Earlier this week, a pair of sleek, four-wheeled robots began trundling across the cracked pavement outside the Sleep Train Arena, the defunct former home of the Sacramento Kings, which the state of California has turned into a field Covid-19 hospital. The robots, dubbed R2, were supposed to be delivering groceries to residents of a wealthy neighborhood in Houston, part of a rollout by the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup Nuro. Instead, like other robots the world over, they have been pressed into service delivering goods...

Residents of the largest retirement community in the US will soon have the option to have their drug prescriptions delivered to them partly by air. Starting this May, UPS and CVS plan to use autonomous drones to shuttle medicine to people in The Villages, Florida, giving them a high-tech way to practice social-distancing. As it has done in the past, UPS will use Matternet M2 quadcopters to deliver the prescriptions (pictured above). At first, the aircraft will drop off the orders at a pickup location, with a human driver on the ground moving them the rest of the way. One CVS pharmacy will take part in the program initially, though there's the potential for two more locations to join in the future.

There might be a more intuitive way to control robots and drones than waggling joysticks or tapping at a screen. MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a control method, Conduct-A-Bot, that uses muscle sensors and motion detection for more'natural' robot control. Algorithms detect gestures using both your movement as well as the activity in your biceps, forearms and triceps. You can wave your hand, clench your fist or even tense your arm to steer the bot. The system doesn't need environmental cues, offline calibration or per-person training.

Built Robotics executives are fond of saying that their autonomous system for construction equipment, like dozers and excavators, might be further along than many autonomous vehicles. In fact, CEO Noah Ready-Campbell insists you'll see autonomous vehicles in controlled industrial environments -- like construction sites -- before you see level 5 driverless cars on public roads. That may be in part because autonomous construction equipment often operates on privately owned land, while public roads face increased regulatory scrutiny. "There's a quote that'Cold fusion is 20 years in the future and always will be,'" Ready-Campbell told VentureBeat. "I think there's a chance that that might be true for level 5 self-driving cars as well."

We may not be living on Mars or traveling to work using jet packs, but there's no doubt the coming decade will bring many exciting technological advances. In this article, I want to outline the 25 key technology trends that I believe will shape the 2020s. The increasing ability of machines to learn and act intelligently will absolutely transform our world. It is also the driving force behind many of the other trends on this list. This refers to the ever-growing number of "smart" devices and objects that are connected to the internet.

A new study has found that using delivery drones in dense urban environments might actually consume more energy than a conventional delivery van. Thomas Kirschstein, an economist at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, developed a simulation to compare how energy efficient different delivery methods would be in a large and crowded city. He compared a delivery drone, electric van, and diesel van as they traveled through a digital recreation of Berlin to see which required the least amount of fossil fuel to complete equivalent delivery routes. The clear winner were electric vans, which consumed more than 50 percent less energy than diesel vans. The biggest surprise, however, came from drones, which turned out to be the most energy hungry of all the delivery methods, consuming as much as 10 times the amount of energy that the electric vans did.

Coronavirus tests should be delivered to people's homes using drones to cut the spread of the deadly infection, a study has suggested. The proposal would see batches tests of tests ferried from centralised test facilities out the the public, allowing authorities to determine who needed to be quarantined. At the same time, removing the need to visit testing facilities would minimise the risk of aiding the disease's spread among the population in the process. They suggest that 36 drones each carrying 100 tests could visit everyone in such a city of population 100,000 inhabitants repeatedly every four days. However, even running tests of individuals every 30 days, they said, 'would flatten the curve quite significantly.' Coronavirus tests should be delivered to people's homes using drones to cut the spread of the deadly infection, a study has suggested The proactive screening of the general population for coronavirus infection -- especially in the case of asymptomatic cases -- has significant potential in helping to curb the spread of COVID-10, but implementing such would have its challenges.

Blue whales swim to the surface to feed on krill as it helps them to conserve energy, according to a new study that involved amazing drone footage of the mammals. Experts from Oregon State University found that feeding on the ocean's surface plays an important role in the hunt for food among New Zealand blue whales. Blue whales are the largest mammals on Earth and have to carefully balance the cost of energy they get from food with the cost of energy used in getting the food. Researchers say the marine mammals forage for krill in areas where they are densely packed and found near the surface of the water to cut their dive time. The Oregon team found that the blue whales do this to conserve on the energetic costs of feeding such as diving, holding their breath or opening their mouths.

Nuro, one of the nation's best-funded self-driving vehicle startups, has begun using its robots to ferry food and medical supplies around a California stadium that has been converted into a coronavirus treatment facility, CEO Dave Ferguson announced on Wednesday. "We realized that we could potentially use our R2 unmanned vehicles to provide truly contactless delivery of goods, where we remove any possible interaction between a driver dropping off goods and a person picking them up," Ferguson wrote. Contactless delivery could reduce the spread of COVID-19. In a Tuesday phone interview, Nuro policy chief David Estrada told Ars that the robots are ferrying food, supplies, and medical equipment from the parking lot of Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, into the stadium itself. Human workers at designated locations load the vehicles at one end of a trip and unload them at the other.

We may not be living on Mars or traveling to work using jet packs, but there's no doubt the coming decade will bring many exciting technological advances. In this article, I want to outline the 25 key technology trends that I believe will shape the 2020s. The increasing ability of machines to learn and act intelligently will absolutely transform our world. It is also the driving force behind many of the other trends on this list. This refers to the ever-growing number of "smart" devices and objects that are connected to the internet.