Category: Robotics and Automation

While some companies, like Google and Tesla, are plowing major research dollars into creating self-driving (autonomous)  vehicles, Toyota intends to create a car that caters to the control freak. A great little article on the Popular Science website reports that the worlds largest automaker has just committed to invest $50 million to establish artificial intelligence research centers over the next 5 years at MIT, Stanford, and other locations:

…the work will have far-reaching interests, from understanding environments and vehicle dynamics to driver behavior. “We’re not just looking at people walking on the street around the car, but also driver distraction, the gadgets we’re using, and general ways and reasons drivers do things,” said Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, Ph.D. “We’ll be analyzing and understanding this behavior.”

Additionally, researchers will work to make the interventions seamless and unobtrusive—hence the pursuit of artificial intelligence, rather than mere driving capability. “We want the AI system to securely monitor the drive and offer assistance to the drivers,” Rus says. “It shouldn’t distract the drivers by doing something that is unexpected, making the driver wonder what’s happening. But it has to help in case the driver needs assistance. That’s the autonomous driving that Toyota considers best.”

For more on Toyota’s announcement and pursuit of “crash-proof” (but not self-driving!) cars that will allow drivers to still be in control, check out PopSci’s informative article on their website.

Source: PopSci.com – “TOYOTA WANTS CRASH-PROOF CARS, BUT DON’T CALL THEM ‘SELF-DRIVING’“

Featured Photo Credit: Google

Uber announced a strategic partnership with Carnegie Mellon University back in February to work with CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) to develop self-driving cars.  We found an excellent and detailed article on Popular Science’s website that dives into the depths of the story, and also looks at why Uber’s partnership with one of the world’s leading robotics labs might actually have a negative impact on the world of robotics research.

The center was typically a flurry of activity, with engineers hunched over terminals tethered to all manner of autonomous machines, including mowers, harvesters, excavators, and combat vehicles. Now, in the middle of a weekday, the lab—part of the biggest robotics program in the country—seemed abandoned. It looked more like a museum closed for renovations.

What happened to NREC? In a word: Uber. The San Francisco-based firm is an exemplar of Silicon Valley success, having reportedly raised $2.8 billion in funding on the strength of a single car-service app. Now Uber is racing to build self-driving cars. No longer content to take on traditional taxi companies, Uber hopes to use robots to lower fares, and ultimately compete with the entire automotive industry. “When there’s no other dude in the car,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said at the Code Conference in 2014, referring to the service’s human drivers, “the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle…and then car ownership goes away.”

Uber opened their Advanced Technologies Center just a short walk from NREC and after the announcement of the partnership, began quietly hiring robotics engineers from it.  The article continues:

 By the time we visited, the startup had hired 40 or 50 of NREC’s roughly 150 researchers, including Tony Stentz, the roboticist who had served as the center’s associate director for 13 years and director for nearly five.

“Uber was incredibly smart in that it went to the one place, outside Google, that has all of the right people—people who actually have a shot at tackling autonomous driving,” says Boris Sofman, who studied robotics at CMU and had Stentz as an adviser.

So why is this a bad thing for robotics research? Read on…

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What and interesting concept: what would a “Robot Cambrian Explosion” look like? A potentially provocative article over on Discover Magazine’s website explores this in depth:

Half a billion years ago, Earth’s animal life rapidly evolved during the event known as the Cambrian explosion. In the future, growing swarms of robots all talking with one another could spark a similar “Cambrian explosion” for robotic evolution. A robotics expert who has worked for the U.S. military recently published a paper on the technological changes that could rapidly spawn the next generation of robots powered by advanced artificial intelligence. He also weighs the consequences of robots rapidly replacing huge numbers of human workers.

What could cause this robot Cambrian explosion? Find out what that is next…

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