Nowadays, smartphones can produce a synchronized (synced) stream of high-quality data, including RGB images, inertial measurements, and other data. Therefore, smartphones are becoming appealing sensor systems in the robotics community. Unfortunately, there is still the need for external supporting sensing hardware, such as a depth camera precisely synced with the smartphone sensors. In this paper, we propose a hardware-software recording system that presents a heterogeneous structure and contains a smartphone and an external depth camera for recording visual, depth, and inertial data that are mutually synchronized. The system is synced at the time and the frame levels: every RGB image frame from the smartphone camera is exposed at the same moment of time with a depth camera frame with sub-millisecond precision. We provide a method and a tool for sync performance evaluation that can be applied to any pair of depth and RGB cameras. Our system could be replicated, modified, or extended by employing our open-sourced materials.

As summer quickly approaches, some dads are itching to get outside. Even if the number of places we can go has been reduced due to the pandemic, many will spend hours in their backyards tinkering with home projects, training for a nonexistent triathlon and grilling every chance they get. As Father's Day approaches, here are the best gifts for all the DIY-, camping-, grilling- and sport-loving dads in our lives. A good head lamp is an easy to way upgrade Dad's camping kit. We've recommended BioLite head lamps in the past, and the new HeadLamp 200 is a winner too, not to mention quite affordable. This model's USB rechargeable battery makes it more convenient than traditional head lamps because your dad won't have to worry about having a few AAA batteries on hand: Just plug it in and charge it up.

AI activities are also being pursued at other Schlumberger locations, often jointly with SDR The locations related to logging and interpretation include: Schlumberger-Doll Research, Ridgefield, Connecticut (Contact: Peter Wu'l); Schlumberger Well Services, Austin, Texas (Contact: Scott Gut/my); Schlumberger Well Services, Houston, Texas (Contact: Scott Ma&s); Nippon Schlumberger, K K, Tokyo, Japan (Contact: Dennzs O'NezU); I&ude et Production Schlumbcraer. Other Schlumberger companies involied in Ai research include! Expert Systems Current work in expert, systems is concerned with developing techniques for building more robust and versatile log interpretation systems. One shortcoming of "first generation" expert systems, such as the Dipmeter Advisor, is their inability to reason about the task that they attempt to perform. Any description of the overall task is usually procedurally encoded and unavailable for examination.

I had somebody ask me questions this week about underwater photography and videography with robots (well, now it is a few weeks ago…). I am not an expert at underwater robotics, however as a SCUBA diver I have some experience that can be applicable towards robotics. There are some challenges that exist with underwater photography and videography, that are less challenging above the water. This causes certain colors to not be visible at certain depths. If you need to see those colors you often need to bring strong lights to restore the visibility of those wavelengths that were absorbed.

Healthy humans take for granted their five senses. In order to mold metal into perceiving machines, it requires a significant amount of engineers and capital. Already, we have handed over many of our faculties to embedded devices in our cars, homes, workplaces, hospitals, and governments. Even automation skeptics unwillingly trust the smart gadgets in their pockets with their lives. Last week, General Motors stepped up its autonomous car effort by augmenting its artificial intelligence unit, Cruise Automation, with greater perception capabilities through the acquisition of LIDAR (Light Imaging, Detection, And Ranging) technology company Strobe.

Last week, General Motors Co. announced plans to release a fleet of new electric vehicles by 2023, laying the groundwork for an "all-electric future." On Monday, the automotive giant revealed that it has bought Strobe, a Pasadena startup that produces the laser-based imaging technology known as lidar. Lidar uses a pulsed laser sensor to measure the distance between objects and is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles' navigation systems. But the technology's high price, complexity and limited performance has kept self-driving cars from being deployed on a larger scale, according to Kyle Vogt, chief executive of Cruise Automation, a subsidiary developing self-driving technology that GM bought last year. "To solve these problems we've acquired Strobe, a company that has quietly been building the leading next-generation lidar sensors," Vogt wrote in a blog post announcing the purchase of Strobe.

In a post on Medium, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt writes that LIDAR-on-a-chip will drop the price "by 99 percent" versus other LIDAR systems. "Strobe, Cruise and GM engineers will work side by side along with our optics and fabrication experts at HRL (formerly Hughes Research Labs), the GM skunkworks-like division that invented the world's first laser," Vogt wrote. The new LIDAR system can apparently deal with sun reflecting off rainy streets and help differentiate between someone clad in black jaywalking at night. Vogt wrote that when combined with RADAR and cameras, the LIDAR can handle pretty much every type of sensing needed for self-driving applications.

General Motors just took another step to prepare itself for the future of driving, acquiring a startup that makes what could prove a key technology to unlock self-driving cars for use in fleets. Cruise, GM's self-driving car startup, will now source its lidar laser sensors from Strobe, a Pasadena-based startup that the Detroit automaker just acquired. GM did not disclose the terms of the deal, which it announced Monday morning, but it's a potentially crucial move in its plan to deploy large fleets of robocars, given the importance of the sensor, and the difficulty of making it not just robust and reliable, but cost effective. "Our mission is to remove the driver from the vehicle and ultimately deploy these vehicles at massive scale," says Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt. "Lidar sensors have been one of the bottlenecks."

Schlumberger is a large, multinational corporation concerned primarily with the measurement, collection, and interpretation of data. For the past fifty years, most of the activities have been related to hydrocarbon exploration. The efficient location and production of hydrocarbons from an underground formation requires a great deal of knowledge about the formation, ranging in scale from the size and shape of the rock's pore spaces to the size and shape of the entire reservoir. Schlumberger provides its clients with two types of information : measurements, called logs, of the petrophysical properties of the rock around the borehole, such as its electrical, acoustical, and radioactive characteristics; and in terpretations of these logs in terms of geophysical properties such as porosity and mineral composition. Since log interpretation is expert skill, the emergence of expert systems technology prompted Schlumberger's initial interest in Artificial Intelligence. Our first full- scale attempt at a commercial-quality expert system was the Dipmeter Advisor. Following these initial efforts, Schlumberger has expanded its Artificial Intelligence activities, and is now engaged in both basic and applied research in a wide variety of areas.