The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies issues an alarming report about Beijing's expanding tentacles in international agencies; Eric Shawn has the Fox News exclusive. Two astronauts on Sunday made the first spacewalk outside China's new orbital station to set up cameras and other equipment using a 15-meter-long (50-foot-long) robotic arm. Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo were shown by state TV climbing out of the airlock as Earth rolled past below them. The third crew member, commander Nie Haisheng, stayed inside. Liu and Tang spent nearly seven hours outside the station, the Chinese space agency said.

Technical Report AIM-340, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, September, 1980.

The Stanford AI lab cart is a card-table sized mobile robot controlled remotely through a radio link, and equipped with a TV camera and transmitter. A computer has been programmed to drive the cart through cluttered indoor and outdoor spaces, gaining its knowledge about the world entirely from images broadcast by the onboard TV system.The cart deduces the three dimensional location of objects around it, and its own motion among them, by noting their apparent relative shifts in successive images obtained from the moving TV camera. It maintains a model of the location of the ground, and registers objects it has seen as potential obstacles if they are sufficiently above the surface, but not too high. It plans a path to a user-specified destination which avoids these obstructions. This plan is changed as the moving cart perceives new obstacles on its journey.The system is moderately reliable, but very slow. The cart moves about one meter every ten to fifteen minutes, in lurches. After rolling a meter, it stops, takes some pictures and thinks about them for a long time. Then it plans a new path, and executes a little of it, and pauses again.

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