Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Visiting Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Alan co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where his research is focussed on the science, engineering and ethics of cognitive robotics. Alan is an advocate for robot ethics; he chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute at the University of Oxford and has co-drafted new standards on ethical risk assessment and transparency. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Claire chatted to Vikas Enti from Reframe Systems about using robotics and automation to build climate-resilient, high-performance homes. Vikas Enti is the co-founder and CEO of Reframe Systems, a physical AI company rethinking how homes are built through automation and localized fabrication. He previously spent more than a decade at Amazon Robotics, where he helped scale advanced robotics systems across global logistics networks. Today, he is applying those same principles of systems design and repeatable production to address the housing shortage. Vikas focuses on building climate-resilient, high-performance homes faster and more predictably than traditional methods.

What if training a robot to handle dirty, dangerous work on the factory floor was as simple as showing it how? Czech startup RoboTwin is doing exactly that, helping factory workers teach robots new skills by demonstration. Instead of writing complex code, workers perform the job once and RoboTwin's technology turns those movements into a robot programme - opening the door to automation for smaller manufacturers. Founded in Prague in 2021, RoboTwin builds handheld devices and no-code software that capture human movements and translate them into instructions for industrial robots. The aim is to make automation faster, simpler and more accessible to manufacturers that do not have specialist robotics programmers.

MIT researchers have spent more than a decade studying techniques that enable robots to find and manipulate hidden objects by "seeing" through obstacles. Their methods utilize surface-penetrating wireless signals that reflect off concealed items. Now, the researchers are leveraging generative artificial intelligence models to overcome a longstanding bottleneck that limited the precision of prior approaches. The result is a new method that produces more accurate shape reconstructions, which could improve a robot's ability to reliably grasp and manipulate objects that are blocked from view. This new technique builds a partial reconstruction of a hidden object from reflected wireless signals and fills in the missing parts of its shape using a specially trained generative AI model.

Simona Aracri is a researcher in the Institute of Marine Engineering at the National Research Council of Italy. Previously, she was a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh, working on the award winning project ORCA Hub and focusing on offshore robotic sensors. Her research uses innovative sensors and robotic platforms to push the boundaries of observational oceanography and environmental monitoring. She has spent more than 6 months at sea on oceanographic sampling campaigns, in the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific Ocean and the North Sea. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

If the goal of a robot is to perform a function, then minimizing the possibility of failure is a top priority when it comes to robotic design. But this minimization is at odds with the robotic raison d'être: systems with multiple units, or agents, can perform more diverse functions, but they also have more different parts that can potentially fail. Researchers led by Jamie Paik, head of the Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory ( RRL) in EPFL's School of Engineering, have not only circumvented this problem, but flipped it: they have designed a modular robot that actually lowers its odds of failure by sharing resources among its individual agents. "For the first time, we have found a way to reverse the trend of increasing odds of failure with increasing function," Paik explains. "We introduce local resource sharing as a new paradigm in robotics, reducing the failure rate with a larger number of modules."

Krystal Mattich leads global data governance, system security, and privacy compliance for Brain Corp: the world's leading autonomy platform for commercial robotics. As Senior Director of Security, Privacy, and Risk, she is the architect of the privacy-first infrastructure that powers over 40,000 BrainOS -enabled robots across retail, airports, education and logistics. Krystal played a central role in launching Brain Corp's public-facing Trust Center, reinforcing the company's commitment to data transparency, GDPR compliance, and responsible AI. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Environment Animals Wildlife Endangered Species Earth's largest otters have chocolate bar-sized babies Chester Zoo celebrates the birth of giant otter triplets. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. While they only weigh 7.1 ounces as babies, giant otters can grow to six-feet-long and weigh up to 71 pounds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. It turns out that giant otter () newborns are actually quite small, weighing just around 7.1 ounces.

Court challenge over Met Police's use of live facial recognition thrown out Privacy campaigners have lost a High Court challenge aimed at limiting the Metropolitan Police's use of live facial recognition technology. Youth worker Shaun Thompson, and Silkie Carlo, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, brought the claim over concerns that facial recognition could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way. Scotland Yard defended the challenge, telling the court that the policy was lawful. The Met Police will continue to use the technology, with commissioner Sir Mark Rowley calling the ruling an important victory for public safety. One of the claimants, Thompson, was misidentified by live facial recognition technology (LFR).

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