Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Google-Owned SCHAFT Robot Won DARPA Robotics Challenge
December 22nd, 2013Via: Slashgear: The Google-owned Japanese robotics company SCHAFT has won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by a wide margin. It scored 27 out of 32 points, beating its nearest competitor IHMC Robotics by seven points. Coming up third was Tartan rescue with 18 points, and MIT following that with 16 points. The contest took place […]
‘Deep Learning’ Professor to Head Facebook AI Lab
December 16th, 2013Via: New Yorker: Earlier today, Facebook announced that one of the most prominent artificial-intelligence researchers in the world, Yann LeCun, will be joining the company to direct a massive new A.I. effort spread across offices in California, New York, and London. While it might sound like just another Facebook hire, the move, which LeCun describes […]
GOOGLE BUYS BOSTON DYNAMICS
December 14th, 2013😯 Via: New York Times: BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie. Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that […]
NASA Unveils ‘Valkyrie’ Robot for DARPA Competition
December 13th, 2013Via: IEEE Spectrum: Valkyrie (officially designated “R5” by NASA) is a 1.9 meter tall, 125 kilogram, 44 degree of freedom, battery-powered humanoid robot. A team from NASA’s JSC in Houston, in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M and with funding from the state of Texas itself, built the robot for the DRC, […]
Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s A Robot
December 13th, 2013Via: Time: The phone call came from a charming woman with a bright, engaging voice to the cell phone of a TIME Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer. She wanted to offer a deal on health insurance, but something was fishy. When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot […]
What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
December 10th, 2013Via: ACLU: We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered…
Birds Will Attack Amazon’s Delivery Drones
December 7th, 2013Amazon is just one potential operator. Once the rules are formalized in 2015, tens of thousands of organizations are going to be operating similar aircraft. Via: Slate: Birds already cause a lot of problems for other things in the airspace. The FAA has tracked more than 121,000 instances of bird-aircraft collisions since 1990. These are […]
Northrop Grumman RQ-180
December 7th, 2013Via: Aviation Week: A large, classified unmanned aircraft developed by Northrop Grumman is now flying—and it demonstrates a major advance in combining stealth and aerodynamic efficiency. Defense and intelligence officials say the secret unmanned aerial system (UAS), designed for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, is scheduled to enter production for the U.S. Air Force […]
Rise of the Machines – USA
December 6th, 2013Via: Journeyman Pictures:
Navy Launches a Drone from a Submerged Submarine
December 6th, 2013Via: Defense One: The Naval Research Lab just launched a drone from a submerged submarine – giving a huge edge to the future of special operations. It took six years to develop and launch an all-electric, fuel cell-powered, folding-wing drone aircraft from a submerged submarine. The eXperimental Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial System, or XFC UAS, […]
