Weekly Piece of Future #101
From Bionic Limbs to AI-Designed Proteins and AI Guide Glasses
Hey there, fellow future-addicts!
Welcome to this week's edition of Rushing Robotics, where we delve into groundbreaking advancements shaping the future of technology and human potential. In this issue, we spotlight a series of remarkable innovations across diverse fields, from prosthetics and robotics to agriculture and mobility.
🤯 Mind-Blowing
Discover how a bionic hand powered by brain-computer interfaces restores the sense of touch, revolutionizing prosthetics by integrating sensory feedback directly from the brain. Learn about the Romanian startup .lumen, which is transforming mobility for the visually impaired with AI-driven glasses, and catch up on Meta's ambitious plan to automate midlevel engineering roles with AI by 2025.
🔊 Industry Insights & Updates
Explore the unveiling of CASBOT 01, a full-size humanoid robot with exceptional computing power and dynamic control capabilities. Witness Zurich Airport's innovative Robobus service, the first autonomous shuttle in a European airport, and understand how NVIDIA’s NeMo Guardrails framework is enhancing AI safety and precision in various sectors.
🧬 BioTech
From ALAFIA AI’s personal supercomputer accelerating healthcare AI workflows to Nobel laureate David Baker’s AI-designed proteins offering a breakthrough in snakebite treatments, the biotech sector is brimming with revolutionary ideas. Additionally, discover the first-ever fungal battery, a sustainable energy solution for small devices.
💡 Products/Tools of the Week
We feature cutting-edge tools like Shapen for creating 3D models from text and images, GenFuse AI for no-code workflow automation, and n8n.io for versatile task automation across multiple platforms. These tools are redefining how professionals interact with technology to enhance creativity and efficiency.
🎥 Video Section
Get a glimpse of the future with AI-powered robotics demonstrations from industry leaders like CASBOT, Unitree, and LimX Dynamics, showcasing the latest advancements in humanoid robot technology.
As innovation accelerates, the line between science fiction and reality blurs. Let’s keep pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine. Stay hungry, stay futurish!
🤯 Mind-Blowing
A breakthrough in prosthetic technology allows a bionic hand to move through thought and restores touch by tapping into the brain's sensory regions. Researchers achieved this by overlapping sensory areas to create a sensation of touch that flows across the hand. The innovation combines brain stimulation with complex robotic prosthetics, providing tactile feedback through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with electrode arrays implanted in motor and sensory brain regions. Users can think to control the prosthetic limb while sensors relay touch sensations back to the brain through intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). Early trials produced only basic contact sensations, but as the technique progressed, users felt a smooth, gliding touch and could identify shapes and textures, even using the bionic arm to steady a slipping steering wheel.
Romanian startup .lumen is revolutionizing mobility for the visually impaired with its innovative glasses that incorporate self-driving technology to replicate the functions of a guide dog. Founded in 2020 by Cornel Amariei, the company seeks to offer a scalable solution to a global challenge. While guide dogs have been effective in aiding the visually impaired, their training costs amount to $0.5 billion, and only around 2,000 dogs are trained each year, leaving over 300 million visually impaired individuals worldwide without assistance. The .lumen Glasses use a haptic interface that guides the user’s head, directing them along safe pathways. Robert Gutt, the company’s Navigation Lead, explains that the glasses create a virtual 3D and semantic map of the environment, identifying streets, sidewalks, and various objects.
Mark Zuckerberg has stated that AI could soon take over the work of Meta's midlevel engineers. He revealed that Meta plans to start automating the tasks of midlevel software engineers in the coming year. "By 2025, we at Meta, along with other companies working on similar technologies, will likely have an AI capable of performing the role of a midlevel engineer, writing code and contributing to projects," Zuckerberg said. While he acknowledged that the transition might be costly initially, he believes that eventually, all the code in Meta’s apps and the AI it develops will be generated by AI.
AirFarm, a pioneering Jordanian company, has unveiled a groundbreaking approach to indoor farming by introducing inflatable modules that leverage aeroponics to accelerate crop growth and maximize efficiency. The company's micro mist aeroponic system enables water usage reductions of up to 99%, offering a solution that is both water-efficient and ideal for urban farming or water-scarce areas. The key to AirFarm’s innovation is its advanced micro mist system, which sprays nutrients directly onto plant roots in a fine mist. This allows plants to grow quickly while minimizing the use of water and other resources. AirFarm’s aeroponics uses 90% less water than hydroponics, cuts fertilizer use by 60%, and entirely eliminates pesticides. It is versatile enough to grow various crops, including leafy greens and root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots, all while maintaining sustainability.
Neura Robotics, a German company specializing in advanced sensory-equipped robots, has secured $120 million in funding. This investment will propel the development of "cognitive" robots with superior perception and information processing capabilities. Neura Robotics aims to design robots that can effectively perceive, interpret, and respond to their surroundings, using advanced sensors to see, hear, and feel touch. These sensory advancements enable the robots to collaborate safely and efficiently with humans in various industrial environments. The new funding will be directed towards enhancing these sensory features and improving the robots' ability to process and react to environmental stimuli.
🔊 Industry Insights & Updates
CASBOT has unveiled its full-size biped humanoid robot, CASBOT 01, also known by its nickname “Wednesday.” This robot features an advanced bionic design and dynamic force control technology. Standing at 1.79 meters tall and weighing 60 kilograms, CASBOT 01 is equipped with 52 degrees of freedom and boasts a computing power of 550 TOPS, allowing it to perform an impressive 550 trillion operations per second. CASBOT 01 is engineered to operate continuously for over four hours. It has a wide range of capabilities, including standing, walking, running, and jumping, as well as executing complex tasks such as organizing clothes, assembling furniture, changing light bulbs, and handling screws with precision.
Zurich Airport in Europe has recently deployed an autonomous shuttle service known as Robobus, marking a significant milestone in the application of autonomous technology at airports. Developed by the company WeRide, the Robobus is designed to accommodate up to nine passengers at a time. This initiative represents the first commercial autonomous bus shuttle project to be implemented at a European airport. The Robobus service is dedicated to transporting airport employees along a fixed route. It will connect the employee entrance at gate 101 with the maintenance area located at gate 130. WeRide has announced that the Robobus service is scheduled to begin operating in the first quarter of 2025, offering a modern and efficient solution for airport staff transportation needs.
NVIDIA has rolled out three cutting-edge NVIDIA NIM microservices designed to boost AI agents' safety, precision, and scalability, powered by the NeMo Guardrails framework. This marks a key milestone for developers aiming to create more secure and trustworthy AI applications in sectors such as automotive, healthcare, telecommunications, and retail. The newly introduced microservices address content safety, topic control, and jailbreak detection, providing developers with essential tools to reinforce AI agent frameworks. These services ensure AI agents deliver secure, context-appropriate responses while deterring jailbreak efforts. The NeMo Guardrails suite facilitates seamless management of these AI safeguards, supporting a controlled ecosystem for large language model (LLM) applications.
A Chinese company has introduced a quadruped robot capable of running 100 meters in under 10 seconds, setting new benchmarks in robotics. The Black Panther 2.0 robot dog is a product of collaboration between Zhejiang University’s humanoid innovation institute and the Hangzhou-based startup Mirror Me. As reported by a Chinese news agency, the robot's design draws inspiration from the paws and joints of jerboas and black panthers, enhancing its high-speed mobility by focusing on power, strength, adaptation, fluidity, and precision. The team aims to surpass the speed and agility of real animals with this robotic innovation.
🧬 BioTech
Healthcare applications in fields like digital pathology, neurology, genetics research, and cardiac imaging are increasingly dependent on advanced computational tools. To meet the rising demands, Florida-based ALAFIA AI has introduced AIVAS, a high-performance personal supercomputer designed to accelerate AI workflows in both clinical and research settings. AIVAS enhances tasks such as next-generation sequencing algorithms and complex imaging data processing, like PET scans, ultimately boosting accuracy and efficiency in healthcare operations. Camilo Buscaron, the founder of ALAFIA and a seasoned expert from NVIDIA and AWS, explains that AIVAS was created to address the infrastructure gap for AI in healthcare. With medical data volumes expanding rapidly, systems like AIVAS are crucial for converting data into valuable, actionable insights.
David Baker, the recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has conducted a study that seeks to revolutionize snakebite treatments. The research highlights the use of AI-designed proteins to neutralize the lethal toxins in snake venom, offering a potentially safer, more effective, and affordable solution. Collaborating with Timothy Patrick Jenkins from Denmark’s Technical University (DTU), Baker’s team focused on designing proteins that target and neutralize three-finger toxins, the deadliest components of cobra venom.
A team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) has developed an innovative battery that utilizes fungi to generate electricity. This fully biodegradable and non-toxic energy source is designed to power small devices such as temperature sensors. While previous research has explored living batteries using bacteria, this marks the first instance where scientists have created a fuel cell that draws power from two different types of fungi, showcasing a novel approach to sustainable energy generation.
💡Products/tools of the week
Browser Use integrates advanced AI capabilities with powerful browser automation to streamline web interactions for AI agents. It features Vision + HTML Extraction, combining visual recognition with HTML structure extraction for comprehensive web tasks. Multi-tab Management facilitates automatic handling of multiple tabs for complex workflows and parallel processing. Element Tracking captures clicked elements' XPaths and replicates LLM actions for consistent automation. Users can implement Custom Actions like saving to files, database operations, notifications, or human input handling. Its self-correcting feature offers intelligent error handling and automatic recovery, ensuring robust automation workflows.
Shapen, an AI-powered tool, allows users to generate 3D models from both images and text descriptions. It creates intricate images based on text prompts, fine-tunes existing visuals while preserving their overall layout, and transforms these images into 3D models for rendering, animation, or 3D printing. With its wide range of categories including characters, vehicles, architecture, and fantasy themes, Shapen is an excellent tool for designers, game developers, and 3D artists to explore innovative design variations and effortlessly bring their digital concepts into 3D form.
GenFuse AI, a no-code platform, revolutionizes workflow automation with its advanced AI agents, enabling users to create and automate complex workflows effortlessly, without any coding experience. The platform includes multi-agent capabilities, pre-built templates, and AI-driven insights, serving diverse business teams like marketing and operations. Tailored for companies of all sizes, GenFuse AI is appreciated for its intuitive design, efficiency, flexibility, and cost-efficiency, helping businesses streamline their processes, conserve time, and enhance productivity across different industries.
n8n.io offers a versatile workflow automation solution, enabling users to connect and automate tasks across numerous applications and services. With its intuitive interface, users can create complex workflows effortlessly. The platform includes over 170 native integrations and allows for custom coding to handle more sophisticated tasks. n8n.io is used to optimize business operations, unify different systems, and automate tedious tasks, helping users save time and increase efficiency in both their professional and personal activities.
