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  Toyota's ceiling-mounted robot. [credit: Toyota Research Institute ]

Today, home robots mostly consist of a little puck-shaped vacuum that can bump around your house picking up debris. But someday, maybe, we'll have bigger, more advanced robots that can clean up more than just our floors. Roboticists are still figuring out what these types of robots are supposed to look like, and one wild concept from the Toyota Research Institute is a “gantry robot” that lives on your ceiling. It looks like a slightly less evil version of GLaDOS.

Rather than move around on the floor, Toyota's gantry robot can "descend from an overhead framework" when it's time for some cleaning. The company's idea is that "by traveling on the ceiling, the robot avoids the problems of navigating household floor clutter and navigating cramped spaces."

Getting a human-sized robot to actually live on the ceiling looks like a complicated and expensive proposition. Toyota's system uses an extremely beefy aluminum extrusion cage that covers the entire ceiling of the test house. The robot lives on a room-width horizontal beam that can move along the cage on the perimeter of the house—we'll call this the Y-axis—and then the robot can move left and right along the beam for the X-axis. The whole setup is basically a giant cartesian coordinate CNC machine. No one is expected to build this into an existing house, but Toyota's idea is "what if, in the future, we could design homes to accommodate robotic solutions?"

Enlarge / The dome of the United State Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Phil Roeder)

The Senate Commerce Committee this morning voted unexpectedly to issue subpoenas to the heads of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to compel them to testify in a hearing—most likely before Election Day.

The committee agreed in a unanimous, bipartisan vote to require Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear (virtually) after none of the three executives had agreed by today to appear voluntarily.

Zuckerberg and Pichai, along with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee earlier this year. That hearing, nominally about antitrust issues, instead squeezed two completely disparate realities together into one small room, as Democratic members primarily asked about competition issues and Republican members primarily complained about the Internet's alleged (and unproven) "bias" against conservative voices.

Enlarge / A man walks with an umbrella outside of AT&T corporate headquarters on March 13, 2020, in Dallas, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T falsely told the US government that it met its obligation to deploy broadband at more than 133,000 locations in Mississippi, state officials say.

Since 2015, AT&T has received over $283 million from the Federal Communications Commission's Connect America Fund to expand its network in Mississippi. But the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC) said it has evidence that AT&T's fixed-wireless broadband is not available to all the homes and businesses where AT&T claims it offers service. The PSC asked the FCC to conduct "a complete compliance audit" of AT&T's claim that it has met its obligation.

"Our investigation has found concrete, specific examples that show AT&T Mississippi has reported location addresses... as being served when, in fact, the addresses are without service under their [Connect America Fund] obligations," said a letter to the FCC sent Tuesday by all three Mississippi PSC commissioners. "This pattern of submitting false data to the USAC [the Universal Service Administrative Company, which administers the program on the FCC's behalf] merits a full compliance audit by the FCC, USAC, or whichever appropriate agency. We feel it is our duty to alert you to this issue."

Enlarge / FAA Administrator Steve Dickson puts a 737 MAX through its paces. (credit: @FAA on Twitter)

On Wednesday, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Steve Dickson donned his mask and took to the runway at Seattle's Boeing Field to test pilot a now-infamous Boeing 737 MAX. The FAA head was positive about the aircraft during the two-hour flight, as he told reporters at a post-test press conference, "I liked what I saw... it responded well." Still, Dickson and the FAA are not ready to recertify the plane and remain in no rush to do so.

"We are not to the point yet where we have completed the process," Dickson said. "We're in the home stretch, but that doesn't mean that we're going to take shortcuts to get it done by a certain date...The FAA and I in particular will not approve the plane for a return to passenger service until I'm satisfied that we've adequately addressed all of the known safety issues that played a role in the tragic loss of 346 lives aboard Lion Air flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302."

LIVE: FAA Administrator Steve Dickson's News Conference on the 737 MAX https://t.co/Y3mRCEmGT4

— The FAA (@FAANews) September 30, 2020

The FAA's test flight comes roughly a year and a half after two high-profile deadly crashes of Boeing's 737 MAX—one in October 2018 and a second in March 2019—resulted in more than 300 individuals losing their lives. The incidents forced airlines around the world to quickly ground these planes. Investigations revealed that the crashes were due to flaws in the design of the aircraft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software. This software tries to help the pilot provide a safer, smoother ride. But in both crashes, a malfunctioning sensor caused the software to mistakenly believe the aircraft was stalling. It then pushed the plane's nose too far down, ultimately leading to a crash.