Latest news with #ChadJenkins
Indianapolis Star
19-05-2025
- Climate
- Indianapolis Star
NWS confirms Bloomington, Monroe County area hit by EF2 tornado Friday.
Meteorologists with the National Weather Service of Indianapolis say multiple tornadoes likely hit southern-central Indiana on Friday causing significant damage, including one confirmed EF2 tornado in Monroe County. Meteorologists with NWS Indianapolis have not determined how many tornadoes hit Indiana, but they plan to continue conducting tornado damage survey in Sullivan, Greene, Brown and Bartholomew counties. "There were a number of homes damaged, lots of trees down and there was very large hail in parts of the (southern-central) area —hail up to 4 inches in diameter," said Chad Swia, NWS Indianapolis meteorologist. Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 17, NWS Indianapolis's survey team confirmed that a low-end EF2 tornado struck central Monroe County yesterday. At its widest, the tornado was 250 yards. Preliminary EF-2 damage was found in Monroe County today. Surveys are complete for the day. Additional surveys will be conducted Sunday. #inwx The survey team released its initial report, noting that the tornado touched down in west central Monroe County, damaging several trees and causing minor structural damage until it reached State Road 45 and South Elwren Road. The tornado then hit a large horse barn, removing the south and east walls along with the entire roof. The tornado continued east, where it eventually hit the Clear Creek post office, ripping the roof off and throwing it about 50 yards to the east northeast. The survey team believed the tornado caused significant damage to the small building due to the fact that it was constructed with cinder blocks and the only anchoring was by mortar with no reinforcement. As it continued east, it destroyed two garages and outbuildings. The debris was thrown nearly 100 yards and a metal storage unit was lifted and tossed nearly 40 yards, landing on top of two cars. The tornado also damaged the roof of a single-floor double rental unit and to several other cars in the area. The survey team believes this tornado traveled along the track of a long-lived Supercell thunderstorm Friday night that started in Illinois and moved through south-central Indiana. The survey team will continue its damage survey on Sunday across the area, west and east of Monroe County. The Indianapolis Airport recorded gusts up to 75 mph Friday night, according to NWS Indianapolis meteorologists. Images on social media showcase an idea of how much damage the region experienced from Friday night's storm. Notably, the Clear Creek Post Office was destroyed by the tornado. Some of the first confirmed reports of tornadoes stemmed from western Indiana, after the Linton Police Department reported that a tornado was moving east at 45 mph over Linton at about 6:50 p.m. On Saturday, Brown County Emergency Management Director Chad Jenkins said some people in the Horsemen's Campground suffered injuries that were not life-threatening. Indiana University Health took the injured to the Bloomington hospital. According to preliminary weather information, radars at 7:42 p.m. determined a severe thunderstorm possibly producing a tornado moving east at up to 50 mph, 7 miles southeast of Bloomington. At 7:51 p.m., radars showed a severe thunderstorm possibly producing a tornado moving east at speeds up to 50 mph, 9 miles northwest of Osgood or 13 miles southwest of Batesville. At 7:55 p.m., radars showed a severe thunderstorm possibly producing a tornado moving east at speeds up to 50 mph, near Vernon, or 18 miles east of Seymour. At 8:01 p.m., radars confirmed that a large and extremely dangerous tornado had emerged near Columbus, moving east at speeds up to 50 mph. Meteorologists with NWS Indianapolis expect a full damage report to be prepared by Sunday evening or Monday morning. About 41,000 customers across Indiana had lost power after Friday night's storm among the five power companies that supply Hoosiers with power. This story may be updated.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Silicon Valley is going all in on humanoid robots. Making them a reality will take decades.
Imagine spending your weekends free of chores. Forget about the laundry, the dishes, and tidying up. It's all been taken care of. And the one responsible is an amalgamation of motors, wires, and computer chips: a robot. That's at least part of the promise of humanoid robotics. And Silicon Valley companies are lining up to get in on the action. Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), and now, according to Bloomberg, Meta (META) and Apple (AAPL), are each funding or developing humanoid robotics systems that could lead to a world where robots walk among us. There are already a number of robots in the world today, whether they're moving objects in warehouses, delivering food to your table at restaurants, or, like Amazon's Astro bot, rolling around your home like a motorized sentry. Humanoid robots, however, will be able to perform more specialized tasks using hands that can grab and grip without crushing objects and interact more seamlessly in a world that's built for us. They could be deployed across factories to address labor shortages, assist in caring for the elderly, and perform tasks in environments that would put human lives at risk. 'We have such a huge need for labor, for taking care of our aging and disabled populations. It really is such a huge cost to provide that care, and we can't provide it to everybody,' explained University of Michigan robotics professor Chad Jenkins. 'Taking care of our aging and disabled populations will provide such a huge benefit to society through improving quality of life, improving our productivity, and robots provide a great way to be able to do that,' he added. But don't start planning for care-free weekends just yet. There are still plenty of complex problems to solve before humanoid robots are as ubiquitous as our smartphones. And getting there could take decades. Humanoid robots like Tesla's Optimus, Agility AI's Digit, and Figure AI's 02 are bipedal machines that can interact with their environment in a manner similar to humans. That means picking up and moving objects with artificial hands, or in some cases claws, and manipulating them in ways that less sophisticated robots simply can't. It's not just how robots interact with objects and the world around them, though. They'll also have to be able to see objects and recognize what they can do with them, a concept referred to as affordance. 'Affordance basically says, whenever I see my mug, I know I can grab that handle, and then I can take a sip out of it or pour out of it,' explained Jenkins. 'That will bring together the hand with the computer vision with all the reasoning that our robots can do. And so that's a big step forward … for a robot to know when and where it can do things and what's going to result, and then what it can do after that,' he added. Getting robots to understand when and how they can use or interact with objects, whether that's a mug, a door, or a piece of heavy equipment, requires an incredible amount of training. There are currently a few ways to 'teach' robots. The first is through mimicking human movements via teleoperation. To do this, a person wears specialized equipment and performs a set task. The equipment, a glove or headset and suit, collects data on the person's movements and then transfers that information to the robot, effectively showing it how it should move, explained Pulkit Agrawal, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. The second way to train robots is via simulations. During his keynote at CES 2025 in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showed off his company's approach to teaching robots via simulations called Nvidia Cosmos. According to Agrawal, researchers use simulated teaching to create a variety of scenarios in a digital world and then translate that knowledge to a robot so it understands how to behave in the real world. The benefit of this approach is that it's fast and doesn't require putting a pricey robot prototype in danger of falling over or breaking something. 'But that also has its own set of challenges,' Agrawal said. 'For example, the simulation is different from the real world. You have to bridge that gap. And some things are still hard to simulate like clothes and things which are deformable, things which are soft.' A third approach fuses these two paths, teaching robots via both real-world human movements and simulations, but that's still a work in progress. 'We're trying to get the best of both of those worlds. And that's still research that we're exploring,' Jenkins said. Outside of training robots how to interact with the world, researchers also have to ensure that humanoid robots are not only safe to use in settings like the home but can also operate for long periods of time. 'If a humanoid robot falls down at home, one thing is the cost to repair, the other is the safety of the humans in the home,' explained Ye Zhao, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. 'The reliability of humanoid robots still needs a lot of work,' he added. At the moment, humanoid robots cost tens of thousands of dollars and don't last long before they need to be recharged. They also overheat, preventing them from moving for extended periods of time. 'There isn't a humanoid hardware that you can buy and say it's reliable. That simply doesn't exist today,' Agrawal said. 'People are claiming they're going to have humanoid robots which are $15,000, $20,000. But if you actually go and look up the costs [it's] more like $50,000, $60,000. They still heat up. They're not reliable. They'll last for half an hour to an hour.' That doesn't mean the technology won't get there eventually, he said. Just don't expect to see a humanoid robot for sale in your local Best Buy anytime soon. Until then, the closest we'll likely get to a practical, in-home robot is the trusty Roomba. Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@ Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley. Sign in to access your portfolio
