Communication and position sensing are among the most important capabilities for swarm robots to interact with their peers and perform tasks collaboratively. However, the hardware required to facilitate communication and position sensing is often too complicated, expensive, and bulky to be carried on swarm robots. Here we present Maneuverable Piccolissimo 3 (MP3), a minimalist, single motor drone capable of executing inter-robot communication via infrared light and triangulation-based sensing of relative bearing, distance, and elevation using message arrival time. Thanks to its novel design, MP3 can communicate with peers and localize itself using simple components, keeping its size and mass small and making it inherently safe for human interaction. We present the hardware and software design of MP3 and demonstrate its capability to localize itself, fly stably, and maneuver in the environment using peer-to-peer communication and sensing.

Transformers have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of applications, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision and Speech Recognition, because of their powerful representational capacity. However, harnessing this representational capacity effectively requires a large amount of data, strong regularization, or both, to mitigate overfitting. Recently, the power of the Transformer has been unlocked by self-supervised pretraining strategies based on masked autoencoders which rely on reconstructing masked inputs, directly, or contrastively from unmasked content. This pretraining strategy which has been used in BERT models in NLP, Wav2Vec models in Speech and, recently, in MAE models in Vision, forces the model to learn about relationships between the content in different parts of the input using autoencoding related objectives. In this paper, we propose a novel, but surprisingly simple alternative to content reconstruction~-- that of predicting locations from content, without providing positional information for it. Doing so requires the Transformer to understand the positional relationships between different parts of the input, from their content alone. This amounts to an efficient implementation where the pretext task is a classification problem among all possible positions for each input token. We experiment on both Vision and Speech benchmarks, where our approach brings improvements over strong supervised training baselines and is comparable to modern unsupervised/self-supervised pretraining methods. Our method also enables Transformers trained without position embeddings to outperform ones trained with full position information.

Digital Album Streaming Download Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app. Digital Album Streaming Download Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app. Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Over a decade ago, I was sitting in a college math physics course and my professor spelt out an idea that kind of blew my mind. I think it isn't a stretch to say that this is one of the most widely applicable mathematical discoveries, with applications ranging from optics to quantum physics, radio astronomy, MP3 and JPEG compression, X-ray crystallography, voice recognition, and PET or MRI scans. This mathematical tool--named the Fourier transform, after 18th-century French physicist and mathematician Joseph Fourier--was even used by James Watson and Francis Crick to decode the double helix structure of DNA from the X-ray patterns produced by Rosalind Franklin. You probably use a descendant of Fourier's idea every day, whether you're playing an MP3, viewing an image on the web, asking Siri a question, or tuning in to a radio station. In addition to his work in theoretical physics and math, he was also the first to discover the greenhouse effect.)

Review: Wrapping up another vintage year, Integral bossmen Artificial Intelligence return from their Metalheadz missions with four stunning reminders of their abilities: the way the strings ease in from behind and take you by surprise on "Nobody", the warm-but-deadly reese funk on "Definition", the power soul of "Dreams Of Freedom" and the return of the classic warm harmonic subby bassline they spearheaded in the mid 2000s on "Close 2 U".