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physical

Nvidia and Hexagon launch new technologies to accelerate industrial digitalization

September 5, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Sweden’s Hexagon is connecting its reality capture and manufacturing platforms to Nvidia Omniverse so enterprises can more easily develop and deploy digital twin applications.

For industrial businesses to reach the next level of digitalization, they need to create accurate, virtual representations of their physical systems.

Nvidia is working with Hexagon, the Stockholm-based global leader in digital reality solutions combining sensor, software and autonomous technologies, to equip enterprises with the tools and solutions they need to build physically accurate, perfectly synchronized, AI-enabled digital twins that can be used to transform their organizations. [Read more…] about Nvidia and Hexagon launch new technologies to accelerate industrial digitalization

Filed Under: Industry, News Tagged With: accelerate, autonomous, capture, developing, digital, digitalization, enterprises, hexagon, industrial, manufacturing, nvidia, omniverse, physical, platforms, reality, software, solutions, teams, technologies, twins, virtual, workflows

Outdoor Fun for Kids: Exploring the Benefits of Kid Ride-On Toys for Physical Activity

August 29, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Kid ride-on toys provide a fantastic way for children to engage in outdoor play and physical activity.

From custom ride-on cars to kids scooter manufacturers, these toys offer numerous benefits for children’s physical development and overall well-being.

In this article, we will explore the benefits of China ride-on toys for promoting physical activity in children and how kid scooter manufacturers are contributing to outdoor fun and fitness. [Read more…] about Outdoor Fun for Kids: Exploring the Benefits of Kid Ride-On Toys for Physical Activity

Filed Under: Design Tagged With: active, activity, balance, children, china, coordination, enhancing, fun, kid, outdoor, physical, play, ride-on, scooter, skills, toys

3M highlights major global trends in materials science and charts its own way ahead

May 27, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

3M Forward is a program that highlights how materials science-based innovation at scale can help society progress amid three unstoppable forces shaping our planet: climate change and resource scarcity, shifting demographics and social change and convergence of the physical and digital worlds. As part of 3M Forward, 3M scientists, engineers and experts share how their solutions are helping to build a brighter future.

Mark Copman, 3M senior vice president, new growth ventures, says: “The global forces highlighted within 3M Forward are disruptive in nature, but we see them as catalysts for new advances in science and positive societal impact.

“Science has the potential to solve the toughest global challenges, and 3M’s diverse global portfolio and vast expertise make us optimally positioned to imagine what’s possible and build what’s next.”  [Read more…] about 3M highlights major global trends in materials science and charts its own way ahead

Filed Under: Features, Materials Tagged With: 3m, brighter, build, change, climate, convergence, demographics, digital, forces, forward, future, global, help, innovation, manufacturing, materials, people, physical, portfolio, president, products, resource, scale, scarcity, science, science-based, shifting, social, society, solutions, technology, vice

Leveraging IoT Technology for Successful Healthcare

April 25, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Leveraging IoT Technology for Successful Obesity Management

Obesity is a global health challenge that affects millions of people and is associated with a range of chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Though healthy eating habits and physical activity remain the cornerstone of obesity management, advances in technology are expanding our ability to manage and prevent this condition.

With the help of IoT and wearables, individuals can now monitor their health metrics such as heart rate, blood sugar levels, and physical activity. [Read more…] about Leveraging IoT Technology for Successful Healthcare

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: activity, apps, data, devices, effective, health, individuals, iot, management, obesity, personalized, physical, provide, recommendations, smart, solutions, technology, weight

Intel Labs introduces SPEAR: An open-source photorealistic simulator for embodied AI

December 25, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

By Mike Roberts, a research scientist at Intel Labs, where he works on using photorealistic synthetic data for computer vision applications

Interactive simulators are becoming powerful tools for training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) systems, but existing simulators have limited content diversity, physical interactivity, and visual fidelity.

To better serve the embodied AI developer community, Intel Labs has collaborated with the Computer Vision Center in Spain, Kujiale in China, and the Technical University of Munich to develop the Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research (SPEAR).

This highly realistic simulation platform helps developers to accelerate the training and validation of embodied agents for a growing set of tasks and domains.

With its large collection of photorealistic indoor environments, SPEAR applies to a wide range of household navigation and manipulation tasks. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to drive research and commercial applications in household robotics and manufacturing, including human-robot interaction scenarios and digital twin applications.

Figure 1. Scenes may be cluttered with objects that can be manipulated individually. A strong impulse can be applied to all objects at the start of the simulation to create the disordered environment. Messy room configurations could serve as initial states for a cleaning task.

To create SPEAR, Intel Labs worked closely with a team of professional artists for over a year to construct a collection of high-quality, handcrafted, interactive environments. Currently, SPEAR features a starter pack of 300 virtual indoor environments with more than 2,500 rooms and 17,000 objects that can be manipulated individually.

These interactive training environments use detailed geometry, photorealistic materials, realistic physics, and accurate lighting. New content packs targeting industrial and healthcare domains will be released soon.

By offering larger, more diverse, and realistic environments, SPEAR helps throughout the development cycle of embodied AI systems, and enables training robust agents to operate in the real world, potentially even straight from simulation.

SPEAR helps to improve accuracy on many embodied AI tasks, especially traversing and rearranging cluttered indoor environments. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to decrease the time to market for household robotics and smart warehouse applications, and increase the spatial intelligence of embodied agents.

Challenges in Training and Validating Embodied AI Systems

In the field of embodied AI, agents learn by interacting with different variables in the physical world. However, capturing and compiling these interactions into training data can be time consuming, labor intensive, and potentially dangerous.

In response to this challenge, the embodied AI community has developed a variety of interactive simulators, where robots can be trained and validated in simulation before being deployed in the physical world.

While existing simulators have enabled rapid progress on increasingly complex and open-ended real-world tasks such as point-goal and object navigation, object manipulation, and autonomous driving, these sims have several limitations.

Simulators that use artist-created environments typically provide a limited selection of unique scenes, such as a few dozen homes or a few hundred isolated rooms, which can lead to severe over-fitting and poor sim-to-real transfer performance.

On the other hand, simulators that use scanned 3D environments provide larger collections of scenes, but offer little or no interactivity with objects.

In addition, both types of simulators offer limited visual fidelity, either because it is too labor intensive to author high-resolution art assets, or because of 3D scanning artifacts.

Figure 2. SPEAR enables embodied AI developers to train a navigation policy on an OpenBot entirely in simulation.

Overview of SPEAR

SPEAR was designed based on three main requirements:

  1. support a collection of environments that is as large, diverse, and high-quality as possible;
  2. provide sufficient physical realism to support realistic interactions with a wide range of household objects; and
  3. offer as much photorealism as possible, while still maintaining enough rendering speed to support training complex embodied agent behaviors.

Motivated by these requirements, SPEAR was implemented on top of the Unreal Engine, which is an industrial-strength open-source game engine. SPEAR environments are implemented as Unreal Engine assets, and SPEAR provides an OpenAI Gym interface to interact with environments via Python.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

SPEAR currently supports four distinct embodied agents:

  • The OpenBot Agent provides identical image observations to a real-world OpenBot, implements an identical control interface, and has been modeled with accurate geometry and physical parameters. It is well-suited for sim-to-real experiments.
  • The Fetch Agent and LoCoBot Agent have also been modeled using accurate geometry and physical parameters, and each has a physically realistic gripper. These agents are ideal for rearrangement tasks.
  • The Camera Agent can be teleported anywhere, making it useful for collecting static datasets.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

By default, agents return photorealistic egocentric observations from camera sensors, as well as wheel encoder states and joint encoder states. Additionally, agents can optionally return several types of privileged information.

First, agents can return a sequence of waypoints representing the shortest path to a goal location, as well as GPS and compass observations that point directly to the goal, both of which can be useful when defining navigation tasks.

Second, agents can return pixel-perfect semantic segmentation and depth images, which can be useful when controlling for the effects of imperfect perception in downstream embodied tasks and collecting static datasets.

SPEAR currently supports two distinct tasks:

  • The Point-Goal Navigation Task randomly selects a goal position in the scene’s reachable space, computes a reward based on the agent’s distance to the goal, and triggers the end of an episode when the agent hits an obstacle or the goal.
  • The Freeform Task is an empty placeholder task that is useful for collecting static datasets.

SPEAR is available under an open-source MIT license, ready for customization on any hardware. For more details, visit the SPEAR GitHub page.

Filed Under: Features, Science Tagged With: agent, agents, ai, embodied, environments, goal, navigation, objects, photorealistic, physical, realistic, simulation, simulators, spear, tasks, training

SLAMcore raises $16 million to give spatial understanding to robots and the metaverse

July 24, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

SLAMcore, a developer of vision-based location and mapping for robots and autonomous machines, has raised $16 million in Series A capital.

The company says the funding will allow the business to rapidly capitalize on its proven technology which combines AI with consumer-grade cameras, sensors and processors to solve the complex challenges of mapping and navigating for a wide range of autonomous machines and devices.

The funding round was led by ROBO Global Ventures and Presidio Ventures who invested alongside Amadeus Capital, Global Brain, IP Group, MMC and Octopus. Strategic investors Samsung Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and Yamato Holdings also joined the round. [Read more…] about SLAMcore raises $16 million to give spatial understanding to robots and the metaverse

Filed Under: Computing, News Tagged With: algorithms, allow, autonomous, business, cameras, capital, companies, consumer, devices, global, machines, mapping, market, navigate, physical, products, robo, robots, slam, slamcore, technology, ventures, wide

Halodi Robotics to supply 140 humanoid robots to security company ADT

March 26, 2022 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Halodi Robotics has signed an agreement to provide 140 humanoid robots to ADT Commercial, a US-based provider of commercial security, fire, life safety and risk consulting services. This is believed to be the largest deal of its kind involving humanoid robots.

The two companies will demonstrate their joint solution at the ISC West trade show in the Las Vegas Convention Center, stand 20019, from March 22-25.

The agreement is the result of the strategic partnership announced in April 2021 where Halodi Robotics secured an investment from ADT Commercial to develop a robot to complement their physical security solutions. [Read more…] about Halodi Robotics to supply 140 humanoid robots to security company ADT

Filed Under: Humanoids, News Tagged With: adt, agreement, capabilities, commercial, functions, halodi, humanoid, partner, patrol, physical, provide, robot, robotics, robots, security, services, tasks

Eavesdropping on our thoughts helps create robots like us

December 30, 2021 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Can intelligence be taught to robots? Advances in physical reservoir computing, a technology that makes sense of brain signals, could contribute to creating artificial intelligence machines that think like us.

In Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Tokyo outline how a robot could be taught to navigate through a maze by electrically stimulating a culture of brain nerve cells connected to the machine.

These nerve cells, or neurons, were grown from living cells and acted as the physical reservoir for the computer to construct coherent signals. [Read more…] about Eavesdropping on our thoughts helps create robots like us

Filed Under: Science Tagged With: brain, cells, chaotic, coherent, computer, computing, contribute, culture, disturbance, environment, homeostatic, intelligence, living, maze, nerve, neurons, physical, researchers, reservoir, rich, robot, robots, signals, solve, state, system, takahashi, task, task-solving, taught, wrong

Roam Robotics launches ‘smart knee’, a robotic partial exoskeleton

May 7, 2021 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Roam Robotics, an artificial intelligence and wearable robotics company, has launched its Ascend product, a “first-of-its-kind smart knee orthosis that helps wearers reduce knee pain and regain mobility”, according to the company.

Ascend’s technology is actively adapting, meaning it senses the body’s movement, automatically adjusts to the wearer’s needs, and provides precise support at the right moment for target muscle groups.

It is a registered Class I device with the FDA and will be available for purchase directly and through private and Medicare insurance, radically expanding public accessibility to wearable robotic devices. [Read more…] about Roam Robotics launches ‘smart knee’, a robotic partial exoskeleton

Filed Under: Health, News Tagged With: ascend, body, company, device, devices, help, knee, lightweight, mobility, pain, people, percent, physical, roam, robotic, robotics, smartpack, support, technology, wearable

UPS installs AutoStore system in warehouse and increases capacity by 400 percent

April 30, 2021 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

When UPS Global Logistics & Distribution in Europe needed to add capacity at a fulfillment center in the Netherlands, the team used an innovation driven approach to think inside the box and find a better way to utilize the existing space rather than build another warehouse.

The solution was implementing a leading automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS).

Automated storage and retrieval systems are revolutionizing traditional warehousing and order fulfillment. Sprawling buildings filled with tall racks, wide rows and loud forklifts are being replaced by grids and bins with robotic arms and workstations. [Read more…] about UPS installs AutoStore system in warehouse and increases capacity by 400 percent

Filed Under: Features, Logistics Tagged With: asrs, automated, autostore, capacity, croix, customer, fulfillment, global, growth, order, parts, physical, process, retrieval, robots, solution, space, storage, system, systems, team, traditional, upsers, warehouse, working, workstations

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