Robots That Teach Each Other

What if robots could figure out more things on their own and share that knowledge among themselves?

Many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in warehouses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognize and easily handle common objects. People generally have no trouble folding socks or picking up water glasses, because we’ve gone through “a big data collection process” called childhood, says Stefanie Tellex, a computer science professor at Brown University. For robots to do the same types of routine tasks, they also need access to reams of data on how to grasp and manipulate objects. Where does that data come from? Typically it has come from painstaking programming. But ideally, robots could get some information from each other.
That’s the theory behind Tellex’s  “Million Object Challenge.” The goal is for research robots around the world to learn how to spot and handle simple items from bowls to bananas, upload their data to the cloud, and allow other robots to analyze and use the information.Robots Teaching Robots
Breakthrough

Robots that learn tasks and send that knowledge to the cloud for other robots to pick up later.
Why It Matters

Progress in robotics could accelerate dramatically if each type of machine didn’t have to be programmed separately.

Key Players in Advanced Robotics

- Ashutosh Saxena, Brain of Things

- Stefanie Tellex, Brown University

- Pieter Abbeel, Ken Goldberg, and Sergey Levine, University of California, Berkeley

- Jan Peters, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Reusable Rockets!!

Rockets typically are destroyed on their maiden voyage. But now they can make an upright landing and be refueled for another trip, setting the stage for a new era in spaceflight.

Thousands of rockets have flown into space, but not until 2015 did one return like this: it came down upright on a landing pad, steadily firing to control its descent, almost as if a movie of its launch were being played backward. If this can be done regularly and rockets can be refueled over and over, spaceflight could become a hundred times cheaper.
Two tech billionaires made it happen. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin first pulled off a landing in November; Elon Musk’s SpaceX did it in December. The companies are quite different—Blue Origin hopes to propel tourists in capsules on four-minute space rides, while SpaceX already launches satellites and space station supply missions—but both need reusable rockets to improve the economics of spaceflight.

Virtual_Reality

The world has so many beautiful and amazing places to visit. If we're lucky, we're able to travel and see a few of them. But even the most active travelers can only see a fraction. What if we could see them all?Ten years ago, Google Earth began as an effort to help people everywhere explore our planet. And now, with more than two billion downloads, many have. Today, we are introducing Google Earth VR as our next step to help the world see the world. With Earth VR, you can fly over a city, stand at the top of the highest peaks, and even soar into space.Now, at 196.9 million square miles, we know the world is pretty big, so we’ve made it easy to find great places to visit. Earth VR comes with cinematic tours and hand-picked destinations that send you to the Amazon River, the Manhattan skyline, the Grand Canyon, the Swiss Alps, and more.

Junkyard Metal Turned into a DIY Super Battery

 "The battery companies won't like this,"

Pint, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, was talking about a high-performance, grid-scale battery he and his students made from metal scrap and common household chemicals, which they documented in a published article. Not only is the battery powerful and easy-to-build, it represents a new kind of approach to innovation because it bypasses industry and manufacturing altogether and goes directly to the people.          

"We can do the hard work, we can do the development and then instead of communicating it to industry, we can communicate it to the public," Pint said.These days, if you want to learn how to build a gizmo or repair a machine, you can search for instructions on Youtube. The proliferation of how-to videos along with the rise of the maker culture, where tinkerers and hackers merge to create new devices, has lead to innovations in just about every field. Except batteries. Pint and his students aim to change that.

They have plans to create an online video to show do-it-yourselfers how to build the battery and then solicit feedback to make improvements. Think of it as an open source approach to energy storage.

"The average person could work with us to develop this," Pint said.

The team got their inspiration from an ancient technology called the Baghdad Battery, which dates to the first century BC. It consisted of a terracotta pot, a copper sheet and an iron rod along with some trace chemicals that could have been an electrolyte.

Components for Pint's battery sound similar. It begins with a piece of steel, a piece of brass and a jar. The team soaked the metal pieces in a jar with a solution of water and salt or a solution of water and antifreeze. Next, they applied a voltage to induce a known process called anodization, which restructures the nanoscopic composition of a metal. That exposes the metal's interior surface and makes it more receptive to storing and releasing energy.

The next step was to place a physical barrier between the two pieces of metal. Lastly, they submerged it in an electrolyte solution made from water and potassium hydroxide, a soap easily purchased online. When connected by wires to a device that generated a current, such as a solar panel, their contraption worked just like a car battery.

See You soon Guys with New Tech Updates..

Your One and Only TECH DYNAMOS!!!

Hackers Turn Tesla Into a Brain-Controlled Car

"Oh it's turning. Brake! Alright, we're scared but we're good."

The Tesla Model S had only gone a few feet,rolling mostly straight from one empty spot in the parking garage to another. The driver wasn't actually behind the wheel, though. He sat in the passenger's seat, donning an EEG headset that allowed him to control the vehicle with his mind. Meet Teslapathic.

This feat is the brainchild of California-based technologists Casey Spencer, Lorenzo Caoile, Vivek Vinodh and Abenezer Mamo. Their team used Spencer's 2015 Tesla Model S 85D for the hack, and their project placed third at the Cal Hacks event for university students this month.

The team only had 36 hours to make Teslapathic happen for the hackathon. In their setup, an EEG headset translates the brain activity for "stop" or "go" into analog signals broadcast by an off-the-shelf RC radio and articulated actuators on the pedals and a motor on the steering wheel, according to the team's description.

A machine learning training program turned the brain activity into specific commands. For "go," Spencer thought about tapping his right foot, and for "stop," he thought about clenching his left hand. The analog signal for "go" caused a linear actuator affixed to the brake pedal to recede, and the actuator on the gas pedal to engage. For "stop," it was the opposite.

                              

Steering was slightly clunkier, and not brain-controlled. They installed a windshield wiper motor fitted with a potentiometer on the steering wheel. A head-mounted gyro for the driver provided some steering so when the Spencer turned his head right or left, the steering wheel responded.

For safety, the code included an emergency brake in case of failure, the user had to hold a dead-man's switch in order to broadcast a signal, and a block wedged behind the accelerator prevented the Tesla from going too fast. And, at worst, the passenger could kick the actuators away from the pedals.

Granted, once it went, the Tesla wasn't quite between the lines and probably would have dinged the neighboring sedan if Spencer didn't think hard enough about stopping. But those few feet represent an incredible surge into the future.

We Hope that You might liked this Post..
See You Soon Guys with NEW TECHNOLOGY UPDATES.
Your One and Only THE TECH DYNAMOS!!!

Pocket-Size Device Lets You Print from Anywhere

A new mobile robotic printer that is only a little bigger than three stacked hockey pucks will enable people to print anywhere and on any size page of paper.Smartphones, tablets and laptops make it easy for people to work on the go, but traditionally, printers have been cumbersome to lug out of the office.Zuta Labs, based in Jerusalem, reasoned that printers nowadays are essentially a printhead running back and forth on a moving piece of paper. The company's approach involves placing a printhead on a set of small wheels and letting it run across a sheet of paper, thus allowing printers to become smaller. detail_info:http://www.livescience.com/56882-pocket-size-mobile-printer.html