Shudu Gram is a striking South African model. She had a Balmain campaign in 2018, a feature in Vogue Australia, and a red carpet appearance at the 2019 BAFTAs in a custom Swarovski gown. Shudu is a computer-generated image (CGI)! CGIs drastically reduce the environmental footprint associated with photo shoots and bringing clothes to market. A significant portion of fashion’s supply chain can happen in a computer. CGIs can work on multiple “shoots” at the same time, and they only require the digital creator to be present. They are the ultimate symbol of individuality and inclusivity, in that every time you shopped online you could see yourself in the clothes.

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The Thermite RS3, manufactured by Textron: Howe & Howe Technologies, is a compact robotic firefighting vehicle that features a low center of gravity and wide chassis. It got its first major test October 13th in Los Angeles when it was used to battle a major blaze for the first time in the United States. The remotely operated 3,500-pound robot resembles a small tank, and is capable of spraying 2,500 gallons/minute.

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General Nick Carter, chief of defense staff for the British army, suggests that new drones and robots could make up a significant fraction of the armed forces. He said that a massive push for a robotic military, in which large numbers of autonomous or remote-controlled robotic soldiers replace human fighters, could be operational by the 2030s

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The US Air Force have worked with Ghost Robotics to create semi-autonomous robot dogs that will be used for enhanced security patrolling operations. An NCO at the Security Forces Electronic Security Sensor System will give the robotic dogs a patrol path and monitor their movements using virtual reality.

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University of Liverpool researchers have built an intelligent mobile robot scientist that works for 21.5 hours/day (with time off to recharge), carrying out experiments on its own, while thinking in 10 dimensions, and making its own decisions about what chemistry experiments to perform next. (The robot has already discovered a new catalyst.)

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French company Capsix Robotics and University of Plymouth researchers have both created robots that can give personalised massages. The Capsix model has a robotic arm with sensors and a camera that allow it to adapt to the individual user’s body shape. It has been programmed with a range of massage protocols developed by physiotherapists.

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The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is quietly developing armed robot submarines controlled by onboard AI. The vessels could potentially kill without explicit human control.

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A smart garbage can can roll itself out to the curb on the appropriate day, once logistical issues, such as its docking station, have been resolved.

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Left Hand Robotics makes an autonomous mobile robot for cutting grass on large fields, such as baseball diamonds, and that transforms into a snow clearing robot in the winter.

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Robot priests are delivering sermons (Buddhist, Japan), performing rituals (Hindu, India), giving blessings (Protestant, Germany), and quoting the Bible (Catholic, Italy). In the Middle Ages, Christians designed automata to perform the mysteries of Easter and Christmas.

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Researchers at Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a card-playing bot (‘Pluribus’) capable of defeating some of the world’s best players at six-person no-limit Texas hold’em poker. When pitted against professional human opponents with real money involved, Pluribus managed to collect winnings at an astounding rate of $1,000 per hour. Details were published in Science.

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iRobot has used its new design, software, and data science strategies to let iRobot’s new vacuum tag-team with the company’s latest robot mop to clean a room. When Roomba finishes a vacuum job, it notifies Braava to start mopping. The two robots share maps of the home.

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Japanese Mira Robotics will have a low-cost robot in 2020, able to carry out a variety of household tasks, including cleaning, cooking, emptying a washing machine, and folding clothes. The robot will be controlled remotely by a human, who could be located anywhere. The current version moves slowly and, instead of humanlike hands, is equipped with a pair of robotic pincers with limited capability.

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In Christchurch, New Zealand, a team of roboticists at Invert Robotics has commercialized an inspection robot that uses tiny suction cups on a series of treads and a specialty chemical to create a technology that has robots literally climbing the walls. In Pittsburgh, USA, Gecko Robotics  has a wall-climbing inspection robot using high-powered magnets. Plant inspections in the food, chemicals and aviation industries are dangerous, and robots can improve quality assurance while eliminating the danger.

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First “1 cent per kWh” deals for solar and wind signed; Solar and wind will reach >15 percent of US electricity, and begin to drive all growth; It will be cheaper to build new solar/wind/batteries than to run on existing coal; ICE car sales have now peaked, and all car sales growth will be electric; New storage technologies will displace Li-ion batteries for tomorrow’s most demanding applications.

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Google’s AI can now translate your speech while keeping your voice. The new system, the Translatotron, has 3 components: 1. Uses a neural network trained to map the audio spectrogram in the input language to the output language. 2. Converts the spectrogram into an audio wave. 3. Layers the speaker’s voiceprint into the final audio output.

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Japanese security company, Secom, and multiple ventures have created a life-sized, artificially intelligent guards, in either male or female form, that appear on a large stationary mirror that can be placed in a building’s entry way. The guards can scan visitors, looking for suspicious items or signs that the person is trying to conceal their identity, or serve as receptionists, or provide emergency services. Anything the virtual guards “see” is monitored by a human guard.

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UK-based company Service Robots has droids for hire or purchase, and one of those is a photographer robot called Eva. The humanoid robot uses facial recognition technology to identify people before asking them if they would like to have their picture taken.

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Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a robotic system that can detect if an object is paper, metal, or plastic. The system includes a soft Teflon hand that uses tactile sensors on its fingertips to detect an object’s size and stiffness. The system was found to be 85% accurate at detecting materials when stationary, and 63% on a simulated conveyer belt.

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Barclays Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, enterprise blockchain firm R3, and others have completed a successful blockchain trial. The trial used test data to carry out simulated property transactions over a distributed ledger system over a 5-day period. This demonstrated that real estate buying and selling could be reduced from >3 months to <3 weeks.

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As part of the UK Land Registry’s Digital Street R&D project, Mishcon de Reya has successfully completed the UK’s first digitized end-to-end residential property transaction. The project is looking at ways of improving the home buying process in the future.

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The world’s first robot designed to carry out unbiased job interviews is being tested by Swedish recruiters. Tengai is the brainchild of Stockholm’s Furhat Robotics. Measuring 16in tall and weighing 7.7lbs, the head sits on a table across from the candidate. The goal is to offer job interviews that are free from any of the unconscious biases that managers and recruiters can often bring to the hiring process.

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A new study from ETH Zurich, Switzerland demonstrated that people learned new rowing skills faster when a robot taught them how to do it using behavior feedback. This simple concept could also be applied to other examples of motor learning.

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India just swore in its first robotic police officer (‘KP-Bot). The animatronic-looking machine was granted the rank of sub-inspector and will operate the front desk of Thiruvananthapuram police headquarters.

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The iPal from China’s AvatarMind Robot Technology is a $2,500 child-sized humanoid robot with a round head, expressive face and articulated fingers, which can keep children engaged and entertained. iPal talks, dances, plays games, reads stories and plugs into social media and the internet, adapting to a child’s likes and dislikes.

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iRobot, the manufacturer of Roomba, will introduce the Terra, a robotic lawn mower, in 2019 in Germany and the US. You set boundaries with wireless beacons, and drive Terra around the perimeter once. Terra will operate on a schedule with mowing parameters, and will return to a charging base whenever necessary.

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The mixologist at the Tipsy Robot in Las Vegas is a two-armed robot, able to shake, stir, muddle and garnish, that makes <120 cocktails an hour.

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Japan’s education ministry will deploy 500 English-speaking robots to the country’s schools from next year, with the aim of improving students’ English-speaking skills.

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Clothes and shoe designers are sketching on high-resolution tablets, and emailing 3-D renderings straight to factories. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to get to store shelves from a year to six months or less.

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Shudu is the world’s first digital super-model. There are an increasing number of digital fashion models. Some have millions of Instagram followers — and brands and retailers are starting to show interest.

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Australian data security company Secure Logic is launching a blockchain solution to support the digitisation of government services, including motor registration, birth and death certificates, medical records, and property titles. New South Wales is using the platform in its trial of a digital drivers licence.

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Under a New South Wales state government directive, applying to the start of the 2019 financial year, all mainstream property transactions must be lodged electronically using a blockchain-based eConveyancing system, and all paper-based Certificates of Title will be cancelled.

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Robotic concierge roam through hotels, hospitals and casinos, giving directions, serving snacks and beverages, using the elevator, and performing bellhop duties. The machines are fully automatic, using digital mapping to travel to and from rooms at 3 mph. Singapore manufacturer Techmatics has robots in casinos and hospitals at over 100 venues. Santa-Clara technology company Savioke has robots in >70 hotels across the world.

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MIT researchers have created a tool that automatically generates product design options for designers who work with computer-aided drafting software. The tool can optimize a design for any object, based on a combination of metrics, and can then create dozens of design options, each tuned to different optimal efficiencies.

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Walmart is rolling out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots made by San Diego start-up Brain Corp. in some U.S. stores by the end of January 2019. The autonomous janitors can clean floors on their own even when customers are around. Initially the machines are operated by humans, who “teach” the layout of the space that needs cleaning. The robots already scrub floors at 4 U.S. airports.

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A drone, created by Aerones, a San Francisco company, can wash skyscraper windows 20 times quicker than manual cleaners. It can also extinguish fires, and will be in operation in 2019. Weighing about 200 lb, it is tethered to the ground with a hose supplying water and electricity.

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The US military is pumping $12 billion a year into a race to develop planes, helicopters, and drones that can fly without a human pilot. There are three main benefits to unmanned aircraft: they take people out of danger, they don’t have the size and speed constraints necessary to accommodate a human pilot, and they promise to be better than humans in combat. An autonomous helicopter could deliver food and supplies to troops, for example, and an autonomous drone could map out unknown enemy terrain. The trouble is it’s also much easier for adversaries to capture and reverse engineer these technologies, then modify them to make autonomous weapons. The United Nations is now considering a ban on such weapon systems, but the US, China, and Russia have yet to sign on. As the Pentagon continues to fuel autonomous technology development, unresolved ethical questions loom overhead.

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The British Army is testing out over 70 new technologies, including unmanned vehicles and surveillance drones, in a four-week experiment on one of its biggest training grounds.

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Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new technique to quickly teach robots novel traversal behaviors with minimal human oversight.

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Researchers want robots to help elderly people with everything from staying active to remembering their medications, and to do so with a sense of cultural norms.

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Stanford researchers are designing a social robot that can manoeuver closely around humans, operating as a generalized personal helpers: delivering packages, cleaning house, and grabbing a snack from the fridge.

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A team of researchers from 3 German universities plan to develop a new social robot, specially designed to generate likeability and social resonance. Their goal is to create a vibrant character who appears fond of people.

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Researchers from Georgia Tech are working on a robot that can help a person get dressed. So far, it can successfully thread one sleeve of a dressing gown onto a person’s arm.

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Sephora lets retail customers personalize their shopping experience by trying on makeup virtually using AR, matching their skin tone to a foundation with AI, and to try on thousands of shades of lipstick, eyeshadow, false lashes, and other makeup.

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A brief review of how police departments are using technology: self-guided drones to investigate alerts from gunshot-detecting sensors; tattoo recognition; Bodycam data; Red Light recorder data; etc.

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A Ford patent describes an autonomous police vehicle that uses sensors to identify traffic violators and give out tickets. Dubai plans for robot police officers to make up a quarter of its police force by 2030.

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Trash-sorting robots are being used in recycling plants, using cameras to recognize specific objects, and robotic arms with suction cups or oversized tongs to flick them into bins of different materials. The robots are already just as accurate as human workers, and up to twice as fast.

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A new report from MarketsandMarket predicts the market share for utility drones to grow from US$110.2 million (2018) to $538.6 million in 2023, due to increased demand in hazardous work conditions.

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In a Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh lab, a robot arm lifts a bottle filled with chemical reagents and carries it over a bank of test tubes, dispensing a precise number of drops into each one, and carrying out multiple tests. Soon, machines won’t just run the experiments—they’ll devise them, too. AI software designed to identify and sort patterns has been deployed across a wide swath of science, from marine biology to astronomy.

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Researchers from Boulder, Denver and Boston have partnered to design autonomous teams of drones that can explore underground environments like subway tunnels, mines and caves, for 2-3 hours. Completion date is late 2021. Flying and rolling drones willo work together to search through dark and dangerous environments to find human survivors of earthquakes, chemical spills and more.

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Tactical Robotics’ Cormorant drone can be deployed for a wide range of military, industrial, and civilian rescue and evacuation applications. The unmanned Cormorant is a compact, single-engine VTOL aircraft. Internal lift rotors allow the drone to land and take off in a large SUV-sized horizontal surface.

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Hacking is the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise, costing the global economy $450 billion in 2016. Applying blockchain technology to various encryption, cybersecurity, and digital identification activities could help end many hacking schemes. Illinois is piloting a blockchain-based system for recording birth certificates. 63% of other US States are considering how to implement blockchain.

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The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC is using interactive 4-foot-tall humanoid robots, created by Softbank, which donated 30 robots to the museum in 2017. Pepper is programmed to answer commonly-asked questions, and tell stories. The robot can react and make gestures and is equipped with an interactive touchscreen.

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FaceBook is handling nearly 6 billion translations per day, and aims to translate each post into the reader’s language. It has recently added 24 new languages to its automatic translation services; now able to handle a total of 4,504 language pairings.

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Virtual Reality (VR) is changing travel. There are 360-degree cameras, capturing absolutely everything, and producing photos and videos that a visitor can immerse themselves in. VR helps consumers ‘try before you buy.’ Destinations compete with resorts and other destinations that are providing potential customers with in-depth, immersive looks into what it’s like to stay there.

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A team of international researchers from Nevada, Zurich, California, Berkeley, and Lausanne are developing robotic solutions in subterranean deployments, with a system of walking and flying robots, equipped with multi-modal perception systems, navigation and mapping autonomy, and self-organized networked communications that enable navigation, exploration, mapping, and object search in complex underground settings.

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Researchers at Rutgers University have developed a smart gel that can be 3D-printed into a variety of shapes, and electrically-activated to make it “walk” underwater, grab and move objects.

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Ukrainian officials indicate they are planning to use armed ground robots in their conflict against Russian-backed forces next year. The experimental Phantom can have treads like a tank or six wheels, and be armed with anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers or machine guns. It can travel at <37 mph, going 81 miles on one engine charge. It can also be used to evacuate wounded soldiers from the field. Both Russia and the US are developing soldier robots.

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Panasonic has unveiled a robot refrigerator that will come from the kitchen to your living area when called. Besides supplying needs for the elderly and disabled (and couch potatoes), the robot can keep track of supplies and link to automated ordering.

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U of Antwerp researchers has developed a robotic arm ‘Aslan’ which is a sign language interpreter. The arm is connected to the network, and users can send a text message, and it will start signing. Aslan is made up of 25 plastic 3D-printed parts, 16 servo motors, 3 motor controllers, and an Arduino Due microcomputer. The manufacturing is being handled through a global 3D printing network called 3D Hubs, which is designed to ensure the robot can be built anywhere.

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The Marine Corps uses a battle-proven hand-tossed flying robot for local surveillance. Raven can fly at speeds of <50 mph with a range of <6 miles, feeding video back to the operator. It is bulky and costs $30,000. Its potential replacement is a 3D-printed drone, Scout, that uses an open-source flight controller, and open-source software for waypoint navigation. Its only payload right now is a camera. Its current range is <2 miles, with speeds of <50 mph for <20 minutes. Its assembly time is 3 minutes, and it only costs $615.

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Debuting in September after a year of R&D, quad-copters will fly above the greenish-blue water of the Gold Coast, relaying video to image-recognition technology that determines if the footage is of sharks. The drone sounds an alarm and can drop a four-person life raft and communication device to enable swimmers to call for help. Shark-spotting is only about 18% accurate from a helicopter, and 12% from an airplane, while the drones achieve 90% accuracy.

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Japan’s electronics manufacturer Panasonic offers a hair-washing robot with 24 fingers to massage the user’s scalp and washing arms to spray water and shampoo.

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Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Stanford University have made a soft robot that can navigate its environment by inflatable growth. It unfurls from a single immobile foot, driven by a battery-powered air mattress pump and directed by a camera at its top, as a flexible pipe that can grow to 74m and can lift 150lb. It can be used to pump air to a trapped earthquake survivor, or as a radio antenna, or to free a trapped body.

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The Local Government Association of Queensland has announced a live trial of drone technology to be used for disaster management, with drones flying beyond visual line of sight. The drones would survey terrain and bridges in disaster zones in real time, and would drop medical supplies. They are also testing drones in police chases, as drones can be launched from police vehicles within seconds, and at a far lower cost than helicopters.

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When a facial reconstruction of a deceased is necessary for an open casket. a Chinese funeral home’s 3D printer can build a complete facial mold in half a day. It would take up to a week for undertakers and mortuary cosmetologists to complete facial reconstructions with plaster and plastic cement.

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A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for use in site surveying, security and other industrial applications in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace.

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Cobalt introduced a mobile security robot, whose main job is patrolling a building watching for any unusual activity, and reporting anything suspicious to the appropriate authorities. If it detects anything unexpected, then an offsite employee can use it as a telepresence robot to manage the situation without putting themselves in a potentially dangerous situation. The robot has >60 sensors, and the computational power to handle machine learning algorithms.

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Ripcord, a new company backed in part by Steve Wozniak, has patented and built robots to automate document storage. The robots can handle mixed content from business cards to legal-sized sheets, from rice paper to cardstock, without changing anything. It even removes staples. A box full of mixed records can be scanned at >600 dpi and sorted into an Amazon-hosted cloud database within hours.

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UK biomimetic engineering startup Animal Dynamics is building a microdrone with wings inspired by the flapping flight of a dragonfly. The project started in June 2015 and is being funded with £1.5 million from the UK Ministry of Defence. The company is confident they’ll have a flying prototype of their Skeeter drone by this summer — with the tech potentially deployed in the field by the end of 2018.

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With 4 nimble legs, Ghost Robotics’ Minitaur small robot can climb a snowy hill, use sensors to check under a car for explosives, climb fences, and jump to open doors. Minitaur will be used by the military and for search and rescue.

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