A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Architects have added to a mechanical framework that can develop and enhance its execution. A robot arm manufactures "babies" that improve at moving with no human mediation. A definitive point of the exploration venture is to create robots that adjust to their environment. The work by groups in Cambridge and Zurich has been distributed in the Journal PLOS One. It appears like a plot from a sci-fi film: a robot that assembles different robots - every one superior to the past era. In any case, that is the thing that analysts in Cambridge and Zurich have done.
In any case, those worried about machines assuming control over the world shouldn't stress, at any rate not yet. At this stage the "infant robots" comprise of plastic shapes with an engine inside. These are assembled by a "mother" robot arm which sticks them together in diverse designs. Although the set up is simple the system itself is ingenious. The mother robot assesses how far its babies are able to move, and with no human intervention, improves the design so that the next one it builds can move further.
The mother robot built ten generations of children. The final version moved twice the distance of the first before its power ran out.According to Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge University, who led the research with colleagues at ETH University in Zurich, one aim is to gain new insights into how living things evolve.
"One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about
- we're using robotics to explore this mystery," he told. "We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they're typically designed for mass production instead of mass customisation, but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity." Another aim is to develop robots that can improve and adapt to new situations, according to Andre Rosendo - who also worked on the project.
"You can imagine cars being built in factories and the robot looking for defects in the car and fixing them by itself," he said. "And robots used in agriculture could try out slightly different ways of harvesting crops to see if they can improve yield." Dr Iidya told me that he came into robotics because he was disappointed that the robots he saw in real life were not as good as the ones he saw in science fiction films such as Star Wars and Star Trek. His aim was to change that and his approach was to draw lessons from the natural world to improve the efficiency and flexibility of traditional robotic systems.
As to whether we'd ever see robots like those in the sci-fi films that inspired him, he said: "We're not there yet, but sure, why not, maybe in about 30 years."
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