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Category: robotics/AI – Page 490

Waymo received approval Friday afternoon from the California Public Utilities Commission to operate a commercial robotaxi service in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Peninsula and on San Francisco freeways.

The approval removes the last barrier for the Alphabet company to charge for rides in these expanded areas. Importantly, it opens up new territory for Waymo in one of the country’s largest cities and unlocks a route to San Francisco International Airport, which is located south of the city.

Waymo has operated a commercial service 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout the city of San Francisco since receiving approval from the commission in August. Waymo is also allowed to give people free driverless rides in parts of Los Angeles. But until today’s approval, it was not able to charge for rides in Los Angeles.

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In today’s column, I am continuing my ongoing coverage of prompt engineering strategies and tactics that aid in getting the most out of using generative AI apps such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Gemini, Claude, etc.

A new prompt engineering technique indicates that mentioning Star Trek when prompting in generative AI can be beneficial. Read about the Spock-like logic involved.

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One thing i do like about China. they like to publicly lay cards on table of a project in development an opponent has, that is high level top secret. Just to ruffle feathers, lol. like weather modification stuff. Of course US has, and far superior, its just an open play to tweak someones nose.

China says it is building a new AI-based intelligence platform to track global scientists and hoover up breakthrough technologies for its industry and military.

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General Atomics’ new air combat drone has flown, another step toward what the Air Force is calling the “first of a second generation” of autonomous aircraft.

The drone, called the XQ-67A, is derived from GA-ASI’s Gambit series of aircraft, which the company is proposing for the Air Force’s program to build robot wingmen, called collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs.

The new platform is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s highly classified Off-Board Sensing Station program, or OBSS. The service awarded GA-ASI and Kratos design contracts in 2021, then picked GA-ASI to actually build the design in 2023.

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Robotic garden helpers have been keeping lawns in trim for decades, but none are as much fun to watch as the Verdie AI-powered outdoor maintenance bot from Electric Sheep as it wheels around edges, blows debris and gets to grips with power tools.

For the last few years, San Francisco’s Electric Sheep Robotics has been providing automated outdoor maintenance tech as a Robots-as-a-Service rental model. But more recently the company has been acquiring traditional outdoor service providers and “progressively transforming operations by deploying proprietary AI software and robots” in a move towards becoming a large-scale outdoor maintenance company.

Tapping into this US$1 trillion market involves replacing the “wide variety of highly pollutant gas power tools; string trimmers, leaf blowers, weed sprayers, etc” – while also addressing labor shortages in the industry – by rolling out emission-free automated helpers.

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# spacebear.

Just over five years ago, on 22 February 2019, an unmanned space probe was placed in orbit around the Moon.

Named Beresheet and built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, it was intended to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing. Among the probe’s payload were tardigrades, renowed for their ability to survive in even the harshest climates.

The mission ran into trouble from the start, with the failure of “star tracker” cameras intended to determine the spacecraft’s orientation and thus properly control its motors. Budgetary limitations had imposed a pared-down design, and while the command center was able to work around some problems, things got even trickier on 11 April, the day of the landing.

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