Robots That Teach Each Other

Many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to reams of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other.

The rise of robots, virtual reality coming soon

Virtual reality and robots could soon become more commonplace in U.S. homes if recent predictions for 2016 play out.

Technology improvements, new gear rollouts and lower costs are expected to spark greater interest in virtual reality technology from Facebook's Oculus, Google as well as Sony, HTC and others, according to Juniper Research.

Two consumer devices are already available: A VR headset made by Oculus for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, and Google Cardboard, which works with any smartphone. Juniper expects those devices and competing gear to get even more popular over the next five years.
"The technology is now poised to transform the entertainment industry, including games and video, in the next few years, whilst offering the potential to quickly expand into other markets such as industrial and healthcare," according to a recent Juniper report.

"We might get to a point where there's enough ubiquity of virtual reality where you can really build a company in this market today," Box CEO Aaron Levie said in an interview with CNBC. Levie's firm sells enterprise software for content management and file sharing.

There are already more than 200 companies developing virtual reality technology including hardware and software, and they're worth a combined $13 billion, according to research from VB Profiles.

Read More: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/11/the-rise-of-robots-virtual-reality-coming-soon.html

China Wants to Replace Millions of Workers with Robots

China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers.

The government’s plan will be crucial to a broader effort to reform China’s economy while also meeting the ambitious production goals laid out in its latest economic blueprint, which aims to double per capita income by 2020 from 2016 levels with at least 6.5 percent annual growth. The success of this effort could, in turn, affect the vitality of the global economy.

The scale and importance of China’s robot ambitions were made clear when the vice president of the People’s Republic of China, Li Yuanchao, appeared at the country’s first major robotics conference, held recently in Beijing. Standing onstage between two humanoid entertainment robots with outsized heads, Li delivered a message from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, congratulating the organizers of the effort. He also made it clear that robotics would be a major priority for the country’s economic future.

Many of the robots on show at the conference’s exhibition hall were service or entertainment robots such as automated vacuum cleaners, cheap drones, or quirky looking machines designed to serve as personal companions. But there were also many industrial robots that signaled the real impetus for China’s robot push: its manufacturing sector.

China is already the world’s largest producer of everything from clothes to electronics, but much of it depends on low-cost, low-skill labor. And even as economic growth has slowed, wages continue to rise across the country as the economy evolves. The Chinese government is also eager to see its workforce diversify and its manufacturing industries become more technologically advanced.

Read More: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544201/china-wants-to-replace-millions-of-workers-with-robots/

Sound waves could power hard disk drives of the future

Our need to store data is growing at an astonishing rate. An estimated 2.7 zettabytes (2.721) of data are currently held worldwide, equivalent to several trillion bytes for every one of the 7 billion people on Earth. Accessing this data quickly and reliably is essential for us to do useful things with it – the problem is, all our current methods of doing so are far too slow.

Conventional hard-disk drives encode data magnetically on spinning discs, from which the data is read by a sensor that scans over its surface as it rapidly rotates. Their moving parts introduce the potential for mechanical failures, and limits the speeds possible. This slows everything down.

Much faster are solid-state storage devices, which have no mechanical parts and store data as tiny electrical charges. Most modern laptops, all modern smartphones and digital cameras, and many other devices use this technology – also known as flash memory. However, while solid-state devices are much faster they have a much shorter lifespan than hard disks before becoming unreliable, and are much more expensive. And despite their speed, they're still far slower than the speed at which data travels between other components of a computer, and so still act as a brake on the system as a whole.

A solid-state drive that encodes data magnetically would be ideal. IBM is developing one variation, known as racetrack memory. This uses collections of tiny nanowires hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. Data is magnetically encoded as strings of ones and zeros along the nanowire, but although it can move data through it far faster than typical hard disks, a key challenge is to find ways to make the data "flow" through the nanowires in order to pass it across the sensors that read and write data to the wire. This can be achieved by applying magnetic fields or electric currents, but this generates heat and reduces power efficiency, affecting battery life.

Read More: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-technology-metal-wires-solar-cells.html