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Google car firm Waymo signs self-driving car deal with rental firm Avis Budget | USA Today
Alex Kirkpatrick
26 Jun 2017
Former Google car project Waymo has signed a deal with Avis Budget Group to service and house a fleet of self-driving vehicles being tested in Phoenix, giving the rental car agency a foothold in the...
Germany’s biggest industrial robotics company is working on consumer robots | The Verge
Alex Kirkpatrick
22 Jun 2017
You might not have heard of Kuka, but you’ll almost certainly know its products. The German firm is one of the world’s top manufacturers of industrial robots, and its robot arms are instantly reco...
Wireless and drone execs praised President Trump as he pledged to cut down regulations | Recode
Alex Kirkpatrick
22 Jun 2017
Some of the nation’s leading wireless giants and drone makers offered effusive praise of President Donald Trump on Thursday as they lobbied his administration to eliminate the federal regulations th...
Tesla replaces chief of self-driving software | Wall Street Journal
Alex Kirkpatrick
21 Jun 2017
Tesla Inc. has parted ways with another senior leader on its self-driving technology team, adding more turmoil to a program that is under pressure to meet the grand ambitions of Chief Executive Elon M...
Personal Food Computer: A new device for controlled-environment agriculture | arXiv
Alex Kirkpatrick
21 Jun 2017
Due to their interdisciplinary nature, devices for controlled-environment agriculture have the possibility to turn into ideal tools not only to conduct research on plant phenology but also to create c...
Toy maker Sphero is starting a new company to put advanced robots in the home | The Verge
Alex Kirkpatrick
20 Jun 2017
Sphero is best known as the creator of toy robots, including popular movie merch for films like Star Wars, Cars, and Spider-Man. But the company has grander ambitions than that: today it announced tha...
New NASA tech tells drones why they’re broken and helps them land | WIRED
Alex Kirkpatrick
20 Jun 2017
IF THE WORLD is ever going to enjoy the upsides of a sky filled with drones, the unmanned aircraft must be able to behave at least as well as human pilots. They must know how to react to other aircraf...
How drones are advancing scientific research | Phys.Org
Alex Kirkpatrick
19 Jun 2017
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been around since the early 1900s. Originally used for military operations, they became more widely used after about 2010 when electronic technology go...
Bosch to build $1.1 billion chip plant for self-driving cars | Bloomberg
Alex Kirkpatrick
19 Jun 2017
Auto supplier Robert Bosch GmbH will build a 1 billion-euro ($1.1 billion) semiconductor plant, the biggest single investment in its history, as the maker of brakes and engines prepares for a surge in...
A colonoscopy robot and other weird biomedical tech from IEEE’s biggest robotics conference | IEEE Spectrum
Alex Kirkpatrick
16 Jun 2017
A host of bizarre biomedical robots turned up at ICRA 2017, IEEE’s flagship robotics conference, which took place earlier this month in Singapore. We saw swallowable robots that poke the stomach w...
‘Little sunfish’ robot to swim in to Fukushima reactor | BBC News
Alex Kirkpatrick
16 Jun 2017
It'll be a tough journey - previous robots sent in to the ruined nuclear reactor didn't make it back.
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This marimba-playing robot invents surprisingly nice tunes | MIT Tech Review
Alex Kirkpatrick
15 Jun 2017
What has four arms, eight sticks, a brain suffused with two million musical motifs, and creates some smooth tunes? As it turns out, Shimon the marimba-playing robot.
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Lyft says all of its self-driving electric cars will be powered by ‘100% renewable energy’ | The Verge
Alex Kirkpatrick
15 Jun 2017
Lyft likes to set lofty goals for itself. Last year, one of the ride-hail company’s founders went on record predicting that “a majority” of Lyft’s trips will be in self-driving cars by 2021. N...
Waymo retires its cute self-driving car in favor of minivans | The Verge
Alex Kirkpatrick
14 Jun 2017
Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post this afternoon, Waymo leaders write that time has come to “reti...
IISc Bangalore scientists are experimenting with drone seed-bombing, and hope to plant a forest | Factor Daily
Alex Kirkpatrick
14 Jun 2017
“I’m basically from that area (Gauribidanur in Karnataka); son of a farmer, came to academia… keen to bring back my younger days, when the river used to flow for three to four months a year. I n...
Smart jacket and VR headset let you pilot a drone with your body | New Scientist
Alex Kirkpatrick
12 Jun 2017
I feel half-superhero, half-idiot. The jacket I’m wearing is letting me fly a drone around a virtual university campus just by spreading my arms and moving my body from side to side – like a kid p...
Drone league races toward another $20 million raise | Forbes
Alex Kirkpatrick
12 Jun 2017
The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced the closing of a $20 million Series B round of financing, bringing the total amount raised to $32 million. The new round of financing was led by Sky, Libert...
Self-driving car angels protect you from yourself | WIRED
Alex Kirkpatrick
10 Jun 2017
ON A FINE day in a parking lot outside Boston, a man holding a smartphone steps in front of a 2015 Prius. The driver keeps pressing the accelerator. But a bunch of electronics hacked into the car brin...
Why Google wanted to sell — and Softbank wanted to buy — Boston Dynamics, which makes crazy robots | LA Times
Alex Kirkpatrick
10 Jun 2017
Boston Dynamics’ robots can lurch like a human, sprint on all fours like a canine and navigate around small spaces like a spider. Though the machines look like sci-fi villains, Google once saw in th...
Chinese exam authorities use facial recognition, drones to catch cheats | Reuters
Alex Kirkpatrick
08 Jun 2017
Chinese education authorities have gone high-tech to catch cheaters as millions of high-school students take their "gaokao", the annual university entrance exam seen as key to landing a lucrative whit...
Honda wants level 4 self-driving cars by 2025 | The Drive
Alex Kirkpatrick
08 Jun 2017
Honda is the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan.
...
AI summit aims to help world’s poorest | Nature
Alex Kirkpatrick
07 Jun 2017
In the world’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are starting to steer self-driving cars down the streets, and homeowners are giving orders to their smart voice-control...
I would spend $10K to furnish my apartment with MIT’s robot furniture | The Verge
Alex Kirkpatrick
07 Jun 2017
Back in 2014, MIT debuted CityHome, a solution for tiny living spaces with the ability to pack several home necessities into a single, movable modular unit. Today, the concept — now renamed Ori Syst...
A rocket-propelled miniature robot for planetary exploration | IEEE Spectrum
Alex Kirkpatrick
06 Jun 2017
In terms of overall bang for your buck, solid-fuel rockets are pretty great: They’re dead simple, very reliable, and offer respectable efficiency in a very small form factor, as long as you’re pre...
Lyft to work with Boston driverless car company | Boston Globe
Alex Kirkpatrick
06 Jun 2017
NuTonomy, a small Boston startup which makes software for self-driving cars, has launched a research and development partnership with San Francisco’s Lyft Inc., the second-largest ride-hailing compa...
Self-driving cars could be terrible for traffic — here’s why | Business Insider
Alex Kirkpatrick
05 Jun 2017
Self-driving cars might make your future commute a lot more pleasant, but they won't eliminate traffic.
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Banned from the US? There’s a robot for that | WIRED
Alex Kirkpatrick
05 Jun 2017
TWO TELEPRESENCE ROBOTS roll into a human-computer interaction conference. Sounds like the beginning of a very nerdy joke, but it really happened (#2017). A few weeks ago in Denver, Colorado, a robot ...
Watch a Navy robot submarine launch a drone | Popular Science
Alex Kirkpatrick
03 Jun 2017
On the water’s surface, a robot talks to an underwater robot and tells it to launch a flying robot. Together, the three autonomous machines scouted for the U.S. Navy in a demonstration, showcasing a...
Self-driving cars will add $7 trillion a year to global economy, says Intel | The Telegraph
Alex Kirkpatrick
03 Jun 2017
Self-driving cars will revolutionise the way we travel, work and live and create a $7 trillion-a-year industry by 2050, according to Intel.
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Robots wielding water knives are the future of farming | WIRED
Alex Kirkpatrick
01 Jun 2017
JUST AFTER DAWN in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco, a raucous robot rolls through a field spitting clouds of vapor. It’s cutting lettuce heads with water knives—super-high-pressure beams...
Incredibly soothing robot makes towers of balanced stones | IEEE Spectrum
Alex Kirkpatrick
01 Jun 2017
Building things with robots is a nice idea, especially if robots are doing what they’re best at: predictable, repetitive tasks like you get with bricklaying. When humans build structures, however, w...
BlessU-2 is a robot priest that will forgive your sins | Popular Mechanics
Alex Kirkpatrick
30 May 2017
To be fair, there are human priests in Wittenberg, too, but the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau recently built a robot priest to give blessings as part of a celebration of the 500th anniversary ...
Robots may help defuse demographic time bomb in Japan, Germany | Bloomberg
Alex Kirkpatrick
30 May 2017
Japan and Germany may be sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb where aging populations begin to drag down economic growth. Good thing they’re also prime candidates for robot revolutions.
Cli...
Here’s why Ford is panicking in self-driving cars: Alphabet is years ahead of everybody | CNBC
Alex Kirkpatrick
25 May 2017
The recent CEO shuffle at Ford suggests it's getting serious about self-driving cars: On Monday, it promoted its head of "Smart Mobility," Jim Hackett, to the CEO role. But statistics show that Ford -...
Meet the most nimble fingered robot yet | MIT Tech Review
Alex Kirkpatrick
25 May 2017
A dexterous multi-fingered robot practiced using virtual objects in a simulated world, showing how machine learning and the cloud could revolutionize manual work.
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Waltzing robot teaches beginners how to dance like a pro | New Scientist
Alex Kirkpatrick
24 May 2017
Got no one to dance with? Not to worry – you might soon be gliding through the moves, thanks to a robotic instructor designed to teach humans how to dance. The robot’s designers had already create...
