SpaceX Deploys 60 Starlink Satellites
May 24th, 2019Via: Reuters:
SpaceX, the private rocket company of high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, launched the first batch of 60 small satellites into low-Earth orbit on Thursday for Musk’s new Starlink internet service.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the satellites blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at about 10:30 p.m. local time (0230 GMT Friday), clearing a key hurdle for a business venture that Musk hopes will generate much-needed cash for his larger ambitions in space.
Robots Conduct Daily Health Inspections of Schoolchildren in China
May 23rd, 2019Wow!
Via: New Scientist:
Please stand in front of Walklake for your examination. This health checking robot takes just 3 seconds to diagnose a variety of ailments in children, including conjunctivitis, and hand, foot and mouth disease. Over 2000 preschools in China, with children aged between 2 and 6, are using Walklake every morning to check the health status of their students.
Dome Covering Nuclear Waste in Marshall Islands Is Beginning to Crack
May 23rd, 2019Via: Independent:
Beginning in 1977, 4,000 US servicemen began collecting an estimated 73,000 cubic meters of tainted surface soil across the islands, according to the Marshall Islands’ government.
The material was then transported to Runit Island, where a 328-foot crater remained from a May 1958 test explosion. For three years, the American military dumped the material into the crater.
Six men reportedly died during the work. Locals took to calling it “The Tomb,” The Guardian reported.
In 1980, a massive concrete dome – 18 inches thick and shaped like a flying saucer – was placed over the fallout debris, sealing off the material on Runit.
But the $218 million (£172 million) project was only supposed to be temporary until a more permanent site was developed, according to The Guardian. However, no further plans were ever hatched.
In 1983, the Marshall Islands signed a compact agreement of free association with the US, granting the island nation the right to govern itself.
But the deal also settled “all claims, past, present and future” tied to the nuclear testing, and left the dome in the care of the island government.
According to a 2017 report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, among the fallout material was plutonium-239, an isotope that is one of the world’s most toxic substances, and one with a radioactive half-life of 24,100 years.
The staying power of that material is the problem. It’s still there, only 18 inches of concrete away from waters that are rising.
U.S. Charges WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange with Espionage
May 23rd, 2019Via: Reuters:
The U.S. Justice Department unveiled 17 new criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, saying he unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with and assisted ex-Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in obtaining access to classified information.
The superseding indictment comes a little more than a month after the Justice Department unsealed a narrower criminal case against Assange.
Assange was initially charged with conspiring with Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of U.S. military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He now faces a total of 18 criminal counts, and could face many decades in prison if convicted.
“These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the U.S. government,” said Barry Pollack, an American attorney for Assange.
Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions
May 23rd, 2019This strikes an interesting balance. It’s right on the line between cringe inducing and hilarious.
Via: Bloomberg:
Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions.
The wrist-worn gadget is described as a health and wellness product in internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. It’s a collaboration between Lab126, the hardware development group behind Amazon’s Fire phone and Echo smart speaker, and the Alexa voice software team.
Designed to work with a smartphone app, the device has microphones paired with software that can discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice, according to the documents and a person familiar with the program. Eventually the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others, the documents show.
Ford’s Vision for Package Delivery Is a Robot that Folds Up Into the Back a Self-Driving Car
May 23rd, 2019Ford conveniently doesn’t show you the robot retrieving the package from the vehicle. As a former FedEx driver who worked with delivery trucks piled top to bottom with packages for years, I chortle deeply and satisfyingly at this one.
Assume that the self driving issue is somehow sorted out, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon, take a look inside the cargo area of a delivery vehicle the next time you see one. It’s a mess. Unless you have some sort of sci-fi grade humanoid robot picking through that, forget it.
Ford might be able to mitigate this piles-of-boxes problem by loading a small number of packages into some sort of magazine which would push out each package to the end of the cargo area so the robot could pick it up. The packages would have to be loaded in delivery order; the box for the first stop would be the first to emerge from the magazine, and so on.
Woops, nobody home/can’t make the delivery. Now what?
The people at Ford are going to be stroking their beards for a while on this one.
Of course, FedEx knows all this—they have been pathologically observing and quantifying their operations for decades.
Vehicle cargo area = Too hard.
I think that’s why they’re looking at sending out a larger number of smaller bots.
But how many bots will they be sending out? One normal truck might have many dozens of packages on board.
Also, there’s a lot of difficult weirdness awaiting robots between the vehicle and the actual point of delivery. Again, you can safely assume that this won’t be viable anytime soon. My guess is that you’ll be getting rides in Musk’s robotaxis before a robot delivers your Amazon order.
I’d like to see one of these bots tuck the box under one arm, open a gate with the other, make the delivery and then kick an attacking German Shepherd in the head during the return trip to the vehicle.
Oh… The neighborhood kids will just LOVE these bots!
What about pizza delivery? Remember the pizza delivery bots? This was three years ago:
What became of this? How many pizzas are being delivered by robots now?
Any?
I think that the best thing about the Rise of the Machines will be the Comedy Gold the results along the way.
Via: The Verge:
The first time you see a strange robot walking down your street, it might be delivering a parcel. That’s the future envisioned by Ford in a new research project that explores how robots and self-driving cars could work together to deliver groceries, fast food, and more.
The robot in question is called Digit, and it stands just over five feet tall. It has a pair of skeletal legs, two arms ending in shapeless nubs, and a sensor array where its head should be. It’s the creation of startup Agility Robotics, which has been developing bipedal robots since 2015 when the company was spun out of research from Oregon State University.
In Ford’s imagining, Digit would be bundled into the back of a self-driving car. When the car reaches its destination, the trunk pops open, and Digit unfolds itself in a manner unnervingly similar to the droid army in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
The robot can then complete the last crucial step of the delivery: actually picking up the parcel and dropping it on your doorstep. No humans required.
Los Angeles: Rotting Trash Piles Attracting Rats and Raising Concerns of a New Epidemic
May 21st, 2019Must see video.
Via: NBC Los Angeles:
Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year’s record number of flea-borne typhus cases.
U.S. Postal Service Testing Self-Driving Trucks for Hauling Mail Between Hubs
May 21st, 2019In yesterday’s post, I mentioned how intercity freight is the low hanging fruit of the self driving world.
Here we go…
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday started a two-week test transporting mail across three Southwestern states using self-driving trucks, a step forward in the effort to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology for hauling freight.
San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
…
Price said self-driving trucks have advantages over passenger cars, including the relative ease of operating on interstates compared with city centers, which reduces mapping requirements and safety challenges involving pedestrians and bicyclists.
Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars
May 20th, 2019A friend of mine is an AI researcher. I know that “AI researcher” is a nebulous term, but let it suffice to say that he is highly qualified in this area.
Back in April, I asked him what he thought about Tesla’s big self driving dog and pony show.
In short, I asked him: Is this going to work?
No.
He’s confident that it’s not going to work under the current paradigm:
Based on my understanding of the technology, I agree with this guy:
“It’s all hype,” said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”
“Unfortunately, it may be necessary for several people to die before regulators step in,” Shladover said.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-tesla-self-driving-technology-20190422-story.html
How about just self driving for freight?
My friend thinks the lack of autonomous systems being used for freight indicates that we are far away from a general purpose self driving capability:
But I wonder, why they don’t start by rolling out remote-controlled trucks? That seems like a step on the way toward autonomous vehicles. But for some reason, they never try do this. And, yet, the public is told self-driving cars are just a few years away.
My guess is that, if it happens, it will happen in the freight market first. Freight is a walk in the park compared to the robotaxi concept that Musk is talking about.
With freight, you can train the machine on a specific route and annotate, by hand, the areas that it’s not able to navigate properly. The machine wouldn’t be able to self drive without this training and annotation process.
That is far less sexy than what Musk is claiming is right around the corner, but I could see route specific AI systems being good enough to begin firing some truck drivers in the not too distant future.
As for the robotaxis zipping from one burbclave to another, I’m with my buddy on that one: Not happening anytime soon.
Via: Design News:
The popular notion of the go-anywhere, go-anytime, sleep-in-the-back autonomous car crumbled a bit in the last few weeks, as automakers admitted that the development of full self-driving technology is more difficult than expected.
Questions about the technology’s future reached full public view in April, when Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett acknowledged what had already become painfully obvious to much of the engineering community. “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Hackett was quoted as saying by numerous news outlets. “Its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.”
The admission came as a shocker to many in the public and in the media, essentially because it flew in the face of a growing belief that shiny new autonomous vehicles would soon be landing in dealerships.
Still, Hackett wasn’t the first to make such an concession. The auto industry had been scattering clues to that effect for months before the Ford statement. In November, 2018, for example, John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo, had been even more blunt than Hackett. “It’s really, really hard,” Krafcik said during a live-streamed tech conference. “You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re actually in there and trying to do things.”
Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. “Autonomy will always have some constraints,” he added.
The comments by Krafcik and Hackett reinforced what many industry analysts had been saying for more than two years. “I agree with John Krafcik’s comment,” noted Sam Abuelsamid principal analyst for Navigant Research, which publishes an extensive annual assessment on the state of automated vehicles. “There’s no guarantee that we will ever have automated vehicles in the foreseeable future that are capable of operating everywhere, all the time.”
Chicago and Detroit Have Bought Real-Time Facial Recognition Systems
May 19th, 2019Via: Wired:
Civil liberties activists trying to inspire alarm about the authoritarian potential of facial recognition technology often point to China, where some police departments use systems that can spot suspects who show their faces in public. A report from Georgetown researchers on Thursday suggests Americans should also focus their concern closer to home.
The report says agencies in Chicago and Detroit have bought real-time facial recognition systems. Chicago claims it has not used its system; Detroit says it is not using its system currently. But no federal or state law would prevent use of the technology.
According to contracts obtained by the Georgetown researchers, the two cities purchased software from a South Carolina company, DataWorks Plus, that equips police with the ability to identify faces from surveillance footage in real time. A description on the company’s website says the technology, called FaceWatch Plus, “provides continuous screening and monitoring of live video streams.” DataWorks confirmed the existence of the systems, but did not elaborate further.
