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Blue River Technology a startup founded in 2011 by two Stanford University Alumni has announced $3.1 million in funding from angel investors led by Khosla Ventures.
The company is developing an alternative to chemical-intensive agriculture, which is both expensive and hazardous to the environment. With advanced computer vision techniques for identifying weeds and selectively killing unwanted plants, Blue River Technology's equipment is much faster and more efficient than traditional methods of weed killing. Known as "Lettuce-bot", this machine is particularly well-suited to organic agriculture and fields with chemical-resistant weeds.
During tests, this automated system gathered over a million images as it moved through the fields. Its Computer Vision System was able to detect and segment individual plants even those that were touching each other with 98% accuracy.
"We intend to invest the proceeds of this round in growing our engineering team and accelerating our new product roadmap," said Jorge Heraud, co-founder and CEO of Blue River Technology. "Our culture fosters extreme innovation aimed at real-world problems. We are looking for passionate engineers to advance the boundaries of computer vision, machine learning and robotics and help us reinvent food production. "
"With global population expected to increase to 9.5 billion by 2050, increasing food production in a sustainable way is going to be one of the great challenges of this century," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. "Blue River Technology's solution will not only be more cost effective than current solutions, but has the potential to reduce U.S. herbicide use by over 250 million pounds a year."
Currently, the machine only works on Iceberg and Romaine lettuce, as the database of images was generated for those plants only. However, it is hoped that more varieties will be possible soon. A number of other companies are developing robots for agriculture and these machines are expected to become fairly commonplace by 2016.
Further into the future, robots working in fields could do more than just eliminate weeds. They could also monitor insects, identify pests, measure the soil pH and nitrogen levels, and check the water content, keeping fields in near-perfect condition.
Back in June, I wrote a post suggesting that fast food automation could potentially have a dramatic impact on low-wage jobs:
Fast Food Robotics – An Update « econfuture | Future Economics and Technology
Millions of people hold low-wage, often part-time jobs in the fast food industry. Historically, low wages, few benefits and a high turnover rate have helped to make fast food openings relatively abundant. These jobs, together with other low-skill positions in retail, provide a kind of safety net for workers with few other options.
In the current economic environment, these jobs are, of course, much harder to get. McDonald’s recent high-profile initiative to hire 50,000 new workers resulted in over a million applications — numbers that give McDonald’s a lower acceptance rate than Harvard.
What about the future? Most forecasts assume that the fast food industry will continue to be a significant job creator. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks food preparation as one of the top four fastest-growing occupations, and that trend is expected to continue at least through 2018. Is it possible that these projections miss the impact of technology? Could these jobs begin to disappear?
…
Increased automation in fast food and beverage providers is likely to someday offer increased convenience, speed, and ordering accuracy. Robotic food preparation could also be viewed as more hygienic as fewer workers come into contact with food. And of course, price will ultimately be the determining factor … If jobs in the fast food industry start to disappear, or even if the rate of job growth slows significantly, the implications for the workers that depend on these jobs of last resort will be dire. There may be few other alternatives for workers at that skill level, especially since other low-wage retail jobs may be similarly threatened.
(The full post is here)
Momentum Machines is a new San Francisco-based start-up that is planning to automate the burger production process. The company’s website claims its robot will save the average restaurant $135K/year in wages and overhead and that the machine will pay for itself in one year.
One news story notes that the company
… has developed a robot designed to take the place of humans in burger restaurants. Its creators believe their patty-flipping Alpha robot could save the fast-food industry in the United States about US$9 billion (Dh33.05bn) a year. Designed to entirely replace two to three full-time kitchen staff, it can grill a beef patty, layer it with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and onions, put it in a bun, and wrap it up to go – no less than 360 times an hour. Momentum believes kitchen robots are not only more cost-effective than human staff, they are also more hygienic.
Momentum Machines is a tiny company that has just emerged from start-up incubator Lemos Labs. However, I think it is very likely that we’ll see soon see a lot more interest in this area from both start-ups and larger companies. If one of the major fast food chains gains a competitive advantage with technology like this, the entire industry will have to follow suit — and it could happen quite rapidly.
Update
Here’s another good article at Xconomy (thanks to commentor “wjtgpf”. Includes a great quote from a company co-founder:
“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”
Alexandros might want to take some lessons in how to spin things from Jeff Burnstein of the Robotic Industries Association…
Smartphones to steer unmanned rotorcraft on the battlefieldThe Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded contracts to Lockheed Martin and Aurora Flight Sciences on Sept. 28 to develop robotic rotorcraft capable of supporting rapid autonomous aerial cargo delivery to the battlefield.
The system would support Navy and Marine Corps units under hostile conditions and could be operated by any warfighter on the ground with a smartphone-like device.
"AACUS responds to warfighter needs derived from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Mike Deitchman, who heads ONR's Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department. "We are trying to develop an autonomous system to deliver supplies to the battlefront more quicklyand to get our vehicle convoys off dangerous roads, where they're much more vulnerable to attack."
Events worldwide remind us of the fact that modern-day fire-fighting has taken on added complexities such as explosions, chemical leaks, and nuclear accidents. In fact it was after Fukushima that two brothers in Waterboro, Maine, resolved to start making their fire-battling robots. The two had been working with the military and they realized how applicable their machines might be to help out in natural disasters. "We could have helped out in Fukushima," they said, and they resolved to come up with robots that can reduce the exposure of human firefighters to out-of-control fires.
Their company, Howe and Howe Technologies, offers a set of robots, in modular fashion, that are designed to clear paths, pull debris and bodies out of the way, and spray water, and the robots can be transported on an all-terrain customized truck. The Howe and Howe portfolio of robots includes the "Guardian" that uses its robotic arm to move debris out of the way of the disaster scene, the "Terra Maxa," to clear the way with a plough, and the "Thermite" which uses a multidirectional nozzle that can spray 600 gallons of water every minute.
Two unmanned drones were able to fly close enough together for an automated refuel to take place, in tests carried out by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
The two planes flew closely at an altitude of 48,000ft (14,630m) for "the majority" of a 2.5 hour flight, the US agency said.
The fuel probe could only be 100ft (30m) at most from the fuel receiver.
During earlier tests this had only been possible with a pilot on board.
"The goal of this demonstration was to create the expectation that future Hale [High Altitude Long Endurance] aircraft will be refuelled in flight," said Jim McCormick, from Darpa.
"Such designs should be more affordable to own and operate across a range of mission profiles than systems built to satisfy the most stressing case without refuelling."
The drones used in the experimental flights were modified RQ-4 Global Hawk planes, which are generally used for surveillance.
The result is the culmination of a two-year research project called the Autonomous High Altitude Refuelling (AHR) programme.
The team said the conclusion of the project was better than expected.
"Since Hale aircraft are designed for endurance at the expense of control authority, the programme started with the expectation that only one of six attempts would achieve positive contact (17%). The final analysis, however, indicated that 60% of the attempts would achieve contact," said a statement on the Darpa website.
"The lessons from AHR certainly extend beyond the Hale flight regime, and insights into non-traditional tanker concepts may offer further operational advantages," said Mr McCormick.
Lasers are the future. Of everything. From food to medicine to rainbows, lasers can do it all. As every science fiction movie ever will attest to, the absolute coolest thing that lasers can do, of course, is blow stuff up, and this is why Boeing is making a truck into a mobile laser weapon system.
This eight-wheel, 500-horsepower Oshkosh HEMTT (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck) has already been modified by Boeing with a beam control system — which is that laser turret thing on top — along with tracking and targeting hardware and software. The only missing piece is the laser itself, and Boeing has just reached an agreement with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command to shove a ten-kilowatt solid-state laser system into it, making the HEL MD (that would be, High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator) fully armed and operational.
Over the next year, Boeing will practice using the HEL MD to pop a bunch of different "threat-representative" targets, which will likely include things like rocket, artillery and mortar projectiles, and not things like tanks, planes and humans. Ten kilowatts is about ten times less power than what's generally accepted as the power a weapons-grade laser really needs, but this is just a demonstrator. When high-power lasers eventually become available, Boeing will be able to shove them into the back of the HEL MD and start fulfilling all of our Command and Conquer fantasies.
You already have NASA to thank in part for everyday, Earthly wonders like memory foam and water filters, but a new one is coming to the list: powered exoskeletons.
The Xi Robotic Exoskeletion is a device—and in some ways almost a vehicle—currently in development by NASA and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Weighing in at 57 pounds, the motorized pants aim to someday offer extra resistance to astronauts in space, who can suffer from muscle atrophy from extended bouts of weightlessness, as well as parapalegics here at home.
The suit has four motorized joints located at the hips and knees, as well as six passive joints up and down the leg which allow for extra freedom of motion so you aren't just locked into walking forward like, well, a robot. A lot of the groundwork for this tech comes from the Robonaut 2, who's already serving on the ISS.
The X1 is still in development, with plans to add even more joints for bonus mobility. Even so, the current models are looking pretty promising. Here's to hoping development continues to go well because really, who wouldn't want to try on a pair of these? [NASA via Technabob]
NASAs Inventing In Style with Awesome Robot Pants
NASA's Inventing In Style with Awesome Robot Pants
Eric Limer
You already have NASA to thank in part for everyday, Earthly wonders like memory foam and water filters, but a new one is coming to the list: powered exoskeletons.
The Xi Robotic Exoskeletion is a deviceand in some ways almost a vehiclecurrently in development by NASA and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Weighing in at 57 pounds, the motorized pants aim to someday offer extra resistance to astronauts in space, who can suffer from muscle atrophy from extended bouts of weightlessness, as well as parapalegics here at home.
The suit has four motorized joints located at the hips and knees, as well as six passive joints up and down the leg which allow for extra freedom of motion so you aren't just locked into walking forward like, well, a robot. A lot of the groundwork for this tech comes from the Robonaut 2, who's already serving on the ISS.
The X1 is still in development, with plans to add even more joints for bonus mobility. Even so, the current models are looking pretty promising. Here's to hoping development continues to go well because really, who wouldn't want to try on a pair of these? [NASA via Technabob]
While wheelchair design is advancing, allowing chairs to do things like move sideways and diagonally and follow the person next to them, stairs and curbs remain a formidable hurdle for all but a few models. It's an obstacle, however, that Japanese researchers are looking to overcome.
A team at Chiba Institute of Technology has rolled out a new robotic wheelchair that can climb over steps, ditches, and other roadblocks. The four-wheel-drive, five-axis vehicle maneuvers like a typical wheelchair -- except when it encounters an obstacle. Then it uses its wheels like legs.
"The robot has five sensors on its feet, to see if there's anything nearby," team leader Shuro Nakajima, a Chiba associate professor, says in the DigInfo TV video below. "It can also see how far it is from a step."
The robot's various sensors can also assess a stair's size, a step up from current stair-climbing wheelchairs that require level steps to operate.
The wheelchair user commands the direction of the device using a joystick, but the robot does the rest of the work. It can keep its seat level when it senses uneven terrain such as a bumpy lawn, and can also line up its wheels and extend stabilizers to the left and right, enabling it to turn in a circle. This maneuver makes it easy for users to reverse direction, even in narrow spaces.
Robots that can climb stairs aren't brand new. Earlier this year, we were somewhat terrified to discover that stairs and ramps could no longer save us from determined humanoid robots.
Killer robots have officially gone out to sea. For the first time, the Navy has fired missiles from a remote-controlled boat, as shown in the video above.
The firing came as part of a test off the Maryland coast on Wednesday. Six of Rafael’s anti-armor Spike missiles got fired off a moving inflatable hulled watercraft, aiming for a floating target about two miles away. The missile firings and the boat’s controls were all handled remotely by Navy personnel on shore at the Navy’s Patuxent River base.
It’s the “first significant step forward in weaponizing surface unmanned combat capability,” Mark Moses, the Navy’s program manager for the armed drone boat project, tells Danger Room. Sure, the U.S. military has no shortage of armed robotic planes and — soon — helicopters. But it doesn’t have weaponized drones that patrol the seas, either above it or below it. The Navy’s early experiments with robotic submarines are for spying and mine clearance, not for attack. Until this week’s tests at Pax River, the Navy didn’t have a robotic surface vessel capable of firing a weapon — the fulfillment of a goal the Navy set for itself in 2007.
Zac Vawter thinks big. A software engineer and former competitive long-distance runner, Vawter’s blog is a list of his not-so-modest aspirations, things like winning a marathon or writing a new large-scale search engine. After the motorcycle accident that took his right leg, Vawter kept running and quickly volunteered as a test subject for experimental new therapies. Now the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is using that tenacity to help debut its new, thought-controlled prosthetic leg in a grueling 103-floor stair-climb of Chicago’s Willis Tower. And Vawter is determined to do it in under an hour.
Unlike many other thought-controlled prosthetics, Vawter’s experimental leg requires no electrodes be implanted in or on the brain, and instead takes its cues entirely from the nerves and muscles in Vawter’s upper leg. Researchers used a procedure called “targeted muscle reinnervation” to re-wire nerves previously bound for below the knee to the remaining hamstring muscle. Years of careful study then allowed them to read and interpret the signals meant for Vawter’s lost lower leg.
Lead researcher Levi Hargrove told the Chicago Tribune that Vawter “thinks about doing those movements and the signals travel down the nerves and are redirected onto hamstring muscle. The body doesn’t know that the ankle is not contracting.” Vawter himself calls previous leg replacements his “dumb” legs, since they are incapable of responding to his unconscious impulses. The 31-year-old will have to return the leg after the climb, however, and get by on the simple limbs until the technology is approved for commercial sale.
If you haven't kept up with advancements in prosthetics, now's a good time to observe how a new generation of devices can undertake even the most precise tasks.
Several months ago, my colleague Tim Hornyak wrote about the BeBionic 3 myoelectric prosthetic hand, a landmark prosthesis that enables a spectacular range of Terminator-like precise gripping and hand maneuverability.
A video making the rounds this week stars 53-year-old Nigel Ackland -- a wearer of the device -- who shows us that we've come extraordinarily far in prosthetic research, perhaps shockingly so if you don't keep up with the subject.
Ackland lost part of his arm in an industrial blender accident six years ago, went through an elective trans-radial amputation, and then used several aesthetic and electric arms that were disappointingly dysfunctional or cosmetically inferior.
A device that would allow paralyzed people to use their thoughts to move robotic limbs fluidly and realistically is now one step closer to reality.
A team of scientists from Harvard, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital led by Ziv Williams have found two groups of cells in one area of the monkey brain that allow the animals to remember a sequence of two movements at once. The team was then able to program a computer to interpret those brain patterns, in turn moving a cursor on a screen in the planned sequence.
The development is an improvement over current brain-machine interfaces, which focus on translating a single thought into a single movement in an external device.
Most real-world actions are multi-faceted. When planning to take a sip from a cup or play a song on a piano, for example, people imagine the fluid behavior, not each individual movement required to get it done.
To bring technology closer to the goal of fluid and efficient movements, the researchers trained two male rhesus monkeys to move a cursor on a computer screen to two targets that had previously flashed in front of them, one after the other. During each round, the researchers recorded activity in 281 neurons in two areas of the prefontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning complex actions.
The X-47B during remote-control tests in November 2012.
How do you drive a jet-powered drone around the deck of an aircraft carrier? If you've ever guided a remote-control toy car around your kitchen floor, you'll have an idea.
Northrop Grumman said today that it has done its first shore-based tests of a wireless handheld controller that can steer its X-47B unmanned aerial vehicle, a key step toward getting the UAV ready for flight tests on an aircraft carrier in 2013.
In the trial run, which took place earlier this month, Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy used the project's Control Display Unit to roll the X-47B forward and to stop it, to execute tight turns, to maneuver it into a catapult and out of a landing area, and to control engine thrust. The overriding goal is to be able to scoot the drone -- also known as the Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator -- safely around the crowded confines of the carrier's flight deck, without disrupting its normal, busy rhythms.
New artificial muscles made from nanotech yarns and infused with paraffin wax can lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than the same size natural muscle, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and their international team from Australia, China, South Korea, Canada and Brazil.
The artificial muscles are yarns constructed from carbon nanotubes, which are seamless, hollow cylinders made from the same type of graphite layers found in the core of ordinary pencils. Individual nanotubes can be 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, yet, pound-for-pound, can be 100 times stronger than steel.
"The artificial muscles that we've developed can provide large, ultrafast contractions to lift weights that are 200 times heavier than possible for a natural muscle of the same size," said Dr. Ray Baughman [pronounced BAK-man], team leader, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas. "While we are excited about near-term applications possibilities, these artificial muscles are presently unsuitable for directly replacing muscles in the human body."
The U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program started back in the '60s, and the dolphins and sea lions in it help defend harbors, retrieve sunken equipment and, most dangerously, identify mines for deactivation. By 2017, the Navy wants robots to do all that, instead.
The dolphins and sea lions the Navy uses really pull their weight: they're highly trained, and a team of veterinarians and handlers keep the animals primed and ready to be deployed anywhere in the world. The flip-side to that is that they're also expensive to train and maintain and, unlike a robot, when you lose one, you have to start all over again with a fresh animal. A robot arrives trained right out of the box, and you don't have to worry about its health in said box if you ship it abroad.
That's the Knifefish by Bluefin Robotics, which can operate continuously underwater for up to 16 hours — a dolphin's stay under the sea is measured in minutes before one needs to breathe. Like a dolphin, however, the Knifefish will use sonar to hunt for mines. The Knifefish could be joined by other 'bots, too — the Navy is purchasing a German-made underwater robotic vehicle to perform similar tasks — and while the dolphins and sea lions are out, divers will work alongside the robots on missions.
Don't bust out the tissues yet, though. According to the BBC, the Navy indicated that "there may still be some specialized missions where sea mammals are needed past 2017." Like what, you ask? Well, maybe this. (But probably not.)
Scientists at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered muscle cells to flex in response to light, and are using the light-sensitive tissue to build highly articulated robots.
This “bio-integrated” approach, as they call it, may one day enable robotic animals that move with the strength and flexibility of their living counterparts.
The group’s design effectively blurs the boundary between nature and machines, says Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“With bio-inspired designs, biology is a metaphor, and robotics is the tool to make it happen,” says Asada, who is a co-author on the paper. “With bio-integrated designs, biology provides the materials, not just the metaphor. This is a new direction we’re pushing in biorobotics.”
Tiny biological robots that walk to the beat of a thin sheet of rat heart cells have been created by US scientists.
The "bio-bots" were fabricated using a 3D printer and then seeded with the cardiac cells.
The regular twitching motion of the heart cells makes the tiny structure flex and slowly inch along.
The project could lead to bio-bots with different shapes, seeded with all sorts of cells, that find a role in medicine or as sensors, said the researchers.
Rat heart cells help create walking 'bio-bots' Each twitch of the rat cells helps the tiny bio-bot move
Tiny biological robots that walk to the beat of a thin sheet of rat heart cells have been created by US scientists.
The "bio-bots" were fabricated using a 3D printer and then seeded with the cardiac cells.
The regular twitching motion of the heart cells makes the tiny structure flex and slowly inch along.
The project could lead to bio-bots with different shapes, seeded with all sorts of cells, that find a role in medicine or as sensors, said the researchers.
BBC News - Rat heart cells help create walking 'bio-bots'
Brain surgery continues to make great strides in terms of safety and efficacy, but the delicacy involved requires a skill and precision that makes the practice a risky procedure. In the hopes of reducing some of that risk, a research group has developed a brain surgery robot.
Created by a team at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot is designed to assist neurosurgeons in the removal of hard to reach brain tumors. Because tumors can move during surgery, keeping the tumor in sight can be difficult while performing intracranial removals. The brain surgery robot works in tandem with an MRI scanner to always keep the tumor in sight, allowing the removal to proceed unhindered by brain shift complications.
Bringing the robot out of the prototype phase and one step closer to operating rooms, this week the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the group $2 million to continue developing the robot into a full-fledged medical tool. In a statement announcing the grant, team member Jaydev P. Desai said, "This technology has the potential to revolutionize the treatment and management of patients with difficult to reach intracranial tumors and to have a direct impact on improving their quality of life."
You can see an early version of the robot in action, sped up 2x, in the video below.
