Perceptron- Robots that feel pain and AI that predicts soccer players’ movements

While artificial skin has been attempted before, the team claims that their concept is unique in that it uses a built-in circuit to operate as an “artificial synapse,” reducing input to a voltage spike. By selecting a threshold of input voltage whose frequency varied according to the level of pressure applied to the skin, the team was able to “teach” the skin how to respond to simulated pain.

According to researchers, the skin is used in robotics to protect a robotic arm from coming into touch with dangerously high temperatures.

DeepMind claims to have built an AI model called Graph Imputer that can predict where soccer players will move based on camera records of only a subset of players, which is tangentially connected to robotics. More impressively, the system can generate predictions about players outside of the camera’s vision, allowing it to accurately track the position of the majority — if not all — players on the field.

Graph Imputer isn’t without flaws. However, the DeepMind researchers suggest it might be used for things like modeling pitch control or determining the likelihood that a player will be able to control the ball if it is in a specific spot. (Pitch control models are used by several top Premier League teams during games, in pre-match and post-match analysis.) DeepMind believes the principles underpinning Graph Imputer to be relevant to areas such as pedestrian modeling on roadways and crowd modeling in stadiums, in addition to football and other sports analytics.