Lifeboat Foundation

Assistance robots are typically mobile robots designed to assist humans in malls, airports, health care facilities, home environments and various other settings. Among other things, these robots could help users to find their way around unknown environments, for instance guiding them to a specific location or sharing important information with them.

While the capabilities of assistance robots have improved significantly over the past decade, the systems that have so far been implemented in real-world environments are not yet capable of following or guiding humans efficiently within crowded spaces. In fact, training robots to track a specific user while navigating a dynamic environment characterized by many randomly moving “obstacles” is far from a simple task.

Researchers at the Berlin Institute of Technology have recently introduced a new model based on deep reinforcement learning that could allow mobile robots to guide a specific user to a desired location or follow him/her around while carrying their belongings, all within a crowded environment. This model, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could help to significantly enhance the capabilities of robots in malls, airports and other public places.

Spotted: Although relatively expensive to produce at present, and with storage often cited as a concern, green hydrogen fuel production is increasing. A naturally occurring and superabundant element, hydrogen is popular for several reasons, including the ability to produce it using renewable energy sources. And now, Element 1’s modular, grid-independent hydrogen generation technology is making the fuel even more accessible.

Designed to efficiently convert methanol to hydrogen to electricity, the technology supports both hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and electric vehicles. The company’s catalytic reactor heats a methanol and water feedstock mix before sending it through a membrane purifier for almost 100 per cent fuel cell grade hydrogen.

Because the modular system produces the fuel as needed, the risk of combustion is nearly eliminated, and specialty storage facilities are redundant. This is because the only material that needs to be stored and transported is the methanol and water feedstock. The hydrogen is then produced on-site. Element 1 provides both small and large-scale solutions, as well as a mobile version specifically for refuelling electric vehicles on the go.

During this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, Lucid Motors not only publicly debuted its Air Grand Touring Performance for the first time, but raced up the famed hill … quickly. Manned by professional driver Ben Collins, the Lucid Air Grand Touring recorded a time in the Goodwood Hillclimb Timed Shootout fast enough to claim the crown as fastest production car.

The Air is the first EV to debut under the Lucid marque, which began last fall with the Dream Edition model. In 2022, deliveries of the second model – the Air Grand Touring – began. According to Lucid Motors’ Q1 report for 2022, it had delivered 360 EVs, but it is unclear how many of them were Grand Tourings.

Even among supply chain constraints that have continued to plague the American automaker’s output goals for 2022, Lucid has maintained excitement around its Air sedan. In April, Lucid announced a new Performance version of the Air Grand Touring with 1,050 horsepower and 446 miles of range.

An Interview with COO Dijam Panigrahi.

“a unified and shared software infrastructure to empower enterprise customers to build and run scalable, high-quality eXtended Reality (XR) – Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) – applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds.”

What does that all mean?

Continue reading “GridRaster Uses the Metaverse to Build High Tech Prototypes and Finished Products” »

The fundamental rotation of micro and nano-objects is crucial for the functionality of micro and nanorobotics, as well as three-dimensional imaging and lab-on-a-chip systems. These optical rotation methods can function fuel-free and remotely, and are therefore better suited for experiments, while current methods require laser beams with designed intensity profiles or objects with sophisticated shapes. These requirements are challenging for simpler optical setups with light-driven rotation of a variety of objects, including biological cells.

In a new report now published in Science Advances, Hongru Ding and a research team in engineering and materials science at the University of Texas at Austin, U.S., developed a universal approach for the out-of-plane rotation of various objects based on an arbitrary low-power laser beam. The scientists positioned the laser source away from the objects to reduce optical damage from direct illumination and combined the rotation mechanism via optothermal coupling with rigorous experiments, coupled to multiscale simulations. The general applicability and biocompatibility of the universal light-driven rotation platform is instrumental for a range of engineering and scientific applications.

Hyundai is offering an early look at its upcoming all-electric sedan, the Ioniq 6. It comes as Bloomberg reports that the company’s EV market share is quietly surging in Europe and the US, causing even Tesla’s Elon Musk to take notice.

Hyundai has revealed an early look at its upcoming all-electric sedan, the Ioniq 6. It draws inspiration from the kind of streamlined car designs that were popular in the 20s and 30s with vehicles like the Stout Scarab.

Do you remember the days in schooling when we attended math classes? The most common question was when we would ever use trigonometric functions or other mumbo-jumbo in real life.

How is it possible for a virtual world to create the exact replica of a person in zeroes and ones? There is not just one technology aiding in creating the fascinating world of Metaverse and IoT is one amongst them.