Tag Archives: Robot

Autonomous flying aircraft are no news. We are reading every day, unfortunately, of autonomous drones used in combat in Ukraine and Russia. These are basically robo-craft with flying “intelligence” embedded in the aircraft itself. Quite a different challenge is to have a robot sitting in the cockpit acting as pilot. …

8. The future of shopping Retail store profitability is at an all time low. The competition from on-line shopping has put out of business thousands of stores (45 retail chains in the US went bankrupt in the last three years)  and drastically decreased the EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) …

World population is getting older and a few companies see a market opportunity in this: providing various forms of support to elderly addressing a broad range of needs. An aging population is not just a population where there are more elderly people, it is also a world where the number …

Just saw this photo on an Italian newspaper reporting on the flooding in the Emilia Romagna region. Fire-men used a robo-tractor, Trypper, to steer a peep of chicks out of a crumbling building. They decided that the flooding had damaged the foundation of the large pen where the chicks were …

Thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence progress, more and more jobs can become automated, not just those inside a manufacturing company, also the ones face to face with the end customer. Fast food companies have started this shift several years ago by creating kiosks for self-ordering on their premises and …

I should say I never felt the need to tickle a bug, not even sure if tickling is something that bugs experience, like/dislike. Yet a team of researchers at the Ritsumeikan University  noticed that with our big human fingers it would be impossible to “tickle” a bug and therefore took …

A nice article is pointing out, once more, that Brain Machine Interface -BMI- still requires the human user to learn how to interact with the machine. It is not like learning a command language (go right, go left, stop, …) it is about finding a thought “pattern” that can be …

Robots playing an instrument go back well before computers. At that time they were mechanical construtions (you can find an interesting historical reconstruction of the evolution of robots playing instruments here). Computers (and software) made it easier to have a machine engage in music production. What is new in these …

Back in 2018 an 11 year old girl had to undergo lengthy cures for an osteosarcoma, both at hospital and at home. Chemotherapy compromised her immune system and she had to remain in a sterile environment. Going to school was not an option and videoconferencing, at that before-Covid age, was …

The focus in the past has been on finding the needed knowledge and acquiring it, inside my (your) brain and inside the company. This is something that is becoming more and more challenging. The fact is that the transfer of knowledge is costly in effort and even more crucial in …