TECH CREATORS

Sophia The Robot Sophia  is a social humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on April 19, 2015 and made her first public appearance at South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in mid-March 2016 in Austin, Texas, United States. She is able to display more than 50 facial expressions. Sophia has been covered by media around the globe and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia, the robot became the first robot to receive citizenship of any country. In November 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first ever Innovation Champion, and the first non-human to be given any United Nations title. Features Cameras within Sophia's eyes combined with computer algorithms allow her to see. She can follow faces, sustain eye contact, and recognize individuals. She is able to process speech and have conversations using a na...

ASIMO THE WORLD'S MOST ADVANCE HUMANOID ROBOT Honda began developing humanoid robots in the 1980s, including several prototypes that preceded ASIMO. It was the company's goal to create a walking robot. E0 was the first bipedal (two-legged) model produced as part of the Honda E series, which was an early experimental line of self-regulating, humanoid walking robot with wireless movements created between 1986 and 1993. This was followed by the Honda P series of robots produced from 1993 through 1997. The research made on the E- and P-series led to the creation of ASIMO. Development began at Honda's Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center in Japan in 1999 and ASIMO was unveiled in October 2000. ASIMO stands 130 cm (4 ft 3 in)  tall and weighs 54 kg (119 lb). Research conducted by Honda found that the ideal height for a mobility assistant robot was between 120 cm and the height of an average adult, which is conducive to operating door knobs and light switches. ASIMO...

Google Glass may come to the aid of autistic people Google Glass  -- an eye-wearable device that made headlines in 2015 but failed in the consumer technology space -- has now rekindled the hopes of millions of people with  autism spectrum disorder  (ASD) globally, including in India. Although no official numbers are available, at least 70 million people have autism worldwide, including over 10 million in India. According to Dr Ned Sahin, Founder and CEO of Brain Power, a US-based science-driven company,  Augmented Reality  (AR)-powered wearable computers can help those with ASD gain confidence, clarity, understanding, social integration and self-sufficiency. There is no cure for autism but early diagnosis and intervention with therapies does improve the long-term outcome. "We need help. We need families and schools to support the first wave of technology for autism and special school communities. "I am open to collaboration if there is an inte...

NASA Readies to Send Probe to the Sun, Closer Than Ever Before NASA is preparing to send a probe closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft has ventured, enduring wicked heat while zooming through the solar corona to study this outermost part of the stellar atmosphere that gives rise to the solar wind. The Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car, is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with August 6 targeted as the launch date for the planned seven-year mission. It is set to fly into the Sun's corona within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the solar surface, seven times closer than any other spacecraft. "To send a probe where you haven't been before is ambitious. To send it into such brutal conditions is highly ambitious," Nicola Fox, a project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told a news conference on Friday. The previous closest pass to the Sun was by a probe called H...

ROBOTIC ARM Getting robots to do things isn't easy: usually scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language. But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger. Building off the team's past work focused on simple binary-choice activities, the new work expands the scope to multiple-choice tasks, opening up new possibilities for how human workers could manage teams of robots. By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and ...