Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 2,336

A Little Robotic Submarine Could Ply Alien Seas

NASA is designing a robot submarine to explore the ultrachilly, hydrocarbon-filled seas on Saturn’s moon Titan — the only body in the solar system, apart from Earth, with liquid on its surface. Researchers have been testing the probe with a bucket-sized mock alien ocean in a lab.

The seas of Titan are very different from their counterparts on Earth: instead of seawater, Titan’s seas consist mainly of a frigid mixture of methane and ethane, at a temperature of around minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 184 degrees Celsius). That’s what NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in 2005, found.

The plan is to send the autonomous submarine into the largest sea on Titan. called Kraken Mare, from the name of a Scandinavian sea-monster and the Latin word for “sea,” the extraterrestrial sea covers 155,000 square miles (400,000 square kilometers) of the moon’s surface. (The second-largest sea on Titan, about a quarter the size of Kraken, is Ligeia Mare, named after one of the monstrous sirens of Greek mythology.) [See Photos of Titan’s Oceans].

Made In Space Takes New Guinness World Record for Longest 3D Printed Part

In 2016, a new Guinness World Record was set for the largest object to be 3D printed in one piece. The ABS/carbon fiber composite tool was 3D printed in 30 hours, and measured 17.5 feet long, 5.5 feet wide, and 1.5 feet tall. It was about as long as an average sport utility vehicle. The part was inarguably an impressive accomplishment – but that long length cannot compare to what Made In Space just 3D printed.

Made In Space is known for some pretty impressive accomplishments already. The company was responsible for the first 3D printer to be launched into space, and has since created a full Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) on the International Space station. Plenty of “firsts” have been set by the AMF as 3D printed tools, medical supplies, art and more have been 3D printed in space, the first of their kind. Now Made In Space has claimed the Guinness World Record for longest non-assembled 3D printed object, and it’s a lot longer than an SUV – it’s 37.7 meters, or 123 feet, 8.5 inches long.

That also happens to be the length of Made In Space’s Moffett Field facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The beam is now hanging from the ceiling of the facility. It was 3D printed with the company’s Extended Structure Additive Manufacturing Machine (ESAMM), which is the internal 3D printer of the Archinaut system. Archinaut uses robotic arms to assemble pre-fabricated and 3D printed components into larger, more complex structures, and will eventually be installed in space where it can autonomously repair things like satellites.

For this robot, the secret to crawling is artificial snakeskin

The world is getting flooded with tiny (creepy) robots that can crawl all over the place, including your clothes. The latest one, created by scientists at Harvard University, uses artificial scaly skins to move forward — kind of like a snake.

The soft robot is just a silicone rubber tube. But what’s special about it is its skin — a thin, stretchable plastic sheet that’s been cut with a laser. The cuts, in the shape of triangles or circles, resemble the scales on the skin of snakes. When air is pumped into the tube, the robot expands and contracts, allowing the scales to pop up, anchor against the surface, and pull the robot forward. In a study published today in Science Robotics, scientists showed that the artificial snakeskins work against rough surfaces like asphalt and concrete. In the future, these robots could be scaled down and used to deliver drugs inside arteries, or in disaster situations where bots need to crawl inside narrow spaces.

Dev Report: IBM & Unity Partner to Offer AI Tool That Could Make Augmented Reality Apps Smarter

This month, the power of artificial intelligence will be coming to more augmented reality developers as a leader in the game and 3D software development space and a major force behind the current school of cloud-based AI have officially announced a new partnership.

In a post on Unity’s website on Tuesday, the company revealed a partnership with computing giant IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK. This programming interface will open up new cloud-based AI services for developers to use in their applications. And, with AR and AI having become increasingly intertwined technologies, this is only good news for AR developers.

Will We Ever Be Able to Upload a Mind to a New Body?

The Netflix series takes place hundreds of years in the future, but references versions of technology that have been in development for years, like brain mapping, human and AI neural links, and mind uploading to computers. Millions of dollars has been bumped into technological ideas that promise, one day, our brains will be turned digital. That said, there are those who believe the human mind is too complex, and our consciousness too nuanced, to be recreated in a digital product. And none of that even goes into what would happen if someone’s digitized mind was placed into real human flesh.

Will we ever be able to upload our minds into other bodies? Furthermore, should we? And honestly, if we ever achieved such a feat, could we even call ourselves human anymore? On this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to experts in neuroscience, philosophy and futurism.

Japan has just invented Robo-bees that can legitimately pollinate the earth

In an example of life imitating art, scientists have come up with a technology straight out of an episode of Black Mirror: Bee-like pollinating drones.

A team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan engineered the devices using a combination of horsehair, $USD 100 drones and a sticky ion gel.

It’s pretty simple really – first, the drones fly into flowers much like a bee would. Inside the flower, pollen gets stuck to the drone due to the combination of the ion gel and horsehair. That same pollen is then shaken off into the next flower, and so on. It’s just your run of the mill birds and the robots bees.