Austin is known for live music, Texas’ premier public university and being home to tech companies. It is also becoming a laboratory for autonomous vehicles. Driverless Waymo taxis, owned by Google’s parent company, regularly drop off diners at Austin’s famous barbecue joints. Box-shaped, four-wheeled robots operated by Avride, a start-up working with Uber Eats, deliver…
On a recent morning, I knocked on the front door of a handsome two-story home in Redwood City, Calif. Within seconds, the door was opened by a faceless robot dressed in a beige bodysuit that clung tight to its trim waist and long legs. This svelte humanoid greeted me with what seemed to be a…
The robots were everywhere. Some pedaled around like “Star Wars” droids. Others manipulated hospital surgery equipment. They all provided a glimpse of what a future powered by artificial intelligence could look like. Nvidia, the world’s largest maker of artificial intelligence chips, brought the robots together as part of its annual developer conference in San Jose,…
California regulators granted Tesla a permit on Tuesday to operate a ride service in the state, an early step toward the electric car maker’s ambitions of having its own robot taxi fleet. The permit, issued by the California Public Utilities Commission, allows Elon Musk’s company to “transport Tesla employees on a prearranged basis and in…
In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration hired experts in surgical robots and pioneers in artificial intelligence. It scooped up food chemists, lab-safety monitors and diabetes specialists who helped make needle pricks and test strips relics of the past. Trying to keep up with breakneck advances in medical technology and the demands of a…
By any measure, the diabetes drug Ozempic has been a blockbuster, racking up billions of dollars in annual sales. In the United States alone, pharmacies fill millions of prescriptions for Ozempic and related drugs, which have become popular for their weight-loss effects, every month. But in the beginning, before the celebrity endorsements and the think…
NASA’s second thoughts about VIPER opened an opportunity for someone else to book that ride to the moon. Just because its cargo was canceled did not mean Astrobotic’s journey was off — it remains scheduled for later this year. And on Wednesday, a small startup named Venturi Astrolab Inc. announced it had claimed that opportunity…