Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang commends President Donald Trump's AI agenda and outlines what the country's job future will look like on'Special Report.' Walking up to your car and seeing it recognize you, light up with a digital smile and respond to your voice used to be something only seen in TV shows and movies. Now, LA-based Faraday Future is making that experience a reality. At its California headquarters, the company recently unveiled the FX Super One, a tech-packed electric vehicle featuring the F.A.C.E., short for Front AI Communication Ecosystem. This expressive LED grille gives the car personality, allowing it to connect through light, sound and even emotional cues.

Automation of hydraulic material handling machinery is currently limited to semi-static pick-and-place cycles. Dynamic throwing motions which utilize the passive joints, can greatly improve time efficiency as well as increase the dumping workspace. In this work, we use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to design dynamic controllers for material handlers with underactuated arms as commonly used in logistics. The controllers are tested both in simulation and in real-world experiments on a 12-ton test platform. The method is able to exploit the passive joints of the gripper to perform dynamic throwing motions. With the proposed controllers, the machine is able to throw individual objects to targets outside the static reachability zone with good accuracy for its practical applications. The work demonstrates the possibility of using RL to perform highly dynamic tasks with heavy machinery, suggesting a potential for improving the efficiency and precision of autonomous material handling tasks.

We present a solution for autonomous forest inventory with a legged robotic platform. Compared to their wheeled and aerial counterparts, legged platforms offer an attractive balance of endurance and low soil impact for forest applications. In this paper, we present the complete system architecture of our forest inventory solution which includes state estimation, navigation, mission planning, and real-time tree segmentation and trait estimation. We present preliminary results for three campaigns in forests in Finland and the UK and summarize the main outcomes, lessons, and challenges. Our UK experiment at the Forest of Dean with the ANYmal D legged platform, achieved an autonomous survey of a 0.96 hectare plot in 20 min, identifying over 100 trees with typical DBH accuracy of 2 cm.

South Africa's Aerobotics is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) in helping fruit and nut farmers in over 18 countries. JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's Aerobotics is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) in helping fruit and nut farmers improve crop yields. Although the Cape Town-based company only started nine years ago, it is already operating in 18 countries, with the U.S. being their largest market, followed by South Africa, Australia, Spain and Portugal. Its customers produce tens of millions of tons of fresh produce every year. California is now ground zero for Aerobotics – where the company has the biggest concentration of customers.

By-tree information gathering is an essential task in precision agriculture achieved by ground mobile sensors, but it can be time- and labor-intensive. In this paper we present an algorithmic framework to perform real-time and on-the-go detection of trees and key geometric characteristics (namely, width and height) with wheeled mobile robots in the field. Our method is based on the fusion of 2D domain-specific data (normalized difference vegetation index [NDVI] acquired via a red-green-near-infrared [RGN] camera) and 3D LiDAR point clouds, via a customized tree landmark association and parameter estimation algorithm. The proposed system features a multi-modal and entropy-based landmark correspondences approach, integrated into an underlying Kalman filter system to recognize the surrounding trees and jointly estimate their spatial and vegetation-based characteristics. Realistic simulated tests are used to evaluate our proposed algorithm's behavior in a variety of settings. Physical experiments in agricultural fields help validate our method's efficacy in acquiring accurate by-tree information on-the-go and in real-time by employing only onboard computational and sensing resources.

NASA inaugurated its 23rd class of new astronauts on Monday, which includes 10 individuals who are set to walk on the moon and maybe even Mars. Deemed the'Artemis Generation,' this group consists of several former US military, an ex-SpaceX medical director and a bioengineer who also participated in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a track cyclist. The name is a reference to NASA's Artemis program, which aims to send the first woman and the first person of color to moon as early as 2025. The astronaut candidates for 2021 are: Nichole Ayers, Marcos Berríos, Guaynabo, Christina Birch, Deniz Burnham, Luke Delaney, Andre Douglas, Jack Hathaway, Anil Menon, Christopher Williams and Jessica Wittner. This is NASA first new class in four years and the group is set to begin the two-year training process in January 2022.

As an international relations scholar who studies space law and policy, I have come to realize what most people do not fully appreciate: Dealing with space debris is as much a national security issue as it is a technical one. Considering the debris circling the Earth as just an obstacle in the path of human missions is naive. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up. To be clear, space debris poses considerable risks; however, to understand those risks, I should explain what it is and how it is formed. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up.

Renault's concept vehicle EZ-GO is designed to be pooled and available on-demand like a taxi service, continuing the trend of the'sharing economy' seen with companies like Uber. Founders of EVelozcity, all former members of auto tech startup Faraday Future, include designer Richard Kim (left), CEO Stefan Krause tech lead Ulrich Kranz. SAN FRANCISCO -- The newest electric car start-up vows it will learn from Tesla's mistakes by echoing Apple's iPhone moves and designing -- but not building -- its vehicles, with its sights set more on the economy market. EVelozcity, a company based in Los Angeles founded by veterans of BMW and electric car start-up Faraday Future, revealed Tuesday it had secured $1 billion in funding from an unnamed group of U.S., European and Chinese backers. The company plans to design and engineer an electric car and leverage third-party contractors for everything from self-driving car software to manufacturing.