The USAF has been playing with a new toy – a twin-mirror relay system that could be used for redirecting laser beams onto distant targets on the ground and in the air. The main advantage of this system is that it removes the need for the firing station to have line-of-sight on the target, and it is part of an ongoing plan to build a system of similar relays in space for missile defense and more. It’s a step on the ladder, but even the airforce themselves admit there’s a lot of work to be done yet.
Exoskeleton’s Peak Performance
A Japanese man who has been paralysed from the neck down for two decades has fulfilled his dream of ascending the Breithorn mountain in Switzerland – by being carried on the back of his buddy, who was kitted out with a HAL ‘robot-suit’ exoskeleton that increases the strength of its wearer by up to 80%. The HAL’s inventor plans to develop the system further, with the goal of enabling more disabled persons to fulfill ambitions otherwise inaccessible to them. Now this proof-of-concept is loose outside the military domain, we can expect to see a lot more devices like it in the coming years.
Bot With A Ball
No, not another soccer-and-robots story. Traditional locomotive systems in robots, like wheels or legs, often add unconvenient size and bulk and make them unsuitable for areas in which humans also roam. The Ballbot, recently developed at Carnegie Mellon University, stands human-height and human-wide on a single ball, enabling it to navigate the same spaces that people use and look pretty striking at the same time.
But Who Will Build Them?
In Japan, plans are afoot to roll out a workforce of robots to carry out menial tasks and transportation duties within the next decade or so. A lot of big technology names have signed up to the ‘CIRT’ group, along with Tokyo University, and the government is pitching in for half of the research bill, in the hope of ameliorating the problems of an increasingly aging population. But if there aren’t enough people to work at looking after the elderly, who’s going to make these robots? There could be some big outsourcing involved here.
The Long Tail Of Search
New evidence seems to demonstrate that the ‘Googlearchy’ of bigger sites reaping all the benefit from search engines is a myth. Data from Alexa and other sources has been used to show that search engines in fact help direct traffic to the smaller sites too – the more specific the search, or the content of the site, the more pronounced the effect. Good news for the little people, and for the Long Tail hypothesis.