Important Innovations

Highly Advanced Robotics from FAU Source:  FAU's Astro Astro, One of the World's Smartest Robodogs Florida Atlantic University's Astro is a very smart robodog.  It's loaded with cameras, sensors, radar imaging, a directional microphone and four teraflops of processing power which enables up to 4 trillion computations per second.  Astro learns like your dog, through repetition, trial and error. It could be a big player in search and rescue, bomb detection, work as a service dog and much more.  For a great news blog on this new invention, go to Important Innovations Collection: Smart Robodog Learns Like a Dog : Astro May Be One of the World's Smartest Dogs Source:  Florida Atlantic University New Invention from Florida Atlantic University...

Robots Navigating Like Humans Photo:  Courtesy of  MIT Going from A to B with a Motion Plan MIT researchers have developed a way to enable robots to navigate environments in the same way that humans do.  In simulations the robot moves through a crowded room by exploring the environment, observing what others are doing and exploring what it's learned from other situations. Robot with Hybrid Brain They've done this by combining a  planning algorithm with a neural network that learns to identify paths to best outcomes and uses the knowledge to guide the robots actions.   It's a novel motion planning model.  Until now, robots have struggled with navigational concepts. CSAIL & McGovern Brain Institute Research The MIT researchers are from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the McGovern Institute for brain, mind and machine research.  They just presented their discoveries to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Syst