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Category: transportation – Page 174

These Self-Driving Cars Are Trained in a Simulation Packed With Terrible Drivers

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Self-driving cars are taking longer to arrive on our roads than we thought they would. Auto industry experts and tech companies predicted they’d be here by 2020 and go mainstream by 2021. But it turns out that putting cars on the road without drivers is a far more complicated endeavor than initially envisioned, and we’re still inching very slowly towards a vision of autonomous individual transport.

But the extended timeline hasn’t discouraged researchers and engineers, who are hard at work figuring out how to make self-driving cars efficient, affordable, and most importantly, safe. To that end, a research team from the University of Michigan recently had a novel idea: expose driverless cars to terrible drivers. They described their approach in a paper published last week in Nature.

Jetoptera Just Reinvented Flight With ‘Bladeless Fans on Steroids’

Nearly every air taxi concept involves rapidly spinning propellers or ducted fans placed in strategic positions outside of the main fuselage of the aircraft — moving air fast enough to achieve thrust in the direction of propulsion.

However, a new air taxi concept from a company in Seattle breaks from the norm — reinventing flight with bladeless fans at incredible power levels, according to Jetoptera’s official website.

US DARPA RACER Off-Road Autonomous Vehicles Teams Navigate Third Test

U.S. DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program recently conducted its third experiment to assess the performance of off-road unmanned vehicles. These test runs, conducted March 12–27, included the first with completely uninhabited RACER Fleet Vehicles (RFVs), with a safety operator overseeing in a supporting chase vehicle. The goal of the RACER program is to demonstrate autonomous movement of combat-scale vehicles in complex, mission-relevant off-road environments that are significantly more unpredictable than on-road conditions. The multiple courses were in the challenging and unforgiving terrain of the Mojave Desert at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center (NTC) in Ft. Irwin, California. As at the previous events, teams from Carnegie Mellon University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Washington participated. This completed the project’s first phase.

“We provided the performers RACER fleet vehicles with common performance, sensing, and compute. This enables us to evaluate the performance of the performer team autonomy software in similar environments and compare it to human performance,” said Young. “During this latest experiment, we continued to push vehicle limits in perceiving the environments to greater distances, enabling further increase in speeds and better adaptation to newly encountered environmental conditions that will continue into RACER’s next phase.”

“At Experiment Three, we successfully demonstrated significant improvements in our off-road speeds while simultaneously reducing any interaction with the vehicle during test runs. We were also honored to have representatives from the Army and Marine Corps at the experiment to facilitate transition of technologies developed in RACER to future service unmanned initiatives and concepts,” said Stuart Young, RACER program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

Auto-GPT and BabyAGI: How ‘autonomous agents’ are bringing generative AI to the masses

Chat gpt 4 is wonderful but one thing it is lacking is sentience which could do all work for millions of years so essentially we would not need find all discoveries and all things by ourselves.

Richards said he originally wanted an AI agent to automatically email him daily AI news. But, as Motherboard, he realized in the process that existing LLMs struggle with “tasks that require long-term planning,” or are “unable to autonomously refine their approaches based on real-time feedback.” That understanding inspired him to create Auto-GPT, which, he said, “can apply GPT4’s reasoning to broader, more complex problems that require long-term planning and multiple steps.” (Richards didn’t respond for a request for an interview with Fast Company.)

“They get confused”

Autonomous agents, at this early stage, are mainly experimental. And they have some serious limitations that prevent them from getting what they want from large language models


Skunk Works Reveals Progress on NASA’s Secret Supersonic X-Plane

Supersonic flight sounds great in theory, but in practice, it can lead to annoying hypersonic booms—the noise associated with shock waves created when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound. The booms can be as loud as an explosion or a thunderclap.

Current FAA rules ban supersonic flight over land due to noise pollution. NASA will use the experimental X-59 to gather data in the hopes of reducing the sonic boom to a barely-audible sonic thump heard on the ground. The supersonic plane will fly over populated regions of the United States, and data will be gathered from residents about the sound the aircraft produces.

If the X-59 succeeds in its mission, commercial air travel could get a lot quicker. Dinner in Paris, anyone?

This $340,000 fully self-sufficient, off-grid luxury camper is solar-powered and can produce its own water from thin air

Sorry I’m not that active. My mom had a heart attack a little over a month ago and I care for her now. Plus last Thursday I went to the ER for overdosing accidentally on depakote which can be deadly. But check this out. In case of an emergency is this cool or what? Kind of expensive though.

If this summer you’re in the mood for some off-the-grid camping trips, this state-of-the-art self-sustainable luxury trailer is what you need. Designed from the ground up for off-grid camping, the trailer can also produce its own water, making it fully self-sufficient. This extremely sophisticated camper is the work of a California-based company called Living Vehicle which specializes in making self-sustainable luxury travel trailers. The 2023 model was recently introduced by Living Vehicle and it boasts a few industry firsts.

According to its makers, the off-grid camper is aimed at those who wish “to travel far away from campgrounds and overcrowded RV parks.” With a starting price of $340,000, the luxury camper is available in three versions: Core, Max, and Pro. Additionally, Living Vehicle offers a laundry list of options that can be added to the camper via the company’s online configurator.

The 29-foot-long innovative camper runs on solar power. It comes with 1,400W of solar capacity as standard, but Living Vehicle offers an option to further increase its capacity. The Pro version boosts the maximum solar capacity of 3,400W. The energy is stored in a lithium-ion battery pack with a capacity ranging from 14.4 kWh to 57.6 kWh depending on the trailer’s version, along with invertor power ranging from 5 kW to 20 kW. The company from Santa Barbara claims the stored solar energy can power the camper’s air conditioner overnight without any external power input.

Explained: What is Auto-GPT, the new ‘do-it-all’ AI tool and how it works

If people are worried that Chat-GPT could be taking their jobs, they haven’t seen Auto-GPT yet.

Auto-GPT is an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT and others. It is based on the GPT-4 language model of OpenAI, the same LLM that powers the ChatGPT. But, as the name implies, “Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” a step further, but what exactly is it? Let us go through what Auto-GPT is and how it works.

What is Auto-GPT

Essentially, Auto-GPT is a chatbot. You ask it the questions it answers smartly. But, unlike ChatGPT and other GPT-based chatbots, which need a prompt every single time, Auto-GPT can automate the whole task, so you do not need to prompt it. Once given a task, Auto-GPT will figure out the steps on its own to reach the goal.

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