Lifeboat Foundation

It’s a new year and we have exciting updates to share on our progress at Vahana over the past few months. We all knew that designing and building this revolutionary vehicle would take time, ingenuity, and the perfect combination of patience and hustle from all parties involved. In addition to our brilliant team, we’re lucky to have incredibly reliable partners and the extended Airbus family, which has played a great role in getting Vahana to a crucial project milestone: flight tests.

In less than two years, Vahana has gone from a sketch on a napkin to a full size vehicle about to undertake its first round of flight testing. In the pursuit of vehicle and personal safety, we decided to slightly delay our original goal of having Vahana accomplish its first flight in 2017. By the last quarter of 2017, the team initiated ground testing, which included powering up all motors, and we’re excited to announce that all ground test points have been completed. We’re targeting this quarter (Q1 2018) for Vahana to take to the sky at the UAS flight range in Pendleton, OR.

We’re grateful to all our partners for their understanding that the success of our project is tethered to working within unrealistic timescales. Yet amongst all of our goals we are fiercely realistic when it comes to pursuing the developing air vehicles that will be safe, reliable, and certified for human flight. We’d rather experience a minor delay now than unduly compromise our long-term development plan.

Continue reading “January 2018 Vahana Project Update” »

““Every Uber driver, as far as I can see, gets a benefit,” said Edward Kleinbard, a USC professor and former chief of staff to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.”

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Now you can have items delivered to you wherever you are.

This new car model has no steering wheel or pedals.

India and Japan have vowed to strengthen their strategic ties by increasing cooperation in the defense, robotics and AI sectors in coming years in response to Chinese regional ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear plans.

“You should expect to see increased bilateral cooperation between us to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and robotics,”Japanese State Minister for Foreign Affairs Kentaro Sonoura told the Times of India. The move follows the successful ratification of the Indo-Japanese civil nuclear agreement by Japan’s parliament in late 2017.

The two countries are launching a working group on cooperation between nuclear companies. “Japan’s intention is to start this quickly, possibly by the end of this month,” Sonoura said.

Acoustic tractor beams use the power of sound to hold particles in mid-air, and unlike magnetic levitation, they can grab most solids or liquids. For the first time University of Bristol engineers have shown it is possible to stably trap objects larger than the wavelength of sound in an acoustic tractor beam. This discovery opens the door to the manipulation of drug capsules or micro-surgical implements within the body. Container-less transportation of delicate larger samples is now also a possibility and could lead to levitating humans.

Researchers previously thought that acoustic tractor beams were fundamentally limited to levitating small objects as all the previous attempts to trap particles larger than the wavelength had been unstable, with objects spinning uncontrollably. This is because rotating sound field transfers some of its spinning motion to the objects causing them to orbit faster and faster until they are ejected.

Continue reading “The world’s most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans” »

Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that’s something of an artist – a “drawing bot.” The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object, but it also adds details to those images that weren’t included the text, indicating that the AI has a little imagination of its own, says Microsoft.

“If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch,” explained Xiaodong He, a principal researcher and research manager in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, in Microsoft’s announcement. “These birds may not exist in the real world — they are just an aspect of our computer’s imagination of birds.”

The bot is able to generate a variety of images, researchers say, including everything from “ordinary pastoral scenes,” like those with grazing livestock, to the absurd – like “a floating double-decker bus.”

Continue reading “Microsoft’s new drawing bot is an AI artist” »

Seven (!) digital touchscreens, and a virtual personal assistant that’s a fish.

BMW is promising a series of new all-electric cars starting next with the first all-electric Mini, but the most anticipated one is the 2021 iNext electric vehicle, which the German automaker has been positioning as a Tesla Model 3 competitor.

They are now hinting at a major range increase for the upcoming vehicle.