Carbon Robotics, a Seattle company led by Isilon Systems co-founder Paul Mikesell, is unveiling its self-driving robot that uses artificial intelligence to identify weeds growing in fields of vegetables, then zaps them with precision thermal bursts from lasers. GeekWire reports: [W]hat farmers need is less a revolution in farming methods than a revolutionary tool that fits into their current farming patterns, Mikesell said. Carbon worked closely with farmers in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, he said. As a result, Carbon's robot system -- the Autonomous Weeder -- was built about the size of a medium tractor so it would fit in the furrows between rows of common crops like onions and sweet potatoes. It can cover up to 16 acres of cropland a day, zapping as many as 100,000 weeds an hour, Mikesell said. And since it's self-driving, all a farmer has to do is take it to the field in the morning and turn it on. "We're really intent on not making farmers have to change how they're doing things," Mikesell said. "That's been a key to our success. We fit right into their operations." Carbon has sold out all the robots it built for the 2021 planting season, and is looking for an industrial partner who could help it build more units for 2022, Mikesell said. The company is looking to get into the hundreds of units built and shipped for next year, he said. "There's a demand for a lot more than that, tens or hundreds of thousands of them."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Koreans must learn how to work alongside machines if they want to thrive in a post-pandemic world where many jobs will be handled by artificial intelligence and robots, according to the country's labor minister. "Automation and AI will change South Korea faster than other countries," Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jae-kap said in an interview Tuesday. "Not all jobs may be replaced by machines, but it's important to learn ways to work well with machines through training." While people will have to increase their adaptability to work in a fast-changing high-tech environment, policy makers will also need to play their part, Lee said. The government needs to provide support to enable workers to move from one sector of the economy to another in search of employment and find ways to increase the activity of women in the economy, he added. The minister's remarks underline the determination of President Moon Jae-in's government to press ahead with a growth strategy built around tech even if it risks alienating the country's unions -- an important base of support for the ruling camp -- in the short term. "New jobs will be created as technology advances," Lee said. "What's important in policy is how to support a worker move from a fading sector to an emerging one." The government is looking to help with this transition by expanding its employment insurance program to 21 million people, or more than 40% of the population, by 2025. "The program is part of a government initiative to provide financial support in the form of insurance for every worker in the country, whether they are artists, freelancers or deliverymen on digital platforms," adds Bloomberg. "Separately, the government is providing stipends for young people to encourage them to keep searching for work, as their struggle to stay employed amid slowing economic growth has been made tougher by the pandemic."

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes a classic article from IEEE Spectrum: A study by a team of Japanese researchers shows that, in certain situations, children are actually horrible little brats^W^W^W may not be as empathetic towards robots as we'd previously thought, with gangs of unsupervised tykes repeatedly punching, kicking, and shaking a robot in a Japanese mall... The Japanese group didn't just document the bullying behavior, though; they wanted to find clever ways of helping the robot avoid the abusive situations. They started by developing a computer simulation and statistical model of the children's abuse towards the robot, showing that it happens primarily when the kids are in groups and no adults are nearby. Next, they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people. When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person. This ensures that an adult is there to intervene when one of the little brats decides to pound the robot's head with a bottle (which only happened a couple times).

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A group of scientists from MIT have equipped a robot with a wrist-mounted camera and an RF reader to help it find hidden objects. "As long an item has an RF tag on it, the robot can find it, even if it's hidden behind things like wrapping paper," reports Engadget. From the report: The team told MIT News the most challenging aspect of developing RF Grasp was integrating both sight and RF vision into its decision-making process. They compare the current system to how you might react to a sound in the distance by turning your head to pinpoint its source. RF Grasp will initially use its RF reader to find tagged objects, but the closer it gets to something, the more it depends on the information it collects through its camera to make a decision. Compared to a robot with only a visual system, RF Grasp can locate and pick up an object in about half as many total movements. It also has the unique ability to clean up and declutter its working space as it goes about its tasks. The team sees RF Grasp helping companies like Amazon further automate and streamline their warehouses. "Perception and picking are two roadblocks in the industry today," said Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez, one of the researchers who worked on the project.

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A robot armed with virus-killing ultraviolet light is being tested on Swiss airplanes, yet another idea aiming to restore passenger confidence and spare the travel industry more pandemic pain. Reuters reports: UVeya, a Swiss start-up, is conducting the trials of the robots with Dubai-based airport services company Dnata inside Embraer jets from Helvetic Airways, a charter airline owned by Swiss billionaire Martin Ebner. Aircraft makers still must certify the devices and are studying the impact their UV light may have on interior upholstery, which could fade after many disinfections, UVeya co-founder Jodoc Elmiger said. Still, he's hopeful robot cleaners could reduce people's fear of flying, even as COVID-19 circulates. Elmiger's team has built three prototypes so far, one of which he demonstrated inside a Helvetic jet at the Zurich Airport, where traffic plunged 75% last year. The robot's lights, mounted on a crucifix-shaped frame, cast everything in a soft-blue glow as it slowly moved up the Embraer's aisle. One robot can disinfect a single-aisled plane in 13 minutes, start to finish, though larger planes take longer. Dnata executives hope airplane makers will sign off on the robots -- Elmiger estimates they'll sell for $15,930 or so -- as governments require new measures to ensure air travelers don't get sick.

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It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired: Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions." Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a mind-bending development, a team of researchers in China have managed to treat brain tumors in mice by delivering drugs to the tissues using microscopic robots. The robots jumped from the mice's bloodstreams into their brains by being coated in E. coli, which tricked the rodents' immune systems into attacking them, absorbing the robots and the cancer-fighting drugs in the process. The team's research was published today in the journal Science Robotics. It comes on the heels of previous research by members of the same team, which saw liquid-coated nanorobots remotely propelled through the jelly-like fluid of the eye. Besides being an obvious recipe for an episode of "The Magic School Bus," the research had obvious applications for ophthalmological research and medical treatments. The crafts are magnetic, and the researchers use a rotating magnetic field to pull them around remotely. On microscales -- we're talking incremental movements about 1% the width of a hair -- the researchers were able to make the hybrid bio-bots wend paths like in the video game Snake. They're dubbed "neutrobots" because they infiltrate the brain in the casing of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. It ultimately took Wu's team eight years to actualize the microscopic robot swarms capable of bridging the gap between the rodent bloodstream in the animal's tail, where the bots were injected, and its brain, where gliomas -- tumors that emerge from the brain's glial cells -- resided. Part of the issue is that the mice's white blood cells didn't dig the flavor of the magnetic robots. To overcome that issue, Wu's team coated the bots in bits of E. coli membrane, which the white blood cells easily recognize as a unwelcome invader. That made the robots much more palatable, and the white blood cells enveloped them. From inside those cells, the robots were then able to roll the cells toward the brain; a Trojan horse for the 21st century (in this case, one that benefits the residents of Troy). The neutrobots made it into the brains and were able to deliver the drug directly to the targeted tumors.

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A two-armed robot is helping to prepare soba noodles at an eatery at JR Kaihimmakuhari Station in this Chiba city's Mihama Ward (in Japan), capably boiling the noodles in a strainer, rinsing them and then dipping them in iced water. From a report: The Sobaichi Perie Kaihimmakuhari eatery implemented a collaborative cooking system, with the robot cooking the food and employees adding the dipping sauce or soup and toppings. It is apparently the first time for the cooking robot to be introduced in an actual restaurant setting. Soba stands at railway stations usually have to deal with a constant stream of customers and work under time pressure, resulting in a chronic shortage of human resources. [...] The robot fetches soba noodles from a box with one arm, and places it in a strainer. Then with the other arm, it picks up the strainer and boils the noodles for a minute and 40 seconds, rinses off the viscous film on the surface and then dips the noodles in iced water to bring out their firmness. The robot can cook 150 servings in an hour, substituting the work of about one employee.

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States like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin have granted sidewalk robots legal rights as "pedestrians." Axios reports: In Pennsylvania, robot "pedestrians" can weigh up to 550 pounds and drive up to 12 mph. "Opposition has largely come from pedestrian and accessibility advocates, as well as labor unions like the Teamsters," per the Pittsburgh City Paper. The laws are a boon to Amazon's Scout delivery robot and FedEx's Roxo, which are being tested in urban and suburban settings. "Backers say the laws will usher in a future where household items show up in a matter of hours, with fewer idling delivery vans blocking traffic and spewing emissions," per Wired. Some technology evangelists think these laws are a spectacularly bad idea. The National Association of City Transportation Officials -- NACTO -- says the robots "should be severely restricted if not banned outright." "Uncoordinated autonomous delivery services could flood sidewalks with bots, making walking increasingly difficult and unpleasant," NACTO says in a report. "Drone delivery could significantly increase noise pollution and add a new dimension of chaos to urban streets."

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The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad." But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...." A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance." The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company. The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

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MojoKid summarizes an article from Hot Hardware: Boston Dynamics made news recently when 80% of the company was acquired by Hyundai. The company's family of robots is always impressive and now it appears they're having some fun to celebrate the close of 2020. Boston Dynamics' robot dog, Spot and its humanoid-like Atlas bot friend, were joined by their oddball sibling Handle to shake their booties on the dance floor to "Do You Love Me" by The Contours. The video starts off impressive enough with just a single Atlas showing its incredible dexterity while busting out some sweet moves that would leave even the late Patrick Swayze envious. However, as the routine progresses, the camera pulls back to show that another twin Atlas is dancing along with the first one as they show off their synchronized and fresh rug-cutting ways. As this robotic soul train continues to roll, Spot the dog saunters in to join in on the fun with the distinct flare that only rover can bring. The entire 3 minute clip is really a marvel to behold, and maybe even slightly unsettling for some that might not fully welcome our robot overlords.

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What if your digital assistant could battle rap? That may sound far-fetched, but Gil Weinberg, a music technologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has adapted a musical robot called Shimon to compose lyrics and perform in real time. From a report: That means it can engage in rap "conversations" with humans, and maybe even help them compose their own lyrics. Shimon, which was intentionally designed to sound machinelike (listen here), is meant to be a one-of-a-kind musical collaborator -- or an inhuman rap-battle opponent. Computer-generated music dates back to the 1950s, when early computers used algorithms to compose melodies. Modern robots can use machine learning to ad-lib on instruments including the flute and drums. One such machine was an earlier version of Shimon, which could play the marimba and sing. The recently updated robot looks the same; it still consists of a ball-shaped "head," with saucy movable eyebrows above visor-covered eyes, perched at the end of a mechanical arm. But now Weinberg claims Shimon is the first improvising robot to foray into rap, with its distinct stylistic features that pose unique programming challenges. The crowning glory of rap lies in the lyrics. On top of semantic content, the words need to adhere to an aesthetically pleasing beat and rhythm, all while delivering multiple layers of poetic complexity. In a recent paper, published in the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity 2020, Weinberg's research team outlines the technical advances that brought a rapping Shimon to life. When Shimon battle raps, software converts its human opponent's spoken lyrics into text. The robot's system identifies keywords from this, and generates new lyrics based on several custom data sets of words that Shimon has been trained on (using deep-learning models). These data sets can come from any text: the work of Lil Wayne, JAY-Z or other rappers; lyrics from other genres; or even nonmusical literary works. Imagine how Shakespeare or Jane Austen might sound if they rapped; Shimon could simulate that for you.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, Walmart has cut ties with Bossa Nova Robotics, opting for human workers instead. CNBC reports: A Walmart spokesperson told the Journal that about 500 robots were in Walmart's more than 4,700 stores when the contract ended. According to the Journal's report, Walmart has come up with simple and cost-effective ways to manage the products on its shelves with the help of its workers rather than using the robots. The report said Walmart U.S. Chief Executive John Furner also worried about shoppers' reactions to the robots. Walmart is pressing ahead with other tech-based experimentation, however. Last week, the retailer said it would turn four stores into e-commerce laboratories that test digital tools and different strategies that could speed up restocking shelves and fulfilling online orders.

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"To fight a disease that thrives on human contact, robots have increasingly taken the place of vulnerable humans," writes Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle: Sentry robots have performed screenings and patrolled streets, looking for lockdown violators. Avatars have allowed family members to visit loved ones in senior homes and enabled graduating students to walk across the stage. In hospitals, germ zappers have blasted UV-C light through hospital rooms, while doctor assistant bots have checked on patients. This photo essay takes a tour of essential robot workers during the time of COVID. "Robots don't need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don't get sick," the article notes, noting they're being deployed "all over the world." Not all robots operate autonomously — many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they've gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable.

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A giant Gundam in Japan's Port of Yokohama is now able to "pick up its legs to walk, bend its knees, turn its head, and contort its fingers to mime hand signals," reports Popular Mechanics. The 60-foot robot is the largest in the world. From the report: Inspired by the fictional Japanese robot of the same name -- which has appeared in over 50 TV series and movies since 1979, as well as many manga comics and video games -- this Gundam features a staggering 24 degrees of freedom. People in Japan have caught and shared a few glimpses of the engineering marvel. Considering the Gundam weighs about 25 tons, it's pretty insane to watch it raise both arms in the air and pick itself back up after kneeling. Those efficiencies are thanks to precise engineering and design work, as outlined in a series of YouTube videos from Gundam Factory Yokohama. In one installment, the engineers give a tour of where they designed, built, and assembled the Gundam. The videos are a great way to really contextualize the size of this monster; from the metal fingertip to where the wrist will connect, for example, the hand is about 6.5 feet wide.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat, written by Emil Protalinski: Founded in 1992, Boston Dynamics is arguably the best-known robot company around, in part because its demonstration videos tend to go viral. Now it is attempting to transform from an R&D company to a robotics business, with an eye on profitability for the first time. When we interviewed Boston Dynamics founder and former CEO Marc Raibert in November 2019, we discussed the company's customers, potential applications, AI, simulation, and those viral videos. But it turns out Raibert was transitioning out of the CEO role at the time -- current CEO Robert Playter told us in an interview this month that he took the helm in November. We sat down to discuss Playter's first year as CEO; profitability; Spot, Pick, Handle, and Atlas; and the company's broader roadmap, including which robots are next. [...] In June, Boston Dynamics started selling its quadruped robot Spot in the U.S. for $74,500. Last week, the company expanded Spot sales to Canada, the EU, and the U.K. at the same price point. Playter says Boston Dynamics has sold or leased about 250 robots to date and business is accelerating. [...] Compared to big manufacturing robotic companies, 250 robots is not a lot. But Playter points out it's a big achievement "for a novel robot like Spot." Other robotic startups would love to get that sort of market validation. "We're penetrating, we're establishing a market, and people are starting to see value. We're adapting Spot to be a solution for some of the industries we're targeting," Playter said. Spot's success means the company is beating its own internal targets. "We are meeting -- actually exceeding -- some of our sales goals for Spot," Playter said. "We had ambitious goals this year, but we met our Q1 goal. We're meeting our Q2 goal. We have ambitious Q3 and Q4 goals. I think we're probably going to meet or exceed them this year. To become profitable, these products do have to become successful. They have to scale. But right now, I think we're beating plan." The company now has a roadmap to profitability. "I think we'll be profitable in about two and a half years," Playter said. "2023-2024 is when I'm projecting that we are cash positive." To hit that milestone, Boston Dynamics is simultaneously developing robots for logistics (think production, packaging, inventory, transportation, and warehousing)...

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The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to permanently replace some humans with machines, according to a new study on Monday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. From a report: Layoffs have been higher among workers in industries that can be automated, which increases the risk those jobs will become permanently obsolete, according to the study by economists Lei Ding and Julieth Saenz Molina. At the same time, the spread of Covid-19 has accelerated automation in industries that have been hit hard by the virus or that don't permit remote work. The longer the recession lasts, the deeper the impact of automation will be. "In case the COVID-19 crisis evolves into a prolonged economic crisis, many job losses in automatable occupations could become permanent in the post-pandemic economy, similar to what happened during the recovery from the Great Recession," Ding and Saenz Molina wrote. Industries that were already facing a high risk of automation lost 4.2 more jobs per 100 than jobs in sector facing fewer threats by technology, the study shows, which analyzes data through August.

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Earlier today, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's brain link device working in a pig named Gertrude. While the science and the device itself were front-and-center at the presentation, the surgical robot the company debuted is equally as important because it's designed to handle the full surgical installation process. "That includes opening up the scalp, removing a portion of the skull, inserting the hundreds of 'thread' electrodes 6mm deep along with the accompanying chip, then closing the incision," reports CNET. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the robot: The rounded polycarbonate sci-fi design of the brain surgeon bot looks like something out of the Portal franchise, but it's actually the creation of Vancouver-based industrial design firm Woke Studio. To be clear, Musk's engineers and scientists have created the underlying technology, but Woke built the robot's look and user experience, as well as the behind-the-ear communication end piece that Neuralink has shown in prior presentations. Neuralink's bot features clean white (required for ensuring sterility, per Woke), arcing lines and smooth surfaces for a look that at once flags its advanced technical capabilities, but also contains some soothing and more approachable elements, which is wise considering what the machine is intended to do. Woke says the Neuralink surgical robot can be separated into three main parts: The head, the body and base. The head of the robot is that helmet-like piece, which actually holds the head of the patient. It also includes a guide for the surgical needle, as well as embedded cameras and sensors to map the patent's brain. The intent of the design of this piece, which includes a mint-colored interior, is to give the robot "an anthroprmorphic characteristic" that helps distract from the invasive nature of the procedure. There are also single-use disposable bags that line the interior of the helmet for sterile operation. The Neuralink robot also has a "body," that humped rear assembly, which includes all the parts responsible for the motion of the robot as it sets up from the procedure. The third element is the base, which basically keeps the whole thing from tipping over, and apparently also contains the computing brains of the brain-bot itself.

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According to a report from the New York Post, Amazon may bring the cashierless tech at its Go convenience stores to Whole Foods as early as next year. The Verge reports: Amazon may start implementing the tech in Whole Foods sometime during the second quarter of 2021, according to the New York Post's source. This technology, which is currently available in more than 20 Amazon Go convenience store locations, uses cameras, sensors, and computer vision to let customers walk out the store with groceries in hand and avoid cashier checkout lines. The New York Post's source claims the rollout of the new technology into Whole Foods is one of two final projects that Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer division, is focusing on before he retires early next year.

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