The cultivation and production of food are what allowed humans to progress from tribes of hunters/gatherers to be able to develop settlements and cities. Planting, growing, harvesting, and preparing food is the basis of our modern civilizations. Now our abilities to do all of these tasks have progressed so far that many of these steps can be done by robots and machines. So what does the future of robotics look like when it intersects with food production? We take a look at the three main areas in which robots are interacting with the process: During the farming stage, during the processing stage, and during the cooking and serving stage.
When it comes to farming and growing our crops, huge advancements in both hardware and software technologies have allowed farmers to use more and more autonomous machines. Companies like John Deere have developed tractors that run without human involvement, using GPS, camera technology, and myriad sensors to help them tend to each individual plant in their field, from planting to fertilizing to harvesting. This allows farmers to get more done with less manpower.
When it comes to food processing, using machines and automated robots is nothing new. Many of us have seen footage on all sorts of food plants where various machines work to process and package everything from fruit to cake. Breakthroughs in technology have allowed autonomous machines to move beyond simple packaging to being able to individually process complex items like removing bones from fish fillets using various sensors and cameras, and then removing the bones with a water jet spray — all in a manner of seconds.
But what about food cooking and serving? Humans still play the biggest role in the preparation and serving of food. Cooking requires a huge amount of nuance, dexterity, and learning, and while robots aren’t quite up to speed with dealing with the complexities of cooking, they are making quite the leap forward. There are machines that can cook omelets, make stir fry, flip burgers, and more, using advanced sensors, cameras, temperature gauges, and machine learning.
The idea in all of this is not to replace human workers but to make the process more efficient and cost-effective. By allowing robots and automated machines to work alongside us at every step of the process can result in making food cheaper, healthier, and more accessible to everyone.
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.