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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Group to share patents for radio tracking

    WASHINGTON
    Tue Oct 21, 2008 3:33pm EDT

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    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France Telecom (FTE.PA), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N) and five other companies got a go-ahead from the U.S. government to form a patent consortium to share high-frequency radio technology used in tracking and identification, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.

    Technology

    Each of the companies holds at least one patent that a standard-setting group had judged essential to create a type of system that uses a radio frequency to track tagged items.

    The system is used by stores to track merchandise, in ID cards, and by airlines to track baggage.

    "The consortium's proposed pooling arrangement appears reasonably likely to yield efficiencies," Thomas Barnett, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, wrote in a letter to the companies' lawyers.

    "It includes safeguards reasonably tailored to minimize the risk of harm to competition," Barnett wrote.

    The other five companies in the consortium are LG Electronics (066570.KS), Motorola Inc (MOT.N), ThingMagic, Inc, Zebra Technologies Corp (ZBRA.O) and 3M Innovative Properties Company, a subsidiary of 3M Co. (MMM.N)

    The consortium had told the Justice Department it would market its patents as a group, would charge "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" and would allocate royalties among themselves.

    (Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Gary Hill)
    Technology


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