A robot army is beginning its march across rural America, promising to transform the future of food. Twenty-five intelligent machines were dispatched last month to the Midwest and the Mississippi Delta, where they will advance over newly planted fields at 12 miles an hour, annihilating baby weeds. Produced by John Deere and created by the startup Blue River Technology, these robotic weeders look much like standard industrial sprayers at first glance, but each is rigged with an intricate system of 36 cameras and a mass of tiny hoses. They use computer vision to distinguish between crops and weeds and then deploy with sniper-like precision tiny jets of herbicide onto the weeds -- sparing the crop and ending the common practice of broadcast-spraying chemicals across billions of acres.

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) has developed an algorithmic planner that can help delegate tasks to humans and robots. The planner is called "Act, Delegate or Learn" (ADL), and it considers a list of tasks before deciding the best way to assign them.

A cockroach-inspired robot can handle complicated and bumpy terrain. It could be used for surveying earthquake rubble or even other planets. The robot, called Omni-Roach, has a rounded body, wings that can open and close, curved legs and a tail that can move left to right and up and down. It is around 20 centimetre long and 10 centimetres tall. Chen Li at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his team tested the robot in an obstacle course that mimicked the forest floor.

In late 2018, Google AI researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini got the go-ahead to test an elegant idea. Google had invented powerful computer chips called tensor processing units, or TPUs, to run machine learning algorithms inside its data centers--but, the pair wondered, what if AI software could help improve that same AI hardware? The project, later codenamed Morpheus, won support from Google's AI boss Jeff Dean and attracted interest from the company's chipmaking team. It focused on a step in chip design when engineers must decide how to physically arrange blocks of circuits on a chunk of silicon, a complex, months-long puzzle that helps determine a chip's performance. In June 2021, Goldie and Mirhoseini were lead authors on a paper in the journal Nature that claimed a technique called reinforcement learning could perform that step better than Google's own engineers, and do it in just a few hours.

Google has unveiled a more diverse scale of skin tones to develop its artificial intelligence systems. The new Monk Skin Tone Scale, named after Harvard University professor Dr Ellis Monk, has 10 skin tones. Google says it will replace outdated skin tone scales which have a bias towards paler skins. The tech company claim it will be used to improve products like search and photos. Machine learning, a type of AI, is used by a lot of technology including cameras which recognise a face to unlock a phone or when your photos are categorised automatically. But to get to this point researchers need to train the technology so that it can recognise a wide range of people.

AUSTIN, Texas – Truly driverless cars – this time with no human drivers ready to take over in case of emergency – are now cruising around Austin. Pittsburgh-based technology company Argo AI says it has begun operating its autonomous test vehicles without human safety drivers in Austin. The company is also testing the driverless vehicles in Miami.

Robots can do a lot. They build cars in factories. Robotic dogs can, allegedly and a little creepily, make us safer by patrolling our streets. But there are some things robots still cannot do – things that sound quite basic in comparison. "It's a simple thing" for humans, says robotics researcher Joe Davidson.

More and more privacy watchdogs around the world are standing up to Clearview AI, a U.S. company that has collected billions of photos from the internet without people's permission. The company, which uses those photos for its facial recognition software, was fined £7.5 million ($9.4 million) by a U.K. regulator on May 26. The U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the firm, Clearview AI, had broken data protection law. The company denies breaking the law. But the case reveals how nations have struggled to regulate artificial intelligence across borders. Facial recognition tools require huge quantities of data.

But growing usable human tendon cells--which need to stretch and twist--has proved trickier. Over the past two decades, scientists have encouraged engineered tendon cells and tissue to grow and mature by repeatedly stretching them in one direction. However, this approach has so far failed to produce fully functional tissue grafts that could be used clinically, in human bodies. A new study, published in Nature Communications Engineering today, shows how humanoid robots could be used to make engineered tendon tissue that is more like the real thing. "The clinical need is clearly there," says Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy from the University of Oxford, who led the team.

A magnetic resonance imaging machine has a powerful magnetic field that could turn a robot with an ordinary motor into a dangerous projectile. A robotic device that can operate inside a medical scanner's claustrophobic interior could pave the way for MRI-guided surgery1. All prices are NET prices. VAT will be added later in the checkout. Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.