Category Archives: Robotics

The rehabilitation robots market was valued at US$ 798. 92 million in 2021 and is projected to reach US$ 3,178. 77 million by 2028; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21. 8% during 20212028. The market growth is mainly attributed to the factors such as rise in geriatric population, stroke and robot-assisted training in rehabilitation therapy.

New York, July 30, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Rehabilitation Robots Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Type ; End User, and Geography" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06124471/?utm_source=GNW However, the high cost of rehabilitation robots hinders the market growth.

Research in rehabilitation robotics and the number of therapeutic rehabilitation robots are rising across the world.Asia-Pacific aging nations, such as Japan and China, are witnessing the expansion of medical technology, resulting in a significant market for rehabilitation robots.

In 2017, around 35.2 million people in Japan were 65 years old or above, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. This figure is predicted to jump to 36.2 million by 2020. Therefore, businesses are encouraged to invest in things for the regions older residents. Therefore, the increasing elderly population and a growing number of stroke-rending people immobile are among the significant factors driving the demand for rehabilitation robots.Robot rehabilitation therapy is used to deliver high-intensity training for patients suffering from motor disorders caused by spinal cord disease or stroke.Stroke is a top cause of severe long-term disability in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Fatigue, hemiparesis, and walking difficulty are a few effects of a stroke.Moreover, rehabilitation robots provide customized, task-oriented, prolonged, intensive, standardized, and repeatable training for patients affected by stroke or other nonprogressive brain lesions.

These advantages of rehabilitation robots, and the rising demand for better and quicker healthcare services drive the growth of the overall rehabilitation robots market.

Social assistive robotics could be a potential tool to support clinical care areas, promoting physical distancing as well as reducing the rate of contagion spread.There is a concern to seek adaptive strategies to continue offering neurorehabilitation services during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the people with disabilities and chronic progressive diseases require constant monitoring and care.

Patients suffering from stroke or COVID-19 develop anxiety, depression, fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorders.In addition to the physical or cognitive state, psychological health acts as an indicator of the quality of living of the survivors.

Nevertheless, considering the rapid spread of COVID-19, several healthcare services are looking for strategies to promote physical distancing and enhance healthcare procedures. With the widespread acceptance of physical distancing and isolation measures, the supply operations and distribution channels have undergone serious disruptions during the pandemic, and manufacturers are facing many backorders on many products.

Based on type, The rehabilitation robots market is segmented into therapeutic robots, assistive robots, exoskeleton robots, and prosthetic robots. The exoskeleton robots segment held the largest share of the market in 2020, and the market for the same is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based on end-user, the rehabilitation robots market is segmented into hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and specialty clinics. The rehabilitation centers segment held the largest share of the market in 2020 and is estimated to register the highest CAGR in the market during the forecast period.

The World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NHS (National Health Service), and CDC are among the major primary and secondary sources referred for preparing this report.Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06124471/?utm_source=GNW

About ReportlinkerReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Rehabilitation Robots Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Type ; End User, and Geography - Yahoo Finance

A California robotics company is about to bring a high-tech knee brace to market that could relieve the suffering of millions of Americans grappling with osteoarthritis of the knee. It may especially appeal to patients who want to avoid knee replacement surgery.

San Francisco-based Roam Robotics said its $7,000 Ascend orthosis should start shipping this winter. Certified by the FDA as a Class 1 medical device, Roamanticipates reimbursement from both Medicare and private insurance. Medicare could cover 50% orhigher, and with private insurance the entire cost could be covered in some cases, Roam says.

Roam Robotics CEO Tim Swift

Roam is located in the San Franciscos Mission district, across the street from Otherlab, an engineering firm awarded tens of millions of dollars in government research contracts, mostly for robotics and energy projects. Roam is one of several start-ups to emerge from Otherlab. Its founder and CEO Tim Swift is a veteran of Ekso Bionics, a pioneer in the exoskeleton field. After working on heavy and super expensive exoskeletons, Swift concluded that a radical departure from conventional designs was necessary if exoskeleton technology was to become accessible and affordable.

I believe that we have the ability to change the relationship that people have with robots on a scale thats really never been considered, says Swift. I dont want people to view robots as something that overtakes what it is to be human. Our goal is not to build cyborgs. Its to make people more human than they ever were.

Ascend is made of lightweight carbon fiber and high-strength woven fabric. The pneumatically powered device is connected to a rechargeable battery carried in a backpack. Sensors in the custom-fitted knee brace provide real-time data to Ascends microprocessors, where proprietary algorithms detect user intent, then extend and flex the knee. Ideally, this relieves pain and increases patients ability to navigate stairs and master previously simple everyday activities.

Ascend is made of lightweight carbon fiber and high-strength woven fabric.

Rowan Paul, a sports medicine doctor who has consulted on Ascend, says it may appeal to those who are reluctant to use a cane because of the stigma of disability it carries. The knee brace makes them look like an athlete with an injury, he says. Ascend could also reduce or eliminate the need for opioid pain meds or cortisone injections, which offer temporary relief for osteoarthritis but come with a risk of side effects.

I have seen several patients, where if we can just give them a little bit of help in a very targeted, precise way, they don't need to do a knee replacement, says Paul.

Roams market research puts the number of patients who are living with severe pain and limited mobility because of osteoarthritis of the knee at 10 million or more.

The pneumatically powered device is connected to a rechargeable battery carried in a backpack.

The company has opened a storefront in San Francisco where patients cantest driveAscend. Reid Weaver drove down from Tacoma, Washington, in June to try one out and was sold on the product. Its so comfortable and its so light, you dont even feel that its there, says Weaver, who spent 19 years as a SWAT police officer in Washington state and now works as a court officer protecting judges in Tacoma.

Weaver had leg surgery after a hiking accident but the surgery exacerbated his osteoarthritis. An avid outdoorsman who played football in college, Weaver, 60, manages to ride a motorcycle to work. With the Ascend knee brace on, Weaver finds he can go up and down stairs with ease and was surprised that it was no longer a struggle to get up from a chair, a challenge for many with osteoarthritis in their knees.

Reid Weaver

This thing was way more powerful than I thought it would be, says Weaver. It basically lifted me out of a sitting position without using my hands, without lurching forward. I think its going to be a game changer.

52-year-old Angelique Newman-Malone of San Jose, California, says she felt trapped in her own body by osteoarthritis. After stumbling upon an ad for Ascend on Facebook, Newman-Malone wore the knee brace on multiple occasions and pronounced it agodsend.

I felt like I had somebody supporting me, like a buddy to walk next to me, she says. That feeling is amazing.

But the best perk for Newman-Malone is that the knee brace allows her to kneel and then get up. A devoutly religious Christian, she said the ability to kneel when she prays is crucial.

Roam has two other smart knee brace models in development. Elevate, Roams knee brace for skiing, was available for renting at ski resorts in the western US for two winter ski seasons but wasnt in use last winter because of the pandemic. Roam COO Nikhil Dhongade says he's hopeful skiers wearing Elevate will be back on the slopes for the 2022-2023 winter season.

Roam has also been developing a smart knee brace for soldiers. Swift says the Armys Special Operations Command has been testing the military model, which is called the Forge.

Roam Robotics Forge

While Elevate and The Forge can be worn on both knees, Ascend has been designed for a single knee because osteoarthritis tends to manifest in one leg initially. Roams Tim Swift notes that more than the 80% of total knee replacements are done on just one leg.

Swift says that as impressive as these high-tech knee braces are now, wait until you see where these wearable robots are heading. To drive home the point, he uses terms associated with aviation and automobiles.

Were not at the end of any runway here, were at the very start, says Swift. What we're building here is much closer to the model T than the Toyota Corolla.

Editors' Note: This story was updated to clarify that Ascend arrives this winter, not fall.

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Robotic Brace Could Mean the End of Knee Replacement Surgery for Some - PCMag

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer on why he believes robots can help the restaurant worker shortage.

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer believes technology will solve the worker shortage facing the restaurant industry today.

On FOX Business'"Varney and Co.,"Taffer pointed to his recent visit to a Westin Hotel where his room service waiter was a robot.

"So in a hotel of that size, that eliminates six, seven, eight employees," he said. "We look at cooking technologies, which are now eliminating another one or two employees."

LABOR SHORTAGE MAY GET WORSE BEFORE IMPROVING, NABE SURVEY

The Chamber of Commerce has warned the worker shortage poses the biggest threat to the economy's still-nascent recovery from thecoronaviruspandemic after the government reported that the U.S. had a little more than 9.2 million vacantjobopenings in May, a record-shattering number despite the 9.3 million unemployed Americans.

"Business can't stop," Taffer told hostStuart Varney. "We've got to find solutions. So automation, computerization, robotics -- all of these things are going to play very, very heavily."

JOHNNY ROCKETS, FATBURGER OWNER SAYS LABOR SHORTAGES FACING RESTAURANTS A TOTAL NIGHTMARE

Bar Rescue executive producer and host Jon Taffer weighs in on employee shortages, innovative tech in the restaurant industry, COVID vaccine and mask requirements and his new line of drinks.

Taffer, who has been part of the food industry for decades, said the automation trend gained momentum two and a half years ago when unemployment was so low, businesses had trouble hiring employees then as well.

"Many of us started on this automation path back then, which is really paying off now," he said. "We have 60% less back-of-the-house employees because of technology."

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He went on to say this can be beneficial amid the pandemic because every less employee is one less point of contamination.

"When employees don't come back to work, I think many of them are going to find their jobs have been replaced by machines," he said.

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FOX BusinessMegan Henneycontributed to this article.

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'Bar Rescue's' Jon Taffer says technology, robots the answer to worker shortage - Fox Business

In May, Path Robotics announced a $56 million Series B. It was a sizable raise, as far as robotics rounds go. But the Columbus, Ohio-based startup is already back for more, raising a pre-emptive Series C a mere two and a half months later.

And its a biggie. The firm has raised $100 million, led by Tiger Global and featuring participation from Silicon Valley Bank, an existing investor. The deal brings the robotic welding firms total funding to $171 million.

Image Credits: Path Robotics

Path cites a longstanding shortage of skilled welders as a primary driver in interest around its tech. The problem dates back before the global pandemic (though thats likely only exacerbated the issue, as it has with so many other labor issues). Once again, it notes a study by the American Welding Society that says the U.S. alone will experience a shortage in the welding workface of around 400,000 by 2024.

From the sound of it, the company is already looking beyond welding. After all, construction is a huge business, with massive opportunities for the right robotics organization. And, of course, having an infusion of $100 million certainly doesnt hurt your growth plans.

Most robots merely repeat what they are told, with no ability to improve themselves. The future of manufacturing hinges on highly capable, flexible robotics, CEO Andrew Lonsberry said in a statement. Robots that can truly see and learn.

Image Credits: Path Robotics

What, precisely, those future plans are, the company doesnt say, but it plans to build them atop of its imaging and AI, presumably to build a sort of modular ecosystem for the construction robotics category.

Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder hints at those plans in a statement. Paths innovative approach to computer vision and proprietary AI software allows robots to sense, understand and adapt to the challenges of each unique welding project. We believe this breakthrough technology can be adopted for many other applications and products beyond just welding, to serve their customers holistically.

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Path Robotics raises another $100M - TechCrunch

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Watch now.

OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubiks Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available.

So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics, Zaremba said. The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, thats for the best from the perspective of the company.

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat: After advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning through our Rubiks Cube project and other initiatives, last October we decided not to pursue further robotics research and instead refocus the team on other projects. Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, weve found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress in our reinforcement learning research.

OpenAI first widely demonstrated its robotics work in October 2019, when it published research detailing a five-fingered robotic hand guided by an AI model with 13,000 years of cumulative experience. The best-performing system could successfully unscramble Rubiks Cubes about 20% to 60% of the time, which might not seem especially impressive. But the model notably discovered techniques to recover from challenges, like when the robots fingers were tied together and when the hand was wearing a leather glove.

This was the culmination of over two years of work. In May 2017, OpenAI released Roboschool, open source software for controlling robotics in simulation. That same year, the company said it had created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, that could learn a new task after seeing it done once. And in 2018, OpenAI made available simulated robotics environments and a baseline implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, a reinforcement learning algorithm that can learn from failure.

The sad thing is, if we were a robotics company, the mission of the company would be different, and I think we would continue. I believe quite strongly in the approach that [the] robotics [team] took and the direction, Zaremba added. But from the perspective of what we want to achieve, which is to build [artificial general intelligence], there were some components missing.

OpenAI has long asserted that immense computational horsepower is a necessary step on the road to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can learn any task a human can. While luminaries like Milafounder Yoshua Bengio and Facebook VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCunargue that AGI cant exist, OpenAIs cofounders and backers among them Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman believe powerful computers in conjunction with reinforcement learning, pretraining, and other techniques can achieve paradigm-shifting AI advances.

AsMIT Technology Reviewreported in 2020, a team within OpenAI called Foresight runs experiments to test how far they can push AI capabilities by training algorithms with increasingly large amounts of data and compute. According to that same report, OpenAI is developing a system trained on images, text, and other data using massive computational resources that the companys leadership believes is the most promising path toward AGI.

One of the fruits of this effort is DALL-E, a text-to-image engine thats essentially a visual idea generator. Given a text prompt, the OpenAI system generates images to match the prompt, filling in the blanks when the prompt implies the image must contain a detail that isnt explicitly stated. DALL-E can combine disparate ideas to synthesize objects, some of which are unlikely to exist in the real world like a hybrid of a snail and a harp.

Brockman and Altman in particular believe AGI will be able to master more fields than any one person, chiefly by identifying complex cross-disciplinary connections that elude human experts. Furthermore, they predict that responsibly deployed AGI in other words, AGI deployed in close collaboration with researchers in relevant fields, like social science might help solve longstanding challenges in climate change, health care, and education.

Zaremba asserts that pretraining is a particularly powerful technique in the creation of large, sophisticated AI systems. At a high level, pretraining helps the model learn general features that can be reused on the target task to boost its accuracy. Pretraining was used to develop OpenAIs Codex, a model thats trained on billions of lines of public code to power Copilot, GitHubs service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Codex is a fine-tuned version of OpenAIs GPT-3, a language model pretrained on over a trillion words from websites, books, Wikipedia, and other web sources.

When we created robotics [systems], we thought that we could go very far with self-generated data and reinforcement learning. At the moment, I believe that pretraining [gives] model[s] 100 times cheaper IQ points,' Zaremba said. That might be followed with other techniques.

OpenAIs move away from robotics might be a reflection of the economic realities the company faces. DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI research lab, has undergone a similar shift in recent years as R&D costs mount, moving away from prestige projects in favor of work with commercial applications, like protein shape prediction.

Its an open secret that robotics is a capital-intensive field. Industrial robotics company Rethink Robotics closed its doors months after attempting unsuccessfully to find an acquirer. Boston Dynamics, considered among the most advanced robotics firms, was acquired by Google and then sold to SoftBank before Hyundai agreed to buy a controlling stake for $1.1 billion. And Honda retired its Asimo robotics project after over a decade in development.

Roughly a year ago,Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in San Francisco-based OpenAI to jointly develop new technologies for Microsofts Azure cloud platform. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to license some of its intellectual property to Microsoft, which the company would then package and sell to partners, and to train and run AI models on Azure as OpenAI worked to develop next-generation computing hardware.

In the months that followed, OpenAI released a Microsoft Azure-powered API that allows developers to explore GPT-3s capabilities.(OpenAI said recently that GPT-3 is now being used in more than 300 different apps by tens of thousands of developers and producing 4.5 billion words per day.) Toward the end of 2020, Microsoft announcedthat it would exclusively license GPT-3 to develop and deliver AI solutions for customers, as well as creating new products that harness the power of natural language generation.

Microsoft recently announced that GPT-3 will be integrated deeply with Power Apps, its low-code app development platform specifically for formula generation. The AI-powered features will allow a user building an ecommerce app, for example, to describe a programming goal using conversational language like find products where the name starts with kids.'

As for projects like DALL-E and Jukebox an AI system that can generate music in any style from scratch, complete with vocals they also have obvious and immediate business applications. OpenAI predicts that DALL-E could someday augment or even replace 3D rendering engines. For example, architects could use the tool to visualize buildings, while graphic artists could apply it to software and video game design.

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OpenAI disbands its robotics research team - VentureBeat

Last month, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba said the company has disbanded its robotics team in a Weights & Biases podcast. I was actually working for several years on robotics. Recently, we changed the focus at OpenAI. I disbanded the robotics team. There are actually plenty of domains that are very rich with data. Ultimately that was holding us back, in the case of robotics, said Zaremba.

The decision was quite hard on him, but he later realised that this was best from a companys perspective (to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI)). When we created robotics, we thought that we could go pretty far. We had self-generated data and reinforcement learning. But, at the moment, I believe that actually pre-training allows to give model 100x cheaper IQ points, and that might follow with other techniques, said Zaremba.

Citing GPT-3, Zaremba said pre-training in language models includes training machine learning models on unsupervised tasks such as next word predictions. But, in the case of robotics, we do not have such data, he added.

Initially, when OpenAI started robotics projects, Zaremba said they lacked clarity on how and what they wanted to build. But, over time, they got more clarity on things they wanted to focus on.

Besides the dearth of data, OpenAIs move away from robotics reflects the economic realities and capital intensive nature of the projects. Three years ago, Rethink Robotics shut down its operations. Last year, the maker of driverless trucks, Starsky Robot, also shut shop. Same year, SoftBank halted the production of its famed robot Pepper.

SoftBank acquired Boston Dynamics from Google in 2017 and recently sold the robotics company to Hyundai for $1.1 billion. Boston Dynamics caught the popular imagination with viral videos of its humanoid and dog-like robots.

Zaremba said building robots requires high computing capabilities. Plus, there are technical issues with running machines in real-time. There are two possibilities to successfully deploy robots. One is to collect a lot of data. Another possibility is that we need powerful video models like that of powerful text models, Zaremba said.

The notable powerful language models at present include Googles Switch Transformer, GPT-3, DistilBERT, Google Gshard, BAAIs Wu Dao 2.0, and GPT-J.

According to MITs The state of industrial robotics: Emerging technologies, challenges and key research directions, the key challenges holding back the robotics industry includes the high cost of integration, lack of standards, inflexibility, better balance of speed and safety, data protocols, and investments to enable technologies.

OpenAI first demonstrated its robotics work in October 2019, when it published research detailing a hand guided by an AI model with 13K years of cumulative experience, called Dactyl, which replicated a humans hand movement to solve the Rubiks cube. Our robot still hasnt perfected its technique though, as it solves the Rubiks Cube 60% of the time (and only 20% of the time for a maximally difficult scramble), according to OpenAI.

OpenAI, at the time, had said, as a result of ADR development, more developers will be able to divert from building task-specific robots to general-purpose machines. Indubitably, we are decades away from having a robot that will make its own decisions without human intervention, but leveraging ADR, developers can successfully attain it, as per OpenAI.

In April 2019, OpenAI hosted its first Robotic Symposium. The event brought together a diverse set of people from robotics and machine learning communities, alongside academics and industry leaders, to create a platform to exchange ideas and address open questions in building complex robot systems.

Four years ago, OpenAI had released Robotschool, open-source software for robot simulation, integrated with OpenAI Gym. In February 2018, it released eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay. OpenAI has used these environments to train models which work on physical robots.

Amit Raja Naik is a senior writer at Analytics India Magazine, where he dives deep into the latest technology innovations. He is also a professional bass player.

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Why Did OpenAI Disband Its Robotics Team? - Analytics India Magazine

Drones were flying Friday in Conemaugh Township as six children participated in a "Drone Boot Camp."

The camp, which was being taught by staff and members of the Robotic Doges Team 8645, included learning how to fly the mini racing drones,an obstacle course and drone racing.A demonstration of the team's award-winning robot was also held.

The camp is meant for children who are at least 8 years old. Another camp session was held Monday, and additional camps are scheduled for 2-4 p.m. Friday and July 30, and for 6-8 p.m. July 26.

Team coach Michele Lamkin said that last year was the first year for these events.

"They were so much fun we decided to do them again," Lamkin said. "The kids had a lot of fun and, also, one of the kids that attended ended up joining our robotics team.

"This is a funevent we do just to let people know we are here."

Doges: Robotics students moving on to state championship

Photos: Doges display their competition robot

Event: Clay shoot proceeds to help Somerset County Sheriff's Office replace drone that crashed

She said the goalof the team and other robotics programs isto spark studentinterestin technologycareers.

Rob Mishler attended Friday's boot camp with his 8-year-old son, Canyon. Rob said his son once had a drone that lasted"10 seconds."

"He's been interested in drones for a little while," the father said. "So we thought, 'Heck, let's give this a go.'"

Team member and homeschooled 10th grader Grant McClemens is in his second year on the team. He was one of the students teaching kids how to work the drones Friday.

He said he plans to pursue a career in engineering.

"I like flying drones a lot. It's a hobby of mine," he said. "Teaching other kids new stuff about drones is fun."

To register for one of the upcoming drone camps,visitlherobotics.org/drones.

Follow Eric Kieta on Twitter @EricKietaDA.

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Drone flying classes in Conemaugh Township offered to students across the area - Daily American Online

In brief OpenAI has disbanded its AI robotics team and is no longer trying to apply machine learning to physical machines.

Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI, who led the robotics group confirmed that the company recently broke up the team to focus working on more promising areas of artificial general intelligence research.

"Here's a reveal ... as of recently we changed the focus at OpenAI, and I actually disbanded the robotics team," he said during an episode of the Weights & Biases podcast.

Zaremba said a lack of training data was holding the robotics research back: there wasn't enough information on hand to teach the systems to the level of intelligence desired.

"From the perspective of what we want to achieve, which is to build AGI, I think there was actually some components missing," he added. A spokesperson from OpenAI this week confirmed it had, indeed, stopped working on robotics.

DeepMind released AlphaFold, the most advanced protein-structure-predicting machine-learning model yet, on GitHub, this week.

If you want to play around with it, youll need to be familiar with Docker, and have the space to store hundreds of gigabytes of genetic sequencing data as well as the model.

AlphaFold is trained to predict how a protein folds and takes shape given its constituent amino acids. Last year, DeepMind entered its system into the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction contest, and thrashed its rivals.

DeepMind's goal is to get the model accurate enough to be useful in developing drugs that can target specific proteins to cure or mitigate diseases. A paper by DeepMind on AlphaFold's design was published this month in Nature.

In a separate project, a large team of researchers at various universities and academic institutions also published their own open-source AI protein folding model. Known as RoseTTaFold, it doesnt perform as well as AlphaFold though its not too shabby, according to a paper published in Science.

A New Yorker review of Roadrunner, a documentary about the late and great Anthony Bourdain, has sparked questions over whether its ethical or not to use machine-learning technology to low-key fake peoples voices.

In the magazine piece, the documentary's filmmaker Morgan Neville admitted to using software that mimicked Bourdains voice, making the celebrity chef and writer say words he had only written. Specifically, the software was used to read out an email Bourdain had written to a friend. The code was trained on clips of Bourdain speaking on TV, radio, audiobooks, and podcasts.

If you watch the film ... you probably dont know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and youre not going to know, Neville said. We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.

Should the director tell viewers or listeners when an audio clip has been synthetically generated? Does it matter, seeing as Bourdain did express those sentiments albeit in an email and not into a microphone? Will this blow a hole in trust in future documentaries, journalism, and media output? This Tech Policy Press interview with Sam Gregory a deep-fakes expert and program director of Witness Media Lab has more on that.

IRC-for-the-next-generation Discord has snapped up an AI startup for its automated moderation tools.

Sentropy, based in Palo Alto, California, confirmed the deal in a blog post this week. Three years after starting this company with Michele, Ethan, and Taylor, Im thrilled to announce that were joining Discord to continue fighting against hate and abuse on the internet, said CEO and co-founder John Redgrave.

The upstart has built proprietary machine-learning models said to be capable of detecting hate speech and toxic language to shut down online harassment. The amount Discord paid to acquire Sentropys technology and team was not disclosed.

Discord was known for being primarily popular with gamers, though it has exploded in use in other communities, from programming to cryptocurrencies. It reportedly walked away from a $10bn offer by Microsoft, earlier this year.

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OpenAI shuts down robotics team because it doesn't have enough data yet - The Register

Intelligent robot technology has expanded beyond cinematography and has found its place in photography now, too, as shared by a photo and video production company that has started to use one to achieve shots and angles that would be hard to replicate manually.

Although cinema robots are still out of reach for many creators due to the high cost that accompanies such technology, they are becoming more approachable and devices of this kind have slowly begun to enter the workflows of smaller production companies that dont have multi-million dollar Hollywood studio budgets.

Designed to cut production times and to increase efficiency, cinema robots such as the ones designed by SISU Cinema Robotics have also become more user-friendly and require minimal technical knowledge so photographers and filmmakers can get started right away after their product training.

The line between photography and videography is also blending, as many cinema cameras can capture RAW still frames that work just as well as a traditional still camera but allow a photographer to capture video at the same time. For example, photojournalist Tom Palmaers captures photos and videos simultaneously thanks to RAW video. The stills featured in this story are another example of this: RAW frames extracted from clips captured using a RED Ranger Gemini camera.

Paul Lanterman, Creative Technical Specialist at OMS Photography, an imaging and production company, tells PetaPixel that the company he works for has embraced a SISU cinema robot and now uses it as part of its photo and video projects. OMS Photography was in the market for a motion control system for its commercial videography project, and while its photography team had extensive experience crafting still imagery, the company wanted to find a system that would blend those talents with added opportunities of moving the camera on set.

Previously, the team used several slider-based systems but felt they lacked flexibility, and changing sets and editing paths took too much time out of the shooting schedule and often left them with disappointing end results.

After they tested out the SISU robot, they found the appeal in its ease of use where if you can move your arm, you can program a camera move in movements. The robot utilizes a wands trigger and joystick which allow users to position the camera with a wave of their hand and it can be easily programmed to perform accurate movements.

Lanterman explains that after they unboxed the system, they plugged it in using standard AC power and one hour later, they had clients on set, directing flybys of products. The device is now used for 75% to 80% of the teams video work because the system helps them get a higher volume of completed shots without needing more equipment or more people on set, which offsets the higher cost of renting or purchasing it.

An added benefit is the ability to extract stills, should the client want exact frames captured in any video clips. The repeatability of the robotics means the same shot can be used for multiple takes of different products:

For OMS Photography, the robot allows the team to treat video shots with the same attention to detail that they can on still shots. For example, after they design a camera move, the system lets them go to any point on the path and see exactly what theyll capture. This level of precision and repeatability allows the production team to tweak everything throughout the entire shot, such as reflections, background, lens flares, subtle lighting, and so forth.

Each programmed move also makes it very clear what the result will be with no surprises along the way, which helps instill visual confidence in clients.

Its like working with live stills, says Lanterman. It eliminates bad takes, which then saves time on set, space on the media, and time spent copying files that nobody will want to use.

Although cinema robots such as these are capable of performing complex moves and angles, they can also perform simple slider moves, zolly shots, and others. Lanterman notes that the ease of setting up a simple move and saving it to get the same shot on 24 different product/combo shots is really powerful.

The cinema robot opens up creative and technical possibilities that may not be possible when shot manually precise repeatability is one such factor that is simply impossible without one. However, Lanterman explains, that for that reason, the set might need to be more detailed and robot users need to pay more attention to ensure background areas are camera-ready. This is because the more dynamic camera moves can reveal angles that are not typically visible.

Similarly, extra preparation is needed for high-speed and slow-motion projects to ensure that everything is where it needs to be and in focus. For this, shooters need to think it through ahead of time and be good at visual analysis to figure out where things might not be lining up before the shot has begun.

These types of motion control systems arent new but are slowly coming down in cost and becoming more accessible to smaller and medium-sized production companies. Although this particular SISU system is more suited for commercial projects and would still land somewhere between $3,000 to $5,000 in rental fees per day plus an operator or from $109,000 to $169,00 as an outright cost, Lanterman explains that the OMS Photography has seven photographers and this technology is now well within the companys reach.

For individuals with smaller budgets, a DIY motion kit setup would be more suitable, however, the technology has advanced and continues to do so, eventually bridging the gap and providing smart device accessibility to more individuals and companies.

More information about SISU robots can be found on the SISU Cinema Robotics website and the OMS Photography portfolio can be viewed on the companys website and Instagram.

Image credits: All images provided by OMS Photography and used with permission.

Excerpt from:

Camera Robots Help Artists Capture Action-Filled Photos and Videos - PetaPixel

AMP Roboticsis expanding its presence in Europe as demand grows for the company's AI and automation solutions.

AMP has appointed REP-TEC Advanced Technologies, specialists in the supply, installation, and support of recycling equipment, as an official reseller and integrator for customers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

In addition, to further support the expansion of its business in Europe, AMP has hired Gary Ashburner as its European General Manager to build out the company's infrastructure across the region. Based in the UK, Ashburner leads customer and partner acquisition, pre- and post-sales consulting, system design, supply, installation, training and service.

AMP's European expansion reflects strong year-over-year revenue growth and investment in operational scale made possible by its latest funding round of USD $55 million at the beginning of the year. The company's AI platform, AMP Neuron, encompasses the largest known real-world dataset of recyclable materials for machine learning, with the ability to classify more than 100 different categories and characteristics of recyclables across single-stream recycling; e-scrap; and construction and demolition debris, and reaching an object recognition run rate of more than 10 billion items annually.

To further its market penetration, AMP is actively seeking to establish additional reseller partnerships in Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and France.

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AMP Robotics partners with recycling reseller on European expansion - Recycling Product News