AI & Robotics

In late 2018, in collaboration with the Central Water Commission of India, Israel Institute of Technology, and Bar-Ilan University, Google piloted a flood-predicting model in portions of Patna, India as a part of its Flood Forecasting Initiative. The company and its partners claimed the model could predict riverine floods — that is, floods from overrun riverbanks — with 75% accuracy during…

Sarcos Robotics, a startup developing robots for industrial and defense applications, today nabbed $40 million in equity financing, bringing its total venture capital raised to nearly $100 million. The company plans to use the capital to commercialize its first full-body, self-powered product — the Guardian XO — ahead of an anticipated 2021 ship date. According to a 2020 Grand View Research…

Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI today launched AllenAct, a platform intended to promote reproducible research in embodied AI with a focus on modularity and flexibility. AllenAct, which is available in beta, supports multiple training environments and algorithms with tutorials, pretrained models, and out-of-the-box real-time visualizations. Embodied AI, the AI subdomain concerning systems…