Intrinsic revealed Intrinsic Flowstate on Monday, which it describes as “an intuitive, web-based developer environment to build robotic applications from concept to deployment.” You can watch Intrinsic’s product keynote, which explains more about Flowstate, right here.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts seems it’s going to be busy as hell trying to give Beast Wars stans what they want, but this new clip of the Autobots and Maximals squaring off in the jungle could honestly be the whole movie, and it’d be incredible.
Amazon’s Astro is now $1,599 and still requires an invite; the company originally said it’d go from $999 to $1,449 once the invite-only period was over.
But hey, act now and you can get it for the low, low price of $66.67 a month for 24 months! Sigh. Here’s our Astro review.
A startup named Figure has come out of stealth and is promising to build a humanoid similar to the much-hyped Tesla Bot.
IEEE Spectrum has a great write-up which notes that a) the company has a lot of impressive engineering talent onboard, but b) hasn’t shown off any hardware yet, just renders.
Still: it’s another serious effort which suggests we’re getting closer, however slowly, to a genuine general purpose robot.
This is, to me, a perfect Lego video — just a person putting bricks together to make a fun and clever idea, then showing it in action.
PS: if anyone wants to take this concept and slow it down to make a clock, that would be extremely cool.
Boston Dynamics is best know for Spot and Atlas, but don’t forget the company also sells Stretch — a machine does what we think of as “proper work,” aka moving boxes in warehouses.
The latest video from the company highlights Stretch’s appeal, which is less about backflips and more about boring things like safety and usability. Trust me, this is the real scary stuff.
Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robots have come a long way, but if they can’t turn everything and anything into a jump shot or dunk, then they still have a long way to go.
M3gan is even more ridiculous than the trailers let on, but it’s also a surprisingly solid horror comedy.
It’s not quite as proficient as that one drumming mascot, but it’s still fun to watch this Xiaomi robot play some beats. Now somebody teach it some rudiments.
Just in case you missed Elon Musk’s “show and tell” about brain-computer interfaces last night, we have the key details for you, viewable in less than 15 minutes.
If the video isn’t for you, Verge science editor Mary Beth Griggs can break it all down here.
During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.
NASA and the European Space Agency are developing a plan to bring interplanetary rock samples — already collected by the Perseverance rover — from Mars back to Earth by 2033.
Watch as Lizzie Philip explains the plan, as it exists so far, for the Mars Sample Return Mission.
The overprotective android horror flick M3gan (stands for Model 3 Generative Android) has a new release date. Charles Pulliam-Moore described its trailer as “serving Small Wonder with a side of murder” — you can watch it right here and judge for yourself.
It was originally scheduled for release on January 13th, but now Deadline reports it’s moved up a week.
The company’s latest dance video shows Spot and Atlas dancing to a 2021 BTS single. It’s interesting to see Boston Dynamic’s robots given the livery of parent company Hyundai, and with the BTS lads getting conscripted, perhaps the robots will take their place? At least it’d be an ethical use-case for AI in war.
Vaskange is an artist that uses the Endless Paper app to create lovely little worlds of “infinite” depth. Here’s just one example.
Ring ring. Hello, who’s there? Feelings.
A guy called David Bowen apparently. His bizarre installation grants a philodendron the ability to control a robotic arm, using an open source microcontroller that reads resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. These signals are then mapped in real-time to the movements of the industrial robot’s joints, allowing it to swing around a machete. A mean, green, slicing machine if you will.
Sure, it walked across that stage like I do when I fell asleep at an odd angle, and my back is feeling tight, but it walked!
