Emotech funding; Midea-Kuka deal; the dark side of ethical robots; 2 X underwater robots; Yamaha's AI bikes?; cobot market 60.04% CAGR; and much more. Find out what's happening in our robotics universe this week. We hope that the news we have selected will interest and amuse you. Enjoy!
UK robotics startup Emotech has raised in excess of $10 million in Series A funding to continue work on Olly, its prototype "personality adapting" robot assistant.
The investment comes from two Chinese VC firms: Alliance Capital and lead investor Lightning Capital, the latter a new VC firm focused on AI and health tech and based in Shanghai.
Emotech is aiming to create a virtual assistant robot with more varied personality than existing voice controlled assistants, such as Amazon’s Echo or Apple’s Siri. The robot’s flagship feature is slated as the ability to adapt to the personality of its owner — with the claim that no two Ollys will be the same because they will adapt to reflect the personality of their owners.
The robot is slated for release in early 2017.
Researchers across the globe are working on the development of ethical robots, but how difficult is it to turn an ethical robot into an unethical one?
According to a new paper by Alan Winfield and Dieter Vanderelst, the answer to that question is "Not very."
[...] if we change a single line of code, we can transform the ethical robot into either a competitive or an aggressive robot. Almost all of the ‘ethical’ robot’s code remains unchanged – in particular its ability to predict the consequences of both its own, and the human’s actions. Which really underlines the point that the same cognitive machinery is needed to behave both ethically and unethically.
On the basis that the benefits outweigh the risks involved, Winfield supports continued development of ethical robots. However, given how easy it could be for hackers to interfere with a robot's ethics capabilities, securing the ethical side of a robot application becomes a major priority.
The answer to the problem highlighted here and in our paper is to make sure it’s impossible to hack a robot’s ethics. How would we do this? Well, one approach would be a process of authentication – in which a robot makes a secure call to an ethics authentication server. A well-established technology, the authentication server would provide the robot with a cryptographic ethics ticket, which the robot uses to enable its ethics functions.
Meet "Tethys," an underwater robot that recently spent 8 days exploring Lake Michigan. The 250-pound robot, which can operate at depths of up to 150-feet, is packed with sensors that enable it to gather information about the lake's food supply.
Researchers from U.S. Geological Survey and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are using the robot to try and understand why the amount of algae in the lake is declining and what impact invasive species such as Zebra Mussels are having on the ecosystem.
"With boats and crew members, weather, you're limited in just how much time you can spend on the water how much information you can get, a device like this allows us to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Strach says.
Now, researchers plan to re-deploy the robot in Pentwater to collect information in the lake there. They also plan to return in two years to track the status of the lake over time.
Meanwhile, an underwater robot operating off the UK coast recently completed a 40-day mission and gathered some sensational deep-sea video along the way:
On Monday, Chinese home appliance giant Midea announced that had secured almost 95 percent of German robotics firm Kuka.
The company already held 13.51 percent of Kuka—a world-leading manufacturer of industrial robots—before its June offer of 115 euros per share, which valued the firm at 4.6 billion euros ($5.1 billion).
Midea said in its Monday statement that 81.04 percent of shares were tendered by the end of an extended acceptance period at midnight on August 3, bringing its total to 94.55 percent.
Midea's offer remains subject to regulatory approval, with some European officials expressing concern over "German high-end intellectual property, technology, and know-how departing for China." For now, at least, the deal looks set to go ahead and it remains unclear what mechanism German ministers could use to prevent it. Whether they should prevent it happening is of course, also a matter of some debate in Germany and beyond.
Assuming the deal is completed, Midea has signed a contract that will guarantee jobs and plants in Germany until 2023.
Yamaha is developing new safety technology to reduce motorcycle spills, company president Hiroyuki Yanagi announced this week.
Yanagi suggested that the system will build on work already completed as part of the Motobot project, which saw a humanoid robot riding a motorcycle for the first time.
Yamaha hopes to reverse slumping domestic sales by adopting advanced technologies to reduce motorcycle accidents such as overturns and collisions. Such risks weigh on potential sales.
“We’ll use the expertise we’ve acquired from robots for our motorcycles,” Yanagi said. “We’ll promote the development of technologies to make motorcycle driving easier.”
The global collaborative robots market is set to hit $3.3 billion by 2022, according to a new market research report.
The growing demand (60.4% CAGR) will be driven by three main factors:
--increased adoption of cobots in the automotive and furniture & equipment industries
--the high ROI and low price of cobots, which is attracting small and medium sized business to automation
--overall increased spend on automation in several industries
Europe accounted for the largest share of the global collaborative robots market in 2015. Owing to the early adoption and strict regulations along with safety standards developed by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the installation of collaborative robots has increased in various applications in Europe.
Asia-Pacific accounted for the second-largest market for collaborative robots in 2015 and is expected to surpass Europe by 2018. Asia-Pacific and RoW regions are expected to offer high growth potential for the collaborative robots during the forecast period for various industries.
High school in Japan to offer drone and robotics course (engadget)
Student researchers build table-football robot (PhysOrg)
Steer driverless cars towards full automation (Nature)
Uh-oh! Crowdfunded social robot Jibo won’t now ship internationally (TechCrunch)
The Robot You Want Most Is Far from Reality (MIT Technology Review)
Cozmo: A Little Robot With Big Personality (KTLA)
Presidential Campaigns Are Talking Around The Robot In The Room (NPR)
Suspect Who Shot Officers Also Shot Robot, Dog (ABC News)
Stunning underwater Olympics shots are now taken by robots (CNN)