Domino's could be putting some of its delivery drivers out of a job this year by rolling out a new wave of robot delivery vehicles in Texas. The robot vehicles, made by the well-funded autonomous driving startup, Nuro, are entirely self-driving and can cart their cargo -- in this case Domino's pizza -- via in-unit storage. Once the robot arrives at its destination, customers must meet the vehicle and use a special pin provided to them upon ordering to unlock the hatch and collect their delivery. Domino's will take the next step in autonomous delivery by partnering with Nuro to deliver pizzas via robot cars. Silicon Valley-based startup, Nuro, will partner with Domino's Pizza to deliver in Houston, Texas.

As the arrival of driverless cars gets closer, cities are scrambling to get ready. And for good reason: The driverless car promises to reshape the urban landscape as we know it. Little wonder, then, that the potential changes are creating excitement--and fear--among city planners. As they host test fleets of robot vehicles and figure out how to rework ordinances to prepare for the autonomous future, they're imagining what life is going to be like when the streets are filled with cars that can largely think for themselves. Some see an opportunity to create on-demand public transit that gets people where they're going faster and reaches more of the population. Or redirect traffic to make it easier to hold functions like farmers markets.

They are machines that tirelessly assemble, pack, repair or transport. Robots never come in late, their standards don't dip when they're hungover, tired or emotional and they can work round the clock in hot, cold, dusty or dangerous environments. Talking about robots taking our jobs isn't the timeliest of discussions since in many cases, it's already happened. But even though they build our cars, sort our mail and harvest our crops, the robots we know all work behind bars. These fast-moving, highly articulated and often massive machines exist in segregation, within areas marked by yellow and black chevrons, flashing lights and cages that protect weak, fleshy humans from their crushing, mashing power.

Walt Disney World in Florida appears poised to launch the highest-profile commercial deployment of driverless passenger vehicles to date, testing a fleet of driverless shuttles that could cart passengers through parking lots and around its theme parks. According to sources with direct knowledge of Disney's plans, the company is in late-stage negotiation with at least two manufacturers of autonomous shuttles – Local Motors, based in Phoenix, and Navya, based in Paris. It's unclear whether contracts would go to both or just one of the companies. The sources, who asked not be identified to avoid offending Disney, said the company plans a pilot program later this year to transport employees in the electric-drive robot vehicles. If that goes well, they said, the shuttles would begin transporting park visitors sometime next year.

Science council moves to safeguard South Africa's robotics prowess Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularised and, indeed, named the concept of the robot in his 1920 science-fiction play, RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) – the word is derived from the Czech word'robota', which means labour – it has exerted a fascination on both the popular and the scientific, and on engineering and technological minds. The robot quickly became a mainstay of science fiction, sometimes benign (as with Robby the Robot in the film Forbidden Planet or R2D2 and C3PO from the Star Wars series), sometimes hostile. The first real working robot, however, bore no resemblance to the humanoid robots beloved of science fiction. This was Unimate, developed by the Unimation (Universal Automation) company in the US, which was specifically founded to manufacture robots for industry. Unimate, which entered service on a General Motors assembly line in 1961, was the forerunner of all today's industrial robots and, being in the form of a large mechanical arm, also set the format most such robots still follow.

It could give your fish a new lease of life - and allow them to explore the world outside their aquarium. A team of Dutch researchers has developed a remote control aquarium on wheels that fish can steer themselves, and is set to start selling it. Called fish on wheels, the $200 gadget uses a camera to monitor the direction the fish swims in. The prototype version of'Fish on Wheels' was constructed using a standard webcam, and an Arduino, a tiny comuter, controlled robot vehicle. Using the contrast of the fish with the bottom of the fish tank, its position is determined and used to send commands to the Arduino computer control board to move the car into that direction.

It could give your fish a new lease of life - and allow them to explore the world outside their aquarium. A team of Dutch researchers has developed a remote control aquarium on wheels that fish can steer themselves. The bizarre gadget is set to be launched as a Kickstarter project. The prototype version of'Fish on Wheels' was constructed using a standard webcam, and an Arduino, a tiny comuter, controlled robot vehicle. Using the contrast of the fish with the bottom of the fish tank, its position is determined and used to send commands to the Arduino computer control board to move the car into that direction.

Driving on today's roadways jammed with automobiles, it is easy to understand the challenges of integrating automated vehicles into the flow of traffic. How do you mix driverless vehicles with the difficult-to-predict movements of vehicles driven by people? How do you convince people to give up the sense of freedom that comes from driving themselves? Clean, electric, robot vehicles would be like R2D2's with seats. If we could use today's roads without human drivers, clean, electric, robot vehicles could already successfully navigate our cities, like R2D2s with seats.

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To demonstrate these methods we have trained an ANS network to drive a vehicle through simulated rreeway traffic. I ntJooducticn Computational systems employing fine grained parallelism are revolutionizing the way we approach a number or long standing problems involving pattern recognition and cognitive processing. The field spans a wide variety or computational networks, rrom constructs emulating neural runctions, to more crystalline configurations that resemble systolic arrays. Several titles are used to describe this broad area or research, we use the term artificial neural systems (ANS). Our concern in this work is the use or ANS ror manually training certain types or autonomous systems where the desired rules of behavior are difficult to rormulate. Artificial neural systems consist of a number or processing elements interconnected in a weighted, user-specified fashion, the interconnection weights acting as memory ror the system. Each processing element calculatE', an output value based on the weighted sum or its inputs. In addition, the input data is correlated with the output or desired output (specified by an instructive agent) in a training rule that is used to adjust the interconnection weights.