Image of a robot (humanoid-style) looking over a cityscape

We’re living in a time when many of our roads, bridges and buildings are getting old and showing signs of wear. It’s like they’re all getting sick at the same time, making it impossible for inspectors to keep up with the job of checking out every crack, creak or crumble. This is a big problem, because if problems are not caught early, they can deteriorate and even lead to dangerous failures.

Here’s where some clever minds at Drexel University in the US come in. Read this week’s blog to find out more about how they’ve developed a system that uses robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to help with the inspections.

Over the past few months, we’ve witnessed a race in the launch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that has been trained to interact with humans in a conversational way.

Natural language models like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can produce pieces of creative writing, translate copy, summarise lengthy texts, access vast amounts of data to answer queries and have a human-like conversation. Whilst experimenting with these technologies can be both useful and fun, this has got us wondering whether AI might soon be taking on other creative work such as designing a building (or perhaps it is already)? Take a look at what we found out in this week’s blog.