"MODULE" · 총 41건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 75,727건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 3,874건(5.1%)·중립 69,960건(92.4%)·부정 1,893건(2.5%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 15.3(중도 균형)입니다.
The arrests were made by Delhi Police’s Special Cell from Delhi, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand over a 17-day operation, said police officials.
Eight men with links to Pakistan's ISI and Dawood Ibrahim have been arrested
Delhi Police's Special Cell arrested nine individuals linked to Dawood Ibrahim and ISI for plotting terror attacks on critical installations and religious places.
Researcher reported the vuln in March. Maintainers haven't responded to his messages since
The National Investigation Agency is conducting searches in four states. This is part of a probe into a Pakistan-linked terror plot. The plot involved drone-delivered arms and planned blasts in Indian cities. Investigators are targeting local supporters of the terror module. The operation aims to uncover a wider terror network.
The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs officially announced that SIM (subscriber identity module) card ...
Country: Uganda Source: World Health Organization **Brazzaville, Kampala, Lomé—**The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa, in collaboration with ministries of health, partner hospitals, and with support from Irish Aid, organized a series of regional training-of-trainers sessions to strengthen hospital care for severe acute malnutrition (SAM) with medical complications. These training courses form part of the implementation of WHO’s updated 2023 recommendations on the prevention and management of SAM and nutritional edema in children under 5 years. They are based on revised WHO training modules (2025), aligned with the latest evidence, and integrate tools on quality of care, clinical management and support for patients and caregivers. In sub-Saharan Africa, malnutrition remains a major driver of child mortality, with waste being its deadliest form. According to the Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates (WHO, UNICEF, World Bank, 2025), 12.2 million children under 5 suffer from SAM worldwide, nearly a quarter of them in Africa—around 3 million children. Faced with this heavy burden, training of health workers is essential to ensure quality, standardized and evidence-based hospital care that can significantly improve treatment and save children’s lives. “This training highlights the critical importance of ensuring quality hospital care for children suffering from malnutrition and addresses a key need: supporting countries in applying standardized protocols and continuously improving care quality to save lives,” said Dr Eugénie Niane, Technical Officer for Nutrition and Food Safety at WHO Madagascar. The sessions combined theoretical and practical approaches, including case studies, simulations, facilitation exercises and supervised clinical placements in hospitals. This integrated approach strengthened clinical skills in assessing, diagnosing and managing SAM complications; improved therapeutic feeding practices and clinical monitoring; promoted caregiver involvement; and introduced continuous quality improvement methods. “This training reminded us of something powerful: Africa has the expertise, passion and determination needed to change the narrative of child survival on the continent,” said Dr Joy Odhiambo, Child Health Specialist at Kenya’s Ministry of Health. She emphasized that every health worker trained through this initiative is now part of a broader movement to protect the future of African children. Participants were also prepared to become national trainers, able to replicate the training in their own countries, thereby contributing to sustainable health system strengthening and continuous improvement of nutritional care. According to Dr John Makengo Mafuila Adjukula, Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at the National Nutrition Programme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a new regional dynamic is underway: “We are now well equipped to replicate the same training in our countries and serve as champions in health facilities to strengthen the management of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition with medical complications.” The training was delivered in two phases: online and in-person. The online preparatory phase took place from 27 April to 1 May 2026, involving 12 countries. It was followed by two in-person sessions: in Kampala, Uganda (4–9 May 2026) for English-speaking countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Sudan and Uganda), and in Lomé, Togo (18–23 May 2026) for French-speaking countries (Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Togo). These 12 countries, heavily affected by child malnutrition, benefit from WHO’s sustained support to adapt and implement national protocols aligned with international standards. Cross-country experience sharing proved particularly enriching and strengthened regional collaboration around quality of care. At the end of the training courses, participating countries developed national action plans to organize domestic trainings, reinforce mentorship and clinical supervision, improve quality of care in nutrition units and accelerate the implementation of national protocols aligned with WHO recommendations. Ultimately, this regional initiative is expected to improve the sustainability and quality of nutritional care services and accelerate the reduction of preventable deaths due to severe acute malnutrition among children in Africa. For Additional Information or to Request Interviews, Please contact: Collins Boakye-Agyemang Communications and marketing officer Tel: + 242 06 520 65 65 (WhatsApp) Email: boakyeagyemangc@who.int Kayi Lawson Communications Officer Regional Office for Africa Email: lawsonagbluluf@who.int
Police bust Pak-linked terror module planning attacks in UP, Delhi, Punjab
CEO Alexander Potapov said the way the group is advancing production in this area is qualitatively different from what is happening in other countries
The state corporation specified that "the Impulse BM-A fire support robots with AGS-30 or AGS-17 automatic grenade launchers mounted in special modules, as well as the Impulse-M logistics robots, are used on the front line"
According to the NIA probe, the activities were linked to a radical module - Ansar Gazwat ul Hind Interim - whose members sourced materials from different parts of India.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev will install a radiotelescope on the surface of the Zvezda module as part of the Solntse-Teraherz experiment
Why Bangladesh must pivot to renewable energy now khairul.jahin@… Tue, 05/26/2026 - 08:30 Image Why Bangladesh must pivot to renewable energy now There are moments in a nation’s history when a crisis does more than create hardship. It reveals the weakness of an old system and opens the door to a better one. Bangladesh is now standing at such a moment. The country is facing an energy crisis that no longer centres on power cuts. It is affecting factories, farms, schools, offices, exports, foreign currency reserves, and the daily life of ordinary people. What we are seeing today is not just a temporary shortage of gas or fuel. It is a signal that our energy system has become too dependent on imported fossil fuels. More than 60 percent of Bangladesh’s energy demand is met through imports. LNG, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels have kept the country running for years, but this dependence has become risky and expensive. Global fuel markets are unstable because of geopolitical tension, supply chain disruption, and price volatility. For a country like Bangladesh, this creates double pressure: fuel supply becomes uncertain while fuel costs keep rising. The government is now spending more than BDT 200 crore per day in energy subsidies. Annual energy import expenditure remains around USD 12 billion, putting serious pressure on foreign currency reserves. Nearly 70 percent of Bangladesh’s LNG imports come from Qatar. If supply is disrupted, Bangladesh can quickly face a severe shortage. In the power sector, daily gas demand exceeds 2,500 mmcfd, but supply sometimes falls to 850–900 mmcfd. This can create a power generation shortfall of 1,500–1,800 MW. Overall, the daily gas shortage exceeds 1,100 mmcfd, and peak-time electricity shortages may reach nearly 2,000 MW. Bangladesh also has a weak Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The current reserve capacity is sufficient for only about 35–40 days, well below that of countries such as China and Japan. This makes the national energy system even more vulnerable. Visual: Teeni and Tuni The impact is already visible. In the readymade garments sector, gas shortages and load shedding are reducing productivity by 25–30 percent in many cases. This threatens export earnings, foreign currency reserves, and economic stability. The crisis has also reached ordinary households. Although Bangladesh declared 100 percent electrification in 2022, many rural areas still experience 10 to 20 hours of load shedding every day during summer. This affects education, small businesses, agriculture, and people’s dignity. We have also seen long lines at fuel stations, schools moving online, and offices shortening working hours because of fuel shortages. These are not isolated events. They show how deeply energy insecurity can disturb national life. Over the last 15 years, electricity tariffs in Bangladesh have been increased on many occasions, including more than 10 rounds of increases at both bulk and retail levels. This path is not sustainable. Fossil-fuel-based electricity depends on imported fuel, global prices, the availability of the dollar, subsidies, and repeated tariff adjustments. Solar power offers a different path. With a one-time investment, solar can provide stable energy for 15–20 years. Once installed, its fuel cost is almost zero. The economic comparison is clear. A 1 MW HFO-based power plant produces electricity per year at a cost of nearly BDT 190 crore, with much of the cost paid in foreign currency. In contrast, a 5 MW solar project requires a one-time investment of around BDT 25 crore, after which fuel costs are practically zero. Each 1 MW of solar power can save around USD 325,000 per year in foreign currency. Read more Bangladesh’s looming energy crisis and the choices ahead This is why renewable energy should not be discussed solely in technical terms like decarbonisation, emissions, and sustainability. For Bangladesh, renewable energy means jobs, fuel independence, savings in foreign currency, industrial competitiveness, agricultural protection, and economic strength. Policymakers and stakeholders can lead this transformation, inspiring confidence in a sustainable future. Despite Bangladesh’s potential, renewable energy contributes less than 5 percent to power generation, far below the global 30 percent target by 2030. Clear, measurable goals and timelines are essential for effective policy planning and investment decisions. Renewable energy equipment imports face around 50–60 percent in duties and taxes, hindering local manufacturing growth. Policy reforms that reduce import duties and support local industry can accelerate renewable deployment and reduce dependency on imports. For Bangladesh, renewable energy means jobs, fuel independence, savings in foreign currency, industrial competitiveness, agricultural protection, and economic strength. Policymakers and stakeholders can lead this transformation, inspiring confidence in a sustainable future. Import duty is usually imposed to protect the local industry. But where local production is not yet significant, a high duty only increases project costs, reduces investment returns, and slows renewable energy expansion. Policy reforms can unlock this potential, making stakeholders feel their efforts directly contribute to progress. India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and China have expanded solar and wind power by offering low or zero import duties, tax exemptions, and low-interest financing. Many countries have also reduced duties on lithium-ion batteries and energy storage systems. Bangladesh should learn from these examples. The barriers are clear: high duties and VAT, high financing costs of 10–12 percent or more, limited access to easy loans, slow approval processes, net metering delays, high LC margin, weak Merchant Power Policy, lack of clear policies for rooftop solar, utility-scale solar, floating solar, agrivoltaics, solar irrigation, and hybrid solar-storage, weak local manufacturing, and insufficient grid digitalisation. Addressing these collectively can accelerate Bangladesh's renewable journey, uniting stakeholders in a common goal. One urgent reform is customs assessment. The current weight-based assessment system does not reflect the actual value of solar equipment. It can create artificial overvaluation and raise duties by three to four times. Bangladesh should shift to transaction-value-based assessment using pro forma or commercial invoice values, in line with international practice and WTO customs valuation principles. The second urgent reform is the elimination of customs duty on renewable energy equipment. This should apply to Solar PV Module, Photovoltaic Cell, Solar Inverter, DC Cable, Data Logger, Aluminium Mounting Structure, Battery Pack, Battery Cell, BMS Circuit Board, PV DG Controller, Hybrid Controller, Solar Plant Safety Aluminium Walkway Mesh, Safety Accessories, and related components. Current TTI rates are high. Solar PV Module carries 26.90 percent, Photovoltaic Cell 25.75 percent, Solar Inverter 28.73 percent, DC Cable 58.40 percent, Data Logger 37.25 percent, Aluminium Mounting Structure 58.40 percent, Battery Pack and Battery Cell 58.40 percent, BMS Circuit Board 31.50 percent, pack materials 37.25 percent, PV DG Controller or Hybrid Controller 89.08 percent, and Solar Plant Safety Aluminum Walkway Mesh 37.25 percent. These should be reduced to zero percent for renewable energy expansion. The third reform is a tax holiday. Rooftop solar power producers and project companies should receive benefits comparable to those of utility-scale renewable energy producers. A practical structure could be a 100 percent tax holiday for the first 10 years, 50 percent for the next 3 years, and 25 percent for the next 2 years. This should apply to CAPEX, OPEX, IPP, and MPP models. A broader 10–20 year tax holiday for renewable energy projects should also be considered. Read more How can Bangladesh rapidly expand solar capacity? Bangladesh has a remarkable solar opportunity already waiting on its rooftops. About 7 percent of the country’s land is covered with concrete or other built structures. This means more than 10,000 square kilometres, or about 10 billion square meters of built surface. If only 30 percent is usable, that would give around 3 billion square meters. At 10 square meters per kW, this can create nearly 300 GW of solar potential. Bangladesh’s peak demand is only around 16–18 GW. The opportunity already exists on rooftops, factories, warehouses, schools, hospitals, government buildings, and commercial establishments. Rooftop solar should therefore be relaunched nationwide with a clear business model. Utility-scale solar also needs support through unused khas land, transparent tendering, and grid readiness. Floating solar, river-based solar, agrivoltaics, solar irrigation, and hybrid solar-storage should receive separate policy attention. The suspended solar projects must also be revisited. A total of 31 solar power projects, with a combined capacity of more than 3,000 MW, were previously suspended or cancelled. Many were being developed by foreign investors, with more than USD 200 million reportedly already invested. If implemented, these projects could save around BDT 10,800 crore annually in energy import costs. They should be reassessed and revived quickly. Energy storage is another missing pillar. Solar and wind need storage support to become more reliable. Duties on lithium-ion batteries, BESS, and other storage systems should be reduced to zero. This will help stabilise renewable power and support future grid flexibility. Electric vehicles can also become part of the solution. In China, Japan, and the United States, EVs are increasingly seen as mobile energy storage systems. A typical EV battery has a capacity of 40–70 kWh, enough to power an average household for 1–2 days. If Bangladesh had 1 million EVs, the country would have 40–70 GWh of distributed storage. This is several times higher than the daily peak demand gap. Solar-powered EV charging, vehicle-to-home, and vehicle-to-grid systems should be included in future energy planning. If Bangladesh had 30–40 percent of the grid powered by solar, along with solar-powered EVs, the country would be far less exposed to global fuel market shocks. Long fuel lines, online schooling, shorter office hours, and industrial disruption could be reduced. Solar, storage, and EVs should now be planned together. Finance will decide how fast this transition happens. Renewable energy projects cannot grow at interest rates below 10–12 percent. Long-term financing should be available at an interest rate of 3.5–4.5 percent. A 10–15-year financing facility at a maximum interest rate of 5 percent should be introduced. Bangladesh Bank’s green refinancing fund should be expanded. Rooftop and residential solar customers should be eligible for collateral-free loans. The LC margin for renewable equipment should be limited to 5%.\ Read more Rooppur begins, but is Bangladesh Prepared? Net metering must be simplified. Approval should be completed within 15–30 days through a one-stop service. Approval, interconnection, inspection, billing adjustment, and utility coordination should all be simple and time-bound. Wheeling charges for renewable energy should also be kept reasonable and low. The Merchant Power Policy should be clear, simple, and investment-friendly so that industries and commercial consumers can directly procure renewable electricity. Agriculture should also be included in the solar transition. Bangladesh can set a target to convert 1.5 million diesel irrigation pumps into solar pumps. This will reduce diesel imports, lower farmers’ production costs, and protect the environment. The program should include duty-free facilities, low-cost loans, investment support, and local service networks. Waste-to-energy should also receive policy support. City corporations need clear rules, easy financing, and private-sector participation to enable urban waste management and distributed power generation to work together. Bangladesh now needs a phased national roadmap for renewable energy. In the short term, within 0–6 months, customs duty, VAT, and taxes on renewable energy equipment should be reduced to zero. Duties on lithium-ion batteries, BESS, and energy storage should be withdrawn. Approval for net metering should be obtained within 15–30 days. Industrial and commercial solar installations should be eligible for special incentives. The 31 suspended solar projects should be reassessed. Wheeling charges should be rationalised. Solar, storage, and EV charging should receive urgent policy support. Collateral-free lines of credit should be introduced for rooftop solar. NBR should quickly implement assessment reform and a 0 percent duty. Read more All hopes will lose steam without a sustainable energy plan In the medium term, within 1–3 years, renewable energy financing should be available at a maximum interest rate of 5 percent for 10–15 years. The LC margin should be limited to 5 percent. Land banks and grid infrastructure should be developed for utility-scale solar. Merchant Power Policy and MPPA should be simplified. Rooftop solar, utility-scale solar, and hybrid solar-storage projects should receive a 10–15-year tax holiday. A national program should convert 1.5 million diesel pumps into solar pumps. Rooftop solar should be made mandatory or incentive-based for government buildings, industrial zones, EPZs, economic zones, and large commercial buildings. EV solar charging and distributed storage policies should be developed. Renewable energy skill development and employment programs should also be launched. In the long term, within 3–10 years, Bangladesh should aim to reach more than 10,000 MW of solar power by 2030. Offshore and onshore wind should be developed. Floating solar, river-based solar, and agrivoltaics should be implemented. A National Energy Storage Strategy should be prepared. Smart grid and power sector digitalisation should be accelerated. Local assembly and manufacturing of solar panels, inverters, mounting structures, battery packs, BMS, and EV charging equipment should be encouraged. Regional power trade should be expanded. The Renewable Purchase Obligation should be introduced. Fossil fuel subsidies should be gradually redirected to a renewable energy transition fund. Image Visual: Anwar Sohel The benefits can be large. Energy import costs will fall. Pressure on foreign currency reserves will decline. Industrial production costs will reduce. Export competitiveness will improve. The subsidy burden will decrease. New investment will grow. Renewable energy can create 20–25 jobs per MW through rooftop solar, utility-scale solar, solar pumps, EV charging, battery storage, smart grids, manufacturing, installation, operation, and maintenance. The government may worry about revenue loss from tax and duty exemptions. But this should be seen as an investment. In the short term, there may be a limited impact on revenue. In the long term, Bangladesh can save far more by reducing fuel imports, lowering subsidies, saving foreign currency, strengthening industries, and attracting new investment. Bangladesh’s energy crisis is a major challenge but also a historic opportunity. The crisis is not only a supply problem. It is a policy framework problem. Renewable energy, especially solar power, storage, and EV integration, can be among the most practical solutions for the country. The question is no longer whether Bangladesh should adopt renewable energy. The real question is how quickly, how systematically, and how boldly the country can complete this transition. Mohammad Ataur Rahman Sarker is a renewable energy entrepreneur and the secretary of the Bangladesh Sustainable and Renewable Energy Association. Md. Tanvir Siraj is a renewable energy researcher. Send your articles for Slow Reads to slowreads@thedailystar.net. Check out our submission guidelines for details. Read More
MANILA, Philippines — The Land Transportation Office (LTO) has admitted that Germany-based Dermalog Identification Systems GmbH no longer provides information technology (IT) support for its Land Transportation Management Systems (LTMS) as the contract for the final module is set to expire by May 30. During the House of Representatives committee on transportation’s hearing on Monday,
According to the developer, the system features a neural network module that can identify the type of unmanned aerial vehicles
This sponsored article is brought to you by Wetour Robotics. A field technician on a wind turbine, harness clipped, both hands on a wrench, needs to send a command to the diagnostic device hanging at her belt. A logistics worker on a loading dock, gloves on, eyes on the pallet, needs to redirect a connected lift. A person using an assistive mobility device on a crowded street wants to nudge it forward without taking out a phone or speaking aloud. None of these moments call for a smarter robot. They call for a smarter way to be heard by the machines that already exist. The industry has been building from one side The past three years of Physical AI have been a story of remarkable progress on the robot side of the loop. Companies like Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Unitree have advanced actuators, locomotion, and dexterity to a level that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics has redefined what vision-language-action models can do in unstructured settings. The trajectory of the hardware and the foundation models is real, and it is accelerating. But there is another side to this loop, and it has been treated as a solved problem for too long. The interface between humans and machines has defaulted, for 40 years, to three input modalities: screens, buttons, and voice. Each of those assumes the user can stop, look down, and translate intent into structured commands. That assumption breaks the moment the work moves into a real environment. On a turbine. On a dock. On a sidewalk. In any setting where hands are occupied, eyes are committed, or speaking is impractical, the conventional interface stack quietly fails. Spatial Intent Fusion is the simultaneous processing of three streams of human-centered information, namely spatial position, visual context, and gestural intent: Your body is the interface. The bottleneck on the human side of the loop is becoming as important as the one on the machine side. And solving it requires a different question. Not how do we make the robot more capable, but how do we let the human participate in the computing system as naturally as the robot already does. Wetour Robotics’ bet: put the human back into the computing loop Wetour Robotics is betting that the next architectural leap in Physical AI is not about making the robot more capable. It is about making the human a first-class node in the computing network, with the same kind of low-latency, high-fidelity participation that connected devices already enjoy. Wetour Robotics’ engineers frame the problem this way: a wristband that recognizes a gesture is not enough. A camera that recognizes a scene is not enough. The information a human carries about what they are about to do is distributed across multiple channels, including where their body is in space, what their eyes are attending to, and what their muscles are preparing to do, and any single channel observed in isolation is ambiguous. Reconstructing intent reliably means fusing those channels at the operating system level, with latency low enough that the loop feels closed rather than mediated. This approach has a name. Wetour Robotics calls it Spatial Intent Fusion: the simultaneous processing of three streams of human-centered information, namely spatial position, visual context, and gestural intent, fused into a single real-time command for any connected physical device. It is the technical implementation behind a simpler positioning statement the company uses externally: your body is the interface. Orchestra is a portable intelligent hub running the operating system that handles sensor fusion, intent inference, command translation, and safety arbitration. The reference compute platform is NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, which provides enough on-device inference capacity to keep the entire control loop at the edge, with no cloud dependency on the critical path. Wetour Robotics The architecture: three layers, four engines, one loop Orchestra is not a single device but a layered platform, designed from the start to be sensor-flexible and actuator-agnostic. The architecture decomposes into three perception layers and four coordination engines. Orchestra itself is the local compute and orchestration core: a portable intelligent hub running the operating system that handles sensor fusion, intent inference, command translation, and safety arbitration. The reference compute platform is NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, which provides enough on-device inference capacity to keep the entire control loop at the edge, with no cloud dependency on the critical path. Edge inference is non-negotiable for this application. Full-chain latency from biosignal acquisition to actuator command is held under 100 milliseconds, the envelope inside which closed-loop control feels natural rather than laggy. VisionLink handles visual and spatial perception. Cameras feed into vision models that identify objects, estimate distances, and track environmental context. VisionLink is designed not as a passive recognition layer but as a real-time command generator: its outputs feed directly into Orchestra OS to be fused with biosignal data. Conductor is the biosignal pipeline. It ingests raw surface electromyographic (sEMG) data from a wrist-worn device, classifies temporal patterns into discrete gestures or continuous control signals, and outputs actuator commands. The technically interesting property of sEMG for this use case is that the signal precedes visible motion. Motor unit action potentials appear at the skin surface roughly 50 to 80 milliseconds before a finger completes the corresponding gesture. Wetour Robotics calls this property pre-motion intent sensing, and it is what allows Orchestra to anticipate user intent rather than react to it. On top of the three perception layers, Orchestra OS runs four coordination engines. The Perception Engine ingests and normalizes raw sensor streams. The Intent Engine performs Spatial Intent Fusion across modalities, resolving what the user is trying to do given where they are, what they are looking at, and what their hand is signaling. The Orchestration Engine translates intent into device-specific command sequences for any connected actuator. The Safety Engine arbitrates conflicting commands, enforces operational envelopes, and gates execution against runtime safety conditions. Wetour Robotics The trade-offs we’re honest about No system that bridges the human body and the digital world is finished. Three engineering challenges remain open, and the company addresses each with a deliberate trade-off rather than a claim of having fully solved it. Baseline stability of sEMG under motion. In a stationary user, continuous gesture recognition from sEMG is reliable. Once the user is walking, climbing, or otherwise moving, motion artifacts and electrode drift degrade the signal in ways that are difficult to fully compensate for. Rather than overpromise on continuous control in dynamic settings, Orchestra defaults to a smaller set of robust discrete gestures in complex operating environments, and reserves continuous control modes for contexts where the signal-to-noise ratio supports them. Miniaturization of edge AI compute. Running the Orchestra control loop entirely at the edge requires real on-device inference, which has historically meant trading off between compute capacity, battery life, and form factor. Wetour Robotics’ approach has been a compact carrier board paired with a thermal design and a battery module sized for all-day wearability. The result is a hub that travels with the user rather than tethering them to a desk, and that performs the full perception-to-actuation loop without offloading to the cloud. Heterogeneity of third-party device protocols. The actuator side of the loop is a fragmented landscape. Different manufacturers expose different command interfaces, different communication stacks, and different safety conventions, and a Physical AI operating system has to integrate with all of them. Wetour Robotics uses an AI-agent layer to negotiate connection and protocol translation adaptively, so that Orchestra OS can ingest data from a wide range of devices, run them through neural network models that infer human intent, and emit the right command on the right protocol for the device on the other end. Why this matters, and why it helps the rest of the field The history of computing is a history of interface revolutions. Command lines gave way to graphical user interfaces, which gave way to touch, which gave way to voice. Each transition expanded who could participate in the system and what they could do with it. The next transition is not about a new screen or a new microphone. It is about treating the human body itself as a participant in the computing network, capable of contributing intent at the same speed and fidelity that any other connected node can. The history of computing is a history of interface revolutions. The next transition is not about a new screen or a new microphone — it is about treating the human body itself as a participant in the computing network. This path is not a competitor to the work being done on humanoid robots, foundation models for embodied AI, and dexterous manipulation. It is the missing complement to that work. The hardest open problem for humanoid systems is the data: every natural interaction between a human and the physical world is a potential training signal, and most of those interactions are currently invisible to any computing system. As more humans become first-class nodes in the loop, those interactions become observable, structured, and ultimately useful for training the next generation of embodied AI, including the humanoid robots being developed today. In other words: putting the human back into the computing loop is not just about better interfaces for individual users. It is about generating the kind of grounded, in-the-wild human-machine interaction data that the broader Physical AI ecosystem will need to keep advancing. The robot side and the human side of the loop are not two competing futures. They are two halves of the same one. That is what Wetour Robotics means when it says: Your body is the interface. Learn more at wetourrobotics.com.
It is designed for short-stay surgical patients and surgical assessments.
This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics. This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity, which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore. The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two-and-a-half-year-old company known for its advanced tactile sensor hardware, most notably a monochromatic, vision-based tactile sensor that packs over 110,000 effective sensing units into a fingertip-sized module. Drawing on its high-resolution tactile sensing technology and a distributed out-of-lab collection network capable of generating millions of hours of data annually, DAIMON is building large-scale robot manipulation datasets that include vast amounts of tactile sensing data. To accelerate the real-world deployment of embodied AI, the company has also open-sourced 10,000 hours of its data. Prof. Michael Yu Wang, co-founder and chief scientist at DAIMON Robotics, has pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision.DAIMON Robotics Behind the strategy is Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON’s co-founder and chief scientist. Prof. Wang earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon — studying manipulation under Matt Mason — and went on to found the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An IEEE Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, he has spent roughly four decades in the field. His objective is to address the missing “insensitivity” of robot manipulation, which practically relies on the dominant Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. He and his team have pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision. We spoke with Prof. Wang about how tactile feedback aims to change dexterous manipulation, how the dataset initiative is foreseen to improve our understanding of robotic hands in natural environments, and where — from hotels to convenience stores in China — he sees touch-enabled robots making their first real-world inroads. Daimon-Infinity is the world’s largest omni-modal dataset for Physical AI, featuring million-hour scale multimodal data, ultra-high-res tactile feedback, data from 80+ real scenarios and 2,000+ human skills, and more.DAIMON Robotics The Dataset Initiative This month, DAIMON Robotics released the largest and most comprehensive robotic manipulation dataset with multiple leading academic institutions and enterprises. Why releasing the dataset now, rather than continuing to focus on product development? What impact will this have on the embodied intelligence industry? DAIMON Robotics has been around for almost two and a half years. We have been committed to developing high-resolution, multimodal tactile sensing devices to perceive the interaction between a robot’s hand (particularly its fingertips) and objects. Our devices have become quite robust. They are now accepted and used by a large segment of users, including academic and research institutes as well as leading humanoid robotics companies. As embodied AI continues to advance, the critical role of data has been clearer. Data scarcity remains a primary bottleneck in robot learning, particularly the lack of physical interaction data, which is essential for robots to operate effectively in the real world. Consequently, data quality, reliability, and cost have become major concerns in both research and commercial development. This is exactly where DAIMON excels. Our vision-based tactile technology captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data. Beyond basic contact forces, it records deformation, slip and friction, material properties and surface textures — enabling a comprehensive reconstruction of physical interactions. Building on our expertise in multimodal fusion, we have developed a robust data processing pipeline that seamlessly integrates tactile feedback with vision, motion trajectories, and natural language, transforming raw inputs into training-ready dataset for machine learning models. Recognizing the industry-wide data gap, we view large-scale data collection not only as our unique competitive advantage, but as a responsibility to the broader community. By building and open-sourcing the dataset, we aim to provide the high-quality “fuel” needed to power embodied AI, ultimately accelerating the real-world deployment of general-purpose robotic foundation models. The robotics industry is highly competitive, and many teams have chosen to focus on data. DAIMON is releasing a large and highly comprehensive cross-embodiment, vision-based tactile multimodal robotic manipulation dataset. How were you able to achieve this? We have a dedicated in-house team focused on expanding our capabilities, including building hardware devices and developing our own large-scale model. Although we are a relatively small company, our core tactile sensing technology and innovative data collection paradigm enable us to build large-scale dataset. Our approach is to broaden our offering. We have built the world’s largest distributed out-of-lab data collection network. Rather than relying on centralized data factories, this lightweight and scalable system allows data to be gathered across diverse real-world environments, enabling us to generate millions of hours of data per year. “To drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics This dataset is being jointly developed with several institutions worldwide. What roles did they play in its development, and how will the dataset benefit their research and products? Besides China based teams, our partners include leading research groups from universities, such as Northwestern University and the National University of Singapore, as well as top global enterprises like Google DeepMind and China Mobile. Their decision to partner with DAIMON is a strong testament to the value of our tactile-rich dataset. Among the companies involved there are some that have already built their own models but are now incorporating tactile information. By deploying our data collection devices across research, manufacturing and other real-world scenarios, they help us to gather highly practical, application-driven data. In turn, our partners leverage the data to train models tailored to their specific use cases. Furthermore, to drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community. Equipped with Daimon’s visuotactile sensor, the gripper delicately senses contact and precisely controls force to pick up a fragile eggshell.Daimon Robotics From VLA to VTLA: Why Tactile Sensing Changes the Equation The mainstream paradigm in robotics is currently the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, but your team has proposed a Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) model. Why is it necessary to incorporate tactile sensing? What does it enable robots to achieve, and which tasks are likely to fail without tactile feedback? Over these years of working to make generalist robots capable of performing manipulation tasks, especially dexterous manipulation — not just power grasping or holding an object, but manipulating objects and using tools to impart forces and motion onto parts — we see these robots being used in household as well as industrial assembly settings. It is well established that tactile information is essential for providing feedback about contact states so that robots can guide their hands and fingers to perform reliable manipulation. Without tactile sensing, robots are severely limited. They struggle to locate objects in dark environments, and without slip detection, they can easily drop fragile items like glass. Furthermore, the inability to precisely control force often leads to failed manipulation tasks or, in severe cases, physical damage. Naturally, the VLA approach needs to be enhanced to incorporate tactile information. We expanded the VLA framework to incorporate tactile data, creating the VTLA model. An additional benefit of our tactile sensor is that it is vision-based: We capture visual images of the deformation on the fingertip surface. We capture multiple images in a time sequence that encodes contact information, from which we can infer forces and other contact states. This aligns well with the visual framework that VLA is based upon. Having tactile information in a visual image format makes it naturally suitable for integration into the VLA framework, transforming it into a VTLA system. That is the key advantage: Vision-based tactile sensors provide very high resolution at the pixel level, and this data can be incorporated into the framework, whether it is an end-to-end model or another type of architecture. DAIMON has been known for its vision-based tactile sensors that can pack over 110,000 effective sensing units.DAIMON Robotics The Technology: Monochromatic Vision-based Tactile Sensing You and your team have spent many years deeply engaged in vision-based tactile sensing and have developed the world’s first monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technology. Why did you choose this technical path? Once we started investigating tactile sensors, we understood our needs. We wanted sensors that closely mimic what we have under our fingertip skin. Physiological studies have well documented the capabilities humans have at their fingertips — knowing what we touch, what kind of material it is, how forces are distributed, and whether it is moving into the right position as our brain controls our hands. We knew that replicating these capabilities on a robot hand’s fingertips would help considerably. When we surveyed existing technologies, we found many types, including vision-based tactile sensors with tri-color optics and other simpler designs. We decided to integrate the best of these into an engineering-robust solution that works well without being overly complicated, keeping cost, reliability, and sensitivity within a satisfactory range, thus ultimately developing a monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technique. This is fundamentally an engineering approach rather than a purely scientific one, since a great deal of foundational research already existed. With the growing realization of the necessity of tactile data, all of this will advance hand in hand. DAIMON vision-based tactile sensor captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data.DAIMON Robotics Last year, DAIMON launched a multi-dimensional, high-resolution, high-frequency vision-based tactile sensor. Compared with traditional tactile sensors, where does its core advantage lie? Which industries could it potentially transform? The key features of our sensors are the density of distributed force measurement and the deformation we can capture over the area of a fingertip. I believe we have the highest density in terms of sensing units. That is one very important metric. The other is dynamics: the frequency and bandwidth — how quickly we can detect force changes, transmit signals, and process them in real time. Other important aspects are largely engineering-related, such as reliability, drift, durability of the soft surface, and resistance to interference from magnetic, optical, or environmental factors. A growing number of researchers and companies are recognizing the importance of tactile sensing and adopting our technology. I believe the advances in tactile sensing will elevate the entire community and industry to a higher level. One of our potential customers is deploying humanoid robots in a small convenience store, with densely packed shelves where shelf space is at a premium. The robot needs to reach into very tight spaces — tighter than books on a shelf — to pick out an object. Current two-jaw parallel grippers cannot fit into most of these spaces. Observing how humans pick up objects, you clearly need at least three slim fingers to touch and roll the object toward you and secure it. Thus, we are starting to see very specific needs where tactile sensing capabilities are essential. From Academia to Startup After 40 years in academia — founding the HKUST Robotics Institute, earning prestigious honors including IEEE Fellow, and serving as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TASE — what motivated you to found DAIMON Robotics? I have come a long way. I started learning robotics during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon, where there were truly remarkable groups working on locomotion under Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics, and on manipulation under my advisor, Matt Mason, a leader in the field. We have been working on dexterous manipulation, not only at Carnegie Mellon, but globally for many years. However, progress has been limited for a long time, especially in building dexterous hands and making them work. Only recently have locomotion robots truly taken off, and only in the last few years have we begun to see major advancements in robot hands. There is clearly room for advancing manipulation capabilities, which would enable robots to do work like humans. While at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, I saw increasingly greater people entering this area in the form of students and postdoctoral researchers. We wanted to jumpstart our effort by leveraging the available capital and talent resources. Fortunately, one of my postdocs, Dr. Duan Jianghua, has a strong sense for commercial opportunities. Recognizing the rapid growth of robotics market and the unique value that our vision-based tactile sensing technology could bring, together we started DAIMON Robotics, and it has progressed well. The community has grown tremendously in China, Japan, Korea, the U.S., and Europe. Robots equipped with DAIMON technology have been deployed in factory settings. The company aims to enable robots to achieve “embodied intelligence” and close the gap between what they can see and what they can feel.DAIMON Robotics Business Model and Commercial Strategy What is DAIMON’s current business model and strategic focus? What role does the dataset release play in your commercial strategy? We started as a device company focused on making highly capable tactile sensors, especially for robot hands. But as technology and business developed, everyone realized it is not just about one component, rather the entire technology chain: devices, data of adequate quality and quantity, and finally the right framework to build, train, and deploy models on robots in real application environments. Our business strategy is best described as “3D”: Devices, Data, and Deployment. We build devices for data collection, our own ecosystem, and for deploying them in our partners’ potential application domains. This enables the collection of real-world tactile-rich data and complete closed-loop validation. This will become an integral part of the 3D business model. Most startups in this space are following a similar path until eventually some may become more specialized or more tightly integrated with other companies. For now, it is mostly vertical integration. Embodied Skills and the Convergence Moment You’ve introduced the concept of “embodied skills” as essential for humanoid robots to move beyond having just an advanced AI “brain.” What prompted this insight? What new capabilities could embodied skills enable? After the rapid evolution of models and hardware over the past two years, has your definition or roadmap for embodied skills evolved? We have come a long way now see a convergence point where electrical, electronic, and mechatronic hardware technologies have advanced tremendously in last two decades. Robots are now fully electric, do not require hydraulics, because hardware has evolved rapidly. Modern electronics provide tremendous bandwidth with high torques. If we can build intelligence into these systems, we can create truly humanoid robots with the ability to operate in unstructured environments, make decisions, and take actions autonomously. “Our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics AI has arrived at exactly the right time. Enormous resources have been invested in AI development, especially large language models, which are now being generalized into world models that enable physical AI capabilities. We would like to see these manifested in real-world systems. While both AI and core hardware technologies continue to evolve, the focus is much clearer now. For example, human-sized robots are preferred in a home environment. This is an exciting domain with a promise of great societal benefit if we can eventually achieve safe, reliable, and cost-effective robots. The Road to Real-World Deployment Today, many robots can deliver impressive demos, yet there remains a gap before they truly enter real-world applications. What could be a potential trigger for real-world deployment? Which scenarios are most likely to achieve large-scale deployment first? I think the road toward large-scale deployment of generalist robots is still long, but we are starting to see signs of feasibility within specific domains. It is very similar to autonomous vehicles, where we are yet to see full deployment of robo-taxis, while we have already started to find mobile robots and smaller vehicles widely deployed in the hospitality industry. Virtually every major hotel in China now has a delivery robot — no arms, just a vehicle that picks up items from the hotel lobby (e.g., food deliveries). The delivery person just loads the food and selects the room number. It is up to the robot thereafter to navigate and reach the guest’s room, which includes using the elevator, to deliver the food. This is already nearly 100 percent deployed in major Chinese hotels. Hotel and restaurant robots are viewed as a model for deploying humanoid robots in specific domains like overnight drugstores and convenience stores. I expect complete deployment in such settings within a short timeframe, followed by other applications. Overall, we can expect autonomous robots, including humanoids, to progressively penetrate specific sectors, delivering value in each and expanding into others. Ultimately, our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans. By seamlessly integrating into our homes and daily lives, they will genuinely benefit and serve humanity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The next phase in the Angara-A5 modernization program involves adapting the rocket for launching manned spacecraft
Adani Green Energy is set to seek board approval to raise Rs 6,150 crore ($750 million) to Rs 8,200 crore ($1 billion) through the qualified institutional placement (QIP) route, said people aware of the matter.Two group companies had got approval of their boards for fundraising on May 13 —Adani Enterprises (Rs 12,500 crore) and Adani Transmission (Rs 8,500 crore).The exercise is part of a group plan outlined internally last year to build a “three-year equity cushion” to support expansion plans.Adani Green has secured such capital-raising permission every year from its board except in 2021, as per a Bloomberg analysis.The capital raised by Adani Green Energy will be used to repay an outstanding $750 million, three-year bond issued in 2021 that’s due next year. The money is likely to be kept in a dedicated redemption reserve account and paid on the due date, said the people cited above.Renegotiating Terms With TotalThe original plan had been to prepay the bond after special Reserve Bank of India (RBI) approval but the company decided against this move.“We do not comment on routine business matters. All public disclosures on business matters are disclosed when appropriate,” an Adani Group spokesperson told ET.Adani Green is also renegotiating the terms of its agreement with French utilities giant TotalEnergies for a proposed $4 billion investment in a green hydrogen venture, having signed a memorandum of understanding in 2022. In February, Total said it was pausing the plan in the wake of the Hindenburg Research report on the Adani Group alleging stock manipulation and fraud. The Adani Group has rejected the report’s findings.Total had said it won’t immediately proceed with the plan that involved taking a 25% stake in Adani New Industries Ltd (ANIL), a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises.In June last year, ANIL and TotalEnergies had outlined a capex plan of $50 billion to set up a 2.5 million metric tonnes per annum (mmtpa) of green hydrogen manufacturing capacity over the next 10 years, with the first phase of 1 mmtpa expected to be commissioned before 2030. Total had also made a total $10 billion capital commitment to the hydrogen venture, standing guarantor to 50% of the project’s debt, translating to $6 billion, ET had reported February 13.ANIL plans to manufacture green hydrogen and downstream products such as ammonia, urea, methanol and ethanol at its Khavda and Mundra SEZ facilities. The Khavda site has a land bank of 71,000 acres, which has a large-scale renewable deployment potential of 20 GW due to its high wind and solar resource potential.After the initial MoU, a more detailed ‘heads of agreement’ — pre-contractual negotiations for a commercial framework — was originally planned to be signed between May and September this year. But this is unlikely at this juncture.The Adani Group has, however, continued with the project work in Mundra on its own, aiming to complete a substantial part of the first phase of the integrated manufacturing ecosystem for ANIL by December.This involves 4.5 GW of solar module manufacturing capacity and 1.5 GW of wind turbine manufacturing capacity along with electrolysers, glass, aluminium frames etc. Analysts say over 5% of the total capex has already been incurred by Adani though the bulk of the work is scheduled for 2026-2028. Any binding agreement with Total is now expected only in 2024 or 2025 and the valuation and the overall commercial terms is likely to get altered as the French company is not incurring any of the greenfield project risks, they said.“We have 40 GW of land equivalent. We've been doing solar modules for the past five years. We know we will produce modules at 15 cents to 17 cents,” Robbie Singh, chief financial officer of Adani Enterprises, had told ET on January 22.Other than the green hydrogen project, Total has just over $3 billion of investments with Adani, including in gas distribution and solar projects, which it has played down as a small 2.4% slice of its total capital commitments.