Drone Pilot Locates Missing 82-Year-Old Man After Three-Day Search

As reported by GigaOm: The case for consumer drones got a boost after an amateur pilot ended a search-and-rescue effort last weekend by locating a missing ophthalmologist, who suffers from dementia, in a bean field in Wisconsin.

David Lesh, who normally uses the drone to make videos for his ski and snowboard business in Colorado, says he decided to try and help after learning of the search while visiting his girlfriend.

“I never thought that I would be using it to find somebody,” Lesh told NBC, saying he spotted 82-year-old Guillermo DeVenecia, who was found shoeless but unharmed, in 20 minutes after scoping a 200-acre field from the air.  

The help from Lesh and his drone spared volunteers hours of trudging through a muddy field, and ended a three-day effort that had involved search dogs, a helicopter and hundreds of people.

The incident may also put additional pressure on the FAA to review its policy on the use of drones, many of which weigh under five pounds. The aviation regulator has so far taken a hard line on drones, banning their commercial use altogether, and ordering a well-known Texas-based search-and-rescue organization to ground its drones (the Texas group has since defied the order after a recent court ruling).

“Drones can very quickly and efficiently save lives and improve industries compared to traditional approaches,” said lawyer Brendan Schulman, who is challenging the FAA policy before the courts on behalf of drone users. “This is a technology our leaders should be embracing and promoting, right now.”

While there is major investment and a number of strong business cases for drones, including farming and news gathering, the devices are also creating social friction; recent incidents involve an assault at the beach, and a man arrested for flying a drone outside medical exam rooms. But as I’ve argued before, in looking at the law of drones, aggressive or creepy behavior can be addressed through state and city laws without the intervention of the FAA.

Video: SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rocket Landing in the Atlantic Ocean

As reported by GigaOm: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is now equipped with landing legs, which could eventually allow it to be reusable–a crucial step toward lowering the cost of carrying cargo to space. The space startup released a video today taken from the surface of the rocket as it passed through the planet’s atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. 

“The water impact caused loss of hull integrity, but we received all the necessary data to achieve a successful landing on a future flight,” a blog post states. “At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment.”

Search-and-Rescue Drone Mission Readies for Takeoff After Defeating FAA

As reported by ArsTechnia: A Texas volunteer search-and-rescue outfit that uses five-pound drones to find missing persons is resuming operations following its Friday courthouse victory against US flight regulators.

Federal Aviation Administration officials in February grounded Texas EquuSearch Mounted Search and Recovery Team, which deployed the unmanned aircraft to search for the missing for free.

EquuSearch, which does not charge for its services, says it has found more than 300 persons alive in some 42 states and eight countries. It challenged the FAA's order and, indirectly, prevailed. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found [PDF] that the e-mail from the FAA to EquuSearch was not the official method for a cease-and-desist order.

"The court's decision explains that Texas EquuSearch is not under any FAA mandate to stop using civilian drones to help families find their missing loved ones. Therefore, the organization and its volunteers plan to resume their use of this life-saving technology immediately," Brendan Schulman, the group's attorney, said in an e-mail.

In response, the FAA said the decision, however, "has no bearing on the FAA's authority to regulate" the commercial use of drones. The agency did not say whether it would commence official proceedings against EquuSearch to enforce its 2007 ban on the commercial use of drones in the US.

Schulman maintains that the agency's 2007 edict cannot be enforced at all because of a different court ruling.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the FAA's ban on the commercial use of drones was not binding because flight officials did not give the public a chance to comment on the agency's rules. Congress has delegated rule making powers to its agencies, but the Administrative Procedures Act requires the agencies to provide a public notice and comment period first.

The agency has promised that it would revisit the commercial application of small drones later this year, with potential new rules in place perhaps by the end of 2015. But for now, the agency is taking a hard-line against the commercial use of drones, and it's unclear whether that policy would change.

The National Park Service banned drones from being flown throughout the park system last month.

The FAA also reiterated its rules last month to make clear that proposed drone-delivery services like the one Amazon.com has proposed won't be coming to consumers' front doors anytime soon. The FAA also said the small drones were barred from a number of uses, including:

• Determining whether crops need to be watered that are grown as part of a commercial farming operation.

• A person photographing a property or event and selling the photos to someone else.

• A Realtor using a model aircraft to photograph a property that he is trying to sell and using the photos in the property's real estate listing.

• Receiving money for demonstrating aerobatics with a model aircraft.

GPS Location Big-Data Reveals City's Most Important Crossroads

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Here’s an interesting question: how do you identify the most important junctions in a city? One way it is to measure the origin, route, and destination of each road trip through a city and then work out where they cross.

That’s never been possible in the past because this kind of data has always been hard to collect. But in recent years, the growing use of GPS navigating devices has changed all that.

Today, Ming Xu at Tsinghau University in Beijing and a few pals have collected the GPS data from hundreds of thousands of taxi journeys in Beijing and use it to do exactly this calculation. The result is a comprehensive map of the most important crossroads in Beijing, information that traffic planners could make good use of to keep the traffic flowing during roadworks, building projects, and so on.

Beijing has a population of more than 21 million people and its road traffic network is correspondingly huge. It contains 13,722 crossroads connected by over 25,000 roads. The network of roads in Beijing is dominated by four more or less concentric ring roads along with a number of arterial routes that head into the city center. To discover the most important of these crossroads, Ming and co used the routes taken by 10,000 taxicabs in Beijing during the month of October 2012.

This dataset consisted of each taxi’s GPS location sampled around once a minute. The team was particularly interested in the peak traffic conditions and so used only the data taken between 7:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. and between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. This consisted of more than 500,000 fare-paying taxi trips between one location and another.

First, they mapped each of these trips onto a map of Beijing to determine the origin, route and destination of each. They also counted the number of crossroads traversed on each trip, a number that varied mainly between 7 and 18. That allowed the team to calculate things like the amount of traffic that passes through any given crossroads during the peak commuter period.

But then notion of an “important crossroad” is more subtle in Ming and co’s model of a city and they use a Pagerank-style algorithm to calculate this.

The Pagerank algorithm is Google’s famous method for ranking important webpages. It judges a webpage to be important if it is linked to by other important webpages. It works by a process of iteration, in which the importance of each webpage is calculated at every step and this is then used to update the calculation in the next step.

Ming and co use the same approach to rank the importance of crossroads. In their algorithm, called CRRANK, a crossroad is important if it is linked to by important roads. And roads are important if they link important crossroads. By iterating this algorithm, a ranking of important crossroads emerges.

Deshengmen City Gate Tower

The results clearly show which crossroads in Beijing are the most significant. The most important is called Deshengmen Bridge. It is the junction of the second ring road with the Badaling Expressway, near the Deshengmen city gate in the northern part of the city wall. It is well known as a major transportation mode.

The second is Xuanwumen Bridge in the southern part of the city and the former location of another gate in the city wall. It is also known as a major transportation hub.

The ranking lists over 100 important, with the most important being on the second ring road. It picks out important junctions on the third and fourth ring roads as well, which are further out. But the trend is that more important junctions tend to be nearer the center. “This is consistent with our daily experience,” say Ming and co.

Incidentally, the most important route is between Jinrong Street in the center of town and Beijing airport.

That’s an interesting way of ranking the importance of crossroads. Other groups have studied the network of roads within cities by creating a model of road traffic, and then removing nodes to see how the network performs without them. This simulates the crossroads becoming blocked by an accident, for example. That also reveals crucial junctions, some of which are so important that entire cities can come to a standstill when they become blocked.

The trouble with these earlier studies is that they have to be done with traffic flow simulations. But the availability of large amounts of high quality traffic data from real vehicles makes this kind of work much more valuable. There’s no reason now why these different approaches can’t be combined in future.

That should help when planning traffic flow during building works.

Nevertheless, the traffic in big cities has always been bad. Victorian commentators describe people running over the roofs of horse-drawn cabs in the traffic-jammed streets of 19th-century London. Any Londoners reading this will know that things haven’t improved much since then.

But with data like this and the ability to number crunch it effectively, perhaps it is reasonable hold out a small candle of hope that traffic jams will become a thing of the past. Then again, possibly not.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1407.2506 : Discovery of Important Crossroads in Road Network using Massive Taxi Trajectories

New Driver's Seat Monitors Your Heart, Knows When You're Falling Asleep

As reported by MotorAuthority: Soon, your car may know your heart rate—and may take control from you if it doesn't like what it sees.

A new project from Nottingham Trent University in the UK is working on an electrocardiogram (ECG) built into the driver’s seat to detect heart rate and determine when the driver is too fatigued—or worse, falling asleep—in order to improve road safety.

The technology uses circuits integrated into the seats, called Electric Potential Integrated Circuits, or EPIC. Developed by Plessey Semiconductors, the EPIC circuit can measure heart rate, respiration, and more to monitor alertness and health.

Plessey business development director Steve Cliffe told industry trade publication Innovation in Textiles, "We are extremely excited to be working with Nottingham Trent University on this TSB funded program. For the first time it will be possible to reliably and robustly extract electrophysiology signals using Plessey EPIC sensors in an automotive environment without direct contact with the body."

Ideally, the system could be integrated with active cruise control, lane-keeping functions, and more, to take over if a driver ignores or fails to respond to the car’s warnings about alertness.


EPIC automotive sensors could monitor driver alertness for safety. Image via Plessey Semiconductors.

The result? Accident mitigation or avoidance in cases of driver fatigue, and potentially other situations, such as heart attack, as well. There's a certain element of discomfort for some when thinking about their car knowing so many intimate details of their biology, especially if it has the ability to take control from the driver, but at the same time, the EPIC sensors, applied in this fashion, could save lives.

The technology is still in a nascent phase, with materials challenges like conductive textile technology required for the ECG electrodes woven into the seat backs. This is the area of research being investigated by researches at NTU.

Due to complexity and cost, the initial applications are expected to come in the commercial driving arena, helping to ensure truck drivers stay safe behind the wheel.

Eventually, it could expand into the private automobile market, likely starting at the high-end luxury realm as so many other new technologies do.

New Miniaturized GPS/Galileo Anti-Jamming Technology

As reported by GPS World: Chemring Technology Solutions has developed miniaturized GPS anti-jamming technology it has dubbed GINCAN. GINCAN is designed to combat illegal GPS jammers and is based on the adaptive antenna concept used by military systems. GINCAN has a chip footprint of six millimeters squared.

GINCAN’s reduced size and weight will significantly cut power usage and cost, the company said, making it ideal for combating the widespread problem of low-powered GPS jamming. GINCAN can be integrated into a range of applications, including in-vehicle satellite navigation systems and cellular technology, and can be used for the protection of the critical infrastructures which rely on GPS to provide positioning and timing.

GPS jammers have already been developed to interfere with the European Union’s Galileo system, which will provide European satellite navigation independently from the Russian, USA and Chinese systems by 2019. Chemring Technology Solutions, based in Romsey, England, has anticipated this problem and its GPS anti-jamming technology will also support systems using Galileo.

Once the preserve of the military, there is now an increasing demand for GPS protection in the civilian market as illegal GPS jamming equipment becomes widely available on the Internet. The £1.5 million government-funded Sentinel project, designed to measure GPS jamming on UK roads, recorded more than 60 individual jamming incidents across six months at a single location. Such attacks could seriously impact industries, including maritime, aerospace, the emergency services and even stock market trading.

“Many years of developing GPS protection technology for the military has enabled our research and development team to miniaturize anti-jamming technology,” said Martin Ward, product manager, Chemring Technology Solutions. “GINCAN can now be easily integrated in to a range of applications to provide effective protection against jamming devices.

“As we become increasingly reliant on GPS technology, and low-cost jammers are proliferating, so a potential time bomb is being created. Chemring Technology Solutions is now able to offer the answer to this problem with jammer protection at a reduced size, weight, power and cost footprint.”

GINCAN is an export controlled product and subject to UK export restrictions.

SpaceX Rocket Launches Six Satellites, and Completes Reusibility Test

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor: The private spaceflight company SpaceX launched six commercial satellites into low-Earth orbit on July 14th in a mission that was expected to include a key rocket-reusability test.

The company's Falcon 9 rocket streaked into space from the pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT) Monday, carrying six spacecraft for the satellite-communications firm ORBCOMM.

The satellites are the first members of the OG2 (short for "ORBCOMM Generation 2") constellation, which should provide a big upgrade over the current OG1 network, company officials said. SpaceX is expected to launch a total of 17 OG2 craft using the Falcon 9. [See photos of the SpaceX launch]

The OG2 satellites, which weigh about 375 lbs. (170 kilograms) each, were built by Sierra Nevada Corp. They're destined for an elliptical orbit that will take them between 382 and 466 miles (615 to 750 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

A successful delivery of the OG2 satellites may have been the main objective of Monday's launch, but it wasn't the only one. SpaceX also aimed to bring the Falcon 9's first stage back to Earth in a soft ocean-splashdown, to test out and advance reusable-rocket technology. It was not clear immediately after liftoff how well this test went.

Developing fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicles is a key priority of SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk, who has said that this breakthrough could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100. In doing so, reusable rockets could help open the solar system for manned exploration, perhaps even making a Mars colony economically feasible.

SpaceX attempted a similar first-stage return during the last Falcon 9 liftoff in April, which blasted the robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station on a cargo mission for NASA. That test went well; data showed that the rocket stage did indeed make a controlled landing in the Atlantic Ocean, though rough seas destroyed it before recovery boats could reach the splashdown scene.

Monday's launch was originally planned for May 10, but the cancellation of a pre-launch Falcon 9 static-fire test and scheduling constraints pushed the liftoff back by about two months. The launch also comes on the heels of SpaceX receiving certification from the U.S. Air Force of its Falcon 9 rocket after three successful flights, a major step in the company's plan to compete for U.S. military satellite launch contracts.