Iván Hernández Dalas: Robot Talk Episode 154 – Visual navigation in insects and robots, with Andrew Philippides

Claire chatted to Andrew Philippides from the University of Sussex about what we can learn from ants and bees to improve robot navigation.

Andrew Philippides is a Professor of Biorobotics at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the be.AI Leverhulme Doctoral centre for Biomimetic Embodied AI. His research combines biological experiments with robotics, modelling, and machine learning to understand how intelligent behaviour emerges from the interaction of body and brain acting in an environment. Focussing on visual navigation, he aims to understand the navigation and learning abilities of ants and bees to develop novel AI and biorobotic algorithms.



View Source

Popular posts from this blog

Iván Hernández Dalas: 4 Show Floor Takeaways from CES 2019: Robots and Drones, Oh My!

Image
We’ve had some time to recuperate from the madness of CES, in which more than 150,000 attendees and thousands of exhibitors displayed their latest gadgets, gizmos and yes, even robots, on the CES show floor. Last week’s reporter’s notebook focused on the collection of startups around the Eureka Park area of CES, but several of the same trends were evident on the main South Hall 2 area of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where drones, robotics, AR/VR, and gaming took center stage. While most of our time was spent at CES hosting the Service Robots Arrive in Daily Life event, we did have some time during the week to visit the show floor and record observations. Here’s what we saw on the show floor, as well as some of our own individual meetings: 1. Underwater drones make a big splash On the main floor, there was no busier aerial drone booth than the DJI booth, but that is expected given the company’s dominance in the space. But once you got past that, you noticed a lot more drone co...
Read more

Iván Hernández Dalas: How automation and farm robots are transforming agriculture

Image
Source: EOS Data Analytics Agriculture is becoming the most high-tech industry today. All the top-notch technologies are finding a place in the way we produce, harvest, and distribute our crops. And in all cases, farm automation and robots are not an affordable luxury, but a necessary minimum due to tackling the rising global food demand. Agricultural robots can mitigate labor shortages by automating tasks like planting, harvesting, and weeding, while also supporting sustainable practices. Combined with satellite imagery tools for data-driven farming, these innovations can make precision agriculture more efficient, resilient, and environmentally responsible. According to the United Nations report , by 2050, the world will need 70% more food to feed nearly 9.7 billion people. Considering this demand, farm robots and remote sensing are the cornerstone of the proper work of the supply chain. Smart machines arise for the farm Farm robots are no longer experimental concepts — they ...
Read more

Iván Hernández Dalas: Physical Intelligence open-sources Pi0 robotics foundation model

Image
Physical Intelligence, the San Francisco-based startup that has raised more than $400 million , has open-sourced its Pi0 robotic foundation model. Pi0 was introduced a few months ago and can be tuned to a range of tasks, including folding laundry, cleaning a table, scooping coffee beans, and more. Physical Intelligence has released the code and weights for Pi0 as part of its experimental openpi repository on GitHub. It also provides checkpoints for a few “simple tasks” on available platforms such as ALOHA and DROID, example code to run inference on real-world and simulated robot platforms, and the code for fine-tuning the base π0 model for your own tasks and platforms. The company said between 1-20 hours of data was sufficient to tune Pi0 to a variety of tasks in its own experiments. HuggingFace has also prepared a PyTorch port of openpi for those developers who prefer PyTorch over JAX. “We believe that general purpose models that can control any robot to perform any task will b...
Read more