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https://youtube.com/watch?v=BlBOVF9GnM8

Last year saw a historic first: an exercise in which an unmanned vehicle provided live covering fire for American troops.

In a historic first, the Army conducted a live fire exercise with a remote-controlled ground combat vehicle armed with a .50-caliber machine gun. It plans to conduct more exercises with more heavily armed ground robots within the next couple of years.

The demonstration was part of the annual Northern Strike exercise, which took place last July and August at Michigan’s Camp Grayling. Primarily geared toward reserve units, this year’s event debuted an unmanned, heavily armed M113 armored personnel carrier. The driver and the weapons operator followed behind in a slightly larger M577 command post vehicle.

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Yandex. Taxi self-driving car safely navigates the streets of Moscow after a recent snowstorm managing interactions with traffic, pedestrians, parked vehicles and other road hazards on snowy streets.

Беспилотный автомобиль Яндекс.Такси уверенно чувствует себя на дорогах Москвы после прошедшего снегопада. Посмотрите, как он ведёт себя не в условиях полигона, а на настоящих улицах с другими машинами, знаками дорожного движения, пешеходами и сугробами.

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Image: Stratolaunch Billionaires are taking to space the way wistful young men take to the sea in 19th Century novels. Last week, Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster at the astroid belt using the world’s most powerful rocket currently in operation. Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen also has a big plan (and a big plane) for going to space. In December of last year, the Stratolaunch performed its first taxi at the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, CA. While that doesn’t seem terribly exciting, it’s the first step to getting the Stratolaunch, the world’s largest plane eve…

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SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon’s planned test of its own delivery service from merchants’ warehouses to its fulfillment centers is the first step in a long-term strategy that could change how packages make the final journey to your door, possibly resulting in lower prices and faster shipping times for consumers.

The experiment is expected to launch sometime later this year in the Los Angeles area with a handful of companies that sell goods on Amazon’s site, sources familiar with the project who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY.

The proposed service would allow third party sellers — whose goods make up the majority of those sold on Amazon — to have an Amazon truck come to their warehouse, pick up pallets of packages and take them to an Amazon fulfillment center where they would be inserted into Amazon’s formidable delivery system. Right now they have to ship them to Amazon centers themselves.

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Elon Musk has agreed to build what is being hailed the “world’s largest virtual power plant”, by rolling out solar panels and Tesla batteries to 50,000 homes in South Australia. The scheme, which will be completed over the next four years, will see any excess energy stored in each battery fed back into the grid to provide power to the rest of the state whenever required. The South Australian government claims participating households will generate a total of 250MW of electricity – about half as much energy produced by a typical coal-fired power station. Read more — Elon Musk about to launch…

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Auto manufacturers, technology companies, road safety advocates and policy makers will attend a March 1 conference over potential government actions that could speed the rollout of autonomous cars, the U.S. Transportation Department said on Friday.

Last month, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the Trump administration plans to unveil revised self-driving car guidelines this summer as the government sets out to rewrite regulations that pose legal barriers to robot vehicles.

Next month’s “summit” is to help “identify priority federal and non-federal activities that can accelerate the safe rollout” of autonomous vehicles, the department said. It will also be open to the public.

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