Lifeboat Foundation

US-based Wright Electric has announced a 100-seat electric short-hop aircraft slated to go into service by 2026. It’ll either be powered by hydrogen, or it’ll use recyclable metal in what the company calls an “aluminum fuel cell.”

Wright is working on a number of large electric aircraft projects, including an even bigger 186-seater it’s developing in conjunction with European airline EasyJet and BAE Systems. This would be a “low-emissions” electric, presumably using a fossil-fueled range extender to top up its batteries and extend its flight range to around 1,290 km (800 miles). The partnership is pitching it as a “path” towards clean aviation, a kind of Prius of the skies, that will prove the electric powertrain while waiting for energy storage to come up to scratch.

Wright’s latest project, however, will be totally zero-emissions, and will use high-density energy storage to tackle flights up to an hour in duration – that’s enough for the ~1,000-km (620-mile) hop between Sydney and Melbourne, or London-Geneva, or Tokyo-Osaka, or LA-San Francisco.

Circa 2020

A newly recruited firefighter in Los Angeles put out a major fire even before being formally introduced at a news conference. That new recruit is a robot.

The Thermite RS3, the first robotic firefighting vehicle in the United States, was scheduled to arrive at the news conference the morning of October 13 but it was diverted to a major emergency structure fire in the fashion district in Downtown Los Angeles earlier that day.

Continue reading “The first firefighting robot in America is here —- and it has already helped fight a major fire in Los Angeles” »

Roboat is a research program on autonomous boats in Amsterdam. The program was scheduled to last from 2016–2021, is developing the world’s first fleet of autonomous vessels. It focuses on moving people and goods, portable infrastructure and data gathering.

source/image(PrtSc): MITCSAIL.

Share disposal comes as the billionaire chief executive exercises a large number of stock options.

Apple EV expected 2025.

It’s all but confirmed now: Apple is working on its very own electric vehicle, no matter what the company says, and the debut is expected to take place in 2025 at the earliest.

In the lead up to the 2019 election, Scott Morrison said Labor’s target of 50 per cent of all new vehicles being electric by 2030 would “end the weekend”. Now he’s backing them with the new $250 million “future fuels” fund.

Laser lidar startup Luminar, founded and led by the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by Forbes, will supply its sensors to Nvidia for a new autonomous vehicle technology platform that the chip and computing powerhouse is developing for automakers to install in consumer cars and trucks. The news pushed Luminar’s shares up more than 20%.

Nvidia aims to supply the DRIVE Hyperion system, powered by its Orin “systems on a chip” computing hardware, AI-enabled software and Luminar’s long-range Iris lidar, to automakers starting in 2,024 Luminar said at Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia’s annual GTC conference. The platform, which also integrates cameras and radar for additional sensing capability, includes everything needed for mass-production vehicles to operate autonomously in highway driving, Nvidia said earlier this year.

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Nvidia may be best known for graphics cards you can’t find in stores, but the company also makes some interesting software tools. An example of this is the noise removal feature known as RTX voice, which was upgraded to work with all GeForce cards earlier this year, and does an excellent job of cleaning up background noise.

Now Nvidia (Thanks, 80.lv) has been showing off a new tool in beta this year involving sound. Audio2Face is an impressive looking auto rigging process that runs within Nvidia’s open real-time simulation platform, Omniverse. It has the ability to take an audio file, and apply surprisingly well matching animations to the included Digital Mark 3D character model.

Beats road traffic any day.

As the world progresses towards electric vehicles and flying cars, a team of researchers from the Washington State University is working with ZEVA Aero, a Tacoma-based start up to test different components to create a single passenger, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

It’s interesting to note that ZEVA Aero has already completed a functional prototype of a very futuristic looking eVTOL vehicle which has been assigned to use by first responders and emergency services before the general public. The prototype is capable of flying at 160 mph for up to 50 miles (80km). When it takes off from the ground, it hovers just like a helicopter and then tilts horizontally to fly more efficiently like a plane. This enables it to take advantage of the reduced drag and travel at faster speed as compared to other eVTOL vehicles.