UK to Test Self-Driving Trucks Later This Year

As reported by Engadget: Later this year, the UK will open up its motorways to self-driving trucks under new plans to speed up deliveries and cut traffic congestion. The Times reports that Chancellor George Osborne will confirm funding for the project, which could see convoys of up to 10 autonomous trucks -- or lorries as Brits call them -- driving a few meters apart, during this month's budget announcement, helping Britain position itself as one of the leading proponents of self-driving vehicles.

According to reports, a stretch of the M6 motorway near Carlisle has been touted as a possible testing ground. On this quieter part of the UK's major road network, a driver can lead a "platoon" of autonomous trucks without having to navigate various entry and exit points.

Although it's not known which vehicles will be tested on British roads, Daimler's autonomous truck is likely to be a frontrunner. The company has already driven an augmented Mercedes-Benz Actros down Germany's Autobahn 8 and also received the green light to test them on US roads.

The UK government is already putting the finishing touches to stretches of smart roads. Jaguar Land Rover, Huawei and Vodafone have joined various UK universities to test a number of self-driving car technologies, including LTE, Wi-Fi, LTE-V and DSRC. Another project in West Yorkshire uses infrared cameras to monitor traffic levels and introduce variable speed limits to help keep vehicles moving.

The Department of Transport believes the new test "has the potential to bring major improvements to journeys and the UK" and save fuel in the process. We'll learn more when George Osborne brings his red briefcase to the House of Commons on March 16th.

SpaceX Launches Satellite, but Doesn't Stick the Landing on the Drone Ship

Today at 6:35 p.m. EST, SpaceX hoped, at last, to make its fifth attempt to launch and then land, its Falcon 9 rocket on an at-sea platform. The launch attempt has been delayed for a multitude of reasons over the last nine days, including bad weather, heavy winds, and even a boat roaming into a safety zone.

However, it was not to be:

Launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, the rocket is set to deliver a commercial satellite into orbit. Shortly after liftoff, the first stage of the rocket was to automatically attempt a landing on a so-called "drone ship" at sea, which SpaceX has named "Of Course I Still Love You."

The company’s four previous attempts to land the Falcon 9 at sea have ended without success, some in spectacular explosions, some in oh-so-close misses, and one in which the rocket blew up while still ascending. In February, the first stage made it back to the drone ship, but exploded when it fell onto the deck of the drone ship after one of its legs broke on impact.

In December, SpaceX did successfully return the the Falcon 9 first stage to Earthfor the first time. But the company's ultimate plans are to be able to land it both on land and at sea, giving it maximum flexibility in the future.

About 10 minutes after launch, the first stage will attempt to return upright on the deck of "Of Course I Still Love You," a 100-foot-by-300-foot, unmanned floating platform currently off the coast of Florida. The rocket is meant to guide itself to the barge using GPS.

Those hoping for a successful landing, however, should temper their expectations. SpaceX said in a mission description (PDF) published ahead of time that because of the launch’s specific profile, "a successful landing is not expected."

When Elon Musk’s company eventually does complete an at-sea landing of the first stage, it will secure a key element of a future of affordable launches.

"SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access," the company says on itswebsite. "The majority of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which flies only once. Compare that to a commercial airliner—each new plane costs about the same as Falcon 9, but can fly multiple times per day, and conduct tens of thousands of flights over its lifetime. Following the commercial model, a rapidly reusable space launch vehicle could reduce the cost of traveling to space by a hundredfold."

Today's mission, of course, also has a scientific purpose beyond returning the rocket home. The launch is meant to deliver the SES-9 commercial communications satellite for SES, a global satellite company, to a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). SES clients, who receive satellite-based communications from the company, include Internet service providers, broadcasters, business and governmental organizations, and mobile and fixed network operators. The company has a fleet of more than 50 geostationary satellites.

"SES-9 is the largest satellite dedicated to serving the Asia-Pacific region for SES," SpaceX wrote in the mission description. "With its payload of 81 high-powered Ku-band transponder equivalents, SES-9 will be the 7th SES satellite providing unparalleled coverage to over 20 countries in the region."

The new satellite will be co-located with SES-7.

The satelite launch itself has been successful, but will take some additional time before it reaches full orbit.

Google’s PlaNet AI Can Figure Out Where a Picture Was Taken Just by Looking at it

As reported by Android Authority: Google’s deep-learning experiments have produced a wide array of results both practical and fascinating. The newest AI endeavor can look at a picture and guess where it was taken by comparing it to millions of other pictures at once. It’s called PlaNet, and it’s heralding an era in which photos won’t need geotags for their photographer’s location to be pinpointed.

The premise is fairly simple and easy to grasp. If you put a picture of the Statue of Liberty in front of someone, billions of people would be able to guess correctly that the photo was taken in New York City. We identify locations based on landmarks all the time, and this program does essentially the same thing. However, it’s able to identify locations in the absence of obvious landmarks by comparing and contrasting the photo with a massive database of pictures taken all around the world.The technology is by no means perfect. Or even consistent. Team lead Tobias Weyland says that PlaNet can can pinpoint a photo’s location with street-level accuracy 3.6 percent of the time. Just guessing the city hops it up to 10.1 percent accuracy, and it gets the country right 28.4 percent of the time. It can guess the continent almost half the time, 48 percent accuracy on that one.

That may sound pathetic, but the point isn’t that it’s perfect. The point is that it’s better at doing this than human beings. To see how well you fair at guessing your location, give Geoguessr a whirl. This little online game will drop you in a random location and let you stroll around and try to figure out where you are. It’s pretty tough, and PlaNet isn’t given the luxury of a stroll when trying to suss out these photos’ locations.

To showcase this tech’s ability, researchers pitted the program against a group of well-traveled human beings. PlaNet was able to out-guess human players in 56 percent of guessing rounds. Although that seems like a narrow victory, researchers pointed out that PlaNet had a “localization error rate” less than half that of its human competitors.

Google hasn’t revealed how they’re planning on using this tech or how its development will be pushed forward, but it does have some interesting implications.

Self-Driving Cars Could Mean the End of Parking Spaces, and That’s Great for Cities

As reported by Science Alert: We’re always being told how self-driving cars will reward us with almost unimaginable benefits when they finally hit the streets. Aside from the sheer convenience of being chauffeured everywhere by artificial intelligence (AI), there’s the safety factor of not having error-prone humans behind the wheel, not to mention how environmentally friendly driverless electric vehicles could be.

But there’s also another advantage to not driving our own vehicles around, and it’s one that could have a vast impact on the look, feel, and function of the cities that we live in: parking. Put simply, if we’re not driving our own vehicles to and from destinations any more, we won’t need to park idle vehicles on public streets or in car parks – something that could radically change the vibe of congested urban spaces."The biggest impact is going to be on parking. We aren’t going to need it, definitely not in the places we have it now," Alain L. Kornhauser, a researcher in autonomous vehicles at Princeton University, told Patrick Sisson at Curbed. "Having parking wedded or close to where people spend time, that’s going to be a thing of the past. If I go to a football game, my car doesn’t need to stay with me. If I’m at the office, it doesn’t need to be there. The current shopping center with the sea of parking around it, that’s dead."

While the extreme case of totally empty car parks and city streets with no stationary vehicles on them would probably require people to fully let go of personal car ownership – something many people won’t feel comfortable doing, in the near future at least – even moderate uptake of self-driving vehicles would constitute an improvement to clogged urban real estate jam-packed with stationary metal and rubber.

"An average vehicle in the US is parked for a staggering 95 percent of the time," Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Curbed. "Car sharing is already reducing the need for parking spaces: it has been estimated that every shared car removes between 10 and 30 privately owned cars from the street."

"Self-driving vehicles will reinforce this trend and promise to have a dramatic impact on urban life, because they will blur the distinction between private and public modes of transportation," he added. "‘Your’ car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family – or, for that matter, to anyone else in your neighborhood, social-media community, or city."

If these kinds of predictions turn out to be accurate, cleared road areas no longer used for parked cars could be put to all sorts of uses, substantially adding to the footprint of city spaces, and letting people reclaim public territory once lost to machines.

"In this environment, you don’t need to park your car, it’ll park by itself (possibly while recharging), so you can think about recapturing the space from the front of one building to the front of another building," said Gerard Tierney of US-based architecture and design firm, Perkins+Will. "It does become a pedestrian-dominated environment, where these vehicles would need to take a more subsidiary role. We would see a huge increase in the amount of space given up to the public realm and a huge increase in the width of sidewalks, bike lanes, and space for any other kind of alternate transportation."

In all likelihood, we won’t see these kinds of changes happening in our cities for many years to come, with self-driving vehicles only just beginning to be considered by road and legal authorities. But it’s exciting to think of the tangential benefits this much-hyped technology could have in all sorts of fringe areas. We can’t wait to see what else the future of driving turns up.

Facebook can Map More of Earth in a Week than We Have in History

As reported by New Scientist: We just learned that Facebook’s artificial-intelligence software can probably map more in a week than humanity has mapped over our entire history.

In a blog post, the social network announced that its AI system took two weeks to build a map that covers 4 per cent of our planet. That’s 14 per cent of Earth’s land surface, with 21.6 million square kilometres of photographs taken from space, digested and traced into a digital representation of the roads, buildings and settlements they show. And Facebook says it can do it better and faster, potentially mapping the entire Earth in less than a week.

This is the starkest example I’ve seen so far of the most important phenomenon in technology – computers doing human work really fast. It’s going to change the way we work forever, and will have massive implications for how we acquire knowledge, cooperate on large projects and even understand the world.

The stated goal of Facebook’s data-science team is to build maps to help the social network plan how to deliver internet to people who are currently offline. It’s a dubious starting point, but whatever you think about Facebook’s internet colonialism, the company’s drones won’t be able to beam Wi-Fi to the disconnected until they know where they are.

Fast learner

The model was able to map 20 different countries after being trained on just 8000 human-labelled satellite photos from a single nation. This is mind-boggling – and Facebook’s data-science team wasn’t even trying to go fast.

The company says it has now improved the process to the point where it could do the same mapping in a few hours. Assuming it had the photographs, it could map Earth in about six days. That’s something that humanity still hasn’t managed to do.

“We processed 14.6 billion images with our convolutional neural nets, typically running on thousands of servers simultaneously,” said Facebook in its blog post.

Using its AI, Facebook aped how humans make maps in the 21st century. One way they are now being made is a project called Open Street Map, which uses volunteer labour to trace satellite photographs by hand, picking out roads and houses. The resulting maps have been used all over the world, often for disaster response – with the system able to build maps of an entirely unmapped region in a few days. Facebook’s AI can do the same in seconds.

Mapping on the scale that its AI system has demonstrated would take decades for a human team of any size – and it is more data than people or their organisations are built to handle.

The power of AI

Facebook’s map-making AI is just one of probably thousands of narrow AIs – ones that are trained to focus on a single task – churning through human tasks around the planet right now, faster and on larger scales than we ever could. The CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is using deep learning to find patterns in the mass of its collision data; pharmaceutical companies are using it to find new drug ideas in data sets that no human could plumb.

Nvidia’s Alison Lowndes, who helps organisations build deep-learning systems, says she now works with everyone: governments, doctors, researchers, parents, retailers and even, mysteriously, meatpackers.

What’s exciting is that all neural networks can scale like Facebook’s mapping AI. Have a narrow AI that can spot the signs of cancer in a scan? Good: if you have the data, you can now search for cancer in every human on Earth in a few hours. An AI that knows how to spot a crash in the markets? Great: it can watch all 20 of the world’s major stock exchanges at the same time, as well as the share prices of individual companies.

The real power of narrow AI isn’t in what it can do, because its performance is almost never as good as that of a human would be. The maps that Facebook’s AI produces are nowhere near as good as those that come out of a company such as custom map developer Mapbox.

But the smart systems being built in labs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft are powerful because they run on computers. What the future of human work looks like will be determined by whether it is better to do an average-quality job 50 million times a second or a human-quality job once every few minutes.

Make no mistake, AI is here – and it’s real and powerful. But humans are still in total control. We’re just all about to get some extremely clever help.

SpaceX Doesn't Expect a Successful Drone Ship Recovery After Tomorrow's Planned Satellite Launch

As reported by The Verge: SpaceX is gearing up for its next Falcon 9 rocket launch this Wednesday, which will send a telecommunications satellite into orbit for the company SES. It will also attempt to land its rocket after launch, but doesn't expect a successful recovery.

This mission will also take a different path than originally intended. The launch was supposed to take place in September, but was then repeatedly delayed after one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded on June 28th. Those delays prompted SpaceX to change the flight path for the launch to help get the satellite into its intended orbit much faster, according to SES.

DELAYS PROMPTED SPACEX TO CHANGE THE FLIGHT PATH FOR THE LAUNCH

The SES-9 satellite that SpaceX is launching is meant to go into geostationary orbit — a circular path more than 22,000 miles above the equator. To get there, SpaceX will boost the satellite part of the way into space; then the satellite will propel itself the rest of the way to its intended orbit. Compared to the rocket, the satellite travels very slowly, and may take months to get to where it’s going, according to Space News. And with all the launch delays, SES is eager to get the satellite operational as soon as possible. So SpaceX has agreed to drop off SES-9 at a higher orbit than originally planned, cutting down the satellite’s solo trip.

Rocket recovery will be much more difficult since this satellite is very heavy and going to a very high orbit. The Falcon 9 will need to go a lot faster. That means the rocket will need extra fuel for the actual launch. But it also means there will be less room for the fuel needed to perform a landing afterward. "Given this mission’s unique GTO profile, a successful landing is not expected," SpaceX said in a statement.

The rocket will attempt to land on one of its drone ships at sea, a feat that requires less fuel than a ground landing. SpaceX is also using its new updated Falcon 9 for the launch — a vehicle that's supposed to make rocket recovery easier. But SpaceX has tried three times before to land the Falcon 9 at sea, and it failed to stick the landing each time. (It did get pretty close on its last attempt.) A floating drone ship on a choppy sea is a much more difficult landing target than a large expanse of unmoving land.SpaceX has been trying for more than a year to land its rockets after launching them into space. It's part of the company's plan to reuse its vehicles in order to bring down launch costs. So far, SpaceX has only been able to land the Falcon 9 on solid ground — as it did in December. But CEO Elon Musk has said that not all missions are suited for ground landings. Demonstrating a successful sea landing would prove that SpaceX is capable of mastering multiple types of rocket recovery, potentially allowing them to reuse even more rockets in the future.

The Falcon 9 is scheduled to take off at 6:46PM ET tomorrow from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Check back here tomorrow to watch the launch live.

Mars in 3 day? NASA Researchers are Working on a Photonic Propulsion System

As reported by Science Alert: Despite how far we've come in space exploration, one thing still holding us back from interstellar travel is our slow spacecraft. While we're able to propel particles to close to the speed of light in the lab, we're struggling to even accelerate spacecraft to beyond 3 percent of that. With our current technology, it's estimated it'll take humans around five months to reach Mars.

But NASA scientist Philip Lubin is working on a system where lasers propel spacecraft with giant sails to the Red Planet in as little as three days. Much likeBill Nye's much-hyped solar sail, this 'photonic propulsion' system relies on the momentum of photons - particles of light - to move forward. But instead of photons from the Sun's rays, Lubin's design would be given a push by giant Earth-based lasers.

It sounds pretty far-fetched, but in a video for NASA 360, Lubin explains that the technology is very much readily available, and that the system could easily be scaled up.

"There are recent advances that take this from science fiction to science reality,"Lubin explains. "There is no known reason why we can not do this."

But let's step back for a second and investigate how the system works. Right now, when we launch spacecraft, the thrust comes from burning a chemical, such as rocket fuel. Not only does this fuel source weigh down spacecraft, it's also an incredibly inefficient system when compared to electromagnetic acceleration, which is the use of light or other electromagnetic radiation to accelerate objects.

"Electromagnetic acceleration is only limited by the speed of light while chemical systems are limited to the energy of chemical processes," writes Lubin in a paper on the technology.

But while electromagnetic acceleration in the lab is relatively straightforward, it requires a lot of complicated and expensive equipment - such as the ring of superconducting magnets that make up the Large Hadron Collider - and hasn't been easy to scale up to the size required for space travel.

One candidate propulsion system, known as the 'impossible' EM Drive, has received a whole lot of attention for allegedly achieving electromagnetic acceleration, but NASA scientists still haven't been able to figure out how it works, or prove that it wasn't an experimental anomaly. 

Photonic propulsion, on the other hand, works in theory, regardless of the scale, making it a more viable candidate.

NASA 360

So how do photons work to propel something as big as a spacecraft? Despite not having any mass, particles of light have both energy and momentum, and when they reflect off an object, that momentum is transferred into a little push. With a large, reflective sail, it's possible to generate enough momentum to gradually accelerate a spacecraft.

While Lubin and his team haven't yet tried out their system, their calculations show that photonic propulsion could get a 100-kg robotic craft to Mars in just three days. 

A larger craft, like the kind humans might travel in, would take around a month to get there - one-fifth of the time it would take the Space Launch System (SLS), the world's most powerful rocket currently being developed to take us to Mars.

Lubin also explains that in the 10 minutes it will take to get the SLS into orbit, photonic propulsion could propel a spacecraft to an unheard-of 30 percent the speed of light - and it would also use a similar amount of chemical energy (50 to 100 gigawatts) to do so.

But the real benefit of photonic propulsion comes over longer distances, where the spacecraft has more time to speed up, and could eventually take us outside our Solar System and to neighboring stars.

To be clear, the system isn't designed to send humans across interstellar distances - first of all, robots are far better equipped for that mission, and secondly, we'd be far too heavy. Instead, Lubin proposes wafer-thin spacecraft that can get close to the speed of light.

But sending our own artificial intelligence to these distant solar systems - especially ones that potentially harbor habitable planets - would still be huge.

"The human factor of exploring the nearest stars and exoplanets would be a profound voyage for humanity, one whose non-scientific implications would be enormous," writes Lubin. "It is time to begin this inevitable journey beyond our home."

Lubin and his team last year received a proof-of-concept grant from NASA to show that photonic propulsion could be used for space travel, so we should start seeing some real-life results soon. Let's hope that the reality lives up to the hype, because we're pretty excited.

Find out more in the NASA 360 video: