A prototype of an automated blood drawing and testing device. Credit: Unnati Chauhan
In the future, robots could take blood samples, benefiting patients and healthcare workers alike.
A Rutgers-led team has created a blood-sampling robot that performed as well or better than people, according to the first human clinical trial of an automated blood drawing and testing device.
The device provides quick results and would allow healthcare professionals to spend more time treating patients in hospitals and other settings.
The results, published in the journal Technology, were comparable to or exceeded clinical standards, with an overall success rate of 87% for the 31 participants whose blood was drawn. For the 25 people whose veins were easy to access, the success rate was 97%.
The Navy converted manned combat jets into unmanned ones. Nobody had any idea they were doing it.
The U.S. Navy announced that it converted EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets into unmanned vehicles.
In a test, a manned Growler controlled two unmanned Growlers.
The previously unknown test could mean that unmanned Navy warplanes are coming sooner than experts thought.
In a surprise announcement, the U.S. Navy revealed on Tuesday that it had successfully flown tests involving unmanned versions of the EA-18G Growler electronic attack fighter. The tests involved a single manned EA-18G controlling two unmanned versions of the same aircraft, opening up the possibility that the U.S. Navy could fly armed unmanned aircraft sooner than originally thought.
Cruise Origin offers a self driving mini bus for cities
It seems these days that there is no shortage of startups promising new vehicles with electric motors and self-driving systems, and now the joint operation between GM and Honda, Cruise, has unveiled its driverless people mover sans any human controls.
The Cruise Origin, billed as a bus, was unveiled at the San Francisco event “Move Beyond the Car.” The underpinnings and drive system will be built by GM.
The X tractor is being presented in commemoration of Kubota’s 130th year in business
According to agricultural machinery manufacturer Kubota, there are now fewer farmers in Japan, trying to manage increasingly large amounts of land. With that problem in mind, the company recently unveiled a concept for helping those farmers out – a driverless tractor.
Known as the X tractor (a play on “cross tractor”), the vehicle was designed as part of Kubota’s Agrirobo automated technology program. It made its public debut earlier this month, at an exhibition in the city of Kyoto.
Although not much in the way of technical details have been provided, the vehicle is apparently completely electrically-powered, via a combination of lithium-ion battery packs and solar panels.
(CNN) — The concept of pilotless commercial jet flight has been bandied about for years.
But while the technology has been there, there’s been little concrete evidence to suggest autonomous flying could ever really get off the ground — until now.
Airbus has confirmed one of its test aircraft took off automatically at Toulouse-Blagnac airport in France last December.
The European aerospace company conducted a series of successful tests on autopilot last month, with two pilots on standby.
According to Airbus, the A350-1000 achieved eight automatic takeoffs over a period of four and a half hours.
“While completing alignment on the runway, waiting for clearance from air traffic control, we engaged the autopilot,” Airbus test pilot Captain Yann Beaufils explained in a statement.
“We moved the throttle levers to the takeoff setting and we monitored the aircraft. It started to move and accelerate automatically maintaining the runway center line, at the exact rotation speed as entered in the system.”
San Francisco (CNN)College career centers used to prepare students for job interviews by helping them learn how to dress appropriately or write a standout cover letter. These days, they’re also trying to brace students for a stark new reality: They may be vetted for jobs in part by artificial intelligence
At schools such as Duke University, Purdue University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, career counselors are now working to find out which companies use AI and also speaking candidly with students about what, if anything, they can do to win over the algorithms. This shift in preparations comes as more businesses interested in filling internships and entry-level positions that may see a glut of applicants turn to outside companies such as HireVue to help them quickly conduct vast numbers of video interviews.
With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance.
Key point: Armed robots are becoming the norm of future warfare. The question is how long humans will stay in the loop.
An Estonian company has teamed up with a Singaporean firm and joined the expanding global race to develop robotic fighting vehicles.
More and more firms are developing armed unmanned ground vehicles, some as private ventures and others in response to formal government programs. But it’s unclear how quickly armies might actually field meaningful numbers of tank-like ground robots.
News broke in June 2019 that Estonia’s Milrem Robotics and Singapore’s ST Engineering had tested a new UGV. “The companies demonstrated the UGV during a live-fire exercise held in Tapa, Estonia,” Estonian World reported.
“The new UGV is armed with a 40-millimeter automatic grenade launcher and a 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun,” according to Estonian World.
While Elon Musk and Waymo get all the attention — and regulations — autonomous vehicles for farming face fewer tech barriers and could be just as important
Between 2009 and 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles for its Waymo subsidiary, which have so far roamed more than 10 million miles of city streets — though none of those miles have yet involved a paying customer. Tesla, which builds the data collection it uses to improve its autonomous technology into every vehicle it sells, lost more than $1 billion as a company last year alone. In pursuit of viable self-driving cars, the companies have had to navigate a web of regulation that varies from state to state, apply for permits, and risk getting banned from roads if they fail to follow the rules. Neither of their self-driving technologies is ready to be set loose on public streets without a human safety driver behind the wheel or navigating previously approved routes.
But Zack James faced few barriers when he started his autonomous tractor company in 2017. His roughly 200-pound tractors are closer in size to a riding lawn mower (and about half the weight) than they are to traditional combines and sprayers, and the open metal frame vehicles work together in a swarm. After coming up with the concept while in law school at the University of Michigan, it took James about a month to fabricate the first prototype, which he soon tested on a family field in Crown Point, Indiana, standing by in case the tractor encountered an obstacle it couldn’t yet navigate.
Instead of sleek Teslas or robot Ubers, the first truly driverless vehicles are more likely to look like James’ tractors: rolling placidly over a cornfield at a max speed of 7 mph.
Almost all major automakers are gearing up to enter the new era of self-driven cars. Taking this concept further is General Motors, which wants to do away with the steering wheel altogether in its latest self-driven model.
The automaker has put in a request to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow it to test self-driving cars sans a steering wheel or other human controls on American roads.
The NHTSA revealed that GM and Softbank-backed startup Nuro petitioned the agency in 2018 seeking exemption from U.S. road safety rules that were written a long time ago and are meant to control cars with human drivers.
Uniqlo is coming close to full automation at its flagship warehouse in Tokyo, according to a new report from The Financial Times.
According to The FT, Uniqlo’s parent company, Fast Retailing, has partnered with a Japanese startup that develops industrial robots to create a two-armed robot that is able to pick up t-shirts and box these up, a task that could previously only be done by a human.
This is an important innovation as it could enable this factory, which has already replaced 90% of its workers with robots, to roll out a fully automated process.
Researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind model to control traffic and intersections in order to increase autonomous car capacity on urban streets of the future, reduce congestion and minimize accidents.
In the not-so-distant future, city streets could be flooded with autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars can move faster and travel closer together, allowing more of them to fit on the road — potentially leading to congestion and gridlock on city streets.
A new study by Cornell researchers developed a first-of-its-kind model to control traffic and intersections in order to increase car capacity on urban streets, reduce congestion and minimize accidents.
“For the future of mobility, so much attention has been paid to autonomous cars,” said Oliver Gao, professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior author of the study, which published in Transportation Research Part B.
Waymo, the Google-affiliated self-driving car company, has finally started to operate its self-driving taxi service without any humans sitting behind the wheel.
That means passengers using the company’s Uber-like Waymo One service might find themselves shuttled around Arizona in the back seat of an otherwise-empty minivan, as one reporter for The Verge did. Removing the drivers is a major milestone in the race for fully-autonomous transport — the vehicles are still supervised remotely, but Waymo is now confident enough in its cars to almost entirely take humans out of the loop.
