WANT: Volkswagen Demonstrates Production-Level Automotive Autopilot on Video. Volkswagen announced their Temporary Autopilot (TAP) system last month, and it's just shown up on video. If anything, it works better than advertised, and includes some innovative features that do their best to keep you safe, even if you completely zone out: As you can see, this TAP system has been integrated into a production car, and uses production-level radar, camera, and ultrasonic sensors along with by a laser scanner and an electronic horizon to do everything that it does.
In other words, there's no crazy custom electronics involved, and nothing that could keep a system like this from becoming (say) an optional extra in a production car relatively soon. A big stumbling block for this kind of thing is the issue of liability and who is (or isn't) in control of the car, and Volkswagen very deliberately includes the following in their press release: "The driver always retains driving responsibility and is always in control.
More steps please. [ HAVEit ] via [ Robots.net ] Volkswagen's Temporary Auto Pilot Makes Your Car Almost But Not Quite a Robot. HAVEit_TAP.wmv. Little Rolling Robot Transforms Into Helicopter. Little Rolling Robot Transforms Into Helicopter. Designing a robot that can traverse variable terrain usually involves a number of unsatisfactory compromises. You can go with a flying robot, which will almost never get stuck, but is of limited use in detailed sensing and can't operate for very long. Or, you can go with a ground robot, which is much more efficient, but also much more likely to run into an obstacle that it can't get around. An ideal platform would spend most of its time on the ground but still be able to fly when it needs to, but this is a very tricky thing to make happen, since the design of something that drives is fundamentally different from the design of something that flies. Researchers from the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota have managed to create a single robot that can actually do this effectively: This is just the first (very fragile) prototype; the next version is much more robust and relies on a non-coaxial system for flight: ParkourBot Can Do Parkour.
Ground-Effect Robot Could Be Key To Future High-Speed Trains. Japanese prototype of a train that levitates on cushions of air. High speed trains are huge in Asia, but barring a catastrophe, most of them are designed to stay firmly on the ground, running on rails. There are plenty of good reasons not to run on rails, though, one of which is that you can go much faster without all that friction. This is the idea behind maglev trains, but there's still a lot of wind drag that crops up between the bottom of a maglev train and its track that makes them less efficient (which combined with other problems make maglevs very costly).
A ground-effect vehicle takes advantage of this fast-moving air and uses some stubby little wings to fly just above the ground, like a maglev without the mag. This is a tricky thing to do, since you have to control the vehicle more like an airplane than a train, meaning that you have to deal with pitch, roll, and yaw and not just the throttle.