Category: Automation

ANYmal recently uploaded a short video showing their quadruped robot working whilst being fully submerged in water. According to the manufacturer, the bot is IP67 rated, so is completely protected against dust for extended periods, and can be fully immersed in water up to 1 meter deep for short periods. I guess that’s handy to know for the coming robot wars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-kZcRgKmMI
https://www.anybotics.com/anymal-autonomous-legged-robot/

Another general purpose humanoid work robot on the market is the Astra by Apptronik. Similar to the Sanctuary AI bot, this upper body robot can be remotely teleoperated, and seems to have decent limb dexterity.

I’m curious to see which industries begin to implement these robots first, and for what specific tasks, because in my opinion at the minute they seem like expensive toys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LWRV7oFHUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XulyFshFQMg
https://apptronik.com/

DEEP Robotics has announced the launch in Europe of the newest version of its Lite3 robot dog. Aimed at researchers, this fairly small robot seems to have good dexterity, and can jump and flip. It can also travel 5km on a single charge, carrying up to 7.5KG loads, and has the ability to follow objects, avoid obstacles and autonomously navigate.

Shipping of the quadruped bot will begin in September this year, and prices start from just under $3000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNkxlKLMoMM
https://deeprobotics.cn/en

After announcing it’s Firefly generative AI model a few months ago, Adobe has now added a new ‘Generative Fill’ feature directly into the latest Photoshop beta, allowing users to quickly add, extend, or remove content from images non-destructively, using simple text prompts.

I think this marks a new milestone in generative image AI technology, as it makes high quality image generation, and especially editing of existing work, very easy for all users. I wonder what the direct, short term impact of this will be on art and design related industries since so many people use Photoshop already?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVTyLYupECI
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/05/23/future-of-photoshop-powered-by-adobe-firefly

From video description:

“At the 2023 Tesla Shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shows off a new Optimus video, the company’s humanoid robot in development.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW3iRzXs940

The next generation LLM by Google has advanced reasoning capabilities, and has multi-lingual proficiency. In their overview video, the company showed PaLM 2 easily translating sections of code from one programming language to another.

They say that the use of compute-optimal scaling, that is scaling the model size and the training data size in proportion to each other has led to PaLM 2 actually being smaller than the previous version, whilst still having better performance.

No date yet on exactly when it will be available to the public.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAANQypgOo8
https://ai.google/discover/palm2

Sanctuary AI uploaded yet another video of their general-purpose robots completing a range of tasks, this time showing off 60 tasks in 60 seconds, from bagging groceries, to sorting mail, dusting, making coffee, soldering and a lot more. I wish more robotics companies were as on the ball with videos showing off their capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZwUWMrn8Z0

AI-RnD is a useful tool that came onto my radar recently and I wanted to share it. If you want to see all the different artificial intelligence research that’s being carried out around the world, this site collates research papers, and makes them easily searchable.

https://www.ai-rnd.com/

North America’s largest homebuilder, Mattamy Homes has teamed up with robotaxi maker Beep to provide a fully autonomous shuttle service for the residents in one of their housing developments.

This will allow the residents of the over 55s Telaro Florida complex to make regular trips to surrounding shops and restaurants. Mattamy is planning on building a further 1000+ new homes on the development this year.

There’s something about this kind of beautiful gated community with it’s own high tech services that feels like a classic sci-fi trope don’t ya think?

https://ridebeep.com/2023/05/03/mattamy-homes-and-beep-demonstrate-community-of-the-future-with-autonomous-mobility-network-expansion/
https://mattamyhomes.com/florida/port-st-lucie/port-st-lucie/tradition/telaro

I asked last week whether any big games developers were integrating AI models for NPC conversations and I now have an answer.

Ubisoft recently announced Ghostwriter, an AI tool they developed which aims to support scriptwriters by generating first drafts for NPC interactions.

Although they say it’s not adding the models directly into games themselves, they hope this tool will be a way to quickly generate variations on NPC dialogue, to make conversations less repetitive and free up time for writers to work on other core game elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OeSOXHBvCI
https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/7Cm07zbBGy4Xml6WgYi25d/the-convergence-of-ai-and-creativity-introducing-ghostwriter

More autonomous delivery services are being tested in Europe now. This time British supermarket chain Asda has partnered with autonomous vehicle technology start-up Wayve to deliver groceries to customers using self-driving vehicles.

Customers of the Park Royal superstore in London will be the first to have grocery orders delivered by self-driving vehicles. The year-long trial covers a catchment area of 72,000 households in London, making it the largest trial in the UK and Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ8zdoA_vHE
https://wayve.ai/press/asda-and-wayve-launch-grocery-delivery-trial/

During Amazon’s first quarter 2023 financial report released last week, the company stated that it’s Robin package handling robots have reached the milestone of processing over 1 billion packages in their US, Canadian and European operations.

The Robin combines machine learning and computer vision systems to automatically sort packages before shipment, and unlike simpler robotic arms, it is actually responding to a dynamically changing environment in real-time, not just carrying out pre-set motions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H11MaLGUAoQ
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2023/Amazon.com-Announces-First-Quarter-Results/