Google Builds Robot Army for Battle With Amazon | Wired Business. A humanoid robot built by Meka, one of several robotics startups The New York Times says have been acquired by Google. Photo: Meka Google grows more and more like Amazon with each passing month, transforming itself into an honest-to-goodness online shopping company, and this evolution is increasingly overt.
But things got really cool today with the news that the web giant is posed to challenge Amazon with an army of robots. In an excellent piece of reporting, The New York Times’ John Markoff reveals that, led by the former head of its Android mobile operating system, Google is quietly buying up robotics startups for a project that appears more than just experimental. “If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones,” Markoff writes, “is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?” Amazon clearly understands this. And why wouldn’t they? Freaky Clean: Mini Robots Scrub Your House. Anyone who knows what dust looks like has probably wished for some bee-like helpers who could just zip around the house to make it magically clean. Or perhaps gel that rolls around, collects all the dirt, and returns to a container.
Designers are on it. Anything You Can Do, Robots Can Do Better: Photos New conceptual designs are emerging that make the Roomba look old school and the Jetsons feel more archaic than ever. In the Effortless Cleaning category — the other two are Natural Air and Social Cooking — semifinalists include Colombian industrial design student Adrian Perez Zapata’s Mab concept. Another semifinalist of note comes from Korean Samaung Art and Design Institute student Juan Lee. I’m fully aware that these concepts are out there and unlikely to be on the store shelves any time soon.
No-Wash Shirt Doesn’t Stink After 100 Days Image: The conceptual Mab automated cleaning system employs miniature flying robots. Robots to revolutionize farming, ease labor woes. SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — On a windy morning in California's Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can "thin" a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand. The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they're sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. View gallery. 'Smart SPHERES' Fly High Aboard the International Space Station. The fastest robot of the world from Stäubli High Speed. Weed control using laser armed drones. German scientists are seriously developing a laser based system of weed control in order to be more "environmentally friendly" than using chemical poisons.
What could go wrong ? Laser armed Robots and drones for farming and weed control and they will have artificial intelligence algorithms and high resolution cameras for recognizing plants. They would have the goal of having this on a large scale for better "organic farming". The laser system is currently being tested in a greenhouse. Drones or small robotic planes would fly over the fields. Could robots or drones weeding beds and fields using laser be the answer? The scientists in the current project are concentrating on CO² lasers, which emit beams in the mid-infrared range. A movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger had laser armed robots and drones The second major challenge is recognising the plant.
At the moment the equipment runs on rails in a greenhouse. SOURCE - Leibniz Universität Hannover and Laser Zentrum Hannover, Deutsche Welle.