Tag Archives: autonomous systems

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2025 Outlook: Revamping infrastructures – III

In a recent post I reported on the scheduled activation of the first autonomous train on the S-Bahn network in Hamburg. This is an example of the interest to revamp existing infrastructures by companies and institutions all over the world. Another example is the plan for the electrification of 2,000 …

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A robot with a bee brain

At the turn of the century (2006) IBM launched a project to map the human brain as a starting point to create a “cognitive computer”. It was clear from the beginning that it was an impossible dream, yet the hope was that pursuing it would increase our knowledge of the computational structures …

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Digital Twins at work II

Following on last post, an interesting presentation came from Sandvik, a company manufacturing heavy machines. The presentation focussed on the increased automation and the use of these machines in mining environment. The operating conditions are particularly demanding, often requiring the machine to operate in very narrow spaces. Something I did …

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Eventually anybody can land a plane…

Last years Garmin announced an auto-landing feature for its navigation system. If a pilot is no longer able to fly the plane all it takes is a passenger to press a button for 2 seconds to engage the auto-landing system. You might object that we have had planes able to …

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Morphing a drone into a hummingbird

The news is not a recent one, goes back to 2019 and in technology one year is quite a long time, but what it makes it relevant today is its application in real life. Researchers at Purdue University, probably fascinated by the amazing capabilities of hummingbirds to hover with an …

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Spreading the Wings

If you Google for Supermarket queues you’ll get plenty of articles and images/video on the lengthy snakes of people in line. No surprise that online shopping has seen a tremendous increase courtesy of the lock-down. However, this is not true in all merchandising sector. Whilst (Italy data for March 2020) …

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