Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various domains, with recent advancements in challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, solving reasoning tasks often requires long decoding chains (of thoughts), which incur $O(N)$ time and memory consumption, where $N$ is the chain length. To mitigate $O(N)$ time and memory consumption, existing sparsity-based algorithms propose retaining only the most critical token's intermediate data (i.e., key-value cache) and discarding the rest. However, these existing algorithms struggle with the ``impossible trinity'' of accuracy, time, and memory. For example, the state-of-the-art algorithm, Quest, achieves high accuracy with $O(L)$ time but $O(N)$ memory ($L$ is the cache budget, $L \ll N$). To address this issue, in this paper, we identify a new attention pattern during the decode stage of reasoning tasks, where milestone tokens (analogous to lemmas in mathematical proofs) emerge, are utilized, and then become unimportant afterward. Based on this pattern, we propose a new algorithm named RaaS that identifies and retains milestone tokens only until they are no longer needed, achieving high accuracy with $O(L)$ time and $O(L)$ memory complexity.

Public transportation systems are experiencing an increase in commuter traffic. This increase underscores the need for resilience strategies to manage unexpected service disruptions, ensuring rapid and effective responses that minimize adverse effects on stakeholders and enhance the system's ability to maintain essential functions and recover quickly. This study aims to explore the management of public transport disruptions through resilience as a service (RaaS) strategies, developing an optimization model to effectively allocate resources and minimize the cost for operators and passengers. The proposed model includes multiple transportation options, such as buses, taxis, and automated vans, and evaluates them as bridging alternatives to rail-disrupted services based on factors such as their availability, capacity, speed, and proximity to the disrupted station. This ensures that the most suitable vehicles are deployed to maintain service continuity. Applied to a case study in the Ile de France region, Paris and suburbs, complemented by a microscopic simulation, the model is compared to existing solutions such as bus bridging and reserve fleets. The results highlight the model's performance in minimizing costs and enhancing stakeholder satisfaction, optimizing transport management during disruptions.

I'll be back in action next week (hopefully the bags under my eyes will have subsided slightly), but until then, I've got one more great interview for you. This week I leave you in the very accomplished hands of Ken Goldberg, who dons the dual hats of U.C. Berkeley robotics professor and chief scientist at Ambi Robotics. TC: What was the biggest robotics story of 2022? What are your biggest robotics predictions for 2023? I believe we'll see robots-as-a-service (RaaS) models that make robots available to a much wider segment of industry (e.g., Model T Ford financing that opened up car-buying to the middle class).

What Is Robotics as a Service? Robotics as a service is a business model where robotics companies rent their robots to clients and customers for short-term or long-term use. RaaS provides consistent revenue for robotics companies, while lowering the cost to entry -- and potential repairs and maintenance costs -- for businesses who want to adopt expensive automation tools.

Maidaan is a'Blockchain Property-Technology Startup' on the verge of incubating various innovative real estate products, which facilitates the vast needs and demands of the fast-paced real estate sector of Pakistan. BaaS is a cloud-based decentralized infrastructure and management platform for digitizing the record keeping process for the real estate sector. Maidaan's BaaS platform will act as a web-3 host, running the back-end operation when it comes to authenticating transactions. Whenever a transaction or transfer is performed through the BaaS network, it is stored on a decentralized transparent digital ledger for all the stakeholder authentication. Maidaan's Rating as a Service (RaaS) helps make investing in real estate an ease for all by making it transparent for investors to make ethical data driven and vetted investment decisions.

Carl Rodrigues is President, CEO and Founder at SOTI, the world's most trusted provider of mobile and IoT management solutions. In the science fiction movies I grew up watching, showing a robot was one of the fastest ways in storytelling to say, "OK, this is a story about the future." In reality, many of us already have a robot vacuum in the house and hardly even think about it. But robots can do a whole lot more than that, and it's obvious we'll have more around us soon. Robots are really just computers that can go more places and do more things.

The vision of Robots and Humans working together has been popularized by numerous Hollywood movies, comic books and the media for many decades now. Success stories about the application of automation in the manufacturing industry date back to the early 1980’s, when welding robots demonstrated efficiency and resilience to deliver on time and increased the overall supply. And ever since, robots have been used for a variety of applications such as painting, assembly, disassembly, pick and place for printed circuit boards, material handling, product inspection, and testing, all accomplished with high speed and precision. In the past few years, however, the world is seeing a significant shift towards AI-enabled robots that are changing the game by bringing various levels of autonomy into the picture. If we consider the example of the labor-intensive task of warehouse piece picking,  AI-enabled robots are learning to handle millions of objects with minimum help from humans. What once required individual item registration and programming of robots, can now be accomplished with self-directing or autonomous robots using deep learning algorithms. This in turn, is helping industries cut costs and improve profits in the long run. Further, with the dawn of COVID-19, the way we patronize restaurants and shops and see our doctors has changed drastically. From collaborative robots (co-robots) to robots with high levels of autonomy, the trend continues towards the application of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) in every industry and retail setting; more so as societies are restructuring places of work and pleasure to minimize human contact. The accelerated adoption of AMRs is being seen in many frontline roles from spraying disinfectants to delivering & serving food to customers, in outdoor and indoor urban hotspots. A key advantage of using AMRs is that they are able to reliably do these repetitive physical tasks when many workers aren’t safely able to or willing to set foot in these areas. As AMRs are becoming more and more competent, a few popular ones that are gaining traction during this pandemic are discussed below.   TELEPRESENCE ROBOT Telepresence Robots or Virtual Assistance Robots, now more than ever, are revolutionizing the way we work or learn remotely. They enable telecommuters, doctors, remote workers, and students to feel more connected to their colleagues by giving them a physical presence where they can’t be in person.   Image Credit: Using robots to enable patients to be inspected remotely In recent times, Telepresence robots are being put to use to enable interactions with COVID-19 patients in isolation wards. These semi-autonomous robots could be teleoperated over the Wi-Fi, to visit the patients and provide a live video link to their loved ones or to deliver their food and medication.   DISINFECTANT ROBOT  In the post pandemic world, disinfecting shared public places has been a tricky problem to solve. A non-intrusive solution widely adopted in recent times is UV-C light, but due to its adverse effects on human skin, trolleying it would look somewhat like the image below.   Image credit: UV-C based disinfection trolley by rapid cleaning of hospital environment, helping in the fight against COVID-19 Enter AMR, mounted with a UV-C lamp as a payload, which would traverse autonomously in a designated area.                                                                                     Image Credit: Weston Robot   This is accomplished by using the mobile app where the user creates a map of the area and chooses the waypoints for the robot to traverse. The robot then follows the waypoints and stops at each waypoint, till the disinfection job is done. Also, it returns to the charging station once the battery is below a threshold eliminating the need for human intervention. A swarm of these robots could be used in and around the areas where the most interactions occur such as hospitals, railway stations, airports, etc. An intrusive solution would be to air-blast disinfectant liquids similar to the ones used in agricultural spraying, to increase the chlorine content in the air and reduce the possibility of aerosol transmission.   Image Credit: Robots deployed to disinfect open spaces This fully autonomous solution is basically an AMR, mounted with a sprayer mechanism, which can navigate to the decontamination area using pre-built maps giving  the technical staff less exposure to these highly concentrated chemicals while working in an entirely safe and risk-free environment. The range of its spray devices can reach up-to 30 feet.   LAST-MILE DELIVERY ROBOTS As door delivery businesses saw a huge increase in demand during the pandemic, Last-Mile delivery robots found application as a reliable and safe contactless delivery system. These robots are an alternative to human food delivery drivers from companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash, which perform tasks that a person cannot do safely. These companies have created and deployed cool new robots with the intelligence to navigate city streets to deliver orders from selected restaurants to the customer location using a mobile app, while avoiding dynamic obstacles like pedestrians.   Image Credit: Autonomous delivery robot   The robot’s body is equipped with a storage bin with a locking compartment where the restaurant stores the delivery package and the bin only unlocks upon authentication by the customer at her location during delivery. Typically, these robots are equipped with cameras and computer vision driven by machine learning. They can detect and classify what they see, and tell the difference between a car, a person, or a wall. While these robots are definitely cool tech; procuring, running and maintaining fleets of robots can be prohibitively expensive. To circumvent this, the solution that small restaurant owners are turning to is the clever ‘Robot-as-a-Service’(RaaS) business model for food delivery, which is becoming more crucial as Covid-19 reshapes the gig economy.   ROBOT AS A SERVICE Many are now familiar with the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) or Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) where the intent is to democratize technology while lowering the barrier to entry for businesses, large and small alike. One of the new areas, this philosophy is becoming more prevalent, is “Robot as a Service” (RaaS), a cloud-based “robotic rental” solution used for both B2B or B2C businesses. RaaS takes the capabilities of robotics and removes the upfront cost of robot installation with large amounts of computing power, utilities, and knowledge.  And so, small- and medium-sized businesses are increasingly experimenting with RaaS because of its flexibility, scalability, and lower cost of entry compared to traditional robotics programs. For example, finding sufficient  numbers of workers in a warehouse, for online retailers during seasonal surges is quite the challenge. With the RaaS model, these seasonal labor shortcomings can be mitigated without investing in equipment that won’t be used in slower periods while still being able to quickly scale up to meet the high demand. RaaS might be the answer for businesses, trying to figure out how to improve productivity or reduce risk, but always thought, robots were out of their price range.   ROBOTICS AT IGNITARIUM Robotics and in particular Autonomous Mobile Robots is an area where Ignitarium has been developing technology solutions for the warehouse use cases. Robotics as a theme started as a R&D thread to leverage the existing skills in computer vision and AI/ML. In the past year, we have demonstrated various use cases on sensor fusion, integration of Lidars & Radars, visual odometry using RGB-D Cameras, path planning, obstacle avoidance, integrating with deep learning modules for object Classification / Detection / Tracking. Our vision is to create a software package which is hardware agnostic, for use  across hardware platforms with minimal customization.     CONCLUSION The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) such as Telepresence, Disinfectant, Last-mile delivery robots. Roboticists are also seeing adaptation of AMRs to new niches and are exploring new avenues. Although the robotics wave is changing the way services and products are sold, there are still challenges to overcome like the amount of customization required, both in hardware and software for the robots to adapt to customer specific needs. Regardless of the hurdles, RaaS will be the inevitable solution many organizations seek either with hardware & software or software-only flavors.

The rise of Intelligent Automation solutions has been meteoric. According to a study conducted by Information Service Group (ISG) looking at the state of robotic process automation (RPA) adoption across Europe, it is estimated that by 2020, over 90 per cent of European businesses would have adopted RPA to some extent. However, as the advent of automation has continued, so too have hiccups begun to emerge for businesses on their automation journey - with the most pressing of all being the issue of scalability. In fact, a recent study from Deloitte found that only 3 per cent of organisations in Europe have been able to scale their automation projects past 50 automation digital workers. So why are businesses automation projects stagnating?

The real robotics revolution is not having robots take care of tasks but having them available to businesses as a service. And so another acronyms to represent the expanding world of as a service is added to today's business vocabulary. The business world has introduced a number of different functions as a service, including software-as a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) among others. But another as a service category has come on the scene in the past couple of years: robotics-as-a-service (RaaS). RELATED: WHY ARE WE SO SCARED OF ROBOTS? 15 EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON WHAT THE REAL DANGERS ARE The video above explains RaaS "is a cloud computing unit that facilitates the seamless integration of robot and embedded devices into Web and cloud computing environment."

The margins between artificial intelligence, smart materials, biology, and robotics are diminishing. From robots which can repair and monitor the natural environment to nanorobots to track and kill cancer. Future robotics will influence every part of our society or life, and this is how robotics will affect the human race in coming future. The progress in robotics industry is happening on all fronts, and Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) is going to accelerate innovation thus disrupting and changing the state of business operations in many sectors globally. Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a new functional tactic and business model where robots are offered as a service rather than as a product to supervise and control the most mundane, repetitive, manual or hazardous tasks in any organization across multiple locations.