Vinothan Strange

BMW Personal Movers Zip Around Manufacturing Plants In order to get factory workers from area to another in its massive plants, BMW is introducing its own personal movers concept. Their facilities are often massive spaces, and employees spend way too much time getting from place to place. According to a recent survey, BMW learned that its employees needed a solution to navigate around the campus easier, so the a personal mobility device is a great solution. These fully electric movers are designed to carry just one user, and allow the worker to stay focused on their specific task. The personal movers can travel at 25 km/h (~15 mph) and have built-in baskets for the employee to carry small items. For now, the focus is on using these BMW personal movers in BMW plants, but they can see a future where they may be introduced in large public spaces. It’s a great idea that could save the company a lot of money by increasing the productivity of its workers. Plus, it’s just ...

This Drone Umbrella Follows You to Keep You Dry Imagine pulling into your driveway and getting out of your car while your umbrella is already hovering there to protect your from a downpour as as you get out. Imagine one hovering over you as you walk down the street. Soon enough, you may never need to hold an umbrella again. Drones teaming up with umbrellas. That’s the future I want. A Japanese company called Asahi Power Services is making it happen. It’s not just for rainy days either. Drone umbrellas can help you beat the heat on a sunny day too. While the prototype requires manual piloting, the Free Parasol will eventually use a camera and AI to register, track, and autonomously follow a user’s head to keep them covered. This is technology that’s  already in use  with autonomous drones, so the concept isn’t entirely new, but they have to work out the kinks before everyone is walking around with a drone umbrella. Right now, the prototypes have a flig...

Norman is The World’s First Psychopath AI: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes… Why? Why would anyone do this? Researchers at MIT have developed an artificial intelligence psychopath named  Norman . You know, named after the guy from Alfred Hitchcock’s  Psycho.  Don’t we have enough crazy people in the world? So now they have a psycho that does image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. They trained Norman using captions that are dedicated to the reality of death. Naturally, because we are talking crazy after all. Then, they compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network on Rorschach inkblots. This is a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders. Lovely. You can see some of the comparisons below. It’s a psycho alright. Where a standard AI sees a vase of flowers, Norman sees “A man is shot dead”. Where a standard AI sees birds sitting on a tree branch, Norman sees ...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Could Hit Speeds up to 430,000 mph NASA has been talking about how hard it is to get a probe or satellite to the Sun. Apparently, it would take 55 times more energy to get to the Sun than to Mars according to scientists. It’s so hard because the Sun has massive gravity and the Earth is moving mostly sideways in relation to our source of sunlight. You have to cancel some of Earth’s 67,000 mph sideways motion to reach the Sun, and that’s what NASA hopes to do with its Parker Solar Probe. In order to overcome this, the probe will zoom around Venus seven times during its 7-year mission. While the probe is shedding sideways speed, it will pick up overall speed which seems contradictory. NASA says that by the time the Parker Solar Probe makes its final orbits around the sun it will break the record for fastest ever manmade object. It will be traveling at 430,000 mph on its final orbits. As Ricky Bobby always says, “If you ain’t first, you’re las...

Dad Builds Working Mars Rover for His Son I know that plenty of parents would like to send their kids to Mars, and if you’re gonna do that, do it right. Build them a rover to ride around in. Hell, just build them one to ride around on Earth. That’s what cool dads do. And Kris Temmerman is a cool dad. I know this, because he built this awesome Mars rover for his son. The Rover steered via a wired controller by Kris as he walks close by, and has six articulated wheels, each with its own motor drive for tackling uneven terrain. To be honest it looks like a really fun off-road vehicle. I wouldn’t mind riding around in this thing if we could up the size, speed, and give it some Bigfoot ties and a killer paint job. You can check out videos of this thing in action, and the build process below: I bet this is what it looks like as the real deal is tooling around on Mars, except there’s a small alien riding it instead of a child; probably doing donuts and stuff, kicking up re...

This Robot Will Park Your Car For You Today we have cars that can park themselves, but that’s not good enough. What we need are robots to park our non-autonomous cars for us.  Stanley Robotics  car-parking robot is basically the mechanical equivalent of a valet parker. Simply drop your car off in a pickup garage, and Stan, the car-parking robot will do the rest. The robot will grab the vehicle by its wheels, lift it up, and tow it into an available airport parking space without any human assistance at all. This will allow drivers to quickly drop off their vehicle when they catch a flight. We are all in a hurry and stressed out about finding a parking spot in this situation, so in this case, it may be pretty cool to have some robot assistance. The car-parking robot will also deliver vehicles to the driver when they arrive back home. That way you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding it in the parking lot after a long flight. The robots can even accoun...

Cassie Humanoid Legs Robot Becomes an AT-ST Meet Chicken-Walker 2.0 everyone. This past Halloween, the weird looking  Cassie humanoid-legged robot  donned a Star Wars AT-ST costume made by members of its build team at Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Lab. So basically these engineers are Imperials, now creating the Empire’s latest toys. I can’t wait to see their Star Destroyers and Death Stars. They also added some CG blaster cannon effects to the video for more realism. Though it probably won’t be long until it can really do that on its own. I think it’s time to recruit an Ewok army so we can be ready to take it down. No one deals with the Empire like those little furry freaks. I hope someone invents a thermal detonator so I can use it on these wobbly monstrosities. At least they’re easy to trip. Stupid robot scientists. I’m surprised they didn’t give it some hands so it can hold a knife and a gun. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you peop...

This Octopod Clock Is the Best Possible Way to Tell Time Got $36,200 burning a hole in your pocket? Then have I got something for you!   What you’re looking at is a desk clock which looks like some kind of creepy robotic octopus, and it’s simply awesome. The meticulously crafted  Octopod  clock was made by MB&F and L’Epee 1839, and looks like the sort of robotic creature that a supervillain would turn loose on one of his victims. Sitting atop its eight spindly, articulated legs is a glass orb, which contains an intricate clock movement, and can rotate 360 degrees either horizontally or vertically. While part of me is sad that it doesn’t actually crawl around, I’m also happy that this thing can’t find its way up onto my bed in the middle of the night, and inject its toxins while I’m sleeping. Just 150 of the Octopod clocks are being made – 50 each with black, blue, or silver legs, and chances are there are enough fantastically-wealthy people o...

Googly-eyed Robots Are Coming to Grocery Stores Pay no attention to the robots that want to wipe out humanity and enslave any survivors. Instead be distracted by this silly looking googly-eyed robot. Isn’t he adorable? Giant Food Stores, a supermarket chain popular in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, will soon getting some silly looking robots in their stores. Within six months time, each of the 172 supermarkets will be working with these robots who are each called “Marty.” Giant’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize USA, based in the Netherlands, also owns Martin’s and Stop & Shop locations, hence the name. These stores will also be getting robots, so Marty is going to show up in 500 locations all told. My question is this: How long until someone paints one of these so that it looks like that hot dog from Sausage Party? Because that’s what it kinda looks like already. Each Marty will alert humans to problems spills or other trip hazards with vo...

Indian City to Get Robotic Traffic Cop This robot here looks like some kind of mask-wearing bandit, but he’s actually one of the good guys. If you can consider robots good guys that is. Apparently, this robot will soon be turned loose on the streets to help manage the chaotic traffic in the Indian city of Chennai. Chennai is going to be the first in the country to get a robotic traffic officer. Will it be the last? We will  see.He’s  going to relieve other officers who are already managing the insane amounts of pollution-spewing traffic on the narrow roads in the area. Is it a good idea to let a robot direct traffic? We are about to find out. I just hope that it doesn’t take the opportunity to make humans crash into each other for sport. Things could get very messy. The robot will regulate traffic on the roads, help school children cross and more. It’ll probably snap pics of people doing bad things too. The Chennai Commissioner of Police A K Viswanathan introduc...

Rifle-wielding Drones Are a Real Thing Russian arms manufacturer  Almaz-Ante  has a quirky looking flying machine that can actually fire rounds of ammo. The “experimental prototype combat drones violator” is a drone, a rifle, offering up its brand of death from above. The style of this drone looks like some kind of miniature WWII plane. Apparently, the rifle is an “autoloading smooth-bore” Carbine Vepr-12 Hummer, a Kalashnikov machine gun-based weapon. As if a flying rifle isn’t scary enough, its wings can be removed so it can be used as a handheld weapon. This changes the battlefield. Imagine running out of ammo in a firefight. No problem. Call in the drone to kill the enemy from the sky, or land it beside you so you can have a new rifle. It’s pretty scary to think that this thing even exists, but imagine thousands of them in the sky being used as a sneak attack on an unsuspecting target. After they make their initial strafing run they can arm a large ...

Parrot ANAFI Folding Drone Records 4K Stabilized Video Parrot has introduced a new drone that looks set to take on the DJI Mavic Air, and it looks pretty sweet. The  Parrot ANAFI drone  is made specifically to take high-quality photos and video from the air, while being portable enough to tote in a backpack. The ANAFI is a foldable drone designed specifically to make it easy to take with you and store.  It has an attached 4K HDR camera that can tilt on a 180-degree gimbal and has 2.8x lossless zoom. The camera also has three-axis image stabilization to eliminate any shake caused by wind or weather. Parrot designed the drone for quiet operation and to be resistant to weather conditions. An internal battery makes the drone good for flights of 25 minutes per charge. AI is embedded to allow the drone to fly in autonomous modes to capture pro-quality shots, like automatically framing or following a subject. The camera uses a 1/2.4″ 21 megapixel CMOS Son...

This Tiny Holographic Girlfriend Is Ready to Move in Gatebox’s  Azuma Hikari is a holographic digital assistant who doubles as a virtual girlfriend. She stands 8 inches tall and lives in a glass capsule, which you can put anywhere in your tiny dark apartment. In  this commercial  for the creepy Japanese gadget, this guy actually leaves work early because his holographic girlfriend texts him. He then cooks her a special dinner because it’s their three month anniversary of living together. So basically this guy is going through his usual pretend girlfriend routine only now he has a tiny hologram to keep him in his mom’s basement forever. This virginity keeper-intacter can text you and also act as a home automation control system, turning your lights on and off and more. I bet when you piss her off, she can turn evil, cut the lights, and make your smart gadgets kill you. Yep, you will be hers forever. Don’t work. Instead come home and cook me dinner t...