Roboticists could learn a thing or two from insects if they're looking to build tiny AI machines capable of moving, planning, and cooperating with one another.
The six-legged creatures are the largest and most diverse multi-cellular organisms on Earth. They have evolved to live in all sorts of environments and exhibit different types of behaviors to survive and there are insects that fly, crawl, and swim.
Insects are surprisingly intelligent and energy efficient given the size of their small brains and bodies. These are traits that small simple robots should have if they are to be useful in the real world, a group of researchers posited in a paper published in Science Robotics on Wednesday.
"We argue that inspiration from insect intelligence represents an important alternative route to achieving artificial intelligence in small, mobile robots," they wrote. "If we succeed in harnessing insect-inspired AI, small robots will be able to tackle difficult tasks while staying within their limited computational and memory budget."
Roboticists are already building bug-like bots. Guido de Croon, first author of the study and a professor at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft University in the Netherlands, helped develop a swarm of tiny drones designed to detect gas leaks in buildings. Elsewhere, researchers at the University of Washington in the US built the first wireless flying robot, complete with a pair of wings, not much heavier than a toothpick yet capable of taking off and landing.
They may not be so impressive compared to larger, more complex machines, but their tiny size and simple electronics make them cheap and potentially useful for applications such as search and rescue, surveillance, or even pollination. Significant challenges remain in building these machines, however, even with the advance of newfangled AI algorithms that have advanced computer vision, planning, and navigation due to hardware and size constraints.
"Many deep neural networks that are being developed in AI are in principle interesting but will not be able to run on small robots yet," de Croon told us.
"For example, there are neural networks that estimate visual motion or recognize objects. Embedded computers made for running deep neural networks are typically on the heavy side and quite power consuming." Even the smallest GPUs, designed for embedded electronics and capable of running these AI models, are right now too heavy and power hungry for small flying robots that have to be as light as possible.
"While a popular embedded processor for deep nets, the Nvidia TX 2 weighs 85 grams and consumes 7.5 Watts. Honestly, even for slightly larger and heavier drones, the relative weight and power of deep net processors should go down," he added.
There are hardware alternatives de Croon and his colleagues believe are promising – microcontrollers and other chips for tiny embedded systems are gaining the necessary oomph for performing ML tasks – while more futuristic neuromorphic processors are better suited to running machine learning algorithms more efficiently.
Intel's neuromorphic chip, Loihi, for example, powered a spiking neural network model to control a flying robot. The end goal, however, isn't necessarily running today's complex software on new hardware, the researchers argued. Real progress will come in developing novel algorithms and models capable of running on energy-efficient hardware incorporated in machines that can replicate insect intelligence.
"The main property of insect intelligence is its parsimony, that is, the way in which insects use minimalistic yet robust solutions to achieve successful behavior in complex, dynamic, and sometimes hostile environments," according to the paper.
De Croon told The Register it was "important to read the biological studies by entomologists" to find inspiration. "Interestingly, though, it is not a one-way street: When trying to design robotic systems for performing tasks done by insects, we often run into problems that are not always evident when directly studying the animals. This in turn may lead to novel insights in biology, that can then be studied by working together with entomologists," he said.
When trying to mimic the motion of fruit flies in one experiment, his team was able to study the mechanism of how they flapped their wings during escape maneuvers.
Mimicking insects mechanically will also advance other areas of robotics. "Insect-like intelligence is relevant also to many other types of robots, as it brings robustness while taking as little resources as possible," he concluded. ®
Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?
But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.
Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.
QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.
The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.
The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.
A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.
In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence."
A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.
"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."
And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.
Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.
It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election.
A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.
The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.
A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.
The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.
It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.
Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.
Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.
The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.
The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.
In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk.
"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.
Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.
"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."
The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.
Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.
The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.
The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.
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