Ethan B. Holland

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Robotics Embodiment

Robotics and Embodiment: Week Ending 01/12/2024

January 12, 2024

Robotics and Embodiment

Prosthetics

A prosthetic robotic arm

Me 😎🦾 https://t.co/3kBcc0cUva pic.twitter.com/QXhr4EXk9r
— Lucas Slusher 🦾 (@BionicSlusher) January 11, 2024

Humanoid Robots

OpenAI-Backed Humanoid Maker Gets $100 Million in EQT-Led Round

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-11/openai-backed-humanoid-maker-gets-100-million-in-eqt-led-round

1X, robotic startup backed by OpenAI, receives $100M in funding | Sam Altman and Bill Gates discuss.

Westwood robotics releases a demo of their humanoid walking and emoting

Cars

Intel: ‘We are bringing the AI PC to the car’

he chip company is doubling down on its auto business, introducing a new AI-enhanced system-on-a-chip for cars. The first company to install it will be Zeekr.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24026990/intel-auto-car-ai-pc-soc-sdv-zeekr-ces

The iPhone self-driving car app continues to get attention

FlowDrive turns your smartphone into a mini self-driving copilot! Lane keeping, cruise control, even traffic light detection.

@flowdrive_ai turns your smartphone into a mini self-driving copilot! Lane keeping, cruise control, even traffic light detection. pic.twitter.com/p9PgjZmH8Q
— Ravneet Punia (@punia_ravneet) January 11, 2024

Volkswagen is getting into the ChatGPT game.

The German automaker announced plans to add an AI-powered chatbot into all Volkswagen models equipped with its IDA voice assistant, starting in Europe.

Volkswagen is bringing ChatGPT into its cars and SUVs

Government/Labor

Hertfordshire: World’s first pothole-preventing robot to hit roads in test rollout

An autonomous robot designed to tackle potholes using AI is to venture out of a controlled environment and be tested on actual roads for the first time.

https://news.sky.com/story/hertfordshire-worlds-first-pothole-preventing-robot-to-hit-roads-in-test-rollout-13045036

An alternate vision of the future is one of “robot animals” – not the FUD of terminator AGI. As an example – consider this video of two Sheep Robotics robots servicing a park in CA, as cobots alongside a human. What’s interesting here is that there is no setup or teaching – the robots are seeing the site for the very first time, and they are off and running within 30 seconds. And all they have is a single stereo camera. There is a single ML model at its core – which encapsulates a rudimentary “world model” of the environment, and an ideal policy that robots ought to engage in. (Stay on grass, avoid hitting things, try to remember what you visited etc, stripe when you can etc etc). All this results in very simple animal-like behavior – it wont compose a sonnet or do algebra – but it’ll seek grass and eat it!

An alternate vision of the future is one of "robot animals" – not the FUD of terminator AGI. As an example – consider this video of two @sheeprobotics robots servicing a park in CA, as cobots alongside a human.

What's interesting here is that there is no setup or teaching -… pic.twitter.com/WWCuW8HKPV
— Nag Murty (@MurtyNag) January 11, 2024

Corporate Automation

McDonalds is testing an autonomous restaurant (kitchen still has humans).

McDonalds is testing an autonomous restaurant (kitchen still has humans).

Economically, I’m expecting a surplus of low skill workers, so keeping them employed for a “friendly face” is likely to sustain, perhaps to hand over the food.

pic.twitter.com/jbDZtx8kE2
— Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) January 7, 2024

Home Assistants

LG announces its AI Smart Home Agent (initially horrible, long term I’m sure it will OK or still horrible). The fact that of all things Amazon chose to make for Alexa was bad AI music… has weakened my already low hope in corporate innovation.

LG announces its AI Smart Home Agent at #CES2024 pic.twitter.com/IZCo4eJGuK
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) January 8, 2024

Embodiment

Excited to share the work we’re doing at Collaborative Robotics on ACoP, our Auditable Collaboration and Planning Framework, to enable a new level of human/robot collaboration by fusing our cobots with LLMs.

https://www.co.bot/news/fusing-our-cobot-with-llms

Complex Tasks

Introducing our CoRL work on Dynamic Handover. We humans often pass along objects, a baseball, a bottle of water, using throw and catch. We now enable the robot hands to throw and catch different unseen objects using RL and Sim2Real transfer!

Introducing our CoRL work on Dynamic Handover. We humans often pass along objects, a baseball, a bottle of water, using throw and catch. 🫴⚾️

We now enable the robot hands to throw and catch different unseen objects using RL and Sim2Real transfer! https://t.co/Xvn6F4jWVV pic.twitter.com/Ii00qviHs5
— Xiaolong Wang (@xiaolonw) September 19, 2023

https://binghao-huang.github.io/dynamic_handover/

Hype?

Figure-01 has learned to make coffee. Our AI learned this after watching humans make coffee. This is end-to-end AI: our neural networks are taking video in, trajectories out

Counterpoint https://youtu.be/hzJFQyYgeVQ?si=RuDpjT5OW_AdVuDj https://twitter.com/adcock_brett/status/1743987597301399852

Be Sure To Read “This Week in AI“

This is an extension of my weekly newsletter, This Week In AI, an executive summary of the top things to know in AI. Each week, I create an accessible overview for laypeople to feel confident they are conversant with the week’s AI developments. I include a curated list of must-click links of the week, to offer everyone a hands-on opportunity to explore the most intriguing updates in artificial intelligence across various categories, including robotics, imagery, video, AR/VR, science, ethics, and more. Beyond the overview, I post these topic-based deeper dives (below). If you haven’t read this week’s overview, I recommend starting there.