A two-armed robot is helping to prepare soba noodles at an eatery at JR Kaihimmakuhari Station in this Chiba city's Mihama Ward (in Japan), capably boiling the noodles in a strainer, rinsing them and then dipping them in iced water. From a report: The Sobaichi Perie Kaihimmakuhari eatery implemented a collaborative cooking system, with the robot cooking the food and employees adding the dipping sauce or soup and toppings. It is apparently the first time for the cooking robot to be introduced in an actual restaurant setting. Soba stands at railway stations usually have to deal with a constant stream of customers and work under time pressure, resulting in a chronic shortage of human resources. [...] The robot fetches soba noodles from a box with one arm, and places it in a strainer. Then with the other arm, it picks up the strainer and boils the noodles for a minute and 40 seconds, rinses off the viscous film on the surface and then dips the noodles in iced water to bring out their firmness. The robot can cook 150 servings in an hour, substituting the work of about one employee.

For almost 40 years, the nation's largest DDT manufacturer disposed of some of its waste product off the coast of Southern California. Now, a research boat is deploying "underwater roombas" to map the ocean floor and assess the damage. Gizmodo reports: In October, people living on Santa Catalina Island, which sits 22 miles (35 kilometers) off the coast of Southern California, were shocked to learn from a Los Angeles Times investigation that a scientist had found leaking barrels of dangerous waste strewn across the ocean floor. Residents had heard rumors that the nation's largest DDT manufacturer, which was based in Los Angeles until 1982, had disposed of some of its waste product near the island, and a huge Superfund lawsuit in 2000 had confirmed the company had disposed waste into sewers that ran into the ocean. But records unearthed by the Times confirmed that the manufacturer had filled up a ship with barrels of DDT-tainted waste and dumped it off the coast once a month for almost 40 years, something unaddressed in the Superfund lawsuit.

So how do you start cleaning up leaking barrels of toxic DDT-laced sludge? Send in the robots. A research boat staffed with a crew and two scientists set off this week on a two-week trip to assess the extent of the damage from the DDT barrels. Eric Terrill of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is spearheading the cleanup efforts, described the robots to the Los Angeles Times as "underwater Roombas," which is very cute. These little buddies are tricked out with sonar equipment that will help them collect data from the ocean floor. Suddenly your robotic vacuum is looking a little less cool. The robot's purpose isn't to vacuum, though, but to survey the area littered with barrels of potentially toxic waste. Over the next two weeks, the aquatic robotic explorers will run between 12 and 16 hours a day, mapping out the ocean floor to ascertain the barrels' location and pinpoint areas for future study.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Bloomberg: There's nothing unusual looking about the 38-foot-long cargo plane that's been flying around Northern California for the past month. But the insides of the Cessna 208 have undergone a sci-fi makeover, resulting in a plane that's been taxiing, taking off, maneuvering in the air, and landing without a pilot. The machinery and software that let it fly on its own come from a startup called Reliable Robotics Corp., which has spent four years working on autonomous flight. The company has a grand total of two planes, but its long-term plan is to fill the sky with pilotless aircraft transporting cargo and passengers.

Reliable's story begins with the self-doubt of its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Robert Rose. His attempt to become a pilot in college ended for lack of money, but by 2016 he'd earned enough to give the cockpit another shot. Rose, who'd spent his career building autonomous cars and spacecraft for Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, expected that planes would have modernized since he last hopped in a cockpit. But the one he took up had decades-old technology. The shock of how much the flight still relied on a human pilot hit Rose midair as he contemplated his rusty skills and mortality. "My first thought was, 'Wow, it's insane that a private person is allowed to do this,'" he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do between other planes and taking instructions from air traffic control. There's layers and layers of stuff. All the while, you are one mistake away from a fatal accident. I kept thinking, 'How is this OK?'"

Rose founded Reliable in 2017 with Juerg Frefel, an old buddy from SpaceX. The pair set up shop in Rose's garage in Los Altos, Calif., planning to make improved autopilot technology. They hoped to tap into the mechanical and positioning systems available on most planes, buy a couple of off-the-shelf sensors, and tie everything together with clever software that could make the types of decisions usually expected of pilots. Each step of the way, however, they discovered the existing gear for sale wasn't resilient enough for the job. "You just could not have a serious conversation about removing the human from the plane with these parts," Rose says. "That meant we had to build."

In a bid to prove that its robot drivers are safer than humans, Waymo simulated dozens of real-world fatal crashes that took place in Arizona over nearly a decade. From a report: The Google spinoff discovered that replacing either vehicle in a two-car crash with its robot-guided minivans would nearly eliminate all deaths, according to data it publicized today. The results are meant to bolster Waymo's case that autonomous vehicles operate more safely than human-driven ones. With millions of people dying in auto crashes globally every year, AV operators are increasingly leaning on this safety case to spur regulators to pass legislation allowing more fully autonomous vehicles on the road.

But that case has been difficult to prove out, thanks to the very limited number of autonomous vehicles operating on public roads today. To provide more statistical support for its argument, Waymo has turned to counterfactuals, or "what if?" scenarios, meant to showcase how its robot vehicles would react in real-world situations. Last year, the company published 6.1 million miles of driving data in 2019 and 2020, including 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions. In those incidents where its safety operators took control of the vehicle to avoid a crash, Waymo's engineers simulated what would have happened had the driver not disengaged the vehicle's self-driving system to generate a counterfactual. The company has also made some of its data available to academic researchers.

States like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin have granted sidewalk robots legal rights as "pedestrians." Axios reports: In Pennsylvania, robot "pedestrians" can weigh up to 550 pounds and drive up to 12 mph. "Opposition has largely come from pedestrian and accessibility advocates, as well as labor unions like the Teamsters," per the Pittsburgh City Paper. The laws are a boon to Amazon's Scout delivery robot and FedEx's Roxo, which are being tested in urban and suburban settings. "Backers say the laws will usher in a future where household items show up in a matter of hours, with fewer idling delivery vans blocking traffic and spewing emissions," per Wired.

Some technology evangelists think these laws are a spectacularly bad idea. The National Association of City Transportation Officials -- NACTO -- says the robots "should be severely restricted if not banned outright." "Uncoordinated autonomous delivery services could flood sidewalks with bots, making walking increasingly difficult and unpleasant," NACTO says in a report. "Drone delivery could significantly increase noise pollution and add a new dimension of chaos to urban streets."

The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."

But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."

A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance."
The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.

The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

Science magazine describes what happens when a robot writes a play: The 60-minute production — AI: When a Robot Writes a Play — tells the journey of a character (this time a robot), who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death.

The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk's company OpenAI, this "robot" is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet. (You can test it here.) So far, the technology has been used to write fake news, short stories, and poems. The play is GPT-2's first theater production, the team behind it claims...

First, a human feeds the program with a prompt. In this case, the researchers — at Charles University in Prague — began with two sentences of dialogue, where one or two characters chat about human feelings and experiences... The software then takes things from there, generating up to 1000 words of additional text.

The result is far from William Shakespeare. After a few sentences, the program starts to write things that sometimes don't follow a logical storyline, or statements that contradict other passages of the text. For example, the AI sometimes forgot the main character was a robot, not a human. "Sometimes it would change a male to female in the middle of a dialogue," says Charles University computational linguist Rudolf Rosa, who started to work on the project 2 years ago... As it keeps going, there is more room for nonsense. To prevent that, the team didn't let GPT-2 write the entire play at once. Instead, the researchers broke the show down into eight scenes, each less than 5 minutes; each scene also only contained a dialogue between two characters at the same time. In addition, the scientists sometimes changed the text, for example altering the passages where the AI changed the character's gender from line to line or repeating their initial text prompt until the program spat out sensible prose.

Rosa estimates that 90% of the final script was left untouched, whereas 10% had human intervention.
It's a thought-provoking experience. (You can watch the whole play online -- with English subtitles.) The play's first lines?

"We both know that I'm dying."
"How do you know that you're dying?"
"I will die very soon."

And within seconds, the protagonist has asked the question: "How can you love someone who dies?"

iRobot, maker of the robotic Roomba vacuums, has confirmed that a software update has been causing issues for some users of its i7 and s9 robots and that it's working on another one to prevent future issues. The catch? It might be a bit before things get sorted out, with iRobot expecting the update to roll out "over the next several weeks." From a report: According to users on Reddit and Twitter, the recent 3.12.8 firmware update has been causing navigation issues. One user described their robot cleaner as acting "drunk" after the update: spinning itself around and bumping into furniture, cleaning in strange patterns, getting stuck in an empty area, and not being able to make it home to the dock. What's more, some other users are reporting that the environment maps their Roombas made were wiped out by the update.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: MIT's CSAIL department this week showcased "LaserFactory," a new project that attempts to develop robotics, drones and other machines than can be fabricated as part of a "one-stop shop." The system is comprised of a software kit and hardware platform designed to create structures and assemble circuitry and sensors for the machine.

A more fully realized version of the project will be showcased at an event in May, but the team is pulling back the curtain a bit to show what the concept looks like in practice. Here's a breakdown from CSAIL's page: "Let's say a user has aspirations to create their own drone. They'd first design their device by placing components on it from a parts library, and then draw on circuit traces, which are the copper or aluminum lines on a printed circuit board that allow electricity to flow between electronic components. They'd then finalize the drone's geometry in the 2D editor. In this case, they'd use propellers and batteries on the canvas, wire them up to make electrical connections, and draw the perimeter to define the quadcopter's shape." For more information, CSAIL has released an accompanying video showing the machine in action. A technical paper is available here.

sciencehabit writes: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has, for more than 20 years, pioneered collecting spectra from millions of astronomical objects, from nearby stars to supermassive black holes. But this year, the survey is making a change: Instead of employing a small team of technicians for the daily chore of plugging optical fibers into preprepared plates so that -- when placed in the telescope -- they collect light from exactly the right position in the sky, the SDSS is going robotic. For the project's upcoming fifth set of surveys, plug plates are being replaced by 500 tiny robot arms, each holding fiber tips, that patrol a small area of the telescope's focal plane. They can be reconfigured for a new sky map in 2 minutes. Although such robot spectrographs have been built before, the SDSS is part of a rush to retrofit robots to older telescopes so astronomers can grab spectra from the wealth of interesting objects that will soon be streaming from new imaging surveys.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After a year of working with businesses and getting feedback, Boston Dynamics is launching a new Spot revision, a long-awaited arm attachment, and some new features. Now, with the new "Spot Arm" -- a six-degrees-of-freedom gripper that can be mounted to the front of the robot -- Spot can actually do stuff and manipulate the environment around it. Boston Dynamics' latest video shows an arm-equipped Spot opening doors, picking up laundry, dragging around a cinderblock, and flipping switches and valves. Since this is a Boston Dynamics video, there's also a ton of fun footage like three Spots playing jump rope, planting a tree, and drawing the Boston Dynamics logo with a piece of chalk. The arm is not just a siloed device on top of Spot; any arm movement is coordinated with the whole body of the robot, just as a human's arm works. Boston Dynamics pointed to a 2013 video of the (much bigger) BigDog robot heaving a cinderblock across the room. This advanced "lift with your legs, put your back into it" whole-body movement is the core of Boston Dynamics' arm locomotion.

In the palm of the gripper is a 4K color camera, a ToF (Time of Flight) sensor for depth imaging, and LEDs for light. The camera is great to not only see what you're trying to pick up but also as a movable inspection camera that offers a lot more flexibility compared to the stationary face- and back-mounted cameras. The arm weighs 17.6 lbs (8kg) and with a half-meter extension can lift 11 lbs (5kg). The gripper's peak clamp force is 130N. That's far below the average human adult grip strength of 300N and puts Spot in the range of a frail senior citizen, but it's good enough to turn a doorknob. It's especially impressive that in this video, Spot demoed opening a smooth, round doorknob, not an easier-to-open ADA-compliant door handle, which is what most robot/door interactions focus on. It can even make sure the door doesn't hit it in the butt on the way out.

Just like for regular movement, controlling the arm via the tablet uses a user-friendly "supervised autonomy" system. You tell the robot what to grab, and it will figure out how to grab it using all the joints of the arm and legs. There's even a special "door opening" mode, where the user points at the doorknob, enters which side of the door the hinge is on, and Spot will do the rest. There's also an API for the arm control, allowing developers to make their own control interface. There's also a new version of Spot called "Spot Enterprise," which features the ability to self-charge via an included charging dock, where Spot can park itself on the charging dock when it is low on power. It takes about two hours to fully charge.

Astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover floated back outside the International Space Station Monday and completed solar array battery replacement work that began four years ago. They also installed three new video cameras and made preparations for upcoming work to install new roll-out solar blankets to upgrade the lab's power system. From a report: The work took less time than expected and the astronauts were able to carry out a variety of lower-priority "get-ahead" tasks before returning to Quest airlock and calling it a day, closing out a five-hour 20-minute spacewalk. Taking one last look around before entering the airlock, Hopkins said simply, "Beautiful view." The excursion began at 7:56 a.m. EST when the two men switched their spacesuits to battery power, officially kicking off the 234th spacewalk, or EVA, devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began 23 years ago in 1998.

"OK, it's a beautiful day. Let's go for a walk outside," astronaut Bob Hines radioed from mission control in Houston. The first priority was electrically connecting a replacement battery in the station's solar power system. The batteries are critical to station operation. They are recharged by the arrays when the lab is in sunlight and then provide that stored power during periods of orbital darkness. Starting in 2017, spacewalking astronauts began work to replace all 48 of the station's original nickel-hydrogen batteries with 24 smaller, more powerful lithium ion units. During battery replacement work in March 2019, one of the new lithium ion power packs used by the station's left-side inboard set of arrays failed and was replaced with one of the older nickel hydrogen batteries that had been removed. All of the other older batteries were replaced as planned during multiple spacewalks. Over the weekend, flight controllers operating the station's robot arm by remote control disconnected the one remaining nickel hydrogen battery and robotically installed a fresh lithium ion unit. Hopkins and Glover electrically connected the battery, finally completing the power system upgrade four years after the work began.

"More than at any point since the QAnon conspiracy began, there is a tremendous opportunity to pull disaffected followers out of the conspiracy," writes FiveThirtyEight. And while it's just one of three possible scenarios, online posts suggest at least some members are abandoning the group, "but they will need support to really sever their connection."

ABC News reports that some QAnon adherents "are turning to therapy and online support groups to talk about the damage done when beliefs collide with reality," including Ceally Smith, a working single mom in Kansas City: "We as a society need to start teaching our kids to ask: Where is this information coming from? Can I trust it?" she said. "Anyone can cut and paste anything." After a year, Smith wanted out, suffocated by dark prophesies that were taking up more and more of her time, leaving her terrified....

Another ex-believer, Jitarth Jadeja, now moderates a Reddit forum called QAnon Casualties to help others like him, as well as the relatives of people still consumed by the theory. Membership has doubled in recent weeks to more than 119,000 members. Three new moderators had to be added just to keep up. "They are our friends and family," said Jadeja, of Sydney, Australia. "It's not about who is right or who is wrong. I'm here to preach empathy, for the normal people, the good people who got brainwashed by this death cult." His advice to those fleeing QAnon? Get off social media, take deep breaths, and pour that energy and internet time into local volunteering.

Michael Frink is a Mississippi computer engineer who helps administer a QAnon recovery channel on the social media platform Telegram. He said that while mocking the group has never been more popular online, it will only further alienate people. Frink said he never believed in the QAnon theory but sympathizes with those who did. "I think after the inauguration a lot of them realized they've been taken for a ride," he said.
The New York Times tells the story of one Bernie Sanders supporter who entered — and then exited — the QAnon movement: Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends... "We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club." Meanwhile, her family was eating takeout all the time since she had stopped cooking and her stress levels had shot up, causing her blood pressure medication to stop working. Her doctor, worried, doubled her dose...

When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master's degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was...

She agreed to speak for this article to help others who are still in the throes of QAnon.
And CNN reporter Anderson Cooper recently interviewed a recovering QAnon supporter, who tells him there were many theories about Cooper, including one that said he was actually a robot. The embarrassed former QAnon supporter admits that he had once believed that the people behind Q "were actually a group of 5th dimensional, intra-dimensional, extraterrestrial bi-pedal bird aliens called blue avians."

During that interview, he also tells Anderson Cooper, "I apologize for thinking that you ate babies."

Google Play's crazy automated app review process strikes again. From a report: This time, the puritan robot overlords that run the Play Store briefly decided that listing support for common subtitle files is enough to get your app banned. The developer for Just (Video) Player wrote in the app's bug tracker, "After a tiny unrelated description update, Just Player got suspended from the Google Play Store for "Sexual Content and Profanity policy". Google finds issues with following: Full description (en_US): "* Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, TTML, VTT."" Yes, just listing standard video player features like support for the "ASS" subtitle format was apparently enough to temporarily earn a suspension. The developer says they "immediately filed an appeal" and today, the app is back up with the ASS subtitle listing still in the description.

Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people. The Independent reports: The patent describes creating a bot based on the "images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages," and more personal information. "The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc," it goes on to say.

"The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot)," Microsoft also describes -- implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death. Microsoft has even included the notion of 2D or 3D models of specific people being generated via images and depth information, or video data.

The idea that you would be able, in the future, to speak to a simulation of someone who has passed on is not new. It is famously the plot of the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back," where a young woman uses a service to scrape data from her deceased partner to create a chatbot -- and eventually a robot.

MojoKid summarizes an article from Hot Hardware: Boston Dynamics made news recently when 80% of the company was acquired by Hyundai. The company's family of robots is always impressive and now it appears they're having some fun to celebrate the close of 2020. Boston Dynamics' robot dog, Spot and its humanoid-like Atlas bot friend, were joined by their oddball sibling Handle to shake their booties on the dance floor to "Do You Love Me" by The Contours.

The video starts off impressive enough with just a single Atlas showing its incredible dexterity while busting out some sweet moves that would leave even the late Patrick Swayze envious. However, as the routine progresses, the camera pulls back to show that another twin Atlas is dancing along with the first one as they show off their synchronized and fresh rug-cutting ways. As this robotic soul train continues to roll, Spot the dog saunters in to join in on the fun with the distinct flare that only rover can bring. The entire 3 minute clip is really a marvel to behold, and maybe even slightly unsettling for some that might not fully welcome our robot overlords.

schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.

Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm.

Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed to buy a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal that values the mobile robot firm at $1.1 billion. From a report: Hyundai Motor, along with some associated companies and Chairman Euisun Chung, will acquire an 80% interest in the U.S. robotics company from SoftBank Group, leaving the Japanese firm with a 20% share, the companies said in a statement Friday. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg News in November. South Korean conglomerate Hyundai Motor Group has been beefing up its research in robotics as it expands further into electric and autonomous vehicles. Carmaker Hyundai Motor plans to spend over 60 trillion won ($55 billion) in the next five years in these areas to become one of the world's leading auto manufacturers. The broader empire is also exploring practical uses for industrial robots. "The combination of the highly complementary technologies of Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics, and the continued partnership of SoftBank, will propel development and commercialization of advanced robots," the companies said, helping to create a "robotics value chain ranging from robot component manufacturing to smart logistics solutions."

According to The Robot Report, citing The Korea Economic Daily, Hyndai will finalize its acquisition of Boston Dynamics on December 10th. A source familiar with the deal said the acquisition is for about $1 billion. From the report: Robotics has become a bigger focus for Hyundai since Chung Euisun was named chairman in October. The company has since said robotics will account for 20% of its future business. Hyundai Robotics was founded in 2017, but it officially launched earlier in 2020. The company's automotive group invested in autonomous vehicle startup 42dot and Realtime Robotics in 2019. Hyundai has also created a $4 billion autonomous vehicle joint venture with Aptiv. It is not yet clear how Boston Dynamics will fit into Hyundai, which becomes the third owner of Boston Dynamics in seven years. It was acquired by Google in 2013 and sold to Softbank Group in 2017. The RBR50 company has mainly operated as an R&D organization since it was founded. But a new emphasis on commercialization was evident after it was acquired by Softbank.

What if your digital assistant could battle rap? That may sound far-fetched, but Gil Weinberg, a music technologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has adapted a musical robot called Shimon to compose lyrics and perform in real time. From a report: That means it can engage in rap "conversations" with humans, and maybe even help them compose their own lyrics. Shimon, which was intentionally designed to sound machinelike (listen here), is meant to be a one-of-a-kind musical collaborator -- or an inhuman rap-battle opponent. Computer-generated music dates back to the 1950s, when early computers used algorithms to compose melodies. Modern robots can use machine learning to ad-lib on instruments including the flute and drums. One such machine was an earlier version of Shimon, which could play the marimba and sing. The recently updated robot looks the same; it still consists of a ball-shaped "head," with saucy movable eyebrows above visor-covered eyes, perched at the end of a mechanical arm. But now Weinberg claims Shimon is the first improvising robot to foray into rap, with its distinct stylistic features that pose unique programming challenges.

The crowning glory of rap lies in the lyrics. On top of semantic content, the words need to adhere to an aesthetically pleasing beat and rhythm, all while delivering multiple layers of poetic complexity. In a recent paper, published in the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity 2020, Weinberg's research team outlines the technical advances that brought a rapping Shimon to life. When Shimon battle raps, software converts its human opponent's spoken lyrics into text. The robot's system identifies keywords from this, and generates new lyrics based on several custom data sets of words that Shimon has been trained on (using deep-learning models). These data sets can come from any text: the work of Lil Wayne, JAY-Z or other rappers; lyrics from other genres; or even nonmusical literary works. Imagine how Shakespeare or Jane Austen might sound if they rapped; Shimon could simulate that for you.