Cyclists, whether they be food delivery riders or MAMILs, are infamous for doing everything they can to conserve their hard-won speed, even if it means running a red light or careering into the way of pedestrians on the footpath. But new work from IBM Research Australia and RMIT's Exertion Games Lab, however, is looking to avoid tiresome stops or dangerous behaviour by using artificial intelligence (AI) to catch the'green wave' of traffic signals. It's well known many cyclists jump traffic signals or make legally questionable deviations to maintain momentum getting from A to B. If you're an underpaid international student under Dickensian food delivery conditions, there's simply no other way. That could be about to change. In a project dubbed'Ari the e-bike,' the researchers used traffic data and'green wave' modelling from VicRoads and internet of things (IoT) technologies to help the rider regulate their speed to match cycles of green traffic lights.

Scientists have created a strange chest-mounted robot that could feed the greediest of people when they're too full to move. The peculiar'Arm-A-Dine' robot arm attaches to the middle of someone's chest and takes food from their plate to their mouth. The robot, which is still just a prototype, is designed to augment the social experience of eating, researchers say. The robotic arm was created by Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Australia and the Indian Institute of Information Technology Design. 'Arm-A-Dine is our design exploration of a novel two-person playful eating system that focuses on a shared feeding experience', researchers told Spectrum.

Eating food is an experience that tends to be about taste and texture and how the food looks and smells. Our focus goes from what's going on on the plate to what's going on in our mouths, without a lot of concern about what happens in between. Eating as a process doesn't get all that much attention; we tend to treat it as just a chore involving utensils. Which is fine, but are we missing out somehow? The Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Australia thinks that the answer to that is yes, and they're using chest-mounted social feeding robots to prove it.