While the Valkyrie program develops one type of wingman drone, the broader Skyborg program is working on the hardware and software for integrating manned and unmanned fighters.
The U.S. Air Force’s future drone fighter is back in the air.
The XQ-58 Valkyrie on June 11, 2019 took off for its second test flight over Yuma, Arizona. The 29-feet-long, jet-powered drone “successfully completed all test objectives during a 71-minute flight,” the Air Force Research Laboratory announced.
New York, NY—August 12, 2019—A novel neck brace, which supports the neck during its natural motion, was designed by Columbia engineers. This is the first device shown to dramatically assist patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in holding their heads and actively supporting them during range of motion. This advance would result in improved quality of life for patients, not only in improving eye contact during conversation, but also in facilitating the use of eyes as a joystick to control movements on a computer, much as scientist Stephen Hawkins famously did.
A team of engineers and neurologists led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine, designed a comfortable and wearable robotic neck brace that incorporates both sensors and actuators to adjust the head posture, restoring roughly 70% of the active range of motion of the human head. Using simultaneous measurement of the motion with sensors on the neck brace and surface electromyography (EMG) of the neck muscles, it also becomes a new diagnostic tool for impaired motion of the head-neck. Their pilot study was published August 7 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.
The brace also shows promise for clinical use beyond ALS, according to Agrawal, who directs the Robotics and Rehabilitation (ROAR) Laborator y. “The brace would also be useful to modulate rehabilitation for those who have suffered whiplash neck injuries from car accidents or have from poor neck control because of neurological diseases such as cerebral palsy,” he said.
Huawei officially launched yesterday the Ascend 910, the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) processor, and an all-scenario AI computing framework called MindSpore.
RELATED: HUAWEI UNVEILS ITS LATEST PHONES, THE HUAWEI P30 AND HUAWEI P30 PRO
“We have been making steady progress since we announced our AI strategy in October last year,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman. “Everything is moving forward according to plan, from R&D to product launch. We promised a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio. And today we delivered, with the release of Ascend 910 and MindSpore. This also marks a new stage in Huawei’s AI strategy.”
Being a janitor is a dirty job, that just got a whole lot easier. #Robots
SOMATIC — commercial bathroom cleaning robotics
June update:
February update:
December update:
Almost everyone who has thought seriously about this has said that more automation is likely to lead to more inequality.
The robots. They’re coming for your jobs. All of you.
Long the prediction of futurists and philosophers, the lived reality of technology replacing human work has been a constant feature since the cotton gin, the assembly line and, more recently, the computer.
What is very much up for debate in the imaginations of economists and Hollywood producers is whether the future will look like “The Terminator,” with self-aware Schwarzenegger bots on the hunt, or “The Jetsons,” with obedient robo-maids leaving us humans very little work and plenty of time for leisure and family. The most chilling future in film may be that in Disney’s “Wall-E,” where people are all too fat to stand, too busy staring at screens to talk to each other and too distracted to realize that the machines have taken over.
A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a humanoid robot failed to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday morning, Russian state news agencies reported.
The Soyuz MS-14 crew ship launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on August 21 with the Skybot F-850, a life-sized artificially intelligent humanoid robot, on the commander’s seat.
Given the issues, emerged during the docking of the #SoyuzMS14 spacecraft with the ISS, the state commission chaired by Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin will held a meeting to consider the situation and discuss the measures to overcome the fault in the docking system. pic.twitter.com/turpSi08Rf
It’s a lunar lander named ‘Peregrine’, developed by the space robotics company to deliver payloads to the Moon for various companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals for $1.2 million per kilogram. Astrobotic was selected by NASA in May 2019 for a $79.5 million contract to deliver up to 14 payloads to the Moon in 2021, under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
To date, Astrobotic has signed 16 customers for lunar delivery on that first mission, totaling 28 payloads from 8 nations and comprising resource development, scientific investigation, technology demonstration, exploration, marketing, arts, and entertainment. The vehicle has already passed an industry-standard Preliminary Design Review, and the program will build and test a Structural Test Model, followed by a Critical Design Review, later this year.
Launch is currently slated for June 2021, with a planned landing a month later in Lacus Mortis, a large crater on the near side of the Moo n with payloads such as instruments to conduct new lunar science, pinpoint lander position, measure the lunar radiation environment, assess how lander and astronaut activity affects the Moon, and assist with navigation precision, among other capabilities.
Circa 2017
In a recent article for Skeptic, Michael Shermer (the magazine’s founding publisher) put forth an argument for “why AI is not an existential threat,” where “AI” stands for “artificial intelligence” and an “existential threat” is anything that could cause human extinction or the irreversible decline of civilization.