The Technology Flow

Article 1 : Scientists develop official guidance on robot ethics By  Ryan Whitwam  on September 20, 2016 It was decades ago when science fiction great Isaac Asimov imagined a world in which  robots  were commonplace. This was long before even the most rudimentary artificial intelligence existed, so Asimov created a basic framework for robot behavior called the  Three Laws of Robotics . These rules ensure that robots will serve humanity and not the other way around. Now the British Standards Institute (BSI) has issued its own version of the Three Laws. It’s much longer and not quite as snappy, though.  In Asimov’s version, the Three Laws are designed to ensure humans come before robots. Just for reference: In abbreviated form, Asimov’s laws require robots to preserve human life, obey orders given by humans, and protect their own existence. There are, of course, times when those rules clash. When that happens, the first law is always held in highest r...

Article n1: Self-driving Shopping Carts Could Greet You at Walmart By Carl Engelking | September 13, 2016                                               The Roomba-like device, seen under the cart, would slide into position and pull the cart. If it has wheels, there’s a good chance someone, somewhere is going figuring out how to make it roll on its own. Last week, for example, the United States government granted Walmart’s patent request  for a system of self-driving shopping carts. Forget yanking carts from a train of clanking metal, or wheeling the things back to their corrals after your car is loaded. The carts themselves won’t change; instead, a fleet of Roomba-like transport units would slide under carts and ferry them through the store. According to Walmart’s patent request, customers will be able to summon one of these cart-pull...

Article n°1: Elon Musk on Tesla’s Autopilot 8.0: “Superhuman” Tesla’s 8.0 update to its Autopilot software will be rolled out within a few weeks. Announced today, the update will offer better radar and better fleet learning. If in action last May, Elon stated, “we believe [the update] would have” saved the life of Josh Brown, driver of an Autopilot-engaged Model S during a fatal accident. Here’s how the update should impact the Tesla’s abilities. Expect Better Radar, Learning, Object Detection “We’re making much more effective use of radar,” Musk explained  on a press call about the updates, TechCrunch reports . “We weren’t confident that we could resolve false positives where the radar would think that it should brake, but it shouldn’t.” From  the official announcement on Tesla’s blog : “The most significant upgrade to Autopilot will be the use of more advanced signal processing to create a picture of the world using the ...

Article 1 :  VW's electric car will cost less than Tesla's The car, called the I.D., is expected to cost less than $30,000, which is less than both the Tesla Model 3 and the Chevrolet Bolt. It will have much longer range, and it could go up to about 375 miles on a single charge, the automaker said at a presentation ahead of the Paris Motor Show. The catch: It won't go on sale until 2020, and there's no telling how much competitors' electric cars will have improved by then. The Chevrolet Bolt, which goes on sale at the end of this year, has a starting price of $37,500, before U.S. government tax breaks, and a driving range of 238 miles. The Tesla Model 3 is expected to go on sale in late 2017 with a starting price of $35,000 and a driving range of 215 miles. But before comparing the I.D. to the Tesla and Bolt, it should be noted that there are different methods to calculate the range of an electric car. It's not clear what method VW used. ...

Article 1 : A robot can finally sew a t-shirt The garment industry has long resisted automation for one key reason: soft fabric is difficult for robots to handle. Whereas cars and computers are made of rigid metal and plastic, clothing is by its nature malleable. It requires a great level of precision to feed a piece of cloth into a sewing machine and create a straight seam. That's meant that humans still need to manually perform many of the steps in clothing production. Web developer and inventor Jonathan Zornow has found an ingenious way to get around robots' difficulty with cloth. He uses a water-soluble thermoplastic to coat the fabric, making it as stiff as cardboard and easy to handle for the robot. His robot, Sewbo, can grab this fabric and feed it through a regular sewing machine. When a piece of clothing is finished, it's merely immersed in hot water and the plastic coating melts off to reveal a complete garment. Robots already do a lot of wor...

Article n1: 3-D Printed ‘Hyperelastic Bone’ Could Be the Future of Mending a Break A new composite material that integrates seamlessly into living tissue could someday bind bones and tendons together following an injury. A synthetic mixture of ceramic dust and a polymer can be quickly 3-D printed in an endless variety of shapes and sizes, perfect for molding it to different body parts. Its sturdy yet porous structure allows living tissues to gradually infiltrate the graft and rebuild organic structures. It is also compressible when printed in the form of a grid, allowing surgeons to mold the shape of the material to better fit the graft site. A Better Bone The material, called “hyperelastic bone,” was created by researchers at Northwestern University as a better means of holding together or replacing broken bones. Previous materials used at graft sites were either toxic, difficult to work with or too dense for tissues to permeate them, fores...