When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The TP-Link Tapo S505 smart light switch is on sale at Amazon. Grab this 2-pack for just $20 while the deal lasts. My smart home life became so much better once I swapped out my old light switches for Tapo ones. The benefits were many, including that I no longer had to get off the couch to turn off the lights--great in the winter when I was already cozy under the blankets!

Smart homes don't need to be complicated or expensive. Take a methodical approach and keep an eye out for bargains and you can enjoy many of the conveniences of living in a smart home without spending much at all. The secret is to start slow, and to invest in a few solid products that will have the most impact, I'm talking electrical outlets, lighting, climate control, and the like. In other words, you can probably get by without a smart washing machine, but installing a smart thermostat will be a game changer for both your comfort and living expenses. One of the keys to successfully getting a smart home up and running is to ensure everything you install is fully compatible and interoperable. Many smart home ecosystems were originally designed around a central hub and wireless protocols that were supposed to hit it big, but that either never really took off or have faded in importance and mainstream appeal.

Recent progress in mixed reality (MR) and robotics is enabling increasingly sophisticated forms of human-robot collaboration. Building on these developments, we introduce a novel MR framework that allows multiple quadruped robots to operate in semantically diverse environments via a MR interface. Our system supports collaborative tasks involving drawers, swing doors, and higher-level infrastructure such as light switches. A comprehensive user study verifies both the design and usability of our app, with participants giving a "good" or "very good" rating in almost all cases. Overall, our approach provides an effective and intuitive framework for MR-based multi-robot collaboration in complex, real-world scenarios.

Ever wish you could turn a particular outlet on and off without using a physical light switch? Maybe for an outlet that isn't even hooked up to a light switch? And right now, you can grab a two-pack of Kasa Smart Plugs for just 13 on Amazon, which is 35 percent off its normal 20 price. If you don't want two, you can get the one-pack for just 8. Imagine it's time to sleep, so you leave the living room and lay down in your bed, get comfy, and you're ready to drift off -- when you suddenly remember that you didn't turn off the lamp. The Kasa Smart Plugs also support voice commands, allowing you to exercise hands-free control over your home devices via Alexa or Google Home Assistant.

Despite increasing research efforts on household robotics, robots intended for deployment in domestic settings still struggle with more complex tasks such as interacting with functional elements like drawers or light switches, largely due to limited task-specific understanding and interaction capabilities. These tasks require not only detection and pose estimation but also an understanding of the affordances these elements provide. To address these challenges and enhance robotic scene understanding, we introduce SpotLight: A comprehensive framework for robotic interaction with functional elements, specifically light switches. Furthermore, this framework enables robots to improve their environmental understanding through interaction. Leveraging VLM-based affordance prediction to estimate motion primitives for light switch interaction, we achieve up to 84% operation success in real world experiments. We further introduce a specialized dataset containing 715 images as well as a custom detection model for light switch detection. We demonstrate how the framework can facilitate robot learning through physical interaction by having the robot explore the environment and discover previously unknown relationships in a scene graph representation. Lastly, we propose an extension to the framework to accommodate other functional interactions such as swing doors, showcasing its flexibility. Videos and Code: timengelbracht.github.io/SpotLight/

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early--when any available treatments are likely to be most effective. The issue has to do with a subtle aspect of language processing: people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) struggle with certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns could refer to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.For instance, in "The electrician fixed the light switch when he visited the tenant," it is not clear without context whether "he" refers to the electrician or some other visitor. But in "He visited the tenant when the electrician repaired the light switch," "he" and "the electrician" cannot be the same person. And in "The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula," there is no reference to a person beyond the sentence.

Psychologists call behavior intrinsically motivated when it is engaged in for its own sake rather than as a step toward solving a specific problem of clear practical value. But what we learn during intrinsically motivated behavior is essential for our development as competent autonomous en- tities able to efficiently solve a wide range of practical problems as they arise. In this paper we present initial results from a computational study of intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aimed at allowing arti- ficial agents to construct and extend hierarchies of reusable skills that are needed for competent autonomy. Psychologists distinguish between extrinsic motivation, which means being moved to do something because of some specific rewarding outcome, and intrinsic motivation, which refers to being moved to do something because it is inherently enjoyable. Intrinsic motiva- tion leads organisms to engage in exploration, play, and other behavior driven by curiosity in the absence of explicit reward. These activities favor the development of broad com- petence rather than being directed to more externally-directed goals (e.g., ref. [14]). In contrast, machine learning algorithms are typically applied to single problems and so do not cope flexibly with new problems as they arise over extended periods of time. Although the acquisition of competence may not be driven by specific problems, this com- petence is routinely enlisted to solve many different specific problems over the agent's lifetime.

Four years after its introduction, the Brilliant platform remains an ambitious but niche product: You can replace light switches with video-enabled touchscreens, complete with a full Amazon Alexa hub, motion detection, and more. The $299 to $449 price per control panel--based on the number of integrated switches--has not budged since launch, making it one of the most expensive ways to outfit your home with smart tech. Interested in Brilliant but don't have five figures handy to kit out your entire home in touchscreens? Good news: Brilliant alleviates some of its platform's sticker shock with a dimmer switch that forgoes the touchscreen, replacing it with a simple touch slider that works just like the sliders on its multi-switch units. It sells for $70, which makes it a whole lot cheaper than a full control panel, but it's still quite a bit more expensive than smart dimmers based on other wireless technologies (Lutron Caséta, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee, et al).

Leviton is expanding its range of smart home switches and outlets with a new Wi-Fi dimmer switch with Amazon Alexa built in. The Decora Voice Dimmer will allow home owners to control their lights with their voice, and it works with all the other things that Amazon Alexa supports. For example, users will be able to say "Alexa, dim the lights to 60 percent," or "Alexa, turn off the kitchen light." Updated to provide links to our hands-on reviews of the Leviton Decora Voice Dimmer, the Leviton Decora Smart Wi-Fi 4-Button Controller, and the Leviton Decora Smart Fan Speed Controller. Leviton already sells Wi-Fi light switches in the Decora range and the new dimmer can be integrated into routines and schedules through the My Leviton control app.

Alexa, are you eavesdropping on me? I passive-aggressively ask my Amazon Echo this question every so often. Because as useful as AI has become, it's also very creepy. And this, of course, produces privacy nightmares, as when Amazon or Google subcontractors sit around listening to our audio snippets or hackers remotely spy on our kids. The problem here is structural.