A fleet of driverless street cleaning vehicles has begun trial operations at an industrial park in Shanghai, according to the Shanghai-based news portal The Paper on Friday.
The convoy, which includes a 6m-long truck and a 3m-long minibus, has been designed and developed by Autowise.ai, a Shanghai technology company, for different road widths.
Continue reading… “Driverless street cleaning trucks begin trial operations in Shanghai”
Less than a month after Uber’s fatal accident in Arizona, California regulators issue a proposal for a pilot test of passenger-carrying autonomous vehicles.
California may start allowing self-driving cars, like this one for Lyft, to carry passengers without a human driver behind the wheel.
Regulators in California are moving closer to allowing driverless cars to carry passengers, even without a backup driver present.
Continue reading… “California eyes driverless car testing with passengers”
Developed by the company behind the Vespa scooter, Gita is a mobile carrier designed to make mobility and transportation easier and more efficient for pedestrians.
A compartment within Gita can hold 44 pounds of cargo such as backpack, a briefcase, or any other items that make walking cumbersome.
The robot uses cameras to track the legs of the person it’s following, memorizing routes as they go.
Seventy two years after launching the iconic Vespa scooter, Italian motor vehicle company Piaggio has unveiled its newest creation: A robot designed to help you get around without a car at all.
I’m not kicking our smart speaker out of the house just yet, but the consequences of having it in my family’s life are becoming clear.
Since last year I’ve had a smart speaker in my living room—an Echo Dot. My family uses it mostly to ask Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa, to play music. But after I saw a report that an Alexa-enabled speaker owned by a family in Portland, Oregon, had recorded a conversation and sent it to a contact, I started wondering: what is it picking up on at my house when we’re not talking to it directly?
Continue reading… “Yes, Alexa is recording mundane details of your life, and it’s creepy as hell”
Tactical Robotics’ Cormorant can carry up to 1,000 pounds and offers a range of 20 miles while flying at more than 100 mph.TACTICAL ROBOTS
FIVE MEN IN white overalls lifted the stretcher off the ground, one of them taking care to lay a clear plastic IV bag that’s connected to the patient onto his stomach. They marched him toward what looks like a black inflatable dinghy on small wheels, crossed with a fly. The stretcher was loaded in through a hatch on the side, and then the men stood back.
The patient was actually a medical training mannequin, but that didn’t stop him (it, rather) from taking part in the first “mission representative” demonstration of a new aircraft. That bean-shaped thing is called the Cormorant, and it was built by Israel-based Tactical Robotics to make battlefield evacuations—which today rely on helicopters—quicker and safer, thanks to a new design and the fact that there’s no human pilot involved.
Continue reading… “Isreal’s self -flying ‘Cormorant’ whisks wounded soldiers to safety”
Employees work on the assembly line of the electric bus at a BYD’s production base on January 23, 2018 in Xi’an, China. China’s largest electric carmaker BYD sold 113,669 new energy vehicles in 2017, up 13.4 percent year-on-year. (Photo by VCG/Getty Images)
Projections have suggested that the advent of electric vehicles will have a dramatic impact on oil demand and now its starting to show. With China adding the equivalent of London’s bus fleet every 5 weeks, that’s 279,000 barrels of oil a day removed from demand.
Continue reading… “Electric vehicles begin to bite into oil demand”
Congress and the Trump administration have yet to create a coherent policy response to a widely forecast social and economic tsunami resulting from automation, including the potential for decades of flat wages and joblessness. But cities and regions are starting to act on their own.
What’s happening: In Indianapolis, about 338,000 people are at high risk of automation taking their jobs, according to a new report. In Phoenix, the number is 650,000. In both cases, that’s 35% of the workforce. In northeastern Ohio, about 40,000 workers are at high risk.
Continue reading… “The coming jobs apocalypse”
Automated robots now have the tools to grow imitation, simplified human organs out of stem cells. Thankfully, we weren’t transported to a sci-fi dystopia where the machines have risen up and started to farm humans, but rather a world where pharmaceutical and other biomedical research just became much easier and faster.
Give these robots some pluripotent stem cells (stem cells that can become any type of cell), and 21 days later they’ll have finished a complicated experiment testing out the effects of a drug or genetic manipulation on some human-like, lab-grown kidneys. According to research published yesterday, May 17, in Cell: Stem Cell, the process is much faster and more reliable than when humans grow the same mini-organs.
One of the best announcements that came out of this year’s Google I/O was a new Gmail feature called Smart Compose, which can autocomplete entire emails for you.
Unlike many of the other announcements from Google I/O, Gmail Smart Compose can actually be switched on and used right now. It’s all part of the new Gmail experience that Google has been rolling out to customers.
They call it “the hive,” or “the grid.” Or sometimes just: “the machine.” It’s a huge structure that fills a warehouse on the outskirts of Andover, a small and quiet town in southeast England. It’s impossible to take in at a single glance, but standing on a maintenance walkway near the building’s rafters, you look over what seems to be a huge chessboard, populated entirely by robots. There are more than a thousand of them, each the size and shape of a washing machine, and they wheel about, night and day, moving groceries. Their job is to be cheaper and more efficient than humans, and they are very good at it.
The hive-grid-machine is the creation of Ocado, a British online-only supermarket that’s made a name for itself in recent years designing highly automated warehouses and selling the tech to other grocery chains. When fully up and running, Ocado’s Andover operation will be its most advanced yet, processing 3.5 million items or around 65,000 orders every week. It’s also a perfect example of the wave of automation slowly hitting countries around the world. The tasks being undertaken by Ocado’s bots are so basic they’re best described by simple verbs — “lifting,” “moving,” “sorting” — and that means they exist in various forms in a range of industries. And when the price is right, someone will want a machine to do those jobs, too.
Continue reading… “Welcome to the automated warehouse of the future”
All Alexa skills developers can now monetize their voice apps with in-skill purchases, Amazon announced last week.
The introduction of in-skill purchasing allows skills developers to sell premium digital content — such as subscription services or one-time purchases that augment a skill’s free offerings — within an Alexa skill.
Continue reading… “Amazon rolls out new ways to monetize Alexa’s skills”
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing is nearing an agreement with Volkswagen (VW) to deploy a “purpose-built” fleet of VW vehicles in its home country, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As part of the joint venture, the German carmaker would provide around 100,000 vehicles, electric and autonomous vehicle technology, and manage the fleet.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.