Lifeboat Foundation

Argo AI LLC, a driverless-car developer controlled by Ford Motor Co., has purchased a 17-year-old company that makes laser systems needed to operate cars without human intervention, an important step for a conventional Detroit auto maker looking to boost its role in shaping the industry’s transformation.

Argo AI said Friday it is buying New Jersey-based Princeton Lightwave Inc. for an undisclosed price, a move that provides Ford with more immediate access to so-called lidar systems that use lasers to create a 3D view of the…

To Read the Full Story.

Continue reading “Ford’s Argo Buys Laser System Firm as It Boosts Driverless Car Development” »

Is this what cars will look like in 2030?

Built Robotics has raised $15 million in a round led by NEA to do for construction equipment what Waymo is doing for automobiles.

Fully automated mining and factories and advanced robotics on the moon and asteroids could be leveraged for the exponential development of space. Here we review some of the developments of robotics for mining and factories on earth.

Robotic mining

Continue reading “Fully automated mining and factories on Earth a precursor of automation for space” »

With artificial intelligence technology advancing rapidly, the world must consider how the law should apply to synthetic beings. Experts from the fields of AI, ethics, and government weigh in on the best path forward as we enter the age of self-aware robots.

Artificially intelligent (AI) robots and automated systems are already transforming society in a host of ways. Cars are creeping closer to Level 5 autonomy, factories are cutting costs by replacing human workers with robots, and AIs are even outperforming people in a number of traditionally white-collar professions.

Continue reading “The rights of synthetic lifeforms is the next great civil rights controversy” »

Artificial intelligence has historically over-promised and under-delivered. That routine leads to spurts of what those in the field call “hype”—outsized excitement about the potential of a core technology—followed after a few years and several million (or billion) dollars by crashing disappointment. In the end, we still don’t have the flying cars or realistic robot dogs we were promised.

But DeepMind’s AlphaGo, a star pupil in a time we’ll likely look back on as a golden age of AI research, has made a habit of blowing away experts’ notions of what’s possible. When DeepMind announced that the AI system could play Go on a professional level, masters of the game said it was too complex for any machine. They were wrong.

Now AlphaGo Zero, the AI’s latest iteration, is being set to tasks outside of the 19×19 Go board, according to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.

Continue reading “DeepMind wants to find the next miracle material—experts just don’t know how they’ll pull it off” »

Toshiba’s next-generation SCiB lithium-ion battery could give electric cars a 200-mile range after recharging for just six minutes.

Driverless cars need superhuman senses. And for the most part they seem to have them, in the form of lidar, radar, ultrasound, near-infrared, and other sensors. But regular cameras, often forgotten about in favor of more exotic technologies, are incredibly important given they’re used to collect data that’s used to, say, read the messages on road signs. So Sony’s new image sensor is designed to give regular camera vision a boost, too.

The new $90 IMX324 has an effective resolution of only 7.42 megapixels, which sounds small compared to your smartphone camera. But with about three times the vertical resolution of most car camera sensors, it packs a punch. It can see road signs from 160 meters away, has low-light sensitivity that allows it to see pedestrians in dark situations, and offers a trick that captures dark sections at high sensitivity but bright sections at high resolution in order to max out image recognition. The image above shows how much sharper the new tech than its predecessor from the same distance.

Don’t expect a beefed-up camera to eliminate the need for other sensors, though: even with strong low-light performance, cameras don’t work well in the dark, and they can’t offer the precise ranging abilities of other sensors. That means lidar and radar will remain crucial complements to humble optical cameras, however fancy they get.

Continue reading “Sony’s New Autonomous Car Camera Sees Road Signs at 160 Meters” »

General Motors says its most recent test vehicle meets some of the requirements for total autonomy.