Lifeboat Foundation

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed H₂O – Human2HumanOid – a reinforcement learning-based framework that allows a full-sized humanoid robot to be teleoperated by a human in real-time using only an RGB camera. Which begs the question: will manual labor soon be performed remotely?

A teleoperated humanoid robot allows for the performance of complex tasks that are – at least at this stage – too complex for a robot to perform independently. But achieving whole-body control of human-sized humanoids to replicate our movements in real-time is a challenging task. That’s where reinforcement learning (RL) comes in.

Continue reading “How blue-collar workers will train the humanoids that take their jobs” »

Sanctuary AI announced that it will be delivering its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility. Based in Canada, with auto manufacturing facilities in Austria, Magna manufactures and assembles cars for a number of Europe’s top automakers, including Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW. As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots will be deployed.

The news follows similar deals announced by Figure and Apptronik, which are piloting their own humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes, respectively. Agility also announced a deal with Ford at CES in January 2020, though that agreement found the American carmaker exploring the use of Digit units for last-mile deliveries. Agility has since put that functionality on the back burner, focusing on warehouse deployments through partners like Amazon.

For its part, Magna invested in Sanctuary AI back in 2021 — right around the time Elon Musk announced plans to build a humanoid robot to work in Tesla factories. The company would later dub the system “Optimus.” Vancouver-based Sanctuary unveiled its own system, Phoenix, back in May of last year. The system stands 5’7” (a pretty standard height for these machines) and weighs 155 pounds.

Tesla has been building Prefabricated Supercharger Units (PSUs) for at least a year at its Giga New York facility, and now the company released a video claiming it can deploy the pre-built EV fast chargers in just four days after getting them delivered to the installation site.

The company’s PSUs have up to four Supercharger stalls installed on a concrete base, with all the wiring in place and everything ready to be hooked up to the utilities. Up to three units–that’s 12 stalls in total–can be loaded onto the back of a truck with a crane and delivered to a new Supercharger location in the United States.

Artificial Intelligence is making its presence felt in thousands of different ways. It helps scientists make sense of vast troves of data; it helps detect financial fraud; it drives our cars; it feeds us music suggestions; its chatbots drive us crazy. And it’s only getting started.

Are we capable of understanding how quickly AI will continue to develop? And if the answer is no, does that constitute the Great Filter?

The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the ‘Great Filter.’

The first full-size prototype of Manta Ray, an advanced uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) produced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has been revealed in new photos.

The images were released on Monday by Northrup Grumman, one of two prime contractors DARPA selected in late 2021 to produce unique full-scale demonstration vehicles for the program.

Continue reading “Look: New Images Unveil DARPA’s ‘Manta Ray’ Extra-Large Glider for Non-Crewed Undersea Missions” »

If you want an electric car that begins charging the moment you plug it into a public fast charger, then you want one with Plug & Charge. Here are the EVs with this feature.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the automaker is planning to unveil its new ‘robotaxi’, a next-generation self-driving vehicle, on August 8th.

Tesla is bringing back its Full Self-Driving transfer program as an incentive to buy this quarter despite Elon Musk’s claim that it would be a “one-time offer.”

For years, Tesla owners who bought the up-to-$15,000 Full Self-Driving Capability package were asking for the capacity to transfer it when trading-in their vehicles for a new one.

The logic was sound: Tesla never delivered the self-driving capacity as promised. It only makes sense to allow owners to transfer the package to a new car for those who still believe that Tesla could eventually deliver through a software update.

While researchers have encountered major headwinds in turning the Hyperloop into a reality, the European Hyperloop Center is still hoping to open the first functional tube by the end of the decade.

The nonprofit foundation has opened a new quarter-mile test tube made out of white steel segments, running alongside a railroad track in the northern Netherlands. It even includes a lane switch that splits the tube into two, an early experiment that could eventually inspire a way to connect a network of tubes.

The concept, as dreamed up by Tesla CEO Elon Musk over a decade ago, involves ferrying passengers and cargo through low-pressure tubes at roughly twice the speed of high speed rail, greatly cutting down the time to travel between cities.