commands

Routine use of robotic lift trucks may not be far off.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with a team of engineers, have transformed a Toyota 8-Series lift truck into an autonomous bot capable of working alongside human supervisors using voice commands or hand gestures.

The 3,000-pound-capacity lift truck from Toyota Material Handling (TMHU) is capable of locating, lifting, moving, and placing supplies while traversing just about any type of terrain. It was demonstrated last month at an event hosted by the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee, in Virginia.

"Robotic forklifts have the potential to protect both military and civilian personnel working in high-risk environments, such as hazardous material storage facilities, said Brett Wood, president of TMHU.

The demo included a review of the robot's safety features, sensor capabilities, and human-robot interface.

The researchers and engineers developed a complex network of systems to enable the lift truck to navigate real-time conditions faced by lift truck operators (navigating obstacles and interacting with other moving vehicles, for example). To do this, they added a camera, sensors, laptops, servomotors, Wi-Fi, and a PDA.

"We chose the internal combustion Toyota lift truck because it can be operated outdoors on packed earth or gravel and because, with mini-lever control some of its functionality can be controlled electronically rather than solely mechanically," said MIT Professor Seth Teller, who headed the project.

The modified vehicle wirelessly exports video from its own point of view, so the human supervisor, even if hundreds of miles away, can see whatever is nearby (provided there is network connectivity between the lift truck and supervisor's tablet).

In September 2009, for example, the team demonstrated the lift truck operating autonomously at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., while under the supervision of an operator in Washington D.C.… Read more

AutoBatch It from iRedSoft Technology is a batch image-processing utility consisting of two "modules," one that operates from the command line prompt, and another for timer-based operation that resides in the system tray. The program can save images as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, and GIF files; add prefixes and suffixes to file names; resize images; and create thumbnails.

AutoBatch It is actually easy to use, even if you don't have much experience with the command prompt. The dialog-based interface has three sections: Image Processing Properties, for setting resizing options; Image Manipulation, which lets you set the interval … Read more

We've seen quite a few screen capture utilities, and although most of them are pretty similar, occasionally these programs have features that set them apart from the competition. CaptureScreen is one such program; although it's not quite as easy to use as some other applications we've seen, it does offer features that we don't think we've come across in similar programs.

CaptureScreen's interface is plain, consisting of a resizable, transparent rectangle. For basic screenshots, users simply drag the rectangle over the portion of the screen they wish to capture, right-click on it, and select … Read more

If you find that your employees are goofing off watching porn at work instead of working, does it make logical sense that you should get rid of the porn, or the employee? Exactly. Of course, the government doesn't see it that way, but they're the ones who encoded their like, 900-word mission statement into the U.S. CyberCommand shield. Sigh.

On today's show, the NSA announces a new security program that's terrifyingly called "Perfect Citizen" but (at least on the surface) appears to be little more than a series of Star Trek red alert alarms. We're rightfully suspicious. Also, Flash is getting 3D, Pirate Bay is under attack, and the iPhone 4 antenna problem is a hardware issue. We knew that.

Flash for Android is released, AT&T's love/hate robot relationship, and a new slate of Motorola Droid offerings. Plus voice navigation tips, and a review of Google Voice. All that and more on this week's edition of the Android Atlas Weekly.

Stories

Flash Launches on Android

Droid X Twitter Feed

Droid 2 Gets a Surprise Hand-On

ios4 vs Android Multi-tasking

Android Team "Laser Focused" On The User Experience For Next Release

AT&T announces Samsung Galaxy Captivate

...and AT&T proceedes to neuter the Android OS in the process.

SlingPlayer Mobile launches on Android phones

Google Maps for Android adds train schedules, live Places info, more Latitude features

How may people are on which version of Android OS?

Want to score some top-rated games on the cheap? Now's your chance: Electronic Arts Mobile is having a pretty big sale on 14 popular, high-profile titles.

Games that originally sold for as much as $9.99 are now available for just 99 cents. Here's the complete list of sale titles.

Obviously there's some terrific stuff here. Command and … Read more

Google has released a tool to let command-line aficionados use several of the Net giant's services with the full glory of a text-based interface.

The tool, called GoogleCL, offers commands to control the contents sites of YouTube, Blogger, and Picasa, and the Google Apps sites of Docs, Calendar, and Contacts.

For example, people can create a photo album, change a document in a text editor, delete all blog posts mentioning a certain word, list all videos, or add a calendar appointment.

Command-line tools aren't for most folks--do you relish the prospect of typing "google youtube post --category … Read more

For power users and other keyboard-shortcut fanatics, Keyboard Maestro is one of those apps that--once you've used it for a couple weeks--you wonder how you ever lived without it. (And, in fact, Keyboard Maestro mimics the functionality of many other much-beloved productivity-enhancing apps, even including the Classic Finder.) Keyboard Maestro's Program Switcher and Window Switcher make cycling through and managing open applications and windows a breeze, and its Clipboard Switcher lets you work with and store an endless number of clipboards. Keyboard Maestro also supports Growl and AppleScript, with the option of automatically pasting in script results at … Read more