NASA Satellites Will Use GPS to Boost Hurricane Forecasts

As reported by Spectrum IEEE: Eight small NASA satellites and the existing GPS network could provide the first serious upgrade for hurricane intensity forecasting in decades. Once launched in a little less than a year, the mission’s boost to extreme weather prediction would go a long way toward giving authorities more time to plan coastal evacuations and prepare for the onslaught of 21st-century storms.

The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) consists of eight micro-satellites weighing just 27 kilograms each. NASA’s planned satellite constellation would have the capability of measuring wind speeds of up to 216 kilometers per hour; the equivalent of a category 4 hurricane. (That’s one notch weaker than Hurricane Patricia when it struck Mexico days ago.) The measurements—based on scattered GPS signals bouncing off the ocean’s surface—would work regardless of how heavy the rainfall was within the intense hurricane eyewalls where the storms’ most damaging wind forces exist.

Wind speed measurements inside hurricanes can currently prove tricky without the help of “hurricane hunter” aircraft flying reconnaissance missions inside the storms. That’s because existing weather satellites have difficulty measuring wind speeds inside storms due to radio absorption from heavy rain.

CYGNSS would solve that problem with the help of GPS satellite signals used for location and timekeeping services all over the world. Many GPS signals simply end up bouncing off the Earth’s land or ocean surface. Such reflected or scattered signals can provide valuable scientific information about the roughness of the ocean’s surface inside a hurricane. CYGNSS can then use computer algorithms to deduce the wind speed and hurricane intensity from that data.

Aaron Ridley, a professor of space weather at the University of Michigan and a lead on the CYGNSS project, explained the advantages of using GPS signals in a blog post:

One of the brilliant things about the CYGNSS satellites is that they don’t carry a transmitter. Instead, they use GPS signals, which are being transmitted by GPS satellites all day, everyday, across the globe. Some of these radio waves are measured by your smartphone to tell you where you are, but the vast majority of the signals are just absorbed by the ground, or reflected back to space. CYGNSS measures those signals that are reflected back to space. A benefit to using the GPS signals is that those radio waves go right through rain, so that CYGNSS can take measurements in the middle of a hurricane, just where other satellites don’t work well.

An added bonus of using GPS signals is that the CYGNSS satellites don’t have to carry their own radio transmitters. That reduced the mission’s overall weight and saved money, according to Ridley. CYGNSS cost just US $102 million to develop, build and test; a relative bargain for a weather forecasting tool that could save lives and better prepare coastal communities against storm devastation. Ridley and his colleagues also plan to save on launch costs by crowding all eight satellites aboard the same rocket.

Each CYGNSS satellite can receive up to four distinct GPS signals scattered or reflected from the Earth’s surface. The satellites also have receivers to detect coherent GPS signals sent directly from GPS satellites as a basis of comparison with the scattered signals. 

After the 2016 launch, the satellites will spread out above the Earth’s tropical regions to monitor tropical cyclones in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Many existing satellites have polar low-Earth orbits that provide fairly poor coverage of hurricanes in the tropics. CYGNSS would help fill that gap by deploying in a global band between 35 degrees latitude north and south of the equator.

The wide swath of CYGNSS coverage would also enable more frequent measurements of tropical cyclone intensity. Simulations suggest CYGNSS would have an average “revisit time” of about five or six hours; much better coverage than satellites orbiting over the Earth’s poles. Not bad for a fairly low-cost effort by University of Michigan researchers and NASA’s Earth Science division.

Have Tesla and Apple Disrupted the Auto Industry Past the Point of No Return?

As reported by Quartz: The challenge that the old manufacturers are having is that they have to cannibalize the profits of their existing lines by making completely new vehicles from the ground-up to compete. So they mostly won’t.

The future of cars is battery electric vehicles; that’s just a reality. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but here are a few:

1. Electricity from generation to wheel is a lot cheaper than any of the proposed intermediaries such as hydrogen fuel cell and air carbon capture + electrolysed hydrogen fake-gas, or diesel.
2. The grid is decarbonizing, but you can’t buy carbon neutral gas or diesel.
3. The VW scandal is just making public what a lot of people already knew: it wasn’t possible to make gasoline or diesel engines significantly better in the compromised space between CO2 emissions, NOx and other pollutant emissions, mileage, performance and engine longevity. That road, amazing as it has been, has reached its end.
4. Electric cars just outperform everything else. I ran across a video of a 1968 Mustang fastback conversion to electric that give it 1.94 seconds to 60 mph and a top speed of 174. Teslas, obviously, are currently reaching 60 in 2.8 seconds with heavy, five-seven passenger luxury sedans. The quickest to-production cars in the world are gas-electric hybrids, because you can’t be fastest without electric motors these days. And the pitiful handful of fuel cell vehicles on the road are sluggish, because batteries are much more efficient at delivering electricity than fuel cells.

If you don’t believe me, how about the CEO of Aston Martin?

“Palmer said it’s inevitable that the entire industry will shift over to electricity, if only because it’s the most plausible way to deliver the power drivers expect.”

To make a good electric car:

1. You have to throw away your frames. All of them. To build an effective, long-range, high-performing electric car, you have to start with something like the Tesla power slab at or below the level of the axles.
2. You have to throw away all of your engine management software; all of the experience built up on getting amazing compromises out of an internal combustion engine is irrelevant when faced with an AC or DC motor.
3. You have to throw away your internal combustion motor. No hybrid, serial hybrid, range extender BS. You have to throw it away. And start with the assumption that you are going to achieve range, fast-charging, and performance by committing to electric motors and batteries.
4. You have to throw away all of your traction control systems. They are all designed around the ludicrously widely varying power output of an internal combustion engine, which changes literally every microsecond at every change of speed and driver input because those engines have such narrow power bands. Instead, you can rely on tremendously straightforward power to your wheels which is much more finely controllable. Your actual traction control results will be much better, but all of the hacks you built up will be useless.
5. You have to throw away all of your emission controls experience, knowledge, technology, investments, and branding. It’s completely unnecessary.
6. You have to throw away your entire fuel storage and delivery system. The tank, the lines, the pumps, the injection systems, all of it. It’s all obsolete.
7. You have to throw away your body panels. They all depend on the frame, the gas tank, the mechanical linkages, and taking up space that they don’t take up anymore.
8. You have to throw away your seat mounting systems, and possibly your seats. They expect a lot of wasted space due to motor and transmission drive shaft hump and gas tank that just aren’t there anymore. They depend on a frame which doesn’t exist anymore.

Tesla discovered this the hard way by trying to base the original Roadster on the great little Lotus Elise. They admit, somewhat ruefully, that it would have been a lot easier and cheaper to start from scratch. And they had no existing technical debt, politics, or any other barriers to making the right decision.

If you do all of that, what are the implications for an automobile manufacturer?

1. Virtually all reusability between existing models and the new models is gone. This is a complete disruption of the economics of the car industry.
2. The most powerful divisions within car companies lose almost all power.
3. Massive investment in new frames and panels is required.
4. Massive investment is required in new control systems.
5. Completely new supply chain partnerships have to be forged.
6. All of the executives and engineers who have made your company great on the back of internal combustion engines have to accept that they are back to close to zero. A lot of the engineers won’t have any role in the new world, or any way short of significant re-education and starting from junior positions to stay employed.

So what’s going to happen to the car industry?

1. All of the majors will continue to deny the reality of the situation and continue to bet on cars with traditional frames, limited batteries, limited electric range and performance, and with internal combustion engines continuing to do the heavy lifting.
2. New competitors such as Tesla and Apple will kick the traditional cars to the curb in every way. More competitors will enter as it becomes obvious to corporations outside of the automotive industry that a massive disruption is killing the traditional car companies, and that they are incapable of responding to it. Traditional electronic and electric motor companies will start wrapping cars around their expertise. Motorcycle companies such as Lightning and Zero will be approached to build cars instead of bikes.

Can we see this happening already?

Yes, BMW’s strategy is what I’ve outlined above. Their two existing cars, the i8 and the i3, are both inferior to the Tesla in most ways, both require gas engines to get more than a rather pitiful distance (and space for the engines, gas tanks, lines, and pumps are all set aside in the i3, so it’s not like you can do anything useful like extend the battery pack). The frames pretend to being unique but they still expect a lot of traditional crap being there, which is obsolete. And their strategy of electric motor components in their entire range by 2025 still has no plans for real electric cars that could compete with Tesla, just more crappy electric cars with internal combustion engines for real driving.

And BMW is one of the more innovative and adaptable traditional motor companies out there.

Most of the current major car companies will fail because they can’t adapt to the disruption that electrification is bringing to their industry. They will refuse to cannibalize their other products. They will refuse to shift power and money to the electric divisions. They will refuse to engineer true electric cars because the economics don’t make sense until they don’t have any money to do it, anyway.

This pattern has played out innumerable times over the past 100 years. Remember RCA? Philips? Control Data? Burroughs? Kodak?

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill in the Most Ethical Manner

Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets. But before they can become widespread, carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the driving.

So it’ll come as no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether (see  “Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities”). These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. And yet they can never be perfectly safe.

And that raises some difficult issues. How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?

The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society.  Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?

So can science help? Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Jean-Francois Bonnefon at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and a couple of pals. These guys say that even though there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, public opinion will play a strong role in how, or even whether, self-driving cars become widely accepted.

So they set out to discover the public’s opinion using the new science of experimental ethics. This involves posing ethical dilemmas to a large number of people to see how they respond. And the results make for interesting, if somewhat predictable, reading. “Our results provide but a first foray into the thorny issues raised by moral algorithms for autonomous vehicles,” they say.

Here is the nature of the dilemma. Imagine that in the not-too-distant future, you own a self-driving car. One day, while you are driving along, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, the owner and occupant. What should it do?

One way to approach this kind of problem is to act in a way that minimizes the loss of life. By this way of thinking, killing one person is better than killing 10.

But that approach may have other consequences. If fewer people buy self-driving cars because they are programmed to sacrifice their owners, then more people are likely to die because ordinary cars are involved in so many more accidents. The result is a Catch-22 situation.

Bonnefon and co are seeking to find a way through this ethical dilemma by gauging public opinion. Their idea is that the public is much more likely to go along with a scenario that aligns with their own views.

So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought. The participants were given scenarios in which one or more pedestrians could be saved if a car were to swerve into a barrier, killing its occupant or a pedestrian.

At the same time, the researchers varied some of the details such as the actual number of pedestrians that could be saved, whether the driver or an on-board computer made the decision to swerve and whether the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the occupant or an anonymous person.

The results are interesting, if predictable. In general, people are comfortable with the idea that self-driving vehicles should be programmed to minimize the death toll.

This utilitarian approach is certainly laudable but the participants were willing to go only so far. “[Participants] were not as confident that autonomous vehicles would be programmed that way in reality—and for a good reason: they actually wished others to cruise in utilitarian autonomous vehicles, more than they wanted to buy utilitarian autonomous vehicles themselves,” conclude Bonnefon and co.

And therein lies the paradox. People are in favor of cars that sacrifice the occupant to save other lives—as long they don’t have to drive one themselves.

Bonnefon and co are quick to point out that their work represents the first few steps into what is likely to be a fiendishly complex moral maize. Other issues that will need to be factored into future thinking are the nature of uncertainty and the assignment of blame.

Bonnefon and co say these issues raise many important questions: “Is it acceptable for an autonomous vehicle to avoid a motorcycle by swerving into a wall, considering that the probability of survival is greater for the passenger of the car, than for the rider of the motorcycle? Should different decisions be made when children are on board, since they both have a longer time ahead of them than adults, and had less agency in being in the car in the first place? If a manufacturer offers different versions of its moral algorithm, and a buyer knowingly chose one of them, is the buyer to blame for the harmful consequences of the algorithm’s decisions?”

These problems cannot be ignored, say the team: “As we are about to endow millions of vehicles with autonomy, taking algorithmic morality seriously has never been more urgent.”

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1510.03346 : Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars? 

Transcontinental US Record Aboard Tesla Model S P85D with Autopilot Claimed

As reported by GizMag: Earlier this year, Carl Reese and Deena Mastracci made a 3,011-mile (4,846-km) drive from Los Angeles to New York in 58 hours and 51 minutes in a Tesla Model S P85D to set a record for the coast-to-coast journey for an electric vehicle. Now Reese and Mastracci, joined by Alex Roy, have beaten that record with the help of Tesla's new Autopilot software.

According to the Transcontinental Drivers Association, the yet-to-be-verified record-breaking drive left Redondo Beach, California on October 18 at 9:15 pm PST and arrived at the Red Ball Garage in New York on October 21 at 10:03 am EST – making for a distance of 2,995 mi (4,820 km) and a time of 57 hours and 48 minutes.

The drive relied on the newly-released Tesla Autopilot software, which was made available by software update to Tesla S and X owners on October 15. This provides semi-autonomous capabilities so the vehicle can be driven without touching the pedals or steering wheel on the highway.

The car uses cameras and radar to keep an eye on other vehicles, potential hazards and road markings. It can execute lane changes with only driver supervision, dodge swerving vehicles, park automatically, and prevent drivers from making potentially dangerous moves like driving over the divider.

The Association says that both the departure and arrival of the Tesla S were recorded by witnesses and the GPS tracking data will be submitted to verify the record.

"Deena and I have been planning this autonomous record for over 11 months," says Reese. "We knew we wanted to be the first group to make the cross-country attempt using the autonomous technology."

London's Iconic Black Cab Goes All Electric

As reported by GizMag: The London Taxi Company (LTC) has unveiled a new version of the Black Cab that famously operates in London, UK. The TX5 is said to retain the spirit of past models and focus on driver and passenger comfort. Reflecting the move toward a low-carbon economy, it will be electric powered.

The predecessor of the new London taxi, the TX4, was launched in 2007 and, although electric versions of it were developed, models on the streets invariably had a conventional diesel engine under the bonnet.

According to LTC, all of the 2,000 components for the TX5 have been designed from the ground up. It has a new lightweight aluminum body structure and composite paneling, rear-hinged doors to improve passenger access and space for a forward-facing wheelchair. It also has a panoramic glass roof.

The cab can accommodate six passengers and provides more legroom for the driver. It is equipped with Wi-Fi connectivity and mobile device charging points for both the driver and passengers.

The TX5 was designed by Brits Peter Horbury and David Ancona at Geely’s design center in Barcelona. They were supported by over 200 engineers and designers in the UK. Hornbury says they were acutely aware of the responsibility that came with designing a new model of such a recognizable and iconic vehicle.

"We wanted to retain those aspects that make the London taxi what it is and what it stands for, while ensuring that the new design reflects everything that a 21st century vehicle needs to be," said Horbury. "We have sought to build on existing features such as the headlights, grille and strong roof lines. But we have also made sure that the new vehicle significantly builds on space and comfort levels for both passengers and drivers."

More detailed specifications about the TX5 have yet to be announced. It is due to be launched in the UK at the end of 2017 and across international markets in 2018.

Battelle’s DroneDefender Anti-Drone Beam Gun Grounds UAVs

As reported by GizMag: There's recently been a run of new anti-drone systems introduced to deal with potential threats from UAVs, but these have been on the large and expensive side. To provide an affordable alternatives to plug the gap between shotguns and truck-mounted systems, national security research and development firm Battelle is introducing DroneDefender. Billed as the first portable, accurate, rapid-to-use UAV counter-weapon, it's a rifle-like raygun device that uses a radio beam to jam drone control systems and stop them in midair.

Most UAVs in service today are relatively harmless, but their growing numbers increases the risk that they will be used maliciously or carelessly. Recent systems for dealing with rogue drones have taken one of two approaches. One type destroys UAVs by shooting them down with special anti-aircraft guns, which has the obvious limitation that such weapons can't be used in many areas for legal or safety reasons. The other type uses large-scale jamming systems that fire radio beams to interfere with the drone's controls, but many of these, like the anti-aircraft guns, are very large, expensive, and not at all suitable for dealing with minor problems at small installations or following VIPs and other targets on the move.

Battelle's DroneDefender is designed as a point-and-shoot system that looks like an elaborate shoulder raygun with two antennae, a software-defined radio, and jamming circuitry. It works by firing a radio beam in a 30° cone that jams the control and GPS navigation frequencies to disable drones at distances of up to 400 m (1,300 ft). Battlle says that the system not only freezes the UAV, but also stops all outside control commands, including radio detonation signals.

The DroneDefender places a heavy emphasis on speed and portability. It weighs under 10 lb (4.5 kg), can cold-start in under a tenth of a second, and operates continuously for up to five hours with optional battery packs. It can be carried or fixed on a Picatinny rail mount and comes in hardened versions for forward deployment in hazardous areas.

Battelle says that the DroneDefender requires no special training to use, has already been tested against a DJI Phantom drone target, and has shown a consistent response in field conditions.

Because, US FAA regulations prohibited an actual demonstration, the video below shows a simulation of the DroneDefender in use.

Bulldozers Guided by Drones are Helping Ease Japan's Labor Shortage

As reported by The Verge: Komatsu is the world’s second largest construction company, a venerable Japanese brand with 94 years of history that sells forklifts and bulldozers to customers around the globe. But in its home country, Komatsu has been struggling with an aging population, a trend that has left few young workers available to operate its machines.

As Japan ramps up new construction in preparation for hosting the 2020 Olympics, experts believe it will face a serious obstacle. "The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years," Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.

To get around this problem, Komatsu has begun creating a new service it calls Smart Construction. A team of robotic vehicles scoops rock and pushes dirt without a human behind the wheel. They are guided in their work by a fleet of drones, which map the area in three dimensions and update the data in real time to track how the massive volumes of soil and cement are moving around the site.The drones are built by an American startup, Skycatch, and today it revealed that Komatsu is one of the principal investors in a new $25 million round of funding that the company plans on using for global expansion and R&D. The partnership will power an entirely new line of business for Komatsu: Instead of selling construction equipment to its customers, it can lease them out for a job, and use a staff of remote operators and autonomous vehicles to complete the work. One or two lightly trained humans are still required on site to take control if something goes wrong.

Before switching to drones, Komatsu had been experimenting with autonomous dump trucks, bulldozers, and excavators, but they lacked the ability to see and understand the environment around them with enough precision to be useful on their own. Komatsu would use teams of human surveyors to create extremely detailed maps of the job site, a process that left a lot of room for improvement. "Because the terrain survey could not be conducted with high accuracy, what results in many sites is a 20 to 30 percent margin of error in soil volume after the construction is complete," says Chikashi Shike, an executive with Komatsu’s Smart Construction division.With Skycatch drones, Komatsu says it has dramatically reduced that margin of error while dramatically cutting the time it takes to complete a sitemap. "With the former, traditional method, it takes about two weeks, on average, to survey a certain piece of land," says Kenishi Nishihara, a project manager with the Smart Construction division. "Meanwhile with Skycatch it can be completely down within one day, or even 30 minutes."

Skycatch is based in Silicon Valley, but has decided to focus its business almost entirely on Japan. "The regulations in the United States make it difficult to operate in a fully autonomous manner, and so that makes it tough to get the full value out of drones," says Skycatch CEO Christian Sanz. Of course, not every country is facing such dramatic labor shortages. "In Japan, there is a clear recognition, and appreciation, of the work these drones can do," says Sanz. "In other places, people are still cautious about collaborating with robots to do jobs that were typically handled by humans."