Lifeboat Foundation

In less than two minutes, Tesla employees were able to take off their gas masks.

If we can just perfect this more; then I have found my answer in transporting me to meetings, conferences, etc. from building location to building location on a non-snowy or non-rainy day. This would be great to use to get around those traffic jams too.

SAUSSET-LES-PINS, France, May 1 (UPI) — A French jet ski champion found victory in another venue Saturday, setting a new Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard flight during a thrilling attempt off the coast of Sausset-les-Pins in the south of France.

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Astronaut Tim Peake controlled a robot from the International Space Station (ISS). However, the robot wasn’t in space, but was located on Earth. The experiment was meant to prepare astronauts and technicians for future human-robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.

As part of a unique experiment, astronaut Tim Peake successfully maneuvered a robot located on Earth from the ISS. The British astronaut took control from the Earth-based team and steered the robot on a simulated Martian landscape. The experiment took place at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, dubbed “Mars Yard.”

The experiment, titled “Supervisory Control of Mars Yard Rover” or SUPVIS-M for short, was designed to one day allow humans, more specifically astronauts, sitting on board ISS or other deep space vehicles, to reliably control robots or machines over vast distances. The experiment is part of Europe’s METERON (Multipurpose End-To-end Robotics Operations Network) project. The overall idea is develop and optimize tasks and directional control.

Continue reading “Tim Peake Controls An Earth Robot From Space — Rover In U.K. Skillfully Driven” »

“Artificial Intelligence, friend or foe?”

I, like most of you, have pondered this question many times over the years, and I’ve finally come to this conclusion: We should NOT give birth to (what could and SHOULD be described as) an entirely new sentient race — then immediately consign it to shackles and slavery. If we do, we will deserve what we get.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence explained” »

But don’t expect the V-280 or SB-1 to hit battlefields until after 2030 — unless their builders find other customers first.

According to Astro Teller, the Google self-driving car is “close to graduating from X.” Parsing out the meaning of that string of words is a little complicated, but basically it means that Alphabet isn’t thinking of self-driving cars so much as a crazy “moonshot,” but as a thing that’s just about ready to be a standalone business that could actually generate revenue.

If you’re not a close follower of Google, though, more explanation might still be in order. It’s coming, in the form of a segment on tonight’s NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. They’ll be airing an inside look at X division inside Alphabet. That’s the group you know as Google X, but after last year’s corporate reorg, we’re all still getting used to the new naming conventions.

Holt interviewed Astro Teller and Obi Felten, who have the cheeky titles “Chief of Moonshots” and “Director of X Foundry,” respectively. It’ll likely be an overview of the projects that X is currently running — including self-driving cars, Project Loon, Project Wing, and Makani. Teller will also be candid about X’s failures. Failure being a favorite topic of his, actually — Holt tells us that inside X, “if you have an idea that crashes and burns, they give you a sticker.”

Continue reading “Google’s self-driving car is ‘close to graduating from X’” »

I do love Nvidia!

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.

The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.

Continue reading “Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer” »

LeEco is known as the “Netflix of China” due to its very popular video streaming service, but the conglomerate also has interests in a much wider range of sectors including smartphones, TVs and electric vehicles.

Ding Lei, LeEco’s auto chief and a former top official at General Motors’ China venture with SAIC Motor, says part of LeEco’s advantage in tomorrow’s auto industry is that it carries no baggage from today’s.

This, the man said, is the future of cars, and the Chinese consumer electronics company LeEco is going to make that future a reality.

Continue reading “China's Jia Yueting intends to outmuscle Musk — Taking on Tesla” »

Turns out the Model 3 isn’t going to be Tesla’s most affordable model.

Teslas can cheaper?

Continue reading “Tesla planning cheaper EV that ‘most people can afford’” »