What does it take for a machine to be called smart? Being able to play chess or compose something kind of like music can make a machine look smart, but it’s just doing what it has been programmed to do. Smart machinery has some special characteristics that set it apart from ordinary machinery. Self awareness… Read more »
Robots have been splitting Oreo cookies for years. But can they split them precisely in half, getting equal amounts of creme on each of the wafers that makes up the iconic sandwich cookie? Nope. In fact, scientists at MIT have, with the help of a robot, determined that it is impossible to split the creme… Read more »
Would you rather have a voice-only AI companion like Alexa or a humanoid robot friend like Pepper? A new study suggests that most of us would prefer the disembodied voice over a more humanlike option. The study was small, and it tested the question by showing people clips from the TV show Black Mirror…. Read more »
A robo-dog (Sparky rather than Spot) checked out the animals at the Sydney Zoo. The video’s titles talk about how the robot is “interacting” with animals, but that seems like a more positive word than we would normally use to describe the hissing and spitting of the cheetahs meeting up with a robot for the… Read more »
Industrial production increased 0.9% in March, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve. It increased by 0.9% in February, too. That adds up to a rise of 8.1% in the first quarter. Automative production in particular jumped 7.8% in March. Total industrial production in March was 5.5% higher than it was at the same… Read more »
You know the sides of the argument by now: on the one hand, robots may take over so many human jobs that people will have no work to do. On the other hand, increasing automation will give humans better and more satisfying jobs. The trouble is, it’s very hard to predict which jobs will still… Read more »
A new robot from Japan can peel bananas. Chipotle is replying a robot named Chippy that can make chips. A robotic nose called NOSE can identify whiskey by brand 95% of the time. Okay, maybe the labor shortage justifies Chippy. But peeling bananas and sniffing whiskey? These are not jobs that are crying out for… Read more »
Rexroth’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, facility has received a $49,500 grant from the state of Pennsylvania to support its apprenticeship program in its area. Rexroth will identify positions that will be opening up within the next two to five years. Then it will reach out to local universities and career training centers to find likely candidates for… Read more »
Robots can do some things much better than human beings. Nonetheless, people who research robots continue to work on things that robots can’t do very well. One of those tasks is dressing people. Robots wouldn’t be good at dressing themselves, either. Cloth is a huge problem for robots. It changes shape continually, in ways that… Read more »
HuggieBot is a new robot that is designed to hug people. The researchers at the Haptic Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, have been diligently working on how to teach robots to give good hugs to people, and they feel that they have succeeded with HuggieBot 3.0. The 11 HuggieBot… Read more »
