Smart Walking Stick for Visually Impaired People JANUARY 30TH, 2023  CONN HASTINGS Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed a smart walking stick that can assist blind or visually impaired people to navigate their environment, from grocery shopping to finding a seat in a busy café. The system employs cameras to visualize the environment and items within it, such as products in a supermarket, and uses AI to identify objects and provide guidance for the user. The stick can provide verbal and haptic prompts to help the user to move closer to a desired product on a supermarket shelf, for example. The researchers hope that the technology will assist the visually impaired in gaining more independence when performing everyday tasks. Assistive technologies are a huge deal for those who benefit from them. Empowering someone to lead a more independent life can pay dividends in terms of enhanced mental health and in freeing up healthcare and social care resources that can be used elsewhere. This latest assistive technology uses recent technological advancements in self-driving cars to help the visually impaired in performing everyday activities. “AI and computer vision are improving, and people are using them to build self-driving cars and similar inventions,” said Shivendra Agrawal, a researcher involved in the study. “But these technologies also have the potential to improve quality of life for many people.”   The stick resembles a standard cane, but also includes cameras that can employ computer vision techniques to map out the surrounding environment. The device uses AI to make sense of what it is seeing. A user can specify that the technology help them to achieve a certain task, such as finding an empty table in a restaurant. “Imagine you’re in a café,” said Agrawal. “You don’t want to sit just anywhere. You usually take a seat close to the walls to preserve your privacy, and you usually don’t like to sit face-to-face with a stranger.” So far, the researchers have tested this application in a mock café with blindfolded volunteers, and after surveying the scene with the stick, the technology calculated a route to the most suitable seat and guided the users to it.   Other applications involve identifying particular products on a supermarket shelf, allowing users to choose their shopping. “Our aim is to make this technology mature but also attract other researchers into this field of assistive robotics,” said Agrawal. “We think assistive robotics has the potential to change the world.” See a video about the technology below. News Source: https://www.medgadget.com/2023/01/smart-walking-stick-for-visually-impaired-people.html

This AI-powered ‘smart bin’ sorts recycling by itself By Euronews  with AP  •  Updated: 13/09/2022 - 17:59 Despite the best intentions, the sad reality is that only a fraction of the plastics we dutifully separate from the rest of our waste is ever truly recycled. And one of the biggest contributing factors to this state of affairs is that plastic recycling isn’t properly sorted. Take Australia, for example. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), almost half of the overall waste generated annually in the country is recycled. But in New South Wales alone, only 10 per cent of the state’s 800,000 tonnes of plastics are recycled because they are not sorted properly, according to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). "The recycling process is quite complicated. If you go to the supermarket or for the daily recycling you need to know how to properly place all the recyclable (items), like bottles or others, into the right bins. You need to know the labels, know the icons," says Dr Xu Wang, from the School of Electrical and Data Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney. With this in mind, Wang and a team of researchers from the university’s Global Big Data Technologies Centre (GBDTC) have designed a hi-tech “smart bin” that can do this sorting automatically. The device is equipped with an arsenal of advanced technology, combining artificial intelligence, robotics and machine vision. Suffice to say, this is no average wheelie bin. "This machine can classify different (types) of waste including glasses, metal cans and plastics,” says Wang. More importantly, Wang says, the bin can recognise different types of plastics including PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and HDPE (high-density polyethylene). "We combine the latest technologies including IoT (Internet of Things). We use different sensors to sense the weight, the matter, the materials. And also, we use the latest AI (artificial intelligence) technology,” says Wang. “So, you can see, we have a camera and we're running an AI algorithm to classify different types of plastics and then we use IoT and other robotics technology to sort the waste into the bins," he adds. According to a ”circular economy roadmap” the CSIRO published last year, innovations like this one could triple the number of jobs created in the waste recovery industry by encouraging the production of high-quality recycled material and the development of new markets. For now, the bin is a prototype and still needs a bit of fine-tuning, but its inventors are already thinking of its commercialisation. Ultimately, their dream is to see smart bins in shopping centres, schools, cinemas, businesses and airports. "The customers can just drop the waste and go. Easy," says Wang. New Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/09/13/this-ai-powered-smart-bin-sorts-recycling-by-itself

Meet Roxo™, the FedEx SameDay Bot® The future is knocking Roxo operates on sidewalks, bike lanes and roadsides, and is designed to be used in a three-to-five mile radius of a retailer’s location. We specifically designed Roxo for reliable, autonomous last-mile delivery that can deliver to a customer's door, including climbing the curb, traveling up the sidewalk and climbing deep terrace steps.  Further testing is being planned, targeting customer use cases like: auto parts, pizza delivery, home improvement, general merchandise and groceries. New source: https://www.fedex.com/en-us/innovation/roxo-delivery-robot.html