DARPA Is About to Start Testing an Autonomous, Submarine-Hunting Ocean Drone

As reported by Motherboard: Early next year, DARPA will begin testing a 132-foot unmanned submarine-hunting ocean drone in San Diego. Slapped with the cumbersome title of Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), it’s designed to do exactly that: track stealth submarines from the surface, quietly and autonomously.

The ACTUV is currently under construction at a facility on the Oregon coast, where it is 90 percent complete. When finished, DARPA hopes it will be able to withstand months of autonomous operations at sea. It will weigh 140 tons, and will be able to hone in on the quietest submarines in the water from the surface, and automatically trail them.

The vessel is so far not necessarily being touted explicitly as a weapon, but, according to DARPA, it will have the capacity to "carry a payload" and “enable independently deploying systems.” On the US DoD’s science site, the vessel is being compared to naval destroyers, which are currently tasked with trailing—and are outfitted to eliminate—submarines. (According to DARPA, one of the ACTUV's chief selling points is that it will be much cheaper than a naval destroyer: The drone boat costs as little as $15,000 a day to operate, versus the destroyer’s $700,000 per day price tag.)

Like many of the advanced robotics projects the US military’s blue sky lab is researching, DARPA seems to be leaving room to weaponize the vessel, while allowing plausible deniability as to the instrument’s intent. This is especially important because the Pentagon’s autonomous weapons directive prohibits fully autonomous machines from using lethal or semi-lethal force, which would apply to the ACTUV should it move beyond the testing stages and ever be outfitted with weaponry. DARPA did not respond to a request for comment.

The development also seems conspicuously timed with the re-emergence of Russia's submarine fleet, which is thought to be dispersed amongst the hotly contested Arctic—recent sightings seem to confirm their presence, and Putin has not been shy about using them in military exercises in the region.

But the focus seems to be on developing autonomous systems that can operate in water. In its official Request for Information, it states that "DARPA is interested in hardware and software solutions that enable an autonomous lookout from a surface vessel."

Meanwhile, one of DARPA’s stated “three primary goals” for the initiative is to “Advance unmanned maritime system autonomy to enable independently deploying systems capable of missions spanning thousands of kilometers of range and months of endurance under a sparse remote supervisory control model,” as Scott Littlefield, program manager of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, explained in the project description.

“This includes autonomous compliance with maritime laws and conventions for safe navigation, autonomous system management for operational reliability, and autonomous interactions with an intelligent adversary,” he added.

In other words, DARPA’s drone boat submarine-hunter would be able to spend months at sea, where it would be able to automatically trail its target, automatically negotiate its surroundings, and, eventually, one imagines, it might automatically destroy an “intelligent adversary.” The Department of Defense notes that “other advantages of the ACTUV concept include greater payload and endurance than a ship-launched unmanned surface vehicle.”

The foremost objective for ACTUV is to trail submarines, but DARPA is apparently exploring other options too. “The Navy is considering using this for a variety of missions,” Littlefield said in a recent announcement, according to the Department of Defense, “including mine countermeasures.”

As the polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise, as new northern passageways open up for maritime trade, expect military tensions in the gas and oil rich Arctic to only ratchet upwards. Russia's belligerence has so far turned the most heads, but Canada and the US each have heavily vested interests in the region. The near future, it seems, may be marked by drones stalking submarines through the slushy detritus of the Arctic.

An Electric Motor that Lasts for One Million Miles? Tesla is Working on It.

As reported by Treehugger: There were many interesting bits of info that came out of Tesla's last quarterly earnings, and we mentioned many in this article. There was one thing that didn't make the cut at the time, but is still quite interesting, especially for those of us who like to keep vehicles for a long time but hate mechanical problems. Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla has changed its target endurance for its drive units (the part that hosts the electric motor, or motors on the dual-motor models).

Tesla/Screen capture

Up to now, they were aiming for 200,000 miles, which isn't bad. But the new goal is a lot more ambitious, and if achieved, will show another way in which electric vehicles are superior to gasoline ones; there's a lot less mechanical complexity, fewer moving parts and fluids sloshing around, and fewer things that can go wrong. Here's Musk on the conference call:

We are very happy with the quality of the drive unit. We changed the goal of the drive unit endurance from being approximately 200,000 miles to being a million miles – just basically we want drive units that just never wear out. That’s our goal. I think we made really good progress in that direction. the drive unit that are going out now and for the last several months have been excellent.

Tesla/Promo image

Musk admitted to problems with drive units in the past, but claims that these have been fixed now, and that any problems would be covered anyway by the 'infinite mile warranty' (for 8 years) launched last year. Here's what he wrote at the time:

The Tesla Model S drive unit warranty has been increased to match that of the battery pack. That means the 85 kWh Model S, our most popular model by far, now has an 8 year, infinite mile warranty on both the battery pack and drive unit. There is also no limit on the number of owners during the warranty period.

Moreover, the warranty extension will apply retroactively to all Model S vehicles ever produced. In hindsight, this should have been our policy from the beginning of the Model S program. If we truly believe that electric motors are fundamentally more reliable than gasoline engines, with far fewer moving parts and no oily residue or combustion byproducts to gum up the works, then our warranty policy should reflect that.

Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

Here's a video produced by Tesla showing how they make their electric drive units. They make the motors in-house to get them exactly how they want them, rather than use something off-the-shelf made by a supplier.

Faraday Future Aims to Take on Tesla Motors With $1 Billion Investment

As reported by The Wall Street Journal: Faraday Future Inc., an electric-car startup aiming to take on Tesla Motors Inc., on Thursday said it is considering four states for a $1 billion factory that would begin making its first cars in 2017.

The Gardena, Calif., company launched 18 months ago with private funding, has grown to more than 400 employees. Faraday Future Product Development Chief Nick Sampson said the company is looking at sites in Nevada, Louisiana, Georgia and California for the plant and would announce the site “in the next few weeks.”

Mr. Sampson is one of a team of former Tesla executives now leading Faraday Future. Like Tesla, Faraday Future is named after an inventor from the 19th century.

Tesla, more than a decade old, has shown how costly it is to break into the auto industry with electric cars. Even though volumes have steadily grown in recent years, the Palo Alto, Calif., car maker has posted 10-consecutive quarterly losses as a public company and routinely burns through more than $100 million in cash a month, requiring a steady pipeline of new financing.

Faraday Future has recruited personnel from BMW AG and General Motors Co. in addition to Tesla. It has promised to deliver a long-range, premium electric car sometime in 2017 that rivals Tesla’s pricey Model S sedan.The $1 billion investment plan is a significant commitment for a company that is virtually unknown. Faraday declined to say where it is getting the funds to finance the manufacturing plant.

“That sort of an amount is going to come from a different number of sources,” said Mr. Sampson, who was the lead chassis engineer for Tesla’s Model S before leaving in early 2012. “We are keeping our partners confidential.”

‘We are keeping our partners confidential. ’

—Nick Sampson, Faraday

The company has been adding dozens of employees every month and is renovating Nissan Motor Co.’s former Southern California sales headquarters as its home location.

Faraday’s plan is to break ground on the plant in early 2016 and begin production sometime in 2017. It is considering a rebuild of an existing factory or building a new plant from the ground up. Mr. Sampson said the company has secured parts suppliers and has begun to make purchase orders for components.

Faraday is one of several companies attempting to create an electric car to compete with Tesla. Ateiva Inc., backed by Beijing Automobile Industry Holding Corp. and Leshi Internet & Technology Co., also is developing an electric car in Silicon Valley. It is run by a former a Tesla engineer, Bernard Tse.

Karma Automotive, formerly Fisker Automotive, which is based in Southern California, has revived its hopes after China’s Wanxiang Group Corp. bought the failed hybrid-electric supercar maker out of bankruptcy in 2014. The company has secured a manufacturing facility in Southern California and is planning to sell a new car in 2016, according to its Web page.

Faraday was operating under the radar until a few months ago when it announced its intentions. Its first vehicle will have a battery pack that is larger than the one offered on Tesla Model S or Model X and will feature a variety of connected car features. But Mr. Sampson wouldn’t elaborate beyond that.

Toyota to Invest $1 Billion Over 5 Years in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the U.S.

As reported by CBS News: Toyota is investing $1 billion in a research company it's setting up in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics, underlining the Japanese automaker's determination to lead in futuristic cars that drive themselves and apply the technology to other areas of daily life.

Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said Friday the company will start operating from January 2016, with 200 employees at a Silicon Valley facility near Stanford University. A second facility will be established near Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The investment, which will be spread over five years, comes on top of $50 million Toyota announced earlier for artificial intelligence research at Stanford and MIT.

Toyota said its interest extended beyond autonomous driving, which is starting to be offered by some automakers and being promised by almost all of them. The technology was pointing to a new industry for everyday use, delivering a safer lifestyle overall, it said.

Toyota has already shown an R2-D2-like robot designed to help the elderly, the sick and people in wheelchairs by picking up and carrying objects. The automaker has also shown human-shaped entertainment robots that can converse and play musical instruments. As the world's top auto manufacturer, Toyota already uses sophisticated robotic arms and computers in auto production, including doing paint jobs and screwing in parts.

To drive home the message that the automaker's vision was more than about just cars, Toyoda appeared at a Tokyo hotel with high profile robotics expert Gill Pratt, who will head the new organization called Toyota Research Institute Inc.

Pratt was formerly a program manager at the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He joined Toyota as a technical adviser when it set up its AI research effort at Stanford and MIT.

Pratt said the company's goals are to support older people in their homes with robotics, make cars free of accidents and use AI to allow all people to drive regardless of ability.

Play VIDEO

The future of robots and artificial intelligence

He gave three examples from his personal life that motivate him to develop robotics and related technology: when he was a child, seeing a boy on a bicycle killed by a car; telling his 83-year-old father he could no longer drive; and sending his father to a nursing home when he was 84.

Pratt, who grew up on Japanese robot animation and dreamed of one day building such robots, said he chose Toyota over other jobs because it was "so focused on social good."

He said coming up with a car as smart as a human being will take a long time. But that also meant the competition had just begun and no one was ahead significantly.

The new company will be hiring researchers and engineers, according to Toyota. Wooing talent is crucial because not only are automakers such as General Motors, Tesla and Nissan competing on autonomous driving but outsiders are as well, including Google, Apple and Uber.

"The rapid adoption of advanced technology for the purposes of autonomous driving and connected car services means car companies have to act more like tech startups than traditional automakers," said Karl Brauer, senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book.

Toyota, which has gone through troubled times with massive recalls and the 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan, has the cash these days to invest in the future.

On Thursday, it kept its profit forecast for the fiscal year through March 2016 unchanged at 2.25 trillion yen ($18.5 billion), as profit rose on cost cuts and the benefits of a weak yen. The maker of the Prius hybrid and Camry sedan is on track to sell about 10 million vehicles around the world this year.

Toyoda, ranked by Forbes in this year's "powerful people" list as the most powerful Japanese, said he looks forward to working with Pratt because they share a vision.

"The goal is to do away with the tragedy of car accidents," he told reporters.

Jetman Flies Next to an Emirates A380 Airliner Above Dubai

As reported by eeDesignIt: Perhaps you’ve heard about  Swiss pilot and aviation enthusiast Yves Rossy, known as the inventor of the individual jet pack that uses carbon-fiber wings to make him fly. “Jetman” created the suit that grants him a 7.9-foot wingspan and is powered by jet engines to turn himself into a real-flying man.

And if that wasn’t impressive enough, he’s gone on some monumental flights including high over the Alps and the Grand Canyon. Now he’s done it again, along with his protegee Vince Reffet. The duo was recorded flying in formation alongside a giant Emirates A380 airliner over Dubai.

Emirates and Jetman designed the flight, including the  world’s largest passenger aircraft flying at 4,000 feet in two holding patterns. The A380 aircraft was then joined by the Jetman duo, while experienced pilots and operators of the smallest jet propelled wing, who were deployed from a helicopter that hovered above the aircraft at 5,500 feet. The duo conducted formations on both sides of the aircraft and joined to one side before breaking away.

Watch the video for the shocking footage:

Hyperloop Announces $26 Million in New Funding for the Pneumatic Metal Tubes of the Future

As reported by Mashable: The dream of rocketing through a metal tube at 800 mph took another big step forward on Thursday with the announcement that Hyperloop has added another $26 million to its war chest of cash.

Hyperloop is on its second major round of funding, known as a series B, while it tries to build a high-speed pneumatic tube transportation system to zip people from one place to another.

Making the announcement about the new funding at the Web Summit in Ireland, CEO Rob Lloyd said the company is confident the company will achieve its goal of meeting its full $80 million series B round by the end of the year.

Lloyd, the former president of Cisco Systems, joined Hyperloop as CEO in September, replacing Brogan BamBrogan, who is now the company's chief technology officer.

The $26 million comes from convertible note financing, which is a type of debt. Convertible notes are bonds that investors buy to help a company raise money; at a certain point in the future, when the bond reaches its maturity, they get the option to trade in the bond and take stock in the company instead.

In the series B, Lloyd, who joined the company in September, said Hyperloop had added investors from around the world including Khosla Ventures. All of its series A investors are participating, which would include Russian businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov's Caspian VC Partners, Sherpa, and ZhenFund.

He said the funding would give Hyperloop's CTO and co-founder Brogan BamBrogan and team "every pound of steel required to achieve our Kitty Hawk moment one year later."

"We've ordered the steel, so we need to fill in the purchase order with the 'ship to' address pretty quickly," he said.

Hyperloop has previously said it will achieve a test loop of 700 mph by the end of 2016. 

"The excitement around our vision and execution is palpable," Lloyd said in a statement on Hyperloop's website after the on-stage announcement.

He was joined on stage by Sherpa Capital's Shervin Pishevar who said that making Thursday's announcement in Dublin was particularly significant for him because it's where Hyperloop closed out its first, or series A, funding in 2014.

And it happened at the same hotel where the investor and entrepreneur signed the term note for that other transportation company he invested in, Uber. "I thank Ireland for the luck of the Irish," he said.

Rob Lloyd, CEO, announces $26M in financing from @KhoslaVentures & others as part of $80M Series B. #WebSummit2015 pic.twitter.com/bfMAmcOqTb

— HyperloopTech (@HyperloopTech) November 5, 2015

Commenting on when things would move past the test stage, Lloyd said three Hyperloop projects will be underway by 2017 and close to completion by 2020 — adding that he and BamBrogan were leaving Dublin and travelling in opposite directions around the globe in search of the right locations.

The theoretical transportation system, which investors say will turn the world into a village, moves people in vacuum-like tubes that they say will be able to travel at up to 800 mph.

Tesla and Space X's Elon Musk dreamed up the idea and is still "supportive of the efforts" according to the company.

The Future of Flight: Will You be Flying on One of These Superjets in 5 Years?

A series of next-generation super planes are currently being designed that promise to transform flight as early as 2020.

As reported by T3: Since the grounding of Concorde, flying has become pedestrian, with almost all journeys still taking as long as they did 30 years ago. Thanks to projects such as Skylon, N+2 and more though, that is about to change.

Skylon

Reaction Engines' Skylon superjet has just been supplied funding by the UK government.

The brainchild of Reaction Engines and BAE Systems, the Skylon super plane is a hypersonic aircraft that utilises a pair of revolutionary Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engines. Dubbed SABRE, these aerospace engines allow the aircraft to operate both in the Earth’s lower stratosphere - the layer that most commercial jets operate in - and also in low Earth orbit.

A cutaway image of a SABRE engine. A series of internal heat exchangers cool hot airstreams incredibly fast.

This ability to skim space will mean that the Skylon will be capable of taking off from a traditional commercial jet runway, fly to the edge of space, and then land anywhere else in the world within just 4 hours. For context, right now it takes just under 4 hours for a commercial jet to get from London to Istanbul, and three times that to get from London to Tokyo.

One of the unique selling points with Skylon is its ability to take off and land at standard, commercial airports.

The key piece of tech that is making this all possible is the next generation heat exchangers that allow the SABRE units to cool hot airstreams from over 1,000°C to minus 150°C in less than 1/100th of a second.

Will it happen? Well, right now, it certainly looks promising, as the UK government has just driven a dump truck load of cash up to Reaction Engines and BAE Systems, with the current deadline for a working system set at 2020.

AS2

Is the Aerion AS2 going to be the new Concorde?

AS2's luxurious cabin.  The perfect environment to drink 'business juice'.

Costing over $100 million (£60m) and set for launch in 2019, the Aerion AS2 is another superjet with slightly more modest goals. Pitched as a business jet, the AS2 looks like it wants to be the new Concorde, with the aircraft looking like it and featuring some similar specifications. For example, the AS2 is capable of flying at up to 1,217mph (Concorde could fly up to 1,350mph) and can complete a journey from London to New York in just 3 hours (Concorde’s record was 2 hours 54 minutes and 30 seconds).

The AS2 will be constructed primarily from carbon fibre composite materials.

Right now the AS2 is set for trial runs in 2019, certification in 2021 and for its first flights to commence in 2022. The design of the aircraft promises to be revolutionary, with its superstructure made from carbon fibre composite, its wings sculpted to reduce overall drag by 20 per cent (this is largely thanks to Aerion’s Supersonic Natural Laminar Flow Technology) and cabin offering stupid levels of comfort for its passengers.

Will it happen? Of all the projects currently in development, it seems like the Aerion AS2 is the one that will almost definitely happen. Aerion are already taking orders for the jet and, considering the latest global economic meltdown has now largely blown over for the corporate world, the money needed to buy and fly on these will be readily available. Here at T3.com though, we’ll probably just stick with the T3 dirigible.

N+2

The N+2 has been designed for mass commercial transport, with its cabin housing 80 passengers.

One of the biggest problems engineers have faced in bringing supersonic flight back and developing it further is the issue of sonic booms. Sonic booms are caused when violent disturbances of air pressure around a plane travelling faster than the speed of sound merge to form enormous shock waves. These shock waves create the thunderous sonic booms that became famous thanks to Concorde. The problem is that they are so loud that right now legislation is in place that forbids jets to fly over land, as the booms are deemed to loud to be exposed to the public.

The N+2 project, a collaborative effort between Lockheed Martin and NASA, aims to solve that problem, with its futuristic commercial jet promising to carry 80 passengers at a time from New York to Los Angeles in just 2 hours 30 minutes. For context, that journey takes over 5 hours today using standard subsonic commercial jets. Crucially though, thanks to the N+2’s unique tri-engine design, where one engine is mounted on top of the aircraft and the other two installed below, sonic booms will be reduced to a level which will make them acceptable for over-ground travel.

The tri-engine design, with one on top and two below, reduces the sonic boom effect significantly.

Will it happen? Our gut feeling here at T3.com is that the N+2 is the most likely never to see the light of day. Lockheed Martin and NASA in specifically have track records of pushing the envelope in terms of technological design and innovation, however often the technology remains just that. The N+2’s technological innovations will most likely be used, just not on the N+2 superjet.