Without much fanfare, robotaxis have been plying the streets of Tokyo. You can't hail one or order one on an app, and when exactly that will be possible remains a mystery. Nihon Kotsu, the old-school Japanese taxi company running the tests with Mountain View, California's Waymo, isn't saying, and analysts are left guessing. What is clear is that 2026 will be a key year if Japan wants to play catch up, said Mai Niizoe, a senior researcher at Sompo Institute Plus, a Tokyo-based think tank. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

While the game Connect-Four has been solved mathematically and the best move can be effectively computed with search based methods, a strong solution in the form of a look-up table was believed to be infeasible. In this paper, we revisit a symbolic search method based on binary decision diagrams to produce strong solutions. With our efficient implementation we were able to produce a 89.6 GB large look-up table in 47 hours on a single CPU core with 128 GB main memory for the standard $7 \times 6$ board size. In addition to this win-draw-loss evaluation, we include an alpha-beta search in our open source artifact to find the move which achieves the fastest win or slowest loss.

Recently, there has been an interest in the incorporation of buckypaper (BP), or carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes, in composite laminates. Research has shown that using BP in contrast to nanotube doped resin enables the introduction of a higher CNT weight fraction which offers multiple benefits including higher piezo resistivity for health monitoring applications and enhanced mechanical response for structural applications. However, their impact on the deformation and failure mechanisms of composite laminates has not been investigated thoroughly. Understanding these issues experimentally would require a carefully executed test plan involving a multitude of design parameters such as BP geometry and placement, material anisotropy and variability, and laminate stacking sequence. This paper presents a deep learning (DL)-based surrogate model for studying the mechanical response of hybrid carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composite laminates with BP interleaves under various mechanical loads. The surrogate model utilizes a long short-term memory architecture implemented within a DL framework and predicts the laminate global response for a given configuration, geometry, and loading condition. The DL framework training and cross-validation are performed via data acquisition from a series of three-point bend tests conducted through finite element analysis (FEA) and in-house experiments, respectively. The model predictions show good agreement with FEA simulations and experimental results, where CFRP with two BP interleaves showed enhanced flexural strength and modulus over pristine samples. This enhancement can be attributed to the excellent crack retardation capabilities of CNTs, particularly in the interlaminar region.

Human-robot co-manipulation of soft materials, such as fabrics, composites, and sheets of paper/cardboard, is a challenging operation that presents several relevant industrial applications. Estimating the deformation state of the co-manipulated material is one of the main challenges. Viable methods provide the indirect measure by calculating the human-robot relative distance. In this paper, we develop a data-driven model to estimate the deformation state of the material from a depth image through a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). First, we define the deformation state of the material as the relative roto-translation from the current robot pose and a human grasping position. The model estimates the current deformation state through a Convolutional Neural Network, specifically a DenseNet-121 pretrained on ImageNet.The delta between the current and the desired deformation state is fed to the robot controller that outputs twist commands. The paper describes the developed approach to acquire, preprocess the dataset and train the model. The model is compared with the current state-of-the-art method based on a skeletal tracker from cameras. Results show that our approach achieves better performances and avoids the various drawbacks caused by using a skeletal tracker.Finally, we also studied the model performance according to different architectures and dataset dimensions to minimize the time required for dataset acquisition

This paper is concerned with the automation and simulation of pick and place processes in the domain of CFK aircraft production. We introduce a workflow which starts from a CAD construction, extracts relevant data out of it, assigns grippers to the CFK pieces and schedules the single steps using a PDDL solver. Finally, the result is visualized in Blender where also prior mistakes can be identified.

The full instructions are here, and a sample game is here. AIs are now better than humans at Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Othello, and Go. See Audrey Keurenkov's A'Brief' History of Game AI Up to AlphaGo for a more in-depth timeline. In 2017, Michael Tucker, Nikhil Prabala, and I set out to create PAI, the world's first AI for Pathwayz. The AIs for Othello and Backgammon were especially relevant to our development of PAI. Othello, like Pathwayz, is a relatively young game -- at least compared to the ancient Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, and Go.

The year 1997 saw the ultimate man versus machine tournament, with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov losing to a machine called Deep Blue. Earlier this year, in what was hailed as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) research, Google's AlphaGo defeated a professional Go player. Go is an ancient Chinese board game that has hitherto been difficult for a computer to play at a high level due to its deceptively complex gameplay. Where chess is played on a board of 8 x 8 squares, Go is typically played on a board of 19 x 19 squares. These are all worthy engineering achievements, but what does it mean for research into genuine machine intelligence and the predicted artificial intelligence that will surpass human intelligence?

AlphaGo, from Google's DeepMind, made history today with its historic 4–1 defeat of Go world champion, Lee Sedol. Prior to the five-game match, many Go experts, including Mr. Lee himself predicted that the machine would be defeated 5–0 or, if it did well, 4–1. The result was quite the opposite with Mr. Lee managing just one win. This is both a shock for Go players, and represents an achievement in AI that many had not expected for at least another decade. Games, and in particular abstract strategy games like Go, chess and draughts have been a staple of AI research since its inception.

In 1957, Herbert A. Simon, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and later a Nobel Laureate in economics, predicted that in 10 years a computer would surpass humans in what was then regarded as the premier battleground of wits: the game of chess. Though the project took four times as long as he expected, in 1997 my colleagues and I at IBM fielded a computer called Deep Blue that defeated Garry Kasparov, the highest-rated chess player ever. You might have thought that we had finally put the question to rest--but no. Many people argued that we had tailored our methods to solve just this one, narrowly defined problem, and that it could never handle the manifold tasks that serve as better touchstones for human intelligence. These critics pointed to weiqi, an ancient Chinese board game, better known in the West by the Japanese name of Go, whose combinatorial complexity was many orders of magnitude greater than that of chess. Noting that the best Go programs could not even handle the typical novice, they predicted that none would ever trouble the very best players.

The search is "small" in the sense that the size of