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Cambridge, MA -- Neurala’s COO and co-founder Heather Ames sat down with Deepu Talla (Nvidia, VP and General Manager of Intelligent Machines) and Brian Gerkey (Open Source Robotics) to talk about Building The Robot Brain today at the TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics event at MIT's Kresge Auditorium. They chatted about the state of AI, on how more standardization might be needed moving for...

Silicon Valley -- The award for the Most Innovative Company in the Draper Venture Network was given to Neurala here today at the Draper CEO Summit.  Neurala was named as the leading company enabling groundbreaking changes in the industry.  The Network has member funds operating in 30 cities across 4 continents. More than 600 portfolio companies were eligible to receiv...

For several years now, we at Neurala have eagerly awaited the release of a consumer drone that is capable of true autonomous flight without expensive hardware add-ons.  Our vision to empower drones to work and play alongside humans without requiring step-by-step control could only be realized with a new class of drone.  Powerful processors and intelligent software needed to be house...

The U.S. Patent Office issued to Neurala, Inc. a new patent (US 9,189,828) that extends the US patent 8,648,867 (Graphic Processor Based Accelerator System and Method) into the domain of real-time control of autonomous machines, such as self-driving cars and drones. While the prior patent covered hardware and software “controllers” that handle most of the primitive operations needed to set up...

There are three main ingredients needed for intelligent robots to be ubiquitous, smart, and useful. I like to call these three ingredients Mind, Brain, and Body. Let's look at how these three enabling technology have evolved, and why the time is now for the emergent of intelligent machines.

When designing robotic platforms, the choice of which sensors to employ is a key area that often determines the Go/No-Go for a robotic platform. This is because the cost of sensors is a huge component of the total cost of robots, and the main challenge in front of effective commercialization of consumer robotic platforms and applications. While inexpensive sensors are often inadequate in providing...

Anniversaries are nice, especially in December! So here is one to share with you all: it has been 10 years since Anatoli, Heather, and Max (the 3 co-founders of Neurala) begun tinkering with GPUs and Deep Learning, setting the foundations of Neurala while getting their Ph.D at Boston University. This post is a re-publication of an earlier post based on our work on AMD GPUs. Funny to say, much of t...

A few years ago, Heather’s, Anatoli, and myself started Neurala with one goal: bring the results and insights of our Ph.D. work on brain-inspired computing into everyday technology. We wanted this technology to change the way society uses and benefits from machines: rather than each device needing 1 human brain to work, we wanted it to have "its own brains" at the service of the human owner. Sim...

One of the pillars of the recent success (almost viral) of Deep Networks, a subspecies of the bigger class called Neural Networks, is that their execution and training methods are highly conducive to parallelism. The term GPGPU is often use to refer to the backbone of the revolution: General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units. GPUs, chips whose main technological push comes from huge...

What is REALLY a robot? On the surface, we could quickly define a robot as something matching what movies have taught us: a humanoid-looking thing (or barrel-looking thing with wheels), preferably with two eyes, or only one but very big, scary, and red, emitting human-like sounds. Something that could pass the Turing test, or get close to graduating at it.

What if having human, or even superhuman Artificial Intelligence (let’s call it SuperAI) would turn out NOT to be the worst nightmare of humankind? What if, after dogs, SuperAI is the biggest friend of Homo Sapiens? We have all seen movies in which AI turns against humans, with robots ranging from the ‘ethereal’ (was it on the cloud?) Hal to embodied metal-made Terminators, to a mix of the t...

Neurala has been awarded a contract from the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) to design and field neuromorphic algorithms for multimodal processing and fusion. Sensory processing of visual, auditory, and other sensor information (e.g., LIDAR, RADAR) is conventionally based on "stovepiped", or isolated processing, with little interactions between modules.

Neurala builds artificial brains to control flying and land robots. This is a tough job, and our neural engineers deserve to have fun sometime.

Robots do not see like humans. Humans do not process the detail of entire images the way a computer does today: they rapidly move their eyes around (“saccade”) to spot items that are of interest, while most computer-based image processing systems process the entire image at equal resolution, as if “every pixel counts”.

The school year has begun and the streets outside of our Neurala offices on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston are filled with eager students starting their first day of classes.  But, with the excitement, we need to say goodbye to our wonderful interns who worked with us on developing robotics hardware and software.

http://youtu.be/_epRLGXvLTU

If pilots can train in flight simulators, why can’t robots? People learn from experience and become better at flying and avoiding collisions.  Neurala is using its bio-inspired intelligence engine to make better robot pilots – and better collision avoidance systems for drone aircraft (UAVs), driverless cars and telepresence robots – by giving them experience with Microsoft Flight Simula...

When you look down your street, you may notice that "your eye is drawn to something." This expression is very apt. Humans do not process the detail of entire images the way a computer does today. Humans rapidly move their eyes around ("saccade") to spot items that are of interest. Our focus is "drawn" to those areas. This is efficient and fast. Yet, most computer-based image processing systems do ...

Visualize what your first personal or office service robot will look like. What do you imagine? Depending upon your age, you may think of Rosie Jetson, C-3PO or even Bender. (Greatest TV Robots of All Time.) Your service robot is coming, but it won't look like any of the robots in the image above. Instead, it will probably look like an iPad on a stick or an iPhone in a tiny tractor.  ...