Victoria Stodden (vcs@stodden.net) is a statistician and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation Award #1941443.

AI researchers from the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington have trained a drone agent with a box on top to catch a range of 20 objects in a simulated environment. In trials, the drone had the lowest catch success rate with toilet paper (0%) and the highest with toasters (64.4%). Other objects included alarm clocks, heads of lettuce, books, and basketballs. Overall, the system's success rate in catching objects outpaces two variations of a current position predictor model for 3D spaces, as well as a frequently cited reinforcement learning framework proposed in 2016 by Google AI researchers. For the study, a launcher threw each object two meters (6.5 feet) toward a drone agent.

A robot dog from Boston Dynamics is now officially available to purchase. Spot, as the machine has been dubbed, will cost $74,500 (approximately £60,000). The canine droid is only available to customers in the United States at the moment, after they make a $1,000 deposit. It is capable of climbing stairs and crossing rough terrain, with the company sending the mechanical pooch into dangerous environments to carry payloads from place to place or collect data from the site. Users can control spot through its controller, which "easy access" to the robot's body posing, walking gaits, obstacle avoidance, and local navigation. Spot can also be set to follow predefined routes.

Amazon has released its first Echo device for use outside of the house, allowing users to take Alexa in their car. The company revealed the device in 2018 but it has finally come to customers in the UK and Ireland. Echo Auto plugs into a car's 12V power outlet or built-in USB port and connects to the in-car stereo via either audio jack cable or Bluetooth to enable the use of voice assistant Alexa inside the vehicle. Users are then able to use Alexa voice commands to control music, check the news, make phone calls or check their schedule without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. The device gets internet connectivity by connecting to a user's smartphone and the Alexa app and using its existing data plan.

Bots are terrorizing World of Warcraft Classic servers, stealing precious resources, monopolizing rare monsters, and inflating the virtual economy with truckloads of illicitly earned gold. Today, WoW Classic developer Blizzard Entertainment announced it has suspended or closed over 74,000 WoW Classic accounts over the last month, many of which were automating gameplay with bots. For months, clusters of bot-driven accounts have trawled around high-level zones, attacking monsters with uncanny precision before rotating toward their next target in robotic 90-degree angles. These in-game characters are operated by scripts, programmed to optimally kill monsters and obtain rare, valuable items that drop from them. Lately, they've been targeting the sought-after Black Lotus, a necessary item for some competitive, high-level play.

The very fact that objects in your sight may obscure your view of things that lie further ahead is blindingly obvious to people. But Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. student in CMU's Robotics Institute, said that's not how self-driving cars typically reason about objects around them. Rather, they use 3D data from lidar to represent objects as a point cloud and then try to match those point clouds to a library of 3D representations of objects. The problem, Hu said, is that the 3D data from the vehicle's lidar isn't really 3D -- the sensor can't see the occluded parts of an object, and current algorithms don't reason about such occlusions. "Perception systems need to know their unknowns," Hu observed.

Stéphane Fymat, the head of that new business, said Honeywell expects the hardware and software market for urban air taxis, drone cargo delivery, and other drone businesses to reach $120 billion by 2030 and Honeywell's market opportunity would be about 20% of that. He declined to say how much of that market Honeywell was targeting to capture, adding only that the unit has hundreds of employees with many engineers. Honeywell doesn't build drones itself but provides autonomous flight controls systems and aviation electronics. The new business creation comes as the coronavirus pandemic creates a surge of interest in drone deliveries; Fymat said it's accelerating the drone cargo delivery programs of some of its partners. Some of Honeywell's customers include Intel-backed Volocopter, Slovenia-based small aircraft maker Pipistrel, which is developing an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft for cargo delivery, and UK-based Vertical Aerospace, which has test flown a prototype vehicle last year that can carry 250 kilograms and fly at 80 kilometers an hour.

UC Berkeley AI researchers are using an iPhone X and Apple's ARKit to train a robotic arm how to grasp an object. ARKit creates point clouds from data generated by moving an RGB camera around an object for two minutes. Robotic grasping is a particular robotics subfield focused on the challenge of teaching a robot to pick up, move, manipulate, or grasp an object. The Dexterity Network, or Dex-Net, research project at UC Berkeley's Autolab dates back to 2017 and includes open source training data sets and pretrained models for robotic grasping in an ecommerce bin-picking scenario. The ability for robots to quickly learn how to grasp objects has a big impact on how automated warehouses like Amazon fulfillment centers can become.

A free facial recognition tool that allows people to find pictures of themselves or others from around the internet has drawn criticism from privacy campaigners. PimEyes describes itself as a privacy tool to help prevent misuse of images. But Big Brother Watch said it could "enable state surveillance, commercial monitoring and even stalking on a scale previously unimaginable". It comes as Amazon decides to pause its use of facial recognition for a year. Polish website PimEyes was set up in 2017 as a hobby project, and commercialised last year.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it would freeze for one year the use of its facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies. Amazon announced on Wednesday that it would freeze for one year the use of its facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies. Amazon announced on Wednesday a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial-recognition technology, yielding to pressure from police-reform advocates and civil rights groups. It is unclear how many law enforcement agencies in the U.S. deploy Amazon's artificial intelligence tool, but an official with the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon confirmed that it will be suspending its use of Amazon's facial recognition technology. Researchers have long criticized the technology for producing inaccurate results for people with darker skin.