Remember Ballie, Samsung’s spherical home robot from CES 2020?
I sure didn’t — until Samsung brought it back at this year’s keynote with a few on-trend AI upgrades.
The new and improved Ballie, which Samsung previewed during its press conference at CES 2024 in Las Vegas today, is around the size of a bowling ball, packing a battery that’s designed to last two to three hours.
In the latter case, Ballie will respond with the aid of a chatbot to confirm requests before taking action.
“With its built-in front [and] rear camera, [Ballie] can detect and analyze its surroundings and learn recurring user patterns,” Samsung continues in the press release.
Google’s DeepMind Robotics researchers are one of a number of teams exploring the space’s potential.
The newly announced AutoRT is designed to harness large foundational models, to a number of different ends.
In a standard example given by the DeepMind team, the system begins by leveraging a Visual Language Model (VLM) for better situational awareness.
A large language model, meanwhile, suggests tasks that can be accomplished by the hardware, including its end effector.
LLMs are understood by many to be the key to unlocking robotics that effectively understand more natural language commands, reducing the need for hard-coding skills.
More recently, the potential use of weaponized robots by law enforcement has been a political lightning rod in places like Oakland and San Francisco.
Earlier this week, I spoke about the bill with Massachusetts state representative Lindsay Sabadosa, who filed it alongside Massachusetts state senator Michael Moore.
Does the bill apply to law enforcement as well?
And what we’ve heard from law enforcement repeatedly is that they’re often used to deescalate situations.
We haven’t had law enforcement weaponize robots, and no one has said, “We’d like to attach a gun to a robot” from law enforcement in Massachusetts.
Here in the States, the $2 trillion industry employs around eight million people — that’s nearly one New York City.
Even in financial boom times, however, these jobs can be difficult to keep filled, owing to physical demands and other potential dangers.
As evidenced from videos released by PaintJet, those sorts of older technologies remain intact here — albeit with an automated twist.
CEO Nick Hegeman tells TechCrunch, that in spit of looking like a fairly standard piece of heavy machine, “We have created 100% of the robotic system.
Of course, PaintJet is far from the only company vying to introduce robots to the world of industrial painting.
For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics.
Large language models like ChatGPT can allow robots and humans to communicate in natural language.
Robot “singularities” are a fundamental problem for all robot arms; they are very different from Kurzweil’s hypothetical point in time when AI surpasses humans.
Robot singularities are points in space where a robot stops unexpectedly and must be manually reset by a human operator.
For repetitive robot motions, singularities can be avoided by tedious manual fine-tuning of repetitive robot motions to adjust them such that they never encounter singularities.
We’re wrapping up our end-of-year robotics Q&A series with this entry from Deepu Talla.
Over the past several years, NVIDIA has established itself a major platform for robotics simulation, prototyping and deployment.
Previous Q&As:What role(s) will generative AI play in the future of robotics?
Simulation: Models will be able to accelerate simulation development, bridging the gaps between 3D technical artists and developers, by building scenes, constructing environments and generating assets.
These GenAI assets will see increased use for synthetic data generation, robot skills training and software testing.
I’ve spent much of the past year discussing generative AI and large language models with robotics experts.
It’s become increasingly clear that these sorts of technologies are primed to revolutionize the way robots communicate, learn, look and are programmed.
Well-funded Oregon-based startup Agility has been playing around with the tech for a while now using its bipedal robot, Digit.
Agility notes, “Our innovation team developed this interactive demo to show how LLMs could make our robots more versatile and faster to deploy.
MIT CSAIL’s Daniela Rus also recently told me, “It turns out that generative AI can be quite powerful for solving even motion planning problems.
Since the company’s earliest days as an MIT spinoff, Boston Dynamics’ systems have always provided entertainment value.
The Nashville-based firm has created theme park and exhibition animatronics for some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, including Avatar, Jurassic Park, Marvel and Harry Potter.
A huge benefit for Neon/Animax is Boston Dynamics’ ability to produce robust and untethered autonomous systems at scale.
The world of theme park robots has transformed in recent years, with experiences like Disneyland’s Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge exhibiting robots that intermingle with park goers.
“We are thrilled about the collaboration with Neon and Animax for the development of fully untethered entertainment robots,” Boston Dynamics Chief Strategy Officerf Marc Theermann notes in a release.
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