BRL brings us quantum physics with robots, so does NCSU.
Plus the latest news in human general intelligence vs AGI, GM vs Cruise, and Elroy Air vs gravity...
The Journal of Advanced Science just published a collaboration between Bristol Robotics Laboratory researcher Dr Joe Smith and University of Bristol Photonic Quantum Engineering researcher Dr Kirishna Coimbatore Balram, showing that robotics could be used to advance all sorts of quantum sensing experiments, more reliably, with “unprecedented levels of speed, detail and complexity”.
While Phys.org says “thanks to a new robotic arm”, I’m excited to see that it’s a Ned2 from Niryo. Not exactly a new robotic arm, but certainly an excitingly new application. The full paper Robotic Vectorial Field Alignment for Spin-Based Quantum Sensors explains the advantages that robotics can bring to the field of quantum engineering.1
See another example, SmartDope, from North Carolina State University, in which an autonomous or “self-driving” lab was able to return best in class results for doping perovskite quantum dots in one day, rather than the 10 years that conventional techniques would have taken.2
Also congratulations to Tangram Vision who raced past the target raise for the HiFi Depth Sensor on Kickstarter in 4 hours! Here’s another fun robotics kickstarter… the Perseverance Mars Rover kit from GeekClub. I’m updating the next robotics crowdfunding post today so paid subscribers will get Pt 2 immediately and everyone else will get it in a few more weeks.
Did you just switch to a paid subscription? Thank you! It makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics as a startup advisor, and accelerator.
If you look at OpenAI’s org chart, yesterday’s ouster of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman by Ilya Sutskever and the other 5 board members looks like just another ‘triumph’ of human general intelligence, rather than the awakening of artificial general intelligence. I think some egos got too big for the building. Maybe all.
Quick Reads:
Elroy Air achieves first flight of Chaparral C1 hybrid eVTOL aircraft - Vertical Magazine
Robotics Q&A with Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ Tedrake - TechCrunch
GM’s Cruise suspends its employee equity program - Reuters
Robotics Activities Continue; Crew Completes an Array of Research - NASA
ETH Zurich 3d print a robotic hand wiht human like bones and tendons - ArsTechnica
B.C. robotics firm secures $17.5M to revolutionize mushroom industry - Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal
Send in the Robots - Small Wars Journal
With mapping robots and blast gel, Israel wages war on Hamas tunnels - Yahoo News
AI is already being melded with robotics - one outcome could be powerful new weapons - The Conversation
Humanoid robots are already here. But do we really need them and will they replace humans? - EuroNews
Remy Robotics CEO: Autonomous Tech Enables Growth of ‘Fast-Fine’ Dining - PYMNTS
US lawmakers raise concerns over Chinese self-driving testing data collection - Reuters
The letters said in the 12 months ended November 2022 that Chinese AV companies test drove more than 450,000 miles in California. In July, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his agency had national security concerns about Chinese autonomous vehicle companies in the United States.
UPS just opened a giant new warehouse where 3,000 robots will do most of the work: ‘It’s a linchpin of our strategy’ - Fortune
Introducing Titan, Amazon’s new mobile robot that can lift up to 2,500 pounds - Amazon
Less than two years after its opening, a robotics company is shutting down its Pittsburgh facility - CBSNews
South Korea allows autonomous robots to use sidewalks - UPI
Port of Virginia preps private 5G for autonomous trucks - RCRWirelessNews
Watch this robot install solar panels in Arizona - Electrek
Robotics Events:
16 Nov - Making It Big: Experts’ Talk Manufacturing Success (Plus Brazilian BBQ)
20 Nov - SVR’s Robotics Technical Network at Autodesk (are you a CTO, technical founder or senior robotics engineer? Ask for an invitation)
4 Dec - SVR’s Startup Mentor Office Hours
4 Dec - SVR’s Founders & Funders Night Out
5 Dec - SVR / AMBay Area Bots & Beer Mixer
12-14 Dec - IEEE Humanoids in Austin TX
Interesting Robotics:
A review of energy supply for biomachine hybrid robots
The energy supply system directly determines the practical application of BHRs. This review from Beijing Institute of Technology in Cyborg and Bionic Systems calls for more researchers to be able to focus on this field and work together to overcome the challenges in energy supply and promote the practical application of BHRs.
Our results show that an industrially designed robotic arm can be adapted to operate around sensitive optomechanical samples and setups. The presented modality produces stable and controllable magnetic fields that are capable of manipulating and aligning a single solid state quantum spin sensor. This is an important step in the use of robotics to replace axial stages and bulky field coils for experimental physics and in developing quantum technologies, where we have evidenced the benefit of the innate flexibility and configurability of robotic arms in highly constrained environments.
The next step in this work is to generate on-demand magnetic fields using a sophisticated algorithm that maps the traversable space given geometrical parameters, making use of the collision-free techniques described. With this, a set of control points can be found, considering application-specific criteria such as the field magnitude, linearization, or the time taken to move between points.
Robotics, unlike solenoid coils, produce minimal local heat. This makes them suited for sensitive samples, and algorithms could be designed for tracking quantum sensors in motion under cell uptake, a difficult task where the spin sensor orientation changes over time.[58, 59] For further flexibility, the cylindrical magnet could be replaced with a rectangular magnet fixed perpendicular to its magnetic axis, with the unused roll degree of freedom in the robotic wrist providing rapid field orientation.
Beyond an off-the-shelf design, an application-specific robot could further maximize efficiency, precision, and control. This could have a larger payload whilst having a smaller form factor, for instance. We can extend this to the use of multiple robots to generate gradient magnetic fields. Without our approach, we find a 99% field uniformity over millimeter volumes (see Figure S1, Supporting Information). However, this is significantly less than Helmholtz coils, which maintain this uniformity over their central volume (> cm3). To combat this, multiple robots could be combined to increase uniformity over large areas. As well as a range of solid-state sensors, the alignment of atoms and ions in cold and vacuum environments can be explored with these form factors. A probe-like flux concentrator appended to the end-effector could achieve higher field strengths at distant locations, although the presence of this ferromagnet would have to be robustly modeled.[60]
In addition, the robot-driven orientation presented can be extended to aligning quantum objects with a range of parameters, including electric and light fields. Here, the end effector would be an electrode, or in optics, a laser or mirror surface. Following this proof-of-principle work, the adaptability of robots in combination with sophisticated software could provide ruggedness for alignment in demanding real-world environments where quantum technologies are emerging, such as point to point quantum key distribution (QKD)[61] and quantum range finding.[62]