Artificial Intelligence has been an important milestone in shaping the future. From identifying patterns with mathematical modeling to creating human-like robots, AI has come a long way. As everyone looks forward to a better future, AI is showing promising outcomes by opening doors to limitless possibilities. Not only improving our day-to-day tasks, but AI is also defining new ways of living in easier and smarter ways that greatly benefit mankind.
This blog post is inspired by the Age of A.I. YouTube series. I really liked some of the innovative technologies shown in the series and I ended up researching more about the below three in particular.
3D Printed Homes on Mars
Yes, you read it right! NASA has been planning to colonize Mars for quite some time. Mars does not have ideal conditions for a human to live and work. Sending the construction materials and manpower to Mars alone is a big challenge. That makes the construction of a habitat very difficult. So NASA wanted to build homes before astronauts arrive on the red planet, fully autonomously using the natural resources found on Mars.
NASA has called out for a competition to build homes with 3D-printers controlled by algorithms, with as little human intervention as possible, suitable for Mars and other extraterrestrial locations. Marsha, the AI SpaceFactory’s habitat design was awarded as the winner in this competition. The material used for constructing Marsha is a combination of basalt, extracted from Martian rocks and bio-plastic, processed from plants grown on Mars. This mixture is 2 to 3 times stronger than cement so it can withhold the weather conditions on Mars.
Just like in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall movie, colonies on Mars are soon to become a reality. So start saving up for your home on mars 😉
AI-based Racing Cars
Who doesn’t love sports car racing? The jolts of excitement that viewers get when the cars get to race is priceless. Can AI be incorporated into racing? Yes, it can. Autonomous cars and trucks have been circling the news over the past few years. What’s more advanced than that? Fully autonomous race cars. AI is set to transform the dynamics of racing.
Roborace, founded by Denis Sverdlov, is a competition held between teams of autonomous racers. Teams will be given the same model of a car, but they have to come up with the AI techniques to race it on the track. DevBot 2.0 is the Roborace’s latest model of the fully autonomous car equipped with LiDAR sensors and AI-controlled 360-degree cameras. This car is being used by the teams in the debut competition, Season Alpha.
Roborace is creating a new sport for racing lovers, a Formula One of the self-driving cars.
Helping People with Impaired Speech Communicate
With smart devices and connected homes, life is becoming very easy for people. We don’t have to get up and walk towards a switch to turn on the light anymore. We have smart devices to do that via voice commands. These smart devices work properly when they can actually recognize our voices. Normal speech recognition devices that we have now give average results for people with accents. But what about the people with speech impairment (or) especially the ones with ALS? ALS is a disease that breaks down the nerve cells which reduces muscle functionality. People with ALS may lose the ability to speak and move. Since they can’t walk, it is very important for them to communicate better with people and smart devices to make their life easier.
Through Project Euphoria, Google is trying to improve voice recognition capabilities so that it understands the speech patterns of various speech impaired people. Google has collected thousands of voice samples from different speech-disabled people, converted them to spectrograms, and trained a model. With this, Google is trying to build personalized speech recognition models that can be integrated with phones and other devices. So, the people with speech inability can independently send a text message to a friend (or) just say “Okay Google, turn on the light”.
