Lifeboat Foundation

If you’ve been staying on top of artificial intelligence news lately, you may know that the games of chess and Go were two of the grand challenges for AI. But do you know what the equivalent is for robotics? It’s table tennis. Just think about how the game requires razor sharp perception and movement, a tall order for a machine.

As entertaining as human vs. robot games can be, what they actually demonstrate is much more important. They test the technology’s readiness for practical applications in the real world—like self-driving cars that can navigate around unexpected people in a street.

These automaker knuckleheads were planning to try and hide self driving cars into the 2030’s:

Head of GM’s foresight and trends unit says timetable for autonomous vehicles likely moved from 2035 to 2020, if not sooner.

A General Motors Co. executive credited Silicon Valley companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google car division and Tesla Motors Inc., for accelerating the development of autonomous vehicle technology and shortening the timetable for when safer self-driving cars hit the road.

Continue reading “GM Executive Credits Silicon Valley for Accelerating Development of Self-Driving Cars” »

Get ready for the 2016 Nano Grand Prix.

Nanotechnology is going to the next level, with minuscule racing cars made of individual atoms.

Elegance, speed, comfort and sustainability – fusing to a new form of traveling, defining a completely new form of freedom. This is the Lilium Jet, the world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing jet.

Start your journey from anywhere and travel faster and more elegantly than in your boldest dreams. 400 km/h top speed – 500 km range. The future of aviation begins now.

StarWars fighting is here! Wow; all we need is Yoda, and a Jedi Academy; then we can say life is indeed imitating art.

Experts believe that US aircraft could be fitted with the so-called death rays early in the next decade once scientists have managed to reduce the size of the devices while increasing their power.

Continue reading “American aircraft will be the first to fire laser weapon” »

Very neat!

Here’s the first look inside a Hyperloop.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has released video of what it will look like to travel inside the Hyperloop.

Continue reading “Hyperloop firm shows off the magnetic tech that will help it move at 760 mph” »

You will never have to carry physical documents of your passport into the airport ever again. De La Rue, a Britain-based commercial banknote printer and passport manufacturer, is working on a technology that can store “paperless passports” in smartphones.

This would act similar to mobile boarding cards, the Telegraph reported. “Paperless passports are one of many initiatives that we are currently looking at, but at the moment it is a concept that is at the very early stages of development,” a spokesman of the company was quoted as saying.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M3C6lrTkBXU

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) officials demonstrated its Blitzer electromagnetic railgun system at the U.S. Army’s Fires Center of Excellence annual Maneuver and Fires Integration Experiment (MFIX)last month at Ft. Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma.

There were eleven firings of the Blitzer railgun during the MFIX event, all at a target with a range that was greater than previous Blitzer firings. At the end of MFIX, GA-EMS’ Blitzer railgun system will be transported back to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah for more testing later this year.

Continue reading “General atomics railgun has successful tests which will lead to army truck based railgun system” »

Movidius’ Myriad 2 vision processing chip (Photo: Movidius)

The branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning has given us new wonders such as self-driving cars and instant language translation on our phones. Now it’s about to injects smarts into every other object imaginable.

That’s because makers of silicon processors from giants such as Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Technologies Inc. as well as a raft of smaller companies are starting to embed deep learning software into their chips, particularly for mobile vision applications. In fairly short order, that’s likely to lead to much smarter phones, drones, robots, cameras, wearables and more.

Continue reading “AI-On-A-Chip Soon Will Make Phones, Drones And More A Lot Smarter” »