Automated System Lets Trucks Convoy as One

As reported by MIT Technology Review: A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno, Nevada, might seem like an unusual sight—not to mention unsafe. But the two trucks doing this a couple of weeks ago were actually demonstrating a system that could make trucking safer and much more efficient.

While the driver in front drove his truck normally, the truck behind him was partly operated by a computer—and it stuck to its leader like glue. When instructed to do so, the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead. The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable, until the system was disengaged. If the truck in front stopped suddenly, the one behind could have reacted instantaneously to avoid a collision.

Most automobile companies are working on full vehicle automation, but they need to overcome significant challenges before they can deploy those technologies (see “Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think”). The technology demonstrated in Nevada, in contrast, could be deployed today, since the system is only partially automated (the driver behind still steers, with the aid of a camera that shows the view ahead of the truck in front). So it is covered by the same guidelines and regulations as adaptive cruise control, a feature in some cars that automatically keeps vehicles on the highway a safe distance from the ones around them.

This kind of “platooning”—as it is known—reduces the wind drag on both trucks, and could therefore save trucking companies millions of dollars in fuel every year. The trucks were fitted with technology developed by a startup called Peloton Tech (“peloton” is the French word for platoon). Peloton’s system consists of radar sensors, a wireless communications system, and computers connected to each truck’s central computer. Video screens in both cabs show the drivers views of blind spots around the two vehicles.

Joshua Switkes, CEO of Peloton Tech, says the fuel savings are 4.5 percent for the front truck and 10 percent for the rear truck. This could amount to $100,000 each year. “For truck companies, these savings are enormous,” Switkes says. He adds that the technology could even allow competing companies to platoon together to get these savings.



Switkes says the technology should also improve safety, since drivers have greater visibility and the radar systems can brake automatically if needed. In theory, more trucks could be virtually tethered together this way, although the initial plan is to connect only two.

The prospect of two trucks driving so close together under computer control may raise concerns among other drivers, but the technology involved, including the vehicle-to-vehicle communications system used to share information between the two trucks, is set to become far more common in the next few years. The U.S. Department of Transportation has indicated that it plans to mandate such communications systems in new vehicles in the hopes of improving road safety (see “The Internet of Cars Is Approaching a Crossroads”).

Vehicle platooning has been a subject of research in industry and academia for decades, but efforts have intensified in recent years as the underlying technology has advanced.

A European project, called SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), has been exploring ways for vehicles to travel in platoons since 2009. This effort is funded by the European Commission and involves various companies, including the carmaker Volvo. Another effort, called Energy ITS, which is backed by the Japanese government and involves several Japanese universities, has been testing platoons made of three semi-automated or fully automated trucks since 2007. A U.S. project, called PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology), operated out of the University of California, Berkeley, is testing vehicle platooning along with other technologies designed to improve transportation.


Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley involved with PATH, says that his own experiments indicate that platooning vehicles even closer together—just a few meters apart— could lead to fuel savings of 20 percent. But it would also introduce new risks. Once trains of trucks get too long, it’s much harder for drivers of other cars to change lanes. “I would not advocate running very long sequences of these trucks close together,” Shladover says.

Hydrogen Fuel Finally Graduating From Lab to City Streets

As reported by Bloomberg: Once relegated to the realm of science projects, hydrogen fuel cells are starting to displace fossil fuels as a means of powering cars, homes and businesses.

On June 10, in the latest addition to mainstream fuel-cell use, Hyundai Motor Co. will begin deliveries of a consumer SUV in Southern California. The technology is already producing electricity for the grid in Connecticut. AT&T Inc. is using fuel cells to power server farms, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. uses hydrogen-powered fork lifts. Later this summer, FedEx Corp. will begin using hydrogen cargo tractors at its Memphis air hub.

“This is the most exciting time for fuel cells in my career,” said Daniel Dedrick, head of hydrogen and combustion technologies at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. The hydrogen market “is starting to accelerate.”

Fuel cells produce electricity from hydrogen in a process that dates back to the 1830s, yet high costs have historically made the technology better suited for Apollo space missions and Soviet submarines. In recent years, the technology has made big strides, and prices are falling. And because the process produces little or no greenhouse gases, hydrogen power stands to get a boost in the wake of President Barack Obama’s recent call for tighter controls on carbon emissions.

Early Days
It’s still early days for hydrogen power. Prominent skeptics, including former Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, have questioned whether the technology will ever catch on.

Hydrogen currently provides less than 1 percent of power worldwide, while coal and gas produced 67 percent of U.S. electricity in 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration. Chu, who was appointed by Obama, called for a 44 percent reduction in funding for hydrogen research.

“People have been working to improve fuel cells for over 150 years, and it’s still not commercially viable,” said Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think-tank.

There are only about 1,000 cars and buses in operation worldwide today using hydrogen technology. There are nine hydrogen filling stations in California, with 48 more under development. California promises to boost that number to about 100 over the next several years. By comparison, there are 160,000 traditional filling stations across the country.

Hydrogen Infrastructure 
Advocates argue the hydrogen landscape could quickly evolve as corporations’ use of hydrogen spreads. The infrastructure for corporate fuel cells has been quietly spreading. Across the U.S., there are now tanks of hydrogen and fueling systems for fleet vehicles and forklifts. There are pipelines delivering the fuel to refiners that use it to make gasoline. As more companies adopt hydrogen power, the needed equipment will come, said Andy Marsh, chief executive officer of Plug Power Inc. (PLUG) in Latham, New York.

Yet even industry leaders say that, without a national pipeline network, it will be a long time before the nascent industry will enjoy widespread development.

“You have to get critical mass to build a business case,” said Ed Kiczek, global business director for hydrogen at Air Products and Chemicals Inc. in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the world’s largest supplier of hydrogen. “That could be 30 years away.”

Shops Buying 
For now, local pockets of hydrogen use are flourishing. Plug supplies fuel-cell powered forklifts for customers including Wal-Mart, the grocery chain Kroger Co. and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. Plug also provides hydrogen-fueling systems. Once a company has a flock of its forklifts at a warehouse, it’s a short leap to installing larger fuel cells that can produce both hydrogen on site and electricity for the entire building, Marsh said.


The company is supplying the systems for FedEx’s airport tractors in Memphis, another location where stationary fuel cells might eventually become either a primary or back-up source of electricity.

AT&T is the largest non-utility fuel cell customer in the U.S.. It has 17.1 megawatts of fuel cells operating at 28 sites in California and Connecticut. The systems offer cleaner power that’s more consistent than electricity supplied by the grid, said John Schinter, the company’s assistant vice president of energy and smart buildings.


“For us, reliability is so critical and these help us ride through power disruptions,” Schinter said. “We deploy fuel cells in our high-cost markets, so these actually reduce our operating costs. We’re definitely planning to expand.”

Autos Next 
Proponents of hydrogen say all this activity will soon spill over to the auto market, and it’s already happening in Southern California. Hyundai will begin deliveries of its fuel-cell Tucson SUV next week. Honda Motor Co. already offers one there and Toyota Motor Corp. will follow next year.

“The shift to hydrogen is inevitable, and it’s happening faster than we expected,” said Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a non-profit clean energy research organization based in Snowmass, Colorado.

Not everyone agrees. Elon Musk, a longtime critic of fuel cell technology, particularly in automobiles that compete with Tesla’s Model S, revisited his opposition to the power-generating devices earlier this week.

“I’m not the biggest fan of fuel cells,” Musk said at the company’s annual meeting in Mountain View, California, on June 3. “I usually call them ‘fool cells.’”

California’s Push 
Even so, California is participating in an eight-state effort to get 3.3 million zero-emission cars on the road by 2025, powered by either fuel cells or batteries. Also participating are Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, which together account for 25 percent of all U.S. auto sales.

Some analysts are predicting steady if modest growth. Automakers may be selling 1.76 million fuel-cell vehicles a year worldwide by 2025, according to Deloitte Tohmastsu Consulting.
Cars that run on hydrogen can typically go more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) on a tank of the gas and then must be refilled. They differ from battery electric vehicles like Tesla’s Model S or the Nissan Motor Co. Leaf, which use lithium ion batteries to store electricity. When those batteries are drained, they must be recharged.

Nearing Profitability
After decades of losses, fuel cell makers are finally closing in on profits. Ballard Power Systems Inc. (BLDP) expects to report break-even earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for 2014, after posting one profitable year since 1992. The Vancouver-based company supplies power systems used in buses and Plug’s forklifts.

FuelCell Energy Inc. (FCEL), a supplier of large stationary systems that run buildings and factories, said yesterday it will have break-even EBITDA by the end of this year. The company’s systems are running the world’s biggest fuel-cell power plant, a 59-megawatt facility in South Korea, and the first utility-scale plant in the U.S., in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Investors are taking note. Plug is up more than 1,000 percent in the past year, the best performer on the Nasdaq Composite Index. (CCMP) Ballard has doubled and FuelCell has gained 49 percent, compared with a 23 percent gain for the broader market index.

In the future, suppliers may tap excess power from wind and solar farms to make hydrogen, reducing the carbon emissions that come when it’s derived from gas, said Michael Beckman, vice president of hydrogen fueling at Linde AG (LIN), the world’s largest industrial gas supplier.

“In three to five years you will see that become more prevalent,” Beckman said. “Wind and solar can make hydrogen cheap when the grid doesn't need the power.” 

Storm Shelter GPS Coordinates Could Help Rescuers in Aftermath of Tornado

As reported by KSHB: For several years, Larry Hall and his wife, Jan, saved up to buy a storm shelter in their Belton home.

Last month, they ordered the unit and had it installed in their garage. When the man who assembled the shelter was finished, he presented the Halls with a certificate. It had the GPS coordinates of their storm shelter. The installer then gave the halls instructions on what to do with those coordinates.

“It says right here ‘Owner’s advised to share with the fire department or with the office of emergency management,” said Larry Hall.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Storm Shelter Association both give the same advice. They believe this information could prove valuable for emergency responders.

After a tornado, streets usually are covered in debris. Street signs may be missing. It’s also sometimes difficult to tell from the debris where homes once stood. When emergency responders arrive, they spend a lot of time hoping they have picked a good spot to dig.

However, with that GPS information, emergency responders could arrived with a handheld GPS location device. That would allow them to pinpoint a specific location where they should start digging.

Emergency Management offices would keep this information in a private database. Participation would be voluntary.


The cities of Moore and Oklahoma City in Oklahoma have started compiling this information. Storm shelter companies are already providing the information to homeowners.



However, when Larry Hall contacted Cass County, he found out they were not taking that information yet.

41 Action News spoke to Cass County Emergency Management Director Stan Swaggart over the phone. He said the idea of collecting GPS coordinates is so new, his county is still devising a good system for doing it.

Swaggart also believes collecting the information would be beneficial to emergency responders. He said he has had several people contact his office wanting to report their coordinates.

Hall said he is glad to hear his county is working on a way to collect this information.

“I figured in this part of the country anything you can do at all helps,” said Hall.

Sprint Agrees to Pay About $32 Bln to Buy T-Mobile

As reported by Reuters: Sprint Corp has agreed to pay about $40 per share to buy T-Mobile US Inc , a person familiar with the matter said, marking further progress in the attempt to merge the third and fourth-biggest U.S. mobile network operators.

The $40 price represents a 17 percent premium to T-Mobile US's closing share price on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of more than $32 billion and the shares have more than doubled in price since the group bought smaller rival MetroPCS a year ago.

Deutsche Telekom shares were up 1.4 percent at 12.60 euros by 1115 GMT on Thursday, valuing the German firm at over 56 billion euros ($76 billion).

However, Hannes Wittig, an analyst at JP Morgan, said the $40 price, if confirmed, seemed low.

"T-Mobile US should be worth more than that given that the synergies should exceed $20 billion, Deutsche Telekom would share some of the execution risk and Sprint would be getting control ... Somewhere in the high 40s would be more appropriate," he said.

Japan's Softbank, which owns Sprint, and Deutsche Telekom, which owns 67 percent of T-Mobile, still have to negotiate on the details, including financing and the termination fee to be paid should the merger get blocked by regulators, the source familiar with the matter said.

Analysts see the regulatory challenge as the biggest hurdle facing the companies since both the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have expressed a desire to have at least two more network operators competing against the market leaders AT&T and Verizon.

Three years ago regulators rejected AT&T's agreed $39 billion bid for T-Mobile US, which resulted in AT&T paying Deutsche Telekom as T-Mobile's full owner a reverse break-up fee of $6 billion in cash and U.S. mobile assets.

Under the proposed sale to Sprint Deutsche Telekom is expected to keep a 15 to 20 percent stake in the combined company, the source said.

It also remains to be seen what the break-up fee would be if the deal fails to gain regulatory clearance. Bloomberg said Softbank was pushing for a termination fee of $1 billion, while Deutsche Telekom wanted more like $3 billion.

Officials at Sprint, Softbank and Deutsche Telekom declined to comment. T-Mobile US did not respond to requests for comment.


REGULATORY CONCERNS
The U.S. telecommunications sector is already in the throes of a major, broader consolidation, with AT&T seeking to buy satellite TV operator DirecTV and cable company Comcast trying to merge with rival Time Warner.

The changes could create a clutch of media and telecoms giants and leave Sprint an also-ran with an inferior business, the source said.

Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son has made no secret of his long-held desire to buy T-Mobile and merge it with Sprint, creating a carrier with the resources to upgrade its network and better compete with AT&T and Verizon.

For Deutsche Telekom, an exit from the United States would allow it to concentrate on its European business, including at home in Germany where it faces an upcoming auction of radio spectrum and needs to invest more in optic fiber broadband.

But first Sprint, T-Mobile US and their owners have to win over U.S. regulators to their merger plan.

"The (regulatory) agencies have tipped their hand and the parties know that," said an antitrust expert who asked not to be named to protect business relationships.

"(They) must think that they have stronger arguments and they're willing to battle them out with the agencies. That has to be part of their calculus here."

Analysts have also said that Softbank and Deutsche Telekom could choose to challenge the U.S. government in court if the acquisition was blocked.

"We see the odds of approval from both the FCC and DOJ as very low unless landscape-altering concessions are offered," wrote Nomura analyst Adam Ilkowitz in a note.

New Chip to Bring Holograms to Smartphones

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky contraption to your head.

Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie "Star Wars."

A key to this future may lay in Carlsbad, Calif., where startup Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3-D images for smartphones and giant screens.

Other companies have shown they can project floating images that appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles. For instance, the lifelike image of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, which graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012, was a combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.

An Ostendo chip with an affixed lens
sitting in the palm of a hand. Evelyn M. Rusli for The Wall Street Journal

Ostendo's projectors, in contrast, are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the color, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.

"Display is the last frontier," said Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in 1998 sold CommQuest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.41% for about $250 million in cash and stock. "Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display."

The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to life.

Ostendo's chief executive and founder,
Hussein S. El-Ghoroury in Carlsbad,
California, on Thursday. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal!

Microsoft Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are both working on their own virtual reality rooms, building a complex system of projectors and computers. Hewlett-Packard Co. recently spun out a company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3-D imaging to smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. agreed in March to spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR Inc., maker of the Oculus Rift headset that pulls users into 360-degree virtual environments.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, in part, convinced of the value of virtual reality after he accidentally tried to set down a real world object on a virtual table while testing the Oculus Rift, forgetting for a moment that the table didn't exist in the real world, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Ostendo, tucked away in Southern California, is little-known but has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, and has secured some $38 million in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of that has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the government's futurist agency that worked on the predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.

That capital has given Dr. El-Ghoroury, an immigrant from Egypt, the luxury to work for nearly a decade undisturbed. Ostendo now employs about 115 people, including scientists suited in scrubs and goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech semiconductor lab.

Researchers with Ostendo Technologies, Inc.
work in a nanotechnology lab on Thursday to
manufacture Quantam Photonic Imager chips that
can produce holograms. Sam Hodgson for
The Wall Street Journal

The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name, which fuses an image processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, alongside software that helps the unit properly render images.

During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air. The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer.

According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT's Media Lab, Ostendo's advantage and the key to its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch, Ostendo's chips are at about 5,000 dots per inch.

Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers, expects the first 2-D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability, in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.

Dr. El-Ghoroury said the company still needs to improve the 3-D product and is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolution.

Ultimately, the larger vision is to have Ostendo's chips everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a glasses-free 3-D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.

So what happens in a world where 3-D and virtual reality is everywhere? Dr. El-Ghoroury predicts people's relationship with technology will change and breed a wave of business opportunities, on scale with the introduction of the iPhone.

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3-D—all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data," he said.

Association Says Indoor E911 Location Technology Not Ready

As reported by GPS World: In a recent FCC filing, the Telecommunications Industry Association said that indoor positioning technology is not sufficiently developed to support ongoing wireless E-911 location accuracy requirements.

While TIA supports the FCC’s goal to improve location accuracy, “Imposing location accuracy mandates at this time would be premature, given the nascent stage of the technology that will be needed to accomplish the Commission’s objectives, and should neither favor nor disfavor specific technologies,” said the association in its filing.

The NPRM proposes a requirement to achieve “rough” indoor location information, TIA said. It proposes to require providers to provide horizontal information for wireless 911 calls that originate indoors, specifically a caller’s location within 50 meters.

TIA also disagrees with an FCC proposal to require mobile operators to provide z-axis, which is vertical location within 3 meters of a caller’s location, for 67 percent and 80 percent of indoor wireless 911 calls — ranging from three to five years after adoption. Again, TIA says that the technology is not fully developed.

TIA quoted AT&T’s filing: “[The] time [is] right to begin discussing Indoor Location Accuracy for E-911” but the “FCC should be careful to ensure that any proposed rules on location accuracy are aligned with proven capabilities of the current state of technology and they should set realistic accuracy benchmarks that the industry and public safety can embrace.”

The location industry has been counting on indoor positioning, with its beacons and Wi-Fi enhancements, to jump-start a location-based services market that always seems to have tremendous potential, but the numbers don’t back it up. Some big-time analysts have said that while the promise of indoor positioning is huge, it just isn't there technically yet.

In fact, one analyst said that the biggest technological breakthrough last year was indoor mapping. Such major retailers as Home Depot and Lowes launched indoor maps with product search locators. These same analysts say that indoor Wi-Fi positioning is not accurate enough for macro location.

The big deal coming up is how FCC positioning accuracy regulations will affect beacons or Bluetooth low energy for micro location and proximity services.

TIA said it supports initial FCC location accuracy requirements back to 2007. However, don’t ask TIA for more location regulation. “To date, the development of 911 and E911 location accuracy technologies and applications has been fostered by a voluntary and consensus-based standards process. This process has proven quite successful to date, and the Commission should refrain from imposing regulations that could slow additional development,” the association said.

LAPD Adds Drones to Their Arsenal

As reported by the LA Times:The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired some eyes in the sky.

On Friday, the department announced that it had acquired two "unmanned aerial vehicles" as gifts from the Seattle Police Department.

The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a camera, video camera and infrared night-vision capabilities.

In making the announcement, however, department officials were at pains to make it clear the LAPD doesn't intend to use the new hardware to keep watch from above over an unsuspecting public. If they're used at all, the remotely controlled aircraft will be called on only for "narrow and prescribed uses" that will be made clear to the public, the statement said.

That, according to LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Andrew Smith, would include situations involving barricaded suspects or hostages in which police need to see inside a building as they decide how to respond.

"We wanted to be really up-front with the public that we're looking at using these down the road," Smith said. "We wanted to make sure it didn't look like we were trying to sneak these things into action."



Wanting to avoid the negative connotations the word has taken on, the department's statement deliberately avoided referring to the aircraft as drones.

The LAPD's skittishness underscores concerns over privacy and other sensitivities that have come up in recent years as police departments around the country have begun to experiment with surveillance technology.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department recently came under fire for flying a small airplane equipped with high-powered cameras over Compton for several days without alerting the city's residents of the video dragnet.

Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, praised the LAPD for being up-front about the acquisition, but raised concerns about the department using them, even in a limited fashion. The potential for abuse, he said, was high.

Villagra highlighted news reports showing Seattle officials abandoned the idea of using the aircraft after a public outcry over them.

The ACLU, he said in a statement, "questions whether the marginal benefits...justify the serious threat to privacy an LAPD drone program could pose."