Today’s animated assistants are more Rosie the Robot than Austin Powers fembot, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take to the runway to strut their stuff. And Wednesday afternoon at the CES Asia 2016 show in Shanghai, that’s exactly what they did.
“It seemed to be the right time for a show like this,” explained Robin Raskin, host of the show’s Robotics on the Runway event and founder of Living in Digital Times. “65 percent of the money spent on robotics development is in the Asia Pacific region. Robotics will be a $135 billion industry in three years,” she told Digital Trends.
The event featured a mixture of learning, teaching robots for kids, personal assistants, pets, and caretakers – all with painfully cute names.
“I feel like I’m on a first name basis with every robot in the world,” Raskin joked. “What, Pepper can’t come out and play? Hondo, your robotic arm isn’t working this week? Everybody who says robotics is just around the corner is dreaming a little bit.”
“Like everything else there will be an early adopter phase,” she added.
So who was at the show? Flip through the slideshow above to find out.
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.