Tag Archives: Simulation

Today, the greatest mysteries facing astronomers and cosmologists are the roles gravitational attraction and cosmic expansion play in the evolution of the Universe. To resolve these mysteries, astronomers and cosmologists are taking a two-pronged approach. These consist of directly observing the cosmos to observe these forces at work while attempting to find theoretical resolutions for observed behaviors – such as ...

There are plenty of processes that might be easier in lower gravity.  So far, the biggest hindrance to developing those processes has been the expense of launching equipment to the low gravity environments of the ISS or other space-based research stations.  Testing on the ground would be preferable both for ease of use and much lower cost, but the Earth’s ...

Science fiction author Frank Herbert is renowned for the richly-detailed worlds he created. None of his work is more well-known than “Dune,” which took him six years to complete. Like his other work, Dune is full of detail, including the description of planet Dune, or as the Fremen call it, Arrakis. Dune is an unforgiving desert world that suffers powerful ...

The interactions with objects in our world are possible because of physical contact. Its simulation is an indispensable yet difficult task for robotics researchers. DeepMind has recently announced making the MuJoCo physics simulator freely available. Image credit: MuJoCo MuJoCo stands for Multi-Joint Dynamics with Contact. It accurately and efficiently captures the salient features of contacting objects. While other simulators sometimes ...

An in silico playground for creatures that learn, mutate, and evolve establishes the importance of morphological intelligence and suggests a new way to optimize embodied AIs. Animals have embodied smarts: They perform tasks that their bodies are well designed for. That’s because the intelligence of every animal species evolved in tandem with its physical form as it interacted with its ...

Researchers at the University of Zurich have developed a new approach to autonomously fly quadrotors through unknown, complex environments at high speeds using only on-board sensing and computation. The new approach could be useful in emergencies, on construction sites or for security applications. When it comes to exploring complex and unknown environments such as forests, buildings or caves, drones are ...

Developing and evaluating agents like robots in the setting where they are meant to be deployed can be costly, dangerous, and time-consuming. Therefore, a proxy of the target task domain could be a useful simulation environment. Image credit: luckey_sun via flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0. A recent paper on arXiv.org investigates the usefulness of a proxy domain by providing proxy usefulness ...

Is there anywhere in the Universe where we can escape from radiation? Certainly not here on Earth. And not in space itself, which is filled with diffuse radiation in the form of gamma rays and neutrinos. Scientists have struggled to explain where all those gamma rays and neutrinos come from. A trio of researchers is proposing a source for all ...