director

Routine use of robotic lift trucks may not be far off.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with a team of engineers, have transformed a Toyota 8-Series lift truck into an autonomous bot capable of working alongside human supervisors using voice commands or hand gestures.

The 3,000-pound-capacity lift truck from Toyota Material Handling (TMHU) is capable of locating, lifting, moving, and placing supplies while traversing just about any type of terrain. It was demonstrated last month at an event hosted by the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee, in Virginia.

"Robotic forklifts have the potential to protect both military and civilian personnel working in high-risk environments, such as hazardous material storage facilities, said Brett Wood, president of TMHU.

The demo included a review of the robot's safety features, sensor capabilities, and human-robot interface.

The researchers and engineers developed a complex network of systems to enable the lift truck to navigate real-time conditions faced by lift truck operators (navigating obstacles and interacting with other moving vehicles, for example). To do this, they added a camera, sensors, laptops, servomotors, Wi-Fi, and a PDA.

"We chose the internal combustion Toyota lift truck because it can be operated outdoors on packed earth or gravel and because, with mini-lever control some of its functionality can be controlled electronically rather than solely mechanically," said MIT Professor Seth Teller, who headed the project.

The modified vehicle wirelessly exports video from its own point of view, so the human supervisor, even if hundreds of miles away, can see whatever is nearby (provided there is network connectivity between the lift truck and supervisor's tablet).

In September 2009, for example, the team demonstrated the lift truck operating autonomously at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., while under the supervision of an operator in Washington D.C.… Read more

Plenty of people outside of Apple have chimed in on Steve Jobs' failure to disclose the seriousness of his health problems in early 2009, but at least one of the company's board members felt so strongly about it he reportedly almost quit.

Apple director Jerry York, who died of a brain aneurysm last week, was at least one of the people privy to Jobs' condition who felt he should have been more upfront with shareholders and the public. A story in The Wall Street Journal Thursday, citing an interview with York last year, says that when he found out … Read more

LAS VEGAS--It's quickly becoming clear that one of the trends at CES 2010 is the prevalence of all-in-one media players and networked streamers. While we already got a taste of the Iomega ScreenPlay TV Link back in 2008, the company is debuting three new products that launch the device in a more ambitious direction. All of the products still get content to your TV screen, but now offer much more useful ways of doing so.

The first, the ScreenPlay Director HD Media Player, is directed at consumers who want the ability to get their content via a home network, … Read more

Apple's iPhone 3GS introduced video recording, trimming, and sharing by adding a higher quality camera and iPhone OS 3.0. These new features introduced a simple way to edit videos, but they won't be replacing iMovie on the Mac--the phone's video-editing capabilities are far too simple, since all you can do is simple trimming and no special effects.

ReelDirector (iTunes link), a new app for the iPhone 3GS by Nexvio, attempts to fill out the iPhone's video editing toolbox by adding advanced video editing features. It sells for $7.99, works best with iPhone OS 3.… Read more

Two years after selling his software company to Hewlett-Packard, Marc Andreessen has joined the PC giant's board of directors.

HP announced the appointment, effective immediately, on Thursday. In a statement, HP's chairman and CEO Mark Hurd described Andreessen as "a software pioneer whose leadership has helped shape the Internet...Marc's entrepreneurial background and industry expertise will be a welcome addition to the HP board of directors."

Andreessen and HP's relationship goes back several years, culminating with HP's purchase of Opsware for $1.6 billion in 2007. Since then, Andreessen, best known as the … Read more

The Excalibur, a new turbine-electric hybrid propelled VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) unmanned attack drone, has successfully completed another test flight after taking on two new onboard computers last week.

Developed by Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. for the U.S. Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate and the Office of Naval Research, the Excalibur is another radical robo-craft concept vying to fill the military's burgeoning demand for specialized UAVs.

The demonstrator model, weighing in at 700 pounds, can hit 520 mph, making it one of the fastest drones around, according to the Aurora. The nearly autonomous flight control system allows … Read more

The X-51A WaveRider is one step closer to its inaugural test flight later this year, now that airmen at Edwards Air Force Base have successfully "mated" the scramjet-propelled vehicle to a B-52 Stratofortress.

In December, an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 is scheduled to papoose the X-51A to 50,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean before cutting it loose. At that point, a solid rocket booster from an ATACMS missile will fire up, accelerating the X-51 to about Mach 4.5. That's when the supersonic combustion ramjet kicks in, pushing the WaveRider to more than Mach … Read more

On Tuesday, Apple's board of directors will gather to take up the question of who will replace Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Schmidt recently left Apple's board after three years, citing concerns that Apple and his own company's businesses were beginning to overlap too much. Both are players in the mobile phone market (Google's Android operating system competes with Apple's iPhone) and soon will compete in desktop operating systems, when Google releases its Chrome OS.

The board could bring in a new director from the outside, but … Read more

Google plans to start paying non-employee directors on its board in cash, just after tossing them a hefty restricted stock award.

In a filing with the SEC Friday, Google revealed that it will be breaking with tradition by deciding to pay directors not employed by the company $75,000 a year in cash and $350,000 a year in restricted stock grants. In addition, those non-employee board members (John Doerr, John Hennessey, Arthur Levinson, Paul Otellini, Ram Shriram, Ann Mather, and Shirley Tilghman) will also receive a one-time stock award worth $500,000, though Mather and Tilghman will have to … Read more