Inside Hardware: Visiting a Manufacturer
A conversation with Mitch White, a Hardware Engineer at Shield AI. You were the lead on designing the battery charger that comes with Nova. Where did you start with this design? At Shield AI we’re fortunate enough to maintain ongoing open dialogues with our customers and to have colleagues who have been in our customers […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: On Progress in Swarming
A conversation with Professor Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. This is a continuation of our conversation of Shield AI Fundamentals: On Multi-Robot Collaboration. Is the idea of swarming decades away? How do you answer the question of when swarming will be possible in the real world? There are different levels of what is […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: On Reinforcement Learning
A conversation with Evan Gravelle, an AI Engineer at Shield AI. What is reinforcement learning? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning concerned with the process of learning by trying things, receiving a positive or negative reward (feedback), and then modifying behavior to try and maximize cumulative expected reward. Many forms of life […]
Inside Hardware: Designing a New Component
A conversation with Connor Kite, a Hardware Engineer at Shield AI. How do you begin brainstorming the design of a new hardware component? We start off with asking the question: What is the user experience that we want for this component? A lot of these are user-facing elements — latches, buttons, and any other things […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: On Multi-Robot Collaboration
A conversation with Professor Nathan Michael, Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. We’ve heard many terms referring to collaboration between robotic systems, can you elaborate on which terms exist and what each mean? There’s collaboration, coordination, teaming and swarming. Collaboration is when systems work together in order to achieve some common goal — working together to […]
Shield AI Fundamentals: Developing an Android App for AI
Android is an open-source, mobile operating system first announced by Google in 2007. Today, it enjoys 70-plus percent global market share, with more than three million Android apps available on the Google Play Store. Continued advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence also have introduced new user interaction patterns and new user behavior, influencing how […]
On Machine Intelligence at Shield AI
What did you do before coming to Shield AI? Before coming to Shield AI, I was an electrical engineer and programmer for the Unmanned Systems group at SPAWAR Systems Center, Pacific. Throughout my eleven years at SPAWAR, I worked on a variety of projects, including electrical design for ground vehicle payloads, command and control user […]
How to Evaluate User Experience
This past July I joined Shield AI, and so far it has been an experience designer’s dream. To work on a system that combines the physical and the digital, to create for a high-stakes use environment where design really matters, and to serve people who are committed to protecting others has been an opportunity that […]
What is Machine Intelligence?
What is Machine Intelligence? The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very prominent in mainstream media, causing the initials to often be used without full comprehension of the meaning. AI’s ability to capture the imagination is hardly new. There are movies reflecting on AI as far back as 1927 with Metropolis and continuing to present day; […]
How to Design a Product the Right Way
There are a lot of products in the world and many of them fail to delight in ways that I imagine their talented design teams originally intended. As an engineer at Shield AI, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes some designs successful and some a failure. No team of talented people […]
