Hitting The Road Without A Driver

GM-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research
using a modified Cadillac SRX crossover.

As reported by NPR: The cars we drive have gotten ever more sophisticated. They can just about park themselves; they tell us if we're drifting out of our lane; they can prevent skids. Some even automatically apply the brakes if they sense that a collision is imminent.

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh are developing a car that can do all of those things and more — it can actually drive itself. Imagine that commute to work.

The car, developed with General Motors, is by all appearances a normal Cadillac SRX crossover. That's by design, according to Jarrod Snider, the chief engineer on the project.

"We're not using really fancy, really expensive devices all over the car," he says. The sensors are integrated into the car, "so when you look at the car you don't see a lot of things hanging off of it."

Hidden in the bumper and behind the car's grille are three types of systems that guide the car's decision-making — sensors, lasers and cameras. Snider says the sensors provide input for the car's software, "so when we see an object we can say that's a person or that's a sign or that's a traffic light. ... We can actually do some classification of the object."

The car's navigation screen will show and identify pedestrians and bikes, as well as traffic lights and some road signs. It also has thermal imaging, useful to identify objects at night, beyond the range of the car's headlights.

In the back of the car, below the floor where the spare tire would normally be, are four computers about the size of Apple's Mac Mini, cooled by an air-conditioning system. Snider says the computers are a development platform and won't be as big or noisy when driverless cars are commercially available.
Inside, the car looks pretty normal, too, with one exception — a big red button that sits prominently in the middle of the dashboard. Snider says it's there for when engineers are testing a new system. If something goes wrong, "we can just push that button and that just turns the car back into a stock car, immediately," he says.

Surprisingly, a test ride in the autonomous Cadillac occurs not on a closed course, but on busy Route 19, a multilane highway in Cranberry Township, outside Pittsburgh. Snider says township officials have been cooperative and helpful with development of the driverless car, installing special radio transmitters on traffic lights to tell the vehicle when to stop (the car can also "read" the lights with a camera positioned over the windshield).

Snider says it's hard to replicate real-world conditions on a closed course. People drive in unpredictable ways; they stop suddenly, change directions; there are pedestrians jaywalking.

To put the car in driverless or autonomous mode, Snider simply turns a knob located near the gear shifter.
"System starting up," a female-sounding computer voice intones. "Autonomous driving."

The car pulls out of the parking lot. Though Snider is behind the wheel, he's not touching it, as the car stops at a stop sign, waits for traffic to clear and then makes a right turn onto the highway.

The car is programmed much like a driver programs a GPS for directions. In this case it's heading for a restaurant in a shopping center. We travel about a half-mile down the busy road, the car accelerating, stopping at a red light and moving into a left-hand turn lane, where it waits for a green arrow before proceeding.

The drive is not always smooth. The car tends to wait until the last minute before braking and floors it when accelerating to its desired speed. Snider says engineers are working on that, but that it's difficult to precisely re-create the human touch on the gas pedal and brakes.

Carnegie Mellon's car is not the only driverless vehicle around. Google has one as well. Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, predicts that by 2020 the technology needed for driverless cars to travel normal roads will be ready. Though he says it make take a bit longer for the legal system and insurance companies to catch up.

"It has to go through the societal process of acceptance, the legal process of laws being in place that allow driverless vehicles on the roads, the insurance aspects of liability, the legal things falling into place," Rajkumar says.

The federal government has already begun conducting research with an eye toward
establishing standards for driverless vehicles. Three states — California, Nevada and Florida — have passed legislation allowing testing of driverless cars on their roads.

Google to test Project Loon in California

As reported by Engadget: It's safe to say Google took the world by surprise when it introduced its Project Loon. But, some were disappointed that it was done so far away from home -- at least at first. Now, the company has announced that it's ready to more openly test out the high-flying internet service in California, with research flights due to take place around The Golden State's Central Valley. Google says it's seeking people in the area "who are willing to have a Loon internet antenna installed on their house or small business building to help test the strength of the Loon internet connection." For those interested in helping out the cause (and why not!), you'll need to fill out the survey located at the source below -- the Project Loon team notes that those selected to participate will be contacted directly.

Electronic Onboard Recording Devices: Cost and Driver Usability is a Concern in the Trucking Industry

As reported by Arkansas Business: Roughly the size of an iPhone, an electronic onboard recording device does not take up much space in the cab of an 18-wheeler.

The tiny device has, however, become a huge topic of conversation in the trucking industry.

By January 2016 it is possible that all drivers will be required to install EOBRs in their vehicles as a means of monitoring hours of service. Proponents see it as a way to make driving more efficient and point to it as the first real change to the act of logging hours of service since the 1930s. Opponents view the replacement for paper logs as an intrusive instrument that will make life more difficult for drivers than it already is.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wants to outfit long-haul commercial vehicles, trucks and buses with EOBRs. Ultimately, the goal is safer roadways. By getting an accurate measure of when drivers are on the road, the FMCSA believes that drivers — already under new hours-of-service rules that went into effect on July 1 — will be on the road less, cutting down on fatigue and, in theory, accidents.

As they have done with hair drug testing, members of the Trucking Alliance (both J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. of Lowell and North Little Rock’s Maverick belong) have lent their support to the use of EOBRs. They see it primarily as a way to improve safety, eliminating the underreporting of hours, something one local trucking official calls “the worst-kept secret in the industry.” The Arkansas Trucking Association also supports putting EOBRs on board each truck.

Plus, the devices can help improve relationships between dispatchers and drivers because both sides will have an accurate measure of hours driven. Neither dispatcher nor driver can take advantage of the other in hopes of getting more hours or getting more work. This, proponents say, will improve the efficiency of scheduling and make interaction friendlier between drivers and their home bases.

Cost is, of course, a concern. High-end EOBRs can come with a price tag of nearly $2,000. Depending on the size of a company’s fleet, even the low-end cost of $300 to $400 per truck can be an intimidating prospect. In theory, the improved operational efficiency will ultimately make up for the increased cost.

Where opponents of EOBRs really have problems with the devices is in determining just how necessary and driver-friendly the technology really is.

There is undoubtedly an element of “Big Brother is watching” that makes drivers and owner-operators nervous about installing EOBRs. Few of us are comfortable with the thought of willingly allowing the government to track our movements (especially when we’re out on the open road and have the cruise control set in that 5-to-9-miles-per-hour-faster-than-the-speed-limit window in which most of us operate).

EOBR data — hours logged, speed driven, stops made — in individual trucks is not likely to be monitored on a daily basis by the government (or law enforcement officials). In fact, other than group data collected for the continued tweaking of regulations, little of the information will be shared outside of specific trucking operations. But surely we can sympathize with those who are nervous about the prospect of having their every move monitored.

Perhaps the biggest issue that drivers have with EOBRs is that the device eliminates flexibility in their schedules. Anybody who has punched a time clock understands what a pain it can be. Many folks are happy to be given a task and a deadline. They don’t want to account for every second spent in accomplishing that task, and if they happen to get finished early, they’d like to just call it a week.

EOBRs make that more difficult for drivers to do. There’s no opportunity for them — let’s use an analogy from your office — to turn a late Friday lunch into an early weekend.

There is still time for tweaks to be made to the proposed regulations, though it is doubtful much will change between now and the end of the year. Regulations mandating EOBRs won’t likely be official until January 2014, and companies will then have two years to become compliant.

How long it takes for companies and drivers to become comfortable with having the EOBRs remains to be seen, of course.

More Connected Homes, More Potential Hacker Targets

They might offer convenience or potential cost savings,
but Internet-connected home appliances may also
create security risks.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: As a growing number of Internet-connected home appliances hit the market, David Bryan and Daniel Crowley worry that digital ne'er-do-wells will get new ways to take control of these devices, unlocking your house, running up your heating bill, flushing your toilet—or worse—from afar.

Bryan and Crowley, both security researchers at Trustwave Holdings, have been trying to sound this alarm since they heard about the Lockitron, a $179 gadget designed to fit on a standard deadbolt and allow you to lock or unlock your home from your smartphone. At the time, the device had not yet begun shipping to customers, but it piqued Bryan and Crowley’s curiosity. They figured they’d try out other “smart” devices while they were at it, and over the past several months they've found that nearly all of them, including lights, a scale, and a toilet, had significant security shortcomings.

Their findings highlight a potential problem with the so-called “Internet of Things” and the new class of Internet-connected home products that you can monitor and manage remotely. These devices offer convenience and potential energy savings and sometimes just novelty (see “Home Tweet Home: A House with Its Own Voice on Twitter”). According to data from ABI Research, there are already more than 10 billion wirelessly connected devices in use, and by 2020 there will be more than 30 billion of them. While “hub” devices like smartphones and laptops make up most of this total today, the market researcher expects this will shift in favor of cheap sensors and node devices that make up the Internet of Things.

Yet as we connect more and more devices to the Internet, everything from the thermostat to the toilet to the front door itself may create a potential new opening for electronic intruders. As with computers, there are ways to protect these devices from outsiders, but Crowley and Bryan’s experiences indicate that, for now at least, this isn’t always a primary concern for companies in a rush to sell this equipment. Making devices more secure can add time to product development.

“It varies from device to device, but a common thread with a lot of these devices is they don’t require any authentication at all,” Crowley says.

For example, Crowley and Bryan examined the Veralight, which plugs into your home computer network and allows you to control and manage many types of household appliances. By default, it required no username or password to access the system, and they say they found numerous ways to bypass authentication even when it was turned on. More recently, Crowley and Bryan discovered how easily one could get a music-playing toilet called the Satis, which is controlled by an Android smartphone app, to flush itself repeatedly or play loud music. They recently discussed their findings at the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Crowley and Bryan say they've contacted each company whose products they believe have security flaws. Mostly, they've gotten no direct response. In a statement, the maker of the Veralight, Hong Kong-based Mi Casa Verde, said it believes its controllers “are as secure or more secure than any of the home automation products on the market today.” Lixel, the Japanese company behind the networked toilet, said in a statement that there are “several necessary conditions” that must be met to control the toilet remotely, such as pairing a smartphone with the toilet, which must be done with a separate unit that comes with the Satis.

Security researchers fear that the risks presented by these new types of gadgets are especially concerning. If hackers can exploit a weakness in a single type of Internet-connected home appliance or system—such as an Internet-connected door lock—they may be able to harm thousands of people at once. “It might be some effort to get this kind of scenario, but if breaking into one server means you get to ransack 100, 1,000, 10,000 people’s homes, that’s definitely worth it, and that’s where the real danger lies,” Crowley says.

Yoshi Kohno, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies computer security and privacy in consumer technologies, says it’s hard to know exactly how big a problem this will be. But he has found “real vulnerabilities” in several Internet-connected things including cars, medical devices, and children’s toys. A toy that includes a webcam, for instance, could allow an online attacker to connect to the toy and turn on the webcam. “We as a community need to look holistically at all the emerging technologies and not just say, ‘Oh, it’s a toaster, it doesn't matter,’ and think that everything matters until we believe that it doesn't,” he says.

Kohno says he’d need to see more of an emphasis placed on security before he’d feel comfortable using most of the currently available connected-home gadgets: lights that can be controlled over the Web may be okay, but an automated door lock, for example, would still be out of the question.

Even with security measures in place, there’s also potential for electronic eavesdropping, says Kamin Whitehouse, an associate professor at the University of Virginia who studies smart buildings. His research has shown that even if data traffic from wireless smart devices in the home is encrypted, an attacker can still analyze network traffic patterns and, by making a few assumptions about human behavior, get an idea of what’s going on inside the house. “Once the house starts becoming fully connected, there’s no reason to think that it won’t become a target,” he says.

For their part, Crowley and Bryan are optimistic that this will change. The smartphone-controlled door lock that first intrigued them recently began shipping to customers and offers security details and an e-mail contact for security-related questions. That’s an indication that Apigy, the company behind Lockitron, is focused on the issue, Crowley says. “That is big. It says something good about the state of security in that product,” he says. “It means we’ll probably have a tough time breaking it.”

Do Our Brains Pay a Price for Using Digital Navigation Devices?

As reported by the Boston Globe:
WHEN I MOVED TO BOSTON in 2011, I took public transportation to work. A couple years later, a friend lent me his car while he was out of town, and for the first time in my life I became a guy who drove to the office. Parking in the employee lot came naturally enough; so did listening to “Morning Edition” and balancing my coffee in the cup-holder. Actually navigating the streets of Cambridge and Boston, however — that part was less intuitive.

So I did what any rational, 21st-century person would do in my situation: punched my work address into my smartphone and listened as a GPS-powered, step-by-step guide told me exactly what to do. Turn left in 300 feet, take the second exit out of the rotary, and so on. This I could handle. Before I knew it, my destination was on my right.

After a few days, I grew confident, and one morning decided to find my own way. But as I tried frantically to remember the GPS’s instructions, I realized that despite multiple trips to and from work, I had learned exactly nothing about the city’s geography. As I sat at a red light, I didn't have the foggiest notion of where I was relative to where I’d come from — or, more importantly, where I was trying to go.

My first instinct was to turn the GPS back on so I could stop being lost. My second was to wonder what, exactly, its handy instructions had done to my mind. How could I have followed all those steps, and made all those turns, without retaining anything?

How GPS affects our natural ability to navigate is a question that has, in recent years, begun to attract the attention of researchers around the world. What they are finding suggests that my experience was not just one novice commuter’s blind spot: Instead, I was one of millions of people for whom technology is disrupting something the human brain is supposed to do well. When we use GPS, the research indicates, we remember less about the places we go, and put less work into generating our own internal picture of the world.

Often referred to as mental maps, these schematics tell us where things are in relation to each other and allow us to navigate among them. They are as powerful as they are mysterious, even to specialists who have devoted their careers to studying how they work. “They are very individual,” said Julia Frankenstein, a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany. “The things which matter to you might be completely different to those that matter to your wife or your children.”

With the option to use GPS to do our wayfinding for us, it might seem like we don’t have much need for mental maps anymore. But according to Veronique Bohbot, a neuroscientist affiliated with McGill University and the Douglas Institute who studies spatial memory and navigation, the process of generating mental maps also plays a role in activities that have nothing to do with getting to work. Becoming overly reliant on GPS and letting that skill atrophy, she and others suggest, might actually be bad for us. “It’s important for people to take responsibility for their health — including their cognitive health,” said Bohbot. “We can’t just take the back seat.”

The research doesn't necessarily mean we should all chuck our beloved devices out the window. But it’s a strong case for not giving up our old-fashioned maps and human-style directions — turn right at the Dunkin’ Donuts and keep the river on your left — just yet. And it may also offer us an idea for how to re-engineer this immensely popular technology itself, so that instead of competing with our astonishing ability at mental mapping, our gadgets actually begin to support it.

WHEN AUTOMOTIVE NAVIGATION DEVICES first started showing up in luxury cars during the mid- to late 1990s, it was like something out of science fiction. Never again would people have to make wild guesses about the next turn, or last-minute decisions about exiting the highway. Instead, a soothing voice would just tell you what to do, patiently laying it out in simple, incremental steps.

This was not just a new way to drive — it was a revolutionary advance in the way we approached the task of orienting ourselves in the world. Historically, humans always had to work hard (if largely unconsciously) at this problem, paying close attention to their surroundings and assembling pictures in their heads that were populated with an array of landmarks, roads, intersections, and boundaries that, in sum, helped them figure out how to get where they wanted to go.

One particular advantage of building these mental maps is that they allow people to be spontaneous and flexible in how they get around: “If all you know is, ‘I have to turn left at the church, then right at McDonald’s,’ then you can reproduce the route, but you are not able to very flexibly navigate from Point A to Point B,” said Frankenstein. That means you can never deviate from the route you know, look for shortcuts, or improvise if the situation calls for it.

With the arrival of personal GPS devices in cars or phones, the tough cognitive work involved in mental mapping was suddenly rendered less necessary. Gary Burnett, an associate professor in the engineering department at the University of Nottingham in England, wanted to know what effect that actually had on people’s ability to navigate. In 2005, he set up an experiment using a driving simulator in which test subjects were asked to complete a set of four routes. Half of them were given step-by-step instructions that guided them right to their destination, while the other half were given traditional paper maps. Afterward they were quizzed on what they’d seen, and asked to sketch a rough map of their route. The drivers who had merely followed instructions did significantly worse on all fronts. They even failed to recognize that they’d been led past certain places twice from different angles.

What GPS was doing, in other words, was letting people just pass their surroundings by, instead of assembling a picture of where they’d been. Other researchers have generated results that support Burnett’s findings. A 2008 study led by University of Tokyo geographer Toru Ishikawa found that people asked to reach a destination on foot drew less accurate maps of their routes when they were assisted by GPS than when they weren't. Two years later, Ginette Wessel, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, reported similar results at a conference on visual interfaces. More recently, a study by Stefan Münzer of the University of Mannheim in Germany found that while people following the kind of “egocentric” cues generated by GPS devices — where the map is constantly reorienting itself to put the user in the center of the universe — made fewer mistakes on the way to their destinations than people who used traditional maps, they didn't remember as much about the landmarks they’d walked past to get there.

Ironically, one of the main reasons for this is that GPS largely prevents us from making mistakes — and when we do mess up, it patiently helps us find our way back. That means we’re never pushed to do the difficult work of recalculating for ourselves. “When you make mistakes, not only does that mean your exposure to the environment is longer — and that helps you learn more things — you also become more engaged in the task,” said Burnett. “When you miss a turn, you become more focused on analyzing what just happened and where you are and what you need to do.”

Bohbot, the McGill neuroscientist, started experimenting with navigation because of an interest in the way people’s brains change as a result of learning. Bohbot developed a method for using fMRI technology to distinguish between people who tended to find their way by going through a memorized list of step-by-step directions — what she calls “stimulus response strategy” — and those who were inclined to orient themselves by conjuring a mental map of the world around them. People who just follow directions, Bohbot found, tended to have less gray matter in their hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for encoding spatial memories.

People whose everyday work is deeply dependent on mental mapping can show brain development that is particularly distinctive. A famous study published in 2000 by British neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire showed that taxi drivers in London with years of experience navigating the city’s complex geography had more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus compared to people who were not taxi drivers. The study underscores that how our brain works is subject to use; the brain is plastic, and the more mental mapping we do, the stronger our cognitive navigation skills and the bigger the part of the brain that encodes them.

While there’s nothing inherently good about having a big hippocampus, researchers have discovered that people with smaller ones are at higher risk for a range of serious psychiatric disorders, including dementia, schizophrenia, and PTSD. And while Bohbot cautions against concluding that GPS actually puts you at risk for mental decline — there is no study that has ever shown that, she points out — she herself has given up the device.

ACCORDING TO BOHBOT, mental mapping — and spatial memory more generally — helps us in more ways than we might think. When a waiter at a restaurant brings six dishes out from the kitchen, for instance, he invokes a mental map of the table to remember who ordered what. When going on a vacation, a family is likely to do a better job of packing if they map out every phase of it in their minds, imagining all the places they are likely to find themselves during the trip. “My students use spatial memory when they study for their exams,” Bohbot said. “They put pages in different places around them on the floor, and the spatial position becomes associated with the specific topic they’re studying.”

Then there are less tangible benefits. For John Huth, a physicist at Harvard and the author of a recent book about human navigation, “The Lost Art of Finding Our Way,” figuring out where you are is a process that forces you to become actively tuned into the physical world. With GPS, he said, the loss is aesthetic as much as anything else. “You’re losing this chance to have a greater awareness of your environment,” Huth said. “It’s almost like depriving yourself of music, or a conversation with another person. There’s a richness that you’re missing out on.”

For some people, the prospect of reclaiming that richness is not enticing enough to justify the pain of constantly getting lost. The good news is that the tradeoff might not be so cut and dried. According to a study conducted by one of Gary Burnett’s students, a set of step-by-step driving instructions that explains what to do in terms of real-world landmarks — the supermarket, the bridge, the river — might actually help with the construction of mental maps, rather than hurting our ability to create them. Navigational aids could also help by allowing us to go explore our surroundings without the risk of getting seriously lost.

Sitting at my desk the day of my humbling morning commute, I studied a map of the city, absorbing what was where, and trying hard to understand what to do, rather than just memorize a list of commands. That evening, as I drove down the Pike, my window down and my phone buried deep in my pants pocket, the city snapped into shape around me. Suddenly I was not just a guy who had learned a set of moves. I was a guy who knew his way.

By 2035, Nearly 100 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be Sold Per Year, Report Says

Many autonomous features are already available on cars
in the current market - such as Advanced Emergency Braking
(AEB) systems.

As reported by Motherboard:

The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping. According to a new report from Navigant Research, in just over two decades, Google Cars and their ilk will account for 75 percent of all light vehicle sales worldwide. In total, Navigant expects 95.4 million autonomous cars to be sold every year by 2035.

That's pretty astonishing. For one thing, that's more cars than are built every year right now. As of 2012, which was a record-breaking year for car production, 60 million cars were rolling off global assembly lines each year.

So it's not just that there will be tons of autonomous cars flooding our streets—there will be tons more cars, period. The figures indicate that there will be nearly 130 million cars sold every year. Bear in mind that many of those sales will include used vehicles—and some estimates place the number of used cars sold in the US alone at 40 million per year.

The projections take into account the fact that hundreds of millions of more people (especially in China) are becoming wealthy enough to buy cars, and imagines that demand will continue to increase. And they will be buying autonomous cars.

Which isn't far-fetched at all, really. As the Navigant report notes, the "industry consensus is that autonomous driving will be available by 2020." But the obstacles to widespread adoption "are not technological."

Indeed, many "autonomous" features are available on cars already the market—auto-braking and driver correction are already hardwired into luxury sedans being sold as we speak. And moving far beyond those innovations entirely technologically feasible, too, as the Google cars have proved.

"Advances in computing power and software development mean that features such as high-end image processing and sensor fusion are now ready for production," the report notes. "Rather, the factors that remain to be solved before rollout to the public are those of liability and legislation."

Despite a couple of laws legalizing driverless cars in Nevada and Florida (and in California, where it's now lawful to test-drive them)—there's still the issue of making these autobots street legal. And then there's the issue of insuring them, which may prove even thornier. Who's liable, after all, when two driverless cars piloted by software engineered for major corporations crash into each other? Because that answer isn't clear, expect driverless cars to uproot the entire insurance system if Navigant's projections hold true.

Once those hurdles are cleared, however, expect increasingly autonomous cars to invade the roads. By 2035, we might just have transformed our cars and highways into trains.

RINGS propels satellites without propellants

As reported by GizMag: Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are testing a new propulsion system ... inside the station. While this might seem like the height of recklessness, this particular system doesn't use rockets or propellants.

Developed in the University of Maryland's Space Power and Propulsion Laboratory, this new electromagnetic propulsion technology called the Resonant Inductive Near-field Generation System (RINGS) uses magnetic fields to move spacecraft as a way to increase service life and make satellite formation flying more practical.

Formation flying is a new field in spaceflight that allows for tackling large jobs without large satellites. By having satellites flying in a coordinated pattern, they can be turned into sensor arrays in the same way as astronomers use separate telescopes to create one gigantic scope. It’s a technique with a large potential, but suffers from the fact that it requires a lot of propellant to keep the satellites in position. This makes the spacecraft heavier and shortens their working life. The use of rockets also risks the danger of other craft in the formation getting caught in the backwash, and the flash and heat can blind instruments.

Electromagnetic formation flight (EMFF) gets around this propellant problem by turning the satellites in a formation into electromagnets. By using a combination of magnets and reaction wheels, spacecraft in formation can move and change their attitude and even spin without propellant. Satellites can change their polarity to attract or repel one another, turn, or shift their relative positions in any manner that doesn't require changing the center of gravity for the entire formation.

According to an MIT study [PDF], when EMFF is perfected, it will have a wide number of applications including interferometers; space telescopes where each satellite carries a section of mirror, generating artificial gravity, creating a magnet shield against solar radiation storms, and clearing space debris by using their spin to toss the debris into a safer trajectory. However, there is still a great deal of work to do because EMFF will need superconducting wires, high-velocity reaction wheels, cryogenic cooling, and other critical technologies to be developed before they become practical.

The University of Maryland's RINGS is one version of EMFF. It was developed by a team led by Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering Ray Sedwick and the experimental prototype was sent to the ISS aboard the Japanese HTV-4 Cargo Ship on August 3. It consists of two separate units, each made of a polycarbonate ring containing a coil of aluminum wire, though in a practical version this would be a superconducting material. The magnetic fields are regulated by microcontrollers that allow the units to maneuver about one another.

The RINGS system has already undergone 2D bench tests and undergone freefall tests in a NASA plane flying a parabolic trajectory. The ISS experiments will allow the system to be tested for longer periods.

"While reduced gravity flights can only provide short, 15 – 20 second tests at a time, the cumulative test time over the four-day campaign provided extremely valuable data that will allow us to really get the most from the test sessions that we’ll have on the International Space Station," says Sedwick.

The ISS tests will see RINGS connected to a pair of SPHERE robots developed by MIT as a test bed for miniature satellite operations. Four test sessions are planned aboard the ISS and data collected will be transmitted back to Earth for analysis.

The tests will also allow the team to put a second technology called the wireless power transfer (WPT) through its paces. This will allow the units to be remotely recharged and in practice, it will make maintaining a satellite formation fleet easier.