Neato’s voice-activated Botvac arrives in the US for $800
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Neato first unveiled the Botvac D7 Connected vacuum over six months ago and it has finally arrived in the US and Europe. The company’s flagship robotic vacuum packs a lot of tech, including Amazon Alexa and Google Home voice control, a floor planner that lets you set no-go zones (pet and children’s areas, for instance), and the LaserSmart system that can guide it in the dark. It supports IFTTT, Android Wear and Apple Watch, and using the iOS and Android Neato app, you can check coverage maps to see where it has cleaned.
Speaking of, Neato promises the "deepest clean you can get" with the Botvac D7 Connected, thanks to the "robust suction," a turbo mode and new brush system. It also looks the part of a flagship robot vac with a new metallic finish that’s resistant to dings and scratches. The Botvac D7 Connected is now available in the US for $800, or £799 and €899 in the UK and Europe, respectively. That’s $100 less than iRobot’s flagship Roomba 980, which has similar features, by the way.
A burger-flipping robot is on a break from work after it appeared to be too slow to meet demand. But ‘Flippy’ might not be to blame.
The robot, made by Miso Robotics, was set to work at a Cali Burger restaurant in Pasadena. It uses image recognition to keep track of the burgers on a grill and heat sensors to determine when each needs flipping. (And it also uses ‘being a robot’ to avoid going crazy through tedium.)
Cali Burger says it plans to put the robots into 50 restaurants, sparking debate over automation of jobs. It’s not necessarily a case of the robot being any better than the human at burger flipping. Instead the chain says the high turnover of employees in this specific role makes the cost of recruiting and training staff a problem.
Flippy ‘worked’ for only two days before being withdrawn from service, something the restaurant is blaming on an unusual (if inevitable) spike in business caused by the media coverage. It appears Flippy is able to cope with the workload as it can handle 2,000 burgers a day.
However, the restaurant doesn’t have enough staff to keep up with the steps in the production process immediately before and after grilling the burgers (namely preparing the patties and adding lettuce to the grilled burger) and then synchronize with Flippy.
Another problem to be solved is that human staff can talk to one another and adjust their operating speed to avoid logjams. With Flippy, everyone else has to work around the robot’s schedule.
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Researchers turned wood into a better insulator than Styrofoam
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The research lab behind the creation of see-through wood has developed a new type of material that could be used as a cheaper, stronger and more environmentally friendly insulator. They’re calling it nanowood and it insulates better than Styrofoam and silica aerogels. "This can insulate better than most other current thermal insulators, including Styrofoam," Tian Li, a researcher on the project, said in a statement. "It is extremely promising to be used as energy efficient building materials."
To make the material, the researchers took wood and stripped away two of its natural components — lignin, which makes it brown and rigid, and hemicellulose. That turned the wood white and made it less able to conduct heat. The tubed structures within a tree that transport water and nutrients up the trunk run in one direction, and heat can conduct along those channels. But heat doesn’t conduct across those channels very well and because stripping away the lignin and hemicellulose leaves a lot of gaps in the wood, wood treated to become nanowood conducts heat in that direction even less.
Along with insulating more effectively than currently used materials like Styrofoam, nanowood is also stronger, and it won’t cause the same lung irritations that fibers from glass wool insulators do. The research team also says that it could be fabricated for as low as $7.44 per square meter, can be folded and rolled when less than one millimeter thick and is biodegradable, so it won’t add to landfill waste like the insulating materials we often use now do.
"My research program experiments with nature’s nanotechnology that we see in wood," project head Liangbing Hu, an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "We are reinventing ways to use wood that could be useful in constructing energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes." The work was recently published in Science Advances.
Walmart’s bot brigade is about to hit the 2,000-mile mark
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Walmart’s bot brigade is about to hit the 2,000 mile mark
Walmart’s shelf-scanning robots have been on the move. In the four months since the company announced it was deploying shelf-scanning robots in 50 of its stores, the automated (and vaguely llama-looking) machines have traveled nearly 2,000 miles through store aisles.
Keeping busy: Vice president of innovation at Walmart John Crecelius says the robots have been scanning the food and consumables sections of the stores three times a day. They search for out of stock items, incorrect prices, and other things that need an associate’s attention. In total, the robots have scanned about 78 million items.
By the numbers: Back of the envelope math suggests that the robots scan about 13,000 per robot per day.
In the field: Walmart has deployed their bots in stores in a variety of geographies with varying traffic and characteristics. “In these first 50 stores our focus has largely been getting [the robot] to be a product that makes a meaningful difference,” says Crecelius. The company plans to continue to collect data before considering an expansion of the program.
The reaction: Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of the robots’ manufacturer, Bossa Nova, says customer reaction has been mixed. While some shoppers are intrigued by the robots, at least 50 percent completely ignore them.
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Texas city drops its bus service in favor of ridesharing vans
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Ridesharing companies often dream of changing the face of public transportation, but one of them is going a step further — it’s becoming the only option for public transportation in one community. Arlington, Texas is replacing its bus service with Via’s ridesharing platform. Pay $3 per trip ($10 for a weekly pass) and you can hop in a Mercedes van that will take you where you need to go, whether your hail it through a smartphone app or a phone call.
Service will initially focus on Arlington’s downtown core and key areas like the entertainment districts, hospital and a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, but it should cover a "large portion" of the city between I-30 and I-20 as of the summer. The vans operate from 7AM to 9PM on weekdays, and 9AM to 9PM on Saturdays.
The low fares are possible thanks to subsidies from the city, which is providing about a third of the overall project’s cost (about $322,500). The Federal Transit Administration is supplying the rest. Whether or not it lasts for a while depends on the initial experience. The city’s initial contract runs for just one year, and it’ll use data gathered from Via’s service to influence its decisions.
A transition to ridesharing is possible in part because Arlington’s existing mass transit options weren’t that great. As The Vergepointed out, the city had been relying on charter buses for 4 years. It would be much harder to rely on ridesharing in cities with well-established mass transit systems, especially in larger cities where you’d need a massive fleet and around-the-clock service to provide adequate coverage. And this isn’t necessarily the first such experiment, as Altamonte Springs, Florida replaced its public transportation with subsidized Uber rides.
This is arguably one of the larger experiments of its kind, however, and it hints at the potential future of ridesharing: it could become the go-to option for public transportation in cities that can’t afford or justify extensive bus or subway routes. It could be particularly important if and when self-driving ridesharing cars hit the mainstream, as ridesharing cars could operate at all hours and take on routes that might be impractical for human drivers.
From Power Rangers to Pacific Rim, we’ve always had the same dream: controlling a badass robot and saving the world. Now’s the time.
The X Prize Foundation (stylized as “XPRIZE”) is a nonprofit helmed by Peter Diamandis that funds technological grand challenges. Since the inaugural 1996 competition, challenge themes have included adult literacy, AI, women’s safety, and suborbital spaceflight. Co-sponsored by All Nippon Airways, the newly announced four-year challenge is a $8 million prize for creating human-controlled robot avatars “that will enable us to remotely see, hear, touch and interact with physical environments and other people.”
Diamandis says the time has come for technology to allow people to help each other across long distances. According to the current draft of the competition guidelines, avatars should be able to pick up objects as small as a playing card or as heavy as debris and work perfectly controlled by an operator 100 kilometers (or about 62 miles) away for participants to win the prize.
“Our ability to physically experience another geographic location, or to provide on-the-ground assistance where needed, is limited by cost and the simple availability of time,” said Diamandis in a press release. “The ANA Avatar XPRIZE can enable creation of an audacious alternative that could bypass these limitations allowing us to more rapidly and efficiently distribute skill and hands-on expertise to distant geographic locations where they are needed, bridging the gap between distance, time and cultures.”
A few of the ideas floated by X Prize are incredible. Strap into a suit and help your elderly parents with yard work or taking a dog for a walk. Alternatively, pitch in with disaster relief thousands of miles away.
Under the current guidelines, submitted bots will be judged based on the five senses. Operators should have full range of vision and depth perception when controlling the avatars. Their voices should be clearly audible to people interacting with the avatars and the operators should be able to hear ambient noises. Applications are also judged based on set up time and how long the robots can operate without a charge. One of the most interesting judging criteria is “touch.” Operators should be able to lift and carry heavy objects distances up to 3 kilometers (or about 1.8 miles), recognize the temperature of the objects they touch, and sensors should tell them where on the avatars they’re being touched.
There are smaller $1 million milestone prizes in April 2020 and April 2021 (winning or losing the smaller prizes doesn’t disqualify teams from the big one), with the $8 million grand prize awarded in October 2021. Register to compete here.
White House Starts Process to Classify Bump Stocks as Machine Guns
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President Donald Trump’s administration said on Saturday it’s taken the first official steps to ban bump stocks, accessories that enable semi-automatic rifles to fire at rates approaching fully automatic ones, the Associated Press reported.
According to the AP report, the new regulations proposed by the Justice Department would classify the hardware as a machine gun, which are mostly banned under federal law—though the DOJ’s authority to do so unilaterally is unclear enough that the whole effort could fall apart:
That would reverse a 2010 decision by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress amended existing firearms law or passed a new one.
A reversal of the department’s earlier evaluation could be seen as an admission that it was legally flawed, which manufacturers could seize on in court. Even as the Trump administration moves toward banning the devices, some ATF officials believe it lacks the authority to do so.
Semi-automatic weapons fire every time the user pulls the trigger without any need to manually chamber rounds between shots. Bump stocks function by using the recoil of a firearm to push the trigger forward against the user’s finger between shots, allowing faster fire.
As the Washington Post noted, there’s a lengthy process by which the DOJ would need to go about actually passing the ban, including a commenting period during which the White House will likely face the usual caterwauling about how gun laws are basically fascism. (Trump has done himself few favors on this front by muddling his own talking points.) Manufacturers are also sure to contest the ban in court—their revenue streams are increasingly dependent on selling not just guns, but elaborate firearms accessories that allow users to customize them. While the ATF has managed to take some accessories like the full-auto firing “AutoGlove”off the market, bump stocks are big business and likely to inspire more legal resistance.
Bump stocks were used in the worst mass shooting in US history, the 2017 Las Vegas massacre which resulted in 59 deaths and 422 injuries. But even assuming the White House plans on following through with the ban rather than just dangling it out there as a distraction from its unwillingness to propose any other new gun restrictions, the Atlantic reported, experts say it’s a marginal measure that would probably end up having little impact on mass shootings.
