have built confined seals to slightly deform and close the gaps between the sealing ring and the texture of the surface. This creates smaller gaps for the flow resistance and gaps in the seals become bigger. The suction cups are dependent on a rotating stream of water to maintain a seal over different surfaces. This will prevent vacuum leakages remove pressure differences in the vacuum zone. The scientists have named this method the Zero Pressure Difference or ZPD. These researchers have tested the new suction cups in robots through three machines spider-man style robot, a wall-climbing robot with ZPD as well as a robotic arm. A whole lot of water was pushed out of these machines when the cups were moving. Each time wall-climbing robots move forward on a wall sufficient water creates a constant flowing seal for suction cups to stick to.

Yes, introducing wall-climbing robots through the implementation of suction cups has revolutionized the way industries clean their boilers, tanks, pipes, and high-walled objects. It has helped Robotics to gain a new perspective on the functionalities of robots.

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Suction Cups in Robotics: Introducing Wall-Climbing Robots - Analytics Insight

The rehabilitation robots market was valued at US$ 798. 92 million in 2021 and is projected to reach US$ 3,178. 77 million by 2028; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21. 8% during 20212028. The market growth is mainly attributed to the factors such as rise in geriatric population, stroke and robot-assisted training in rehabilitation therapy.

New York, July 30, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Rehabilitation Robots Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Type ; End User, and Geography" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06124471/?utm_source=GNW However, the high cost of rehabilitation robots hinders the market growth.

Research in rehabilitation robotics and the number of therapeutic rehabilitation robots are rising across the world.Asia-Pacific aging nations, such as Japan and China, are witnessing the expansion of medical technology, resulting in a significant market for rehabilitation robots.

In 2017, around 35.2 million people in Japan were 65 years old or above, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. This figure is predicted to jump to 36.2 million by 2020. Therefore, businesses are encouraged to invest in things for the regions older residents. Therefore, the increasing elderly population and a growing number of stroke-rending people immobile are among the significant factors driving the demand for rehabilitation robots.Robot rehabilitation therapy is used to deliver high-intensity training for patients suffering from motor disorders caused by spinal cord disease or stroke.Stroke is a top cause of severe long-term disability in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Fatigue, hemiparesis, and walking difficulty are a few effects of a stroke.Moreover, rehabilitation robots provide customized, task-oriented, prolonged, intensive, standardized, and repeatable training for patients affected by stroke or other nonprogressive brain lesions.

These advantages of rehabilitation robots, and the rising demand for better and quicker healthcare services drive the growth of the overall rehabilitation robots market.

Social assistive robotics could be a potential tool to support clinical care areas, promoting physical distancing as well as reducing the rate of contagion spread.There is a concern to seek adaptive strategies to continue offering neurorehabilitation services during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the people with disabilities and chronic progressive diseases require constant monitoring and care.

Patients suffering from stroke or COVID-19 develop anxiety, depression, fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorders.In addition to the physical or cognitive state, psychological health acts as an indicator of the quality of living of the survivors.

Nevertheless, considering the rapid spread of COVID-19, several healthcare services are looking for strategies to promote physical distancing and enhance healthcare procedures. With the widespread acceptance of physical distancing and isolation measures, the supply operations and distribution channels have undergone serious disruptions during the pandemic, and manufacturers are facing many backorders on many products.

Based on type, The rehabilitation robots market is segmented into therapeutic robots, assistive robots, exoskeleton robots, and prosthetic robots. The exoskeleton robots segment held the largest share of the market in 2020, and the market for the same is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based on end-user, the rehabilitation robots market is segmented into hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and specialty clinics. The rehabilitation centers segment held the largest share of the market in 2020 and is estimated to register the highest CAGR in the market during the forecast period.

The World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NHS (National Health Service), and CDC are among the major primary and secondary sources referred for preparing this report.Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06124471/?utm_source=GNW

About ReportlinkerReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Rehabilitation Robots Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Type ; End User, and Geography - Yahoo Finance

A California robotics company is about to bring a high-tech knee brace to market that could relieve the suffering of millions of Americans grappling with osteoarthritis of the knee. It may especially appeal to patients who want to avoid knee replacement surgery.

San Francisco-based Roam Robotics said its $7,000 Ascend orthosis should start shipping this winter. Certified by the FDA as a Class 1 medical device, Roamanticipates reimbursement from both Medicare and private insurance. Medicare could cover 50% orhigher, and with private insurance the entire cost could be covered in some cases, Roam says.

Roam Robotics CEO Tim Swift

Roam is located in the San Franciscos Mission district, across the street from Otherlab, an engineering firm awarded tens of millions of dollars in government research contracts, mostly for robotics and energy projects. Roam is one of several start-ups to emerge from Otherlab. Its founder and CEO Tim Swift is a veteran of Ekso Bionics, a pioneer in the exoskeleton field. After working on heavy and super expensive exoskeletons, Swift concluded that a radical departure from conventional designs was necessary if exoskeleton technology was to become accessible and affordable.

I believe that we have the ability to change the relationship that people have with robots on a scale thats really never been considered, says Swift. I dont want people to view robots as something that overtakes what it is to be human. Our goal is not to build cyborgs. Its to make people more human than they ever were.

Ascend is made of lightweight carbon fiber and high-strength woven fabric. The pneumatically powered device is connected to a rechargeable battery carried in a backpack. Sensors in the custom-fitted knee brace provide real-time data to Ascends microprocessors, where proprietary algorithms detect user intent, then extend and flex the knee. Ideally, this relieves pain and increases patients ability to navigate stairs and master previously simple everyday activities.

Ascend is made of lightweight carbon fiber and high-strength woven fabric.

Rowan Paul, a sports medicine doctor who has consulted on Ascend, says it may appeal to those who are reluctant to use a cane because of the stigma of disability it carries. The knee brace makes them look like an athlete with an injury, he says. Ascend could also reduce or eliminate the need for opioid pain meds or cortisone injections, which offer temporary relief for osteoarthritis but come with a risk of side effects.

I have seen several patients, where if we can just give them a little bit of help in a very targeted, precise way, they don't need to do a knee replacement, says Paul.

Roams market research puts the number of patients who are living with severe pain and limited mobility because of osteoarthritis of the knee at 10 million or more.

The pneumatically powered device is connected to a rechargeable battery carried in a backpack.

The company has opened a storefront in San Francisco where patients cantest driveAscend. Reid Weaver drove down from Tacoma, Washington, in June to try one out and was sold on the product. Its so comfortable and its so light, you dont even feel that its there, says Weaver, who spent 19 years as a SWAT police officer in Washington state and now works as a court officer protecting judges in Tacoma.

Weaver had leg surgery after a hiking accident but the surgery exacerbated his osteoarthritis. An avid outdoorsman who played football in college, Weaver, 60, manages to ride a motorcycle to work. With the Ascend knee brace on, Weaver finds he can go up and down stairs with ease and was surprised that it was no longer a struggle to get up from a chair, a challenge for many with osteoarthritis in their knees.

Reid Weaver

This thing was way more powerful than I thought it would be, says Weaver. It basically lifted me out of a sitting position without using my hands, without lurching forward. I think its going to be a game changer.

52-year-old Angelique Newman-Malone of San Jose, California, says she felt trapped in her own body by osteoarthritis. After stumbling upon an ad for Ascend on Facebook, Newman-Malone wore the knee brace on multiple occasions and pronounced it agodsend.

I felt like I had somebody supporting me, like a buddy to walk next to me, she says. That feeling is amazing.

But the best perk for Newman-Malone is that the knee brace allows her to kneel and then get up. A devoutly religious Christian, she said the ability to kneel when she prays is crucial.

Roam has two other smart knee brace models in development. Elevate, Roams knee brace for skiing, was available for renting at ski resorts in the western US for two winter ski seasons but wasnt in use last winter because of the pandemic. Roam COO Nikhil Dhongade says he's hopeful skiers wearing Elevate will be back on the slopes for the 2022-2023 winter season.

Roam has also been developing a smart knee brace for soldiers. Swift says the Armys Special Operations Command has been testing the military model, which is called the Forge.

Roam Robotics Forge

While Elevate and The Forge can be worn on both knees, Ascend has been designed for a single knee because osteoarthritis tends to manifest in one leg initially. Roams Tim Swift notes that more than the 80% of total knee replacements are done on just one leg.

Swift says that as impressive as these high-tech knee braces are now, wait until you see where these wearable robots are heading. To drive home the point, he uses terms associated with aviation and automobiles.

Were not at the end of any runway here, were at the very start, says Swift. What we're building here is much closer to the model T than the Toyota Corolla.

Editors' Note: This story was updated to clarify that Ascend arrives this winter, not fall.

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Robotic Brace Could Mean the End of Knee Replacement Surgery for Some - PCMag

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer on why he believes robots can help the restaurant worker shortage.

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer believes technology will solve the worker shortage facing the restaurant industry today.

On FOX Business'"Varney and Co.,"Taffer pointed to his recent visit to a Westin Hotel where his room service waiter was a robot.

"So in a hotel of that size, that eliminates six, seven, eight employees," he said. "We look at cooking technologies, which are now eliminating another one or two employees."

LABOR SHORTAGE MAY GET WORSE BEFORE IMPROVING, NABE SURVEY

The Chamber of Commerce has warned the worker shortage poses the biggest threat to the economy's still-nascent recovery from thecoronaviruspandemic after the government reported that the U.S. had a little more than 9.2 million vacantjobopenings in May, a record-shattering number despite the 9.3 million unemployed Americans.

"Business can't stop," Taffer told hostStuart Varney. "We've got to find solutions. So automation, computerization, robotics -- all of these things are going to play very, very heavily."

JOHNNY ROCKETS, FATBURGER OWNER SAYS LABOR SHORTAGES FACING RESTAURANTS A TOTAL NIGHTMARE

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer weighs in on employee shortages, innovative tech in the restaurant industry, COVID vaccine and mask requirements and his new line of drinks.

Taffer, who has been part of the food industry for decades, said the automation trend gained momentum two and a half years ago when unemployment was so low, businesses had trouble hiring employees then as well.

"Many of us started on this automation path back then, which is really paying off now," he said. "We have 60% less back-of-the-house employees because of technology."

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He went on to say this can be beneficial amid the pandemic because every less employee is one less point of contamination.

"When employees don't come back to work, I think many of them are going to find their jobs have been replaced by machines," he said.

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'Bar Rescue's' Jon Taffer says technology, robots the answer to worker shortage - Fox Business

In May, Path Robotics announced a $56 million Series B. It was a sizable raise, as far as robotics rounds go. But the Columbus, Ohio-based startup is already back for more, raising a pre-emptive Series C a mere two and a half months later.

And its a biggie. The firm has raised $100 million, led by Tiger Global and featuring participation from Silicon Valley Bank, an existing investor. The deal brings the robotic welding firms total funding to $171 million.

Image Credits: Path Robotics

Path cites a longstanding shortage of skilled welders as a primary driver in interest around its tech. The problem dates back before the global pandemic (though thats likely only exacerbated the issue, as it has with so many other labor issues). Once again, it notes a study by the American Welding Society that says the U.S. alone will experience a shortage in the welding workface of around 400,000 by 2024.

From the sound of it, the company is already looking beyond welding. After all, construction is a huge business, with massive opportunities for the right robotics organization. And, of course, having an infusion of $100 million certainly doesnt hurt your growth plans.

Most robots merely repeat what they are told, with no ability to improve themselves. The future of manufacturing hinges on highly capable, flexible robotics, CEO Andrew Lonsberry said in a statement. Robots that can truly see and learn.

Image Credits: Path Robotics

What, precisely, those future plans are, the company doesnt say, but it plans to build them atop of its imaging and AI, presumably to build a sort of modular ecosystem for the construction robotics category.

Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder hints at those plans in a statement. Paths innovative approach to computer vision and proprietary AI software allows robots to sense, understand and adapt to the challenges of each unique welding project. We believe this breakthrough technology can be adopted for many other applications and products beyond just welding, to serve their customers holistically.

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Path Robotics raises another $100M - TechCrunch

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OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubiks Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available.

So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics, Zaremba said. The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, thats for the best from the perspective of the company.

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat: After advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning through our Rubiks Cube project and other initiatives, last October we decided not to pursue further robotics research and instead refocus the team on other projects. Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, weve found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress in our reinforcement learning research.

OpenAI first widely demonstrated its robotics work in October 2019, when it published research detailing a five-fingered robotic hand guided by an AI model with 13,000 years of cumulative experience. The best-performing system could successfully unscramble Rubiks Cubes about 20% to 60% of the time, which might not seem especially impressive. But the model notably discovered techniques to recover from challenges, like when the robots fingers were tied together and when the hand was wearing a leather glove.

This was the culmination of over two years of work. In May 2017, OpenAI released Roboschool, open source software for controlling robotics in simulation. That same year, the company said it had created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, that could learn a new task after seeing it done once. And in 2018, OpenAI made available simulated robotics environments and a baseline implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, a reinforcement learning algorithm that can learn from failure.

The sad thing is, if we were a robotics company, the mission of the company would be different, and I think we would continue. I believe quite strongly in the approach that [the] robotics [team] took and the direction, Zaremba added. But from the perspective of what we want to achieve, which is to build [artificial general intelligence], there were some components missing.

OpenAI has long asserted that immense computational horsepower is a necessary step on the road to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can learn any task a human can. While luminaries like Milafounder Yoshua Bengio and Facebook VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCunargue that AGI cant exist, OpenAIs cofounders and backers among them Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman believe powerful computers in conjunction with reinforcement learning, pretraining, and other techniques can achieve paradigm-shifting AI advances.

AsMIT Technology Reviewreported in 2020, a team within OpenAI called Foresight runs experiments to test how far they can push AI capabilities by training algorithms with increasingly large amounts of data and compute. According to that same report, OpenAI is developing a system trained on images, text, and other data using massive computational resources that the companys leadership believes is the most promising path toward AGI.

One of the fruits of this effort is DALL-E, a text-to-image engine thats essentially a visual idea generator. Given a text prompt, the OpenAI system generates images to match the prompt, filling in the blanks when the prompt implies the image must contain a detail that isnt explicitly stated. DALL-E can combine disparate ideas to synthesize objects, some of which are unlikely to exist in the real world like a hybrid of a snail and a harp.

Brockman and Altman in particular believe AGI will be able to master more fields than any one person, chiefly by identifying complex cross-disciplinary connections that elude human experts. Furthermore, they predict that responsibly deployed AGI in other words, AGI deployed in close collaboration with researchers in relevant fields, like social science might help solve longstanding challenges in climate change, health care, and education.

Zaremba asserts that pretraining is a particularly powerful technique in the creation of large, sophisticated AI systems. At a high level, pretraining helps the model learn general features that can be reused on the target task to boost its accuracy. Pretraining was used to develop OpenAIs Codex, a model thats trained on billions of lines of public code to power Copilot, GitHubs service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Codex is a fine-tuned version of OpenAIs GPT-3, a language model pretrained on over a trillion words from websites, books, Wikipedia, and other web sources.

When we created robotics [systems], we thought that we could go very far with self-generated data and reinforcement learning. At the moment, I believe that pretraining [gives] model[s] 100 times cheaper IQ points,' Zaremba said. That might be followed with other techniques.

OpenAIs move away from robotics might be a reflection of the economic realities the company faces. DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI research lab, has undergone a similar shift in recent years as R&D costs mount, moving away from prestige projects in favor of work with commercial applications, like protein shape prediction.

Its an open secret that robotics is a capital-intensive field. Industrial robotics company Rethink Robotics closed its doors months after attempting unsuccessfully to find an acquirer. Boston Dynamics, considered among the most advanced robotics firms, was acquired by Google and then sold to SoftBank before Hyundai agreed to buy a controlling stake for $1.1 billion. And Honda retired its Asimo robotics project after over a decade in development.

Roughly a year ago,Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in San Francisco-based OpenAI to jointly develop new technologies for Microsofts Azure cloud platform. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to license some of its intellectual property to Microsoft, which the company would then package and sell to partners, and to train and run AI models on Azure as OpenAI worked to develop next-generation computing hardware.

In the months that followed, OpenAI released a Microsoft Azure-powered API that allows developers to explore GPT-3s capabilities.(OpenAI said recently that GPT-3 is now being used in more than 300 different apps by tens of thousands of developers and producing 4.5 billion words per day.) Toward the end of 2020, Microsoft announcedthat it would exclusively license GPT-3 to develop and deliver AI solutions for customers, as well as creating new products that harness the power of natural language generation.

Microsoft recently announced that GPT-3 will be integrated deeply with Power Apps, its low-code app development platform specifically for formula generation. The AI-powered features will allow a user building an ecommerce app, for example, to describe a programming goal using conversational language like find products where the name starts with kids.'

As for projects like DALL-E and Jukebox an AI system that can generate music in any style from scratch, complete with vocals they also have obvious and immediate business applications. OpenAI predicts that DALL-E could someday augment or even replace 3D rendering engines. For example, architects could use the tool to visualize buildings, while graphic artists could apply it to software and video game design.

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OpenAI disbands its robotics research team - VentureBeat

Last month, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba said the company has disbanded its robotics team in a Weights & Biases podcast. I was actually working for several years on robotics. Recently, we changed the focus at OpenAI. I disbanded the robotics team. There are actually plenty of domains that are very rich with data. Ultimately that was holding us back, in the case of robotics, said Zaremba.

The decision was quite hard on him, but he later realised that this was best from a companys perspective (to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI)). When we created robotics, we thought that we could go pretty far. We had self-generated data and reinforcement learning. But, at the moment, I believe that actually pre-training allows to give model 100x cheaper IQ points, and that might follow with other techniques, said Zaremba.

Citing GPT-3, Zaremba said pre-training in language models includes training machine learning models on unsupervised tasks such as next word predictions. But, in the case of robotics, we do not have such data, he added.

Initially, when OpenAI started robotics projects, Zaremba said they lacked clarity on how and what they wanted to build. But, over time, they got more clarity on things they wanted to focus on.

Besides the dearth of data, OpenAIs move away from robotics reflects the economic realities and capital intensive nature of the projects. Three years ago, Rethink Robotics shut down its operations. Last year, the maker of driverless trucks, Starsky Robot, also shut shop. Same year, SoftBank halted the production of its famed robot Pepper.

SoftBank acquired Boston Dynamics from Google in 2017 and recently sold the robotics company to Hyundai for $1.1 billion. Boston Dynamics caught the popular imagination with viral videos of its humanoid and dog-like robots.

Zaremba said building robots requires high computing capabilities. Plus, there are technical issues with running machines in real-time. There are two possibilities to successfully deploy robots. One is to collect a lot of data. Another possibility is that we need powerful video models like that of powerful text models, Zaremba said.

The notable powerful language models at present include Googles Switch Transformer, GPT-3, DistilBERT, Google Gshard, BAAIs Wu Dao 2.0, and GPT-J.

According to MITs The state of industrial robotics: Emerging technologies, challenges and key research directions, the key challenges holding back the robotics industry includes the high cost of integration, lack of standards, inflexibility, better balance of speed and safety, data protocols, and investments to enable technologies.

OpenAI first demonstrated its robotics work in October 2019, when it published research detailing a hand guided by an AI model with 13K years of cumulative experience, called Dactyl, which replicated a humans hand movement to solve the Rubiks cube. Our robot still hasnt perfected its technique though, as it solves the Rubiks Cube 60% of the time (and only 20% of the time for a maximally difficult scramble), according to OpenAI.

OpenAI, at the time, had said, as a result of ADR development, more developers will be able to divert from building task-specific robots to general-purpose machines. Indubitably, we are decades away from having a robot that will make its own decisions without human intervention, but leveraging ADR, developers can successfully attain it, as per OpenAI.

In April 2019, OpenAI hosted its first Robotic Symposium. The event brought together a diverse set of people from robotics and machine learning communities, alongside academics and industry leaders, to create a platform to exchange ideas and address open questions in building complex robot systems.

Four years ago, OpenAI had released Robotschool, open-source software for robot simulation, integrated with OpenAI Gym. In February 2018, it released eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay. OpenAI has used these environments to train models which work on physical robots.

Amit Raja Naik is a senior writer at Analytics India Magazine, where he dives deep into the latest technology innovations. He is also a professional bass player.

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Why Did OpenAI Disband Its Robotics Team? - Analytics India Magazine