TAMIYA is a little bit late in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) educational kits game but at the end the Japanese company decided to step in and create the new Programming Robot Series. The first model, Microcomputer Robot Crawler, is going to be released on July 20th and includes a BBC micro:bit board (it controls the model when it is finished, and can even be modified with your own unique program).
Last week Amazon, the e-commerce giant founded by Jeff Bezos, announced the all new AWS DeepRacer: a 1/18th scale radio-controlled, four-wheel drive car, complete with a new racing league (“The world’s first global autonomous racing league, open to anyone”). What exactly is this scale car from Amazon? First, it’s autonomous, and there isn’t a radio control. So how people will compete? Simple, young coders can develop the program that will drive the car: the AWS DeepRacer is a scale car designed to get customers to adopt reinforcement learning.
The DeepRacer is controlled by an Intel Atom processor (that runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Robot Operating System, and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit) and mounts a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, WiFi board and multiple USB ports.
