Grocers Get Robotic Help to Compete Against Amazon
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"What happens if grocery retailers can help you put a fresh dinner on the table faster than pizza delivery and cheaper than restaurant delivery?" That vision comes from CommonSense Robotics, an Israeli startup with plans to open its first AI-run fulfillment centers staffed by both robots and human workers in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom before the end of 2018. Such a service could help local grocery stores survive the coming onslaught from Amazon’s aggressive expansion i
Always Connected Windows 10 PCs that use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 ARM processors will work on all four major US networks, the chip company has announced today, with T-Mobile and AT&T joining the previously announced Sprint and Verizon.
In total, 14 different network operators across 10 countries have pledged to support the new generation of ARM-powered Windows 10 laptops and tablets. Qualcomm adds that some of those network operators will also be selling the systems, though it has not specified which will be doing so.
Initially, three systems will be available. HP’s Envy x2 is a tablet with detachable keyboard, as is Lenovo’s Miix 630. Asus’ NovaGo, in contrast, is a clamshell laptop with a 360-degree hinge to enable tablet-like operation.
Qualcomm has also listed a number of retail outlets that will carry the hardware. In the US, systems will be available from Amazon and Microsoft Stores. Surprisingly, Best Buy—arguably the most important brick-and-mortar computer retailer in the US—isn’t included in Qualcomm’s list. If this absence is accurate, then it represents a major gap in the retail visibility and availability of the new range of systems.
Qualcomm also says that retail availability will begin “this calendar quarter,” meaning that Windows 10 on ARM will be hitting shelves, or at least the webpages of online vendors, sooner rather than later.
The Cadillac CT6 review: Super Cruise is a game-changer
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Jonathan Gitlin
Cadillac’s flagship CT6 might not have the best interior in its class. It might not have the sharpest, track-honed handling. It doesn’t have a butter-smooth V12 engine. It definitely doesn’t have the best infotainment system. And yet, it is carrying the most exciting technology being offered in any production vehicle on sale in 2018.
Called Super Cruise, Cadillac’s new tech represents the best semi-autonomous system on the market. In fact, Super Cruise is so good, I think General Motors needs to do everything it can to add it to the company’s entire model range, post-haste.
You sure sound excited about this thing
Regular readers will know this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Super Cruise. In fact, at last year’s New York auto show, we awarded it an Ars Best distinction in the "Automotive Technology" field—a bold move for new technology that we had yet to actually test.
But with almost 900 miles of Super Cruising under my belt now, I am glad to report that boldness paid off. This system really is that good. As long as its operational conditions are satisfied, Super Cruise will enable the CT6 to accelerate, brake, and steer without any need for you to touch the pedals or steering wheel. This can happen for hours at a time.
At its essence, Super Cruise is another one of those systems that combines adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Forward-looking sensors measure the speed and range of any cars ahead of you to maintain a constant distance and also read the lane markers on either side to keep you centered within it. So far, so much the same as any number of systems from any number of OEMs. But Super Cruise adds a couple of other features that are missing in every other implementation—even in Tesla’s much-loved, somewhat-infamous Autopilot. What’s more, Super Cruise’s unique features will be critical for true self-driving cars in the future.
First up is the driver monitoring system (Cadillac calls it a Driver Attention System). This isn’t entirely unheard of; various car makers have been putting crude monitoring into vehicles to warn drivers when they might be getting too drowsy. The CT6’s DMS lives just on top of the steering wheel column, pointed at your face. Don’t worry! It’s not doing anything creepy like detecting your emotional state. (Do worry! Those kinds of systems are only a few years from showing up in our cars.)
Rather, the CT6 uses gaze tracking to know what you’re looking at. Here we encounter the first of the required conditions for Super Cruise to operate: you must be paying attention to the road ahead. Stop doing that for too long and a series of ever-more attention-grabbing alerts will follow. Keep ignoring those, and the system will disengage. Eventually, it will slow to a stop if there continues to be no driver input.
Ambient light isn’t an issue, because the steering wheel rim contains a number of infrared LEDs to illuminate you even in the dead of night, and DMS had no problems "seeing" my eyes even when I was wearing polarized sunglasses. If the DMS can’t see you because its line of sight is blocked by an object, it reacts the same way as it would if it could see you but you weren’t paying attention.
The second big difference between Super Cruise and everyone else is that it is geofenced. Regular old adaptive cruise control can be engaged anywhere. And lane keeping assists that autosteer for you only care that their optical sensors can read the lane markings. But Super Cruise is a bit pickier. It will only activate if you’re driving on a divided, limited access highway. More than that, it also has to be a highway that GM has lidar-scanned and added to its HD map, something the company has done for more than 160,000 miles (257,500km) of highways in the US and Canada thus far.
If both those conditions are satisfied—driver paying attention; car driving on a mapped, limited-access highway—you’re good to go.
The view from the driver’s seat. The cruise control and Super Cruise buttons are on the left spoke of the steering wheel. That black strip up top is an LED.
Cadillac
The little black nubbin you see on top of the steering column is the driver monitoring system. It’s a camera that does gaze tracking to make sure you are paying attention to the road ahead. Stop looking at the road while Super Cruise is active and it will disengage.
Cadillac
To the right of the speedometer you’ll see the Super Cruise icon (the little steering wheel) in white. That means the system can be engaged.
Cadillac
The Super Cruise button is in the middle row, second from the right.
Cadillac
Now that icon is green, which means it’s active.
Cadillac
You’ll also have noticed that there’s now a bright green strip on the steering wheel. This also means Super Cruise is active.
Cadillac
If Super Cruise is going to disengage, the LED turns red. There’s also an alert dialog on the main instrument display.
Cadillac
If you temporarily take control of the steering—to change lanes for example—the LED and icon turn blue to indicate you have control.
Cadillac
Super Cruising.
Cadillac
These are the highways in the US and Canada that GM has lidar-mapped and that, therefore, will allow you to use Super Cruise.
Engage!
Before you can engage Super Cruise, you need to be already using cruise control (on non-mapped roads this works just the same as every other adaptive cruise system). Once you see a white Super Cruise icon on the instrument display, you can turn it on via a dedicated button on the multifunction steering wheel. At this point, the magic happens. The icon on the dash turns green, but more importantly so does a big, bright LED strip set into the top portion of your steering wheel. And now, you can go hands- and feet-free. As long as that light strip is green, Super Cruise is happy.
Take your eyes off the road for too long—about five seconds by my reckoning—and the warnings begin. The first of these starts the steering wheel light bar flashing. It remains green, but it wants your attention back on the road ahead.
Keep ignoring it and the alerts become more urgent. The light bar now flashes bright red, and there will either be audio warnings or the seat will start to vibrate angrily. (The choice of audio or haptic alerts is user-configurable.) Should you continue to ignore all of those warnings and keep your focus somewhere other than the straight ahead, Super Cruise disengages.
The system will also use the red light bar and vibrations to alert you about an imminent disengagement, handing back control to the human. Unlike the "Level 3" driverless systems we’ve seen, Super Cruise doesn’t give you 30 seconds to take back control, but then again it has been designed not to have to solve that problem. As long as it’s active, Super Cruise knows you’re paying attention to the road, so there shouldn’t be any surprises.
When running, Super Cruise is an extremely good driver. It does not veer from one side of the lane to the other, and if the speed is set too high for an upcoming curve it will slow you down before you reach it. If you need to change lanes or adjust your trajectory in any other way via the steering wheel, the green LED will change to blue, and you have full control of the steering.
To return back to Super Cruising, simply let go of the wheel, and the LED turns green again. Like all cruise controls, dumb or otherwise, using the brake pedal will disengage it all. But if you need (or want) an extra burst of speed, using the accelerator will not interrupt it, it will merely make you go faster. Take note, this only works up to 90mph: exceeding such speeds will also cause the system to disengage.
Critics repeatedly point to "mode confusion" as a reason we shouldn’t pursue anything other than completely self-driving vehicles, pointing out that crashes happen when a driver thinks the car is in control, but the car expects the driver to be actively driving. And they’re not wrong. I experienced this while testing a Volvo XC60 recently on at least two occasions when I thought its Pilot Assist system was running when in fact it was not. I don’t think that would ever be a problem with Super Cruise, which is even less ambiguous about which mode you’re in than Nissan’s ProPilot Assist.
Again, this is a limited system that doesn’t work everywhere. During my testing (mainly on the highways between DC and Charlotte, North Carolina), I found it would disengage at highway junctions and also (but not always) when road construction meant the highway was narrowed and off its usual course. If I had one complaint, it would be that Super Cruise places the car slightly closer to the right-hand lane boundary than I’d prefer. But beyond that tiny quibble, I was deeply impressed with its ability to get me home from Charlotte safely after a long day of meetings and demos (with NASCAR, something you can read about in the next few weeks).
SpaceX has a sooty booster on the pad in California, ready for a launch.
9:30am ET update: The launch of the PAZ satellite Thursday morning was nominal, as the Falcon 9 rocket took off under clear, dark skies along the California coast. Two Starlink broadband demonstration satellites were expected to deploy shortly, as well. However, the webcast ended without providing any information about the success (or lack thereof) of an experimental attempt to “catch” the payload fairings. We hope to find out more information soon.
Original post: SpaceX had to scrub the Wednesday launch attempt of its Falcon 9 rocket due to upper-level winds, but will try again Thursday morning. The instantaneous launch window opens (and closes) again at 9:17am ET. This launch will occur from at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in Southern California.
There is heightened interest in this launch because, for the first time, SpaceX will attempt to “catch” one of the two payload fairings that enclose the satellite at the top of the rocket. The value of these fairings is about $6 million, and recovering and reusing them would both save SpaceX money and remove another roadblock on their production line for Falcon 9 rockets. These fairings will separate from the rocket at about three minutes after launch and are “steerable” in the sense that SpaceX hopes to guide them back to a target location the ocean.
“Going to try to catch the giant fairing (nosecone) of Falcon 9 as it falls back from space at about eight times the speed of sound,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Instagram Thursday morning. “It has onboard thrusters and a guidance system to bring it through the atmosphere intact, then releases a parafoil and our ship with basically a giant catcher’s mitt welded on tries to catch it.”
The primary mission on Wednesday is the launch of the PAZ satellite to low-Earth orbit. This is a synthetic-aperture radar satellite that can generate high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface, regardless of whether there are clouds covering the ground. The customer is Hisdesat, a Spain-based commercial satellite company.
The Falcon 9 rocket will also carry a second payload of note: two experimental non-geostationary orbit satellites, Microsat-2a and -2b. Those are two satellites that SpaceX has previously said would be used in its first phase of broadband testing as part of an ambitious plan to eventually deliver global satellite Internet. Further satellites will be launched in phases, with SpaceX intending to reach full capacity with more than 4,000 satellites by 2024.
The webcast below, presuming upper-level winds are better Thursday morning, will open about 15 minutes before the launch.
Door-Opening Robot Dog Gets Abused by Boston Dynamics Lackey
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From Boston Dynamics:
A test of SpotMini’s ability to adjust to disturbances as it opens and walks through a door. A person (not shown) drives the robot up to the door, points the hand at the door handle, then gives the ‘GO’ command, both at the beginning of the video and again at 42 seconds. The robot proceeds autonomously from these points on, without help from a person. A camera in the hand finds the door handle, cameras on the body determine if the door is open or closed and navigate through the doorway. Software provides locomotion, balance and adjusts behavior when progress gets off track. The ability to tolerate and respond automatically to disturbances like these improves successful operation of the robot. (Note: This testing does not irritate or harm the robot.)
The Time Studio Ghibli Stood Up To Harvey Weinstein With A Samurai Sword
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Among the many things for which former Hollywood mogul and alleged predator Harvey Weinstein was notorious were re-editing movies as he saw fit, earning the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands.” But when Weinstein was handling Princess Mononoke’s US release, Studio Ghibli wouldn’t be bullied and sent Weinstein a samurai sword with the words “No cuts” to prove it.
Back in a 2005 interview recently reposted by Metro, SoraNews and Kobini, Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki told The Guardian about the experience. At that time, Disney had the rights to Princess Mononoke in the United States, and Harvey Weinstein, who then headed up Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, was overseeing its release.
According to The Guardian, the rumor was that Miyazaki sent Weinstein a samurai sword with “No cuts” on the blade.
“Actually, my producer did that,” Miyazaki clarified, seeming to refer to longtime producer Toshio Suzuki. “Although I did go to New York to meet this man, this Harvey Weinstein, and I was bombarded with this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts.”
“I defeated him,” Miyazaki said at the time, smiling.
Trump signals he’s open to mileage tax to pay for infrastructure fixes
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WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday praised an experimental program in Oregon that charges a mileage tax to volunteer drivers, adding to signals that President Donald Trump is open to finding new revenue sources to pay for his proposed infrastructure program.
Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans, however, dislike the idea of a transportation tax as it would go against the party’s push to lower taxes and could hit Republican-leaning rural areas harder than cities.
In the annual Economic Report of the President, the White House described Oregon — a Democratic-leaning state where environmental issues are a priority for many voters — as a “pioneer” in transportation funding and highlighted its funding initiative, which began in 2015.
Volunteers are charged a fee of 1.7 cents for each mile driven on state roads — at that rate, someone who drove 10,000 miles in a year would pay $170. In return, however, drivers get rebates for state fuel taxes. As of the end of 2016, only about 700 people were participating in the pilot program, which is intended to gather data and generate consumer feedback.
“The program offers tangible evidence that a tax on vehicle miles traveled is a promising alternative to relying on fuel taxes,” the report said.
Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, described Oregon’s mileage tax as “innovative” in a conference call with reporters and made clear the Trump administration was open to looking at ways to raise revenue for infrastructure projects.
Trump last week called for using $200 billion in new federal spending over 10 years in an effort to stimulate $1.5 trillion in infrastructure spending. It would largely see states shoulder most costs and rely on unspecified spending cuts to pay for repairs.
The federal tax of 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline has not been hiked since 1993. The federal tax on diesel fuel is 24.4 cents a gallon. The money raised from those taxes is used to pay for infrastructure repairs but has failed to keep up with costs as cars became more fuel-efficient.
Hassett said the administration was still looking at the “pluses and minuses” of different ways to pay for infrastructure.
“There’s a lot of discussion that will continue to evolve, I’m sure, as the infrastructure legislation moves forward, about how should we pay for this stuff,” Hassett said.
In a private meeting with lawmakers last week to discuss infrastructure, Trump expressed support for hiking the federal gasoline tax by 25 cents a gallon, according to Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who attended the meeting.
The report also boosted the idea of driverless cars, estimating autonomous cars “could add more than $200 billion to GDP, 2.4 million jobs and $90 billion in wages to the U.S. labor force” once they account for half of U.S. vehicles.
