Dexterous robotic manipulation remains a challenging domain due to its strict demands for precision and robustness on both hardware and software. While dexterous robotic hands have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks, efficiently learning adaptive control policies for hands still presents a significant hurdle given the high dimensionalities of hands and tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose Tilde, an imitation learning-based in-hand manipulation system on a dexterous DeltaHand. It leverages 1) a low-cost, configurable, simple-to-control, soft dexterous robotic hand, DeltaHand, 2) a user-friendly, precise, real-time teleoperation interface, TeleHand, and 3) an efficient and generalizable imitation learning approach with diffusion policies. Our proposed TeleHand has a kinematic twin design to the DeltaHand that enables precise one-to-one joint control of the DeltaHand during teleoperation. This facilitates efficient high-quality data collection of human demonstrations in the real world. To evaluate the effectiveness of our system, we demonstrate the fully autonomous closed-loop deployment of diffusion policies learned from demonstrations across seven dexterous manipulation tasks with an average 90% success rate.

After a couple of weeks of experimentation, I realised the AI had the potential to describe imaginary artworks. To my delight, I discovered I could prompt it to write the kind of text you see on a wall label next to a painting in an art gallery. This would prove to be the start of a fascinating collaborative journey with GPT-3 and a suite of other AI art tools, leading to work that has ranged from a physical sculpture of toilet plungers to full-size oil paintings on the wall of a Mayfair art gallery. In recent months, AI-generated art has provoked much debate about whether it will be bad news for artists. There's little doubt that there will be disruptive changes ahead, and there are still important questions about bias, ethics, ownership and representation that need to be answered.

The weird and wonderful art created when AI and humans unite BBC Will AI kill art? Not likely, says the artist Alexander Reben, who has been working with AI for years. "I knew I had hit upon the right recipe when I got the following output by GPT-3 (which made me laugh a little too hard alone in my studio in lockdown):" "The sculpture contains a plunger, a toilet plunger, a plunger, a plunger, a plunger, and a plunger, each of which has been modified. The first plunger is simply a normal plunger, but the rest represent a series of plungers with more and more of the handle removed until just the rubber cup is left. The title of the artwork is "A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night" by the artists known as "The Plungers" (whose identity remains unknown). "The Plungers", were a collective of anonymous artists, founded in 1972. They were dedicated to the "conceptualization and promotion of a new art form called Plungism." Plungism was a creative interpretation of the idea of Plungerism, which was defined by The Plungers as "a state of mind wherein the mind of an artist is in a state of flux and able to be influenced by all things, even plungers." The Plungers' works were displayed in New York galleries and included such titles as "Plunger's Progress," "The Plungers," "The Plungers Strike Back," and "Big Plunger 4: The Final Plunger," all of which featured plungers, and "Plungers on Parade," which showed images of plungers in public spaces. The Plungers disappeared and left no trace of their identity."

Clever crows can assemble tools from two or more components without any help, a feat previously seen only in humans and great apes. The birds were filmed slotting together rod pieces to create a tool long enough to extract a morsel of food which scientists had hidden away. In one experiment, they were presented with disassembled syringes, and created the right length of tool without any prompt or demonstration. The birds' ability to anticipate what an unseen object will be able to do matches the intelligence of a human toddler, Oxford University researchers said. The animals in the experiment were New Caledonian crows - a species native to a large Pacific island east of Australia of the same name.

Audi's autonomous cars are becoming quite the world travelers: Recall the much-ballyhooed first robotic drive from San Francisco to New York City, about a year ago. Impressive stuff, though honestly, humans can hold their own at pulling into a rest stop. I'm about to take on Robby, the autonomous RS7 sport sedan that's designed to rock a racetrack at speeds that would blister Google's cartoonish bubble car. If a human driver can't keep up, it occurs to me, then our obsolescence draws that much closer. Robby is looking cool and confident in the pits at Parcmotor Castelloli, near Barcelona.