AI Articles and Analysis about Automation and robotics

Just as car companies are betting big that self-driving vehicles will change our roads, shipping companies are making a similar bet that automation will change how we move goods around the world. For autonomous ships, the open ocean may prove to be more fertile ground for the adoption of full automation than crowded city streets.

Episode summary: Unlike the field of self-driving cars, the fields of construction, mining, agriculture, and other classes of “heavy industry” involve a huge variety of equipment and use-cases that go beyond traveling from A to B. The heavy industry leaders of today are no farther behind automakers in their understanding that AI and automation will be essential for the future of their companies. In this episode, guest Dr. Sam Kherat discusses the applications of AI in heavy industry, including: What type of capabilities and functions are automate-able, and at what level. He also shines a light on how AI might affect the future of the industry within the next 2-3 years, and in what ways we can expect large equipment to become more autonomous.

High costs and technical limitations kept the uses of drones relatively limited until recently. After significant excitement starting around 2012, the FAA's 2016 adoption of regulations - combined with the drop in price - has made drones an economically viable option for a broad range of commercial functions.

Burger flipping is often used as derogatory shorthand for low-skilled, low-tech work, but fast food companies have been making major investments in automation, apps, analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics. We set out to ask the questions that business leaders would need to know:

A company by company examination of the top car makers public investment and statements by their top executives makes it clear that most car companies are betting that artificial intelligence utilized in self-driving will be inevitable, and they're all jumping in with investment and initiatives.

The rise of AI industrial robotics experienced record double-digit expansion in various countries in 2014 and 2015, but such large scale segments i.e. 'industrial' versus 'medical' or 'military', were more or less one amalgam of parts a couple of decades ago. Examples of medical and military applications can be found in our updated machine learning in robotics guide. There was a time before the early 1980s when it was possible for AI researchers to keep up with all that was going on in the AI and the robotics industry as a whole, but it seems the tides had changed by 1982.

Episode Summary: This week we speak with CEO and Founder of Nexar Inc., Eran Shir, whose company has created a dashboard app that allows drivers to mount a smartphone, which then collects visual information and other data, such as speed from your accelerometer, in order to help detect and prevent accidents.
The app also serves as a way to reconstruct what happens in a collision - a unique solution in a big and untapped market. In this episode, Shir gives his vision of a world where the roads are filled with cyborgs, rather than autonomous robots, i.e. people augmented with new sensory information that trigger notifications, warnings or prompts for safer driving behavior, amongst a network of cloud-connected cars.  He also touches on what the transition might look like in response to the question - when will autonomous cars be mainstream?

1 - Carnegie Mellon Receives $10 Million From K&L Gates To Study Ethical Issues Posed By Artificial Intelligence