Robo-Cars Picked for Pentagon Driving Test

36 teams are moving on to the semi-finals of the Urban Challenge, the Pentagon's contest to see if robotic cars can move their way through cities.

That includes all five teams that completed 2005's Grand Challenge driverless rally across the desert.

Read More

IBM wants to improve communication between cars, roads, and drivers.

Vehicles are getting smarter all the time, thanks to a combination of sensor and wireless communications technologies. Car manufacturers say that tomorrow's drivers will be assisted by a wealth of safety information generated by vehicles that can talk to not only each other but to the roadway itself. But with so much data often comes information overload. And that's why computing giant IBM has launched a project to help the driver get the right information at the right time.

IBM calls the research initiative collaborative driving, and the company says it's designed to prevent accidents and reduce traffic congestion. The work will be spearheaded by the IBM lab in Haifa, Israel. "More than a million people die on the roads every year around the world, and people waste a lot of time and money sitting in traffic jams," says IBM researcher Oleg Goldshmidt. "You would like to help with both problems in any way possible."

Read More

ONARCHITECTURE- Intelligent design: Will robots take over architecture?

What if a building could build, repair, dismantle, and recycle itself? What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence? Finally, what if you could talk to a building and it could talk back?

Those are the kinds of questions students in UVA architecture professor Jason Johnson's Robotic Ecologies seminar are encouraged to ask and explore.

Read More

A Smarter Web

New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0."

Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear.

Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability--the seeming intelligence--to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done.

Read More

Mapping Traffic Flow

New trafficking software will enable drivers to find the quickest route to their final destination.

Drivers are always searching for the fastest route--whether they are traveling home on a busy Friday afternoon or rushing to the airport for an early-morning flight. Now Tele Atlas, a Boston-based company that provides digital maps and navigational content, has integrated new trafficking software into its map database so that drivers can find the most optimal route based on speed rather than distance--for any stretch of road at any hour of any day of the week.

Read More

Faster "slamming" robots

SLAM is an acronym for 'simultaneous localization and mapping,' and slamming robots are simply robots which at the same time build a map of their environment while keeping track of their own localization.

Now, according to New Scientist, Purdue University engineers have designed P-SLAM robots based on a prediction-based SLAM algorithm. This algorithm contains an environmental-structure predictor to predict the structure inside an unexplored region. As these robots make some guesses about their environments, they are able to react faster in unfamiliar buildings. But if this technique is working well in offices — which have some repetitive characteristics from room to room — it is not yet well-adapted to outdoor environments.

Read More

A Robot Is Built To Rescue Soldiers

U.S. researchers are developing a remote-controlled robot designed to rescue injured or abducted soldiers without putting their comrades at risk. The prototype of the nearly 6-foot-tall Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, called Bear, can lift nearly 300 pounds with one arm, and its developer, Vecna Technologies of College Park, Md., is focusing on improving its two-legged lower body.

Read More

'Guessing' robots find their way

Robots that use "guesswork" to navigate through unfamiliar surroundings are being developed by US researchers.

The mobile machines create maps of areas they have already explored and then use this information to predict what unknown environments will be like.

Read More

Merging of Man and Robot

Seapower is the official magazine of the Navy League but under the direction of Richard Barnard, Peter Atkinson, and Rick Burgess in recent years it has also emerged as a great source of future tech news and information.

The May issue of Seapower is no exception. Among features on micro air vehicles and new uses for fighter targeting pods is a cover story about the merging of man and robot to fight the wars of the not-so-distant future.

Read More

AI will surpass human intelligence after 2020

Vinge is a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is well-known for his 1993 manifesto, "The Coming Technological Singularity," in which he argues that exponential growth in technology means a point will be reached where the consequences are unknown. Vinge still believes in this future, which he thinks would come anytime after 2020.

Read More

Robot future poses hard questions

Scientists have expressed concern about the use of autonomous decision-making robots, particularly for military use.

As they become more common, these machines could also have negative impacts on areas such as surveillance and elderly care, the roboticists warn.

Read More

French startup sees the future, and it includes robots

PARIS (AFP) - Imagine having someone to serve you a glass of water whenever you ask, or even dance if you put on your favourite music.

Now imagine that certain someone is a something -- a robot, in fact.
A French startup named Gostai is doing just that.

Read More

Link: Gostai