Category Physics

Researchers Expand Ability of Robots to Learn from Videos

A team from CMU’s Robotics Institute used affordances to teach robots how to interact with objects.

New work from Carnegie Mellon University has enabled robots to learn household chores by watching videos of people performing everyday tasks in their homes.

The research could help improve the utility of robots in the home, allowing them to assist people with tasks like cooking and cleaning. Two robots successfully learned 12 tasks including opening a drawer, oven door and lid; taking a pot off the stove; and picking up a telephone, vegetable or can of soup.

“The robot can learn where and how humans interact with different objects through watching videos,” said Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science...

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Scientists develop Magnetically Controlled Soft Medical Robot inspired by the Pangolin

Pangolin the inspiration for medical robot
The pangolin-inspired untethered magnetic robot. A Conceptual illustration of the pangolin-inspired robot operating in the small intestine. Robot is actuated with a low-frequency magnetic field and heated remotely with a high-frequency magnetic field. The pangolin’s body consist of individual overlapping hard keratin scales. The robot inspired by this overlapping design is shown on the right. Images of pangolins used under Standard licence from Shutterstock. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Tübingen

Pangolins are fascinating creatures. This animal looks like a walking pine cone, as it is the only mammal completely covered with hard scales. The scales are made of keratin, just like our hair and nails...

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Hybrid AI-powered Computer Vision Combines Physics and Big Data

Machine learning pipeline
Graphic showing two techniques to incorporate physics into machine learning pipelines — residual physics (top) and physical fusion (bottom) Achuta Kadambi/UCLA

Researchers from UCLA and the United States Army Research Laboratory have laid out a new approach to enhance artificial intelligence-powered computer vision technologies by adding physics-based awareness to data-driven techniques.

Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the study offered an overview of a hybrid methodology designed to improve how AI-based machinery sense, interact and respond to its environment in realtime — as in how autonomous vehicles move and maneuver, or how robots use the improved technology to carry out precision actions.

Computer vision allows AIs to see and make sense of their surroundings by ...

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Google StyleDrop generates Images from Text

Credit: Google

It took Da Vinci 16 years to paint the Mona Lisa. Some say he needed 12 years just to paint her lips.

There is no truth to the rumors that slow Internet was the cause.

But Da Vinci, a polymath who dabbled in botany, engineering, science, sculpture, and geology as well as painting, surely would have appreciated a new text-to-image generative vision transformer developed by Google Research.

Google’s StyleDrop, as described in a June 1 paper on the arXiv preprint server, lets users describe objects and specify artistic styles they wish to have incorporated in the generated output.

StyleDrop returns images reflecting the user’s specifications in about three minutes.

“The proposed method is extremely versatile and captures nuances and details of a user-provided...

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