Why Google Is Sending Its Smartphones Into Space?

As reported by Business Week: Google (GOOG) and NASA are developing smart robots designed to fly around the International Space Station and eventually take over some menial tasks from astronauts with the aid of custom-built smartphones.

Since 2006, three colorful, volleyball-sized robots have been slowly floating around a 10-foot by 10-foot by 10-foot space inside the ISS. Scientists used them for research projects such as a study on the movement of liquids inside containers in microgravity environments.

NASA now plans to attach smartphones to the flying robots to give them spatial awareness that would enable them to travel throughout the space station. The Android-based phones will track the 3D motion of the robotic spheres while mapping their surroundings. “Our goal is to advance the state of 3D sensing for mobile devices in an effort to give mobile devices human-scale sense of space and motion,” says Johnny Chung Lee, a technical program lead at Google.

Video: The Man Behind Google’s Growing Robot Army

Before the phones are attached to the robots, a human will carry each phone around the station so that the mobile device can create a full 3D model of the facility. The robots should be able to navigate autonomously 230 miles above Earth. Within a few years, the project’s leaders say, such robots could shoot video from inside the station, conduct regular sound surveys, and take inventory of the tools on board.

“Inventory management is a huge problem at the ISS,” says Chris Provencher, a project manager for Smart Spheres at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “Think of something that’s the size of a house and has thousands of tools, and they are spread all over the house—and every few months, you get a new family that has to figure out where everything is.”

It took a lot of tinkering to get Google’s spatially aware phones working in space, Provencher says. The phones’ gravity-vector algorithms had to be removed from the software, and the devices had to be adjusted to accommodate the robots’ slow speeds, which top out at about a foot per second.

NASA began investigating the use of sensors mounted on the robotic spheres three years ago, and researchers quickly realized that smartphones with cameras and accelerometers could provide a cheap alternative to custom-built hardware. At first, astronauts velcroed a Google Nexus S smartphone to a sphere and collected data from the phone’s gyroscope to show how the robotic sphere moves differently in orbit than on Earth. NASA was also able to operate the spheres remotely, from the ground.

“You can imagine, in the future, if you had a free flyer capable of flying outside, you could have crew control it from the inside,” Provencher says. “If the crew has to go out there eventually to do work, this can at least reduce the amount of time they have to spend outside. They can review the damage.”

The new phones are scheduled for launch into space on June 10. Google says the technology may also have applications on earth, such as in gaming and navigation assistance for the visually-impaired. “This is one step on the journey to making these algorithms more robust, more sophisticated, and to make them available to a large number of people,” says Lee.

SpaceX Brings a Booster Safely Back to Earth

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, took a step toward making spaceflight less expensive by reusing its rocket boosters during a mission on Friday to the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 rocket used for the mission, dubbed Commercial Resupply-3, or CRS-3, was the first to fly with landing legs, and was the first to successfully perform a controlled ocean splashdown.

The launch of the third official cargo delivery mission by SpaceX to the station had been delayed from last month and again from Monday due to technical problems.

The rocket, carrying a Dragon space capsule loaded with 3,500 pounds of supplies for the space station, lifted off at just after 3:25 p.m. EST. The Dragon spacecraft reached the precise orbit needed to rendezvous with the space station on Sunday.

The mission was the first successful test of a new capability for the first stage of the Falcon 9: the ability to descend to a soft touchdown after delivering its payload to orbit. Conventional rocket boosters fall back to Earth after expending their fuel, reentering the atmosphere fast enough to disintegrate in the heat caused by friction with the air. This adds greatly to launch costs, which can top $200 million per launch, since a new rocket has to be built for each flight (see “SpaceX to Launch World’s First Reusable Rocket”).

SpaceX is already the lowest-cost provider of launch services to the U.S. government and the commercial satellite industry, with flights costing less than $100 million. The company hopes to drop costs even further with reusable rockets. SpaceX has been testing a Falcon 9 first stage in low-altitude hops at its McGregor, Texas, rocket development and testing center. The company posted a video of a test flight that took place last week with the same type of landing legs used on Friday’s orbital flight.

A camera on the second stage of the rocket captured live video of the nine SpaceX-built Merlin engines firing on the first stage of the rocket, with the plume of flame and smoke gradually expanding as the air around the vehicle thinned. At about 50 miles in altitude, and traveling at about 10 times the speed of sound some 35 miles off the Florida coast, the first-stage engines cut off as planned. As the first stage dropped away, the single Merlin engine in the second stage fired to propel the Dragon craft the rest of the way into orbit. Another camera view showed the Dragon moving away from the second stage into space with the Earth as a backdrop.

Meanwhile, a data link with the first stage confirmed that three of the nine engines on the first stage had fired as planned to slow the booster’s reëntry into the atmosphere. The plan then called for a single engine to restart at lower altitude over the Atlantic Ocean to enable a gentle splashdown. The second stage of the rocket was not designed to be recovered.

Fly away: After separating from a SpaceX Falcon rocket, the Dragon capsule heads off toward the International Space Station.

At a press conference about an hour and a half after the launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the initial data from the first-stage booster looked good. The booster had slowed to just over the speed of sound and had descended to about five miles, or about the altitude of a commercial airliner, before the terrestrial tracking station lost contact.

The latest data showed that the vehicle was not rolling. During the first attempt of a Falcon 9 first stage to safely splash down following an orbital flight, in November, the rocket spun out of control. Along with the addition of landing legs, the booster used for Friday’s flight included more powerful thrusters for countering the booster’s rolling motion.

Even so, Musk was not initially confident that the booster had landed softly on the water because of high waves.

“I think it’s unlikely that the rocket was able to splash down successfully,” he said during the post-flight press conference. At the time of the conference, he and his engineers were awaiting data from an airplane tracking the booster near the planned splashdown location, some 400 to 500 miles from Cape Canaveral. Boats that were to retrieve the booster were not able to approach the splashdown site because of the waves, which topped 15 to 20 feet.

However, Musk reported via Twitter about two hours after the press conference that the booster had indeed landed safely. “Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good!” he tweeted. “Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal.” At last report, the crews of several boats were attempting to retrieve the booster.

SpaceX engineers are working toward the day when a Falcon 9 first stage will touch down on land. The company will attempt a touchdown on land after it demonstrates further precision splashdowns. The next big milestone following the successful recovery of a booster will be to reuse one, which could happen as early as next near. The company’s goal is not only to recover and reuse boosters, but to do so economically.

“The reuse must be both rapid and complete,” said Musk in the press conference, “like an aircraft or a car or something like that. If you have to disassemble and reassemble a car and change a bunch of parts in between driving it, it would make it quite expensive. So it’s true that we don’t just have to recover it, we have to show that it can be reflown quickly and easily with the only thing changing being reloading propellant.”

The Dragon that launched on Friday’s flight reached Space Station and was grappled by the station’s robotic arm on Sunday morning. It was then installed at the Earth-facing port on the station’s Harmony module.

This was the fifth flight of a Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX has a contract with NASA for nine more cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. The company plans 10 more flights this year, including commercial satellite launches, each one of which will offer an opportunity to recover a booster.

How Smartphones Are Increasingly Driving Our Cars

As reported by ReadWrite: Suddenly it's not so important to own a car that's "the ultimate driving machine," as opposed to "the ultimate app machine." I drive my Honda Pilot instead of my Volvo XC90 whenever I can because the Honda can connect to my smartphone over Bluetooth, plus it has a great navigation system. My Volvo has neither—all it does is drive.

Car manufacturers have picked up on this trend, recognizing that our apps are increasingly important in our car purchasing decisions:

Developers want to get in on the action, too, but there is a big problem. In the car app market, "Developers are faced by enormous fragmentation, small addressable markets and high friction in the distribution and monetization of their software," as a new VisionMobile report highlights.

In other words, the car app market is a nightmare. And yet, there's still hope.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

The best approach to incorporate apps these days is through in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. Within the IVI market, mobile laggards Blackberry (QNX Car) and Microsoft (Windows Embedded Automotive) are the leaders. But not for long.

Given how important in-car technology has become—and the sluggish pace at which it updates—more automobile manufacturers are turning to smartphones to drive innovation. While people swap out their cars infrequently, we change our smartphones every two years or so, making the smartphone ideal as a target for car app innovation. John Ellis, head of Ford's developer program, explains:

The only one that puts software on the head unit is Ford Motor Company. We don't allow you access to the head unit but through a dedicated set of APIs. In our philosophy, the phone drives the head unit, the head unit is a display. Innovation is much faster on the phone than it could be on the head unit. Certainly for us, we're very bullish on this model. People are starting to see that it just works.

As VisionMobile's report indicates, there are three different ways automakers integrate cars and smartphones:

1. The steering wheel controls and built-in voice recognition can be used to control smartphone apps. 
2. Reversely, smartphone voice recognition (e.g. Apple’s Siri or Google Now) can be used to control IVI apps. 
3. The built-in infotainment system becomes a second display for smartphone apps, using APIs, or in its most extreme case, by mirroring the smartphone app on the in-car display. 

Standardizing The Link Between Car And Smartphone

Of course, this assumes there are standards for seamlessly connecting our cars to our smartphones. There are several competing standards, with Ford, who recently open-sourced its AppLink system as SmartDeviceLink, leading the pack. Others include the Car Connectivity Consortium's (CCC) Mirrorlink, an alliance of consumer electronics companies (Mirrorlink has roots in Nokia) and car makers.

As important as these car manufacturer-driven initiatives are, there's a fair amount of enthusiasm for two new platforms from Apple (CarPlay) and Google (Open Automotive Alliance, modeled after the Open Handset Alliance). Such efforts, however, may be artificially limited: Any household that mixes iOS and Android devices is going to want a car app platform that isn't fixated on a particular smartphone OS. For those households, an open platform like SmartDeviceLink, which can integrate with different smartphone OSes, may be the better choice.

The Distant Future Of App-Enabled Cars

For developers pining after the biggest addressable market, smartphones are the biggest and best target, by far. But it's not a target to salivate over today: While there were 84 million new vehicles manufactured in 2012, a small minority of these are “app-enabled” models. According to ABI Research, there were fewer than 8 million OEM-installed connected car telematics systems in 2012. 

Pushing new technologies and applications through through automakers is always going to be slow. It's far more likely that Apple and Google will find ways to go "over-the-top" and connect apps directly with cars, perhaps by connecting directly to the car through its On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port. The OBD-II port has been mandatory in cars for over 10 years, which leaves the door open for app developers to connect directly with cars without awaiting formal approval from Ford, Fiat or others. At the moment, there are almost 200 apps in the Google Play store that use OBD-II. 

While OBD-II connections don't allow apps to actually control the car, it may give developers just enough access and a lot more development freedom, which are the key ingredients for fostering innovation.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Launches To ISS Despite Bad Weather

As reported by GigaOm: After months of delays, SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off today carrying cargo bound for the International Space Station.

The Dragon capsule inside the rocket, which will complete the final leg of the journey to the ISS, contains an array of important science experiments, including NASA’s OPALS project, which will test using a laser to transfer data between the space station and Earth. SpaceX will also deliver parts to repair a broken backup computer that is involved in the ISS’s robotics system.

The launch was originally tentatively scheduled for September 2013, but was pushed by repeatedly by NASA due to limited docking opportunities and equipment issues on the ISS. SpaceX scrubbed a launch on April 14 after experiencing a helium leak.

Today’s take off marks SpaceX’s third mission carrying cargo to the ISS for NASA.

MIT And Stanford Show Robotaxis Could Replace Private Cars And Public Transit

As reported by Forbes: Someday, when fully autonomous vehicles are a reality, private car ownership and public transportation might plummet in favor of faster, better and cheaper mobility-on-demand services fulfilled by driverless cars. Imagine Uber powered by fleets of Google self-driving cars.

Such services underlie intriguing future scenarios where “robotaxis” provide door-to-door service while enabling significant reductions in transportation cost, enhancing mobility for millions saddled with limited access to private and public transportation, relieving congestion, and reducing the need for parking.

These scenarios are built on the fact that cars are relatively expensive but go mostly unused—cars are parked, on average, more than 90% of the time. Robotaxis would enable much higher utilization by sharing otherwise unused cars. This allows the purchase, maintenance and insurance cost to be spread across a large number of users on a pay-as-you-go basis, thereby increasing access and reducing cost for everyone. Also, since passengers don’t need to find parking, travel times, congestion, cost and space requirements would go down.

Robotaxis would be more efficient and convenient than emerging car sharing services like Zipcar and Car2Go in that the robotaxis go to the passenger, and return by themselves to the appropriate staging areas or to the next customer.

Robotaxis would be much less costly than traditional taxis and limousine services because there is no need for a human driver. (More on the jobs issue later.) Robotaxis would also deliver the added safety and performance benefits of self-driving cars.

There are, however, significant logistical and financial challenges to creating large-scale car-sharing services—even assuming that driverless technology works. The design challenges boil down to this: Can the fleet be sized and operated with acceptable service at a viable price?

For example, fielding too many cars to meet rush-hour demand results in high capital cost and a lot of idle cars during non-peak hours. Too few cars drive down service. Poor routing leads to a lot of empty miles, adding to cost, congestion and poor service. Even worse, routing algorithms must contend with stochastic demand that could easily lead to fleet imbalances and cause unpredictable and unacceptably long wait times.

A paper by a group of MIT and Stanford researchers reports several advances in addressing these challenges. The researchers developed rigorous methods to determine fleet sizing and manage robotaxi routing while ensuring attractive service levels. What’s more, they demonstrate that their methods work using actual traffic data and road networks of Singapore and New York.

In Singapore, the researchers applied their methods to extensive governmental data on travel patterns, traffic flows and road networks to simulate a large-scale robotaxi system. Rather than just replacing car traffic, the researchers show that a robotaxi system could handle all transportation needs—including private and public cars, taxis, scooters, buses, trains, etc.

Yes, you read that right. Their analysis showed that a fleet of 250,000 robotaxis could replace all modes of personal transportation and fulfill the transportation needs of the entire Singapore population. Maximum wait time with this fleet size is about 30 minutes during rush hours—and significantly lower during non-peak periods. Travel times would approximate current times.

Increasing the fleet to 300,000 vehicles brings maximum wait times down to less than 15 minutes. To put this number in context, there are about 800,000 total number of passenger vehicles in Singapore.

MIT Professor Emilio Frazzoli, one of the paper’s authors, shared this thought about his team’s work:

"Our study was more of a thought experiment: we assumed that there were no other means of transportation available. This is clearly unrealistic—but I think it sends a compelling message."

Compelling indeed: Theoretically, robotaxis could meet all of Singapore’s transportation needs at today’s service levels while eliminating 500,000 cars and all buses and trains.

Others are also studying the potential of robotaxi-enabled car sharing. Some studies, in fact, conclude that robotaxis could replace an even larger percentage of human-driven cars. This study is among the first to use actual transportation data of such scale.

Larry Burns, Professor of Engineering Practice, University of Michigan and former corporate vice president in charge of research, development and planning at General Motors, praised the research. Burns, along with several colleagues, reached similar results in earlier research conducted at Columbia’s Earth Institute. That study, however, used simpler analytics and simulation models rather than actual data.

“Every city is different in terms of road networks, traffic flows, trip densities, and congestion,” Burns told me. “MIT’s work very good, and is the right thing to do if you are planning for a specific system.”

Some might recoil at the prospect of robotaxis taking riders away from public buses and trains. Brad Templeton, who coined the “robotaxi” term and is chair of Computing & Networks at Singularity University, argues, however, that robotaxis would not only be more convenient than public transit but also more environmentally advantageous. In several articles, including The Decline of Mass Transit and Is Green U.S. Mass Transit a Big Myth?, Templeton argues that well designed robotaxis will beat the energy efficiency of public transit by large margins. Templeton doesn't argue for replacing existing transit systems but rather that robotaxis might well diminish the need for major extensions and new systems.

Given the politics of public transit funding, however, a more likely robotaxi adoption strategy is to target the displacement of cars and taxis. In Singapore, which has a very sophisticated public transportation system, cars and taxis account for about 33% of total trips. Might a robotaxi fleet of less than 100,000 cars eliminate the need for all 800,000 privately owned, human-driven cars and taxis?

A glimpse of this future shown in a related paper, where several of the same researchers applied similar methods to model a system that could handle all New York City taxi traffic. In that study, the researchers showed that their routing algorithms could serve the same demand with a 40% reduction in fleet size. The savings result from intelligent coordination of the robotaxis to minimize congestion, keep the system in balance and better serve anticipated demand.

The research also shows that robotaxis are financially viable.

In New York, the economics for replacing taxis is straightforward. Reducing the cost of drivers—on top of a 40% reduction in vehicles—leaves a wide margin for a sustainable robotaxi business model.

For Singapore, the researchers estimated that direct cost per mile for the robotaxis would be about 30% less than human-driven cars. This analysis was based on conservative assumptions about technology cost and actual operational data from current car-sharing services, like ZipCar. If the value of the time saved is considered, the savings increased to almost 50%. Again, such levels of cost reductions leave ample room for a sustainable business.

In addition to the tremendous cost and time savings, another major benefit of robotaxis is increased mobility at a practical cost for the disadvantaged, disabled and elderly with limited access to cars or unable to drive. A US Bureau of Transportation Statistics survey found that almost 15 million people, six million of whom are disabled, have difficulties getting the transportation they need. This number will rise. The Los Angeles Times reports that by 2030, up to a quarter of the nation’s licensed drivers will be older than 85. Not having easy, affordable transportation or losing the ability to drive altogether has been linked to lower employment, increase in depressive symptoms and a decline in out-of-home activity levels.
Massive disruptions would come along with the benefits, however.

There is much to learn, for example, about the secondary effects of making car travel cheaper and more convenient. Will this shift usage from public transit? Will it drive up overall demand and increase pollution and congestion? Will it enhance urban, suburban and exurb sprawl?

The impacts on jobs and profits will be substantial. More than $2T is spent each year in the US on car-related spending, encompassing suppliers, carmakers, dealers, financing, service, repairs, insurance, energy, rentals, taxes, etc. As I've previously discussed, massive car sharing has the potential of eliminating or redistributing a significant portion of these revenues through new business models and changes in the competitive landscape.

Professional drivers, for example, could suffer huge job losses. In New York City alone, there are over 50,000 licensed taxi drivers and about another 50,000 other professional drivers of black cars, livery services and other For-Hire Vehicles (Source: 2014 NYC Taxicab Fact Book). (I explored this issue in depth in several previous articles, including one entitled Will The Google Car Force A Choice Between Lives And Jobs?)

The disruptions would reach far beyond professional drivers. Take automakers and car dealers, for example.

Car dealers could be disintermediated if robotaxis are sold as large fleets to robotaxi operators, rather than to through dealers to individual owners. Car dealers in the US handle more than $650 billion in new and used cars sales today and, as Tesla is finding out, jealously guard their position in the automotive value chain.

An increase in fleet sales and in total mile travel due to cheaper transportation would be good for automakers but robotaxis could hurt them in other ways.  Profits would be squeezed if robotaxis cut into the sales of large expensive models that provide most of today’s margin. That’s because most car trips involve only one or two persons. So, if robotaxis allow riders to call for the type of car needed, when they need it, customers might opt for smaller, less expensive cars. Gone might be the days when buyers choose minivans just to accommodate the occasional family outing or car-pooled soccer game. They might opt buy the smaller car, and request larger robotaxis when they need it. The same rationale might diminish the tendency to purchase second or third cars for occasional use.

A lot of invention and innovation is needed before a robotaxi pulls up to your door and, in doing so, induce broad social and economic disruptions. Estimates of when this might happen range from a few years to never. Many hard issues remain to be solved—but many forces are working towards making that eventuality come sooner rather than later.

Fasten your seat belts; we are in for a wild and bumpy ride.

The Dismal State of SATCOM Security

As reported by Help Net Security: Satellite Communications (SATCOM) play a vital role in the global telecommunications system, but the security of the devices used leaves much to be desired, says Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant with IOActive.

The list of security weaknesses he and his colleagues found while analyzing and reverse-engineering firmware used on the most widely deployed Inmarsat and Iridium SATCOM terminals does not include only design flaws, but also features in the devices themselves that could be of use to attackers.

"We live in a world where an ever-increasing stream of digital data is flowing between continents. It is clear that those who control communications traffic have an upper-hand," Santamarta pointed out in a recently released whitepaper documenting their research. "The ability to disrupt, inspect, modify, or re-route traffic provides an invaluable opportunity to carry perform surveillance or conduct cyber-attacks."

Many important industries depend on satellite networks, including the maritime and aerospace sectors, emergency services, the energy and military sectors, and the media. IOActive researchers have concentrated on analyzing the terminals used on the ground segment of the SATCOM infrastructure.

"Our research was not intended to stress the software in search of common memory corruptions, but rather to understand the devices’ native security strengths and weaknesses," he pointed out, and unfortunately, the weaknesses abound.

"The vulnerabilities we uncovered what would appear to be multiple backdoors, hardcoded credentials, undocumented and/or insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. These vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to compromise the affected products. In certain cases no user interaction is required to exploit the vulnerability; just sending a simple SMS or specially crafted message from one ship to another ship would be successful for some of the SATCOM systems," Santamarta shared.

Technical details that would allow attackers to take advantage of the found vulnerabilities have, of course, not yet been widely shared. The company is working with government CERT Coordination Center and the vulnerable vendors to fix them before making those details public.

In the meantime, they advised SATCOM manufacturers and resellers to remove all publicly accessible copies of device firmware updates from their websites, so that attackers can't download them freely and scour them for usable vulnerabilities.

Despite all this, the aforementioned whitepaper is an extremely interesting read, as it details a variety of possible attack scenarios.

GLONASS Fails Again, Briefly

As reported by Inside GNSS: Russia's GLONASS satellite navigation system reportedly suffered another major disruption on Tuesday (April 15, 2014), with eight satellites malfunctioning and another going off the air entirely.

According to the Russian Interfax news agency as reported by the Moscow Times, eight GLONASS satellites malfunctioned for a half-hour period beginning shortly after 1 a.m. Moscow Time.

A ninth satellite, GLONASS #730 stopped working completely at 10:20 p.m. on Monday, and remained in maintenance status as of today (August 16, 2014), leaving the system with only 23 operational satellites on the air. The constellation has four on-orbit spares, which system operators can call on to restore GLONASS to full operational capability.

Russia’s Izvestia news quoted Nikolai Testoyedov, general director at JSC Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems, which manufactures the satellites, as saying that the glitches occurred while work was being carried out to update the system.

The latest problems came just two weeks after all GLONASS satellites broadcast inaccurate data for more than 10 hours earlier this month.

Also on Tuesday, the GLONASS System Control Center announced that the most recently launched satellite, GLONASS-M #754 had been added to the GLONASS operational constellation as of 20:01 Moscow Time (UTC+4) on Tuesday (April 14, 2014).

The earlier lengthy outage, also blamed on an erroneous data uploaded, had prompted expressions of concern from GNSS experts.

Professor Chris Rizos of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Australia, said, “This catastrophic failure of one of the world’s two global satellite navigation constellations is a wakeup call for all of us. We ignore the possibility of these ‘Black Swan’ events at our own peril.”

Nunzio Gambale, CEO of Locata Corporation, which offers a terrestrial positioning technology, said, “There is no way you can iminterpret this clear sign of the elephant in the room. We have been telling the industry for years that you cannot have a critically important capability like GPS without also having a backup.”