The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) manages a budget of $7.5 billion to discover, manufacture, and integrate warfighting capabilities and technologies for the U.S. Air Force and Space Force. DARPA had a budget of $4.1 billion in 2023. AFRL is close to double the budget of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). AFRL RESEARCH AREA …
Three US soldiers were killed and dozen injured by a drone attack at Tower 22 base in Jordan. There have been other attacks on US bases in the region, but before Sunday there were no fatalities, according to the US military. There have been a total of over 160 attack on US bases and Navy …
Nextbigfuture has written about the drone attack and counter drone jamming defenses used in the Ukraine-Russia War. There is a new New Scientist article (behind a Paywall) talking about “What Does Ukraine’s Million Drone Army mean for the Future of War?” The First Person Drones are a delivery method for grenades and rocket propelled grenades …
Humanoid bot company Figure announces blockbuster partnership with BMW following amazing demo of bot autonomy. Brett Adcock is CEO and founder of Figure, an AI Robotics company developing autonomous general purpose humanoid robots. Figure will be fully hardware ready (actuators, sensors, perception and compute on board) in the first half of 2024 to do useful …
There is oppression all over the Middle East. The countries in the region are generally dominated by an ethnic or religious minority. There were 483 million people in the middle east in 2023 and there will be about 500 million in 2024. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and …
Elon Musk says @SpaceX will release Starlink Mini later in 2024. It will be small enough to fit in your backpack. The outdoor use case also requires the power requirements for Starlink to be muchless. You will be able to pull the terminal out of your backpack in the middle of nowhere and connect to …
Smart home robots and smart home hubs are striving to be the center of the smart home. LG wants to create the Zero Labor home using these devices. The new robot devices from LG, Samsung and many others add mobility, environmental awareness, cameras and sensors. They will have superior AI that will leverage large language …
There were announcements every week in 2023 on Large Language Models. It appears that there will be similar pace of announcements with humanoid robots in 2024. The leaders are Teslabot, Sanctuary AI and Figure. However, there are dozens of other companies. Nextbigfuture has written just days ago that Elon Musk will likely speed up the …
AI driven Large Behaviorial Models (LBM) is to robotics like large language models (aka ChatGPT like systems) are to text, picture, video and voice AI. The systems are scaling up to 1000 narrow tasks in 2024 from just over a hundred tasks. The key is to get autonomous, reliable and adaptable systems. The systems in …
University of Stanford researchers Zipeng Fu and his open source Mobile ALOHA’s hardware is very capable. Mobile ALOHA is teleoperated for now. It is low-cost open-source hardware and teleoperation system. They mount ALOHA to a mobile base designed for warehouses: Tracer AGV It can carry 100kg, move up to 1.6m/s, while costing only $7000. They …
Anduril Industries is a new American defense company that specializes in autonomous drone systems. They excel at artificial intelligence, software, drones and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey created the Oculus Rift which was sold to …