GoPro’s latest product is a move in a new direction: Up.After a year of rumors and teases, the action camera company finally announced its very first drone, the Karma ($800).
Source: GoPro announces its own drone GoPro — cameras sold separately – Sep. 19, 2016
Like other Disney creations, Jimmy looks rather magical.
While humanoid robots can be painfully slow, Jimmy moves with lifelike speed and grace. A video posted earlier this year shows the robot waving at people, doing a little dance, drumming on a table. Just as impressive, Jimmy can safely operate near people, and by “near” we mean in contact with them. In the video, the robot plays patty-cake with a kid and even pats her cheeks—something you don’t see very often in human-robot interaction experiments.
Source: Disney Robot With Air-Water Actuators Shows Off “Very Fluid” Motions – IEEE Spectrum
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved.
Source: Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month – Bloomberg
So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
- Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
- Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
- Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it
The jobs of nearly 90% of garment and footwear workers in Cambodia and Vietnam are at risk from automated assembly lines – or “sewbots” – according to a new report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
CityPilot has taken a key early step towards fully autonomous public transportation: The Mercedes-Benz self-driving bus program saw one of its Future Bus vehicles drive 20 km (or around 12.4 miles) in the Netherlands, on a route that connected Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport with the nearby town of Haarlem. To make the trip, the bus had to stop at traffic lights, pass through tunnels, and navigate among pedestrians.
Source: Self-driving Mercedes-Benz bus takes a milestone 12-mile trip | TechCrunch
“In just five years, the driverless experience will be activated by the touch of a button,” said Amnon Shashua, the chief technology officer of Mobileye.
Source: BMW promises fully driverless cars by 2021 – Jul. 1, 2016
DJI releases a computer/graphics card package specifically designed for aerial image processing. This is very, very interesting…a computer specifically designed for computer vision use while flying.
The Manifold is a high-performance embedded computer specially designed for the DJI Onboard SDK. It enables developers to transform aerial platforms into truly intelligent flying robots that can perform complex computing tasks and advanced image processing literally on the fly.
Source: DJI Developer
We’re now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they’ll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. Our software and sensors do all the work. The vehicles will be very basic—we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible—but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that’s an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.
via Official Google Blog: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle.
A followup from the previous tentacle, a great presentation on the next-stage of robotics by reimagining engineering via soft-structures. Fascinating stuff, very sci-fi. The future is going to be weird, folks.
