New Guidelines for $10 Million Avatar XPRIZE Promise Compelling Robot Challenge

With some input from the robotics community, XPRIZE’s new guidelines will make this a robotics competition worth getting excited about Earlier this year, XPRIZE announced a new challenge: a four-year global competition to “develop real life avatars,” with a US $10 million prize sponsored by All Nippon Airways (ANA). We like robot challenges, especially robot challenges with prizes big enough to attract top-notch competition, and the idea of creating remote presence systems that can do more than just send back video is a compelling one, with all kinds of potential use cases. However, our first reaction to the sample of potential challenge scenarios published by XPRIZE was that they weren’t nearly difficult and compelling enough, meaning that the challenge wouldn’t promote the kind of cutting-edge innovation that we (and presumably XPRIZE) would like to see. To their credit, XPRIZE has put a lot of work into incorporating feedback from a Continue reading New Guidelines for $10 Million Avatar XPRIZE Promise Compelling Robot Challenge

Plant Wearables and Airdropped Sensors Could Sow Big Data Seeds

Cheaper plant sensors could bring monitoring to individual plants on a massive scale Stretchable plant wearables and smart tags dropped by drones aim to help give farming a big data makeover. The relatively cheap technologies for mass monitoring of individual plants across large greenhouses or crop fields could get field tests in three countries starting in 2019.