Year: 2020

By Sean O’Kane

Zoox, a self-driving car company that Amazon bought in June, has finally revealed its robotaxi after six years of gnarly prototypes and secrecy. And while it broadly resembles other first-generation autonomous vehicles from automakers and Silicon Valley startups, Zoox’s robotaxi has a few standout features, as well as an overall polish to it that makes obvious why Amazon thinks it might be the cornerstone of a fledgling autonomous ride-hailing service.

The autonomous “carriage-style” vehicle is an all-electric four-wheeler that seats up to four people, and is similar in appearance to fully self-driving vehicles created by other companies in the space. At just 3.63 meters long, it falls somewhere in between the big, boxy Origin robotaxi from Cruise (which is owned by General Motors) and the delivery-focused robot made by Nuro. ZOOX CLAIMS A TOP SPEED OF 75 MILES PER HOUR, HINTING AT HIGHWAY USE

To further differentiate, Zoox has spent the last few years working on outfitting its autonomous vehicle with the ability to drive both forward and backward, and side to side, or “bi-directionally.” Combined with four-wheel steering functionality, Zoox says its vehicle will be able to handle precise maneuvers like “tight curbside pickups” and “tricky U-turns.” Zoox also claims its vehicle is the first of its kind to be able to travel at up to 75 mph, a possible nod to ambitions to one day put the vehicles on the highway.  

Dennis Lee

The pandemic has made trips to the grocery store a slog. Prices feel high, lines feel long, and we’re all getting tired. The new model of shopping aims to change all of it.

This article by TechCrunch shows what Amazon is doing in its physical stores to improve the grocery shopping process, and it definitely feels futuristic. Currently if you visit an Amazon grocery store, you swipe yourself in with the Amazon app on your phone, and you go shopping as usual. As you go through the store and place items in your cart, cameras and shelf sensors figure out what you’re putting in your grocery cart, and Amazon compiles a virtual checkout cart for you as you go along. (I can’t tell how this makes me feel.) When you’re done shopping, Amazon charges you for what it’s logged in your cart.

Now Amazon has announced that it will license this system, called Just Walk Out, to other grocers. Instead of using an Amazon account, all shoppers will need to do is swipe a credit card at the entrance. While this sounds like a pretty big adjustment, Amazon claims that current grocery stores only need a few weeks to be retrofitted with the technology.

By Luke Dormehl

The world of farming is changing rapidly. Whether it’s CRISPR editing for improving crop yields, smart scarecrows, or robot weeding machines, this sector continues to transform at a breakneck speed.

But rather than simply being capable of driving from point A to point B, the Monarch Tractor promises to carry out any function a farmer might use a tractor for, interfacing with other tractor attachments, along with carrying out assessments on crop health and more. Depending on the mode, they can work autonomously, controlled in a fleet by farmers on the ground, or tailing other drivers in a shadow mode. It’s an impressive piece of tech.

“The Monarch Tractor is fully autonomous, but it also works with existing tractor drivers, as well as interfacing with existing implements,” Praveen Penmesta, founder and CEO of Monarch, told Digital Trends. “We didn’t want to change the appearance [too much from the traditional vehicle so] that the farming community didn’t recognize it as a tractor. However, we wanted to make the Monarch Tractor adaptive so that it can grow with the farmer. We wanted to ensure our compact tractor could implement any attachment and have it work fully electrically like the tractor, and maintain balance and productivity.”