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Seattle-based Picnic™, an innovator of food production technology and Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) solutions, unveiled today the first-of-its-kind intelligent end-to-end automated assembly platform for the food service and hospitality industries. The compact, freestanding system integrates Picnic’s issued U.S. patent and other U.S. and international patent-pending modular, configurable equipment, with its software, cloud and deep learning technology, and is available to customers with no upfront costs. The platform will initially focus on the production of high-volume, customizable pizzas, made with any kind of ingredients, consistently and sequentially, at a rate of up to 180 18” or 300 12” pizzas per hour.

Wallops island—a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology. If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little of it. But if crew members had looked closer, they would have seen that no one was aboard: The engine throttle levers were...

Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai Thursday that artificial intelligence should enable people to work 4 hours a day, 3 days a week, Bloomberg reports. Why it matters: It's a remarkable demonstration of Ma's faith in AI, given he's known for endorsing the Chinese tech sector's standard "996" schedule, which consists of a 72-hour workweek: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. The big picture: Ma appeared onstage at the event with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with whom he had a disagreement on whether humans can be outsmarted by computers.

Amazon’s self-driving robots will be roaming the streets of another neighborhood. The online shopping giant said Tuesday that the six-wheeled robots, about the size of a smaller cooler, will begin delivering packages to customers in Irvine, California. It comes after Amazon began testing them in a suburb of Seattle at the beginning of the year.

In June, thousands of dockworkers marched at the Port of Los Angeles against the coming introduction of robotic machines threatening their jobs. And they are not alone in fearing automation. According to a recent Pew Research survey, a staggering 85% of Americans support policies to restrict the rise of robots. We even have a presidential candidate in Andrew Yang running to protect jobs from automation. Economists tend to dismiss anti-technology sentiment as backwards and Luddite. But they miss an important point. As I argue in my new book, The Technology Trap, The Luddites, who smashed machinery during the Industrial Revolution,...

Full title: Hummingbird Robots 1, Drones 0 Engineers just built a bird bot that can fly better than unmanned aerial vehicles. Engineers at Purdue have built a flying robot to mimic one of the most expert flyers in the natural world: the hummingbird.... ... After going through the training, the robot has an understanding, so to speak, of when to pause and when to take flight. Even more impressive? The robot can't actually see. It senses by touching surfaces, with each touch altering an electrical current.

Engineers at Purdue have built a flying robot to mimic one of the most expert flyers in the natural world: the hummingbird. Drones wish they could fly with the agility and grace of the biological family Trochilidae, which includes all 357 types of hummingbirds. Boasting the flying capabilities of birds and the hovering abilities of insects, they represent an intersection of flying philosophies that scientists are eager to unlock. Hummingbirds could lead to leaps forward for search-and-rescue drones, commercial filming robots, military use, and any other flying venture that is punctuated by quick, unexpected stops and starts. The Purdue engineers...

Robots have undergone impressive designs and engineering for social use, manifested in puppy-like robots with expressive, blinking eyes, to little space robots. These little pals and helpers appeal to the home-confined elderly and children. These are social robots designed to understand and respond to cues. Flip it. A research paper said, "not much research has gone into designing interactions with technology what would support behaviors of destruction and catharsis. This project focuses on objects that are designed to support negative expressions of emotion."The research project is derived from previous work that included a theoretical review of the historical and cultural...

FARMINGTON, Minn. — Farmington High School’s Rogue Robotics team is on a roll. The media buzz from the team’s Project Cillian — they built a modified wheelchair for a Farmington boy with a disability — grew so loud it reached the White House. Earlier this week, coach Spencer Elvebak got a call from aides organizing first lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” event, asking if he could come to Washington on Tuesday, May 7, to be recognized for the project. Elvebak was floored. “The kids are all ecstatic about it,” he said. “I cried,” said Cami Schachtele, 17, who builds field...

They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible. I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening. In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate...

In the name of scientific “progress,” Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital in the United Kingdom recently tried to pioneer the use of a surgical robot that it tasked with repairing a patient’s damaged heart valve, only to have the machine go completely bonkers and ultimately kill the man on the operating table. According to reports, this first-time-use robot not only physically assaulted a living medic while attempting to conduct its programmed surgery, but also implanted stitches into the patient’s heart in a manner that physicians present during the fiasco described as not being in “an organised fashion.” A situation that can only...

FINLAND will be opening its first sex doll BROTHEL later this week as demand for silicone companions blows up all over the world. Russian-owned Unique Dolls will open its doors in Helsinki on Thursday - charging frisky Finns €100 an hour with its demimonde dolls. The silicone brothel is located in a discrete location behind a shopping centre in the Finnish capital. And they say they'll only ever be allowing a maximum of four clients in the building at any one time to keep noise levels at a respectable level. Each of the four models has its own room at...

If you think regular snakes are scary, try a robotic serpent that can scale ladders. Japanese researchers at Kyoto University have unveiled a prototype 'robot snake' that can slither and curl around surfaces and climb just like the real thing. Rather than just creating it to trigger nightmares, they believe it could one day be used to save lives.

Making a one-legged robot that moves is very hard. Two-legged robots are a little bit more straightforward in some ways, and four-legged robots are statically stable much of the time. You can see where this is going—there’s a general trend toward more legs being more stable and potentially easier to control, especially as terrain complexity increases. So what happens if you take that logic to an extreme? As it turns out, you end up with a spherical robot made of 32 individually actuated telescoping legs, named Mochibot.

I was falsely accused of having an affair and fathering a child with a woman I never met. A WOMAN I NEVER MET. I am a reasonably locally-prominent person. I had the misfortune of being on the front page of a local paper one day when a lady I'd never met gave birth. I gave a lot of money to a school. She saw me on the paper. She saw I was wealthy and reasonably important. So when the clerk came in with the birth certificate form to fill out, she put my name. She went on welfare and concocted...

A novel tiny, soft robot with caterpillar-like legs capable of carrying heavy loads and adaptable to adverse environment was developed from a research led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU). This mini delivery-robot could pave way for medical technology advancement such as drugs delivery in human body. Around the world, there has been research about developing soft milli-robots. But the CityU's new design with multi-legs helps reduce friction significantly, so that the robot can move efficiently inside surfaces within the body lined with, or entirely immersed in, body fluids such as blood or mucus.

More than half of all workplace tasks will be carried out by machines by 2025, organizers of the Davos economic forum said in a report released Monday that highlights the speed with which the labor market will change in coming years. The World Economic Forum estimates that machines will be responsible for 52 percent of the division of labor as share of hours within seven years, up from just 29 percent today. By 2022, the report says, roughly 75 million jobs worldwide will be lost, but that could be more than offset by the creation of 133 million new jobs.

A short drive north of Toronto, $60 buys a half hour alone with a life-sized doll that’s "warm and ready to play.” Customers take rented sex robots to a private room in a warehouse, near an emissions testing center, before returning them for cleaning. The owner of KinkySdollS told the Washington Examiner he will open a second location in Houston this month, with a goal of 10 U.S. locations by 2020. How? Because there's no regulation. "The States is a bigger market, and a healthier market, and God bless Trump," said owner Yuval Gavriel.

The Governor of the Bank of England has warned that the rise of robots in the workplace could cause a revival in Communism and 19th-century wage stagnation. Mark Carney, 53, said automation of millions of jobs would result in more support of Communist ideas within a generation. 'Marx and Engels may again become relevant' if mechanisation forces down pay and raises inequality, he warned. To alleviate the damage, Carney suggested workers should train for jobs that require higher emotional intelligence, for example in care and leisure.

A team of California researchers has developed a robotic gripper that combines the adhesive properties of gecko toes and the adaptability of air-powered soft robots to grasp a much wider variety of objects than the state of the art... The gecko is one of nature's best climbers, thanks to millions of microscopic hairs, with features about 20 to 30 times smaller than a human hair, that allow it to climb on virtually any surface. The hairs end in tiny nanostructures that interact at the atomic level with molecules on the surface the gecko is trying to grip...