Genrobotics launched the robot in Thiruvananthapuram on an experimental basis in March.

The startup was among the participants of the two-day Huddle Kerala conclave, which concluded here Saturday as their stall at the expo drew much attention.

The Kerala Water Authority (KWA) and Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) have signed a MoU for the transfer of technology and products, including the use of robots for cleaning up sewers.

They told the media they have received an invitation to present Bandicoot in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Of the five new robots, one each will be used in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for pilot projects, two will go to KWA, and one will be used by the Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL).

The Bandicoot has four limbs and a bucket system attached to a spider web-like extension, which can go inside the manhole.

The waste at the bottom of the manhole is shovelled into the bucket system and lifted out. The robot has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules.

Apart from the state-owned Kerala Financial Corporation (KFC), Genrobotics is getting funds from venture capitalist Unicorn India Ventures for the production of the robots.

Founded in 2015, by four young engineering graduates, Genrobotics specialises in powered exoskeletons and human-controlled robotic systems and at the two-day event, they said they have got a good number of enquiries from the UAE.

IANS

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Allowing robots to help care for the elderly – a job typically seen as requiring a human touch – may be a jarring idea in the West. But many Japanese see them positively, largely because they are depicted in popular media as friendly and helpful. (Click reut.rs/2IVPNAd to see a picture package about these elder care robots.)

“These robots are wonderful,” said 84-year-old Kazuko Yamada after the exercise session with SoftBank Robotics Corp’s Pepper, which can carry on scripted dialogues. “More people live alone these days, and a robot can be a conversation partner for them. It will make life more fun.”

Plenty of obstacles may hinder a rapid proliferation of elder care robots: high costs, safety issues and doubts about how useful – and user-friendly – they will be.

The Japanese government has been funding development of elder care robots to help fill a projected shortfall of 380,000 specialized workers by 2025.

Despite steps by Japan to allow foreign workers in for elder care, obstacles to employment in the sector, including exams in Japanese, remain. As of the end of 2017, only 18 foreigners held nursing care visas, a new category created in 2016.

But authorities and companies here are also eyeing a larger prize: a potentially lucrative export industry supplying robots to places such as Germany, China and Italy, which face similar demographic challenges now or in the near future.

“It’s an opportunity for us,” said Atsushi Yasuda, director of the robotic policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or METI. “Other countries will follow the same trend.”

More than 100 foreign groups have visited Shin-tomi the past year from countries including China, South Korea and the Netherlands.

A few products are trickling out as exports: Panasonic Corp has started shipping its robotic bed, which transforms into a wheelchair, to Taiwan. Paro is used as a “therapy animal” in about 400 Danish senior homes.

The Japanese government has been funding development of elder care robots to help fill a projected shortfall of 380,000 specialized workers by 2025.

Despite steps by Japan to allow foreign workers in for elder care, obstacles to employment in the sector, including exams in Japanese, remain. As of the end of 2017, only 18 foreigners held nursing care visas, a new category created in 2016.

But authorities and companies here are also eyeing a larger prize: a potentially lucrative export industry supplying robots to places such as Germany, China and Italy, which face similar demographic challenges now or in the near future.

“It’s an opportunity for us,” said Atsushi Yasuda, director of the robotic policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or METI. “Other countries will follow the same trend.”

More than 100 foreign groups have visited Shin-tomi the past year from countries including China, South Korea and the Netherlands.

A few products are trickling out as exports: Panasonic Corp has started shipping its robotic bed, which transforms into a wheelchair, to Taiwan. Paro is used as a “therapy animal” in about 400 Danish senior homes.

To nurture the industry, the government is using a two-pronged approach. METI is promoting development, providing 4.7 billion yen ($45 million) in subsidies since 2015.

The labor ministry is spearheading the spread of robots, and spent 5.2 billion yen ($50 million) to introduce them into 5,000 facilities nationwide in the year that ended last March. There is no government data about how many care facilities use robots.

Government officials stress that robots will not replace human caregivers.

“They can assist with power, mobility and monitoring. They can’t replace humans, but they can save time and labor,” said METI’s Yasuda. “If workers have more time, they can do other tasks.”

THAT’S A ROBOT?

Most of the devices look nothing like the popular image of a robot. By the government’s definition, each has three components – sensors, a processor and a motor or apparatus.

Panasonic used government aid to develop Resyone, a bed that splits in two, with one half transforming into a wheelchair.

Cyberdyne Inc’s HAL – short for Hybrid Assistive Limb – lumbar type is a powered back support that helps caregivers lift people.

Those needing walking rehabilitation can grab hold of Tree, made by unlisted Reif Co, which crawls along the ground, showing where to place the next step and offering balance support.

SoftBank’s Pepper is used in about 500 Japanese elder care homes for games, exercise routines and rudimentary conversations.

But some workers find Pepper difficult to set up, said Shohei Fujiwara, a manager at SoftBank Robotics, a unit of Internet conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. They’d like Pepper to respond to voice commands and move around independently – functions that SoftBank hopes to introduce this year, he said.

A COSTLY SOLUTION

Cute, furry and responsive, Paro reacts to touch, speech and light by moving its head, blinking its eyes and playing recordings of Canadian harp seal cries.

“When I first petted it, it moved in such a cute way. It really seemed like it was alive,” giggled 79-year-old Saki Sakamoto, a Shin-tomi resident. “Once I touched it, I couldn’t let go.”

Paro took more than 10 years to develop and received about $20 million in government support, said its inventor, Takanori Shibata, chief research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. About 5,000 are in use globally, including 3,000 in Japan.

But Paro, like most robots, is expensive: 400,000 yen ($3,800) in Japan and about 5,000 euros in Europe. Panasonic’s Resyone bed costs 900,000 yen ($8,600) and Cyberdyne’s HAL lumbar exoskeleton costs 100,000 yen ($950) a month to rent.

Most facilities using them, including Shin-tomi, have relied on local and central government subsidies to help cover the costs. Individuals can also use nursing care insurance to help cover approved products, but those numbers are tiny.

And so far, the robots have not reduced Shin-tomi’s personnel costs or working hours.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” said Kimiya Ishikawa, president and CEO of Silverwing Social Welfare Corp, which runs Shin-tomi. “We brought them in mostly to improve the working environment, keep staffers from getting back injuries and make things safer.”

What they have done, he said, is boost the morale of both staff and residents.

Reuters

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According to a report in Futurism, the robots could fix minor maintenance issues, keeping up with current orbiters as they age and sustain damage.

The agencies also hope to keep the orbit clear of debris called space pollution which is caused by broken satellites abandoned in the space.

In 2015, there were about 25,000 human-made objects larger than a human fist and roughly half a million larger than a dime orbiting Earth.

Additionally, these satellites could also face off against mechanical foes in orbit meaning it could sabotage enemy satellites in the event of war, apparently by dismantling opponents or forcing them to crash.

They could also play defence, monitoring for tampering, the report highlighted.

IANS

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The study, detailed in the journal Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, demonstrated that the physically robust and chemically resistant sensor skin could vastly improve the ability of robots to perform everything from surgical and industrial procedures to cleaning a kitchen, opening a door, interacting with a phone, shaking hands, picking up packages and handling objects, among others.

“By mimicking human physiology in a flexible electronic skin, we have achieved a level of sensitivity and precision that’s consistent with human hands, which is an important breakthrough,” said Jonathan Posner, Professor at University of Washington.

“The sense of touch is critical for both prosthetic and robotic applications, and that’s what we’re ultimately creating,” Posner added.

The stretchable electronic skin is made from the same silicon rubber used in swimming goggles.

The rubber is embedded with tiny serpentine channels—roughly half the width of a human hair—filled with electrically conductive liquid metal that won’t crack or fatigue when the skin is stretched, as solid wires would do.

When the skin is placed around a robot finger or end effector, these microfluidic channels are strategically placed on either side of where a human fingernail would be.

IANS

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“Our goal was to design and build a molecular robot that could perform a sophisticated nanomechanical task: cargo sorting,” Qian added, in the paper described in the journal Science.

To build the molecular robot, the researchers constructed three basic components that could be used to assemble a DNA robot: a “leg” with two “feet” for walking, an “arm” and “hand” for picking up cargo, and a segment that can recognise a specific drop-off point and signal to the hand to release its cargo.

Each of these components is made of just a few nucleotides within a single strand of DNA.

In the study, the robots worked together to find and collect fluorescent molecules with individually achieving an 80 per cent chance of successful delivery.

One step for these nano robots takes five minutes, and allows them to move six nanometers.

“The findings could be used to develop DNA robots for synthesising a therapeutic chemical from its constituent parts in an artificial molecular factory, delivering a drug only when a specific signal is given in bloodstreams or cells, or sorting molecular components in trash for recycling,” Qian noted.

IANS

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Today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to “pick it up,” it would be completely lost.

With the new system dubbed “ComText,” for “commands in context”, if someone tells the system that “the tool I put down is my tool,” it adds that fact to its knowledge base.

One can then update the robot with more information about other objects and have it execute a range of tasks like picking up different sets of objects based on different commands.

“Where humans understand the world as a collection of objects and people and abstract concepts, machines view it as pixels, point-clouds, and 3-D maps generated from sensors,” said Rohan Paul from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

“This semantic gap means that, for robots to understand what we want them to do, they need a much richer representation of what we do and say,” Paul said in a statement released by MIT.

The team tested ComText on Baxter, a two-armed humanoid robot developed for Rethink Robotics by former CSAIL director Rodney Brooks.

With ComText, Baxter was successful in executing the right command about 90 per cent of the time, according to a paper presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Australia.

In the future, the team hopes to enable robots to understand more complicated information, such as multi-step commands, the intent of actions, and using properties about objects to interact with them more naturally.

For example, if you tell a robot that one box on a table has crackers, and one box has sugar, and then ask the robot to “pick up the snack,” the hope is that the robot could deduce that sugar is a raw material and therefore unlikely to be somebody’s “snack.”

The researchers believe that by creating much less constrained interactions, this line of research could enable better communications for a range of robotic systems, from self-driving cars to household helpers.

IANS

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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, informed marketers and ad agency partners that their ads shown through the search engine had garnered fraudulent traffic generated by bots, which certainly would never click on their ads they had paid for to be shown.

“Today, we can’t disclose the information about third parties. So when we aren’t able to catch invalid traffic before it impacts our advertisers and we’re unable to refund their media spent, it hurts us, even if we’re not responsible,” Scott Spencer, director of project management at Google, was quoted as saying.

Spencer added that the meagre refunds had been paid back to advertisers.

According to the report, the refunds primarily involved video advertising and highlight a persistent issue that threatens the health of commercial content online.

Google has geared up to resolve the issue. It is believed that the search engine will provide more clarity over which tech providers in the ad-buying chain are responsible for making the refunds.

IANS

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The robot, called Versius, mimics the human arm and can be used to carry out a wide range of laparoscopic procedures including hernia repairs, colorectal operations, and prostate and ear, nose and throat surgery, in which a series of small incisions are made to circumvent the need for traditional open surgery.

The robot is controlled by a surgeon at a console guided by a 3D screen in the operating theatre, according to its maker Cambridge Medical Robotics.

“Having robots in the operating theatre is not a new idea,” said the company’s chief executive, Martin Frost.

“But the problem at the moment is that they are phenomenally expensive, not only do they cost $2.5 million each to buy but every procedure costs an extra $3,800 using the robot… and they are very large.”

The Cambridge Medical Robotics said it was already working with a number of National Health Services-owned and private hospitals to introduce the robots.

The current global market for surgical robots is worth approximately $4 billion a year but this is expected to grow to $20 billion by 2024.

IANS

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The system developed by the company has been on a pilot service after a successful test in covering all games of the 2016-17 EPL season. It produced a total of 380 automatic experimental articles, each within one or two seconds of a game’s end.

Yonhap said it will develop another programme to cover the PyeongChang Winter Olympics slated for February 2018.

Soccerbot has been used to produce Yonhap’s Korean-language articles starting with Saturday’s 2017-18 season opener between Arsenal and Leicester City. The programme will cover all 380 league games.

The programme utilises a database of words and sentences written by Yonhap reporters. It produces articles in three steps—collecting data, writing sentences and going through spelling and grammar checks.

Through the editing process, the programme reorganises the structure depending on the results and whether the game included South Korean players.

The software also gathers data from up to five different sources to identify incorrect information.

Last month, Google provided British news agency Press Association $805,000 to build a software that will gather, automate and write nearly 30,000 local stories a month.

Dubbed as ‘Radar’ (Reporters And Data And Robots), the software project will “automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement,” Re/Code reported.

‘Radar’ will see journalists identifying national open databases from government departments, local authorities, NHS Trusts and more, and creating detailed story templates across a range of topics including crime, health and employment.

The software project, scheduled to be launched in early 2018, will hire five journalists who will help identify datasets and curate and edit news articles generated from Radar.

The Natural Language Generation (NLG) software will be applied to produce multiple versions of stories, to scale up the mass localisation of news content.

IANS

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“What we’ve developed is a gripper that uses gecko-inspired adhesives,” said Mark Cutkosky, Professor at the Stanford University in California.

Previously proposed methods such as the use of suction cups or traditional sticky substances have proved unsuccessful to collect and dispose of space waste under the harsh conditions of space while magnets only work on magnetic objects.

The gripper’s design was inspired by geckos, which can climb walls because their feet have microscopic flaps that, when in full contact with a surface, create a Van der Waals force between the feet and the surface.

The gripper has a grid of adhesive squares on the front and arms with thin adhesive strips that can fold out and move toward the middle of the robot from either side, as if it were offering a hug, the researchers said, in the paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

The grid can stick to flat objects, like a solar panel, and the arms can grab curved objects, like a rocket body.

The group tested their gripper in their lab and in multiple zero gravity experimental spaces, including the International Space Station and saw promising results.

“There are many missions that would benefit from this, like rendezvous and docking and orbital debris mitigation,” explained Aaron Parness, group leader of the Extreme Environment Robotics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“We could also eventually develop a climbing robot assistant that could crawl around on the spacecraft, doing repairs, filming and checking for defects,” Parness added.
IANS

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