Illustration: Boring Company Advertisement Editor’s Picks On Thursday, the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, on behalf of the City of Chicago, announced that it was awarding Elon Musk’s Boring Company a contract to build a rapid-transit link between O’Hare Airport and downtown. The trip currently takes about 40 minutes on public transportation; the Boring Company aims to… Continue reading Elon Musk’s Boring Company Wins Chicago High-Speed Transit Contract
Author: IEEE_Spectrum
Waymo Filings Give New Details on Its Driverless Taxis
Image: Waymo Advertisement Editor’s Picks Waymo CEO John Krafcik announced last week that the company would be launching a driverless taxi service in Phoenix later this year. An application Waymo filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) for driverless testing, obtained by IEEE Spectrum using public record laws, reveals more about how that… Continue reading Waymo Filings Give New Details on Its Driverless Taxis
Drive.ai Launches Robot Car Pilot in Texas With a Focus on Humans
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum Advertisement Editor’s Picks Self-driving vehicle startup Drive.ai has only been around since 2015, but has moved aggressively toward getting autonomous cars out into the world to do useful things safely and efficiently. Drive struck a partnership with Lyft last September to test its technology with the ride-sharing service in San Francisco,… Continue reading Drive.ai Launches Robot Car Pilot in Texas With a Focus on Humans
Self-Driving Cars Won’t Need Accurate Digital Maps, MIT Experts Say
Image: MIT CSAIL Advertisement Editor’s Picks One of the truisms of the self-driving car business is that you can’t begin to function properly without super-detailed, constantly updated digital maps that show buildings, trees, and other features. That might seem no problem at all if you’re a Google spinoff called Waymo. After all, your corporate parent… Continue reading Self-Driving Cars Won’t Need Accurate Digital Maps, MIT Experts Say
Inside TickTock’s Consumer Robot Product Explorations
Image: Ryan Hickman/TickTock Advertisement Editor’s Picks This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. We started TickTock in March 2017, knowing that robotics was about to have a breakthrough, and it was going to start with mobility.… Continue reading Inside TickTock’s Consumer Robot Product Explorations
Creating Driving Tests for Self-Driving Cars
Illustration: Jude Buffum At a test track east of Gothenburg, Sweden, people are ushered into autonomous vehicles for a test drive. But there’s a twist: The vehicles aren’t actually autonomous—there’s a hidden driver in the back—and the people are participating in an experiment to discover how they’ll behave when the car is chauffeuring them around. At Zenuity—a… Continue reading Creating Driving Tests for Self-Driving Cars
Nuro Raises $92 Million for Adorable Autonomous Delivery Vehicles
Somewhere between a delivery truck and a sidewalk robot, Nuro’s robotic vehicles want to deliver your groceries Photo: Nuro It seems like we’ve gotten to the point with self-driving vehicles where it’s no longer enough to “just” be developing a car that could at some point be used as an autonomous rideshare vehicle. That space… Continue reading Nuro Raises $92 Million for Adorable Autonomous Delivery Vehicles
CES 2018: Chinese Startup Byton Unveils $45,000 Gadget-Packed Electric SUV
The ghost of Faraday Future hovered over the glitzy launch of Byton’s electric, autonomous SUV at CES on Sunday. In 2017, Faraday Future’s billionaire boss Jia Yueting watched in horror as his supposedly self-driving FF91 car failed to park itself at its unveiling. That was just the start of a terrible year that saw Faraday… Continue reading CES 2018: Chinese Startup Byton Unveils $45,000 Gadget-Packed Electric SUV
Sprawling Wheel Leg Robot Crawls and Climbs
Photo: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev We’re always impressed by the way David Zarrouk (a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev by way of UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab) manages to extract a ton of functionality from the absolute minimum of hardware in his robots. In the past, we’ve seen clever designs like a… Continue reading Sprawling Wheel Leg Robot Crawls and Climbs
Chip Hall of Fame: RCA CDP 1802
Photo: Paul Rautakorpi/Wikipedia CDP 1802 Manufacturer: RCA Category: Processors Year: 1976 If the RCA Corp. had made different decisions in the 1970s, the name Joe Weisbecker could be as revered as Steve Wozniak’s is today. Weisbecker was the architect of the RCA CDP 1802 microprocessor, also known as the Cosmac. Part of what made the 1802 special… Continue reading Chip Hall of Fame: RCA CDP 1802