The Karlovy Lazne Music Club in Prague has a new employee — a robot DJ that gets the crowd jumping at the popular five-story nightclub, according to a report from Reuters. The robot uses software to help it select songs, scratches records, and even dances along to the beat.
“Kuka,” which is also the company that manufactured the robotic arm, began life as an automotive industry robot, and ended up with the record-spinner gig after the club issued a challenge to a robotics firm.
Club manager Adam Lipsansky said the unique attraction draws customers in. “People are excited (about the robot), because they haven’t seen anything like this around Europe, and I am not sure if there is something similar in the world,” he said.
The robot keeps the party going with its human programmer as they swap out hourly shifts. Lipansky admits that the robot’s people skills may be a bit lacking. “He knows everything like a human DJ. He is only unable to react to people, to how they are behaving,” he said.
As to Lipinsky’s claim about the MC mech, this is hardly the first time that robots have served DJ duty in clubs. In fact, a Ford Fiesta commercial from 2016 showcased the very premise of a professional DJ trying to teach an automotive assembly robot how to perform.
The versatile Kuka robotic arms can be programmed for a variety of tasks, which you can see in the Nigel Stanford-robot musical collaboration Automatica. They’ve even partnered with an amusement park ride maker to create RoboCoaster, and a Kuka robot performed at the Paralympics Opening Ceremony in Rio in 2016.
We’ve already got robot baristas, robot bartenders, and even robot dancers. Why not robot DJs? The reviews are mixed among Czech partiers.
“The robot is very good,” said a student named Sebastian. “I like it very much.”
On the other hand, some clubgoers found the experience too … robotic. “I don’t like the robot. It can’t feel what the people want to dance to,” said Marcia Lopes, 24. “There is no emotion behind the music. When there is a real person, they know, what fun is like.”
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.