mindblowingscience: NASA greenlights 2028 launch for epic Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s huge moon Titan NASA’s delayed Dragonfly drone mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan is on track to launch in July 2028, the space agency confirmed late Tuesday (April 16). The highly anticipated decision greenlights the mission team to proceed to final mission design and testing in preparation for the revised launch date. The car-sized Dragonfly, which is being built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will reach Titan in 2034. For the next 2.5 yea ..read more

Boston Dynamics humanoid robot Atlas is retired ..read more

raven6229: Anyone wanna see a dope robot my class made? That’s really cool! Congrats to your class on your great work ..read more

nasa: ALT ALT The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history – not only as the first aircraft to perform powered, controlled flight on another world – but also for exceeding expectations, pushing the limits, and setting the stage for future NASA aerial exploration of other worlds. Built as a technology demonstration designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity performed flight operations from the Martian surface for almost three years. The helicopter ended its mission on Jan. 25, 2024, after sustaining damage to its rotor blades during its 72nd flight. So, what ..read more

mindblowingscience: In a First, a Prosthetic Limb Can Sense Temperature Like a Living Hand Amputees’ hopes to experience the feeling of human touch using their prosthetics are becoming closer to reality. Now, new technology is allowing them to feel temperature—even in limbs that are no longer part of their bodies. For the first time, a functional artificial limb has been fitted with fingertip sensors that allow an ordinary prosthetic hand to sense and respond to temperature just as a living hand does. The device provides a realistic sense of hot and cold in the missing “phantom” hand by del ..read more

chromaherder: Mainstream sci-fi loves to insist on having drab looking machines as tools of war and oppression almost as a self fulfilling prophecy. But what if, hear me out, we started considering a future with more humane AI and healthier relations to different modes of intelligence (ie. the entire non-human being population of Earth ..read more

thursdayisbetterthanfriday: SENSTER Artist: Edward Ihnatowicz Original Year: 1968 Reconstruction: 2017 - Zachęta exhibition Video: ArtDone Artwork in the age of Cybernetics Edward Ihnatowicz was an artist whose interest in finding ways to emulate animal movement led him to become a pioneer of robotic art. Ihnatowicz was known for filming animals, documenting how they responded and moved, which led him to think about creating sculptures that behaved like living creatures. Senster marked the pinnacle of Ihnatowicz’s achievements and is remembered today as a pioneering piece of technology-base ..read more

earhartsease: this is so on the nose [ID: post by The Garantine quoting the start of a wikipedia article Very tired of hearing about what the intentions are. If a system constantly produces a different outcome than the one it is “intended” for then it’s perfectly reasonable to assume the actual intention is the outcome it continues to produce. beginning of quoted article below reads as follows: The purpose of a system is what it does The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is “no point in claiming ..read more

Amazon’s Acquisition of iRobot Falls Through By Evan Ackerman 29 Jan 2024 Citing “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union,” Amazon and iRobot have announced the termination of an acquisition deal first announced in August of 2022 that would have made iRobot a part of Amazon and valued the robotics company at US $1.4 billion. The European Commission released a statement today that explained some of its concerns, which to be fair, seem like reasonable things to be concerned about: Our in-depth investigation preliminarily showed that the acquisition of iRobot would have enabled Amaz ..read more

NASA Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars ends after three years | CNN By Ashley Strickland, CNN After completing 72 historic flights on Mars over three years, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter mission has ended. Originally designed as an experiment, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to operate and fly on another world, lifting off on April 19, 2021. Imagery and data returned to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, showed that one or more of the chopper’s carbon fiber rotor blades was damaged while landing during its final flight this month. The team determined that the helico ..read more