Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Robopocalypse Report #7

Welcome to the latest Robopocalypse Report.  This is where I highlight some of the changes coming due to the new robotics revolution we are going through.  There is a strong emphasis on the technology of what is happening, but links will be present for the implications when they are present too.

The explosive ordnance disposal community in the US is now really worried about flying IEDs.  Their concern comes from the idea someone could strap a bomb on a quadcopter or other commercial drone and...yikes!  

The US Navy nuclear attack submarine successfully deployed an unmanned underwater vehicle, drone sub, and recovered it while on deployment.


The Russians took their Platform-M (gotta love Russian project names) to Crimea and showed off at one of their 'military festivals.'  It seems the controller is from video game console.  There are other bits to criticize as well.  Their timing was pretty bad.

The reason being Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and others have called on United Nations to ban autonomous weapons.  So long as one member of the Security Council wants those sort of weapons, the UN is going to do bupkiss. 

Back to more peaceful uses of drones, Amazon proposed the altitude of 200 ft to 400 ft be set aside for drone flights as a way of regulating with a buffer of another 100 feet so manned helicopters and aircraft would be required to fly at 500 feet and higher.

Back down to earth Matt Burgess posits how autonomous commercial vehicles will have a far greater impact on our lives than self driving cars.

General Electric, in an interview by John Lizzi, discusses its vision of 'service robotics' and how bots will act like our apprentices.

MIT - those organic traitors! - have also greatly improved object recognition for machine vision.

No comments:

Post a Comment