The reason voice-activated devices favor male voices is probably not as simple as you'd think.
Also: Robot news from the air, the street, the surgical theater and a deep, deep cave in Kentucky.
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Another military self-flying drone milestone.
A U.S. Navy F-35 fighter was refueled in mid-air by an autonomous drone last week, for the first time. It was the Navy’s third successful test of aerial refueling by Boeing’s MQ-25 “Stingray.’’ The plan is for the Stingrays to replace human-piloted planes that now fly on missions just to refill the tanks of combat-ready fighters. This should free up more human pilots to fight and so increase the U.S. Navy’s chances of winning in a confrontation. As DefenseOne notes, some in the Chinese military seem to think highly of this concept. According to the analyst Collin Koh, a recent study of the MQ-25 program by officers of the People’s Liberation Army said the drone will make the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based forces more effective and resilient.
Another Walmart test of a self-driving delivery system.
Walmart, Ford and Argo (an AI company jointly owned by Ford and Volkswagen) will soon use autonomous delivery vehicles for Walmart orders, in a tes…