A snake-like robot that measures 26 feet (8 metres) and is covered in short brush-like hairs has been built by Japanese scientists to help during large-scale disasters. The bizarre machine can climb over walls and rubble and is designed to reach people trapped in hard-to-reach places after earthquakes and tsunamis. The innovative creation is the first snake-shaped robot in the world that can move with its camera-mounted front tip off the floor, which it does by firing a jet of air. A snake-like robot (pictured) that measures 26 feet (8 metres) and is covered in short brush-like hairs has been built to probe disaster zones by Japanese scientists. The robot was designed to assist and respond to crises around the world.

A convenience store with a modern twist has launched in China. Moby Mart is an unmanned self-driving store which runs on solar power and is able to drive to your area at the touch of a button. Customers scan the goods themselves to purchase their shopping all without meeting a single person. Moby Mart is open to the public 24 hours a day and can automatically restock goods. New technology also allows users of the app to call a Moby to their area in order to buy items. While there are also plans to have drones installed on the top of shops to deliver goods to customers.

Designing effective exploration-exploitation algorithms in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state-action spaces is the main challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). In fact, the learning performance degrades with the number of states and actions in the MDP. However, MDPs often exhibit a low-dimensional latent structure in practice, where a small hidden state is observable through a possibly large number of observations. In this paper, we study the setting of rich-observation Markov decision processes (\richmdp), where hidden states are mapped to observations through an injective mapping, so that an observation can be generated by only one hidden state. While this mapping is unknown a priori, we introduce a spectral decomposition method that consistently estimates how observations are clustered in the hidden states. The estimated clustering is then integrated into an optimistic algorithm for RL (UCRL), which operates on the smaller clustered space. The resulting algorithm proceeds through phases and we show that its per-step regret (i.e., the difference in cumulative reward between the algorithm and the optimal policy) decreases as more observations are clustered together and finally, matches the (ideal) performance of an RL algorithm running directly on the hidden MDP.

Lucian Fogoros: The number of industrial robots deployed worldwide will increase to around 2.6 million units by 2019. Broken down according to sectors, around 70 percent of industrial robots are currently at work in the automotive, electrical/electronics and metal and machinery industry segments. In what other sectors should we expect a growth? Ben Wolff: Most of the industrial robots that are in use today are intended to perform repetitive tasks in highly structured environments better, faster or cheaper than humans. Structured or predictable environments have historically been more conducive to automation and robotics because the number of variables are fewer and the problem set far more limited.

It'll be a tough journey – previous robots sent in to the ruined nuclear reactor didn't make it back.

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!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I suppose you could decide that this project from MIT's Tangible Media Group isn't really a robot, but I think it's arguably robotic enough (and definitely cool enough) that we can let it slide for this week: We present AnimaStage: a hands-on animated craft platform based on an actuated stage. Utilizing a pin-based shape display, users can animate their crafts made from various materials.

Solar panels stand at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada in 2014. California and Arizona by far generate the most electricity with solar power in the U.S. The U.S. set a new renewable energy milestone in March, in data released Wednesday. For the first time, wind and solar accounted for 10 percent of all electricity generation, with wind comprising 8 percent and solar coming in at 2 percent. The report was published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects and disseminates environmental data that is used to inform policymakers. Wind and solar generation typically peaks in the spring and fall when there is less energy demand, and the EIA expects April to continue the record-setting 10 percent trend.

Human thinking is beyond imagination. Can a computer develop such ability to think and reason without human intervention? This is something programming experts at IBM Watson are trying to achieve. Their goal is to simulate human thought process in a computerized model. The result is cognitive computing – a combination of cognitive science and computer science.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.

Read through some examples of how the oil and gas industry will benefit from the combination of Artificial Intelligence and mobile development. To read the Bloomberg article about Apple's Artificial Intelligence chip, click here.