One of the good things about drones is the fact that they can safely be flown in conditions that would prove hazardous for crewed aircraft. That’s where the JC260 unmanned helicopter comes in, as it’s designed to fight forest fires.
Created by Chinese manufacturer QilingUAV, the JC260 can be equipped with two of the company’s retardant-filled “fire extinguishing bombs.” Dropped separately or in unison, each of the bombs can reportedly cover a flaming forest area of 50 cubic meters (1,766 cu ft).
Lift is provided by two sets of counter-rotating rotor blades, measuring 3.6 m (11.8 ft) in diameter. These are powered by two 34-hp water-cooled gasoline engines, taking the aircraft to a claimed cruising speed of 100 km/h (62 mph). One tank of gas should be good for a flight time of three to four hours.
A hotel in China used a robot to deliver food to people in coronavirus quarantine ( XHN )
Robotics experts say AI and machines could save lives by performing the ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ jobs
The development of robots to save lives and reduce human exposure to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak could lead to a new era of robotic human helpers, researchers have said.
Robotics professor Henrik Christensen from the University of California San Diego, was among a group of leading experts who outlined how robots could be used to combat the coronavirus pandemic by doing the “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs.
“Already, we have seen robots being deployed for disinfection, delivering medications and food, measuring vital signs, and assisting border controls,” the scientists wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Robotics.
With the world’s population under quarantine, nature is showing signs of coming back to life, literally! With reports coming in globally – dolphins in the ports of Cagliari, China seeing clear blue skies to even fishes swimming in clear canal water of Venice, it is obvious that when humanity makes a true effort to save the world, nature responds! But present circumstances kept aside, how easy is it to make such eco-friendly changes to our infrastructure that can affect the population on such a global scale? This is one of the questions the designers at Volkswagen plan to resolve with their latest creation – the Mobile Charging Robots!
DRIVERLESS: Autonomous vehicles are a solution to a shortage of nighttime bus drivers, officials said, with tests being conducted on Xinyi’s dedicated bus lanes
The Taipei Department of Transportation yesterday announced that it would start road tests for autonomous buses in May and allow city residents to take part in the trial services beginning in September.
The city government is looking to automated buses as a solution to the shortage of nighttime public vehicle drivers, officials from the transportation and information technology departments told a news conference.
Following the signing of a letter of intent between the city government and Turing Drive Co last year, the company submitted to the Ministry of Economic Affairs its “trial project for uncrewed vehicles with innovative technology.”
Einride is hiring autonomous pod operators in both the U.S. and Sweden with the new jobs set to begin later this year.
Einride, a Swedish technology company that designs, develops and sells driverless electrified trucks and logistical solutions, has announced it will be hiring the first autonomous and remote truck operator in the freight mobility space.
The company said new operators will be hired in Sweden in March and in the U.S. in the third quarter.
Einride said the first drivers are slated to hit the street in Sweden for commercial purposes later this year, with the first American drivers getting to work in the fourth quarter.
In the coming years, as SAE Level 4 self-driving technology is implemented on scale, trucking will change fundamentally, Einride noted. Looking towards the future, the company said it has made the decision to hire a former truck driver as its first dedicated autonomous truck operator, opening a new category of jobs.
I’m often asked questions about the future of work. Will the machines takeover? How long until the human race declines? And how many jobs will go away?
One new book that thoughtfully approaches these topics of how we will work symbiotically with machines and how we can all evolve to benefit together is HUMAN/MACHINE: The Future Of Our Partnership with Machines.
I recently spoke with Olivier Blanchard, one of the co-authors.
Employees sort parcels with automated guided vehicles (AGVs) at a logistic centre of a postal service in China last November.
Manufacturing as we know it isn’t quite dead – but it will be soon. We’re at the cusp of a major transformation where the classic factory worker’s tasks will soon be digitized and managed by robots and intelligent software.
Human jobs have been sacrificed through every major industrial revolution and this change will be no different. Unfortunately, the speed at which this next displacement is taking place exceeds the speed at which people are being retrained for the new factory roles that are now required. In this environment, technology companies will have new responsibilities to reskill their workforce and the workforces impacted by their products.
In warehouses, call centers, and other sectors, intelligent machines are managing humans, and they’re making work more stressful, grueling, and dangerous
On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.
The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.
These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.
In few sectors are the perils of automated management more apparent than at Amazon. Almost every aspect of management at the company’s warehouses is directed by software, from when people work to how fast they work to when they get fired for falling behind. Every worker has a “rate,” a certain number of items they have to process per hour, and if they fail to meet it, they can be automatically fired.
Northwestern University researchers tested their invention on a swarm of 100 robots
Algorithm for self-driving vehicles could reduce traffic and crashes Northwestern University. Researchers have developed an algorithm that could stop self-driving vehicles from getting in crashes and traffic jams. The team from Northwestern University (NU) claims their invention is “the first decentralized algorithm with a collision-free, deadlock-free guarantee.”
The algorithm divides the ground beneath the machines into a grid. The robots learn their position through technology similar to GPS and coordinate their movements through sensors that assess where there’s free space to move.
“The robots refuse to move to a spot until that spot is free and until they know that no other robots are moving to that same spot,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the study. “They are careful and reserve a space ahead of time.”
In poor visibility, your car could look for landmarks — under the surface of the road.
MIT is working on self-driving technology that allows cars to “see” through the ground up to a depth of ten feet below the surface of the road. The idea is to allow self-driving cars to figure out exactly where they are — especially when snow, heavy fog, or other bad weather obscures road markings.
Current-generation self-driving cars typically rely on cameras and light detection sensors (LIDAR) to position themselves on roadways. But once the snow starts falling and covers up lane markers, it can get tricky for the car to tell where it is — and that could spell disaster, especially at highway speeds.
A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have come up with a new system they call “Localizing Ground Penetrating Radar” (LGPR) that can create a real-time map of the ground below the road’s surface.
The first Amazon Go Grocery opens today in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district
Amazon is getting more serious about its brick-and-mortar retail ambitions with its first-ever Amazon-branded grocery store. The store opens today in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, confirming reports from last year that Amazon was developing a more ambitious version of its cashier-less Go model. The new store, which The Verge toured late last week, is indeed modeled after a standard Amazon Go location, but it has been expanded to include a wide array of grocery items you’d find at, say, Amazon-owned Whole Foods.
In fact, the store does source a number of its items, including some produce and meat and other fresh food, from Whole Foods suppliers. It also carries Whole Foods’ 365 brand for certain items. But Amazon’s store offers other products, like Kellogg’s breakfast cereal and Coke products, that you won’t find at Amazon’s higher-end, organic-focused subsidiary.
Automation is firmly established in the workplace, and many businesses have benefited greatly from this rapidly evolving technology. Tedious, repetitive tasks—such as data entry and scheduling—that once ate up valuable hours in an employee’s day can now be streamlined with the right automation processes.
Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has become, “What’s next?” The members of Forbes Technology Council are constantly looking out for new tech trends, and they believe the next jobs to be impacted by automation might not be the ones people expect.
