With its bright-yellow armored body, grippy tank-like treads, plow nose and water cannon, the Los Angeles Fire Department's latest piece of equipment looks more like a Star Wars sidekick than a firefighting assistant. But this mini robot tanker is an inferno buster that pack a powerful punch of water or foam and can go where firefighters otherwise can't. The LAFD on Tuesday became the first fire department in the nation to acquire the Robotics Systems 3, a droid on steroids.LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas said firefighters put their lives on the line when battling blazes. This year, 11 LAFD crew members were severely injured when a fireball engulfed four downtown buildings after a massive explosion that was ignited by hazardous materials.Now, firefighters can use RS3 as a safer alternative in battling potentially explosive blazes and it allows the department to get inside a burning building when humans could not dare enter safely. "I can afford to lose one of these wonderful machines, I cannot afford to lose a firefighter," Terrazas said, admiring the control pad that remotely operates the firefighting drone.On Tuesday morning, as flames engulfed a pair of industrial textile buildings in downtown L.A., firefighters …

A firefighting robot got its first major test Tuesday in Los Angeles when it was put to use for the first time in the United States to battle a major blaze. The Los Angeles Fire Department said the Thermite RS3 robot was supposed to have its official public introduction in the afternoon but got called into duty a few hours early due to a blaze downtown. "It had already gotten dirty at an early morning major emergency commercial structure fire that morning - proving its value from the start," the department said. The Thermite RS3, manufactured by Textron: Howe & Howe Technologies, is a compact robotic firefighting vehicle that features a low center of gravity and wide chassis. The Los Angeles Fire Department debuted the first robotic firefighting vehicle in the United States, putting it to use on its first day in service Tuesday.

With its bright-yellow armored body, grippy tank-like treads, plow nose and water cannon, the Los Angeles Fire Department's latest piece of equipment looks more like a Star Wars sidekick than a firefighting assistant. But this mini robot tanker is an inferno buster that pack a powerful punch of water or foam and can go where firefighters otherwise can't. The LAFD on Tuesday became the first fire department in the nation to acquire the Robotics Systems 3, a droid on steroids. LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas said firefighters put their lives on the line when battling blazes. This year, 11 LAFD crew members were severely injured when a fireball engulfed four downtown buildings after a massive explosion that was ignited by hazardous materials.

Artificial intelligence promises to streamline many industries and will play a big role in healthcare and bioscience research, two areas where Pasadena organizations are at the forefront nationwide. AI Healthcare is the subject of the Life Summit Panel at Caltech Thursday night, where some of the smartest minds in the industry will gather and discuss the possibilities of AI in the science fields. Nonprofit AI LA Community hosts the event. AI promises to play an important role to eliminate repetitive tasks, creating more precision with researching and analyzing data and generally freeing up smart minds to perform more critical tasks. "Pasadena is soon to be a powerful healthcare and biotech hub," said Todd Terrazas, executive director of AI LA Community.

The current investigations on hyper-heuristics design have sprung up in two different flavours: heuristics that choose heuristics and heuristics that generate heuristics. In the latter, the goal is to develop a problem-domain independent strategy to automatically generate a good performing heuristic for the problem at hand. This can be done, for example, by automatically selecting and combining different low-level heuristics into a problem specific and effective strategy. Hyper-heuristics raise the level of generality on automated problem solving by attempting to select and/or generate tailored heuristics for the problem at hand. Some approaches like genetic programming have been proposed for this. In this paper, we explore an elegant nature-inspired alternative based on self-assembly construction processes, in which structures emerge out of local interactions between autonomous components. This idea arises from previous works in which computational models of self-assembly were subject to evolutionary design in order to perform the automatic construction of user-defined structures. Then, the aim of this paper is to present a novel methodology for the automated design of heuristics by means of self-assembly.