FMCSA to Debut Wireless Truck Inspections

As reported by Go By Truck News: As part of a 10-year effort to improve technology in the safety inspection arena, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is coordinating a field test to see if wireless technology can be used to conduct roadside inspections.

The focus will be on maintaining quality while providing a more efficient way of conducting inspections, enabling the compliant driver to continue on rather than stop, states Chris Flanigan, manager of the wireless roadside inspection program at FMCSA. Drivers will be able to stay at speed while the commercial mobile radio service technology actually does the inspections.

The testing will be ongoing for the next three years and will encompass approximately 1,000 trucks and 2,400 miles of roads in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi. FMCSA is working together with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to choose the radio service provider, which in turn will choose carriers to take part in the evaluation process.

“[The processing system] will have to show that the system can manage the volume of data and provide a benefit to compliant carriers,” says Flanigan. The wireless system will process data from the truck, transmitting it to the inspection facility, federal and state databases, and the carrier.

All of this will take place in what will be called a “geofence area.” These are trigger points for the wireless system that will be in place on the road. Once the drivers enter the geofence area, data immediately starts to route to the operations center. The operations center then takes this information, including driver credentials, truck information and hours of service, and adds more data such as carrier information. It then sends this safety data message to the processing system.

Once the wireless system takes account of all the received information, it sends a message back to the operations center, which in turn sends a message to the driver. That message may be to turn into an inspection area or continue on the road. All of that information is also sent to the inspection officials and to FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System.

Details are still yet to be worked out. For example, the message to the driver may be in the form of a stoplight. A red light would tell the driver to stop, green would mean continue on and yellow may mean that there is insufficient data to proceed.

The data will likely be used to help determine carrier Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores, as well, specifically in the areas of driver fitness and hours of service compliance.

Humans Are Taking Automotive Jobs From Robots In Japan

As reported by The Japan Times:  Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future. 

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

These gods, or “kami-sama” in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counterintuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across the nation so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.

“Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level,” said Jeff Liker, who has written eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year. “In almost every company you would visit, the workers’ jobs are to feed parts into a machine and call somebody for help when it breaks down.”

The return of the kami-sama is emblematic of how Toyoda, 57, is remaking the company founded by his grandfather as the chief executive officer has pledged to tilt priorities back toward quality and efficiency from a growth mentality. He’s reining in expansion at the world’s-largest automaker with a three-year freeze on new car plants.

The importance of following through on that push has been underscored by the millions of cars General Motors Co. has recalled for faulty ignition switches linked to 13 deaths.

“What Akio Toyoda feared the company lost when it was growing so fast was the time to struggle and learn,” said Liker, who met with Toyoda in November. “He felt Toyota got big-company disease and was too busy getting product out.”

While the freeze and spread of manual work may bear fruit in the long run, it could come at the expense of near-term sales growth and allow GM to Volkswagen AG challenge Toyota by deepening their foothold in markets such as China.

The effort comes as Toyota overhauls vehicle development, where the carmaker will shift to manufacturing platforms that could cut costs by 30 percent. It also underscores Toyota’s commitment to maintain annual production of 3 million vehicles in Japan.

Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes, Kawai said.

In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.

Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.

The work extends beyond crankshafts. Kawai credits manual labor for helping workers at Honsha improve production of axle beams and cut the costs of making chassis parts.

Though Kawai doesn’t envision the day his employer will rid itself of robots — 760 of them take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan — he has introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota’s factories in its home country, he said.

“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”

Kawai, 65, started with Toyota during the era of Taiichi Ono, the father of the Toyota Production System envied by the auto industry for decades with its combination of efficiency and quality. That means Kawai has been living most of his life adhering to principles of “kaizen,” or continuous improvement, and “monozukuri,” which translates to the art of making things.

“Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own,” said Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Manufacturing Management Research Center. “Mechanization itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific mechanization may lead to omission of kaizen and improvement.”

Toyoda turned to Kawai to replicate the atmosphere at Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division, established in 1970 by Ono. Early in his career, Toyoda worked in the division, whose principles are now deployed at Toyota plants and its parts suppliers to reduce waste and educate employees.

Newcomers to the division such as Toyoda would be given three months to complete a project at, say, the loading docks of a parts supplier, which their direct boss could finish in three weeks, Liker said. The next higher up could figure out the solution in a matter of three days.

“But they wouldn’t tell him the answer,” Liker said of Toyoda’s time working within the division. “He had to struggle, and they’d give him three months. He told me that’s what he thought Toyota lost in that period of time when it was growing so fast. That was his main concern.”

During its rise to the top of the automotive industry — Toyota has set a target for 2014 to sell more than 10 million vehicles, a milestone no automaker has ever crossed — the company was increasing production at the turn of the century by more than half a million vehicles a year.

A year after the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 sent car demand tumbling, Toyota began recalling more than 10 million vehicles to fix problems linked to unintended acceleration, damaging its reputation for quality.

Last month, the company agreed to pay a record $1.2 billion penalty to end a probe by the U.S. Justice Department, which said Toyota had covered up information and misled the public at the time. Lawmakers are now considering fines and suggesting criminal penalties for companies after GM took more than a decade to disclose defects with its cars.

In the aftermath of its crisis, Toyota has paused from announcing any new car assembly plants as GM and VW push for further spending on new capacity.

In the years leading up to the recalls, Kawai had also been increasingly concerned Toyota was growing too fast, he said. One way for him to help prevent such a recurrence is to help humans keep tabs on the machines.

“If there is ever a technology that’s flawless and could always make perfect products, then we will be ready and willing to install that machine,” Kawai said. “There’s no machine that is eternally stable.”

Glow-In-The-Dark Roads Make Debut In Netherlands

As reported by Wired UK: Light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings have replaced streetlights on a 500m (0.3 mile) stretch of highway in the Netherlands.

Studio Roosegaarde promised the design back in 2012, and after cutting through rather a lot of government red tape we can finally see the finished product.

One Netherlands news report said, "It looks like you are driving through a fairytale," which pretty much sums up this extraordinary project. The studio aims to bring technology and design to the real world, with practical and beautiful results.

Back in October 2012, Daan Roosegaarde, the studio's founder and lead designer, told us: "One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave. I started imagining this Route 66 of the future where technology jumps out of the computer screen and becomes part of us."

Part of that vision included weather markings—snowdrops, for instance, would appear when the temperature reached a certain level. For now though, the stretch of the N329 highway in Oss features only the glow-in-the-dark road markings, created using a photo-luminescent powder integrated into the road paint, developed in conjunction with road construction company Heijmans.

Roosegaarde told Wired.co.uk that Heijmans had managed to take its luminescence to the extreme—"it's almost radioactive", said Roosegaarde. You can get some sense of that in this embedded tweet, which appears to show three stripes of varying shades of radioactive green along both the highway's edges.

According to a report in Dutch News, Heijmans wants to expand the project but has not yet secured any further contracts. There's no news yet on how the paint holds up against wear and tear—the glow lasts up to eight hours once powered throughout the day, but a patchy inconsistent strip would not pave the way as effectively as energy-guzzling street lights.

But it's of course in the interest of road operators and local government to employ these types of trials, considering the cost savings. However, when Roosegaarde spoke with Wired.co.uk a few months ago about his proposed smog-attracting electrostatic fields, to be deployed in Beijing (yes, he's helped create a smog vacuum), he explained that bureaucracy has been a big problem. In October, Roosegaarde said the project had been ready for months, but it was being held up because of a license application and approvals from local government.

"There needs to be a call to ministers all over the world—this is a problem, and we should not accept it," said Roosegaarde. "We should create labs in the city where we can experiment and explore these kinds of solutions. Like a free zone. We want to do it safely, but just give us a park [for the smog project] and we'll prove it to you. Be more open."

Telematics Success ‘Doesn’t Happen Overnight’

As reported by Transport Topics: Investment in a telematics system should be seen as a long-term strategy that can generate results beyond initial goals, fleet management experts said here during the NAFA Fleet Management Association’s annual Institute & Expo.

“We have seen good results so far, but it doesn’t happen overnight,” said Scott Darling, corporate fleet manager for energy company BP PLC in Houston. Speaking during a panel discussion, Darling said his company’s focus is on driver safety and aims to use the data it collects to reduce accidents and injuries across its global fleet of 12,000 vehicles. About 80% of them are pickup trucks, he said.

In the company’s pipeline operation, around 300 trucks have been outfitted with telematics devices. But before those devices were installed, Darling said, BP researched the technology’s lifecycle.

“You have hardware costs, installation costs, activation costs and monthly fees,” he said, adding that fleets also must consider whether a selected vehicle will remain in service for the life of the telematics device. “You have to keep track of that, because it affects overall cost,” he said.

Keeping track of the data collected is a separate challenge, one that can occupy significant staff resources.

“There is a return on investment consideration with people, too,” Darling said. “Who is looking at the data? Do you need an analyst? And do you need someone to manage the devices?”

Data management is important, he said, because the systems are constantly collecting information that could be useful, even if it’s not relevant to a fleet’s original goals.

“You can’t just turn it off,” Darling said. “I have to make sure that if there is something I should be looking at, that I am looking at it,” he said.

In fact, taking a proactive approach to fleet management is a key reason for embracing telematics, said Brad Bohnen, head of fleet management for Ericsson Inc. in Overland Park, Kansas.

“Everything we had done was reactive,” he said during the panel. “We saw telematics as a way to be proactive.” The company’s goals were to improve driver behavior, cut costs, and reduce output of carbon dioxide. It is in the middle of a program to deploy telematics across its fleet, Bohnen said.

With so many goals, the company had to divide responsibility for the information, he said, echoing Darling’s point about data management. “We did not want to ignore any data, so when it came in, we had to decide who did what,” Bohnen said. “There was a negotiation process to come up with action items.”

But taking a thorough approach to mining the information paid off in unexpected ways, he said.  For example, the company used geo-fencing on its trucks to identify which routes took vehicles past compressed natural-gas stations. That helped Ericsson decide where it might deploy CNG-powered trucks.

“You can be creative with the device and leverage it to drive other objectives,” he said.

That can include identifying vehicles that are underutilized, said Anthony Foster, corporate fleet manager for Pioneer Natural Resources Company in Savannah, Texas. “The system we use flags a vehicles that is traveling fewer than 500 miles per month,” he said. “You might look at that and say, ‘Hey, why do we even have this vehicle?’”

Google Acquires Drone Startup Titan Aerospace

As reported by TechCrunch: Google has acquired Titan Aerospace, the drone startup that makes high-flying robots which was previously scoped by Facebook as a potential acquisition target (as first reported by TechCrunch), the WSJ reports. The details of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the deal comes after Facebook disclosed its own purchase of a Titan Aerospace competitor in U.K.-based Ascenta for its globe-spanning Internet plans.

Both Ascenta and Titan Aerospace are in the business of high altitude drones, which cruise nearer the edge of the earth’s atmosphere and provide tech that could be integral to blanketing the globe in cheap, omnipresent Internet connectivity to help bring remote areas online.

According to the WSJ, Google will be using Titan Aerospace’s expertise and tech to contribute to Project Loon, the balloon-based remote Internet delivery project it’s currently working on along these lines.

That’s not all the Titan drones can help Google with, however. The company’s robots also take high-quality images in real-time that could help with Maps initiatives, as well as contribute to things like “disaster relief” and addressing “deforestation,” a Google spokesperson tells WSJ. The main goal, however, is likely spreading the potential reach of Google and its network, which is Facebook’s aim, too. When you saturate your market and you’re among the world’s most wealthy companies, you don’t go into maintenance mode; you build new ones.

As for why an exit to Google looked appealing to a company like Titan, Sarah Perez outlines how Titan had sparked early interest from VCs thanks to its massive drones, which were capable of flying at a reported altitude of 65,000 feet for up to three years, but how there was also a lot of risk involved that would've made it difficult to find sustained investment while remaining independent.

Google had just recently demonstrated how its Loon prototype balloons could traverse the globe in a remarkably short period of time, but the use of drones could conceivably make a network of Internet-providing automotons even better at globe-trotting, with a higher degree of control and ability to react to changing conditions. Some kind of hybrid system might also be in the pipeline that marries both technologies.

Titan Aerospace also represents just the latest in a string of robotics acquisitions Google has been making lately, which include Boston Dynamics and seven other companies purchased to help fuel its experimental robotics program under Andy Rubin. There’s no question Google has bots on the brain, but thanks to Loon ambitions, the reasoning behind the Titan buy might be the most transparent yet.

SpaceX Rocket Launch Scrubbed Due To Helium Leak

As reported by CBS News: Launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo capsule bound for the International Space Station was scrubbed Monday afternoon because of an apparent first stage helium leak. A new launch date has not been announced, but the flight is off until Friday at the earliest, officials say.

The Falcon 9 version 1.1 rocket was on track for liftoff from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:58 p.m., roughly the moment Earth's rotation would have carried the pad into the plane of the station's orbit.

But engineers preparing the rocket for liftoff ran into what NASA described as a helium leak in the plumbing of the rocket's first stage, an issue that could not be resolved in time for launch. SpaceX launch director Ricky Lim ordered a scrub at 3:39 p.m.

"As folks heard on the anomaly net, we have encountered an issue that will result in our scrubbing today's 4/14 launch attempt," he said. "The team here will start to safe the vehicle, offload propellants and then working on the details of the next few days forward. So for now, launch is scrubbed. Propellants offload will be commencing here shortly."

Based on the space station's orbit and the requirements of the Dragon rendezvous sequence, the next launch opportunity is Friday at 3:25 p.m., setting up a berthing at the International Space Station early Sunday.

The unpiloted Dragon spacecraft is loaded with nearly 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies, including a new spacesuit, spare parts for suits already aboard the station, food and clothing, an experimental laser communications system, high-definition video cameras and equipment to grow salad-type crops in weightlessness in research that also will augment the crew's menu.

Whenever it arrives, Expedition 39 commander Koichi Wakata and Rick Mastracchio, operating the station's robot arm and berthing system, will be standing by to lock onto a grapple fixture to pull the spacecraft in for attachment to the Earth-facing port of the forward Harmony module.

The launching was approved by NASA's Mission Management Team Sunday after engineers showed the failure of an external computer aboard the space station Friday posed no increased risk for normal lab operations.

The computer, which serves as a backup for commanding solar array motion, a robot arm transporter and other critical systems, will be replaced during a contingency spacewalk next week. In the meantime, modified procedures have been developed to keep the station operating normally even if another failure occurs.

Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager, said Sunday a launch delay would not have any major impact on NASA's plans to operate the station "as is" until the contingency spacewalk can be carried out.

Getting the Dragon spacecraft safely into orbit is the primary objective of SpaceX's third commercial resupply mission, or CRS-3. But the company also plans to used the launch as an incremental step in an ongoing series of tests aimed at learning how to recover, and eventually reuse, Falcon rocket stages.

With the Dragon capsule and the Falcon's second stage safely on their way, the discarded first stage is programmed to attempt what amounts to a "soft landing" in the Atlantic Ocean east of Cape Canaveral, firing its engines for a controlled descent and deploying four 25-foot-long landing legs just before ocean impact. Recovery crews aboard a nearby ship will be on station to monitor the descent and possibly recover hardware.

Earlier experiments with controlled stage re-entries have been problematic, and Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance at SpaceX, is not overly optimistic this time around, putting the odds of controlling the descent all the way to the ocean at just 40 percent at best.

But if SpaceX engineers eventually perfect a recovery system, future rocket stages could be guided to nearby landing sites for refurbishment and reuse, dramatically lowering costs compared to traditional throw-away boosters.

"I must point out that the entire recovery of the first stage is completely experimental, it has nothing to do with the primary mission," said Koenigsmann, adding that SpaceX is "really low-balling the probability of success here because this is a really difficult maneuver."

Koenigsmann stressed that the test was designed to have no impact on Dragon's flight to the space station.

The pressurized section of the Dragon capsule, the cabin accessible to the station crew, is packed with 1,576 pounds of research equipment, 1,049 pounds of food and other crew supplies, 271 pounds of spacesuit tools and parts and 449 pounds of space station hardware.

The equipment includes a fresh spacesuit, a set of legs for the station's humanoid robot, Robonaut 2, and the Vegetable Production System, or VEGGIE, the crew will use to grow food and carry out research.

"Based on anecdotal evidence, crews report that having plants around was very comforting and helped them feel less out of touch with Earth," Gloria Massa, a project scientist at the Kennedy Space Center, said in a NASA description. "You could also think of plants as pets. The crew just likes to nurture them."

The Dragon spacecraft also features and unpressurized "trunk" section that can be accessed by the station's robot arm. The trunk is being utilized for the first time in the CRS-3 mission to carry up components that will be mounted on the station's exterior.

One trunk-mounted payload is NASA's Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science, or OPALS, which will be mounted on the station's solar power truss. The OPALS hardware will test high-speed laser data transmission to and from a California ground station in a demonstration that could pave the way to improved communications with future spacecraft.

Compared to traditional radio communications, the laser technology represents an increase in speed reminiscent of what home computer users experienced upgrading from dial-up modems to DSL or cable for high-speed internet access.

"Future operational laser communication systems will have the ability to transmit more data from spacecraft down to the ground than they currently do, mitigating a significant bottleneck for scientific investigations and commercial ventures," said Michael Kokorowski, the OPALS project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Another trunk-mounted payload includes four high-definition cameras that will be mounted on the station's exterior as part of the High Definition Earth Viewing, or HDEV, project. The cameras will be used to downlink live, streaming video of Earth while engineers monitor the effects of the space environment on the camera hardware.

Because of the space station computer failure Friday, however, the crew will not move the lab's robot arm to begin extracting the trunk-mounted payloads until after a replacement is installed. As of this writing, engineers at the Johnson Space Center are targeting April 22 for a planned 2.5-hour spacewalk by astronauts Steven Swanson and Rick Mastracchio.

The crew spent part of the day Monday replacing components in spacesuit 3005, which Swanson will wear, to minimize any chance of a water backup like one that flooded a European astronaut's helmet during a spacewalk last year.

The Dragon capsule will remain attached to the space station until around May 8 when it will be unberthed for re-entry and splashdown off the coast of California. The Dragon is the only cargo ship currently servicing the station that is capable of bringing components, experiment samples and other materials back to Earth for post-flight analysis.

This time around, the spacecraft will be packed with some 1,600 pounds of experiment samples and other station components.

This will be the third commercial resupply mission carried out by SpaceX under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA that calls for 12 missions through 2016 to deliver some 44,000 pounds of supplies and equipment.

Another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., holds a $1.9 billion contract covering eight cargo delivery missions using its Antares rockets and Cygnus supply ships. Both contracts were awarded after the decision to retire NASA's shuttle fleet.