The Innovation Report
Michigan Launches Mobility Office
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer formalized the launch of an Office of Future Mobility and Electrification (OFME) last week to support transportation innovation efforts already underway in cities across the state. Chief Mobility Officer Trevor Pawl told Smart...
Study: Few Health Impacts from 5G
But because 5G technology is so new, little is known about the potential health effects from its radiofrequency radiation, which is higher than the current industry standard 4G. The Oregon State study begins to change that. "Based on our study, we don't think 5G...
Pentagon AI Center Focuses on Joint Operations
The Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts. “As we have...
Autonomous Robot Scientist Chooses Its Own Experiments
Robots are learning to do the jobs of human factory workers, bus drivers, burger flippers, butlers, and healthcare workers, among many others – and now, they may be coming for scientists as well. Engineers at the University of Liverpool have...
Robotic Lab Assistant 1,000 Times Faster at Research
Researchers have developed what they say is a breakthrough robotic lab assistant, able to move around a laboratory and conduct scientific experiments just like a human. The machine, designed by scientists from the UK’s University of Liverpool, is far from fully...
Robots: Just What the Doctor Ordered in Time of Social Distancing
As the coronavirus pandemic rewrites the rules of human interaction, it also has inspired new thinking about how robots and other machines might step in. The stuff of the bot world — early factory-line automation up to today's artificial intelligence — has been a...
Malleable Structure Makes Robot Arm More Versatile
The majority of robot arms are built out of some combination of long straight tubes and actuated joints. This isn’t surprising, since our limbs are built the same way, which was a clever and efficient bit of design. By adding more tubes and joints (or degrees of...
AI Driving New Bluetooth Headset Choices
Companies like Sennheiser, and now its joint-venture spinoff EPOS, have been working on AI machine learning to improve speech clarity using microphones that may not even be anywhere near the user’s mouth. And yet the sound produced by this new breed of headset makes...
iRocket Lands Contract with U.S. Air Force to Develop Autonomous Rockets
New York-based startup iRocket has landed a contract award from the U.S. Air Force to develop and build its fully autonomous small payload rockets, which the company says will be able to launch and propulsively land both its first and second stages, with the potential...
Tesla: Close to Fully Autonomous Car
Tesla founder Elon Musk said Thursday that the world's recently crowned most valuable auto company could achieve a fully autonomous car by the end of 2020. Musk, who has made premature predictions about the advent of completely autonomous cars before, offered the...
