Westland Real Estate Group patrols its 1,000-unit apartment complex in Las Vegas with "a conical, bulky, artificial intelligence-powered robot" standing just over 5 feet tall, according to NBC News. Manufactured by Knightscope, the robot is equipped with four internal cameras capturing a constant 360-degree view, and can also scan and record license plates (as well as the MAC addresses of cellphones). But is it doing any good? As more government agencies and private sector companies resort to robots to help fight crime, the verdict is out about how effective they are in actually reducing it. Knightscope, which experts say is the dominant player in this market, has cited little public evidence that its robots have reduced crime as the company deploys them everywhere from a Georgia shopping mall to an Arizona development to a Nevada casino. Knightscope's clients also don't know how much these security robots help. "Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?" Dena Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. "No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled."

For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots "predict and prevent crime," without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim. "It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a "roving scarecrow." Additionally, the company does not provide specific, detailed examples of crimes that have been thwarted due to the robots.
The robots are expensive — they're rented out at about $70,000-$80,000 a year — but growth has stalled for the two years since 2018, and over four years Knightscope's total clients actually dropped from 30 to just 23. (Expenses have now risen — partly because the company is now doubling its marketing budget.)

There's also a thermal scanning feature, but Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University, still called these robots an "expensive version of security theater." And NBC News adds that KnightScope's been involved "in both tragic and comical episodes." In 2016, a K5 roaming around Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, hit a 16-month-old toddler, bruising his leg and running over his foot. The company apologized, calling it a "freakish accident," and invited the family to visit the company's nearby headquarters in Mountain View, which the family declined. The following year, another K5 robot slipped on steps adjacent to a fountain at the Washington Harbour development in Washington, D.C., falling into the water. In October 2019, a Huntington Park woman, Cogo Guebara, told NBC News that she tried reporting a fistfight by pressing an emergency alert button on the HP RoboCop itself, but to no avail. She learned later the emergency button was not yet connected to the police department itself... [The northern California city] Hayward dispatched its robot in a city parking garage in 2018. The following year, a man attacked and knocked over the robot. Despite having clear video and photographic evidence of the alleged crime, no one was arrested, according to Adam Kostrzak, the city's chief information officer.
The city didn't renew its contract "due to the financial impact of Covid-19 in early 2020," the city's CIO tells NBC News. But the city had already spent over $137,000 on the robot over two years.

Boston Dynamics has been purchased by Hyundai in a deal valued at $1.1 billion. According to Motherboard, the deal "sees Hyundai assume an 80 percent controlling stake in the robot company. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake." From the report: It is hard to tell what Hyundai wants out of Boston Dynamics from the press release, which is laden with technobabble. Robots in car manufacturing are nothing new, but Hyundai says the acquisition is "another major step toward its strategic transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider" such as "autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI), Urban Air Mobility (UAM), smart factories and robots," which seems to speak to the company's ambitions beyond car manufacturing. Hyundai says it hopes to "develop advanced technologies that enhance people's lives and promote safety, thereby realizing the progress for humanity."

Apparently, the "progress of humanity" means a lot less of it. To celebrate the purchase, Hyundai released a bizarre hype video featuring a seeing-eye robot dog, a nurse robot dog with a tablet mounted on its head that allows the patient to nod at a doctor who is somewhere else, and a teen dancing with a robot in the street. In other words, Hyundai envisions a lonely future in which social cohesion between humans has broken down and robots are our only friends. That's all bad enough, but why anyone would want a seeing eye robot dog instead of a real dog is beyond comprehension.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares an interesting report from IEEE Spectrum: In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of "making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones." Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics' $74,000 Spot), Unitree's quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn't quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they've just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700.

Speedy, good looking gait, robust, and a nifty combination of autonomous human-following and obstacle avoidance... There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu... The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access... Battery life is a big question — the video seems to suggest that the Go1 is capable of a three-kilometer, 20-minute jog, and then some grocery shopping and a picnic, all while doing obstacle avoidance and person following and with an occasional payload.
Unitree later provided the reporter more detailed specs:

• The battery life of the robot while jogging is about 1 hour
• It weighs 12kg
• The Super Sensory System includes five wide-angle stereo depth cameras, hypersonic distance sensors, and an integrated processing system
• It's running at 16 core CPU and a 1.5 tflop GPU

Check out this video footage of the sleek Mayflower 400 slicing through the water, hoping to retrace the historic 1620 journey of the famous ship which carried pilgrims to America. Unfortunately, unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger "had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem," reports the Associated Press: Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the autonomous ship, said it made the decision to return to base "to investigate and fix a minor mechanical issue" but hopes to be back on the trans-Atlantic journey as soon as possible.

With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea.

Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot (15-meter) Mayflower Autonomous Ship began its trip early Tuesday, departing from Plymouth, England, and spending some time off the Isles of Scilly before it headed for deeper waters.

It was supposed to take up to three weeks to reach Provincetown on Cape Cod before making its way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. If successful, it would be the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic.

The BBC reports: China's Zhurong rover has sent back a batch of new images from Mars — including a "selfie". The robot, which landed in May, positioned a wireless camera on the ground and then rolled back a short distance to take the snap. To Zhurong's right is the rocket-powered platform that brought the six-wheeled vehicle to a soft touchdown. Both display prominent Chinese flags...

It weighs some 240kg. A tall mast carries cameras to take pictures and aid navigation; five additional instruments will investigate the mineralogy of local rocks and the general nature of the environment, including the weather. Like the current American rovers (Curiosity and Perseverance), Zhurong has a laser tool to zap rocks to assess their chemistry. It also has a radar to look for sub-surface water-ice - a capability it shares with Perseverance.
Slashdot reader InfiniteZero writes that the mission's "full resolution images including a 360 panoramic view of the landing site, can be found at the official CNSA website."

New submitter DaveV1.0 shares a report from CNBC: At 10 McDonald's locations in Chicago, workers aren't taking down customers' drive-thru orders for McNuggets and french fries -- a computer is, CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday. Kempczinski said the restaurants using the voice-ordering technology are seeing about 85% order accuracy. Only about a fifth of orders need to be a taken by a human at those locations, he said, speaking at Alliance Bernstein's Strategic Decisions conference.

In 2019, under former CEO Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's went on a spending spree, snapping up restaurant tech. One of those acquisitions was Apprente, which uses artificial intelligence software to take drive-thru orders. Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than one or two years to implement. "Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S., with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — and on and on and on," he said. Another challenge has been training restaurant workers to stop themselves from jumping in to help.

18-inch tall robots on four wheels zipping across city sidewalks "stopped people in their tracks as they whipped out their camera phones," reports the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery landscape...

In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot servers grows around the country. And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and several others, in the next couple of weeks... "Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing the space with the delivery bots," said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...

Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in 30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at Berkeley, where at least one of its robots burst into flames. But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000 deliveries...

"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."

A video shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer having to tip human food-delivery workers.

Instacart has an audacious plan to replace its army of gig shoppers with robots -- part of a long-term strategy to cut costs and put its relationship with supermarket chains on a sustainable footing. From a report: The plan, detailed in documents reviewed by Bloomberg, involves building automated fulfillment centers around the U.S., where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup while humans gather produce and deli products. Some facilities would be attached to existing grocery stores while larger standalone centers would process orders for several locations, according to the documents, which were dated July and December.

Despite working on the strategy for more than a year, however, the company has yet to sign up a single supermarket chain. Instacart had planned to begin testing the fulfillment centers later this year, the documents show. But the company has fallen behind schedule, according to people familiar with the situation. And though the documents mention asking several automation providers to build the technology, Instacart hasn't settled on any, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. In February, the Financial Times reported on elements of the strategy and said Instacart in early 2020 sent out requests for proposals to five robotics companies.

An Instacart spokeswoman said the company was busy buttressing its operations during the pandemic, when it signed up 300,000 new gig workers in a matter of weeks, bringing the current total to more than 500,000. But the delays in getting the automation strategy off the ground could potentially undermine plans to go public this year. Investors know robots will play a critical role in modernizing the $1.4 trillion U.S. grocery industry.

"Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia's first fully automated farm," reports Australia's national public broadcaster ABC.

The total cost of the farm's upgrade? $20 million. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the "hands-free farm" on a 1,900-hectare property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock... The farm will use robotic tractors, harvesters, survey equipment and drones, artificial intelligence that will handle sowing, dressing and harvesting, new sensors to measure plants, soils and animals and carbon management tools to minimise the carbon footprint.

The farm is already operated commercially and grows a range of broadacre crops, including wheat, canola, and barley, as well as a vineyard, cattle and sheep.

The New York Police Department said this week that it will stop using the "Digidog," a four-legged robot occasionally deployed for recon in dangerous situations. NYPD officials confirmed in a statement it had terminated its contract and will return the dog to vendor Boston Dynamics. Last December, the agency leased the Digidog, nicknamed Spot, for $94,000. From a report: John Miller, the police department's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the contract was "a casualty of politics, bad information, and cheap sound bites." Miller bemoaned the role of bad press in the backlash, but in many ways the NYPD's own actions were a blueprint for how not to introduce new tech. And, for activists, how to effectively agitate for banning unwanted technologies.

In truth, it wasn't just sound bites that doomed Spot. New Yorkers didn't want it. In February, the NYPD used Spot to defuse a hostage situation in the Bronx. When video of the device went viral, its flexible legs and camera-for-a-head design spooked people. The robot is quadrupedal but doesn't actually look like a dog. A more immediate comparison is the armed robots featured in a postapocalyptic episode of Black Mirror. This comparison spread rapidly on social media. The NYPD's secrecy worked against it: There was no public comment process for Spot, and residents hadn't known to expect to see robot-dogs respond to hostage situations. The NYPD had exactly this opportunity, months earlier, when it had to disclose both the price and governing policies for all surveillance devices as defined by the city's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. Instead, the agency included a passing reference to Spot in a larger section on "situational awareness cameras," with no images.

Legal services startup DoNotPay is best known for its army of "robot lawyers" -- automated bots that tackle tedious online tasks like canceling TV subscriptions and requesting refunds from airlines. Now, the company has unveiled a new tool it says will help shield users' photos from reverse image searches and facial recognition AI. The Verge reports: It's called Photo Ninja and it's one of dozens of DoNotPay widgets that subscribers can access for $36 a year. Photo Ninja operates like any image filter. Upload a picture you want to shield, and the software adds a layer of pixel-level perturbations that are barely noticeable to humans, but dramatically alter the image in the eyes of roving machines. The end result, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder tells The Verge, is that any image shielded with Photo Ninja yields zero results when run through search tools like Google image search or TinEye.

The tool also fools popular facial recognition software from Microsoft and Amazon with a 99 percent success rate. This, combined with the anti-reverse-image search function, makes Photo Ninja handy in a range of scenarios. You might be uploading a selfie to social media, for example, or a dating app. Running the image through Photo Ninja first will prevent people from connecting this image to other information about you on the web. Browder is careful to stress, though, that Photo Ninja isn't guaranteed to beat every facial recognition tool out there.

Hmmmmmm writes: China plans to launch its next robot lunar lander in 2024, and it will carry equipment manufactured by scientists from France, Sweden, Italy, and Russia, Hu Hao, the program's chief designer, told the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday. The country aims to position the lander, named Chang'e 6, near the lunar south pole where it will collect samples, per the official Xinhua News Agency.

The Chang'e 6 lander is part of China's ongoing mission to successfully return moon samples back home "for comprehensive analysis and research," Hu said at a conference, Associated Press reported.

For the 2024 mission, The China National Space Administration has invited scientists from around the world to take part in the program, offering to transport solicited payloads into space. So far, four payloads designed by the international scientists have been preliminarily chosen, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

destinyland writes: Mystery Science Theater 3000 will be coming back — with a new home online. Though Netflix didn't pick them up for another season after 2019, "We still want to keep making new episodes," series creator Joel Hodgson explains in an online video on Kickstarter. (Also available through the URL MakeMoreMST3K.com.)

And with 12 days left to go, 18,969 online fans have already pledged $3,348,705, funding six new episodes...

But in addition the first $2 million funded the creation of the Gizmoplex, "our very own virtual online theatre," while the first stretch goal was also funded — the creation of MST3K apps for Android, iOS, and streaming services like AppleTV and Roku. "I'm tired of other people deciding if our show lives or dies," explains Crow T. Robot in the Kickstarter video. "I wanna do that." New host Jonah Heston adds, "If we want MST3K to keep going long-term, maybe networks aren't the most reliable option. Maybe it should be up to the fans to decide how long we keep going..."

Their next stretch goal of $4.4 million would fund three more episodes, but will also allow them to invite backers to the Gizmoplex for live monthly events, "for at least a year." And if they reach their goal of $5.5 million, they'll fund three more episodes — so an entire 12-episode season — as well as 12 short-subject films.

The ultimate hope is to host frequent live screenings, premieres, and community events in the Gizmoplex — while fans can even host their own MST3K watch parties whenever they want. And their Kickstarter page even suggests they might someday extend the Gizmoplex into virtual reality (accessible on computer and headsets).
I still remember how back in 2008 Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers. "I've been a fan so long, I can't even remember when," posted CmdrTaco.

According to Sacramento CBS affiliate KOVR-TV, Yana Sydnor called the police to report a possible home invasion. Turns out, it was a robovac that her son turned on before leaving for the weekend. Android Police reports: At 1 a.m., she and her 2-year-old daughter woke up to loud booms coming from her stairs disrupting her meditation music. She texted her friends about the sounds before they quickly responded, urging her to call 911. "I hear someone walking down my stairs, so it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom," Sydnor recalls telling the dispatcher. Desperate to exit the house and avoid a run-in with the invader, she ran to the bathroom, put her daughter in the tub, and thought about grabbing a ladder to get them both outside to ground level.

Officers arrived within 10 minutes of Sydnor's call. They rammed the front door wide open only to find a poor robovac, fresh from a tumble down a flight of stairs. "My son turned on the vacuum cleaner because he didn't want to do chores before he left for the weekend," she explained to the reporter after a moment of exasperated silence. The vacuum hadn't been used for 2 years and, even after the fall, it still works. We couldn't make out the make and model of the robovac, so we don't quite know if it could stop itself from going over the ledge much less what exactly happened in this case if it did have the ability.

William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.

Researchers have developed a tool that can design complex DNA robots and nanodevices in minutes instead of days. Phys.Org reports: In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3-D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2-D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3-D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex.

The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties. Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world.

schwit1 writes: Able to move 1,600 boxes per hour using just one arm, Dill relies on humans to keep it operating efficiently Pickle Robots says that Dill's approach to the box unloading task is unique in a couple of ways. First, it can handle messy trailers filled with a jumble of boxes of different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights. And second, from the get-go it's intended to work under human supervision, relying on people to step in and handle edge cases.

We asked Meyer how much Dill costs, and to our surprise, he gave us a candid answer: Depending on the configuration, the system can cost anywhere from $50-100k to deploy and about that same amount per year to operate. Meyer points out that you can't really compare the robot to a human (or humans) simply on speed, since with the robot, you don't have to worry about injuries or improper sorting of packages or training or turnover. While Pickle is currently working on several other configurations of robots for package handling, this particular truck unloading configuration will be shipping to customers next year.

"Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the nation's most valuable semiconductor company, with a stock price of $645 a share and a market cap of $400 billion, is out to create the metaverse," writes Time magazine.

Huang defines it as "a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours." Huang credits author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, filled with collectives of shared 3-D spaces and virtually enhanced physical spaces that are extensions of the Internet, for conjuring the metaverse. This is already playing out with the massively popular online games like Fortnite and Minecraft, where users create richly imagined virtual worlds. Now the concept is being put to work by Nvidia and others.

Partnering with Nvidia, BMW is using a virtual digital twin of a factory in Regensburg, Germany, to virtually plan new workflows before deploying the changes in real time in their physical factory. The metaverse, says Huang, "is where we will create the future" and transform how the world's biggest industries operate...

Not to make any value judgments about the importance of video games, but do you find it ironic that a company that has its roots in entertainment is now providing vitally important computing power for drug discovery, basic research and reinventing manufacturing?

No, not at all. It's actually the opposite. We always started as a computing company. It just turned out that our first killer app was video games...

How important is the advent and the adaptation of digital twins for manufacturing, business and society at large?

In the future, the digital world or the virtual world will be thousands of times bigger than the physical world. There will be a new New York City. There'll be a new Shanghai. Every single factory and every single building will have a digital twin that will simulate and track the physical version of it. Always. By doing so, engineers and software programmers could simulate new software that will ultimately run in the physical version of the car, the physical version of the robot, the physical version of the airport, the physical version of the building. All of the software that's going to be running in these physical things will be simulated in the digital twin first, and then it will be downloaded into the physical version. And as a result, the product keeps getting better at an exponential rate.

The second thing is, you're going to be able to go in and out of the two worlds through wormholes. We'll go into the virtual world using virtual reality, and the objects in the virtual world, in the digital world, will come into the physical world, using augmented reality. So what's going to happen is pieces of the digital world will be temporarily, or even semipermanently, augmenting our physical world. It's ultimately about the fusion of the virtual world and the physical world.
See also this possibly related story, "Nvidia's newest AI model can transform single images into realistic 3D models."

EW reports: Felix Silla's friend and former Buck Rogers in the 25th Century costar Gil Gerard reported on Twitter that Silla died Friday after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Coming in at just under 4 feet tall and only 70 pounds, Silla was the perfect choice for the mumbling Cousin Itt on The Addams Family. For years, audiences didn't see his face, the character covered in a full-length hairpiece, sporting sunglasses and a bowler hat... Silla did not provide the distinct mumbling voice of Cousin Itt. That was added by sound engineer Tony Magro in production...

He first came to the United States in 1955 and began his career touring with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for seven years. He worked as a trapeze artist, tumbler, and bareback horse rider. Eventually, he settled in Hollywood in 1962, where he became a stuntman. He went on to work in movies like A Ticklish Fair, TV shows like Bonanza, and appeared in the first pilot for Star Trek, "The Cage." His small stature often helped him find work, including as Cousin Itt, robot sidekick Twiki on the NBC series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and even as a hang-gliding Ewok in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi...

He also excelled as a stand in, double, and stuntman working on projects such as Planet of the Apes, Demon Seed, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Towering Inferno, The Hindenburg, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, The Golden Child, Howard the Duck, and Batman Returns.
In 2018 one Las Vegas blog spotted Silla with Gil Gerard, posting a picture of the two side by side -- just as they'd posed decades earlier on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

While for that show Mel Blanc had provided the voice for Twiki the robot, the blog notes that Silla himself supplied the voice of Mortimer Goth in the Sims 2 videogame.

The days of experts gathering in a sealed-off room to sip coffee and grade beans on their color, aroma and taste may be numbered. From a report: An Israeli company has developed a handheld device that is able to scan beans to determine their quality. The machine, powered by artificial intelligence, will need a human to input the quality parameters first, but after that, it will be able to classify coffee before it's even roasted. The company has completed a pilot program with Carcafe, the Colombian division of Volcafe, one of the world's largest coffee traders. A shift to computers would upend the traditional way coffee has been graded by humans, known as cupping. The well-paid and trained examiners, or Q graders, at the ICE Futures U.S. exchange in New York conduct the laborious task of determining the quality and value of the coffee beans received by the bourse. Trading houses and roasters also usually have their own graders.

Cupping is an involved process, not unlike that undertaken by wine sommeliers. Q graders weigh the coffee and grind it into a cup. They sniff the dry grounds, taking notes on the fragrance. Water heated to 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93 Celsius) is poured over the grounds and the graders smell the wet coffee. After 4 minutes, the crust that forms on top of the cup is broken and grounds and foam are removed. After waiting 15 minutes for the coffee to cool, and only then is the coffee slurped up in a spoon. "It's the human that establishes the sensorial part," said Oswaldo Aranha Neto, a coffee industry veteran who just joined Demetria as a board member. "You need to teach the robot what to do."