Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon. "Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps. SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.

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Robots have a hard time improvising, and encountering an unusual surface or obstacle usually means an abrupt stop or hard fall. But researchers have created a new model for robotic locomotion that adapts in real time to any terrain it encounters, changing its gait on the fly to keep trucking when it hits sand, rocks, stairs and other sudden changes. From a report: Although robotic movement can be versatile and exact, and robots can "learn" to climb steps, cross broken terrain and so on, these behaviors are more like individual trained skills that the robot switches between. Although robots like Spot famously can spring back from being pushed or kicked, the system is really just working to correct a physical anomaly while pursuing an unchanged policy of walking. There are some adaptive movement models, but some are very specific (for instance this one based on real insect movements) and others take long enough to work that the robot will certainly have fallen by the time they take effect. The team, from Facebook AI, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, call it Rapid Motor Adaptation. It came from the fact that humans and other animals are able to quickly, effectively and unconsciously change the way they walk to fit different circumstances. "Say you learn to walk and for the first time you go to the beach. Your foot sinks in, and to pull it out you have to apply more force. It feels weird, but in a few steps you'll be walking naturally just as you do on hard ground. What's the secret there?" asked senior researcher Jitendra Malik, who is affiliated with Facebook AI and UC Berkeley. Certainly if you've never encountered a beach before, but even later in life when you have, you aren't entering some special "sand mode" that lets you walk on soft surfaces. The way you change your movement happens automatically and without any real understanding of the external environment.

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Grubhub and Russian self-driving startup Yandex are teaming up to use robots to deliver food on US college campuses. It represents the latest deal that envisions hundreds of six-wheeled self-driving robots that essentially act as roving lunchboxes in cities across the country. From a report: The robot-powered delivery service won't kick off until this fall when college students return to campus. Yandex, which is often described as Russia's Google, will operate the robots, as well as handle the entire food delivery process. Grubhub, which has partnerships with over 250 college campuses in the US, will serve as the platform for the delivery transactions. Grubhub cited the cost savings it will get by eliminating the delivery worker from the equation as a potential benefit from the deal with Yandex -- though neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. "We're excited to offer these cost-effective, scalable and quick food ordering and delivery capabilities to colleges and universities across the country that are looking to adapt to students' unique dining needs," said Brian Madigan, vice president of corporate and campus partners at Grubhub, in a statement. Yandex says that its delivery robots can navigate pavement, pedestrian areas and crosswalks, and reach campus areas not accessible by car. "Such functionality enables the robots to handle delivery tasks traditionally performed by people and provides efficient last-mile logistics automation," the company says.

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The New York Times reports: When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse... And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm. An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation... [S]ome economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way. "Once a job is automated, it's pretty hard to turn back," said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic... A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world. "Six months ago, all these workers were essential," said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. "Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they're trying to figure out how to get rid of them...." The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology... Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity. In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that "a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation" — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic. "If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality," Professor Acemoglu said. "We'll look back and say why didn't we do this sooner," fast-food franchisee Shana Gonzales told the Times after implementing an automated voice-recognition system that takes customers' orders. Gonzales added that she'd gladly hire human workers instead, but she just can't find them, and says she's even tried raising their starting pay rate — from $9 an hour to $10. "Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course."

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Westland Real Estate Group patrols its 1,000-unit apartment complex in Las Vegas with "a conical, bulky, artificial intelligence-powered robot" standing just over 5 feet tall, according to NBC News. Manufactured by Knightscope, the robot is equipped with four internal cameras capturing a constant 360-degree view, and can also scan and record license plates (as well as the MAC addresses of cellphones). But is it doing any good? As more government agencies and private sector companies resort to robots to help fight crime, the verdict is out about how effective they are in actually reducing it. Knightscope, which experts say is the dominant player in this market, has cited little public evidence that its robots have reduced crime as the company deploys them everywhere from a Georgia shopping mall to an Arizona development to a Nevada casino. Knightscope's clients also don't know how much these security robots help. "Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?" Dena Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. "No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled." For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots "predict and prevent crime," without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim. "It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a "roving scarecrow." Additionally, the company does not provide specific, detailed examples of crimes that have been thwarted due to the robots. The robots are expensive — they're rented out at about $70,000-$80,000 a year — but growth has stalled for the two years since 2018, and over four years Knightscope's total clients actually dropped from 30 to just 23. (Expenses have now risen — partly because the company is now doubling its marketing budget.) There's also a thermal scanning feature, but Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University, still called these robots an "expensive version of security theater." And NBC News adds that KnightScope's been involved "in both tragic and comical episodes." In 2016, a K5 roaming around Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, hit a 16-month-old toddler, bruising his leg and running over his foot. The company apologized, calling it a "freakish accident," and invited the family to visit the company's nearby headquarters in Mountain View, which the family declined. The following year, another K5 robot slipped on steps adjacent to a fountain at the Washington Harbour development in Washington, D.C., falling into the water. In October 2019, a Huntington Park woman, Cogo Guebara, told NBC News that she tried reporting a fistfight by pressing an emergency alert button on the HP RoboCop itself, but to no avail. She learned later the emergency button was not yet connected to the police department itself... [The northern California city] Hayward dispatched its robot in a city parking garage in 2018. The following year, a man attacked and knocked over the robot. Despite having clear video and photographic evidence of the alleged crime, no one was arrested, according to Adam Kostrzak, the city's chief information officer. The city didn't renew its contract "due to the financial impact of Covid-19 in early 2020," the city's CIO tells NBC News. But the city had already spent over $137,000 on the robot over two years.

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Boston Dynamics has been purchased by Hyundai in a deal valued at $1.1 billion. According to Motherboard, the deal "sees Hyundai assume an 80 percent controlling stake in the robot company. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake." From the report: It is hard to tell what Hyundai wants out of Boston Dynamics from the press release, which is laden with technobabble. Robots in car manufacturing are nothing new, but Hyundai says the acquisition is "another major step toward its strategic transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider" such as "autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI), Urban Air Mobility (UAM), smart factories and robots," which seems to speak to the company's ambitions beyond car manufacturing. Hyundai says it hopes to "develop advanced technologies that enhance people's lives and promote safety, thereby realizing the progress for humanity." Apparently, the "progress of humanity" means a lot less of it. To celebrate the purchase, Hyundai released a bizarre hype video featuring a seeing-eye robot dog, a nurse robot dog with a tablet mounted on its head that allows the patient to nod at a doctor who is somewhere else, and a teen dancing with a robot in the street. In other words, Hyundai envisions a lonely future in which social cohesion between humans has broken down and robots are our only friends. That's all bad enough, but why anyone would want a seeing eye robot dog instead of a real dog is beyond comprehension.

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Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares an interesting report from IEEE Spectrum: In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of "making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones." Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics' $74,000 Spot), Unitree's quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn't quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they've just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700. Speedy, good looking gait, robust, and a nifty combination of autonomous human-following and obstacle avoidance... There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu... The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access... Battery life is a big question — the video seems to suggest that the Go1 is capable of a three-kilometer, 20-minute jog, and then some grocery shopping and a picnic, all while doing obstacle avoidance and person following and with an occasional payload. Unitree later provided the reporter more detailed specs: The battery life of the robot while jogging is about 1 hour It weighs 12kg The Super Sensory System includes five wide-angle stereo depth cameras, hypersonic distance sensors, and an integrated processing system It's running at 16 core CPU and a 1.5 tflop GPU

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New submitter DaveV1.0 shares a report from CNBC: At 10 McDonald's locations in Chicago, workers aren't taking down customers' drive-thru orders for McNuggets and french fries -- a computer is, CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday. Kempczinski said the restaurants using the voice-ordering technology are seeing about 85% order accuracy. Only about a fifth of orders need to be a taken by a human at those locations, he said, speaking at Alliance Bernstein's Strategic Decisions conference. In 2019, under former CEO Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's went on a spending spree, snapping up restaurant tech. One of those acquisitions was Apprente, which uses artificial intelligence software to take drive-thru orders. Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than one or two years to implement. âoeNow there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather â" and on and on and on,â he said. Another challenge has been training restaurant workers to stop themselves from jumping in to help.

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18-inch tall robots on four wheels zipping across city sidewalks "stopped people in their tracks as they whipped out their camera phones," reports the Florida Sun-Sentinel. "The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery landscape... In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot servers grows around the country. And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and several others, in the next couple of weeks... "Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing the space with the delivery bots," said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation... Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in 30 minutes or less. Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at Berkeley, where at least one of its robots burst into flames. But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000 deliveries... "Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free." A video shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer having to tip human food-delivery workers.

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Researchers have developed a tool that can design complex DNA robots and nanodevices in minutes instead of days. Phys.Org reports: In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3-D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2-D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3-D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex. The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties. Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world.

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schwit1 writes: Able to move 1,600 boxes per hour using just one arm, Dill relies on humans to keep it operating efficiently Pickle Robots says that Dill's approach to the box unloading task is unique in a couple of ways. First, it can handle messy trailers filled with a jumble of boxes of different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights. And second, from the get-go it's intended to work under human supervision, relying on people to step in and handle edge cases. We asked Meyer how much Dill costs, and to our surprise, he gave us a candid answer: Depending on the configuration, the system can cost anywhere from $50-100k to deploy and about that same amount per year to operate. Meyer points out that you can't really compare the robot to a human (or humans) simply on speed, since with the robot, you don't have to worry about injuries or improper sorting of packages or training or turnover. While Pickle is currently working on several other configurations of robots for package handling, this particular truck unloading configuration will be shipping to customers next year.

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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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