Lifeboat Foundation

The super fast, futuristic transportation was first envisioned by Elon Musk in 2013. Now it’s coming to China.

The big roll out Was going to be 2022, now looking like maybe 2027. There has been some shady stuff happening in the background in the USA to hold up self driving cars. It seems the people who were set to lose a lot of money on the changeover have found ways to hold it up.

Despite the rapid accumulation of testing miles, Krafcik warned the governors not to end all of their infrastructure investments just yet. Responding to a question about the need for new parking facilities, he responded that there will be a very long period of overlap between personally owned human driven vehicles and shared automated vehicles from Waymo and others. He suggested that it might be possible to slow down on some massive parking structures but was non-committal on timelines.

With Waymo planning to launch its commercial service by the end of 2018, GM coming in 2019 and others including Zoox, Daimler and Voyage in the next 2–3 years, there will be shared automated vehicles on the road. However, these will be limited to locations where they are demonstrated to function reliably and there is a market for ride-hailing despite the optimistic projections of some investors and developers. Widespread adoption in the millions of vehicles globally is unlikely before the latter half of the 2020s.

Continue reading “Transition To Autonomous Cars Will Take Longer Than You Think, Waymo CEO Tells Governors” »

The company’s autonomous vehicles just drove 8 million miles on public roads. What’s more, it took the company just one month to go from 7 million miles to 8 million miles driven.

“We’re driving now at the rate of 25,000 miles every day on public roads,” CEO John Krafcik said Friday while addressing the National Governors Association.

Waymo’s acceleration in logging miles with self-driving cars has picked up in the last year. In November 2017, it crossed 4 million miles. Less than a year later it’s doubled that figure.

Continue reading “Waymo’s self-driving cars log 1 million miles on public roads in a month” »

Delft Hyperloop is back, and it claims it’s about to break the speed record for hyperloop. As 20 teams gather in Hawthorne, California, for SpaceX’s third pod racing competition on Sunday, the Netherlands-based group could be one of the key drivers in a transportation revolution.

“Our objective is to go faster than the current record,” Clément Hienen, the team’s design engineer, tells Inverse. “For sure, we designed to break the record.”

It’s a bold claim, especially considering the wider industry. When Elon Musk first released his white paper for a vacuum-sealed-tube-based transportation system in 2013, he claimed pods could fly through at a theoretical maximum speed of 700 mph — cutting a six-hour drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco down to just 30 minutes. Musk’s own firms set a public speed record of 220 mph in August 2017, only for Richard Branson-backed Virgin Hyperloop One to beat the record with 240 mph in December 2017. Delft plans to beat both of these.

Continue reading “How These University Students Plan to Break the Hyperloop Speed Record” »

Zoox has jokingly dubbed its prototype robot taxis “vaporware horseshit.”

Akka Technologies is developing pods with detachable wings that would integrate aviation and public transit. The AKKA Group is an engineering and technology consulting company with 16000 employees.

The detachable wings would make for vastly more efficient boarding and improve the utilization of the engines and wings.

Continue reading “Akka pod with detachable wings would integrate aviation with public transit” »

Researchers have shown that it is possible to train artificial neural networks directly on an optical chip. The significant breakthrough demonstrates that an optical circuit can perform a critical function of an electronics-based artificial neural network and could lead to less expensive, faster and more energy efficient ways to perform complex tasks such as speech or image recognition.

“Using an optical chip to perform neural network computations more efficiently than is possible with digital computers could allow more complex problems to be solved,” said research team leader Shanhui Fan of Stanford University. “This would enhance the capability of artificial neural networks to perform tasks required for self-driving cars or to formulate an appropriate response to a spoken question, for example. It could also improve our lives in ways we can’t imagine now.”

An artificial neural network is a type of artificial intelligence that uses connected units to process information in a manner similar to the way the brain processes information. Using these networks to perform a complex task, for instance voice recognition, requires the critical step of training the algorithms to categorize inputs, such as different words.

Continue reading “Researchers move closer to completely optical artificial neural network” »

The engines of an airplane are complicated machines with plenty of hard-to-reach places, and keeping them in working order requires a lot of time and maintenance. The future of this task, as Rolls-Royce sees it, could involve deploying different kinds of of robots that patrol these aircraft parts and quickly nip any problems in the bud.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m5HGUY3xxf8

Full automation of things like Logging, and Mining is not that far off. A humanoid robot that can do all the tasks of those sorts of jobs is already really close, the main issue right now is copying Human Hands, and it is almost there. Then, having vehicles like this to haul the stuff out of there. And, then those jobs are gone for good.

It might not be the quickest vehicle at the event, but Swedish transport company Einride has chosen the Goodwood Festival of Speed to reveal the T-log, an autonomous, electric logging truck. Incorporating some unusual purpose-built design for the niche logging market, the vehicle is designed to go off-road and to navigate forest roads with and without loads.