Ford has announced it has hired a pair of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robotic dogs. Ford is using the robotic dogs to help it 3D-map its Van Dyke Plant “By having the robots scan our plant, we can see what it actually looks like now and build a new engineering model. That digital model is then used when we need to change the equipment in the plant for new products,” said Mark Goderis, Ford’s digital engineering manager. The automaker named one of them Fluffy. The other is keeping its name Spot assigned to it by Boston Dynamics.

The dogs are used to capture 360-degree images of areas in the plant that are difficult to get to using a traditional 3D camera on a tripod. They’re equipped with five cameras and can climb stairs and kneel down to get into hard-to-reach places. Their four legs allow the robots to walk like a dog, around the plant at speeds of up to 3 mph — so they’re not exactly zippy. Besides, the battery lasts for only two hours.

Mark said that the old way of scanning with a camera on a tripod could take two weeks. Using the robotic dogs cuts that time in half. It also used to cost $300,000 to do it the old way. The robotic dogs are cheaper, but Ford didn’t say by how much.

At present, the metal dogs are followed by their handler, Paula Wiebelhaus, who manages the robotic dogs through a controller with a display that sees what the dogs see. But in the near future Ford wants to be able to program the dogs to go to different parts of the plant and report back what they see without being followed by a human. They can also ask for a ride on the back of a mobile robot that Ford has named Scouter. Like the dogs, it’s also capturing 3D scans of its environment.

If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be terrified. But what if you were trapped in ruins after a natural disaster and first responders couldn’t locate you? Maybe then a human-seeking drone(无人机) wouldn’t be such a terrible idea. That concept is the focus for engineers at Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE Institute, who’ve built a drone to find people by detecting(探测) human screams.

“The human-seeking drone would be ideal for post-disaster situations,” said Macarena Varela, one of the lead engineers. “They could hover over an area that rescue crews have difficulty getting to and locate exactly where people may be trapped.” An auditory(听觉的) system would need to distinguish human cries from sounds that often happen in nature, such as animal calls and wind. It might also need to recognize patterns associated with kicking, clapping or other ways people try to get the attention of rescue teams.

Engineers took those situations into account when building out their concept drone. They recorded themselves screaming, tapping and creating other noises that might be a sign of people in trouble. Then, they analyzed each sound frequency to find common signatures and used those to train artificial intelligence software. They also worked to remove the noise created by the drone and other environmental sounds.

Once the software part was complete, the team placed tiny digital microphones under the drone and used signal processing techniques that enabled them to track where human noises are coming from. The microphones also enhanced the volume and clarity of the speech. So far, they have conducted successful open field experiments, finding that the drone can estimate a victim’s location within a few seconds of picking up sound.

Next, they would like to add a higher frequency microphone to a drone to acquire more audio sound signals.

Twenty years ago, the word “smartphone” didn’t exist. By necessity, neither did the word “dumbphone.” In two decades, we might talk about all of our appliances in similar ways. From ovens to garage doors to insulin pumps to vehicles, many of our devices are going to be connected to the Internet in the same sense that our phones are now. One company, SmartThings   sells devices that help consumers control their lights and locks while they’re not at home, for example. Eventually, these items will be able to respond to signals from one another independent of human input. 【小题1】.

That could be great, but it also vastly expands the universe of things that could go wrong, particularly when it comes to privacy. Take dishwashers. At heart, they're very simple machines. But a hacked dishwasher might start running on overdrive, going through multiple cycles, wasting gallons of water and costing you extra and possibly flooding your house. Although the folks who make dishwashers may be fantastic engineers, or even great computer programmers, it doesn’t necessarily imply they’re equipped to protect Internet users from the beginning,

【小题2】 Hacking is just an extreme case. Short of that, there are all kinds of security problems that could crop up in an Internet of Things situation. Many of these devices are pumping out vast amounts of data. According to Hagins, a modest 10,000 households have SmartThings installed. Together, those homes produce 150 million data points a day.

【小题3】As early as 2010, Siemens said it was capable of using its smart meters to learn some pretty incredible things about our energy usage: “We, Siemens, have the technology to record it every minute, second, microsecond”. From that we can infer how many people are in the house, what they do, whether they're upstairs, downstairs, do you have a dog, when do you habitually get up, when do you have a shower: masses of private data. 【小题4】

One difference between data-hungry businesses like Google and your future home network of Internet-enabled objects is that some of those devices may not need to talk to each other over the public Internet. If they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network, maybe those devices won’t need to transmit data across the Web. “Utilize but keep the data within the home boundary, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien suggested ‘‘Keep the interesting variations within the home boundary.”