Creating and managing integrated schedules for upstream assets is a complex and challenging task. Schedulers must assign rigs and other equipment to well delivery, facility, and maintenance activities in the most efficient sequence, while keeping business goals in mind and avoiding offset well violations. DSO/Upstream scheduling and optimization software tames the complexity of integrated, optimized rig scheduling with powerful decision support technology and advanced analytics that rapidly identifies optimal schedules to meet business goals. Build and manage rig schedules, and incorporate other resources and activities for a comprehensive operations schedule. "What if?" scenarios show schedulers exactly how decisions will influence costs, production, equipment use, and financial goals.

MIT's version of the "robotoddler" is just the latest MIT entry in the world of robots that can move themselves in a variety of settings. There's still a long way to go before today's robots evolve into practical, everyday technologies, but even now, autonomous robotic vehicles developed at MIT are exploring uncharted or hazardous places, assisting troops in combat and performing household tasks. In addition to his well-known work on humanoid robots such as Kismet, Professor Rodney Brooks led the development of several robotic vehicles and co-founded a company, iRobot, that develops these machines commercially. Troops in Afghanistan use PackBots to explore enemy caves, and soldiers in Iraq use them to detect improvised explosive devices and inspect weapons caches. "In 20 years, we've gone from robots that can hardly maneuver around objects to ones that can navigate in unstructured environments," said Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof now walks down the street issuing a faint mechanical hum. That is the sound of an electronic exoskeleton that moves the 41-year-old's legs and propels him forward. "I never dreamed I would walk again. After I was wounded, I forgot what it's like," said Kaiof, who was injured while serving in the Israeli military in 1988. "Only when standing up can I feel how tall I really am and speak to people eye to eye, not from below."

In a crisis control center, several teams of firefighters in Montelibretti, Italy, used laptops to guide a robotic ground vehicle into a smoke-filled highway tunnel. Inside, overturned motorcycles, errant cars, and spilled pallets impeded the robot's progress. The rover, equipped with a video camera and autonomous navigation software, was capable of crawling through the wreckage unguided while humans monitored the video footage for accident victims. But most of the time the firefighters took manual control once the robot was a few meters into the tunnel. Although the search was just an experiment, microphones recorded clear signs of stress during several tests of the scenario: The firefighter driving the rover spoke at a higher pitch, and members of some teams also interfered with one another's radio transmissions.

This article originally appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer 2015). We thank the American Economic Association for giving us permission to reproduce it here. About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the "Cambrian Explosion." Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, with one of the most provocative being the evolution of vision, which allowed animals to dramatically increase their ability to hunt and find mates (for discussion, see Parker 2003). Today, technological developments on several fronts are fomenting a similar explosion in the diversification and applicability of robotics. Many of the base hardware technologies on which robots depend--particularly computing, data storage, and communications--have been improving at exponential growth rates. Two newly blossoming technologies--"Cloud Robotics" and "Deep Learning"--could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth. In Cloud Robotics--a term coined by James Kuffner (2010)--every robot learns from the experiences of all robots, which leads to rapid growth of robot competence, particularly as the number of robots grows.

Editor's Note: This is part of IEEE Spectrum's ongoing coverage of Japan's earthquake and nuclear emergency. An anonymous worker at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has written dozens of blog posts describing the ups and downs of his experience as one of the lead robot operators at the crippled facility. His blog provides a window into the complex and dangerous work environment faced by the operators, a small group of young technicians who, like other front-line personnel, must approach areas of high radiation, deploying remote-controlled robots to assist with efforts to further stabilize and shut down the plant's four troubled reactors. The blog posts, which have recently been deleted, depict the operators' extensive robot training exercises, as well as actual missions, including surveying damage and contamination in and around the reactors and improvising a robotic vacuum to suck up radioactive dust. The author, who goes by the initials S.H., also used the blog to vent ...

Following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, Honda reportedly received numerous requests to send its humanoid robot ASIMO to help with the recovery. ASIMO, however, wasn't designed to work outside a lab or office environment, let alone a highly radioactive rubble-strewn zone. Now it looks like Honda is working to address the problem by developing a bigger, beefed-up version of ASIMO that can walk, crawl, and perform tasks in a disaster environment. After the Fukushima accident, many observers were surprised that Japan, a country known for its advanced robots, wasn't better prepared and had to rely on U.S. robots instead. In the months that followed, Japanese government agencies and companies got to work to develop capable disaster-response robots.

The C5.0 algorithm uses the Max-Gain method of selecting the best attribute. H measures the information content or entropy in bits (i.e., number of yes/no questions that must be asked) associated with a set S of examples, which consists of the subset P of positive examples and subset N of negative examples. Note: 0 H(P,N) 1, where 0 no information, and 1 maximum information. Half the examples in S are positive and half are negative. Say all of the examples in S are positive and none are negative.

Venture Beat covered the closing ceremonies of the third summer session of the Singularity University. Matternet is the most technologically ambitious. In the first phase, it utilizes small-scale electric vehicles deployed with vertical take-off and landing capability, limited payload-bearing capacity and range. In the longer term, we will have a wide range of AAVs suitable for different payload capacity, flying range and weather conditions. Ground stations They create and use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to ferry medicine and other goods to remote places such as rural villages in Africa.

In 2007, Google unleashed a fleet of cars with roof-mounted cameras to provide street-level images of roads around the world. Now MIT spinout Essess is bringing similar "drive-by" innovations to energy efficiency in homes and businesses. The startup deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that create heat maps of thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in "building envelopes" -- windows, doors, walls, and foundations -- to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, Essess' rig includes several long-wave infrared radiometric cameras and near-infrared cameras. These cameras capture heat signatures, while a LiDAR system captures 3-D images to discern building facades from the physical environment.