Robohub is an online platform and non-profit that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world, focused on connecting the robotics community to the public. It can be difficult for the public to find free, high-quality information about robotics. At Robohub, we enable roboticists to share their stories in their own words by providing them with a social media platform and editorial guidance. This means that our readers get to learn about the latest research and business news, events and opinions, directly from the experts. Since 2012, Robohub and its international community of volunteers have published over 300 Robohub Podcasts, 7000 blog posts, videos and more, reaching 1M pageviews every year, and more than 30k followers on social media. You can follow robohub on Twitter at @robohub.

OAKLAND, California, Dec. 14, 2020 /Press Release/ -- Silicon Valley Robotics, the world's largest cluster of innovation in robotics, announces the inaugural'Good Robot' Industry Awards, celebrating the robotics, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will help us solve global challenges. These 52 companies and individuals have all contributed to innovation that will improve the quality of our lives, whether it's weed-free pesticide-free farming, like FarmWise or Iron Ox; supporting health workers and the elderly manage health care treatment regimes, like Catalia Health or Multiply Labs; or reimagining the logistics industry so that the transfer of physical goods becomes as efficient as the transfer of information, like Cruise, Embark, Matternet and Zipline. The categories Innovation, Vision and Commercialization represent the stages robotics companies go through, firstly with an innovative technology or product, then with a vision to change the world (and occasionally the investment to match), and finally with real evidence of customer traction. The criteria for our Commercialization Award is achieving $1 million in revenue, which is a huge milestone for a startup building a new invention. Tessa Lau, Founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, an Innovation Awardee said "We're almost there. Dusty Robotics' FieldPrinter automates the painstaking, time-consuming process of marking building plans in the field, replacing a traditional process using measuring tape and chalk lines that hasn't changed in 5000 years. The company's vision of creating robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce resonates strongly with commercial construction companies. Dusty's robot fleet is now in production, producing highly accurate layouts in record time on every floor of two multi-family residential towers going up in San Francisco. The SVR'Good Robot' Industry Awards also highlight diverse robotics companies. In our Visionary Category, Zoox is the first billion dollar company led by an African-American woman, Aicha Evans, and Robust AI shows diversity at every level of the organization. Diversity of thought will be critical as Robust AI tackles the challenge of building a cognitive engine for robotics that incorporates common sense reasoning. "Robotics and AI will shape the next century in the same way the Industrial revolution shaped the 20th century.

CHELMSFORD, MASSACHUSETTS - The U.S. Army is looking for a few good robots. Not to fight -- not yet, at least -- but to help the men and women who do. These robots aren't taking up arms, but the companies making them have waged a different kind of battle. At stake is a contract worth almost half a billion dollars for 3,000 backpack-sized robots that can defuse bombs and scout enemy positions. Competition for the work has spilled over into Congress and federal court.

The heads of more than 100 of the world's top artificial intelligence companies are very alarmed about the development of'killer robots'. In an open letter to the UN, these business leaders – including Tesla's Elon Musk and the founders of Google's DeepMind AI firm – warned that autonomous weapon technology could be misused by terrorists and despots or hacked to perform in undesirable ways. But the real threat is much bigger – and not just from human misconduct but from the machines themselves. Research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions. The research into complex systems shows how behaviour can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions.

The next big trend in AI looks likely to be computers and robots that teach themselves through trial and error. Elon Musk and Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) caused a stir last December by luring several high-profile researchers to join OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to releasing cutting-edge artificial intelligence research for free. Today the nonprofit released the first fruits of its work, and it suggests that kind of learning will be important for the future of AI. The nonprofit has released a tool called OpenAI Gym for developing and comparing different so-called reinforcement learning algorithms, which provide a way for a machine to learn through positive and negative feedback. This week OpenAI also announced two new recruits, including Pieter Abbeel, an associate professor at Berkeley and a leading expert on applying reinforcement learning to robots. OpenAI Gym includes code and examples to help others get started with reinforcement learning.