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In new paper, experts working at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and physics-based simulation share how computer simulation could accelerate the development of “smart robots” which “might interact with humans”

Ultimately, it’s about people, not technology. It has become clear again in 2020 that technology and innovation are not an end goal, but tools that are used to achieve a business or social goal. That is one of the recurring themes in the conversations we have had for Rocking Robots this year.

By unanimous vote of the Heads of Delegations of the Member States, ALLAI was accepted as Observer to the CAHAI, the Council of Europe’s Ad-hoc Committee on AI.

Although this international edition of Rocking Robots only started in the second half of this year, we covered quite a few trends and developments in AI, robotics and RPA in a short time. Video’s are a popular content-item on this platform, so in this post we share a few video’s that symbolize the current trends.

During a training flight, the US military experimented with AI takeover of systems in a jet fighter. According to a report in the Washington Post, AI took over both the navigation and sensors of a U2 spy plane during this flight.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies (ICTs) – has launched a new Focus Group to support the emergence of ICT networks able to control their behaviour autonomously in the interests of efficiency. Participation is open to all interested parties.

Attempts at airborne retrieval of three unmanned air vehicles, nicknamed Gremlins, were just inches from success in DARPA’s latest flight test series that started on October 28. Each X-61A Gremlins Air Vehicle (GAV) flew for more than two hours, successfully validating all autonomous formation flying positions and safety features.

Scientists in Japan’s brain science project have used machine intelligence to improve the accuracy and reliability of a powerful brain-mapping technique, a new study reports.

Nuro has become the first company to receive a permit to deploy autonomous vehicles on public streets from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. This permit will allow the vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near their headquarters in the Bay Area. The service will start with a fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by the custom-designed electric R2 vehicles.

NVIDIA has announced a preview release of Isaac Gym – NVIDIA’s physics simulation environment for reinforcement learning research. RL-based training is now more accessible as tasks that once required thousands of CPU cores can now instead be trained using a single GPU.