SCIENCE BOND

Mother is a peanut-shaped robotic sensor hub that watches over you and your family. It measures how well you brush your teeth, it knows how much you drink and it watches you when you sleep.  The idea behind Mother is that you can have everything in your home constantly monitored. Affix a sensor to your door, and it's a door alarm. Put a sensor on your grandmother's pills, and it will tell you if grandma is taking her medications. Put it under your pillow, and your sleep habits get tracked. That may or may not be something you're interested in. But man, is it creepy-looking.The aptly named KeyMouse is a split keyboard that fits your hands perfectly. Move around the two keyboard halves, and it becomes a mouse. The KeyMouse folks thought of everything. It has a mouse button at your thumbs. There's a NumLock button on the left that lets you convert the letters to numbers on the right hand. There are a bunch of programmable buttons that pretty much do whatever y...

Yamaha motors  Yamaha Motors has revealed it is developing a robot designed to ride any racing motorbike at high speeds.  The Japanese company unveiled a prototype at the Tokyo Motor Show. At present it is reliant on human operators, but in time the firm plans to have the android make its own decisions about the best course and speed to achieve the best race time around a track.

By 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already learning from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her.  It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones.  Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.First as a PhD student and latterly as director of the computer vision lab at Stanford University, she has pursued the painstakingly difficult goal with an aim of ultimately creating the electronic eyes for robots and machines to see and, more importantly, understand their environment.  Half of all human brainpower goes into visual processing even though it is something we all ...

An autonomous starfish-killing robot is close to being ready for trials on the Great Barrier Reef, researchers say.  Crown-of-thorns starfish have have been described as a significant threat to coral. The Cotsbot robot, which has a vision system, is designed to seek out starfish and give them a lethal injection. After it eradicates the bulk of starfish in a given area, human divers can move in and mop up the survivors.here are no crown-of-thorns starfish in Moreton Bay but once the navigation has been refined, the robot will be unleashed on the reef. "Later this month we begin deploying the robot in the Great Barrier Reef to evaluate our state-of-the-art vision-based crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) detection system," he said. Over the next five months we plan to progressively increase the  level of autonomy the robot is allowed, leading to autonomous detection and injection of the starfish. The technology has two key components - an image recognition system and t...