Unmanned Army Black Hawk Passes Autonomous Flight Tests

As reported by Wireless Design Mag: Upon hearing “unmanned aerial vehicles,” most people probably think of those pesky drones flying over little league baseball games—not so much four-bladed, twin engine, 180 mph military choppers. But recently, the United States Army’s Black Hawk has passed a critical test in autonomous helicopter flight and robot teaming, an Army official said.

Flying autonomously, the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk successfully delivered an amphibious all-terrain vehicle (AATV) to a Florida drop zone last Tuesday. After picking up the AATV, the helicopter flew five to seven kilometers, delivering the vehicle to its specified ground location. The AATV (also unmanned) then proceeded to travel through a ten kilometer scenario, facing various chemical and biological hazards and relaying that data back to the chopper via satellite.

The success of the Black Hawk and AATV’s joint (autonomous) mission points to a new level of robotics emerging in the United States military. It also marks an important step in the venture to make the Black Hawk an optionally manned aircraft—something Sikorsky, the company that builds the Black Hawk, has been working on, following an announcement last year. Since then, the company has been conducting remotely piloted flight tests and advancing its hardware-software kit, dubbed the Matrix, to allow for greater self-steering.

The Army currently has 2,500 Black Hawks at its disposal, and refashioning them to include the unmanned technology would grant military commanders greater flexibility in prioritizing manned operations: crews could focus on more “sensitive” missions, while the autonomous vehicles would fulfill resupply missions without increasing fleet size.

Robert Sadowski, a roboticist for the Army's Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), told Defense One, “If you can retrofit [the Black Hawks], you can do autonomous logistics when the crew is resting. It gives you the ability to have an enhanced operational tempo. It can be retrofitted across the older UH-60s. In fact, they’re trying to do that to show that it can be done.”

Tesla is Already Making Grid Batteries at the Gigafactory

As reported by Fortune: Electric car maker Tesla Motors is already assembling batteries to be used by utilities and building owners at its huge battery factory, the Gigafactory, just outside of Reno, Nev. The company made the announcement during its third quarter earnings on Tuesday.

Earlier this year Tesla announced that it would start selling batteries that could be plugged into the power grid, connected to buildings, or paired with solar panels. Business owners and home owners can use Tesla’s batteries to lower electricity bills by powering buildings when grid electricity rates are high. Utilities can use the batteries to operate their grids more smoothly and to avoid building additional expensive and dirty power plants.

Tesla said that it started assembling these batteries—called the Powerpack and Powerwall—at its factory in Fremont, Calif. in the third quarter of this year. In the early part of the fourth quarter, Tesla says it “relocated production from Fremont to an automated assembly line at the Gigafactory.” These Powerpack and Powerwall battery packs are likely using battery cells from its battery partner Panasonic.

Previously Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk had said that the company would move production of the grid batteries to the Gigafactory next year in the first quarter.

At the end of 2016, Tesla will make the Powerpack and Powerwall battery packs using battery cells that it produces at the Gigafactory, says Tesla.Overall, Tesla says it’s accelerating and expanding its plans to make the grid batteries. The company is seeing strong demand for the Powerpack and Powerwalls, in particular in Australia, Germany and South Africa.

Earlier this year Musk said the company had $1 billion-worth, or 100,000 in orders, for the grid batteries. As a result the grid batteries are sold out in 2016 already. Musk has also said that there’s been so much demand for Tesla’s grid batteries that they “went viral” and were “crazy off the hook.”Previously Musk has estimated that just the grid battery orders could deliver between $40 million to $45 million in sales for the fourth quarter of this year. Sales for the battery business could be “ten times that number next year” — or presumably $400 million to $450 million in a quarter — after that.

Beyond next year, the business could reach “a few billion dollars in 2017,” Musk said earlier this year. “It’s sort of growing by a half order of magnitude to an order of magnitude per year.”

Tesla didn’t give any more details on the volumes of grid batteries it has been assembling at the Gigafactory on the earnings call. But Tesla CTO JB Straubel confirmed on the call that Tesla had just started assembly in the factory and said battery assembly will be done in a separate part of the building than where the battery cells will be manufactured.

Tesla is Going to Lock Down Autopilot so It's Harder to do Stupid Things With It

As reported by The Verge: It's no secret that some Model S owners have been doing truly dumb things with their cars since Tesla rolled out autopilot — the temptation to let go of the wheel and let the car take total control is strong, even though Tesla calls it a "beta" and insists that drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times. In an earnings call Q&A this afternoon, CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that some scary videos had made it onto the internet of autopilot making scary decisions, saying that the company is planning "some additional constraints" around when the feature can be enabled in order to "minimize the possibility of people doing crazy things with it."

He didn't detail what those constraints might be, but it's easy to imagine that Tesla could, for instance, have more rigor around insisting that hands are placed on the wheel — if hands are removed for more than a few seconds, the system could automatically disengage, as some lane-keep systems in other vehicles do today. That'd reduce the chances that an inattentive driver could get caught off-guard by the car doing something unexpected.

Musk's comments come on the heels of Google's October self-driving report, where the company laid out why it decided to work on a fully autonomous car — because drivers aren't very good at taking control of self-driving cars that need to disengage their autonomous functionality. Some Model S owners are learning that better than anyone at the moment, though there's a lot of hope that Tesla's system will get better over time: the company has noted that data from cars in the field is continuously being uploaded in order to refine its maps and algorithms.

Testing Cars is so Physically Punishing on Humans, Ford is Licensing Automakers a Robotic Replacement

As reported by The Verge: When humans can't hack it, it's time to call in the robots.

Ford has announced today that it's working with ASI, a Utah-based firm that specializes in vehicle automation, to sell "robotic testing kits" that help automakers endurance test new cars. The kits effectively turn in-development vehicles into rudimentary R/C cars with a hint of self-driving — they can be programmed to hold a course within one inch of error and have sensor arrays to avoid nearby pedestrians and other vehicles — which is convenient for sending test cars down brutal stretches of test track designed to simulate potholes and other hazards that they'll encounter over their useful lives.

From Ford's release:

Robotically driven vehicles are expected to repeatedly perform tests on torturous surfaces with names like Silver Creek, Power Hop Hill and Curb Your Enthusiasm. These tests can compress 10 years of daily driving abuse into courses just a few hundred yards long, with surfaces that include broken concrete, cobblestones, metal grates, rough gravel, mud pits and oversized speed bumps.

Spending days on end hurtling a development vehicle down these kinds of surfaces sounds about as much fun as punching yourself in the face, which is where the notion of automating it comes into play: by installing Ford's kit, a car company can basically let the car test itself. Ford says the system can be disengaged quickly if an engineer needs to get in and drive, but for the bulk of the testing, the car can bounce and jerk all it wants without endangering the backs and necks of the poor employees trying to get the car ready for real roads.

Ford is refusing to reveal which automakers have picked up the kits so far, but it says that "several automotive OEMs" have gotten orders in.

Watch: MIT Drone Autonomously Avoids Obstacles at 30 MPH

As reported by Robotics Trends: Obstacle avoidance needs to be the next big thing for drones. As 3D Robotics founder Chris Anderson said, the “mass jackassery” (reckless flying) needs to stop. It’s part of the reason we now have a mandatory drone registration system looming over us.

DJI has been on the forefront of avoidance technology for drones, recently introducing its Guidance system that uses multiple stereo and ultrasonic sensors that allows the drone to automatically avoid obstacles within 65 feet.

Andrew Barry, a PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), is looking to push this technology to the next level. Barry and professor Russ Tedrake have created an obstacle-detection system that allows a drone to autonomously avoid obstacles in its flight path while flying 30 miles per hour.

CSAIL posted a fascinating video, which you can watch below, of Barry’s system helping a drone “dip, dart and dive” through a tree-filled field.

The drone in the video, which was made with off-the-shelf components for $1,700, weighs just over a pound and has a 34-inch wingspan. It has a camera on each wing and two processors that are “no fancier than the ones you’d find on a cellphone.”

CSAIL says Barry’s software runs 20 times faster than existing obstacle detection software. Operating at 120 frames per second, the open-source software allows the drone to detect objects and map its environment in real time, extracting depth information at 8.3 milliseconds per frame.

“Sensors like lidar are too heavy to put on small aircraft, and creating maps of the environment in advance isn’t practical,” Barry says. “If we want drones that can fly quickly and navigate in the real world, we need better, faster algorithms.”

So, how does it work? We’ll let CSAIL explain:

Traditional algorithms focused on this problem would use the images captured by each camera, and search through the depth-field at multiple distances - 1 meter, 2 meters, 3 meters, and so on - to determine if an object is in the drone’s path.

Such approaches, however, are computationally intensive, meaning that the drone cannot fly any faster than 5 or 6 miles per hour without specialized processing hardware.

Barry’s realization was that, at the fast speeds that his drone could travel, the world simply does not change much between frames. Because of that, he could get away with computing just a small subset of measurements - specifically, distances of 10 meters away.

“You don’t have to know about anything that’s closer or further than that,” Barry says. “As you fly, you push that 10-meter horizon forward, and, as long as your first 10 meters are clear, you can build a full map of the world around you.”

While such a method might seem limiting, the software can quickly recover the missing depth information by integrating results from the drone’s odometry and previous distances.

Barry wrote about the system in his paper “Pushbroom Stereo for High-Speed Navigation in Cluttered Environments” (PDF) and says he needs to improve the software so it can work at more than one depth and dense environments.

“Our current approach results in occasional incorrect estimates known as ‘drift,’” he says. “As hardware advances allow for more complex computation, we will be able to search at multiple depths and therefore check and correct our estimates. This lets us make our algorithms more aggressive, even in environments with larger numbers of obstacles.”

Skreemr Jet Could Fly New York to London in 30 Minutes

As reported by Condé Nast Traveler: There's a lot of excitement around the idea of supersonic travel right now. Airbus has patent approval for a reboot of the Concorde—the Concorde-2—that would go Mach 4 (or faster) to get you from New York to London in an hour. Now designer Charles Bombardier is talking about cutting that travel time in half: with the Skreemr supersonic jet. Allow me to get technical for a second: The Skreemer vision, which looks like a prop from the upcoming Star Wars movie, would launch from a magnetic railgun at Mach 4, ignite rockets to the point where it's going fast enough to "fire up a scramjet," propelling it to a crazy Mach 10, or or 7,673 miles per hour. Popular Mechanics has the full breakdown, but yes, apparently, this could be a passenger jet. (Popular Mechanics)

Starship Technologies Plans to Bring a Fleet of Delivery Drones to the Streets

As reported by Design Boom: formed by skype co-founders, starship technologies is a european startup planning on building a fleet of self-driving delivery drones made to transport goods locally within 30 minutes. designed using readily available components, the robots are lightweight and low-cost, enabling the company to bring the current cost of delivery down by 10 to 15 times per shipment.

the fleet will reduce CO2 emissions, and will create unprecedented convenience for individuals while opening up new opportunities for businesses such as parcel firms or grocery stores. the robots are intended to slip seamlessly into the environment, traveling at slow speeds on sidewalks blending safely in with pedestrian traffic. starship technologies are currently testing and demonstrating prototypes and plans to launch the first pilot services in cooperation with its partners in the US, UK and other countries in 2016.

‘our vision revolves around three zeroes – zero cost, zero waiting time and zero environmental impact,’ explains ahti heinla, a skype co-founder and CEO at starship technologies. ‘we want to do to local deliveries what skype did to telecommunications. with e-commerce continuing to grow consumers expect to have more convenient options for delivery – but at a cost that suits them. the last few miles often amounts to the majority of the total delivery cost. our robots are purposely designed using the technologies made affordable by mobile phones and tablets – it’s fit for purpose, and allows for the cost savings to be passed on to the customer.’

The drones will travel on sidewalks at about 4 miles per hour for package weights of up to 20 lbs.  The top lid opens to fit small and medium sized packages and the unit is opened through the use of an app on the customer's smartphone.  The units can also be tracked by the deliverer or the customer.

Starship's robots are said to be "99-percent" autonomous, which means that although they'll drive themselves, human oversight will be present at all times, ready to take control if the robot gets confused.

Starship Technologies is clearly targeting companies that want to compete with services like Amazon's Prime Now one-hour deliveries -- although there's no reason why Amazon couldn't integrate this robot into its supply chain if it proves as cost-effective as claimed. The company still has a lot of questions to answer, though. It says the robots "consume less energy than most light bulbs," but that's not exactly the most precise metric. We also don't know how much it'll cost companies to run and maintain a fleet of bots, or whether Starship can secure the necessary regulatory permission to ride on sidewalks. Assuming it can answer those questions, and the many more that'll arise in the coming months, Starship says it'll launch "pilot services" in partnership with other companies across the US, UK, and other countries in 2016.