Category: Autonomous Systems

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Ingenuity on the Hunt for Records

On 19 April 2021, Ingenuity successfully performed an experiment on Mars (Photo: NASA). The little helicopter flew vertically into the air, took a selfie with its shadow, and landed safely back on the ground. There are many expectations and aspirations associated with the red planet. Its surface is currently being explored in an unprecedented way. In a few years, humans are expected to travel to Mars. According to Digital Trends, Ingenuity arrived as a technology demonstration, “with the team keen to see if such a contraption could become the first to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet” (Digital Trends, 26 September 2023). The platform reported on September 26, 2023: “Just a week after setting a new altitude record on Mars, NASA’s impressive Ingenuity helicopter has just flown faster than ever before, reaching a speed of 17.9 mph (8 meters per second) during its 60th flight. Its previous record was 15 mph (6.5 m/s) in a flight earlier this year.” (Digital Trends, 26 September 2023) It can already be said that the deployment of the small helicopter on Mars is a complete success.

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Expansion of Robocar Operations in Frisco

Robot cabs have been seen in San Francisco for years, first by Uber, then by Cruise and Waymo. But there have been various restrictions on their operation in the past. NBC BAY AREA reported on August 10, 2023: “California regulators on Thursday approved an expansion that will allow two rival robotaxi services to operate throughout San Francisco at all hours, despite safety worries spurred by recurring problems with unexpected stops and other erratic behavior that resulted in unmanned vehicles blocking traffic, including emergency vehicles.” (NBC BAY AREA, 10 August 2023) It goes on to say: “The California Public Utilities Commission voted to approve rival services from Cruise and Waymo to operate around-the-clock service. It will make San Francisco first major U.S. city with two fleets of driverless vehicles competing for passengers against ride-hailing and taxi services dependent on humans to operate the cars.” (NBC BAY AREA, 10 August 2023) It is highly likely that accidents will occur, including personal injury. A city is a highly complex environment, and the technology for autonomous driving is far from mature. In addition, the population and tourists are not sufficiently prepared for this form of traffic.

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Self-driving Cars Stopped by Fog

“Five self-driving vehicles blocked traffic early Tuesday morning in the middle of a residential street in San Francisco’s Balboa Terrace neighborhood, apparently waylaid by fog that draped the southwestern corner of the city.” (San Francisco Chronicle, 11 April 2023) The San Francisco Chronicle reported this in an article published on April 11, 2023. The fact that fog is a problem for Waymo’s vehicles has been known to the company for some time. A blog post from 2021 states: “Fog is finicky – it comes in a range of densities, it can be patchy, and can affect a vehicle’s sensors differently.” (Blog Waymo, 15 November 2021) Against this background, it is surprising that vehicles are allowed to roll through the city unaccompanied, especially since Frisco – this name comes from sailors – is very often beset by fog. But fog is not the only challenge for the sensors of self-driving cars. A thesis commissioned and supervised by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel presented dozens of phenomena and methods that can mislead sensors of self-driving cars. The San Francisco Chronicle article “Waymo says dense S.F. fog brought 5 vehicles to a halt on Balboa Terrace street” can be accessed at www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-waymo-stopped-in-street-17890821.php.

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AAAI Spring Symposia Proceedings 1992-2018

The AAAI Spring Symposia is a legendary conference that has been held since 1992. It usually takes place at Stanford University. Until 2018, the leading US artificial intelligence organization itself published the proceedings. Since 2019, each symposium is responsible for its own. Following a restructuring of the AAAI website, the proceedings can be found in a section of the new “AAAI Conference and Symposium Proceedings” page. In 2016, Stanford University hosted one of the most important gatherings on machine ethics and robot ethics ever, the symposium “Ethical and Moral Considerations in Non-Human Agents” … Contributors included Peter M. Asaro, Oliver Bendel, Joanna J. Bryson, Lily Frank, The Anh Han, and Luis Moniz Pereira. Also present was Ronald C. Arkin, one of the most important and – because of his military research – controversial machine ethicists. The 2017 and 2018 symposia were also groundbreaking for machine ethics and attracted experts from around the world. The papers can be accessed at aaai.org/aaai-publications/aaai-conference-proceedings.

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Bard Comes into the World

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced the answer to ChatGPT in a blog post dated February 6, 2023. According to him, Bard is an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA. It has been opened to trusted testers and will be made available to the public in the coming weeks. “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.” (Sundar Pichai 2023) In recent weeks, Google had come under heavy pressure from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was clear that they had to present a comparable application based on LaMDA as soon as possible. In addition, Baidu wants to launch the Ernie Bot, which means another competing product. More information via blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/.

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A CARE-MOMO for Lio

The discipline of machine ethics examines, designs, and produces moral machines. The artificial morality (aka machine morality) is usually pre-programmed by a producer or developer. However, another approach is the more flexible morality menu (MOME), an invention by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel. With this, owners or users replicate their own moral preferences and convictions onto a machine. A team at the School of Business FHNW implemented a MOME for MOBO (a certain chatbot) in 2019/2020. This project was continued in 2022. Marc Heimann developed a morality menu under the supervision of Oliver Bendel, which is part of a morality module (MOMO) for a care robot like Lio from F&P Robotics. The principle is the same as for the MOBO-MOME. With sliders, the patient can determine the behavior of the robot. This supports his or her personal autonomy and ensures his or her well-being. The results of the CARE-MOMO project will be presented to the company F&P Robotics, which accompanied the project, in October 2022.

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Chess Robot Breaks Finger of Young Opponent at the Moscow Open

According to the Guardian, a chess-playing robot, “apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, unceremoniously grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open” (Guardian, July 24, 2022). That’s a strange formulation, though, because the robot certainly wasn’t unsettled. It simply does not comply with current safety regulations and should never have been used in this form. Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, even twists things when he says: “There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait …” (Guardian, July 24, 2022) In such a setting, the robot should follow safety rules rather than the human. In chess, one is focused on the game and highly tense. One should not still have to adjust to the behavior of the cobot. Cobots are useful tools in production and logistics and also in the service area. The models from Kuka, Franka Emika, or F&P Robotics are very safe to operate. The chess robot that was used in Moscow is not at the current technical level.

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No More Drone Transports over Lake Zurich?

Swiss Post and PostBus are pioneers in the operation of robotic vehicles, robots, and drones. Swiss Post now reports the withdrawal from an project in which drones were used to transport laboratory samples: “Swiss Post drones have flown across various Swiss cities as a service for hospitals since 2017. After five years of pioneering work, the company has now decided to hand over its drone project to the Californian drone systems developer Matternet. Although the autonomous drones have attracted global interest, the current regulatory environment for unmanned aerial vehicles in Switzerland means Swiss Post is unable to use the drones widely enough or operate them at a profit. With its new strategy, the company is focusing on logistics solutions in its core business and on continuing to finance the public service for Switzerland using its own resources. This strategic decision is a logical step as part of its strategy.” (Media release Swiss Post, June 1, 2022) There were repeated problems within the project. For example, a drone once crashed into Lake Zurich. Nevertheless, the approach was generally considered innovative. It will be interesting to see whether the drone transports will be resumed one day.

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A New Language AI

“Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI’s pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers – together with details about how it was built and trained.” (MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2022) This was reported by MIT Technology Review on May 3, 2022. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to generate natural language. Not only web-based systems, but also voice assistants and social robots can be equipped with it. Amazing texts emerge, and long meaningful conversations are possible – almost like between two real people. “Meta’s move is the first time that a fully trained large language model will be made available to any researcher who wants to study it. The news has been welcomed by many concerned about the way this powerful technology is being built by small teams behind closed doors.” (MIT Technology Review, May 3, 2022)

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Dagstuhl Report on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems

On February 18, 2022, the Dagstuhl Report “Conversational Agent as Trustworthy Autonomous System (Trust-CA)” was published. Editors are Effie Lai-Chong Law, Asbjørn Følstad, Jonathan Grudin, and Björn Schuller. From the abstract: “This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 21381 ‘Conversational Agent as Trustworthy Autonomous System (Trust-CA)’. First, we present the abstracts of the talks delivered by the Seminar’s attendees. Then we report on the origin and process of our six breakout (working) groups. For each group, we describe its contributors, goals and key questions, key insights, and future research. The themes of the groups were derived from a pre-Seminar survey, which also led to a list of suggested readings for the topic of trust in conversational agents. The list is included in this report for references.” (Abstract Dagstuhl Report) The seminar, attended by scientists and experts from around the world, was held at Schloss Dagstuhl from September 19-24, 2022. The report can be downloaded via drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/15770/.