The technological standards of photography have dramatically increased over the last few years. While cell phones used to not even have photo capture capabilities, nowadays, it is becoming more and more expected that modern smartphones can take pictures of a quality close to that of a dedicated camera. The computer vision community has recently focused on assessing image aesthetics for image cropping and learning systems for capturing cinematographic videos. In other words, researchers are asking themselves if robots can understand and capture aesthetically pleasing imagery. However, these systems often focus on composing specific objects of interest into the photo by using composition heuristics, like the rule of thirds, and do not translate directly to a system that can capture well-composed photographs in general.

Clearpath Robotics, a manufacturer of mobile robotic platforms for research and development, and Open Robotics, primary maintainers of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo simulator, today announced TurtleBot 4 - the next generation of the world's most popular open-source robotics platform. The TurtleBot 4 aims to build on the success of previous versions by providing a low-cost, fully-extensible, ROS-enabled reference platform for robotics researchers, developers and educators. The mobile base of the TurtleBot 4 is built on the iRobot Create 3 educational robot which provides an IMU, optical floor tracking sensor, and wheel encoders for accurate positioning and localization. It also includes a suite of sensors including infrared, cliff, bump, and slip detection, along with a 26Wh Li-ion battery for powering additional sensors and accessories. As well, all onboard sensor data are available as ROS topics via the network-connected ROS 2 API.

Two things can be said about human beings: we like building machines, and we tend to freak out about the machines we build. The Luddites of 19th-century England, an oath-based secret society, looked to the industrial era and saw not liberation but destitution. The most radical among them formed paramilitary groups to raid textile factories and destroy knitting machines and mechanical looms -- devices that would replace workers. Their political descendants include the lamplighters of early-20th-century New York who went on strike to protest the advent of electric streetlights, and the switchboard operators of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, who in the 1930s took action against the rotary dial system. Did predictions of automation and mass joblessness come true?

While conducting research for the recently released Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing Market Report, IoT Analytics identified 300 leading Industry 4.0 companies that supply cutting edge products and services that are driving the fourth industrial revolution. The leading Industry 4.0 companies were selected based on a number of criteria (case studies, product offerings, estimated market share, etc.) and were categorized based on what type of Industry 4.0 product or service they supplied. Building on its long history of supporting industrial automation companies, Microsoft has emerged as the hosting partner of choice for many Industry 4.0 companies. Both end users (manufacturing facilities) and suppliers (OEMs, industrial automation companies, etc.) have partnered with Microsoft to develop and run mission-critical on-premise SCADA and MES applications for decades. Microsoft's deep domain knowledge and technical capabilities (especially with respect to hybrid cloud solutions) have helped it become a leading provider of hosting services for major manufacturing end users and suppliers such as Siemens, PTC, GE, and Emerson.

A next revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried. The world's top artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies have used a conference in Melbourne to collectively urge the United Nations to ban killer robots or lethal autonomous weapons. An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world's biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race. Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, released the letter at the opening of the opening of the conference, the world's pre-eminent gathering of experts in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The need for fast, accurate 3D mapping solutions has quickly become a reality for many industries wanting to adopt new technologies in AI and automation. New applications requiring these 3D mapping platforms include surveillance, mining, automated measurement & inspection, construction management & decommissioning, and photo-realistic rendering. Here at Clearpath Robotics, we decided to team up with Mandala Robotics to show how easily you can implement 3D mapping on a Clearpath robot. Localization can be achieved by fusing many different types of pose estimates. Pose estimation can be done using combinations of GPS measurements, wheel encoders, inertial measurement units, 2D or 3D scan registration, optical flow, visual feature tracking and others techniques. Mapping can be done simultaneously using the lidars and cameras that are used for scan registration and for visual position tracking, respectively.

Not every artificial intelligence venture is a startup. In fact, there's a sizable community of established entrepreneurs that are well ahead of the AI game: Waterloo, Ont. It's home to a burgeoning population of robotics/AI companies, many of which have landed substantial VC financing deals over the years. Aeryon Labs, a developer of unmanned aerial systems (drones) for example, raised $60 million of growth equity from Summit Partners in October 2015. Clearpath Robotics, makers of autonomous mobile robots, raised $30 million in October 2016 from backers that include the venture arms of Caterpillar and General Electric Co. Thalmic Labs, creators of interactive wearable technologies (the Myo gesture control armband), received close to US$120 million, led by Intel Capital, the Amazon Alexa Fund and Fidelity Investments Canada in September 2016 – one of the biggest Canadian VC deals in history.

Self-driving vehicles that can seamlessly shuttle people around cities are years away--perhaps even decades, depending on who is providing the forecast. But the founders of Clearpath Robotics aren't worried. They already have fleets of self-driving vehicles operating on roads with traffic, intersections, and pedestrians. But instead of shuttling people through city streets, the startup's self-driving vehicles navigate goods through the miles of roads inside massive industrial factories, including at Caterpillar cat and GE ge . "Unlike city streets, a factory floor is a controlled environment, which makes it an ideal place to introduce self-driving vehicles at scale," said Clearpath CEO and co-founder Matt Rendall.