Lifeboat Foundation

More than a score of companies are pushing to be early winners in the race for self-driving taxis — robotaxis — with the potential that brings to capture the entire value chain of car transport from your riders. They are all at different stages, and they almost all want to convince the public and investors that they are far along.

To really know how far along a project is, you need the chance to look inside it. To see the data only insiders see on just how well their vehicle is performing, as well as what it can and can’t do. Most teams want to keep those inside details secret, though in time they will need to reveal them to convince the public, and eventually regulators that they are ready to deploy.

Because they keep them secret, those of us looking in from the outside can only scrape for clues. The biggest clues come when they reach certain milestones, and when they take risks which tell us their own internal math has said it’s OK to take that risk. Most teams announce successes and release videos of drives, but these offer us only limited information because they can be cherry picked. The best indicators are what they do, not what they say.

Unlike Hubble, which orbits Earth and was visited by NASA astronauts for fixes and upgrades, Webb is going a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2—so Webb almost certainly can’t be fixed if anything goes wrong (though never write-off NASA).

NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) is due to go skywards—at long, long last—on December 18, 2021.

And he will also be the first space tourist to go to the moon in 2023.

Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa is on his way to the International Space Station (ISS), after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-20 crew ship today, December 8, at 2:38 am ET (07:38 GMT).

“Dream come true,” the entrepreneur tweeted before boarding the three-seat Soyuz spacecraft that would launch him up into orbit. He is joined by Russian cosmonaut and pilot Alexander Misurkin and film producer Yozo Hirano, who will document the expedition for Maezawa’s YouTube channel.

Continue reading “Japanese Billionaire Launches to the ISS Aboard a Soyuz Rocket” »

A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

Imagine windows that can easily transform into mirrors, or super high-speed computers that run not on electrons but light. These are just some of the potential applications that could one day emerge from optical engineering, the practice of using lasers to rapidly and temporarily change the properties of materials.

“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a light switch,” says Caltech Professor of Physics David Hsieh. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”

In a new study in Nature, Hsieh and his team, including lead author and graduate student Junyi Shan, report success at using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of any excess damaging heat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNT-45zK0cQ&feature=share

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You’re on the PRO Robots channel and in this issue, on the eve of the New Year and Christmas, we’ve made a selection of non-trivial gifts for you. From high-tech, to simple but useful! See Top robots and gadgets you can buy right now for fun, usefulness, or to feel like you’re in a futuristic movie of the future. Have you started picking out presents for the New Year yet?

Continue reading “Non-trivial gifts for the New Year | Top robots and gadgets to give as gifts” »

Beijing is making moves to challenge the dominance of the American military. Reports claim that China wants to establish its first permanent military presence on the Atlantic Ocean in Equatorial Guinea. Palki Sharma tells you more.

#Gravitas #China #EquatorialGuinea.

Continue reading “Gravitas: Chinese military mounts a challenge in America’s backyard” »

Alphabet’s AI subsidiary DeepMind has built a new AI language model named Gopher. It has 280 billion parameters, making it significantly larger than OpenAI’s GPT-3.

Space news, Elon Musk, spaceX, Perseverance rover, mars, space.