Meet your future package delivery team: A self-driving vehicle and a robot

 

Digit - Agility Robotics

Digit uses its hands made of rubber balls to lift boxes that weigh up to 40 pounds, and has the ability to sidestep objects in its path and walk up staircases.

In may, damion shelton, the CEO of Agility Robotics, watched nervously as his new robot, Digit, attempted a groundbreaking feat: delivering a package from a self-driving vehicle to a front porch. “The robot has only been assembled for a couple months,” he says. “Now, it needs to stand and walk on its own. Will it fall and damage itself or deliver the package?”

Digit, a five-foot-tall, 88-pound bipedal robot, stands upright on thin, long, ostrich-like legs. It has 3D-printed rubber balls instead of fingers, a laser-range (LiDAR) sensor, a 3D camera for its head, and a battery-pack that lets it run for three hours on a single charge. Capable of picking up packages that weigh up to 40 pounds, Digit is designed to work in sync with self-driving vehicles, unfolding itself from the trunks of cars to deliver items across short distances within neighborhoods.

Continue reading… “Meet your future package delivery team: A self-driving vehicle and a robot”

The Future of the Darknet: 9 Critically Important Predictions

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Futurist Thomas Frey:  Have you ever run across a situation so frustrating that you wished you could hire a “fixer?”

Maybe it has to do with gangs moving into your neighborhood, or the local slumlord not willing to repair a dangerous situation, or a local politician taking bribes, or finding out that your husband is also married to someone else in another state.

My guess is that we’ve all run into problems that are outside of our ability to deal with and we need help. But the help we need is not the normal kind. We don’t have millions to throw at lawyers and we don’t have the time, patience, or resources to go though official channels.   Continue reading… “The Future of the Darknet: 9 Critically Important Predictions”

Creating Humanless Distribution Networks

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Futurist Thomas Frey:  A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak at the 8th annual Turkish Postal Symposium in Antalya, Turkey on the future of the postal industry. This was a fascinating gathering of thought leaders to discuss next generation postal service.

I focused my talk around a central question – “How long will it be before we can mail a package and have it travel to a city on the other side of the world without ever being touched by human hands?”   Continue reading… “Creating Humanless Distribution Networks”

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