#destroy your local AI data centre

[probablyasocialecologist]

The almost overnight surge in electricity demand from data centers is now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world, according to interviews with data center operators, energy providers and tech executives. That dynamic is leading to years-long waits for businesses to access the grid as well as growing concerns of outages and price increases for those living in the densest data center markets. The dramatic increase in power demands from Silicon Valley’s growth-at-all-costs approach to AI also threatens to upend the energy transition plans of entire nations and the clean energy goals of trillion-dollar tech companies. In some countries, including Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Malaysia, the energy required to run all the data centers they plan to build at full capacity exceeds the available supply of renewable energy, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest available data. By one official estimate, Sweden could see power demand from data centers roughly double over the course of this decade — and then double again by 2040. In the UK, AI is expected to suck up 500% more energy over the next decade. And in the US, data centers are projected to use 8% of total power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, according to Goldman Sachs, which described it as “the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation.”

21 June 2024

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

7 Sep 2020: How Covid saved the high street

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash]

2030: How Covid saved the high street

The high street had been struggling for decades [grave voice]. Out of town retail parks and online shopping had pulled shoppers and spend away, and when the virus came along in 2020, everyone switched to online shopping. The end.

But is it possible to trace out a possible future in which Covid *saves* the high street?

Covid forced many organisations into Working From Home. The lockdowns paused lots of retail, with many unfortunate job losses and business failures.

Organisations learned that Wfh works ok, particularly if they avoid doing back to back video calls all day.

But because many towns are organised around commuting, shops and other commerce in urban centres were struggling. The Confederation of British Industry warned of ghost towns if offices stay empty, and the UK Government encouraged workers to get back to the office to save the “office economy”. Perhaps companies that had optimised for commuting and city-worker sales were most exposed: Pret A Manger cuts 2,800 jobs as sales sink to lowest level in 10 years.

Despite the government pleas, companies decide to delay returning to their office. “Fifty of the biggest UK employers say they have no plans to return all their staff full-time in the near future”. Recent research found that 9 out of 10 office workers want to continue Wfhoming in some way.

Companies start exiting big “head office” leases in big city centres. Capita to close over a third of offices permanently. Pinterest cancels plans for a massive San Francisco campus, citing remote work shift from coronavirus.

Organisations start switching to multiple regional offices. Eg: suburban bank branches find new use as alternate office space for staff reluctant to commute to big HQs in city centres. They find it more resilient, lower cost. The people costs (communication, co-ordination, productivity, team health) start to improve as organisations get better at it.

Large retailer and product brands move toward online-and-delivered shopping propositions. And shopping behaviour continues to shift: online is for things that you already know you want, or that you don’t need to inspect, or that need to be cheap. Offline is for things that you need now, or didn’t know you needed until you saw them, or for experiences.

Commuting drops because people are staying and working more locally. “Cities will not die, but their benefits could become more diffuse, with well-paid workers spread further into the rest of the country.” Their offline spend correspondingly stays more local. This means that local services and high streets see a regenerative effect, particularly where local authorities support reinvention rather than conservation. The high street is revived: a mixture of “convenient and now” and “experiential” retail.

The emptier central business districts in cities are eventually re-colonised by residential and smaller/independent retail. They eventually look like new high streets too.

Retail news

Asda is doing parcel collection and returns in 600 locations with To You. It’s not 100% clear whether it uses staff or is an automated locker thing, and it looks like it might be certain retailers/brands only. Finding new uses for existing space is interesting...

Amazon is trialling same-day delivery from Morrisons supermarkets - a trial in Leeds.

New apps use your phone to record your dimensions and recommend what size to buy at shops - it might be useful if the shop itself did this, tuning the measurement to their own sizing regime.

Price of single-use plastic carrier bags in England to double - 10p in April 2021.

Bread price may rise after dire UK wheat harvest.

Covid-safe cars

“To see the fast-food chain of the future, simply walk to your car, open the door, and take a seat. Because you’ve just arrived.” Fast food restaurants are redesigning for faster drive through and click and collect. Drive through was always about convenience, but these days your car is also a safe way to shop and a safe place to eat. If the car is a Covid-safe place, how will it be redesigned in future? How will towns and cities change so you can stay in your car?

Perhaps this is how: here’s a self-driving taxi with some interesting features. First, Covid safety: “ambulance-grade U-VC lighting”. Will this kind of thing will be used in all public transport in future? It would be helpful if shops and other public locations and forms of transport were able to visibly prove or demonstrate they were clean and safe. And maybe that UV blue (or face mask green?) will be the colour that signals “Covid-safe.

(The second interesting thing about the taxi was, the AI stuff: a careful separation between the self-driving bit and the safety bit. No doubt that is the Right Thing To Do but naively it sounds like they’re saying that there is a fair bit more work to do on self-driving.)

But if a car is *self-driving*, you might see shops that come to you. Convenient and safe.

Health news

Facebook just figured out how to make MRIs four times faster - the breakthrough, made with scientists from New York University, could transform medical imaging.

Amazon’s new $100 ‘Halo’ health band measures body fat, voice tone, sleep quality, and activity. Using AI “to help customers understand how they sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships” sounds like great fun.

Spreadsheet error led to hospital opening delay - humans make mistakes.

Quoted

“Spoiler: it didn’t go to plan” - Co-op Digital’s Charles Burdett on launching a side project, Workshop Tactics. 

“Trying to know ourselves through platform data tends to yield partial and contorted accounts of human behavior that conceal platform interventions […] Measurement is thus a product of the social and institutional context”. Feels correct.

“Companies including supermarkets and fast food retailers must make full transparency of supply chains a condition of trade" - Greenpeace comments on a proposed UK law that would make it illegal to use products that fail to comply with laws to protect nature in those origin nations. (Imagine the depth of supply chain reporting needed.)

“Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.” - How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (long read).

Co-op Digital news and events

Free of charge events at Federation house: 

Andy’s Man Club – Gentleman's Peer to Peer Mental Health Meet Up – Mondays 7pm 

Advance Careers UK – Kick Start Your Digital Career – 7 Sept – 8:30pm  

Giving back with CodeYourFuture – Meet Up – 8 Sept – 6pm 

North West User Drupal Group – Meet Up – 8 Sept - 7pm 

Carbon Coop – Beginners Guide to Retrofit – 9 Sept – 6pm 

What is Data – Panel Discussion - 10 Sept – 4.30pm 

HER+Data MCR – Meet Women in Data – 10 Sept – 6:30pm  

Motion North – Meet Up – 17 Sept - 7pm 

GM Responsible Tech Collective | Co-Production Roundtable, 27 September 2pm – This is a cross-sector community of organisations working to establish Greater Manchester as an exemplary region for ethical tech. Our very own Amity CIC, Noisy Cricket and Diverse & Equal will all be speaking around black tech and homelessness employment innovation. For more information, click here. 

Paid for events:

Invisible Cities - Online Tours of Manchester or Edinburgh – Various Dates & Times 

Mandala Yoga – Online Yoga Sessions - Various Dates & Times 

Tech Ethics – Meet Up – Various Dates & Times 

More detail on Federation House’s events.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[warninggraphiccontent]

4 June 2021

Not feeling 100%?

This is more anecdote than data, but I feel like I've been seeing a lot of clustered bar charts (where you have a number of bars, for different series, bunched together in each category) with quite a lot of bars per category recently.

This sort of thing:

Lest I risk being stripped of my Peston Geek of the Week badges, there isn't anything particularly wrong with this - it just happened to be one example I noticed this week! But personally, I find four bars per category a bit much - I don't think the key stories are as easy to read as they might be. (I should confess my own sins at this point.)

In instances like this one - where the results for a single age group will add up to 100% - I think there's an obvious alternative: a 100% bar chart.

I think this makes the same point - that attitudes to lifting lockdown divide along age lines - more clearly. The thing you might lose is being able to easily compare should/should not for a particular age group, but that's not the main point being made and (personally) I think that takes some time with the original anyway.

Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with the original in this instance. But I've definitely seen more egregious examples, where the number of clustered columns becomes a bar to understanding the data.

Some initial thoughts on other subjects:

DB I thoroughly enjoyed last night's Data Bites geo-special, which you can watch as-live here (and will appear in slightly edited form here). I even included a chart-based quiz - question here (it does get there eventually), answer here. We'll be back on Wednesday 7 July with the next one, and then back on 8 September after a short summer break.

VPs Reports (Meta data, below) suggest the government has backtracked on many of its 'vaccine passport' plans for domestic use. (Rumours government will leave much to the free market are still a concern - government needs to provide clarity and be wary of harms, whoever is developing such systems.) Here's the Ada Lovelace Institute report on vaccine passports I was involved with.

GPDPR Also below are many links about the planned General Practice Data for Planning and Research, a new NHS Digital initiative to use patient data, which is now starting to become A Thing in the press.

LN If you're interested in data sonification, a new podcast - Loud Numbers - is launching with a whole festival on the topic this Saturday. Here are my collected sonifications for the Institute for Government podcast (which I've been saying I'll write up for about a year and a half now...)

ODI There are some great jobs - including researcher and senior researcher roles - going at the Open Data Institute, where I'm a special adviser (but don't let that put you off).

OGP NAP If you'd like to get involved in shaping the UK's next national action plan for open government, remember you can sign up here.

CogX And last but not least, I'm delighted to announce I'll be chairing a session on 'AI Governance: the role of the nation in a transnational world' at this year's CogX at 1pm on Wednesday 16 June.

W:GC will be taking a break next week, and perhaps the week after if I'm feeling really decadent. Remember there are 100+ other data newsletters, podcasts or event series you can sign up to here.

Have a great weekend/week/fortnight

Gavin

Enjoying Warning: Graphic Content?

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Today's links:

Graphic content

Viral content

Peru has world’s worst per capita Covid toll after death data revised (The Guardian)

Pretty big validation... (John Burn-Murdoch)

Covid-19 deaths in Wuhan seem far higher than the official count (The Economist)

This is an analysis of the rate of growth of the "delta variant" (Alex Selby)

COVID-19: Indian variant now dominant in a fifth of areas in England - do you live in one? (Sky News)

How the Indian Covid variant has surged in England* (New Statesman)

Side effects

Covid catch-up plan for England pupils ‘pitiful compared with other countries’ (The Guardian)

How England’s school catch-up funding falls £13.6bn short* (New Statesman)

Concerns about missing work may be a barrier to coronavirus vaccination* (Washington Post)

COVID-19 passports: Britons are still in favour even as government scraps plans (YouGov)

Most people in UK did not work from home in 2020, says ONS (The Guardian)

UK

UK's culture war divisions exaggerated but real, say public – as shown by views on equal rights, cultural change and class, and online bubbles (The Policy Institute at King's College London, Ipsos MORI)

Lewis Baston: London voting patterns 2021. Not so much a doughnut as a swirl (On London)

Labour, not the Conservatives, was the largest party among low-income workers in 2019* (New Statesman)

The Greens are on the march. Who should be afraid?* (New Statesman)

Gender in public life (IfG)

Is this the beginning of the end of marriage? (Tortoise)

US

Small share of US police draw third of complaints in big cities* (FT)

Biden Targets Racial, Social Inequities With Vast Spending Push* (Bloomberg)

Hunger has declined dramatically across America in the past year* (The Economist)

NYC’s School Algorithms Cement Segregation. This Data Shows How (The Markup)

The Persistent Grip of Social Class on College Admissions* (The Upshot)

Building a Home in the U.S. Has Never Been More Expensive* (Bloomberg)

Nature, environment, energy

Cicadas, insecticides and children* (The Economist)

Corporate-led $1bn forests scheme is ‘just the beginning’* (FT)

European Banks’ Next Big Problem? The CO2 in Their Loan Books (Bloomberg)

How an Insurgency Threatens Mozambique’s Gas Bonanza* (Bloomberg)

Everything else

English clubs are dominating European football once again* (The Economist)

Unpacking the 2021 Digital Government Survey (FWD50)

#dataviz

A collection of visualization techniques for geospatial network data (GEOSPATIAL NETWORK VISUALIZATION)

Reconstructing the Neighborhood Destroyed in the Tulsa Race Massacre* (New York Times)

Meta data

Viral content

NHS Covid app signs £10m six-month contract extension with developer Zühlke (Public Technology)

The UK’s response to new variants: a story of obfuscation and chaos (BMJ)

Exclusive: UK vaccine passport plans to be scrapped* (Telegraph)

Introducing Covid certificates is a ‘finely balanced’ decision, says Gove (The Guardian)

SCOTTISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT DURING COVID-19: DATA NEEDS, CAPABILITIES, AND USES (Urban Big Data Centre)

Sharing data to help with the Covid-19 vaccination programme (DWP Digital)

How Modi’s fraught relationship with pandemic data has harmed India* (FT)

All those pub apps you’ve downloaded are a privacy nightmare* (Wired)

Losing patients?

Our perspective on the new system for GP data (Understanding Patient Data)

Helen Salisbury: Should patients worry about their data? (BMJ)

Your NHS data will be quietly shared with third parties, with just weeks to opt out – GPs like me are worried (i)

Dear #research, People are opting out in droves – Matt Hancock’s data grab, facilitated by NHSX, is damaging your work (medConfidential)

Matt Hancock has quietly told your GP to hand over your health data. Why? (openDemocracy)

Plans to share NHS data must be reconsidered* (FT)

GPs warn over plans to share patient data with third parties in England (The Guardian)

The Guardian view on medical records: NHS data grab needs explaining (The Guardian)

Your medical records are about to be given away. As GPs, we’re fighting back (The Guardian)

UK government

Government Digital Service: Our strategy for 2021-2024 (Strategic Reading)

Geospatial Commission sets its 2021/22 priorities (Geospatial Commission)

Office for Statistics Regulation Annual Business Plan 2021/22 (OSR)

Office for National Statistics: the number-crunching whizzes keeping Britain afloat are the unsung heroes of the pandemic (Reaction)

Digital Strategy for Defence: Delivering the Digital Backbone and unleashing the power of Defence’s data (MoD)

Introducing a Head of Digital role to DfE (DfE Digital and Technology)

Why we’ve created an accessibility manual – and how you can help shape it (DWP Digital)

Working in data, insight and user research roles at GOV.UK (Inside GOV.UK)

How to make hybrid or ‘blended’ meetings work for your team (MoJ Digital and Technology)

AI got 'rithm

How soft law is used in AI governance (Brookings)

The race to understand the exhilarating, dangerous world of language AI* (MIT Technology Review)

Can AI be independent from big tech?* (Tortoise)

Sentenced by Algorithm* (New York Review of Books)

Google says it’s committed to ethical AI research. Its ethical AI team isn’t so sure. (Recode)

Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them.* (Washington Post)

Privacy, people, personal data

Privacy group targets website 'cookie terror' (BBC News)

EU to step up digital push with digital identity wallet (Reuters)

ICO call for views: Anonymisation, pseudonymisation and privacy enhancing technologies guidance (ICO)

Data isn’t oil, whatever tech commentators tell you: it’s people’s lives (The Observer)

Everything else

In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips (The Guardian)

Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies (BBC News)

Gadgets have stopped working together, and it’s becoming an issue (The Observer)

German Bundestag adopts autonomous driving law (The Robot Report)

Code is cheap; ignorance is costly (Matt Edgar)

The internet is flat. (Galaxy Brain)

Opportunities

EVENT: AI Governance: the role of the nation in a transnational world (CogX)

Full programme

EVENT: Special Topic Meeting on R/local R/transmission of Covid19 (Royal Statistical Society)

EVENT: Deploying algorithms in government (Global Government Forum)

EVENT: Emerging approaches to the regulation of biometrics: The EU, the US and the challenge to the UK (Ada Lovelace Institute)

SURVEY: Help to shape the National AI Strategy (AI Council, supported by The Alan Turing Institute)

JOB: CEO (Advanced Research and Invention Agency)

BEIS seeks chief for research agency championed by Cummings (Civil Service World)

JOB: Chief Digital Officer for Health and Care for Wales (Health Education and Improvement Wales, via Jukesie)

JOB: Head of Data Strategy (Companies House)

JOB: Head of Data Policy Analysis Team (DCMS)

JOB: Data Architect (GDS)

JOBS: Open Data Institute

JOBS: Open Data Manchester

JOB: Manager, Data and Digital Team (Social Finance, via Jukesie)

And finally...

Baked in

We collected data on 1,500 politicians' favourite biscuit. Here's what we found. (Democracy Club)

NYC Mayor Race: Ranked-Choice Ballot Explained, With Bagels* (Wall Street Journal)

Maps

Countries coloured by the number of other countries they border (Helen McKenzie)

An orange or an egg? Determining the shape of the world* (The Spectator)

I'm planning to cycle around London looking at bits of internet infrastructure and general sites of interest in computer history (Reuben Binns)

"How much of Scotland is further south than the most northerly part of England?" (Alasdair Rae)

Cartoons

'It's just counting!' (Scott Murray)

Help a Computer Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (The Pudding)

Everything else

Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game (MIT Technology Review)

Behind the painstaking process of creating Chinese computer fonts* (MIT Technology Review)

[waynekelton]

The Best Offline Strategy Games for Android & iOS

In the age of the always-online freemium mobile experience, sometimes it's nice to know that there are quality strategy games out there that you can play offline. Maybe Grandma's wi-fi isn't up to the job, or maybe you just don't have any internet. Are you on a Bus? A Plane?

Whatever the case, there comes a time when you need a strategy game that's a real feast--but at a table set for one. Luckily, there are a large number of mobile games with great offline experiences in 2018, on both iOS and Android.

What are the best Offline Strategy Games for Android & iOS?

Bad North

Star Traders: Frontiers

Rebel Inc.

Doorkickers

Frozen Synapse Prime

Tharsis

Ticket to Ride

XCOM: Enemy Within

Battle of Wesnoth

Bad North

Bad North is a self-styled 'micro' or 'minimalist' real-time strategy game that's been a big hit on PC and Switch, and is finally available on mobile. It works perfectly even when you're not connected to data or wifi, which makes it a no-brainer for this last. Technically, we've played this the most on Airplanes but since it's a game primarily about short-bursts of activity, it's also suited for played on the bus.

Essentially you're in charge of a small army of units that you must use to defend a succession of islands from Viking invaders. Islands are connected together in a randomised and procedurally generated chain, and once you've completed one it unlocks the the next in line. You have to try and keep up forward momentum because if you lag behind you may be overtaken and you lose. Along the way you can find items and more units to command, but the islands get harder to defend.

Star Traders: Frontiers

This is technically more RPG than strategy, but it's a cracking solitaire game that gives you a wide open sandbox to explore as captain of your own space-shop. Trade and take on 'quests' as you strive to make a name for yourself in a dangerous universe, with both turn-based squad battles (JRPG style) and turn-based ship combat which will put your vessel and your crew to the test. You can customise your character and your crew as much as you like, levelling them up along specific career paths that can make you a hard-as-nails combat vessel, or a stealthy smuggler looking to maximise profit. The game has lots of story vignettes to pull you through, from standard quest systems, to larger multi-part stories and era-defining events that you can help shape, or not. Regardless, this is a living sandbox that will progress with or without your help.

What makes this a good 'offline' game though is the fact that not only does it not require an internet connection, but the game will remember your state if you find yourself having to close down the app unexpectedly, even in the middle of a battle. Plenty of save slots as well for all you scummers out there. The icing on the cake is that the developers are always pushing out updates, so there's near weekly fresh content being dropped into the game. Read our review to find out more.

Rebel Inc.

Just like its predecessor Plague Inc., Rebel Inc. is an excellent drop-in/drop-out game that allows you to pause the action and come back to it at a later date. This real-time strategy experience puts you in the shows of a newly appointed administrator of a troubled region recovering from a recent war (evoking memories of the recent War in Afghanistan, specifically). You must spend your budget wisely on government improvements and initiatives to help the population rebuild and to win support.

Unlike Plague, however, you can't just sit back and wait for the people to love you - the enemies vanquished in the recent war haven't gone away, and soon insurgent forces will start popping up on the map trying to try and take over by force. You then enter a different game entirely - one of tactical placement. By marshalling local or coalition forces, you must drive out the insurgents from the major population centres and corner them so that they have nowhere to run. Do well and they'll eventually ask for peace but the longer the linger, the quicker your reputation declines and if it reaches zero, you lose.

Doorkickers

Doorkickers makes a great bite-sized tactical treat. Each mission is a puzzle that you solve by drawing lines for your squad of police officers to follow. First you plan, then you can pause the game at any time to modify your strategy. The encounters are over as quickly as a real tactical breach would be, which means if you screwed up and got your officers fragged you can try again almost immediately. You can pass a mission with minimal requirements, but casualties and mistakes will carry over to the next level. While there's not much story here, there is a gradual progression of unlockable gear and skills and new, more challenging missions. At the same time, you're free to take on any one of several campaigns at the same time. Get stuck and you can just try a different one.

Frozen Synapse Prime

This is another great tactical game that works well with a touch interface. Set in a futuristic city with cyborg commandos that can be controlled remotely, Frozen Synapse breaks turns out of a real-time battle by pausing every few seconds for both sides to issue new orders. The orders play out simultaneously, so the core mechanic is predicting what your opponent is going to do next.

While Frozen Synapse is extra great with a human partner to second-guess, it also has a very cool single-player campaign with a pretty interesting post-cyberpunk story-line. This also features quite a variety of mission types, smart AI, and satisfying progression. On iOS, you'll also be able to get the original, with hip minimalist graphics. On Android, you've got the Prime remake, which is essentially the same game but with more realistic visuals.

Iron Marines

This mission-based RTS will take a little more commitment, but the rewards are worth it. From veteran developers Ironhide, creators of the mega-hit Kingdom Rush, is a polished, neon-colored gem of a mobile strategy game. It's your basic space marines vs aliens set against highly improbable but beautiful alien landscapes. Your commander has MOBA-like hero abilities that will help you face a variety of mission types and enemies, and the game can get pretty tough later in the campaign. Read our Iron Marines review for more.

Tharsis

The fact that this game is iPad only (for now) doesn't stop it being an excellent solo turn-based strategy experience. Inspired by dice-rolling board game design, this is a survival/disaster management game where you must try and get as many of your crew to Mars as you can as the spaceship that's carrying you there slowly falls apart around you. Each turn represents a week aboard the failing Iktomi, in which the crew have to repair various system failures or suffer the consequences. These consequences include a faulty life support system damaging the crews’ health or a severe fire destroying the ship’s hull and bringing an abrupt end to your mission.

The solo nature of this game means that it's an excellent one for those longer-haul journeys, although the caveat is it may not be as battery friendly as others in this section. Still, the thought of being forced to resort to cannibalism to keep your crew alive can sometimes be too compelling to ignore, battery be damned. Read our review for more.

Ticket to Ride

A must have feature of any modern digital board game must be pass-and-play. It brings these apps closer to their physical counter-part and allows them to actually fill the niche they were designed for, albeit at the potential expense of sales as close-knit groups or couples only end up buying one version of the app between them. Ticket to Ride is an extremely popular, mainstream boardgame, although we can quibble over its definition of 'strategy' if you like. Still, it's combination of set collection and the tactical placement of your trains makes for a very compelling game - do you go the easiest route, or the longest? do you focus on your tickets, or try to subvert other player's routes? Do you place those trains now, or pick up those cards you desperately need?

Regardless, as an app and as an offline experience, it's well above par. The base purchase gets you the USA map, but most of the series' spin-offs and expansions are available to purchase via IAPs. IF you wait for a sale, you could easily stock up on options and you'll find yourself with a great shared experience to tide you through those long flights. You can even fit in a game with two people and two AI in an hour-long domestic flight, so if you're looking for a quintessential offline experience for two or more people, look no further than Ticket to Ride.

XCOM: Enemy Within

Likewise, the mobile port of XCOM is rightly lauded as one of the few PC-quality experiences to be had on a tablet. Not only did this standalone expansion of the original ground-breaking remake Enemy Unknown polish off all the rough edges of its original, it added great new wrinkles to the classic core gameplay. You still get a massive open-ended campaign with tactical turn-based missions, but now you have a much more interesting storyline that has your soldiers questioning whether they have gazed too long into the abyss to still be considered human.

Battle of Wesnoth

For a different sort of grand experience, try the venerable Battle for Wesnoth, an open-source project fifteen years in the making. It's a grand strategy game with a Tolkienesque fantasy theme. There's a massive variety of units in six highly distinct factions, plus different historical ages that change the balance. Its sixteen (!!) lengthy and story-based campaigns will keep you busy for a long long time. The complexity of the interface means this is one for the tablet, and the free Android version is a bit jankier than the more polished (and paid) iOS version.

Other iOS & Android Offline Strategy Games

Civilization VI

Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion

Slay

Templar Battleforce Elite

Aliens vs Humans

What would your favourite offline strategy games be for mobile? Let us know in the comments!

The Best Offline Strategy Games for Android & iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[technato]

Video Friday: ROS 10 Years, Robotic Imaginations, and Centimetre Bots

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Image: Australian Centre for Field Robotics/YouTube

Centimetre Bots developed at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

IEEE IRC 2018 – January 31-2, 2018 – Laguna Hills, Calif.

HRI 2018 – March 5-8, 2018 – Chicago, Ill.

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

In case you weren’t keeping track, Monday, December 4, was National Cookie Day in the United Sttes, so here’s a throwback to MIT’s PR2 baking a cookie (they say it’s called a “Chocolate Afghan,” whatever that is).

[ MIT ]

We’ve been waiting TEN YEARS for this: It’s the official ROS 10 year montage!

[ ROS.org ]

UC Berkeley researchers have developed a robotic learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before. In the future, this technology could help self-driving cars anticipate future events on the road and produce more intelligent robotic assistants in homes, but the initial prototype focuses on learning simple manual skills entirely from autonomous play.

Using this technology, called visual foresight, the robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a particular sequence of movements. These robotic imaginations are still relatively simple for now – predictions made only several seconds into the future – but they are enough for the robot to figure out how to move objects around on a table without disturbing obstacles. Crucially, the robot can learn to perform these tasks without any help from humans or prior knowledge about physics, its environment or what the objects are. That’s because the visual imagination is learned entirely from scratch from unattended and unsupervised exploration, where the robot plays with objects on a table. After this play phase, the robot builds a predictive model of the world, and can use this model to manipulate new objects that it has not seen before.

“In the same way that we can imagine how our actions will move the objects in our environment, this method can enable a robot to visualize how different behaviors will affect the world around it,” said Sergey Levine, assistant professor in Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, whose lab developed the technology. “This can enable intelligent planning of highly flexible skills in complex real-world situations.”

[ UC Berkeley ]

This small bot is capable of doing useful tasks in a fully autonomous fashion. Features include on-board computing, communications, sensing, power management, solar system and high torque motors. There is also space for additional payloads. Small robots have a number of potential applications including materials inspection (i.e., pipes), navigating through collapsed buildings, intelligent transportation/delivery, micro surgery, surveillance and more.

[ University of Sydney ]

Honda will unveil its new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics Concept at CES 2018, demonstrating a range of experimental technologies engineered to advance mobility and make people’s lives better. Expressing a variety of functions and designs, the advanced robotic concepts demonstrate Honda’s vision of a society where robotics and AI can assist people in many situations, such as disaster recovery, recreation and learning from human interaction to become more helpful and empathetic.

-3E-A18, a companion robotics concept that shows compassion to humans with a variety of facial expressions

-3E-B18, a chair-type mobility concept designed for casual use in indoor or outdoor spaces

-3E-C18, a small-sized electric mobility concept with multi-functional cargo space

-3E-D18, an autonomous off-road vehicle concept with AI designed to support people in a broad range of work activities

[ Honda ]

I am not entirely sure what LOVOT is, except that LOVE × ROBOT = LOVOT, and it’s apparently being developed by the lead developer on Pepper.

Here is how LOVOT is different from ROBOT, according to the website:

ROBOT improves the convenience of life.

LOVOT improves the quality of life.

Basically, ROBOT obeys anyone’s instructions.

LOVOT sometimes shy personally to people other than you.

ROBOT heads for one purpose and does not take unnecessary movements.

LOVOT stares at you, and sometimes makes a wasteful move.

ROBOT will not listen to anyone’s bitches.

LOVOT will be your power to cry.

I’ll take it. Launching in 2019.

[ LOVOT ] via [ Groove-X ]

Robots, drones and AI. The Danish Technological Institute (DTI) in Odense, Denmark is working with a wide variety of robotics. What many people do not know, however, is that there is also a small cross-disciplinary special task force dedicated to saving Christmas.

If I woke up on Christmas morning and found a box with a UR3 in it, I’d be just as happy as that kid.

[ DTI ]

Stanford is testing some gecko-inspired grippers on our favorite cubical space robot, Astrobee:

[ NASA ]

Kuka Robotics, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to lend Simone Giertz a LBR iiwa arm which I bet they had to contractually require her not to “accidentally” destroy.

[ Simone Giertz ]

Mechanical Engineering’s Aaron Johnson talks about his research in creating robots that can be useful to help humans perform desired behaviors in any type of terrain.

Fun fact: robots are clinically proven to perform better when they have googly eyes on them. And we’re reeeaaally looking forward to seeing what a Minitaur with an actuated back-tail can do.

[ CMU RoboMechanics Lab ]

Thanks Aaron!

Robust and accurate visual-inertial estimation is crucial to many of today’s challenges in robotics. Being able to localize against a prior map and obtain accurate and drift-free pose estimates can push the applicability of such systems even further. Most of the currently available solutions, however, either focus on a single session use-case, lack localization capabilities or an end-to-end pipeline. We believe that only a complete system, combining state-of-the-art algorithms, scalable multi-session mapping tools, and a flexible user interface, can become an efficient research platform. We therefore present maplab, an open, research-oriented visual-inertial mapping framework for processing and manipulating multi-session maps, written in C++.

On the one hand, maplab can be seen as a ready-to-use visual-inertial mapping and localization system. On the other hand, maplab provides the research community with a collection of multi-session mapping tools that include map merging, visual-inertial batch optimization, and loop closure. Furthermore, it includes an online frontend that can create visual-inertial maps and also track a global drift-free pose within a localization map. In this paper, we present the system architecture, five use-cases, and evaluations of the system on public datasets. The source code of maplab is freely available for the benefit of the robotics research community.

[ GitHub ] via [ ETH Zurich ASL ]

Thanks Juan!

Qooboooooo

[ Qoobo ] via [ Kazumichi Moriyama ]

Jamie Paik’s Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RLL) at EPFL has been getting up to some modular, squishable, deformable stuff this year:

What’s that little jumpy dude at a minute in, have we seen that before…?

[ RRL ]

I can totally do this:

[ YouTube ]

This video by George Joseph shows the view of a Cozmo robot as it navigates through doorways marked by ArUco markers. The software is part of the cozmo-tools package available on GitHub. Work done at Carnegie Mellon University, November 2017.

Not bad for a little toy robot, right?

[ GitHub ]

Drone Adventures sent a team to Sao Tomé and Principe in March 2017 to map several shores around the islands where erosion and flooding threaten local communities.

[ Drone Adventures ]

Rusty Squid Robotic Design Principles: The evolution of robotics is too important to leave in the hands of the engineers alone.

Design practice and thinking are simply not done in the robotics labs around the world. Large sums of cash are spent on very expensive robotics and the first time the engineers see how the public react is when the robots are complete… and they wonder why the robots aren’t being welcomed with open arms.

Our robotic art and design laboratory has gone back to first principles and created a robust design process that draws on the traditions of puppetry, animatronics and experience design to build rich and meaningful robots.

[ Rusty Squid ]

Thanks Richard!

The nice thing about robots is that you can program them to laugh, even if your jokes are really really bad.

Is Nao capable of giving high fives? Wouldn’t it be a high three?

[ RobotsLAB ]

YouTube’s auto translate can’t make sense of this, but I think Sota is suggesting that you buy a robot for Christmas?

[ Vstone ]

Per Sjöborg interviews Mel Torrie from Autonomous Solutions in the latest episode of Robots in Depth:

Mel Torrie, is the founder and CEO of ASI, Autonomous Solutions Inc. He talks about how ASI develops a diversified portfolio of vehicle automation systems across multiple industries.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar is from Alan Wagner, on “Exploring Human-Robot Trust during Emergencies”:

This talk presents our experimental results related to human-robot trust involving more than 2000 paid subjects exploring topics such as how and why people trust a robot too much and how broken trust in a robot might be repaired. From our perspective, a person trusts a robot when they rely on and accept the risks associated with a robot’s actions or data. Our research has focused on the development of a formal conceptualization of human-robot trust that is not tied to a particular problem or situation. This has allowed us to create algorithms for recognizing which situations demand trust, provided insight into how to repair broken trust, and affords a means for bootstrapping one’s evaluation of trust in a new person or new robot. This talk presents our results using these techniques as well as our larger computational framework for representing and reasoning about trust. Our framework draws heavily from game theory and social exchange theories. We present results from this work and an ongoing related project examining social norms in terms of social and moral norm learning.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: ROS 10 Years, Robotic Imaginations, and Centimetre Bots syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

[probablyasocialecologist]

Each time you search for something like “how many rocks should I eat” and Google’s AI “snapshot” tells you “at least one small rock per day,” you’re consuming approximately three watt-hours of electricity, according to Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company exploring the unintended consequences of digital trends. That’s ten times the power consumption of a traditional Google search, and roughly equivalent to the amount of power used when talking for an hour on a home phone. (Remember those?) Collectively, De Vries calculates that adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could easily consume as much electricity as the country of Ireland.

[...]

This insatiable hunger for power is slowing the transition to green energy. When the owner of two coal-fired power plants in Maryland filed plans to close last year, PJM asked them to keep running till at least 2028 to ensure grid reliability. Meanwhile, AI is also being used to actively increase fossil fuel production. Shell, for example, has aggressively deployed AI to find and produce deep-sea oil. “The truth is that these AI models are contributing in a significant way to climate change, in both direct and indirect ways,” says Tom McBrien, counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a digital policy watchdog. Even before Google’s AI integration this spring, the average internet user’s digital activity generated 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. That means the world’s current internet use already accounts for about 40 percent of the per capita carbon budget needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

20 June 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

The cryptocurrency hype of the past few years already started to introduce people to these problems. Despite producing little to no tangible benefits — unless you count letting rich people make money off speculation and scams — Bitcoin consumed more energy and computer parts than medium-sized countries and crypto miners were so voracious in their energy needs that they turned shuttered coal plants back on to process crypto transactions. Even after the crypto crash, Bitcoin still used more energy in 2023 than the previous year, but some miners found a new opportunity: powering the generative AI boom. The AI tools being pushed by OpenAI, Google, and their peers are far more energy intensive than the products they aim to displace. In the days after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, Sam Altman called its computing costs “eye-watering” and several months later Alphabet chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that getting a response from Google’s chatbot would “likely cost 10 times more” than using its traditional search tools. Instead of reassessing their plans, major tech companies are doubling down and planning a massive expansion of the computing infrastructure available to them.

[...]

As the cloud took over, more computation fell into the hands of a few dominant tech companies and they made the move to what are called “hyperscale” data centers. Those facilities are usually over 10,000 square feet and hold more than 5,000 servers, but those being built today are often many times larger than that. For example, Amazon says its data centers can have up to 50,000 servers each, while Microsoft has a campus of 20 data centers in Quincy, Washington with almost half a million servers between them. By the end of 2020, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlled half of the 597 hyperscale data centres in the world, but what’s even more concerning is how rapidly that number is increasing. By mid-2023, the number of hyperscale data centres stood at 926 and Synergy Research estimates another 427 will be built in the coming years to keep up with the expansion of resource-intensive AI tools and other demands for increased computation. All those data centers come with an increasingly significant resource footprint. A recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global energy demand of data centers, AI, and crypto could more than double by 2026, increasing from 460 TWh in 2022 to up to 1,050 TWh — similar to the energy consumption of Japan. Meanwhile, in the United States, data center energy use could triple from 130 TWh in 2022 — about 2.5% of the country’s total — to 390 TWh by the end of the decade, accounting for a 7.5% share of total energy, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s nothing compared to Ireland, where the IEA estimates data centers, AI, and crypto could consume a third of all power in 2026, up from 17% in 2022. Water use is going up too: Google reported it used 5.2 billion gallons of water in its data centers in 2022, a jump of 20% from the previous year, while Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons in its data centers, an increase of 34% on 2021. University of California, Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren told Fortune, “It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI.” But these are not just large abstract numbers; they have real material consequences that a lot of communities are getting fed up with just as the companies seek to massively expand their data center footprints.

9 February 2024

[waynekelton]

The Best Offline Strategy Games for Android & iOS

In the age of the always-online freemium mobile experience, sometimes it's nice to know that there are quality strategy games out there that you can play offline. Maybe Grandma's wi-fi isn't up to the job, or maybe you just don't have any internet. Are you on a Bus? A Plane? Read on, my friend...

Whatever the case, there comes a time when you need a strategy game that's a real feast--but at a table set for one. Luckily, there are a large number of mobile games with great offline experiences in 2018, on both iOS and Android.

Community Suggestions & Hall of Fame

Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion

Slay

Templar Battleforce Elite (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Aliens vs Humans (iOS Universal & Android)

Games for the Bus

Bad North (iOS Universal and Android)

Bad North is a self-styled 'micro' or 'minimalist' real-time strategy game that's been a big hit on PC and Switch, and is finally available on mobile. It works perfectly even when you're not connected to data or wifi, which makes it a no-brainer for this last. Technically, we've played this the most on Airplanes but since it's a game primarily about short-bursts of activity, it's also suited for played on the bus.

Essentially you're in charge of a small army of units that you must use to defend a succession of islands from Viking invaders. Islands are connected together in a randomised and procedurally generated chain, and once you've completed one it unlocks the the next in line. You have to try and keep up forward momentum because if you lag behind you may be overtaken and you lose. Along the way you can find items and more units to command, but the islands get harder to defend.

Star Traders: Frontiers (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

This is technically more RPG than strategy, but it's a cracking solitaire game that gives you a wide open sandbox to explore as captain of your own space-shop. Trade and take on 'quests' as you strive to make a name for yourself in a dangerous universe, with both turn-based squad battles (JRPG style) and turn-based ship combat which will put your vessel and your crew to the test. You can customise your character and your crew as much as you like, levelling them up along specific career paths that can make you a hard-as-nails combat vessel, or a stealthy smuggler looking to maximise profit. The game has lots of story vignettes to pull you through, from standard quest systems, to larger multi-part stories and era-defining events that you can help shape, or not. Regardless, this is a living sandbox that will progress with or without your help.

What makes this a good 'offline' game though is the fact that not only does it not require an internet connection, but the game will remember your state if you find yourself having to close down the app unexpectedly, even in the middle of a battle. Plenty of save slots as well for all you scummers out there. The icing on the cake is that the developers are always pushing out updates, so there's near weekly fresh content being dropped into the game.

Rebel Inc. (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

Just like its predecessor Plague Inc., Rebel is an excellent drop-in/drop-out game that allows you to pause the action and come back to it at a later date. This real-time strategy experience puts you in the shows of a newly appointed administrator of a troubled region recovering from a recent war (evoking memories of the recent War in Afghanistan, specifically). You must spend your budget wisely on government improvements and initiatives to help the population rebuild and to win support.

Unlike Plague, however, you can't just sit back and wait for the people to love you - the enemies vanquished in the recent war haven't gone away, and soon insurgent forces will start popping up on the map trying to try and take over by force. You then enter a different game entirely - one of tactical placement. By marshalling local or coalition forces, you must drive out the insurgents from the major population centres and corner them so that they have nowhere to run. Do well and they'll eventually ask for peace but the longer the linger, the quicker your reputation declines and if it reaches zero, you lose.

Doorkickers (iPad and Android) (Review)

Doorkickers makes a great bite-sized tactical treat. Each mission is a puzzle that you solve by drawing lines for your squad of police officers to follow. First you plan, then you can pause the game at any time to modify your strategy. The encounters are over as quickly as a real tactical breach would be, which means if you screwed up and got your officers fragged you can try again almost immediately. You can pass a mission with minimal requirements, but casualties and mistakes will carry over to the next level. While there's not much story here, there is a gradual progression of unlockable gear and skills and new, more challenging missions. At the same time, you're free to take on any one of several campaigns at the same time. Get stuck and you can just try a different one.

Frozen Synapse Prime (iOS Universal and Android)

This is another great tactical game that works well with a touch interface. Set in a futuristic city with cyborg commandos that can be controlled remotely, Frozen Synapse breaks turns out of a real-time battle by pausing every few seconds for both sides to issue new orders. The orders play out simultaneously, so the core mechanic is predicting what your opponent is going to do next.

While Frozen Synapse is extra great with a human partner to second-guess, it also has a very cool single-player campaign with a pretty interesting post-cyberpunk story-line. This also features quite a variety of mission types, smart AI, and satisfying progression. On iOS, you'll also be able to get the original, with hip minimalist graphics. On Android, you've got the Prime remake, which is essentially the same game but with more realistic visuals.

Iron Marines (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

This mission-based RTS will take a little more commitment, but the rewards are worth it. From veteran developers Ironhide, creators of the mega-hit Kingdom Rush, is a polished, neon-colored gem of a mobile strategy game. It's your basic space marines vs aliens set against highly improbable but beautiful alien landscapes. Your commander has MOBA-like hero abilities that will help you face a variety of mission types and enemies, and the game can get pretty tough later in the campaign.

Games for the Airplane

Tharsis (iPad) (Review)

The fact that this game is iPad only (for now) doesn't stop it being an excellent solo turn-based strategy experience. Inspired by dice-rolling board game design, this is a survival/disaster management game where you must try and get as many of your crew to Mars as you can as the spaceship that's carrying you there slowly falls apart around you. Each turn represents a week aboard the failing Iktomi, in which the crew have to repair various system failures or suffer the consequences. These consequences include a faulty life support system damaging the crews’ health or a severe fire destroying the ship’s hull and bringing an abrupt end to your mission.

The solo nature of this game means that it's an excellent one for those longer-haul journeys, although the caveat is it may not be as battery friendly as others in this section. Still, the thought of being forced to resort to cannibalism to keep your crew alive can sometimes be too compelling to ignore, battery be damned.

Ticket to Ride (iOS Universal and Android) (Review)

A must have feature of any modern digital board game must be pass-and-play. It brings these apps closer to their physical counter-part and allows them to actually fill the niche they were designed for, albeit at the potential expense of sales as close-knit groups or couples only end up buying one version of the app between them. Ticket to Ride is an extremely popular, mainstream boardgame, although we can quibble over its definition of 'strategy' if you like. Still, it's combination of set collection and the tactical placement of your trains makes for a very compelling game - do you go the easiest route, or the longest? do you focus on your tickets, or try to subvert other player's routes? Do you place those trains now, or pick up those cards you desperately need?

Regardless, as an app and as an offline experience, it's well above par. The base purchase gets you the USA map, but most of the series' spin-offs and expansions are available to purchase via IAPs. IF you wait for a sale, you could easily stock up on options and you'll find yourself with a great shared experience to tide you through those long flights. You can even fit in a game with two people and two AI in an hour-long domestic flight, so if you're looking for a quintessential offline experience for two or more people, look no further than Ticket to Ride.

Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (iPhone|iPad & Android)

Lots of old console titles have been ported to mobile, but not many are worth the hassle. Final Fantasy Tactics is the exception. Brought over from the beautiful PSP port with an improved translation, gorgeous cel-shaded cutscenes, and new aspect ratio, the game still has the PlayStation original's RPG-influenced tactics. Most importantly, FFT is the one console port that works brilliantly with touch controls. What makes FFT a great use of your offline time is its mammoth campaign with a rich, mature storyline. There's gameplay here to fill a few months of commutes.

XCOM: Enemy Within (iOS Universal & Android) (Review)

Likewise, the mobile port of XCOM is rightly lauded as one of the few PC-quality experiences to be had on a tablet. Not only did this standalone expansion of the original ground-breaking remake Enemy Unknown polish off all the rough edges of its original, it added great new wrinkles to the classic core gameplay. You still get a massive open-ended campaign with tactical turn-based missions, but now you have a much more interesting storyline that has your soldiers questioning whether they have gazed too long into the abyss to still be considered human.

Battle of Wesnoth (iOS Universal and Android)

For a different sort of grand experience, try the venerable Battle for Wesnoth, an open-source project fifteen years in the making. It's a grand strategy game with a Tolkienesque fantasy theme. There's a massive variety of units in six highly distinct factions, plus different historical ages that change the balance. Its sixteen (!!) lengthy and story-based campaigns will keep you busy for a long long time. The complexity of the interface means this is one for the tablet, and the free Android version is a bit jankier than the more polished (and paid) iOS version.

What would your favourite offline strategy games be for mobile? Let us know in the comments!

The Best Offline Strategy Games for Android & iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[technato]

Video Friday: ROS 10 Years, Robotic Imaginations, and Centimetre Bots

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Image: Australian Centre for Field Robotics/YouTube

Centimetre Bots developed at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

IEEE IRC 2018 – January 31-2, 2018 – Laguna Hills, Calif.

HRI 2018 – March 5-8, 2018 – Chicago, Ill.

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

In case you weren’t keeping track, Monday, December 4, was National Cookie Day in the United Sttes, so here’s a throwback to MIT’s PR2 baking a cookie (they say it’s called a “Chocolate Afghan,” whatever that is).

[ MIT ]

We’ve been waiting TEN YEARS for this: It’s the official ROS 10 year montage!

[ ROS.org ]

UC Berkeley researchers have developed a robotic learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before. In the future, this technology could help self-driving cars anticipate future events on the road and produce more intelligent robotic assistants in homes, but the initial prototype focuses on learning simple manual skills entirely from autonomous play.

Using this technology, called visual foresight, the robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a particular sequence of movements. These robotic imaginations are still relatively simple for now – predictions made only several seconds into the future – but they are enough for the robot to figure out how to move objects around on a table without disturbing obstacles. Crucially, the robot can learn to perform these tasks without any help from humans or prior knowledge about physics, its environment or what the objects are. That’s because the visual imagination is learned entirely from scratch from unattended and unsupervised exploration, where the robot plays with objects on a table. After this play phase, the robot builds a predictive model of the world, and can use this model to manipulate new objects that it has not seen before.

“In the same way that we can imagine how our actions will move the objects in our environment, this method can enable a robot to visualize how different behaviors will affect the world around it,” said Sergey Levine, assistant professor in Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, whose lab developed the technology. “This can enable intelligent planning of highly flexible skills in complex real-world situations.”

[ UC Berkeley ]

This small bot is capable of doing useful tasks in a fully autonomous fashion. Features include on-board computing, communications, sensing, power management, solar system and high torque motors. There is also space for additional payloads. Small robots have a number of potential applications including materials inspection (i.e., pipes), navigating through collapsed buildings, intelligent transportation/delivery, micro surgery, surveillance and more.

[ University of Sydney ]

Honda will unveil its new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics Concept at CES 2018, demonstrating a range of experimental technologies engineered to advance mobility and make people’s lives better. Expressing a variety of functions and designs, the advanced robotic concepts demonstrate Honda’s vision of a society where robotics and AI can assist people in many situations, such as disaster recovery, recreation and learning from human interaction to become more helpful and empathetic.

-3E-A18, a companion robotics concept that shows compassion to humans with a variety of facial expressions

-3E-B18, a chair-type mobility concept designed for casual use in indoor or outdoor spaces

-3E-C18, a small-sized electric mobility concept with multi-functional cargo space

-3E-D18, an autonomous off-road vehicle concept with AI designed to support people in a broad range of work activities

[ Honda ]

I am not entirely sure what LOVOT is, except that LOVE × ROBOT = LOVOT, and it’s apparently being developed by the lead developer on Pepper.

Here is how LOVOT is different from ROBOT, according to the website:

ROBOT improves the convenience of life.

LOVOT improves the quality of life.

Basically, ROBOT obeys anyone’s instructions.

LOVOT sometimes shy personally to people other than you.

ROBOT heads for one purpose and does not take unnecessary movements.

LOVOT stares at you, and sometimes makes a wasteful move.

ROBOT will not listen to anyone’s bitches.

LOVOT will be your power to cry.

I’ll take it. Launching in 2019.

[ LOVOT ] via [ Groove-X ]

Robots, drones and AI. The Danish Technological Institute (DTI) in Odense, Denmark is working with a wide variety of robotics. What many people do not know, however, is that there is also a small cross-disciplinary special task force dedicated to saving Christmas.

If I woke up on Christmas morning and found a box with a UR3 in it, I’d be just as happy as that kid.

[ DTI ]

Stanford is testing some gecko-inspired grippers on our favorite cubical space robot, Astrobee:

[ NASA ]

Kuka Robotics, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to lend Simone Giertz a LBR iiwa arm which I bet they had to contractually require her not to “accidentally” destroy.

[ Simone Giertz ]

Mechanical Engineering’s Aaron Johnson talks about his research in creating robots that can be useful to help humans perform desired behaviors in any type of terrain.

Fun fact: robots are clinically proven to perform better when they have googly eyes on them. And we’re reeeaaally looking forward to seeing what a Minitaur with an actuated back-tail can do.

[ CMU RoboMechanics Lab ]

Thanks Aaron!

Robust and accurate visual-inertial estimation is crucial to many of today’s challenges in robotics. Being able to localize against a prior map and obtain accurate and drift-free pose estimates can push the applicability of such systems even further. Most of the currently available solutions, however, either focus on a single session use-case, lack localization capabilities or an end-to-end pipeline. We believe that only a complete system, combining state-of-the-art algorithms, scalable multi-session mapping tools, and a flexible user interface, can become an efficient research platform. We therefore present maplab, an open, research-oriented visual-inertial mapping framework for processing and manipulating multi-session maps, written in C++.

On the one hand, maplab can be seen as a ready-to-use visual-inertial mapping and localization system. On the other hand, maplab provides the research community with a collection of multi-session mapping tools that include map merging, visual-inertial batch optimization, and loop closure. Furthermore, it includes an online frontend that can create visual-inertial maps and also track a global drift-free pose within a localization map. In this paper, we present the system architecture, five use-cases, and evaluations of the system on public datasets. The source code of maplab is freely available for the benefit of the robotics research community.

[ GitHub ] via [ ETH Zurich ASL ]

Thanks Juan!

Qooboooooo

[ Qoobo ] via [ Kazumichi Moriyama ]

Jamie Paik’s Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RLL) at EPFL has been getting up to some modular, squishable, deformable stuff this year:

What’s that little jumpy dude at a minute in, have we seen that before…?

[ RRL ]

I can totally do this:

[ YouTube ]

This video by George Joseph shows the view of a Cozmo robot as it navigates through doorways marked by ArUco markers. The software is part of the cozmo-tools package available on GitHub. Work done at Carnegie Mellon University, November 2017.

Not bad for a little toy robot, right?

[ GitHub ]

Drone Adventures sent a team to Sao Tomé and Principe in March 2017 to map several shores around the islands where erosion and flooding threaten local communities.

[ Drone Adventures ]

Rusty Squid Robotic Design Principles: The evolution of robotics is too important to leave in the hands of the engineers alone.

Design practice and thinking are simply not done in the robotics labs around the world. Large sums of cash are spent on very expensive robotics and the first time the engineers see how the public react is when the robots are complete… and they wonder why the robots aren’t being welcomed with open arms.

Our robotic art and design laboratory has gone back to first principles and created a robust design process that draws on the traditions of puppetry, animatronics and experience design to build rich and meaningful robots.

[ Rusty Squid ]

Thanks Richard!

The nice thing about robots is that you can program them to laugh, even if your jokes are really really bad.

Is Nao capable of giving high fives? Wouldn’t it be a high three?

[ RobotsLAB ]

YouTube’s auto translate can’t make sense of this, but I think Sota is suggesting that you buy a robot for Christmas?

[ Vstone ]

Per Sjöborg interviews Mel Torrie from Autonomous Solutions in the latest episode of Robots in Depth:

Mel Torrie, is the founder and CEO of ASI, Autonomous Solutions Inc. He talks about how ASI develops a diversified portfolio of vehicle automation systems across multiple industries.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar is from Alan Wagner, on “Exploring Human-Robot Trust during Emergencies”:

This talk presents our experimental results related to human-robot trust involving more than 2000 paid subjects exploring topics such as how and why people trust a robot too much and how broken trust in a robot might be repaired. From our perspective, a person trusts a robot when they rely on and accept the risks associated with a robot’s actions or data. Our research has focused on the development of a formal conceptualization of human-robot trust that is not tied to a particular problem or situation. This has allowed us to create algorithms for recognizing which situations demand trust, provided insight into how to repair broken trust, and affords a means for bootstrapping one’s evaluation of trust in a new person or new robot. This talk presents our results using these techniques as well as our larger computational framework for representing and reasoning about trust. Our framework draws heavily from game theory and social exchange theories. We present results from this work and an ongoing related project examining social norms in terms of social and moral norm learning.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: ROS 10 Years, Robotic Imaginations, and Centimetre Bots syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP