Drone deliveries ready to soar in Japan but lingering issues likely to keep post office in business
A drone carrying a package sails through the air, touching down to make a delivery right on a customer's doorstep. Amazon.com Inc. wowed the world in 2013 with a video purporting to show what the future of the delivery industry would look like. But are we any closer to that now? ...
Pilot schools cash in as drone business takes off in Japan
As Japan positions itself to take advantage of the growing trend in drones, another sector is popping up in the ...
From office watcher to farm protector and crop duster, unmanned aircraft playing unusual roles
At exactly 5 p.m. one recent Friday at Taisei Co., a flying drone alerted workers at the building maintenance firm ...
YouTube will launch a music streaming service next week, it said Thursday, as it looks to use its popular internet video brand to tap the growing market for paid music streaming. YouTube Music, which will offer both ad-supported and $9.99-per-month versions, will compete directly with ...
Firm takes website offline after learning flaw exposes real-time locations of U.S. cellphones
A security researcher says a website flaw at a U.S. company could have allowed anyone to pinpoint the location of nearly any cellphone in the United States. The lapse at LocationSmart, a company that gathers real-time data on cellular wireless devices, is the latest to ...
Student's idea for app that pulls up athlete profiles on demand gets nod from Tokyo organizers
A student's idea for making a facial-recognition app for smartphones that can provide speedy access to the profiles of Olympic athletes who appear on TV has drawn interest from the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee, which hopes it can meet the changing needs of modern ...
Tesla with Autopilot feature slams into truck stopped at red light
A Tesla sedan with a semi-autonomous Autopilot feature has rear-ended a fire department truck at 60 mph (97 kph) apparently without braking before impact, but police say it is unknown if the Autopilot feature was engaged. The cause of the Friday evening crash, involving a ...
SoftBank-owned Boston Dynamics prepares to unleash its dog-like robot
A robotics company owned by SoftBank Corp. and known for its widely shared videos of nimble, legged robots opening doors or walking through rough terrain is preparing to sell some after more than a quarter century of research. U.S.-based Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert said ...
Italian researchers on Thursday unveiled a new robotic hand they say allows users to grip objects more naturally and features a design that will lower the price significantly. The Hennes robotic hand has a simpler mechanical design compared with other such myoelectric prosthetics — which ...
Artificial intelligence has a new challenge: whether and how to alert people who may not know they are talking to a robot. Tuesday, Google showed off a computer assistant that makes convincingly human-sounding phone calls, at least in its prerecorded demonstration. But the real people ...
Self-navigating AI learns to take shortcuts, outperforms human expert: study
A computer program modeled on the human brain has learned to navigate a virtual maze and take shortcuts, outperforming a flesh-and-blood expert, its developers said Wednesday. While artificial intelligence programs have recently made great strides in imitating human brain processing — in everything from recognizing ...
'Innovation zone' sites picked for program aimed at expanding drone flights
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao on Wednesday announced 10 sites for a test program aimed at increasing the use of unmanned aircraft for projects that range from monitoring crops and oil pipelines in North Dakota to applying mosquito-killing treatments in Florida and package ...
Google put the spotlight on its artificial intelligence smarts at its annual developers conference Tuesday, where it announced new features and services imbued with machine learning. The company's digital concierge, known only as the Google Assistant, is gaining new — if experimental — abilities to ...
