Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Mitsubishi's bragging rights for designing the world's fastest Rubik's cube-solving robot have officially been stolen by a team of undergrads in Indiana. Earlier this month, Purdue University announced four collaborators in its Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) successfully designed and built a bot that not only set the new Guinness World Record--it absolutely demolished the multinational company's previous time. Meet Purdubik's Cube: a machine capable of completing a randomly shuffled Rubik's cube in just 0.103 seconds. At 1-2 times faster than the blink of a human eye, the feat is difficult to see, much less comprehend.

Following its autonomous food delivery launch in Miami and Fairfax, Virginia, Uber Eats will soon be offering the same robotic service in Japan -- its first outside the US. It is once again collaborating with Google alum startup Cartken, with local compliance help from Mitsubishi Electric, to bring a fleet of Model C sidewalk delivery robots to select areas in Tokyo in March. Uber Eats Japan CEO Shintaro Nakagawa says the autonomous delivery service will solve the local labor shortage issue, while complementing the existing human delivery methods "by bicycle, motorbike, light cargo, and on foot." Cartken's six-wheeled Model C uses six cameras and advanced AI models for autonomous driving plus obstacle detection, and remote control mode is available when needed. With guidance from Mitsubishi, the robot has been modified to suit local needs in Japan.

Phantom Auto, a California-based startup focusing on remote vehicle operation, has struck a deal to provide logistics equipment heavyweight Mitsubishi Logisnext Co. with software that enables forklifts to be operated remotely from thousands of miles away. A unit of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Kyoto-based Mitsubishi Logisnext is the third-biggest company in the $45 billion-plus global market for forklifts. Via their tie-up, Bessemer Venture Partners-backed Phantom Auto and Mitsubishi will offer forklifts that can rove around a warehouse in California, controlled by workers sitting at a desk a continent away. "We're moving warehouse workers into office jobs," Elliot Katz, Phantom Auto co-founder and chief business officer, said in an interview. Because it removes geographic labor restrictions and improves efficiency as drivers can be "teleported" into factories experiencing surges, the software offers the potential to knock 30% or more off forklift operation costs, Katz said.

The Mitsubishi Corporation has set up a joint venture company that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to control on-demand bus services in Japan. The new company, called Next Mobility, has been established by Mitsubishi and the Nishi-Nippon Railroad Company, a major Japanese bus operator. The joint venture will start a one-year trial in April at Island City, in the Higashi-ward of Fukuoka City. In a statement Wednesday, Mitsubishi said that the AI would be used to automatically generate routes, in real time, based on passenger requests that are made through a smartphone app. Deep learning will be used to collate "operational data" on both traffic conditions and passenger destinations.

Self-driving cars are already asking people to put AI systems in control of their vehicles. Now, Mitsubishi wants to rid its new cars of one of the last relics of the past: the rear-view mirror. The automotive manufacturer announced this week that it has developed the industry's highest performing automotive camera technology. When installed on a vehicle, it can detect objects up to 100 meters (328 feet) away, and boosts object detection accuracy from a previous 14 percent to 81 percent. Mitsubishi explains their new cameras utilize their own Maisart AI, which has the ability to accurately differentiate between pedestrians, cars, and motorcycles.

People are, generally speaking, much better than computers at picking out a single voice in a crowd. You'll know this if you've ever tried to say something to your smart speaker while someone else is talking at the same time. Chances are it probably asked you to repeat your command. Now, this could be about to change, following the announcement Google has trained an AI model to separate distinct speech signals from one single audio recording. In a blog post, the company reveals its new deep learning model works by using both the auditory and visual signals of an input video – in short, it lip reads.

Consequently, the United Nations has set a target of halving this number by 2020. A new technology being readied for its debut could be a step forward in achieving that ambitious goal: greatly improved automotive video cameras meant to replace mirrors on vehicles. In its annual R&D Open House on 14 February, Mitsubishi Electric described the development of what it believes is the industry's highest-performance rendition of mirrorless car technology. According to the company, today's conventional camera-based systems featuring motion detection technology can detect objects up to about 30 meters away and identify them with a low accuracy of 14 percent. By comparison, Mitsubishi's new mirrorless technology extends the recognition distance to 100 meters with an 81 percent accuracy.

Mirrorless cars, terrifying as they may sound, as coming. In 2015, the United Nations gave the go ahead for carmakers to replace mirrors with cameras and display systems, so the race is on to design tech that's fit for the job. Now, Mitsubishi says it's developed the industry's highest-performing vehicle camera, able to detect objects up to 100 meters away. The technology uses the brand's proprietary AI to give drivers advanced warning of upcoming obstacles, and is expected to help prevent accidents, especially when changing lanes. The system has a visual-cognition mode, which mimics human visual behavior to focus on the right thing in any given field of view, and it can distinguish between object types, such as pedestrians, cars and motorcycles (not that it's okay to drive into any of them, of course).

"Years before the first computer was actually built, the famous British mathematician Alan Turing envisaged it playing chess and beating the human world champion. When the very first computers were delivered to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the 1950s the scientists there immediately started to program it to play chess. For 50 years one of the recurring motifs of the science of artificial intelligence was a chess computer beating the world champion. It was almost an obsession in the community, with scores of teams in dozens of universities dedicating their academic careers to achieve this goal." Who should explore space, man or machine?

Mitsubishi's experimental Safe and Secure Lighting system takes turn signals to the next level. Instead of tiny blinking lights, it uses big road-surface projections coupled with car displays to inform pedestrians and other vehicles what you're going to do. When the car is in reverse, it projects big illuminated arrows pointing backwards. For now, though, Mitsubishi will exhibit the system's current version on an electric EMIRAI 4 concept car at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition from October 27th to November 5th.