Tag Archives: autonomous systems

The French Supermarket chain FranPrix is testing robot shopping delivery in the XIII Arrondissement in Paris. Their plans are to start running the test first  with three robots in one of their stores that will be helping people with some movement impairment (hence having problems in moving stuff from the …

Ever walked in an orchard and, feeling a bit like Adam, picked up a nice apple? What could be easier than that. You see the tree, all the nice apples hanging around, you just need to choose the one looking nicer, and probably tastier , stretch your arm and you …

The drone landscape is really expanding like the Big Bang: in just a few years the drone ecosystem is now seeing more than a thousands companies (see the infographics in the second figure of this post. Yes, I know, it is impossible to read but you can get a bigger, …

Walmart announced the hiring of 360 janitors for its stores in US. This makes the news because the janitors are not human beings, rather robots endowed with artificial intelligence. Indeed, these will be smart robots. They will sweep the floor and will also collect data as they move along the …

For those of you, as old as I am, the name HAL rings a bell. It is now 50 years since the “2001: A space Odyssey”, the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick. At that time it made quite an impression, a spaceship with an AI support, HAL, able to talk …

It is so easy for us to look around, see what is out there  and make sense out of it. This happens every single moment, and we are able to make sense also of things we are seeing for the very first time (well, 99.99% of the time!). Our brain …

3D printing is able to manufacture (additive manufacturing) from tiny parts to big turbine fan and even be able to print a whole house. Whatever is printed, however, has be be “smaller” than the printer. This has been an accepted fact so far. Now, however, a research team at Nanyang …

Today, inspecting an airplane engine is a complicated endeavour. Before any take off engines are inspected on the outside, looking for tell tale signs of problems. It is not possible, however, to look inside. This is done when a major check is scheduled. To look inside several parts of the …

In a city populated “only” by self driving vehicles (unlikely to happen before 2050 and then one should consider motorcycles, bikes, pedestrians…) red lights are no longer needed. Vehicles may negotiate with one another the right of way or be assigned a slot at intersection they have to take. As …

Car manufacturers have already started to wonder how to re-invent themselves at a time when the value perception of their customers will be significantly different and new players might be better placed to offer the new values sought by customers. The shrinking of the market for vehicles (with an expected …