Robotic eyes on autonomous vehicles could improve pedestrian safety, according to a new study at the University of Tokyo. Participants played out scenarios in virtual reality (VR) and had to decide whether to cross a road in front of a moving vehicle or not.
When that vehicle was fitted with robotic eyes, which either looked at the pedestrian (registering their presence) or away (not registering them), the participants were able to make safer or more efficient choices.
DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program has successfully completed one experiment and is now moving on to even more difficult off-road landscapes at Camp Roberts, California, for trials set for September 15–27, according to a press release by the organization published last week.
Giving driverless combat vehicles off-road autonomy
The program has stated that its aim is “to give driverless combat vehicles off-road autonomy while traveling at speeds that keep pace with those driven by people in realistic situations.”
The artificial artist Dall-E 2 has now designed the Apple Car.
A hypothetical “AI-generated Apple Car” ingeniously made use of artificial intelligence technology was created by Dall-E 2 in response to a text request by San Francisco-based industrial designer John Mauriello.
Mauriello focuses on advancing his one-of-a-kind craft by utilizing cutting-edge technologies. He typed that he wanted a minimalist sports automobile inspired by a MacBook and a Magic Mouse created out of metal and glass on DALL-E 2, an artificial intelligence system that can create realistic visuals and art from a description. Additionally, he gave the AI instructions to style the design using Jony Ive’s methods, the former head of design at Apple.
In nature, wood, shells, and other structural materials are lightweight, strong, and tough. Significantly, these materials are made at the ambient temperature in the local environment – not at the high temperatures at which human-made structural materials are generally processed. Similar materials are difficult to make synthetically. In a review article in Nature Materials, a team of scientists assessed the common design motifs of a range of natural structural materials and determined what it would take to design and fabricate structures that mimic nature. They considered the remaining challenges to include the need for comprehensive characterization of strength and toughness to identify underlying multiscale mechanisms.
This comprehensive assessment provides new inspiration and understanding of design principles that may lead to more efficient synthetic approaches for advanced, lightweight structural materials for transportation, buildings, batteries, and energy conversion.
In the natural world, many of the structural materials (wood, shells, bones, etc.) are hybrid materials made up of simple constituents that are assembled at ambient temperatures and often have remarkable properties. Even though the constituent materials generally have poor intrinsic properties, the superior extrinsic properties of the hybrid materials are the result of the arrangement of hard and soft phases in complex hierarchical architectures, with dimensions spanning from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The resulting materials are lightweight and usually show interesting combinations of strength and toughness, even though these two key structural properties tend to be mutually exclusive. It is relatively easy to make materials that are strong or tough, but difficult to make materials that are both.
New light has been shed on the formation of increasingly precious rare earth elements (REEs) by researchers from Trinity College Dublin. They accomplished this by creating synthetic rocks and testing their responses to varying environmental conditions. REEs are used in many electronic devices and green energy technologies, including everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.
The findings, just published on September 19 in the journal Global Challenges, have implications for recycling REEs from electronic waste, designing materials with advanced functional properties, and even for finding new REE deposits hidden around the globe.
Dr. Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco, Associate Professor in Nanomineralogy at Trinity and an iCRAG (SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences) Funded Investigator, was the principal investigator of the work. He said:
Scientists have discovered a mineral stronger than a diamond called lonsdaleite. The mineral, which has been theorized about for years, was recently found in Africa after meteorites landed in the region. It’s also believed to exist on Earth in some form, though scientists are unsure how much is available on our planet.
Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with Jetson Orin Nano, a system designed for low-powered robots — plus a new platform called IGX.
Isaac Sim, which launched in open beta last June, allows designers to simulate robots interacting with mockups of the real world (think digital re-creations of warehouses and factory floors). Users can generate datasets from simulated sensors to train the models on real-world robots, leveraging synthetic data from batches of parallel, unique simulations to improve the model’s performance.
It’s not just marketing bluster, necessarily. Some research suggests that synthetic data has the potential to address many of the development challenges plaguing companies attempting to operationalize AI. MIT researchers recently found a way to classify images using synthetic data, and nearly every major autonomous vehicle company uses simulation data to supplement the real-world data they collect from cars on the road.
This novel technology can be built in many ways, even like a snake.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has revealed a breakthrough technology with wave energy. The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.
NREL — which specializes in the research and development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy systems integration, and sustainable transportation — has already taken out the patent of its unique distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec).
NREL
The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.
Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three
“You could train your particular ‘tongue’ to know what one of these whiskies ‘tasted’ like, so that when the fake stuff came along it could identify it and when the real stuff came along it could confirm that it was the real stuff,” said Dr Alasdair Clark, the lead author of the research from the University of Glasgow.
Clark said the technology could be incorporated into a small, portable device and have a wide range of applications, from identifying poisons to environmental monitoring of rivers.
“Initially we thought of it more for sort of production line, quality control maintenance, [for example] if you are an apple juice company and you want to make sure that the apple juice you make on Tuesday is the same as the one that you made last week,” said Clark.