SHOW NOTES
Podcast Recorded on January 6th, 2024 (YMMV)
HOSTS
AB – Andrew Ballard
Spatial AI Specialist at Leidos.
Robotics & AI defence research.
Creator of SPAITIAL
Helena Merschdorf
Marketing/branding at Tales Consulting.
Undertaking her PhD in Geoinformatics & GIScience.
Mirek Burkon
CEO at Phantom Cybernetics.
Creator of Augmented Robotality AR-OS.
Violet Whitney
Adj. Prof. at U.Mich
Spatial AI insights on Medium.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.
William Martin
Director of AI at Consensys
Adj. Prof. at Columbia.
Co-founder of Spatial Pixel.
FAST FIVE – Spatial AI News of the Week
From Violet:
Assisting you through the process of riding in an Uber
How could the Humane device alert you with time sensitive information about your Uber, and provide updates on your ride while you’re in transit?
https://michaelmofina.com/blog/humane-concept-04-riding-an-uber
From Helena:
Perplexity.ai
You need answers, and you need them now. But sometimes, you need more than a quick search can offer. Enter Perplexity Copilot, your new digital assistant for in-depth answers.
Powered by the most powerful AI models like GPT-4 and Claude 2, Copilot is in a league of its own. Unlike basic search engines that shoot back quick answers, Copilot chats with you. It asks. It listens. It refines its search based on what you really want. The result? Spot-on answers, virtually every time.
From Mirek:
Mobile ALOHA – a ‘low cost’ robot that mimics human motions
Imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown impressive performance in robotics. However, most results focus on table-top manipulation, lacking the mobility and dexterity necessary for generally useful tasks. In this work, we develop a system for imitating mobile manipulation tasks that are bimanual and require whole-body control. We first present Mobile ALOHA, a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection.
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
From AB:
Twinkly lights map your tree in 3D for amazing off-the-shelf hackery
Two years ago, Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame, released a video where he hacked together a way to map all 500 lights on his Christmas tree into a 3D mesh – then invited people to submit their own patterns/lighting designs to try out on his own Christmas tree. The results ranged from meh to simply stunning patterns.
- Part One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlpIojusBE&ab_channel=Stand-upMaths
- Part Two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMRJf6B5Q4&ab_channel=Stand-upMaths
- GitHub Project page: https://github.com/standupmaths/xmastree2021
BUT in 2023, a company called Twinkly (https://twinkly.com/en-au) has brought out an off-the-shelf product that replicates all that Matt Parker and the YouTube community made, and wrapped it up into a brilliant iOS app. It’s pretty amazing – it not only lets you map your lights in 2D AND in 3D, but it also lets you gang up multiple sets together, and map then all as one large set.
This means that you can just roll out your lights however you want to / however you’re able, and let the app figure out the spread of lights, and make some truly amazing light patterns.
My wife, Beck, and I bought one set of 200 lights… and had so much fun we kinda had to go back for two more sets. So in the show notes I’ll put links to some quick videos of the final product.
Needless to say, Christmas 2024 will be a VERY Twinkly Christmas at the Ballard house.
Our lights in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i-Zbs1HCNc&ab_channel=AndrewBallard
From William:
Digit + Large Language Model = Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Is there a world where Digit can leverage a large language model (LLM) to expand its capabilities and better adapt to our world? We had the same question. Our innovation team developed this interactive demo to show how LLMs could make our robots more versatile and faster to deploy. The demo enables people to talk to Digit in natural language and ask it to do tasks, giving a glimpse at the future.
To absent friends.
