The aircraft will be supplied by Lilium, a Germany-based aviation company that manufacturers the industry’s only five-passenger “electric vertical takeoff and landing” aircraft.
DARPA’s SIGMA+ program conducted a week-long deployment of advanced chemical and biological sensing systems in the Indianapolis metro region in August, collecting more than 250 hours of daily life background atmospheric data across five neighborhoods that helped train algorithms to more accurately detect chemical and biological threats. The testing marked the first time in the program the advanced laboratory grade instruments for chemical and biological sensing were successfully deployed as mobile sensors, increasing their versatility on the SIGMA+ network.
“Spending a week gathering real-world background data from a major Midwestern metropolitan region was extremely valuable as we further develop our SIGMA+ sensors and networks to provide city and regional-scale coverage for chem and bio threat detection,” said Mark Wrobel, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Collecting chemical and biological environment data provided an enhanced understanding of the urban environment and is helping us make refinements of the threat-detection algorithms to minimize false positives and false negatives.”
SIGMA+ expands on the original SIGMA program’s advanced capability to detect illicit radioactive and nuclear materials by developing new sensors and networks that would alert authorities with high sensitivity to chemical, biological, and explosives threats as well. SIGMA, which began in 2014, has demonstrated city-scale capability for detecting radiological threats and is now operationally deployed with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, helping protect the greater New York City region.
We received multiple reports last night via Twitter of low-flying helicopters in the area, but they were not the recently reported police, news, or Department of Energy air traffic.
For those interested in the hyperloop. Here is a video of some people testing it out.
Very interesting. Could it be the future of transportation? How will it fair against trains and aircraft?
The first-ever hyperloop passenger test has just been conducted by Virgin Hyperloop.
Gonzalez thinks that Tesla taxis could help reinvigorate the city’s yellow-cab industry, which has taken a major hit from ride-hailing services like Uber, Via, and Lyft. He also predicts that the city could, for sustainability reasons, start mandating electric cabs, so he’s looking to get ahead of the curve, even if the commercial charging infrastructure isn’t quite there yet.
Drive Sally plans to bring hundreds of Teslas to New York’s streets in the near future, but for now, the company is still working out the kinks. Gonzalez suspects that the EVs may be better suited for for-hire “black cars” than yellow cabs, and he also said that the more-spacious Model Y would likely work better as a cab than the Model 3, but they’re still too expensive.
The year is coming to a close and it’s safe to say Elon Musk’s prediction that his company would field one million “robotaxis” by the end of 2020 isn’t going to come true. In fact, so far, Tesla’s managed to produce exactly zero self-driving vehicles. And we can probably call off the singularity too. GPT-3 has been impressive, but the closer machines get to aping human language the easier it is to see just how far away from us they really are.
So where does that leave us, ultimately, when it comes to the future of AI? That depends on your outlook. Media hype and big tech’s advertising machine has set us up for heartbreak when we compare the reality in 2020 to our 2016-era dreams of fully autonomous flying cars and hyper-personalized digital assistants capable of managing the workload of our lives.
Continue reading “Neural’s market outlook for artificial intelligence in 2021 and beyond” »
The company is working towards safety certification by 2025 and commercial operations by 2030, it has said.
Canada’s TransPod and Spain’s Zeleros also aim to upend traditional passenger and freight networks with similar technology they say will slash travel times, congestion and environmental harm linked with petrol-fuelled machines.
High-speed pods could eventually make New York-Washington trip in 30 minutes.
Continue reading “First passengers travel in Virgin’s levitating hyperloop pod system” »
In the Nevada desert yesterday, Virgin Hyperloop tested human travel in a hyperloop pod for the first time.
Have no fear: the Jolly Green II is finally here.
The Air Force officially took possession of its first two HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters at Moody Air Force Base last week, the service announced.
23rd Wing and 347th Rescue Group leadership took receipt of the new helos after they were flown from Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky Training Academy in Connecticut to Moody AFB in Georgia by Air Force personnel.
A group of five companies including the Japanese unit of IBM Corp are currently developing an artificial intelligence suitcase to assist visually impaired people in traveling independently, with a pilot test of a prototype conducted at an airport in Japan earlier this month.
The small navigation robot, which is able to plan an optimal route to a destination based on the user’s location and map data, uses multiple sensors to assess its surroundings and AI functionality to avoid bumping into obstacles, according to the companies.
At the pilot experiment held on Nov 2, the AI suitcase was able to successfully navigate itself to an All Nippon Airways departure counter after receiving a command from Chieko Asakawa, a visually impaired fellow IBM overseeing the product’s development.
