Australian Team Smashes 26-Year-Old Electric Car World Record

As reported by C/NET: Sunswift, a solar car racing team from the University of New South Wales, has today broken an electric car world record that has stood since 1988. The record, overseen by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), measures the average speed of an electric vehicle over a 500km distance on a single charge.

The record-breaking vehicle is Sunswift's fifth car, the Sunswift eVe. The vehicle previously ran in the 2013 World Solar Challenge, a 3,000km solar car race in Australia that runs from Darwin to Adelaide. The car has a top speed of 140kph with an electric-only range of approximately 500km, or up to 800km when its solar cells are also active -- all while using about as much power as a kitchen toaster when travelling at freeway speeds. The solar system was turned off to adhere to the electric car specific record attempt.

Late Wednesday afternoon from the track in Victoria, Australia, they tweeted to confirm their success.

IT'S OFFICIAL: We broke the record!!!!!!
— Sunswift (@sunswift) July 23, 2014

Sunswift smashed the existing record of 73 kilometres per hour, achieving a final new record of over 100kph with a final official result awaiting confirmation with the FIA.
For the record attempt the team of university students was required to work with FIA accredited professional drivers. One of the drivers, Garth Walden, was particularly pleased with the opportunity.

"As a racing driver you always want to be on the podium and it's not everyday you get to break a world record," said Walden. "I really enjoyed hanging out with the team and being part of history."

For the Sunswift team, the result was about proving the future of everyday viability for solar electric vehicles -- achieving a speed that shows an electric vehicle can sustain freeway speeds over an extended range.

"Five hundred kilometres is pretty much as far as a normal person would want to drive in a single day," said Hayden Smith, project director and engineering student.

"This is really about curing people's fear of the lack of speed and curing their range anxiety, showing this car can travel at high speeds for long distances which is really what everyone wants."

The Sunswift team is now working on modifying the car to make it street legal and expects to be able to drive it on public roads in 2015.

UNSW's Sunswift eVe breaks a 26-year-old FIA electric car speed record. Dave Cheng/CNET

What it's like to drive eVe
We had a chance to take eVe for a spin in the weeks leading up to the record attempt at a track in Sydney. The car is built like a race car, made for efficiency and not for comfort, with a low-slung racing seat and incredibly stiff suspension.

Acceleration and regenerative braking were both managed via paddles on the steering wheel instead of foot pedals, with only the mechanical brake at your feet. It was readily apparent the vehicle would need a lot of ergonomic work to become street-legal, as it is difficult to get in and out, and requires such gymnastics as crossing your legs to reach the brake pedal if you're anywhere near average height.

But these adjustments feel like simple window dressing compared to the feats of engineering already achieved by this team to build this record breaking car. Smith identifies this as a big challenge, but making eVe Australia's first road-legal solar-powered car would be a record that can never be taken away from the team.

Tomorrow’s Fastest Cars Could Be Covered in Morphable Skins

As reported by Wired: Wrinkles aren't usually an aspect of the future that gets people excited. But fast cars are. And someday we might have cars that can accelerate more quickly, and efficiently, by morphing their surface texture through the mechanics of wrinkling.

Speed-enhancing body wrinkles on your Tesla are still years away, but researchers at MIT have created what could be the first step: a ball with morphable surface texture. They were able to get their creation, which they call a smorph (short for smart morphable surface), to wrinkle into a dimpled pattern similar to a golf ball’s, with similar aerodynamic properties.

Smorphs are sort of like raisins. As the soft inside of a grape dries out, the stiffer skin can’t shrink with it. Instead, it develops wrinkles to conform around the reduced volume. Smorphs don’t dry out (they also make terrible snacks), but the volume of  a smorph can be similarly reduced by sucking air out of its hollow core. That core is surrounded by different polymers: a thick, squishy layer covered by relatively stiff outer skin. As the core shrinks, the squishy layer is soft enough to contract smoothly, but the skin is forced to wrinkle.

The trick is controlling exactly how a smorph wrinkles. MIT mechanical engineer Pedro Reis, the material’s lead inventor, studies how wrinkling and other types of structural failures can be made useful. He says the first step toward controlling the wrinkling of a smorph is making the squishy base layer thick enough that the sphere doesn’t crumple like a ping pong ball. From there, they can tune the pattern of the wrinkles by changing the thickness of the outer skin. Dimples form when the skin is one-tenth to one-hundredth of the sphere’s radius.

The dimpling isn’t a pre-designed pattern. It’s the natural way the Smorphs’ skin collapses when air in the center is sucked out.  Pedro Reis/MIT

Because the smorph dimples look so much like those on a golf ball’s surface, the researchers were inspired to test their creation in a wind tunnel. It’s well established that a golf ball’s dimples help it fly further. Air passing over the dimples creates a bunch of tiny vortices. Rather than slowing the ball down, these vortices create a thin, turbulent sheath that the surrounding air can’t cling to. The result is lower drag. 

Sure enough, when the researchers tested the smorph in a wind tunnel, they found that it was about twice as aerodynamically efficient when dimpled.

But the sheath of vortices only forms at relatively low speeds. If a golf ball were to fly fast enough, it would be better off with a smooth skin. This is where smorphs could offer a huge advantage.

“What our system lets you do is tune the drag between the two extremes,” Reis said. Because of their size, golf balls rarely reach a speed when the dimples are less efficient. But something bigger, like a car, could be more fuel efficient with a few strategically placed morphable surfaces that would be dimpled at slower speeds and smooth when the car speeds up.

Earlier this year, Reis won an NSF grant to keep developing smorphs, which he hopes to someday scale up to use on cars, aircraft, and even buildings. He’s optimistic, but says this is probably a long way off. One problem is that hexagonal dimples are unstable on flat surfaces. So far smorphs have only been used on a round, ball shape, but Reis and his co-authors believe they can figure out how to reproduce the pattern on slightly curved surfaces. Creating the same aerodynamic dimpling on a car’s complex curves will be even more challenging.

Suit Against Walmart in Tracy Morgan Crash Claims Carrier Violated HOS Rules

As reported by  Overdrive Online: Four survivors of the June 7 New Jersey Turnpike truck crash that left comedian James McNair dead and actor Tracy Morgan in critical condition are suing Walmart Transportation, claiming the private carrier was “careless and negligent” in its oversight of drivers and equipment, which led to the crash, the lawsuit alleges.

Tracy Morgan is among those suing. The suit was filed July 10.

NTSB: Truck operator in Tracy Morgan crash was within
hours limits, but speeding.

The Walmart driver, Kevin Roper, reportedly was awake for 24 hours prior to the crash, though the National Transportation Safety Board in its preliminary crash report said he was within his hours-of-service limits, both in on-duty time and in driving time.

However, Roper had to commute in his personal vehicle 700 miles to the Walmart terminal in Delaware where he worked, the lawsuit notes and news outlets have reported. During the commute he was not on-duty. 

The lawsuit stems from Roper’s odd commute, alleging “Wal-Mart knew, or should have known, Mr. Roper was awake for more than 24 consecutive hours immediately before the subject accident.” The lawsuit alleges Roper fell asleep at the wheel, ultimately leading to the crash.

Walmart issued a statement responding to the lawsuit, saying it is cooperating with the investigation and is “committed to doing the right thing.”

“This has been a terrible tragedy,” the statement says. “We wish Mr. Morgan, Mr. Fuqua Jr., and Mr. Millea full recoveries. Our thoughts continue to go out to them, their families and friends, as well as to the families and friends of everyone involved, including Mr. McNair who lost his life. We are deeply sorry that one of our trucks was involved. As we've said, we’re cooperating fully in the ongoing investigation. We know it will take some time to resolve all of the remaining issues as a result of the accident, but we’re committed to doing the right thing for all involved.”

The suit also accuses Walmart of intentionally and regularly violating federal hours-of-service (HOS) limits for drivers, saying it “condoned this practice of its drivers routinely violating” federal rules.

The private fleet also failed to factor in driver commutes into its scheduling, the suit claims.

Driver pleads not guilty in crash charges, HOS argument brims.

“Wal-Mart had a custom and practice of recklessly and intentionally allowing its drivers to drive for prolonged and unreasonable periods of time, making them exceedingly vulnerable to suffer from fatigue,” the suit reads, adding that it also “recklessly and intentionally failed to take proper measures to combat” driver fatigue.

Lastly, the suit alleges the Walmart truck involved in the crash was equipped with an autonomous braking system, which did not deploy prior to the accident. Walmart “knew or should have known” the autonomous braking system was “compromised,” the lawsuit claims.

In addition to Morgan, comedian Ardley Fuqua Jr. is a plaintiff, along with Morgan’s personal assistant, Jeffrey Millea, and Millea’s wife Krista. The group — along with two others, including James McNair — were traveling in a Mercedes Sprinter van from one comedy show, where they were performing, to another.

They’re seeking actual, compensatory and statutory damages, punitive damages and attorney’s fees and court costs.

Roper has been charged with counts of vehicular homicide and assault by auto, to which he has pleaded not guilty. NTSB’s report concluded that Roper was traveling more than 20 mph over the posted 45 mph speed limit.

The crash also made the debate over the 2013 hours-of-service rule a national issue, causing lawmakers and celebrities to condemn Senate action in June to rollback certain HOS regs.

The Senate’s annual Department of Transportation funding bill includes an amendment that would suspend two of the 2013 rule’s 34-hour restart provisions, including the once-per-week limit and the requirement that the restart include two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker proposed an amendment to strip that amendment from the bill. However, the bill has been idle in the Senate for nearly a month now.

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