Autonomous

For the past year, Uber-backed Serve Robotics' wheeled robots have been delivering food to customers in the Los Angeles area. The firm has now announced that up to 2,000 of the bots are set to enter use with Uber Eats in other North American cities.

This is no puny chatbot. AutoGPT is a stack of AIs, managed by other AIs. It goes and gets jobs done for you, figuring things out step by step and adjusting on the fly. It's an early, but janky glimpse at how autonomous AI will change your life.

Norwegian shipping company Torghatten AS is due to launch what's billed as the world's first commercial autonomous and electric passenger ferry, which will start making regular trips between islands in central Stockholm, Sweden, later this year.

Since we first got wind of Saildrone's autonomous USVs back in 2018, they've mapped miles of ocean floor, chased hurricanes, and surveyed remote regions. Now the company is adding a new vessel to tackle near-shore mapping and maritime surveillance.

If a drone is large and powerful enough to carry packages long distances, then that drone is likely too big and noisy to be landing in amongst trees, houses and bystanders. The BMT Sparrow system could help, by autonomously steering lowered loads.

Swedish electric moto maker Cake is aiming to help clean up large-scale farming operations by replacing polluting machinery with the Kibb, an electric four-wheeler that can ride like an all-terrain vehicle or serve as an autonomous cargo hauler.

Oregon's Arcimoto has agreed to supply tourism company GoCar with 310 electric Fun Utility Vehicles that will include autonomous driving technologies developed by Faction. The first vehicles will launch a pilot program in Las Vegas next year.

Back in 2019, Bosch and Mercedes were granted a special permit for an automated parking system operated without human supervision. Now the partnership has been given the official nod to operate Level 4 automated valet parking on a commercial basis.

It was just this week that we heard about the SPD1, a spider-inspired robot designed to inspect sewer lines. Well, it looks like the bot won't be alone down there, as the recently announced Joey robot is designed to do exactly the same thing.

US military contractor Anduril has signed a US$100 million contract with the Australian Navy, to design and deliver three iterations of an Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (XL-AUV). These drones will be as big as buses, but not watertight.

Researchers have developed an ultra-small, ultra-thin LiDAR device that splits a single laser beam into 10,000 points covering an unprecedented 180° field of view. It's capable of 3D depth-mapping an entire hemisphere of vision in a single shot.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology are working on a new autonomous search and rescue system made up of a marine vessel that can launch a fleet of fixed-wing drones to scout a predefined area, along with live-feed quadcopters.