Tokyo, Aug. 1 (Jiji Press)—Tokyo-based startup A.L.I. Technologies Inc. plans to start accepting reservations for its “hover bike” flying motorcycle from October, company officials said Thursday.
The startup company, which mainly develops small unmanned aerial vehicles, will unveil the product at the Tokyo Motor Show in autumn.
It aims to sell the product mainly to wealthy foreigners, by touting its cutting-edge technologies.
With more electric cars on the road and the negative environmental impact of traditional vehicle emissions on the forefront of many minds, some may struggle with their choice to drive a car with a standard combustion engine.
But what if you could just “convert” your car into an electric one?
French startup Transition-One says it can do it for only $9,500 — in fact, in France, you also get a subsidy for a converted car so it actually only works out to around $5,600.
The world’s largest all-electric ferry completed its first voyage with passengers last week in Denmark.
The Ellen sailed between the southern Danish ports of Fynshav to Soby, on the island of Aero.
The e-ferry is capable of carrying 30 vehicles and 200 passengers and is powered by a battery “with an unprecedented capacity” of 4.3MWh, according to Swiss battery maker Lechanché which provided the system.
► Second Lagonda concept ► All-electric, All-Terrain ► Revealed in full at Geneva
After kickstarting the Lagonda brand with the slick Vision Concept at the 2018 Geneva motor show, Aston Martin has returned to the 2019 Geneva motor show with an evolution of this idea called the All-Terrain Concept.
As you can probably guess from the name this new concept stands taller than last year’s Vision Concept, but retains the broad design strokes of its lower, svelte sibling. Not to mention its all-electric drivetrain.
WASHINGTON — If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly, you know that insects react to movement extremely quickly. A newly created biologically inspired compound eye is helping scientists understand how insects use their compound eyes to sense an object and its trajectory with such speed. The compound eye could also be used with a camera to create 3D location systems for robots, self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles.
In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, researchers from Tianjin University in China report their new bio-inspired compound eye, which not only looks like that of an insect but also works like its natural counterpart. Compound eyes consist of hundreds to thousands of repeating units known as ommatidia that each act as a separate visual receptor.
“Imitating the vision system of insects has led us to believe that they might detect the trajectory of an object based on the light intensity coming from that object rather than using precise images like human vision,” said Le Song, a member of the research team. “This motion-detection method requires less information, allowing the insect to quickly react to a threat.”
This is already happening on a small testing scale; the Big roll out is coming in 4 or 5 years.
UPS has been delivering a new kind of automated mail — and it’s not via email.
The parcel delivery company has revealed a collaboration with TuSimple. In a statement, they said that, since May, the autonomous truck company has been carrying UPS cargo on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.
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Samsung will release a smartphone powered by new graphene battery technology that can fully charge in under 30 minutes in 2020, or possibly 2021. This will be three to five times faster than today’s lithium-ion batteries which take about 90 minutes to charge.
In 2017, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) announced they had developed a “graphene ball,” a unique battery material that enables a 45% increase in capacity, and five times faster-charging speeds than standard lithium-ion batteries. The breakthrough provides promise for the next generation secondary battery market, particularly related to mobile devices and electric vehicles. In its research, SAIT collaborated closely with Samsung SDI as well as a team from Seoul National University’s School of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
A small company in Wales is reinventing clean motoring with a handmade ecological car, the Rasa, powered by fuel cells and emits water rather than CO2.
In the U.S., air travel accounts for about a third of all Co2 emissions. A startup called ZeroAvia wants to clean things up in a big way.
ZeroAvia recently emerged from stealth with a zero-emission powertrain for small aircraft. It’s electric, but there are no big, bulky batteries involved. ZeroAvia opted for compressed hydrogen instead.
Why not use batteries? Compressed hydrogen is about four times as energy-dense as today’s best batteries. Founder, physicist and pilot Valery Miftakhov told FastCompany “actually getting a sizable aircraft in the air for a reasonable amount of time will be quite difficult with batteries.” That’s something he believes isn’t likely to change in the near future.
Before an A.I. system can learn, someone has to label the data supplied to it. Humans, for example, must pinpoint the polyps. The work is vital to the creation of artificial intelligence like self-driving cars, surveillance systems and automated health care.
Artificial intelligence is being taught by thousands of office workers around the world. It is not exactly futuristic work.
At iMerit offices in Kolkata, India, employees label images that are used to teach artificial intelligence systems. Credit Credit Rebecca Conway for The New York Times.
