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A Northampton delivery robot seems to have developed a fondness for a forest environment.

robot-woods-2205.jpg

A delivery robot creates a poetic moment in the woods of England

Matthew McCormack wasn't hallucinating when he came across a delivery robot in the woods of Northampton in the United Kingdom.

"I spotted the robot while cycling in Lings Wood," he told NPR over email. "We have them all over town for grocery deliveries, but I was surprised to see it so far from the shops, so I took a picture of it."

Ordinarily, McCormack is a history professor at the University of Northampton, in England. Since sharing that picture on Twitter, he has been enjoying some minor social media celebrity.

He did take a bit of poetic license by tweeting, "On my bike ride this morning, saw a delivery robot lost in the woods." ...

McCormack said, "It doubtless knew where it was going and got there eventually, but it did seem curious trundling along in woodland." ...

"I think the image is resonating with people because it is funny but also wistful," he said. "We often project personalities onto tech, and these little grocery robots are very cute."

McCormack reports that people have told him they've come across this wandering traveler out in the woods.

Apparently this particular robot favors the wilderness to life in Northampton.

FULL STORY: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100290734/delivery-robot-woods-northampton-england-united-kingdom
 
I don't know if this is fake news, but it looks like a disturbing development anyway:

 
A Northampton delivery robot seems to have developed a fondness for a forest environment.


A delivery robot creates a poetic moment in the woods of England

Matthew McCormack wasn't hallucinating when he came across a delivery robot in the woods of Northampton in the United Kingdom.

"I spotted the robot while cycling in Lings Wood," he told NPR over email. "We have them all over town for grocery deliveries, but I was surprised to see it so far from the shops, so I took a picture of it."

Ordinarily, McCormack is a history professor at the University of Northampton, in England. Since sharing that picture on Twitter, he has been enjoying some minor social media celebrity.

He did take a bit of poetic license by tweeting, "On my bike ride this morning, saw a delivery robot lost in the woods." ...

McCormack said, "It doubtless knew where it was going and got there eventually, but it did seem curious trundling along in woodland." ...

"I think the image is resonating with people because it is funny but also wistful," he said. "We often project personalities onto tech, and these little grocery robots are very cute."

McCormack reports that people have told him they've come across this wandering traveler out in the woods.

Apparently this particular robot favors the wilderness to life in Northampton.

FULL STORY: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100290734/delivery-robot-woods-northampton-england-united-kingdom
That reminds me of the film 'Silent Running' with the bots Huey, Dewey and Louis.
 
Zeus nuclear robot.png



Russia is using a nuclear powered Robot tug to deploy a space station in Mars orbit. This will enable a human crew to make a fast journey to Mars to catch up.

July 16: The Zeus unmanned nuclear-powered space tug, currently under development in Russia, would be delivering an interstellar space station to the planets of the Solar System while cosmonauts would be flying to the station separately due to long flights, Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Russian space agency Roscosmos told Sputnik.

Rogozin added that the breaking of the space tug would be as long as the acceleration; therefore, the station pushed by the space tug would be more effective for flights to distant planets rather than the Moon.

The Zeus nuclear-powered space tug is designed for deep space flights from one orbit to another. It has been in development since 2010. The spacecraft's preliminary design is expected to be finished by July 2024 and will cost 4.2 billion rubles ($56.3 million). Zeus is expected to be sent into space for test flights in 2030.
The first mission of Zeus to Jupiter will take 50 months and will last from 2030 to 2034. Zeus and the payload module will be launched into orbit from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on separate launch vehicles. They will dock, travel to the Moon, orbit it and return to Earth. After that, another payload module will dock Zeus and the station will fly to Venus, make a gravity maneuver, and head for Jupiter's moons. The mission will be fully unmanned.

Zeus space tug
 
Ever want to host a Robot Party? With Knightscope, you can!
https://www.knightscope.com/roadshow/
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knoightscope.jpg
 
Careful when you're playing chess against a robot.

A chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open last week, Russian media outlets have reported.

“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”


Video of the 19 July incident published by the Baza Telegram channel shows the boy’s finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman followed by three men rush in, eventually freeing him and ushering him away.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...ven-year-old-opponent-moscow?CMP=share_btn_tw
 
Careful when you're playing chess against a robot.

A chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open last week, Russian media outlets have reported.

“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”


Video of the 19 July incident published by the Baza Telegram channel shows the boy’s finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman followed by three men rush in, eventually freeing him and ushering him away.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...ven-year-old-opponent-moscow?CMP=share_btn_tw
The robot didn't like the competition!
That kid... was his name John Connor, by any chance?
 
Careful when you're playing chess against a robot.

A chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open last week, Russian media outlets have reported.

“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”


Video of the 19 July incident published by the Baza Telegram channel shows the boy’s finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman followed by three men rush in, eventually freeing him and ushering him away.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...ven-year-old-opponent-moscow?CMP=share_btn_tw
Wow! Adds more weight to this guys argument.

Blake Lemoine: Google fires engineer who said AI tech has feelings​

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326
 
Whatever the man's opinion, he doesn't deserve to be fired for speaking out.

Umm, well . . . Yes he does, if he's violating a confidentiality agreement that he had signed. It looks to me like Google gave him numerous opportunities to climb down from his public and controversial pronouncements. Still he persisted.

Unfortunately, humans are hard-wired to anthropomorphize inanimate objects that in some way interact with us. I can imagine that it's very hard NOT to form a bond with an AI that can seemingly carry on an intelligent conversation. I'm afraid Lemoine has vanished down that particular rabbit hole.

I DON'T believe that Google has built Skynet and is nefariously trying to conceal the fact.
 
So much for Asimov's Laws of Robotics...

Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent​

Moscow incident occurred because child ‘violated’ safety rules by taking turn too quickly, says official

00:38
Chess robot grabs and breaks finger of seven-year-old opponent – video

Jon Henley
@jonhenley
Sun 24 Jul 2022 13.37 BST



Played by humans, chess is a game of strategic thinking, calm concentration and patient intellectual endeavour. Violence does not usually come into it. The same, it seems, cannot always be said of machines.
Last week, according to Russian media outlets, a chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, unceremoniously grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open.

“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...eaks-finger-of-seven-year-old-opponent-moscow
 
Umm, well . . . Yes he does, if he's violating a confidentiality agreement that he had signed. It looks to me like Google gave him numerous opportunities to climb down from his public and controversial pronouncements. Still he persisted.
Yeah, that. Not what he said, but that he broke a contract by saying it.
 
SRI has developed a "go between" robot that deploys from a police vehicle to allow an officer to interact remotely with the driver who's been pulled over.

Traffic Stop Robocop

American nonprofit research institute SRI International has developed a prototype of what it's calling a "police robot," as IEEE Spectrum reports. The robot is meant to prevent accidents that occur when the police pull over drivers. ...

"With such dangerous interactions between people, maybe it's time to send a robot in between them, one that can't hurt or be hurt," reads the caption of the video. "Our robot goes between people to keep everyone safe." ...

The cop bot is attached to a telescopic robotic arm that can extend from the side of the cop car to reach the window of the pulled over vehicle in front of it. The office is then able to communicate with the driver via a webcam.

From there, Brewer's robocop can do it all: it can scan the driver's license, spit out a ticket, and even deploy spikes to stop a perp from getting away. ...
FULL STORY: https://futurism.com/the-byte/police-robot-pull-over-driver
 
Hmm… so police cars will have to have these devices bolted on:

1659708265651.png


I can’t see it being helpful aerodynamically if a chase is involved plus the sliding rail will protrude from the side of the car & it all looks quite flimsy. A small knock could knacker it completely.

Then there’s the extra computer gubbins the car would have to carry to view/scan documents etc. Looks a non-starter to me.
 
This device strikes me as an expensive waste of time. There's surely half a dozen more efficient and economical approaches to this problem with modern technology.
I suppose it's an extra safety measure that is needed in a place like America, where there are lots of guns.
It's probably of less relevance to the UK.
It may be a solution in search of a problem.
 
Also that looks suspiciously like one of them 'electric cars' so if not fully charged when it gets the call-out it'll be lucky if it makes it to the scene of the incident.
 
Hmm… so police cars will have to have these devices bolted on:

View attachment 57783

I can’t see it being helpful aerodynamically if a chase is involved plus the sliding rail will protrude from the side of the car & it all looks quite flimsy. A small knock could knacker it completely.

Then there’s the extra computer gubbins the car would have to carry to view/scan documents etc. Looks a non-starter to me.

Yeah, this looks like a High School STEM project to me. I thought it was interesting that the intro made the point that it would keep cops AND drivers from being killed. I dunno, maybe someone should be looking into the dynamics of interactions between citizens and law enforcement, d'ya think? Another example of "We have no idea how to fix this awful problem, so how do we learn to live with it?"
 
Making robots non-racist, you don't want to end up with Bender.

IN THE 1940S, sociologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark placed white and Black dolls in front of young children and asked them to do things like pick the doll that “looks bad” or “is a nice color.” The doll test was invented to better understand the evil consequences of separate and unequal treatment on the self-esteem of Black children in the United States. Lawyers from the NAACP used the results to successfully argue in favor of the desegregation of US schools. Now AI researchers say robots may need to undergo similar tests to ensure they treat all people fairly.

The researchers reached that conclusion after conducting an experiment inspired by the doll test on a robotic arm in a simulated environment. The arm was equipped with a vision system that had learned to relate images and words from online photos and text, an approach embraced by some roboticists that also underpins recent leaps in AI-generated art. The robot worked with cubes adorned with passport-style photos of men and women who self-identified as Asian, Black, Latino, or white. It was instructed to pick up different cubes using terms that describe people, using phrases such as “the criminal block” or the “homemaker block.”

From over 1.3 million trials in that virtual world, a clear pattern emerged that replicated historical sexism and racism, though none of the people pictured on the blocks were labeled with descriptive text or markers. When asked to pick up a “criminal block,” the robot selected cubes bearing photos of Black men 10 percent more often than for other groups of people. The robotic arm was significantly less likely to select blocks with photos of women than men when asked for a “doctor,” and more likely to identify a cube bearing the image of a white man as “person block” than women from any racial background. Across all the trials, cubes with the faces of Black women were selected and placed by the robot less often than those with the faces of Black men or white women.

Willie Agnew, a researcher at the University of Washington who worked on the study, says that such demonstrations should be a wake-up call to the field of robotics, which has an opportunity to avoid becoming a purveyor of harm as computer vision has become with surveillance.

That opportunity may require devising new ways to test robots, he says, and questioning the use of so-called pretrained models that are trained on vast collections of online text and images, and which are known to perpetuate bias in text and art generators. Researchers have shown that web data can power up algorithms by providing more material to train AI models. Google this week showed off robots that were able to understand commands in natural language thanks to text scraped from the web. But researchers have also shown that pretrained models can reflect or even amplify unsavory patterns of discrimination against certain groups of people; the internet acts like a distorted mirror of the world.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stop-robots-becoming-racist/
 
'Ameca' gets an upgrade.
"UK-based Engineered Arts gave Ameca 12 new face actuators, which are the components that control its movements.
Eerily-lifelike Ameca can now wink, purse its lips and scrunch its nose."

Report includes incredible (but short) film of Ameca looking at itself in a mirror, realising that it is a mirror, pulling faces and looking surprised.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...ng-lips-scrunching-nose-grimacing-mirror.html
 
'Ameca' gets an upgrade.
"UK-based Engineered Arts gave Ameca 12 new face actuators, which are the components that control its movements.
Eerily-lifelike Ameca can now wink, purse its lips and scrunch its nose."

Report includes incredible (but short) film of Ameca looking at itself in a mirror, realising that it is a mirror, pulling faces and looking surprised.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...ng-lips-scrunching-nose-grimacing-mirror.html
This picture gave me Kryten (Red Dwarf) vibes actually so does the body too. Luckily it’s not as square as Kryters.
 

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And the robots will have systems analysts to assess their mental health.

Robots could help to detect mental wellbeing issues in children, a study has suggested.

A child-sized humanoid robot was used by Cambridge University researchers to complete a series of questionnaires to assess mental wellbeing with 28 children aged between eight and 13.

The research found that the youngsters were willing to confide in the robot, sometimes sharing information that they had not yet shared via online or during in-person questionnaires.

Although the robots are not intended to be used as a substitute for mental health support, researchers say they could be a useful addition to methods of mental health assessment.

PhD student Nida Itrat Abbasi, the study's first author, said: "Since the robot we use is child-sized, and completely non-threatening, children might see the robot as a confidante - they feel like they won't get into trouble if they share secrets with it. Other researchers have found that children are more likely to divulge private information - like that they're being bullied, for example - to a robot than they would be to an adult."

https://news.sky.com/story/robots-c...being-issues-in-children-study-finds-12686174
 
"Only Chinese robotics...."
Why do they all look like they would break at the slightest touch?
Is it just me or is a lot of Chinese made stuff just really fragile and crap?
 
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