New Florence. New Renaissance.

Teaching robots to see and touch

To connect sight and touch, the (MIT) CSAIL engineers worked with a KUKA robot arm, a type often used in industrial warehouses. The scientists outfitted it with a special tactile sensor called GelSight—a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber that works as an imaging system. Objects are pressed into GelSight, and then cameras surrounding the slab monitor the impressions.

With a common webcam, the CSAIL team recorded almost 200 objects, including tools, household products, and fabrics being touched by the robot arm over 12,000 times. That created a trove of video clips that the team could break down into 3 million static images, creating a dataset they termed “VisGel.”

TechCrunch

 

 

 

 

Auto Infotainment trends

In an effort to satisfy a growing demand from drivers for high-tech gadgetry, automakers are placing audio, navigation, telephone, and texting capabilities—a bundle of features known as infotainment—front and center, adding a screen on the dashboard where only knobs and buttons used to be. In 2014, just 53 percent of vehicles sold in the U.S. had a dashboard touch screen, according to data from research and consulting firm IHS Markit. This year, that number is up to 82 percent.

But for all of the convenience these systems are supposed to provide, CR’s most recent owner satisfaction survey of members suggests that there’s plenty of room for improvement. From data collected on more than 60,000 vehicles, only 56 percent of owners reported that they were very satisfied with their car’s infotainment system.

Consumer Reports

here are some features they recommend

Your hands as the only interface you need

Soli tracks and recognizes dynamic gestures expressed by fine motions of the fingers and hand. In order to accomplish this with a single chip sensor, we developed a novel radar sensing paradigm with tailored hardware, software, and algorithms. Unlike traditional radar sensors, Soli does not require large bandwidth and high spatial resolution; in fact, Soli’s spatial resolution is coarser than the scale of most fine finger gestures. Instead, our fundamental sensing principles rely on motion resolution by extracting subtle changes in the received signal over time. By processing these temporal signal variations, Soli can distinguish complex finger movements and deforming hand shapes within its field.

Google

Next-gen UX

FastCompany has 15 mind-blowing UX including the Microsoft Canetroller

It’s essentially a cane that works in virtual reality, allowing someone without vision to tap their way through simulated 3D environments. It’s a reminder that the next digital revolution cannot leave anyone behind. And it’s a marvel of engineering, to boot.

Brain to Vehicle interfaces

Nissan made big, brainy waves at CES by unveiling its brain-to-vehicle research project. If you’ve read recent headlines about people controlling robotic arms or quadcopters simply by thinking about doing so while wearing funny electroencephalography (EEG) caps bristling with sensors and wires, you might wonder whether the era of drive-by-wireless imagination is upon us. It is not. Nor is direct brain control of your commute what Nissan is after. This sandbox research project simply aims to use brainwaves to make your time in a car more pleasurable in two specific instances—when you’re driving and when you’re being driven.

Motor Trend

 

Universal standard for Braille displays

The USB Implementers Forum — a group that includes major tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google — has announced a new USB HID (Human Interface Device) standard for Braille displays. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big move forward to make computers more accessible to people who are blind or have impaired vision by making it much easier to use Braille displays across different operating systems and devices without having to worry about unique software or drivers for each device.

Ultimately, it means that soon, users will be able to simply use Braille readers as plug-and-play devices across a wide hardware ecosystem, much in the same way that users are able to simply plug in a USB mouse or keyboard. The standard seeks to make this process function similarly across operation systems, whether it’s a PC, Mac, or Android device.

The Verge

Fingerprints, DNA, now voice analysis?

During his keynote at Cognizant Community, Malcolm Frank described how Rita Singh at Carnegie-Mellon U had helped the Coast Guard with machine learning applied to voice recognition use cases. It could be the next frontier in helping law enforcement agencies.

Here’s more from the Tribune-Review

“That's long enough for Singh. She can pull troves of information from short snippets of sounds.

“There are things about your voice that you simply cannot change, like the sound of your breath,” Singh said. “Any information that we give them narrows the search. We're not at the point where we can say this is what the person looks like, go get him.”

Singh wasn't really sure what she had until the Coast Guard came asking. The Coast Guard came to her with a tape. She listened to it, ran in through her computer programs and was surprised with what she found.

“That was when we realized what we could do and that was when they realized we could do it,” Singh said. “You could actually get a lot of information from sound and it was actually pretty useful.”

Haptics of robotic screwing and unscrewing

This is how they found the universal pattern of screwing and unscrewing forces that can successfully drive home a screw or remove it. “Results show that people apply axial force to the screws to avoid screwdriver slippage (cam-outs) and this axial force is proportional to the torque which is required for screwing,” say Mironov and co.

The team also found that the required force depends on the type of screw head: screws with a Phillips head require significantly more axial force to avoid cam-outs than screws with a hex head. So given the same axial force, hex heads are less likely to slip than Phillips heads.

Finally, Mironov and co programmed a robot to re-create the same pattern of forces. This robot is  equipped with a screwdriver, a gripper to hold the screw, and machine vision to locate the screw in its socket.

MIT Technology Review

 

Pushing UX, drone and other frontiers

Samsung’s latest patent is for a drone with an integrated display that’s able to detect the face and pupils of a person as well as their hand gestures and position. The patent shows a unit that features a display at the center with four propellers on each corner.

The patent describes a drone that can include a camera and observation system to transmit information to the main control unit. The system can track the users’ eyes, head, hands, or fingers in real time. The drone’s flight speed and direction can be controlled by moving your head, eyes, or hands, and the unit can also automatically track users without any additional gestures.

The Verge

Photo Credit

 

Firefox Quantum

The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It's a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It's better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It's my new go-to browser.

The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows.

Wired