Baseball’s future has arrived in the Atlantic League with the introduction of an automated strike zone. If the experiment goes well, the days of players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end.
Wall Street Journal
What robots can do for retail
The real benefit of retail robots is the opportunity to capture more granular data about the products on the shelves and customer buying patterns, which can increase efficiency and accuracy in inventory management. The key is using retail robots as data-collectors within an internet-of-things (IoT), which is best thought of as a complex network of connected devices, objects, and sensors gathering voluminous data that is analyzed in the cloud or with edge computing, which uses nearby servers to lower latency.
Ben Forgan
Building a guilt-free disposable water bottle: It’s not easy
Does the world really need another brand of bottled water?
Alex Totterman believes it does if the packaging is completely biodegradable. Cove’s new water bottle, which is scheduled to get a small pilot launch in December and hit store shelves more broadly in January, is the first to be made entirely from biodegradable materials, the company contends, including the bottle cap, label, and adhesive.
+ LAT
AI gets down in the dirt as precision agriculture takes off
Some farmers have turned to a high-tech solution to improve yields and reduce costs. For example, harvesting combines introduced this year by Deere & Co. include high-resolution cameras and sensors linked to AI software. The system monitors grain as it's collected and adjusts dozens of settings on the combine in real-time to maximize how much grain is chopped from each stalk and to minimize waste. An X-9, as the new machine is called, can harvest a field 45% faster than Deere's older equipment lacking the automated system, and it uses 20% less fuel.
+ Fortune