Hasta La Gadget!

Everyone’s talking about the coffee cup and water bottle, but fans are having a hard time dismissing this mistake.

It hasn’t even been two full weeks since Google’s 3a and 3a XL were released to the public and some users are already reporting phone-breaking bugs. According to users on a number of forums like Reddit and Google support pages, the new handsets suffe…

There’s great potential in using both drones and ground-based robots for situations like disaster response, but generally these platforms either fly or creep along the ground. Not the “Flying STAR,” which does both quite well, and through a mechanism so clever and simple you’ll wish you’d thought of it.

Conceived by researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, the “flying sprawl-tuned autonomous robot” is based on the elementary observation that both rotors and wheels spin. So why shouldn’t a vehicle have both?

Well, there are lots of good reasons why it’s difficult to create such a hybrid, but the team, led by David Zarrouk, overcame them with the help of today’s high-powered, lightweight drone components. The result is a robot that can easily fly when it needs to, then land softly and, by tilting the rotor arms downwards, direct that same motive force into four wheels.

Of course you could have a drone that simply has a couple of wheels on the bottom that let it roll along. But this improves on that idea in several ways. In the first place, it’s mechanically more efficient because the same motor drives the rotors and wheels at the same time — though when rolling, the RPMs are of course considerably lower. But the rotating arms also give the robot a flexible stance, large wheelbase and high clearance that make it much more capable on rough terrain.

You can watch FSTAR fly, roll, transform, flatten and so on in the following video, prepared for presentation at the IEEE International Convention on Robotics and Automation in Montreal:

The ability to roll along at up to 8 feet per second using comparatively little energy, while also being able to leap over obstacles, scale stairs or simply ascend and fly to a new location, give FSTAR considerable adaptability.

“We plan to develop larger and smaller versions to expand this family of sprawling robots for different applications, as well as algorithms that will help exploit speed and cost of transport for these flying/driving robots,” said Zarrouk in a press release.

Obviously at present this is a mere prototype, and will need further work to bring it to a state where it could be useful for rescue teams, commercial operations and the military.

General Motors announced today that most of its global models will be capable of receiving over-the-air software updates by 2023. The manufacturer is deploying new electrical systems for its vehicles which are designed to securely transmit heavy data and deliver firmware downloads from the cloud.

This just goes to show that GM still has a ways to go before it can catch up with Tesla which has long used smartphone-style over-the-air updates to release new software features for its vehicles. This functionality enables Tesla to quickly release these features to customers without having to require them to bring their car into a dealership for a software upgrade.

Tesla is also able to use this technology to release updates that improve the safety of its vehicles. Just last week, the company released a software update which promises improved battery management following reports of two Model S units catching fire for no apparent reason.

General Motors has addressed its lack of functionality in this regard, saying that matching Tesla’s use of OTA updates will require new electrical systems for its vehicles in addition to robust cybersecurity measures to ensure that the vehicles don’t become a target for hackers.

The company hasn’t said previously which systems and features it may be able to upgrade with these firmware updates but does say that this “enables the adoption of functionality upgrades throughout the lifespan of the vehicle.”

Most New GM Vehicles To Get Over-The-Air Updates By 2023 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

NASA has revealed the spacecraft that the new Mars rover will use to travel to the red planet in 2020, as the US space agency continues to pave the way for an eventual manned mission. Mars 2020 will see a brand new rover set loose on the surface of the planet, complete with a toolkit of all-new instrumentation to do … Continue reading