Apple Bought a Company Focused on Super-Accurate GPS

As reported by Engadget: Apple has snapped up more than a few companies that know how to deal with yourlocation data, but it now appears to be focused on improving the accuracy of that data from the get-go. MacRumors has discovered evidence that Apple recently acquired Coherent Navigation, a company specializing in very accurate GPS. It combined the usual GPS positioning with information from Iridium's low-orbit communication satellites to pinpoint your whereabouts within inches, rather than feet.

It's not clear just what the Coherent team is doing under Apple's wing. Its CEO and co-founders have taken positions in Maps and wireless technologies teams, but that's about as far as the revelations go.

We've reached out to Apple to confirm the deal, but it doesn't historically reveal what its plans are following buyouts. However, it could be for more than just ensuring that your Maps directions are on the mark. Apple is rumored to be developing an electric car with self-driving features that, by their nature, would depend on very accurate GPS info to get you around safely. There's no guarantee that Apple took on these new hires with autonomous vehicles in mind, but the move would at least make sense in that light.

Russian Rocket Carrying Mexican Satellite Is Said to Crash in Siberia

As reported by the NY Times:  A Russian-made rocket ferrying a Mexican telecommunications satellite crashed in eastern Siberia minutes after its launching on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported, citing officials at the country’s space agency.

The Proton-M rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:47 a.m. and crashed in the Chita region of Siberia about eight minutes later, the reports said.

The failure appeared to have occurred with the rocket’s third stage, which was intended to bring the satellite to an altitude of about 110 miles. At that point, it was supposed to be propelled by engines into geostationary orbit.

Instead, there was a catastrophic failure. The stream of telemetry data sent back by the rocket failed about a minute before the satellite was to enter orbit, the news agencies reported.

The Interfax agency quoted an unidentified official at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, as saying there had been an “emergency engine shutdown of the third stage.”

The Proton rocket is the mainstay transporter for International Launch Services, a joint Russian-American satellite carrier business. The satellite, called Centenario, was being sent into orbit on behalf of Mexico’s Ministry of Communications and Transportation and had been manufactured by Boeing Satellite Systems.

According to a statement issued by International Launch Services before the launching, it was intended to provide “mobile satellite services to support national security, civil and humanitarian efforts and will provide disaster relief, emergency services, telemedicine, rural education and government agency operations.”

The Proton-M is regarded as a workhorse but has encountered numerous problems in its decades of service. In 2013, a leadership shake-up at Roscosmos was prompted in part by the fourth failed launch of a Proton-M rocket within three years.

Officials said further launchings would be suspended until the cause of Saturday’s crash was determined.

The Mexican ministry said International Launch Services would create a commission to investigate the accident.

It said the satellite loss was “100 percent” covered by insurance, a point that seemed aimed at a domestic population often skeptical of the government’s spending on big projects.

The ministry said it still planned to launch another communications satellite from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard a Lockheed Martin rocket in October.

Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, the transportation and communications secretary, said that the lost satellite and its launching were valued at $390 million.

“I regret the mission was not a success,” Mr. Esparza said. “If Mexico is joining in these high technologies, we are going to have to learn to live with the risks that are not uncommon in this industry. The benefit is not so much being in the space era so much as the service it could provide to Mexicans.”

The Mexsat 1 is enclosed inside the Proton rocket's payload fairing before Saturday's launch. 

GE 3D Prints a Working Jet Engine

As reported by Computer World: General Electric this week revealed that it has completed a multi-year project to print a working jet engine.

The engine, small enough to fit in a backpack, was built by a team of technicians, machinists and engineers at GE Aviation's Additive Development Center outside Cincinnati. The lab is working with additive manufacturing as a way to produce next-generation jet parts using a technique known as (DMLM).

The engine also required some post-printing machining and polishing of parts. The research team then rigged up a data acquisition system to measure exhaust temperature, speed and thrust.


The engine, which consisted of more than a dozen parts, was printed on an M270 industrial 3D printer from EOS. The machine can melt a variety of alloys, including cobalt chrome, nickel alloy, titanium and stainless steel.

The M270 3D printer allowed the GE engineers to use high-temperature alloys not typically available to the radio-controlled engine industry. The resulting engine from GE's 3D printing process endured numerous tests and the turbine achieved 33,000 rpm.

The GE research team had been working on the engine for several years. The researchers have already build working aircraft components using the DMLM 3D printing method, including an FAA-approved part for a GE90 jet engine The part is a metal housing for a sensor, known as T25. Unable to yet build a full-sized working jet engine, the engineers used a radio controlled airplane jet engine model plans, and tweaked them to improve performance.

The jet turbine engine is GE's first functioning prototype.

Earlier this year, a group of researchers at an Australian university, along with its spinoff company, used 3D printing to make two metal jet engines that, while only proof-of-concept designs, have all the working parts of a functioning gas turbine engine.

The two engines, created by Monash University and its spinoff Amaero Engineering, are garnering a lot of attention from leading aeronautics companies. Airbus, Boeing and defense contractor Raytheon are lining up at the Monash Centre for Additive Manufacturing in Melbourne to develop new components with 3D printing.

The proof of concepts are replicas of an auxiliary power unit used in aircraft such as the Falcon 20 French business jet, which was provided by Microturbo.

Why are We Still Coordinating Disaster Relief Over Radios?

As reported by The Verge:Tuesday night, Philadelphia's emergency dispatch channels lit up. The city was the site of a catastrophic Amtrak derailment, resulting in seven deaths and dozens of injuries, and first responders were scrambling to cut through the chaos. If you listened in to the open radio channels, you could hear it — EMS drivers looking for a hospital with room for patients, or dispatchers directing resources. Even finding the right staging area was a challenge at points, given the flood of different agencies rushing to help, and conducting everything over regular non-digital radio channels only made it more of a challenge.

That's not to say the first responders were anything other than professional. Some chaos is inevitable, as responders rush in before the situation is fully understood. What's more remarkable is that despite the dawn of the internet age and the smartphone revolution, some of our most critical communication is still happening over primitive, walkie-talkie-style radio. The basic nature of the technology makes simple tasks like group formation and private messaging difficult, and imposes a constant stress over maintaining a clear channel. Aren’t there better tools for this job?

Some jurisdictions already have them. First responders in California can access information through the Next-Generation Incident Command System (also known as NICS), an MIT project sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. Developed over the last three years, NICS is meant to move all that communication to the web, plotting information on a constantly updating map of the area. The developers describe it as "carefully designed for the responder under extreme stress," accessible through mobile browsers alongside desktops. It’s also built on open standards, allowing developers to build apps on top of it or allow third-party logins from services like Google.

There are a lot of advantages to a system like NICS, starting with some of the basic questions responders faced on Tuesday night. If an ambulance driver is looking for the nearest hospital with room for new patients, a map will be more useful than a radio tool. But like any new product, adoption has been the biggest problem. NICS is available to anyone who wants it, and while it’s seen some adoption outside of California (particularly in pre-planned events like marathons), most departments have been slow to see the benefits. Even in California, the system is more of a supplement than a legitimate replacement for the standard radio system.

There’s also the issue of tracking victims in the wake of the disaster, which has also been tackled by digital systems. Wireless medical record systems have huge advantages over conventional paper methods in a crisis situation, and in 2009, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality made recommendations for a "National Mass Patient and Evacuee Movement, Regulating, and Tracking System." An ideal system would have the ability to locate and track patients, as well as regulate their flow during mass casualty events, the Agency said. RFID tags could be used to passively monitor location, providing continuous data without requiring patients to actively check in. The system could also include real-time resources availability data from hospitals, and send automatic notifications to first responders once it’s been decided where to send a given patient. Still, six years after the system was proposed, it’s still just a wish list, and there is no comprehensive federal system for patient tracking.

So why haven’t more first responders adopted these systems? Bureaucratic inertia is certainly part of the answer, but there are also real practical concerns about how more complex systems will function in situations where the slightest technical failure can have life-or-death consequences.

In some cases, the problem is simply maintaining a signal. Thick smoke from a fire or explosion can interfere with signals coming from Bluetooth headsets and phones, which would cause real problems for any setup relying on a continuous connection. It’s a problem for voice radio signals too, but the nature of a responders’ channel makes it easy to drop off for a few minutes without disrupting the larger group. In other settings, the volume of traffic is a problem. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile networks were all overloaded in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, leaving many unable to contact loved ones. As a result, many are wary of moving responders to conventional data channels without more comprehensive connectivity solutions in place. Fortunately, first responders have call priority during emergencies, and could potentially get more spectrum help from the FCC if needed, but it still raises a world of problems that radio channels have already solved.

Even more practically, conventional electronics doesn’t play well with a lot of first responder gear. Firefighters’ gloves make it hard to use tiny electronic devices with touchscreens, which is part of the reason why you’re more likely to see a rescue team with a gigantic radio unit in hand than the latest smartphone. There are solutions — different gloves, different devices — but they would have to be deployed at tremendous scale. There are about 1,140,000 firefighters, 239,000 EMTs, and 590,000 local police officers in the US, and they’re all trained on the proper use of radio channels. Training them on the latest tablet system is an immense task, particularly when we aren’t entirely sure what we want from the system itself.

Seen in that light, the conventional radio channels look pretty good. It’s not the most powerful communication channel, but everyone responding knows how to use it, and there’s rarely any technical difficulty in signing on. As long as you can find the staging area, you can join the effort, with no passwords or downloads required, and that’s an important feature. First responders are working in situations of extreme urgency and chaos, and as a result, they end up using the most reliable and universal systems they can find. If that means forgoing the latest tech, it might be worth the tradeoff.

The World's Most Dangerous Driving Simulator

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: If your last experience of a racing game was the old Pole Position on Nintendo in the ‘80s, you’ve missed the digital revolution that’s made simulators so realistic that you can almost smell the gasoline.

The latest, Motion Pro II from Los Angeles-based CXC Simulations, is perhaps the most true-to-life experience yet—as you’d expect from a professional simulator and training tool that starts from US $54,000. At its pulsing heart is a new force feedback steering controller than understands the moves of more than 1,000 cars—classic and modern, street machines or legendary racers of every vintage—and mimics minutia like the brutal forces of the late Ayrton Senna’s F1 McLaren in mid-corner, the feel of tires as they wear, and the lightening of a car as its fuel load decreases.

The steering system directly connects a direct-drive servo motor to the steering shaft, eliminating belts and gears. CXC’s previous system could generate 2 newton meters of physical feedback, but the new one can deliver 16 Nm, enough to mimic the destructive forces of a real-world crash. That is, if the company cranked it up that high.

“If you hit the wall in an Indy Car and don’t take your hands off the wheel, you’ll break your wrists,” says Chris Considine, a former racer and CXC founder. “Our wheel is a one-to-one replication of that, but we don’t turn it up that high. It’s the first time we’ve been able to replicate racing forces so high that it introduces liability questions,” he says with a laugh.

More important, he says, “We can now replicate not just the power, but the fidelity. All the tiny pieces of information that come through the wheel are so crucial to a driver,” from simulated cracks on the pavement at Watkins Glen to rumble strips on the streets of Monaco.

Hundreds of the world’s racetracks, current or historic, are laser-scanned into the system at sub-millimeter accuracy, enough to show the leaves on the trees. Professional racers can thus quickly and confidently translate their simulated experience to the real world.

The company includes a former Ferrari F1 engineer and Maserati test driver. Dozens of pro racers, including Porsche factory driver Patrick Long, have helped develop and hone the system. Racing teams are using the Motion Pro II to develop and test their own cars as in 3-D CAD design, translating up to hundreds of thousands of data points—on fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, materials, everything—into the simulation.

Nestled into the driving rig, pilots get a serious physical workout via low-mass motion generators that simulate up to 2 g’s of lateral force. Seat belt tensioners simulate powerful braking forces. Vibration generators pulse through the system’s steering wheel, chassis, pedals and switches, while panoramic video screens and a powerful 5.1 surround sound system fill in the other senses. The Motion Pro II is powered by an Intel Core I7 Extreme Edition. The rig can be expanded into a top-level flight simulator as well.

Here’s some footage of pros using the system:

CXC’s unit has also been used to develop and test racetrack designs before the first asphalt has been poured, including the posh-and-private Thermal Club, in California’s Coachella Valley. And while a few home users have sprung for what Considine calls “the ultimate big-boy toy,” it’s actually designed to save money for pros whose competitiveness and safety is anything but a game.

“The company was born from a need for a cheaper way to test and train,” and to do it without physical risk to drivers as they push their limits, lap upon lap, in what’s edging closer and closer to virtual reality,  Considine says.

“Unlike a real race car,” he says, “the simulator costs you money once, and never again.” 

Self-Driving Cars in California: 4 out of 48 Have Accidents, None Their Fault

As reported by the NY Times: Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads.

Two accidents happened while the cars were in control; in the other two, the person who still must be behind the wheel was driving, a person familiar with the accident reports told The Associated Press.

Three involved Lexus SUVs that Google Inc. outfitted with sensors and computing power in its aggressive effort to develop "autonomous driving," a goal the tech giant shares with traditional automakers. The parts supplier Delphi Automotive had the other accident with one of its two test vehicles.

Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor.

Since September, any accident must be reported to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency said there have been four, but would not comment about fault or anything else, citing California law that collision reports are confidential.

The person familiar with the accident reports said the cars were in self-driving mode in two of the four accidents, all of which involved speeds of less than 10 mph. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the reports publicly.

Five other companies have testing permits. In response to questions from the AP, all said they had no accidents. In all, 48 cars are licensed to test on public roads.

The fact that neither the companies nor the state have revealed the accidents troubles some who say the public should have information to monitor the rollout of technology that its own developers acknowledge is imperfect.

John Simpson, a longtime critic of Google as privacy project director of the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, pointed out that the company's ultimate goal is a car without a steering wheel or pedals. That would mean a person has no power to intervene if a car lost control, making it "even more important that the details of any accidents be made public — so people know what the heck's going on."

A chief selling point for self-driving cars is safety. Their cameras, radar and laser sensors give them a far more detailed understanding of their surroundings than humans have. Their reaction times also should be faster. Cars could be programmed to adjust if they sense a crash coming — move a few feet, tighten the seat belts, honk the horn or flash the lights in hope of alerting a distracted driver.

A higher priority so far is teaching them to avoid causing a serious accident that could set public and political acceptance of the technology back years, said Raj Rajkumar, a pioneer of the technology with Carnegie Mellon University.

In the October accident involving Delphi, the front of its 2014 Audi SQ5 was moderately damaged when, as it waited to make a left turn, another car broadsided it, according to an accident report the company shared with AP. The car was not in self-driving mode, Delphi spokeswoman Kristen Kinley said.

Google, which has 23 Lexus SUVs, would not discuss its three accidents in detail.

The accidents are not Google's first: In a briefing with reporters a year ago, the leader of Google's self-driving car program acknowledged three others between when the company first sent cars onto public roads several years ago — without the state's official permission — and May 2014.

In a written statement, Google said that since September, cars driving on streets near its headquarters in Mountain View had "a handful of minor fender-benders, light damage, no injuries, so far caused by human error and inattention."

Google said that while safety is paramount some accidents can be expected, given that its cars have gone "the equivalent of over 15 years of typical human driving," or approximately 140,000 miles.

The national rate for reported "property-damage-only crashes" is about 0.3 per 100,000 miles driven, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In that context, Google's three in about 140,000 miles may seem high. As the company pointed out, however, perhaps 5 million minor accidents are not reported to authorities each year, so it is hard to gauge how typical Google's experience is.

Three other states have passed laws welcoming self-driving cars onto their roads. Regulators in Nevada, Michigan and Florida said they were not aware of any accidents.

As self-driving cars proliferate, others issues will arise that human drivers have dealt with for decades, notably who's liable for an accident. Each test car is required to have $5 million insurance.

Interest in accidents will remain high, especially if the self-driving car is at fault, said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who has written extensively on the technology.

"For a lot of reasons," Smith said, "more might be expected of these test vehicles and of the companies that are deploying them and the drivers that are supervising them than we might expect of a 17-year-old driver in a 10-year-old car."

Why Driverless Cars May Not Need Windows

As reported by The Atlantic: For the last 80-some years, the model car has been pretty standard. The tail fins and bucket seats came and went, but there were almost always four wheels, two headlights, and windows, plenty of big, clear windows ringing the car. All of that will change soon because the robot cars upend so many parts of the game that the designers can begin again with a clean file in their design software.

Reconsidering the role of car windows may be the most obvious.

Windows won't be necessary when there's no human inside who needs to see to pick a path. The autonomous cars will use five, 10, or even more cameras looking at every angle and these cameras don't need to be much bigger than the dots on the back of a phone. Some may use elaborate laser range finders that currently live perched on the roof of some of the prototypes but these whirling gadgets don't need windows either.

When riders start having a choice, will they pick and choose autonomous cars with glass portals to the world? The first robot cars will almost certainly have them because it's never good to ask people to endure too many radical changes. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe described how the early Mercury astronauts insisted that NASA add a window to the capsule:

Similar considerations are being made for windowless jet aircraft.

And why? Because pilots had windows in their cockpits and hatches they could open on their own. That was what it was all about: being a pilot as opposed to a guinea pig. The men hadn't stopped with the window and the hatch, either. Not for a moment. Now they wanted ... manual control of the rocket. They weren't kidding! This was to take the form of an override system: If the astronaut believed, in his judgment, as captain of the ship (not capsule), that the boost rocket engine was malfunctioning, he could take over and guide it himself—like any proper pilot.
 
The emphasis is Wolfe's but the same holds for the autonomous cars. Early riders aren't going to want to be ‘spam in a can,’ the astronaut's term; they'll want some control over this robot driver and windows are a big part of having a seat at the committee table.

Google's early prototypes started with stock cars from current manufacturers and lately they've been releasing pictures of their own design which looks like a smaller Volkswagon with windows in all of the normal places.

Daimler, though, understands that they have an opportunity to throw away the old rules and they've been muscling into the picture with the Mercedes-Benz F-015, a futuristic concept car that looks like a silver kidney bean. To the outsider, it's often hard to tell if there's any windows at all because the glass is coated to have the same silver gloss as the metal. The riders, though, can still see out a big front windscreen and slim side glass. But Daimler doesn't seem to think the passengers will spend much time actually looking out them. A number of the photos from the company emphasize the way that four passengers can sit facing each other, talking, working or playing games, all while ignoring the outside world.

If they do look out, they're just as likely to see the big touch screens on each door—screens that seem bigger than the slim windows. These can let anyone take control of the car— Daimler calls it "conducting"—and also pull up any other images.

The sales literature from Daimler certainly anticipates that the riders will be like the early astronauts, promising us "a continuous exchange of information between vehicle, passengers and the outside world." But one video shows a man rolling through the desert in the southwest while the touchscreens display imagery of the Louvre in Paris. It's not a car, it's a "digital living space" that provides "a perfect symbiosis of the virtual and the real world."

If the riders will be immersed in the touch screens and tablets as they roll through the world, is there any advantage to real windows? Aside from letting the passengers watch the scenery and feeling like they have some chance to control the vehicle, there's not much that the glass offers—and much that it detracts.

Standard glass is not as strong as steel and so the designers must compensate for the glass when desiging the frame. If there's a crash, the glass offers no protection. (Though the way that it shatters into a million tiny pieces is considered a step up from the way that crashes used to produce flesh-ripping shards.) In the winter the glass offers little insulation and in the summer, the windows let in too much heat, heat that must be removed by the air conditioner.

The windows also offer no privacy, letting anyone see in. If the riders really want to know where they're going, they can watch a video feed from the car's many cameras displayed on some tablet or wall screen. These cameras may even have zoom lenses and so the screens and tablets could offer a better view with greater detail than the old windows.  (A movie thriller will undoubtedly include some plot where the people inside are fooled about their destination with a hacked video feed.)

Celebrity vehicles are typically designed for privacy as
well as safety.

The sentimental among us may still choose windows out of nostalgia, but the autonomous car world could be dominated by fleets of robot cabs run by accountants. The managers will flinch at extra costs and almost certainly grow to see windows as an extra expense that breaks too easily and adds too much to the air-conditioning bill.

What will people choose? Today, buses with many passengers have windows so people can watch where they're going but custom coaches designed for smaller groups often have no windows. Rock-and-roll bands on tour almost always seem to choose the buses with no markings and no windows at all.

The early riders in autonmous cars may want the power of being a captain of a ship, but in time people seem to aspire to the lazy hedonism of being a rock and roll star. And so they'll probably choose cars as rock stars pick buses—with few windows except, perhaps, a small porthole like the astronauts were given, just in case.