The Nightmare in Silicon Valley: 8 horror technologies that should scare you to death
Every night is fright night with what can happen once these scary technologies take hold in ways that you may not have imagined.
This year's conference in Santa Clara is all about empowering businesses to develop a better robotics strategy. More than 2000 attendees will mingle with industry experts. But the real draw, of course, will be the bots.
Jackrabbot (JR), developed by engineers at Stanford, is a multi-sensory platform mounted on a Segway system and powered by GPUs. JR is one of a new breed of visually intelligent, socially amicable and interactive robots. It doesn't run on highways -- its natural habitat are places filled with humans and it is designed to roam on the sidewalks of campuses, shopping malls, airports, train stations, and other general public spaces.
Impressively, JR is designed to understand humans and predict human intentions accurately as well as to learn human social conventions and basic social etiquette. For example, it has learned how to keep an appropriate distance from others, how to share resources like sidewalks, and how to take turns. It understands the ways people signal each other to coordinate movements and negotiate other spontaneous activities, like forming a line.
Caption by: Greg Nichols
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