“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
Tag: robots
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DJI Manifold
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.
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RHex the Parkour Robot
This is beautiful and terrifying.
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.
I think we all know where this ends.
Right now, there’s no wallet-friendly, backpack-sized consumer robot on the market that does these things:
- Remote 2-way telepresence
- Computer vision
- Autonomous navigation
- Facial recognition
We want to change that, and we need your support.
via Romo – The Smartphone Robot for Everyone by Romotive — Kickstarter.
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Self-sculpting sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.
In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.
via Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate | Video on TED.com.
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Sony Rolly
In case you didn’t know, Sony is a Japanese company, and Japan is the home of all things cute. Thus, the Sony Rolly.
It will be launching soon in Japan, and yes, it is a dancing MP3 player.
According to a recent press release, it will have 1gig of internal memory, but be able to play tunes via Bluetooth from your cell or laptop as well. And dance, of course. And flap its ears.
I have no idea why I would possible want one, but I do.
Here’s a FAR better video, that really shows it in use.
It looks like quite a little tech marvel: bluetooth music streaming, the video makes it look like it has an accelerometer, and given the Sony.jp page it looks like there is a motion editor for programming movement yourself. Sony has tried and tried to bust into the home robotics market with the Aibo, and they show off Asimo to people all over the world….is Rolly the next step?
And when are they going to release him in the US? Do I have to import one? 🙁