[ad_1] You won’t have to visit Japan to see a life-size Gundam statue in the months ahead, although you may still have to book a lengthy trip. Our Engadget Chinese colleagues report that Bandai Namco will debut an 18-meter (about 59ft) Freedom Gundam statue at the LaLaport Mall in Jinqiao, Shanghai, China sometime in 2021. […]
Category: Robots
Spot and Pepper robots will perform at spectatorless baseball games in Japan
[ad_1] Sports leagues and teams around the world have been filling stadiums with stuffed toys and cardboard cutouts to stand in for fans who can’t watch in person due to the coronavirus pandemic. SoftBank, however, is taking things a step further in an effort to make its Japanese baseball team’s games a lot livelier. The […]
AI robot ‘Erica’ will star in $70 million sci-fi movie ‘b’
[ad_1] It was up to Ishiguro and Ogawa to “teach” Erica how to act, which they did by applying the principles of method acting to artificial intelligence. Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, the film’s visual effects supervisor and producer Sam Khoze, explained, “In other methods of acting, actors involve their own life experiences in the role. […]
A robot sloth will (very slowly) survey endangered species
[ad_1] The robot will start by watching over the Atlanta Botanical Garden for several months, hanging from a lone 100-foot cable. In the long run, though, researchers hope to have SlothBot covering wide areas with multiple cables. It could be vital for tracking endangered species and changes to their environments, such as orchid pollination by […]
Researchers taught a robot to suture by showing it surgery videos
[ad_1] “There’s a lot of appeal in learning from visual observations, compared to traditional interfaces for learning in a static way or learning from [mimicking] trajectories, because of the huge amount of information content available in existing videos,” Tanwani told Engadget. When it comes to teaching robots, a picture, apparently, is worth a thousand words. […]
Watch VFX bring Westworld’s dystopian LA to life
[ad_1] Now that Westworld season 3 has aired, the team behind the show’s impressive visual effects has revealed exactly how they made the series’ robots come to life. In a short Vimeo clip, DNEG illustrates how a combination of VFZ wizardry helped to create Westworld’s bleak dystopian landscape, along with the processes used for modeling […]
Harvard shrank its insect-inspired microrobot to the size of a penny
[ad_1] Kaushik Jayaram/Harvard SEAS “The wonderful part about this exercise is that we did not have to change anything about the previous design,” said Kaushik Jayaram, first author of the paper on HAMR-JR. “We proved that this process can be applied to basically any device at a variety of sizes.” The researchers also wanted to […]
South Korean cafe uses robotic baristas to comply with social distancing
[ad_1] With its COVID-19 outbreak seemingly contained, South Korea may offer the rest of the world a glimpse of what society could look like after the pandemic ends — and it may include robotic baristas. According to Reuters, a cafe in Daejeon, South Korea, is now using robots to prepare drinks and deliver them to […]
Hitting the Books: Do we really want our robots to have consciousness?
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI by Mark H. Lee © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although I argue for self-awareness, I do not believe that we need to worry about consciousness. There seems to be an obsession with robot consciousness in the media, but why start […]
Sphero spins off a new company to make robots for police, military use
[ad_1] Sphero has brought four million robots to market, including programmable tank robots, and it’s experience in mobility could come in handy. We’ve also seen it make wearables. Though so far, those have been used to create music, not keep users safe. It’s not entirely surprising that Sphero would see an opportunity in the military […]