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Autonomy

Autonomy is where code meets the physical world—machines that perceive, reason, and act without people directing them. From vision-language robots and multi-agent goal inference to the power systems driving giant LLMs, this category tracks the breakthroughs, pitfalls, and engineering craft behind giving systems the judgment to work safely and independently alongside us.

Robot Bees and other Little Robots

Researchers in China are crafting cyborg bees by fitting them with incredibly thin neural implants (article: Design of flight control system for honeybee based on EEG stimulation). The story isn’t that biology replaces electronics; it’s that biology supplies free actuation, sensing, and ultra low power computation that we can piggyback on with just enough silicon […] read more

Robot Vision (and action)!

Hello Gemini Robotics! Google surprised me a couple weeks ago with some cool tech. I’m watching carefully for the events that get AI into hardware and Vision Language Action has a lot of promise in creating more general and adaptable robots. It’s a good name — intelligence that integrates vision, language, and action—allowing robots to […] read more

robots

Robots and Chatbots

Before ChatGPT, human looking robotics defined AI in the public imagination. That might be true again in the near future. With AI models online, it’s awesome to have AI automate our writing and art, but we still have to wash the dishes and chop the firewood. That may change soon. AI is finding bodies fast […] read more

Power and AI

The Growing Power Needs for Large Language Models In 2024, AI is awesome, empowering and available to everyone. Unfortunately, while AI is free to consumers, these models are expensive to train and operate at scale. Training them is expected to be the most expensive thing ever. Yes, more than the Manhattan project, pyramids and the […] read more

Autonomy

I lead autonomy at Boeing. What exactly do I do? We engineers have kidnapped a word that doesn’t belong to us. Autonomy is not a tech word, it’s the ability to act independently. It’s freedom that we design in and give to machines. It’s also a bit more. Autonomy is the ability to make decisions […] read more