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Ponder — https://soundcloud.com/prodbyponder.
Laura Shigihara — @supershigi.
Andrew Applepie — https://soundcloud.com/andrewapplepie.
Blue Wednesday — https://soundcloud.com/bluewednesday

Robots are all around us, from drones filming videos in the sky to serving food in restaurants and diffusing bombs in emergencies. Slowly but surely, robots are improving the quality of human life by augmenting our abilities, freeing up time, and enhancing our personal safety and well-being. While existing robots are becoming more proficient with simple tasks, handling more complex requests will require more development in both mobility and intelligence.

Columbia Engineering and Toyota Research Institute computer scientists are delving into psychology, physics, and geometry to create algorithms so that robots can adapt to their surroundings and learn how to do things independently. This work is vital to enabling robots to address new challenges stemming from an aging society and provide better support, especially for seniors and people with disabilities.

A longstanding challenge in computer vision is object permanence, a well-known concept in psychology that involves understanding that the existence of an object is separate from whether it is visible at any moment. It is fundamental for robots to understand our ever-changing, dynamic world. But most applications in computer vision ignore occlusions entirely and tend to lose track of objects that become temporarily hidden from view.

Stranded with no obvious way out, the man came up with a plan on how to alert rescuers to his situation. He attached his cellphone to a drone he had in his vehicle. He typed out a text on his phone to a friend describing what had happened and his exact location. Then he hit send on the text and launched the drone several hundred feet into the air. That high up, the phone was able to connect to service and send the text.

The man’s friend received the text, reached out to authorities and rescue crews were able to locate the man and rescue him. During the rescue trip, crews also found and rescued another driver who’d been stranded nearby in the snow for multiple days.

Imagine a world with precision medicine, where a swarm of microrobots delivers a payload of medicine directly to ailing cells. Or one where aerial or marine drones can collectively survey an area while exchanging minimal information about their location.

One early step towards realizing such technologies is being able to simultaneously simulate swarming behaviors and synchronized timing—behaviors found in slime molds, sperm and fireflies, for example.

In 2014, Cornell researchers first introduced a simple model of swarmalators—short for “swarming oscillator”—where particles self-organize to synchronize in both time and space. In the study, “Diverse Behaviors in Non-uniform Chiral and Non-chiral Swarmalators,” which published Feb. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, they expanded this model to make it more useful for engineering microrobots; to better understand existing, observed biological behaviors; and for theoreticians to experiment in this field.

Last week, Microsoft researchers announced an experimental framework to control robots and drones using the language abilities of ChatGPT, a popular AI language model created by OpenAI. Using natural language commands, ChatGPT can write special code that controls robot movements. A human then views the results and adjusts as necessary until the task gets completed successfully.

In a demonstration video, Microsoft shows robots—apparently controlled by code written by ChatGPT while following human instructions—using a robot arm to arrange blocks into a Microsoft logo, flying a drone to inspect the contents of a shelf, or finding objects using a robot with vision capabilities.

Find a counter-intuitive way to strike the enemy while increasing the chance of survival for the crew.

Researchers at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate aerial dogfights using hypersonic aircraft. In the simulation, the aircraft flew at speeds between Mach 5 to Mach 11 or up to 11 times the speed of sound, the South China Morning Post.

The advent of drones or autonomous vehicles has already changed the nature of warfare today. During the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Russia has successfully deployed cheaply assembled drone swarms to attack critical infrastructure.

~UserGI15994093/ iStock.

The drones are to be tasked with expeditionary roles, including special operations, to “open the opportunity for real-time autonomous response by the robot.”

The United States Air Force has reportedly developed AI-powered facial recognition techechnolgy (FTR) for autonomous drones.

The drones will be used by special operations personnel for missions overseas and for gathering intelligence and other operations, according to a contract between the Department of Defense (DoD) and Seattle-based company RealNetworks.

The language model could command robot arms, drones, and home assistant robots.

Imagine a scenario in which you can directly communicate with robots, enabling them to complete various tasks for you. To achieve this, Microsoft has outlined its plans to partner with OpenAI to develop ChatGPT’s capabilities to control robots. The software giant used the chatbot and “controlled multiple platforms such as robot arms, drones, and home assistant robots intuitively with language,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Robots still rely heavily on hand-written codes to perform their tasks, while humans find spoken language the most intuitive way to communicate.

Ipopba/iStock.

How can ChatGPT help in this regard?

Russia and Ukraine have deployed an army of drones in their conflict. Mechanized warfare is about to dramatically change in the 21st century.

The Russia-Ukraine war is using military drones not just to gather intelligence, but also to kill. Are autonomous robot armies to follow?

ChatGPT is best known as an AI program capable of writing essays and answering questions, but now Microsoft is using the chatbot to control robots.

On Monday, the company’s researchers published (Opens in a new window) a paper on how ChatGPT can streamline the process of programming software commands to control various robots, such as mechanical arms and drones.

“We still rely heavily on hand-written code to control robots,” the researchers wrote. Microsoft’s approach, on the other hand, taps ChatGPT to write some of the computer code.