Mumbai:

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have uncovered how animals find their way back home without getting lost or being late by using a robot that mimics their movements.

This robot is designed to move on its own, much like an animal finding food and then to use light as a guide to return home (homing), the IIT Bombay said in a statement on Tuesday.

In a new study, researchers from the department of physics have used this robot to study the underlying principles of homing by animals.

“The primary goal of our research group was to understand the physics of active and living systems. We achieve this by performing experiments on centimetres-sized self-propelled programmable robots. In simple words, we model these robots to mimic the dynamics of living organisms, both at the individual and collective levels,” Dr Nitin Kumar, an assistant professor at the department of physics, IIT Bombay, said.

For their study, the researchers wanted to determine the time it took for the robot to return home, with increasing amounts of deviations from its homing path.

It was observed that the reorientation rate, the frequency at which the robot (or an animal) should adjust its direction for successful homing, originated from the degree of randomness in its path.

The researchers discovered an ‘optimal reorientation rate’ for a particular value of randomness beyond which the adverse effects of increased randomness are negated by more frequent reorientations, ultimately ensuring successful homing.

This suggested animals might have evolved to reorient themselves at an optimal rate to efficiently find their way home, regardless of the noise or unpredictability in their environment.

“The observation of a finite upper limit on return times indicates that the homing motion is inherently efficient. Our results demonstrated that if animals are always aware of the direction of their home and always correct their course whenever they deviate from the intended direction, they will surely get home within a finite time,” Kumar added.

Apart from physical experiments, the researchers also ran computer simulations where the robot’s movement mimicked animals.

This virtual robot combines active Brownian motion (the random motion of particles in a liquid or gas, caused by collisions with fast-moving atoms or molecules in the fluid) with occasional resets to its orientation to correct its course back towards home.

These simulations matched the experimental results, reinforcing the idea that randomness and reorientation work hand-in-hand to optimise homing.

“When we applied this model to the trajectories of a real biological system of a flock of homing pigeons, it showed a good agreement with our theory, validating our hypothesis of enhanced efficiency due to frequent course corrections,” Mr Kumar said.

He said in real and more complex systems, the homing cues might be more complicated than a simple uniform gradient towards home, as modelled in this experiment.

“In our future research, we aim to model these scenarios in our experiment by using a combination of spatiotemporal variations in light intensity and physical obstacles,” the assistant professor added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

London:

Tesla CEO and ‘X’ owner, Elon Musk said on Wednesday that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could endanger the existence of human civilisation.

“There is some chance, above zero, that AI will kill us all. I think it’s slow but there is some chance. I think this also concerns the fragility of human civilization. If you study history, you will realise that every civilisation has a sort of lifespan,” he said.

His remarks came during a media interaction as he arrived to attend the United Kingdom hosted world’s first global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit.

Moreover, Musk was also seen having conversations with some of the participants at the summit.

Earlier, a day before attending the AI summit, Musk appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he that artificial intelligence (AI), if programmed by people in the “environmental movement”, may lead to the extinction of humanity.

In the podcast, he said, “Actually, what I think the biggest danger is for AI is that if AI is implicitly programmed, I don’t think they explicitly but implicitly programmed with values that led to the destruction of downtown San Francisco. And a bunch of these AI companies are in San Francisco or in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then you could implicitly program an AI to believe that extinction of humanity is what it should try to do.”

He added, “I think the most likely outcome to be specific about it is a good outcome, most likely a good outcome. But it’s not for sure. So i think we’re to be careful how we program the eye and make sure that it is not accidentally antihuman.”

Moreover, the social media company Meta President said, “I’m looking forward to attending the AI Safety Summit in the UK this week. I hope we spend as much time as possible developing much-needed solutions to current problems – for example, on the transparency and detectability of AI-generated content.”

He added, “not just debating speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist, and may never possess the autonomy and agency that some people fear.”

The summit underway in UK will see a convergence of governments, academia and companies working in artificial intelligence to debate and identify risks, opportunities and the “need for international collaboration, before highlighting consensus on the scale, importance and urgency for AI opportunities” a statement by the British High Commission read.

Moreover, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that he will do a live conversation with Elon Musk on X after the AI summit.

PM Sunak posted on X, “In conversation with @elonmusk. After the AI Safety Summit, Thursday night on @x.”

The summit aims to put light on the transformative benefits that AI technology can offer, putting a predominant focus on “education and areas for international research collaborations”.

Representatives from The Alan Turing Institute, The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Ada Lovelace Institute are also among the groups confirmed to attend.

Prime Minister Sunak had last week stated that the summit will focus on understanding the risks such as potential threats to national security including the dangers a loss of control the technology could bring.

On the agenda are discussions around issues likely to impact society, such as election disruption and erosion of social trust.

According to government estimates, the UK already employs over 50,000 people in the AI sector and contributes 3.7 billion pounds to its economy annually. Michelle Donelan will be joined by members of the UK’s Frontier AI Taskforce – including its Chair, Ian Hogarth. The task force was launched earlier this year with an aim to evaluate the risks of frontier AI models (generative language models of AI).

Additionally, on the first day of the Summit, Union Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar participated the AI summit and conveyed India’s thoughts on AI.

On the second day of the summit, Chandrasekhar will contribute to discussions regarding the establishment of a collaborative framework for AI among like-minded nations. He will shed light on India’s perspective concerning AI risks in areas such as disinformation and electoral security.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)