Reddit Robotics Showcase, Air and Sea Self-Driving Technology speeds ahead
OSTP calls for comments on National AI (Robotics) Strategy
More writing coming in the next few days, working on the next part of the humanoids piece and a robot crowdfunding retrospective. Meanwhile, I’m going to ask you all to write something!
The Office of Science and Technology Policy is calling for information to inform the Biden-Harris Administration National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. These days AI also means robotics. You can see what I mean in the recently updated National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan 2023 Update. Comments must be submitted by 5:00pm ET on July 7, 2023.
Big thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber - it makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics and as a startup advisor, and accelerator. And maybe we can do more to share your experience and expertize with the robotics startup community. Maybe Mentor Office Hours, maybe startup profiles. We’ll keep exploring.
Quick Reads:
Joby Aviation lands in Santa Cruz - Amelia Walsh in Flying
A plant-inspired controller that could facilitate the operation of robotic arms in the real world - TechXplore
The US is building factories at a wildly fast rate - Insider
Giant robots greet customers at Korean retailers new Galleria flagship store in Houston - Chron
DOD officials approve East Coast UAS and AAM test corridor - Flying
Autonomous air mobility may serve Miami in five years - Miami Today
This robot butler will tackle all your household chores - Interesting Engineering
Singapore creates digital blueprint for generative AI and autonomous systems - ZDNet
Open MV Cam RT Rev 2 Ready for Sample Production - OpenMV
The rise of the social robot. HMi meets … Moxie - LaingBuisson
Going behind the scenes to build with Comau - intrinsic
AI Everywhere, All at Once - Harry Goldstein at IEEE Spectrum
San Antonio women are leading a robotics revolution in the Alamo City - San Antonio Business Journal
Ground Rules for the Age of AI Warfare - Foreign Affairs
Chicago area landscaping company deploys its first autonomous mowing robots this season - WSILTV
Robot farmers? Machines are crawling through America’s fields. And some have lasers. - USA Today
AI-Controlled Autonomous Battery Powered Trucks Ordered for Felixstowe - The Maritime Executive
Stockholm autonomous ferry service set for debut - MarineLog
We’re still waiting for self-driving cars, but autonomous boats are already here - CNN
NASA Research Gathers Key Radar Data for Autonomous Air Cargo Delivery - NASA
Indy Autonomous Challenge to Relaunch Autonomous Challenge SIM Races with the Autoware Foundation and Autonoma - BusinessWire
TuSimple’s autonomous trucks commence testing on Expressway in Japan - Cision
GM chief Barra stnads by her bet on autonomous vehicles - Reuters
10 Groundbreaking Insights on Level 4 Autonomous Trucks: Torc Robotics And C.R. England Collaborate - Trucking Tech News
California Assembly Passes Bill Prohibiting Autonomous Trucks on State’s Roads Without Drivers - Forbes
Autonomous car kills dog in San Francisco - Drive
How Many Sensors For Autonomous Driving? - Semiconductor Engineering
In Depth: The March of Chinese Robots into Domestic Factories - Caixin Global
Techman Robot Selects NVIDIA Isaac Sim to Optimize Automated Optical Inspection - NVIDIA
Japanese AI startup launches robot for home use - the japan times
Fourier Intelligence’s ArmMotus EMU Wins Prestigious IERA Awards 2023 - Fourier Intelligence
SoftBank’s Onetime Pizza-Robot Darling Shuts Down - The Information
Robot Pizza Startup Shuts Down After Cheese Kept Sliding Off - Yahoo News
Robot ‘chef’ learns to recreate recipes from watching food videos - University of Cambridge
Tertill, maker of home weeding robot, merges with Harvest Automation - The Robot Report
GRoW Harvesting Robot picking tomatoes at Axia Vegetable Seeds - hortidaily
Tesla’s Optimus robot fuses self-driving tech with mind-blowing humanlike capabilities - Yahoo News
ChatGPT Designs Its First Robot With Food Supply in Mind - Morning AgClips
AI and humans collaborate on first ChatGPT designed robot - New Atlas
Researchers create new robotic bee with full freedom of movement - Interesting Engineering
Benchmarking Robots with Dog-Inspired Barkour - IEEE Spectrum
Boston Dynamics’ Spot expands sensing, software features - The Robot Report
The First Robot Vacuum That Can Climb and Clean Stairs Could Be a Game-Changer - Gizmodo
Retail Insights - Robots are having a renaissance - CBInsights
Deepmind’s AlphaDev discovers sorting algorithms that can revolutionize computing foundations - VentureBeat
Microsoft to move top AI experts from China to new lab in Canada - Financial Times
Stratasys and Desktop Metal Merge to Fill Production Gaps - Design News
Robotics Events:
June 10-11 - Reddit Robotics Showcase - Reddit
June 13 - Founder Friends SF - Hustle Fund
June 14-17 - VivaTech in Paris - VivaTechnology
June 15 - Responsible AI Symposium - AI LA
June 19-22 - TechConnect World in Washington DC - TechConnect Org
June 20 - Revealing the AI 100: The World’s Most Promising Companies - CBInsights
June 20-22 - FITMA in Mexico City - Feria Internationale
June 20-22 - Sensors Converge in Santa Clara - Sensors Converge
June 26-29 - Collision in Toronto - Web Summit
June 27-30 - Automatica in Munich - VDMA
June 27 - The Future with Robots - Silicon Valley Robotics and IEEE RAS at the Commonwealth Club SF
July 11-12 - VB Transform: Get Ahead of the Generative AI Revolution - VentureBeat
Sep 19-21 - FIRA USA Salinas - FIRA
Sep 28 - The Autonomous Systems Showcase - Deep Tech Showcase
Oct 1-5 - IROS in Detroit - IEEE RAS
Deep Reads:
Kate Darling, robot expert: ‘We shouldn’t laugh at people who fall in love with a machine. It’s going to be all of us’ - El Pais
Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding (https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02858)
Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Lidong Bing
We present Video-LLaMA, a multi-modal framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of understanding both visual and auditory content in the video. Video-LLaMA bootstraps cross-modal training from the frozen pre-trained visual & audio encoders and the frozen LLMs. Unlike previous vision-LLMs that focus on static image comprehensions such as MiniGPT-4 and LLaVA, Video-LLaMA mainly tackles two challenges in video understanding: (1) capturing the temporal changes in visual scenes, (2) integrating audio-visual signals. This highlights the potential of Video-LLaMA as a promising prototype for audio-visual AI assistants.
Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13516, 22 May 2023)
Meta AI develops a speech-to-text model for ~1,100 different languages (for comparison, OpenAI's Whisper model supports 99) called MMS. Meta's MMS model outperforms Whisper on all 54 languages in the FLEURS benchmark that are covered by both MMS and Whisper. The model is released under a permissible CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
