You’ve seen this before: a truck unloading robot that’s made up of a mobile base with an arm on it that drives up into the back of a trailer and then uses suction to grab stacked boxes and put them onto a conveyor belt. We’ve written about a couple of the companies doing this, an … | Continue reading
Many a technologist has been inspired by science fiction. Some have even built, or rebuilt, entire companies around an idea introduced in a story they read, as the founders of Second Life and Meta did, working from the metaverse as imagined by Neal Stephenson in his seminal 1992 … | Continue reading
In the past few months, we’ve seen a deepfake robocall of Joe Biden encouraging New Hampshire voters to “save your vote for the November election” and a fake endorsement of Donald Trump from Taylor Swift. It’s clear that 2024 will mark the first “AI election” in United States his … | Continue reading
Every time you use your voice to generate a message on a Samsung Galaxy mobile phone or activate a Google Home device, you’re using tools Chanwoo Kim helped develop. The former executive vice president of Samsung Research’s Global AI Centers specializes in end-to-end speech recog … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER … | Continue reading
If you ask longtime IEEE members why they have remained a member, you will get many different reasons. For me, IEEE is a community of technological professionals who help each other stay current, develop valuable professional skills, and work together to make the world a better p … | Continue reading
Diversity of thought in industrial design is crucial: If no one thinks to design a technology for multiple body types, people can get hurt. The invention of seatbelts is an oft-cited example of this phenomenon, as they were designed based on crash dummies that had traditionally m … | Continue reading
On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric Illuminating Co. This master station clock kept a very particular type of time: It used a … | Continue reading
Today, Figure is announcing an astonishing US $675 million Series B raise, which values the company at an even more astonishing $2.6 billion. Figure is one of the companies working towards a multi or general purpose (depending on who you ask) bipedal or humanoid (depending on who … | Continue reading
Sometimes extreme procrastination works in your favor. Procrastination certainly played a role in this month’s Hands On, which was 20 years in the making. So, too, did family, and place, and what meaning might be found in bringing silent circuits to life. This then is a story tha … | Continue reading
Last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), researchers introduced several technologies to fight even the sneakiest hack attacks. Engineers invented a way to detect a hacker placing a probe on the circuit board to attempt to read digital traffic in a c … | Continue reading
Diesel cars are a popular choice for those looking to buy a used vehicle in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. After all, diesel cars cost less to maintain, burn less fuel, and have a longer engine life. Although the pollutant emissions of a diesel engine are less than those of a gasol … | Continue reading
Wireless spectrum is always at a premium—if you’ve ever tried to connect to Wi-Fi in a crowded airport or stadium, you know the pain that comes from crowded spectrum use. That’s why the industry continues to tinker with ways to get the most out of available spectrum. The latest e … | Continue reading
Twenty homes scattered across Canada and the northern United States are keeping warm this winter using prototypes of the latest iteration in residential heating systems: cold climate heat pumps. Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t … | Continue reading
CMOS, the silicon logic technology behind decades and decades of smaller transistors and faster computers, is entering a new phase. CMOS uses two types of transistors in pairs to limit a circuit’s power consumption. In this new phase, “CMOS 2.0,” that part’s not going to change, … | Continue reading
Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use. Patryk Borkowski Employer: Unilever … | Continue reading
Computers have grown more and more powerful over the decades by pushing the limits of how small their electronics can get. But just how big can a computer get? Could we turn a planet into a computer, and if so, what would we do with it? In considering such questions, we go beyond … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, … | Continue reading
Jung Uck Seo, who served as 2003–2004 IEEE Region 10 director, died on 11 January at the age of 70. While working at Korea Telecom, the IEEE Life Fellow led the development of the TDX-1 digital telephone switching system. Later he worked to commercialize the code division multipl … | Continue reading
The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable energy deployment. At the heart of the problem are utility companies that refuse to purs … | Continue reading
Dina Genkina: Hi. I’m Dina Genkina for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum’s most important beeps, including AI, Change, and Robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just … | Continue reading
There are many constraints on the design of augmented reality systems. Not the least of which is that “you have to look presentable when you’re walking around,” Meta research scientist Tony Wu told engineers Tuesday at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC … | Continue reading
In an exclusive interview ahead of an invite-only event today in San Jose, Intel outlined new chip technologies it will offer its foundry customers by sharing a glimpse into its future data-center processors. The advances include more dense logic and a 16-fold increase in the con … | Continue reading
The annual IEEE STEM Summit in October brought together a record number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics enthusiasts, who shared ideas and inspired each other to continue their work with school-age children.The event for preuniversity educators, IEEE volunteer … | Continue reading
How much thought do you give to where you keep your bits? Every day we produce more data, including emails, texts, photos, and social media posts. Though much of this content is forgettable, every day we implicitly decide not to get rid of that data. We keep it somewhere, be it i … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2 … | Continue reading
Many college students participate in sports, listen to music, or play video games in their spare time, but IEEE Student Member Gerard Piccini prefers amateur radio, also known as ham radio. He’s been involved with the two-way radio communication, which uses designated frequencies … | Continue reading
A lot has happened in robotics over the last year. Everyone is wondering how AI will transform robotics, and everyone else is wondering whether humanoids are going to blow it or not, and the rest of us are busy trying not to get completely run over as things shake out however the … | Continue reading
Accurate timing is something that’s always been of interest to me. These days we rely heavily on time delivered to us over the Internet, through radio waves from GPS satellites, or broadcast stations. But I wanted a clock that would keep excellent time without relying on the outs … | Continue reading
Generative AI is today’s buzziest form of artificial intelligence, and it’s what powers chatbots like ChatGPT, Ernie, LLaMA, Claude, and Cohere—as well as image generators like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, and Midjourney. Generative AI is the branch of AI that enabl … | Continue reading
In the days before the U.S. Democratic Party’s New Hampshire primary election on 23 January, potential voters began receiving a call with AI-generated audio of a fake President Biden urging them not to vote until the general election in November. Voters in Slovakia audio posted t … | Continue reading
Odorigui is a type of Japanese cuisine in which people consume live seafood while it’s still moving, making movement part of the experience. You may have some feelings about this (I definitely do), but from a research perspective, getting into what those feelings are and what the … | Continue reading
Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you?It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. as the International Business Machin … | Continue reading
Just last month, Oslo, Norway-based 1X (formerly Halodi Robotics) announced a massive $100 million Series B, and clearly they’ve been putting the work in. A new video posted last week shows a [insert collective noun for humanoid robots here] of EVE android-ish mobile manipulators … | Continue reading
E-bikes are today a growing component of the global transition away from fossil fuels—possibly more than the car-and-truck-focused sustainability crowd appreciates. E-bikes’ rapid growth in recent years stems in part from their simple solution to the range issue that big, hulking … | Continue reading
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. If Disney’s history of storytelling has taught us anything, it’s to never underestimate the power of a great sidekick. Even though sidekicks … | Continue reading
In honor of the IEEE Foundation’s 50th anniversary, 16 February has been established as IEEE Foundation Day—a Celebration of the Heart. The theme reflects the Foundation’s vision of being the heart of IEEE’s charitable giving and philanthropy.On 16 February 1973, IEEE launched it … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 20 … | Continue reading
Samuel K. Moore Hi. I’m Samuel K. Moore for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future podcast. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum‘s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our f … | Continue reading
This is a guest post. For the other side of the argument about open-source AI, see the recent guest post “Open-Source AI Is Uniquely Dangerous.“A culture war in AI is emerging between those who believe that the development of models should be restricted or unrestricted by default … | Continue reading
It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the last decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or research perspective—for a bit over US $200, you can buy a little 27-gram, completely open source drone, and a … | Continue reading
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away 1 January 2024. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software,” published in Computer, the magazine for members of the IEEE Computer Society, which I read early i … | Continue reading
The dream of fusion power inched closer to reality in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed that a fusion reaction had produced more energy than what was required to kickstart it. According to new research, the momentary fusion feat re … | Continue reading
About a decade ago, there was a lot of excitement in the robotics world around gecko-inspired directional adhesives, which are materials that stick without being sticky using the same van der Waals forces that allow geckos to scamper around on vertical panes of glass. They were u … | Continue reading
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, approximately 15 percent of net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector. To meet global climate targets, we must devise ways to get people and goods from point A to point B without burn … | Continue reading
Volunteers are needed to serve as corporate officers, committee chairs, and members. IEEE is governed by volunteer members and depends on them for many things, including editing its publications, organizing conferences, coordinating regional and local activities, writing standard … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 20 … | Continue reading
Kingsley Fregene wants to keep people out of harm’s way—so much so that he has ordered his life around that fundamental goal. As director of technology integration at Lockheed Martin, in Grand Prairie, Texas, he leads a team that is actively pursuing breakthroughs designed to, am … | Continue reading