United Kingdom

Norway and Britain have announced they will supply Black Hornet micro drones to Ukraine to aid in its war with Russia. The Teledyne Flir Black Hornet drones can be used for reconnaissance and target identification. The cost will be up to $9.26 million.

The University of Michigan (UM) Computer Science and Engineering department’s works to advance the intersection of programming systems and artificial intelligence (AI). As UiPath provides semantic automation it supports the research of Xinyu Wang, Assistant Professor at UM, who has a goal of building fundamental intelligent programming techniques that are useful in practice.

A team led by scientists Dr. Maximilian Kückelhaus and Prof. Tobias Hirsch from the Centre for Musculoskeletal Medicine at the University of Münster has carried out the first completely robot-supported microsurgical operations on humans. The physicians used an innovative operating method in which a new type of operations robot, designed especially for microsurgery, is networked with a robotic microscope.

The 25 emerging technologies to watch on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2022 are enabling the evolution and expansion of immersive experiences, accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) automation and optimising technologist delivery.

Brazilian twins who were joined at the head have been separated by surgeons using virtual reality. Three-year-olds Bernardo and Arthur Lima underwent surgeries in Rio de Janeiro, with a connection to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The doctors have trained for months, using virtual reality projections of the twins based on CT and MRI scans.

Constructing a tiny robot from DNA and using it to study cell processes invisible to the naked eye. This is the subject of research by scientists from Inserm, CNRS and Université de Montpellier at the Structural Biology Center in Montpellier. This highly innovative “nano-robot” should enable closer study of the mechanical forces applied at microscopic levels, which are crucial for many biological and pathological processes. It is described in a new study published in Nature Communications.

Researchers at the Robotics Institute (RI) in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores.

In a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Recreation Therapy, University of Utah researcher Rhonda Nelson and graduate student Rebecca Westenskow developed a protocol for using robotic pets with older adults with dementia. The protocol uses a low-cost robotic pet, establishes ideal session lengths and identifies common participant responses to the pets to aid in future research.

The convergence of AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and solutions (AIoT) is leading to “thinking” networks and systems that are becoming increasingly more capable of solving a wide range of problems across a diverse number of industry verticals. AI adds value to IoT through machine learning and improved decision-making. IoT adds value to AI through connectivity, signaling, and data exchange.

Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) implemented a non-verbal Turing test that shows that people interacting with the humanoid robot iCub were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed.