In the rapidly evolving world of AI and robotics, there are always new developments and advancements to keep track of. Safety and certification considerations are becoming increasingly important as AI algorithms enable robots to act autonomously. The global robotics industry is concerned about the proposed requirement for mandatory third-party certification of AI-enabled robots in the European Machinery Product Regulation draft, which would impact any company selling robots on the European market, disadvantaging European companies, especially SMEs and start-ups.
AI opens up new possibilities for robotic automation, enabling robots to sense and respond autonomously to their external environment in real-time. This is particularly useful in situations with high variability and unpredictability, such as manufacturing and logistics sectors, and public environments where healthcare or assistance robots are at work. Experts estimate that AI could halve the time required to programme a robot, as well as significantly cut the time needed to re-task it, making automation economically viable for many small-to-medium-sized companies (SMEs) or larger manufacturers and wholesalers with high product variance.
The Stanford AI Lab has recently published several blog posts on robotics, including the use of crowdsourced language annotations and videos of humans to learn reward functions in a scalable way, enabling them to generalize more broadly. They have also conducted an extensive study of six offline learning algorithms for robot manipulation, analyzing the most critical challenges when learning from offline datasets.
Ambi Robotics, a leading AI-powered robotics company, has recently achieved unmatched autonomous sorting speeds with NVIDIA GPUs and accelerated computing. They have also launched a new website and introduced Generalization Through Imitation (GTI), an algorithm for learning visuomotor control from human demonstrations and generalizing to new long-horizon tasks by leveraging latent compositional structures.
For those looking to stay up-to-date on the latest news and trends in the robotics industry, there are several top blogs to follow, including Robohub, Robotics.org, RoboGlobal News, Robotics Business Review, and The Robot Report. By staying informed and up-to-date on the latest news and trends, we can better understand the potential of these technologies and their impact on society.
