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Marines field autonomous support vehicles based on winning robot design (video)
Since their third-place finish in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge , TORC Technology’s had quite a climb — the company founded by Virginia Tech graduates has since provided IED-scouting Humvee kits to the US Military, and a vehicle for the blind uses the drive-by-wire platform that they designed. Now, the Marines are testing a TORC kit called the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate (GUSS), which autonomously navigate off-road terrain.
Solar Impulse returns from 24 hour test flight 26 hours later
Rest easy, fans of solar-powered aeronautics. Captain Piccard’s Solar Impulse has safely returned after 26 hours in the air — powered by nothing but the sun. The four-engine aircraft, which features 12,000 solar cells arranged on its wingspan, reached a height of almost 29,000 feet before touching down at Payerne Airport near Berne, Switzerland today
YouTube launches Leanback, mobile site gets HTML5 revamp (video)
Looks like YouTube ‘s having quite the day. The site has officially rolled out Leanback, its television-friendly interface first espied during Google TV’s big unveiling .
Junaio’s augmented reality app for iPhone and Android can add cartoons to your otherwise-boring existence
As an augmented reality navigator that you want to use for finding pizza joints and friends on Foursquare and Twitter, you’ve got more polished options than Junaio’s new 2.0 release — Layar and Yelp, just to name a couple — but Junaio has at least one interesting differentiator with a feature it calls “Glue.” Basically, independent content providers can develop their own Junaio “channels,” which function in the same way as a Layar layer — it’s a particular set of points of interest that’ll be displayed in the current view. With Glue, though, Junaio isn’t just using your positional information as a point of reference, it can also scan the image for specific objects that developers have programmed their channel to look for, and when such an object is found, crazy things can happen
Amazon Kindle dual-screen e-reader patent granted, Barnes & Noble Nook potentially in trouble
Looks like the battle for e-reader dominance between Amazon and Barnes & Noble could soon expand beyond the recent spate of price drops and into the courtroom as well: the USPTO just granted a 2006 Amazon patent on e-readers with secondary LCD displays (like the original Kindle’s scroller-navigation panel ), and several of the claims are potentially broad enough to cover the Nook and many other devices with both electronic paper and LCD displays. What’s more, Amazon agreed not to file for any corresponding foreign patents during the four-year approval process and thus wasn’t required to publish the patent application — meaning this is likely a complete surprise to the entire industry
Opera 10.6 hits Windows, Mac and Linux with faster Javascript, WebM video support
Four short months after Opera 10.5, the Scandanavian potato boilers are back for more — the latest version of their lightweight web browser features not only claims to be the fastest, but the first final browser with WebM video support . While we actually noticed a variety of web videos felt choppy with the Windows version, there’s no denying it’s a speedy little hummingbird; Engadget felt snappier on Opera than Chrome or Firefox by far
