Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Company Wants to Plant One Billion Trees a Year Using Drones
April 27th, 2015Terraforming… Our own planet. Via: Independent: A drone start-up is going to counter industrial scale deforestation using industrial scale reforestation. BioCarbon Engineering wants to use drones for good, using the technology to seed up to one billion trees a year, all without having to set foot on the ground. 26 billion trees are currently being […]
Robotic Strawberry Harvesters
April 27th, 2015Via: Tampa Tribune: A company backed by strawberry growers in Florida and California is developing a high-tech robot that can pick and package berries in the field. Harvest CROO Robotics has already spent $1 million on a prototype automated picker. Research is continuing, and the company working on a more advanced model to harvest strawberries […]
Tiny Robots Climb Walls Carrying More Than 100 Times Their Weight
April 25th, 2015Via: New Scientist:
The Machines Are Coming
April 19th, 2015Via: New York Times: THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching […]
What Microsoft Was for PCs, This Company Hopes to Be for Drones
April 16th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: Microsoft’s Windows operating system had a vital role in turning the personal computer into a ubiquitous technology. Jonathan Downey hopes his company Airware will play a similar part in the development of commercial drones. The startup today launched a control system for drone makers to bundle with their small aircraft. It […]
U.S. Navy Tests Autonomous, Swarming UAVs
April 15th, 2015Via: Office of Naval Research: A new era in autonomy and unmanned systems for naval operations is on the horizon, as officials at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced today recent technology demonstrations of swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — part of the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program. LOCUST can launch swarming UAVs […]
Customer Service Robot at Japanese Bank
April 14th, 2015Via: Japan Times: Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ took a first step toward employing nonhuman staff on Monday, with the introduction of a customer service humanoid robot at its flagship Tokyo outlet. Standing 58 cm tall and weighing 5.4 kg, the Nao robot will work at reception until April 23 before potentially being rolled out full […]
Amazon Gets Green Light from U.S. Regulators for New Drone Tests
April 11th, 2015Via: Reuters: Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has won approval from U.S. federal regulators to test a delivery drone outdoors, less than a month after the e-commerce powerhouse blasted regulators for being slow to approve commercial drone testing. The Federal Aviation Administration had earlier given the green light to an Amazon prototype drone in March, but the […]
Indian Police to Use Pepper-Spraying Drones on Unruly Protesters
April 9th, 2015Via: AFP: Police in a northern Indian city said Tuesday they have a new weapon for controlling unruly protesters in the world’s largest democracy: pepper-spraying drones. Yashasvi Yadav, police chief of Lucknow, said his officers have successfully test-flown the newly purchased drones with a view to better crowd control. “The results were brilliant. We have […]
Robotic Co-Pilots
April 7th, 2015Via: New York Times: This summer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon research organization, will take the next step in plane automation with the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System, or Alias. Sometime this year, the agency will begin flight testing a robot that can be quickly installed in the right seat of military […]
