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Category: drones – Page 129

Google ends Pentagon contract to develop AI for recognising people in drone videos after 4,000 employees signed an open letter saying that Google’s involvement is against the company’s “moral and ethical responsibility”.

Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires.

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision at a meeting with employees Friday morning, three sources told Gizmodo. The current contract expires in 2019 and there will not be a follow-up contract, Greene said. The meeting, dubbed Weather Report, is a weekly update on Google Cloud’s business.

Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company, Greene said, adding that the decision was made at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work. The company plans to unveil new ethical principles about its use of AI next week. A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about Greene’s comments.

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TIME magazine’s latest issue is a special report on the rapid explosion of drones in our culture. For the cover photo, TIME recreated its iconic logo and red border using 958 illuminated drones hovering in the sky. It’s the first-ever TIME cover captured with a camera drone.

To create the photo, TIME partnered with Intel’s Drone Light Show team (which creates beautiful sky displays using hundreds of drones at a time) and Astraeus Aerial Cinema Systems to fly and capture (respectively) the 958 drones above Folsom, California (where Intel has a campus).

The project was one of the biggest drone shows ever done in the United States — it’s a display measuring 100 meters (~328 feet) tall:

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Insect-sized flying robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks. These robots soar by fluttering tiny wings because they are too small to use propellers, like those seen on their larger drone cousins. Small size is advantageous: These robots are cheap to make and can easily slip into tight places that are inaccessible to big drones.

But current flying robo-insects are still tethered to the ground. The electronics they need to power and control their wings are too heavy for these miniature robots to carry.

Now, engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time cut the cord and added a brain, allowing their RoboFly to take its first independent flaps. This might be one small flap for a robot, but it’s one giant leap for robot-kind. The team will present its findings May 23 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Brisbane, Australia.

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Future wars could be much more fierce with weapons even more powerful than nukes:

The world is progressing in many ways, but tribalism isn’t going away, so new arms races in AI, drones, bio-weapons and space weapons are already under way. Forewarned is forearmed. What sort of weaponry should we expect? I’ve discussed AI and bio approaches before on other blogs, so this one looks just at kinetic weaponry using advanced materials, coupled to EM acceleration systems.

https://carbondevices.com/2017/08/31/using-inverse-rail-guns…ce-launch/ shows a crude illustration of my invention, the inverse rail gun, which inverts the idea of using a slug on a short rail gun and uses the short rail gun to accelerate a long tape instead.

Slide32

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The US space agency said Friday it plans to launch the first-ever helicopter to Mars in 2020, a miniature, unmanned drone-like chopper that could boost our understanding of the Red Planet.

Known simply as “The Mars Helicopter,” the device weighs less than four pounds (1.8 kilograms), and its main body section, or fuselage, is about the size of a softball.

It will be attached to the belly pan of the Mars 2020 rover, a wheeled robot that aims to determine the habitability of the Martian environment, search for signs of ancient life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers.

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It’s not a bird, nor a plane. But Uber’s new prototype vehicle unveiled Tuesday shows off its vision of the future of transportation—a “flying taxi” that aims to alleviate urban congestion.

A model of Uber’s electric vertical take-off and landing concept (eVTOL)—a cross between a helicopter and a drone—was displayed at the second annual Uber Elevate Summit in Los Angeles.

“Our goal is to radically improve global mobility,” said Uber Aviation product chief Nikhil Goel.

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