Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Zoox’s purpose-built robotaxis have no steering wheel or pedals and are omnidirectional. | Source: Zoox Zoox’s purpose-built robotaxis with no steering wheel or pedals are driving on public roads in Las Vegas, making it the second city the company has deployed its robotaxis. The vehicles took to Las Vegas roads for the first time on June 16, 2023.  Initially, the robotaxis will be driving on a one-mile loop around the neighborhood where Zoox’s Las Vegas HQ is located, but the company hopes to expand its range in the coming months. The autonomous vehicles (AVs) can transport up to four people at a time and reach speeds up to 35 mph (56 kph) on this route. The rectangular vehicle has four-wheel steering, allowing it to perform precise maneuvers. Because it doesn’t have a driver’s seat, the small vehicle is bidirectional, meaning it can move forward and backward with ease.  While the current route is limited, it still has plenty of obstacles for the Zoox robotaxi to learn ...

Google DeeMind introduced RoboCat, a self-improving AI agent for robotics, in its latest paper . RoboCat can learn to perform a variety of tasks across different robotic arms and then self-generate new training data to better improve its technique. Typically, robots are programmed to perform one specific task or a few tasks well, but recent advances in AI are opening doors to robots being able to learn a variety of tasks. Google has previously done research exploring how to develop robots that can learn to multitask at scale and how to combine the understanding of language models with the real-world capabilities of a helper robot . But RoboCat aims to go beyond these capabilities. This latest AI agent aims to solve and adapt to multiple tasks and do so across different, real robots. Google said RoboCat can pick up a new task with as few as 100 demonstrations because it draws from a large and diverse dataset. The agent is based on Google’s multimodal model Gato (Spanish for “cat”),...

Nauticus Robotics , a developer of autonomous underwater robots that use AI for data collection and intervention services for the ocean industries, has been awarded a contract with Petrobras to develop and test its autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Aquanaut in Brazil. The contract leads to a potential market worth over $100 million annually and will expand Nauticus’ international presence to South America.  Under the contract, Nauticus will deploy Aquanaut, its autonomous subsea robot, to support Petrobras’ offshore activities. Specifically, Aquanaut will be used in Petrobras’ Deepwater Production Field using supervised autonomy for infield inspection services. The contract consists of approximately two months’ worth of subsea inspection time.  Aquanaut is a fully electric AUV that carries an array of multi-spectral perception sensors that allow the robot to detect, classify, inspect, and act upon subsea infrastructure using its pair of manipulators without direct operator...

A surgeon using the Moon Surgical Maestro surgical robotics system. | Source: Moon Surgical The Moon Surgical Maestro robotic surgery system faces some stiff competition — and the device developer plans to use that to its advantage. In an interview with  Medical Design & Outsourcing , Moon Surgical CEO Anne Osdoit, and Chief Technology Officer David Noonan discussed the technology behind what they described as their system’s key benefit: the ability to collaborate with surgeons. “We’ve built a collaborative robot, which is not necessarily what you typically see out there in the market,” Noonan said. “[Most] robot arms are extremely stiff. If you want to try and grab a hold of that and use it to manipulate it, you can’t because the payload and the stiffness are what’s needed to execute the task.” But Maestro is designed to let surgeons directly move the laparoscopic instruments attached to its robotic arms and hold them in place. That reduces strain on surgeons and frees ...

Powermat Technologies , a global supplier of wireless charging technologies, announced its PMT350 600W wireless power platform, the next generation in its family of platforms based on the company’s SmartInductive hybrid inductive/resonance technology. Building on its previous-generation 40W, 200W and 300W platforms, Powermat’s new 600W platform is optimized for mid-power industrial products, including robots.  Removing charging cables and replacing them with Powermat’s wireless power technology creates autonomous systems free from exact alignment or docking restrictions. Powermat also said this can reduce the expensive downtime of both maintenance and wired charging, lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). “Delivering [an] affordable wireless power system designed for Industry 4.0 is a game-changer for powerful systems that are notoriously expensive to implement,” Powermat CEO Kfir Abuhatzira said. “Industrial equipment often vibrates or moves, so replacing charging cables w...

iRobot’s Roomba Combo j7+. | Source: iRobot Despite the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) clearing Amazon’s $1.7 billion pending acquisition of iRobot just last week, the European Union (EU) seems ready to open a full-scale anti-trust investigation into the deal, according to Reuters .  On July 6, according to Reuters , the EU will start a four-month investigation at the end of its preliminary review of the acquisition. While Amazon still has a chance to convince the European Commission that the deal wouldn’t interfere with antitrust laws, sources told Reuters the odds against that are high. Amazon first announced its plans to purchase iRobot in August 2022. The deal was quickly put on hold in September 2022, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officially started an antitrust investigation into the deal.   While Amazon hasn’t commented much publicly on the FTC or EU investigations, it did previously highlight the size of the robot vacuum cleaner m...

A tomato-picking robot designed by ChatGPT. | Source: Adrien Buttier / EPFL A team of researchers at the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands and the Swiss technical university EPFL used ChatGPT to help them develop a tomato-picking robot. A study about the development of the robot was recently published in  Nature Machine Intelligence .  ChatGPT played an essential role in the development process from the very beginning. To decide what kind of robot they should create, researchers asked ChatGPT questions about what the greatest challenges for humanity would be in the future, which led them to focus on issues with the food supply. The team picked tomatoes because ChatGPT taught them that tomatoes would be one of the most economically valuable to automate.  “We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” Dr. Cosimo Della Santina, an assistant professor at TU Delft, said. During the design process, ChatGPT gave the team helpf...