Chinese Robot Just Kept Walking…and Walking…and Walking

http://middleeastvideo.com/video.php?video=jUMwSsgHMd

 
A four-legged robot with serious athletic endurance recently walked its way right into the history books.
The sure-footed robot hiked 83.28 miles (134.03 km) to break the world record for the farthest distance traveled by a quadruped robot, Guinness World Records reported Monday (Nov. 2). Researchers from Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China built the resilient little bot, which kind of looks like a shoebox on stilts.
The aptly named Xingzhe No. 1 robot (xingzhe means "walker" in Chinese) has four articulated, or jointed, legs and is guided by a computer. While the robot's endurance is impressive, Xingzhe isn't known for its speed. It took the robot 54 hours and 34 minutes (that's more than two days) to complete the record-breaking journey before its battery died.
The robot walked around the same 104.32-yard (95.39 meters) indoor track 1,405 times to earn its title. The previous world record holder for farthest distance covered by a four-legged bot was Ranger Robot, developed by researchers at Cornell University. Ranger Robot walked just 40.5 miles (65.18 km) to earn its world title back in 2011.
Although Xingzhe No. 1 has gained notoriety for being such a persistent pedestrian, the real impetus for creating the bot was to study the electrical efficiency of such machines, said Li Qingdu, a robotics professor at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who led the research team that developed Xingzhe. Qingdu told the Guinness World Records that he and his colleagues also aimed to increase the endurance and durability of the remotely controlled bots to make them more useful in real-life situations. The ultimate goal, he said, is to have a bot like Xingzhe perform tasks that might be dangerous for humans.
Qingdu and his team aren't alone in their quest to design robots that can perform human tasks. In June, roboticists from around the world met in California to participate in the Robotics Challenge Finals, a competition hosted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Like Xingzhe, the two-legged bots that competed in the DARPA finals were designed to complete tasks that might be dangerous for people. The bots opened doors, climbed over walls and even drove around in cars to simulate things first responders might need to do after natural or man-made disasters.
But the DARPA bots have yet to earn a Guinness World Record, an honor that Xingzhe shares with a number of other smart machines. There's CUBESTORMER 3, a robot from the United Kingdom that holds the record for fastest bot to solve a Rubik's Cube (it takes the bot a little more than 3 minutes). And while Xingzhe might be the farthest walking robot, a bot from Germany holds the record for largest walking robot (it's more than 51 feet, or 15.5 meters, tall).

The Future of Drones: Uncertain, Promising and Pretty Awesome

http://middleeastvideo.com/video.php?video=B7UW4xin53



When filmmaker George Lucas popularized droids — worker robots designed to tend to humanity's every need — in the 1977 movie "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope," he seemed like a sci-fi visionary. But fast-forward nearly 40 years, and the idea of flying surveillance cameras, robotic companions and even unmanned aircraft carrying supplies around the planet is swiftly becoming mainstream.
The first drone delivery in the United States took place this past summer, marking an important milestone in the development of the new technology. But even though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made headlines in 2013 when he unveiled the company's vision for using delivery drones, the online retail giant was not the one to carry out the first-ever delivery flight.
Instead, Australian startup Flirtey, in partnership with Virginia Tech and NASA, used a drone to carry 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of medical supplies from an airfield in Virginia to a remote clinic about a mile away over three 3-minute flights. While the demonstration was a landmark moment for drone technology and policy, it was a far cry from Amazon's vision of a fleet of drones delivering online purchases to customers' doorsteps within 30 minutes.
Still, Amazon is committed to making its drone delivery program, dubbed Prime Air, a reality. In April, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the company permission to begin testing its drones. But Amazon isn't the only tech giant doubling down on drone technology.
In July, Facebook revealed that it had completed a full-size version of its solar-powered Aquila drone, which is now ready for testing in the United Kingdom. The huge robotic flier, which has the same wingspan as a Boeing 737 jetliner, is designed to circle around in the stratosphere (the layer of Earth's atmosphere located between 6 and 30 miles, or 10 to 48 kilometers, above the planet's surface)and use lasers to beam Internet access to the most remote corners of the world.
A similar drone developed by Google crashed during a test run in New Mexico in May, but the company is also developing a delivery service, known as Project Wing, to compete with Amazon's Prime Air.

While these developments grab headlines, they tend to overshadow the real progress being made in the drone industry, experts say. Many companies are leveraging drones' ability to capture high-resolution imagery using tech ranging from regular cameras to laser scanners, leading the FAA to predict that drones will spawn a $90 billion industry within a decade.
Drones could help farmers prioritize where to apply fertilizer. They also could help energy companies monitor their infrastructure. Drones could even enable emergency response teams to quickly map the extent of damage after natural disasters. [Photos from Above: 8 Cool Camera-Carrying Drones]
"There's been even more explosive growth than I expected," said Dan Kara, practice director for robotics at the technology consulting firm ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York. And because the technology is still in its infancy, Kara said, the potential is limitless. "There will be applications that will just come over the wall," he told Live Science. "If you think of these things as basically just airborne mobile sensors, all kinds of uses open up."


But not everyone is satisfied with these incremental steps. Michael Drobac, executive director of the industry-backed Small UAV Coalition, said the proposals are less restrictive than anticipated, but only because expectations for how the FAA would handle the emerging tech were so low. He said he credits Congress with "putting the fire under" the FAA. However, without allowances for flying these UAS beyond visual line of sight, and without separate rules for safer micro-UAS that weigh less than 4.4 lbs. (2 kg), the industry will remain hamstrung, he noted.
"Personally, I am very disheartened, because it doesn't make any sense that the biggest problem companies face are arbitrary and capricious rules," Drobac told Live Science.
A spokesman for the FAA denied that pressure from Congress had any impact on the agency, and pointed out that promoting commercial drone use is not its mandate. "Our primary goal in integrating UAS into the airspace is to maintain today's ultra-high level of safety," he said. He added that separate micro-UAS rules could eventually make it into the final regulations, as the agency asked for input on the proposed framework announced in February.
The FAA's detractors point out that some other countries, such as Canada and Switzerland, have more relaxed regulatory environments. But with more than 19,000 airports; 600 air traffic control facilities; and far more general aviation concerns to oversee, U.S. airspace is arguably the most complex in the world. "The FAA has been in the business of integrating new technology into U.S. airspace for 50 years," the spokesman said. "I have no doubt we will be able to do the same with UAS, but it has to be done in a safe and incremental way."

Is the government tinkering with global warming data?

The hottest topic in climate research is the observation that global average surface temperature, as well as satellite observations of temperatures in the atmosphere, has shown little or no warming during the 21st century.
Now the political climate is heating up over the same issue. Heated words began circulating last summer, when a team of government scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), led by Thomas Karl, published a paper in Science titled “Possible Artifacts Of Data Biases In The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus.” 
The press release from NOAA included this statement from Karl, who is head of the National Centers for Environmental Information:   “Adding in the last two years of global surface temperature data and other improvements in the quality of the observed record provide evidence that contradict the notion of a hiatus in recent global warming trends.”
Media headlines quickly touted the Karl conclusion that science now shows the hiatus in warming never existed.
The significance of the hiatus is that it contradicted the 2007 assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which projected a rate of warming of 0.2^oC per decade in the early part of the 21st century.  The discrepancy between the climate models and the observations raised serious questions about the climate models.
Scientists on both sides of the debate have been critical of Karl’s paper and temperature adjustments made in the new data set, particularly the ocean data analysis.
Some said that adjusting reliable ocean surface buoy data upwards to match much less reliable data from engine intake channels in ships causes an artificial upward trend in the readings.
Another recent paper used a different NOAA ocean surface temperature data set to find that since 2003 the global average ocean surface temperature has been rising at a rate that is an order of magnitude smaller than the rate of increase reported in Karl’s paper.
Clearly, scientists have much work to do to better understand the problems with historical ocean temperature data, adjust the biases among different types of measurements, and understand the differences among different data sets.
But the hiatus fuss is also telling us about the politicization of climate science.
The surface temperature data set plays a central role in the political debate over climate change. In his 2015  State of the Union address, President Obama declared: “2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record.”
This statement followed a joint press release from NOAA’s Karl and Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that said the same thing. The release was widely criticized for failing to point out that 2014 was in a statistical tie with several other recent years.
NOAA’s press release in June for Karl’s paper on the hiatus also appeared just before a big event: EPA was getting ready to issue its very controversial Clean Power Plan. And the politics are heating up even more with the approach of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris at the end of this month.
Last month, the House Science Committee, chaired by Lamar Smith (R-Texas), subpoenaed NOAA for data and communications relating to Karl’s article.  NOAA is refusing to give up the documents, citing confidentiality concerns and the integrity of the scientific process.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex) called the request “a serious misuse of Congressional oversight powers.”
Is the subpoena harassment or appropriate constitutional oversight?
There are two legitimate concerns here.
The first is data quality, an issue that needs to be resolved owing to the central role that this data set is playing in U.S. climate policy.
The second issue is arguably more worrisome and difficult to uncover: a potential alliance between NOAA scientists and Obama administration officials that might be biasing and spinning climate science to support a political agenda.
Rep. Smith stated: “The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made.”
The House Committee’s investigation should provide insight into the following questions that deserve answers.
To what extent did internal discussions occur about the more questionable choices made in adjusting the ocean temperature data?
Was any concern raised about the discrepancies of the new ocean temperature data set and NOAA’s other ocean temperature data set (OISST) that shows no warming since 2003?
Were any Obama administration officials communicating with NOAA about these statements prior to issuing press releases?
Was the release of the land and ocean temperature data sets, which were documented in papers previously published, delayed to follow Karl’s June press release?
Earlier this year, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., initiated an investigation into possible industry funding of scientists (including myself) who had recently provided Congressional testimony for the Republicans.
While potentially undisclosed industrial funding of research is a legitimate concern, climate science research funding from government is many orders of magnitude larger than industrial funding of such work.
If the House Science Committee can work to minimize the political influence on government-funded research, and also help to resolve legitimate scientific issues, it will have done both science and the policies that depend on science a big favor.