Monday, August 29, 2016
NFL Reportedly Using Ball Tracking Chip Sensors in 2016 Pre-Season Games
SpaceX's Rival ULA Ramps-Up Plans With 'Space Trucks'
Tony Bruno, chief executive officer of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership between aerospace engineering companies Lockheed Martin and Boeing, discussed the company’s plans to create a cargo carrier that he nicknamed the “space truck” with news outlet Quartz this week.
Does this signal a shift towards greater specialization in the space engineering market?
SpaceX is not the only company sending shipments of food, experiments, and other supplies to the international space station, but it is the best known – and offers a significantly lower cost. The company’s successful quest to create a reusable rocket has prompted rivals to aggressively seek ways to lower their costs.
The United Launch Alliance is one of those rivals. The company’s launch contract with NASA is due to expire in 2019, meaning that ULA needs to innovate to remain relevant.
Mr. Bruno’s vision for ULA’s future is expansive, and includes plans for space infrastructure that can support lunar colonization by 2020. To that end, the company’s current project aims to make it cheaper and easier to get into space.
Like SpaceX, ULA hopes to achieve its aims by developing a reusable rocket. According to Bruno, unlike rival SpaceX, ULA’s rocket will have a reusable second stage (the portion of the rocket that finishes the journey) as well as a reusable first stage (the stage that propels the rocket from Earth into orbit).
And unlike SpaceX, which has developed the technology to bring reusable rockets back to Earth, ULA plans to leave the reusable second stages in space.
“We realized that you don’t have to bring it back in order for it to be reusable,” Bruno told Quartz “That’s the big paradigm change in the way that you look at the problem – if you have an upper stage that stays on orbit and is reusable.”
ULA’s second stage design looks like a fuel tank, and can be refueled and reloaded while still in orbit, where it would wait for cargo loads sent up from Earth. Due to the relief rockets (ULA’s “space trucks”) waiting in orbit, a cargo load could be incredibly heavy and still be able to make it to its final destination, whether that be a lunar colony or the ISS.
Once you have these second stage fuel capsules in space, Bruno says, “It starts becoming practical to construct large-scale infrastructure and support economic activities in space, a transportation system between here and the moon, practical microgravity manufacturing, commercial habitats, prospecting in the asteroids.”
As of last year, ULA also had plans to develop a reusable first stage Vulcan rocket that could be recovered in mid-air. As with its most recently announced second-stage plan, the company placed cost-effectiveness at a premium, with senior staff engineer Mohamed Ragab telling SpaceNews:
“If you work the math, you see that you’re carrying a lot of fuel to be able to bring the booster back and it takes much longer to realize any savings in terms of the number of missions that you have to fly – and they need to be all successful.”
While there are several other companies with commercial space ambitions and Silicon Valley interest, they are lesser known entities such as Moon Express and Planetary Resources.
Much of today’s space innovation is occurring at the commercial level, making it ever more valuable for companies such as ULA and SpaceX to specialize.
On Thursday, ULA announced that it has been chosen by NASA to launch the next Mars rover exploration project in 2020. Even the ISS could soon be commercially run.
"Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability,” said NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development Bill Hill last Sunday, “so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, we figure that will be in the mid-20s."
Tesla Autopilot Crash Exposes Industry Divide
Google and most self-driving car startups take an opposite view, aiming to deliver vehicles that are fully autonomous from the start, requiring passengers to do little more than tap in their destinations and relax.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) classifies automation systems from Level 1, sporting basic lane-keeping or anti-lock brakes, through to Level 4, where humans need never touch the wheel (if there is one).
A Level 2 system like Tesla’s Autopilot can take over in certain circumstances, such as highways, but requires human oversight to cope with situations that the car cannot handle—such as detecting pedestrians, cyclists, or, tragically, a white tractor-trailer crossing its path in bright sunlight.
Proponents of Level 4 technologies say that such an incremental approach to automation can, counter-intuitively, be more difficult than leap-frogging straight to a driverless vehicle. “From a software perspective, Level 2 technology may be simpler to develop than Level 4 technology,” says Karl Iagnemma, CEO of autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy. “But when you include the driver, understanding, modeling and predicting behavior of that entire system is in fact pretty hard.”
Anthony Levandowski, who built Google’s first self-driving car and now runsautonomous trucking startup Otto, goes even further. “I would expect that there would be plenty of crashes in a system that requires you to pay attention while you’re driving,” he says. “It’s a very advanced cruise control system. And if people use it, some will abuse it.”
Even if drivers are following Tesla’s rules—keeping their hands on the wheel and trying to pay attention to the road—many studies have shown that human motorists with little to do are easily distracted.
At this point, of course, Tesla is extremely unlikely to remotely deactivate the Autopilot system until it reaches Level 4. So what are its options? Experts think that in one respect, at least, Tesla is on the right track. “Putting the self-driving hardware on all your vehicles then activating it with a software update later seems like a great idea,” says Levandowski. “It’s shocking that nobody else did that.”
“There are very few examples of software of this scale and complexity that are shipped in perfect form and require no updating,” agrees Iagnemma. “Developers will certainly need to push out updates, for either improved performance or increased safety or both.”
One sensor noticeably absent from Tesla’s Model S and X is lidar—the laser ranging system favored by the majority of autonomous car makers. It can build up a 360-degree image of a vehicle’s surroundings in the blink of an eye. “The introduction of an additional sensor would help improve system performance and robustness,” says Iagnemma. “What Tesla was thinking, I believe, is that maybe a lidar sensor wasn’t necessary because you have the human operator in the loop, acting as a fail-safe input.”
Mark Halverson is CEO of transportation automation company Precision Autonomy and a member of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems. He thinks that roads with a mix of connected human drivers and self-driving cars would benefit from a cloud-based traffic management system like the one NASA is developing for drones.
“In this accident, the truck driver and the Tesla driver both knew where they were going,” he says. “They had likely plugged their destinations into GPS systems. If they had been able to share that, it would not have been that difficult to calculate that they would have been at the same position at the same time.”
Halverson thinks that a crowdsourced system would also avoid the complexities and bureaucratic wrangling that have dogged the nearly decade-long effort to roll out vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technologies. “A crowdsourcing model, similar to the Waze app, could be very attractive because you can start to introduce information from other sensors about road conditions, pot holes, and the weather,” he says.
Toyota, another car company that favors rolling out safety technologies before they reach Level 4, has been struggling with the same issues as Tesla. Last year, the world’s largest carmaker announced the formation of a US $1-billion AI research effort, the Toyota Research Institute, to develop new technologies around the theme of transportation. The vision of its CEO, Gill Pratt, is of “guardian angel” systems that allow humans to drive but leap in at the last second if an accident seems likely. His aspiration is for vehicles to cause fatal accidents at most once every trillion miles.
Such technologies might not activate in the entire lifetime of a typical driver, requiring all the expensive hardware and software of a driverless Level 4 vehicle but offering none of its conveniences. “It’s important to articulate these challenges, even if they’re really hard,” says John Leonard, the MIT engineering professor in charge of automated driving at TRI. “A trillion miles is a lot of miles. If I thought it would be easy, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
Elon Musk will surely be hoping that the next Autopilot accident, when it inevitably comes, will be nearly as many miles off.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
NVIDIA's Made-For-Autonomous-Cars CPU is Freaking Powerful
However, Parker is significantly less beefy than NVIDIA's other deep learning initiative, the DGX-1 for Elon Musk's OpenAI, which can hit 170 teraflops of performance. This platform still sounds more than capable of running high-end digital dashboards and keeping your future autonomous car shiny side up without a problem, regardless.
On that front, NVIDIA says that in addition to the previously-announced partnership with Volvo (which puts Drive PX2 into the XC90), there are currently "80 carmakers, tier 1 suppliers and university research centers" using Drive PX2 at the moment.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver’s seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.
The Volvo deal isn’t exclusive; Uber plans to partner with other automakers as it races to recruit more engineers. In July the company reached an agreement to buy Otto, a 91-employee driverless truck startup that was founded earlier this year and includes engineers from a number of high-profile tech companies attempting to bring driverless cars to market, including Google, Apple, and Tesla. Uber declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, but a person familiar with the deal says that if targets are met, it would be worth 1 percent of Uber’s most recent valuation. That would imply a price of about $680 million. Otto’s current employees will also collectively receive 20 percent of any profits Uber earns from building an autonomous trucking business.
Otto has developed a kit that allows big-rig trucks to steer themselves on highways, in theory freeing up the driver to nap in the back of the cabin. The system is being tested on highways around San Francisco. Aspects of the technology will be incorporated into Uber’s robot livery cabs and will be used to start an Uber-like service for long-haul trucking in the U.S., building on the intracity delivery services, like Uber Eats, that the company already offers.
The Otto deal is a coup for Uber in its simmering battle with Google, which has been plotting its own ride-sharing service using self-driving cars. Otto’s founders were key members of Google’s operation who decamped in January, because, according to Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski, “We were really excited about building something that could be launched early.”Levandowski, one of the original engineers on the self-driving team at Google, started Otto with Lior Ron, who served as the head of product for Google Maps for five years; Claire Delaunay, a Google robotics lead; and Don Burnette, another veteran Google engineer. Google suffered another departure earlier this month when Urmson announced that he, too, was leaving.
“The minute it was clear to us that our friends in Mountain View were going to be getting in the ride-sharing space, we needed to make sure there is an alternative [self-driving car],” says Kalanick. “Because if there is not, we’re not going to have any business.” Developing an autonomous vehicle, he adds, “is basically existential for us.” (Google also invests in Uber through Alphabet’s venture capital division, GV.)
Unlike Google and Tesla, Uber has no intention of manufacturing its own cars, Kalanick says. Instead, the company will strike deals with auto manufacturers, starting with Volvo Cars, and will develop kits for other models. The Otto deal will help; the company makes its own laser detection, or lidar, system, used in many self-driving cars. Kalanick believes that Uber can use the data collected from its app, where human drivers and riders are logging roughly 100 million miles per day, to quickly improve its self-driving mapping and navigation systems. “Nobody has set up software that can reliably drive a car safely without a human,” Kalanick says. “We are focusing on that.”
In Pittsburgh, customers will request cars the normal way, via Uber’s app, and will be paired with a driverless car at random. Trips will be free for the time being, rather than the standard local rate of $1.05 per mile. In the long run, Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”
For now, Uber’s test cars travel with safety drivers, as common sense and the law dictate. These professionally trained engineers sit with their fingertips on the wheel, ready to take control if the car encounters an unexpected obstacle. A co-pilot, in the front passenger seat, takes notes on a laptop, and everything that happens is recorded by cameras inside and outside the car so that any glitches can be ironed out. Each car is also equipped with a tablet computer in the back seat, designed to tell riders that they’re in an autonomous car and to explain what’s happening. “The goal is to wean us off of having drivers in the car, so we don’t want the public talking to our safety drivers,” Krikorian says.
On a recent weekday test drive, the safety drivers were still an essential part of the experience, as Uber’s autonomous car briefly turned un-autonomous, while crossing the Allegheny River. A chime sounded, a signal to the driver to take the wheel. A second ding a few seconds later indicated that the car was back under computer control. “Bridges are really hard,” Krikorian says. “And there are like 500 bridges in Pittsburgh.”
Bridges are hard in part because of the way that Uber’s system works. Over the past year and a half, the company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. As the car moves, it collects data, and then using a large, liquid-cooled computer in the trunk, it compares what it sees with the preexisting maps to identify (and avoid) pedestrians, cyclists, stray dogs, and anything else. Bridges, unlike normal streets, offer few environmental cues—there are no buildings, for instance—making it hard for the car to figure out exactly where it is. Uber cars have Global Positioning System sensors, but those are only accurate within about 10 feet; Uber’s systems strive for accuracy down to the inch.
When the Otto acquisition closes, likely this month, Otto co-founder Levandowski will assume leadership of Uber’s driverless car operation, while continuing to oversee his company's robotic trucking business. The plan is to open two additional Uber R&D centers, one in the Otto office, a cavernous garage in San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, a second in Palo Alto. “I feel like we’re brothers from another mother,” Kalanick says of Levandowski.
The two men first met at the TED conference in 2012, when Levandowski was showing off an early version of Google’s self-driving car. Kalanick offered to buy 20 of the prototypes on the spot—“It seemed like the obvious next step,” he says with a laugh—before Levandowski broke the bad news to him. The cars were running on a loop in a closed course with no pedestrians; they wouldn't be safe outside the TED parking lot. “It was like a roller coaster with no track,” Levandowski explains. “If you were to step in front of the vehicle, it would have just run you over.”
Kalanick began courting Levandowski this spring, broaching the possibility of an acquisition during a series of 10-mile night walks from the Soma neighborhood where Uber is also headquartered to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two men would leave their offices separately—to avoid being seen by employees, the press, or competitors. They’d grab takeout food, then rendezvous near the city’s Ferry Building. Levandowski says he saw a union as a way to bring the company’s trucks to market faster.
For his part, Kalanick sees it as a way to further corner the market for autonomous driving engineers. “If Uber wants to catch up to Google and be the leader in autonomy, we have to have the best minds,” he says, and then clarifies: “We have to have all the great minds.”
Astronauts Are About to Install a Parking Space for SpaceX and Boeing
Installing these adapters is a necessary step in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which seeks to spur development of commercial crew spacecraft. Since the space shuttle was discontinued in 2011, NASA has had to pay Russia million to take its astronauts to the ISS. The Commercial Crew Program will give NASA cheaper options in crewed spaceflight.
The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 8:05 a.m. on Friday, and live coverage will start at 6:30. This will be Williams' fourth spacewalk, and Rubins' first. Here is a video describing exactly what the spacewalk will entail:
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Beartooth Turns Your Smartphone Into An Industrial Radio
A Radio On Your Radio
Essentially, Beartooth is a radio you attach to your smartphone, and which interacts with your smartphone in various ways using publicly available radio bandwidth. It’s not dissimilar to the GoTenna in that respect, but Beartooth adds a few elements, especially in the physical realm, which make it much more interesting to the outdoorsy and those who just like fiddling with microwave radiation.The Citizen’s Band, Improved
Essentially, it’s a CB radio with all the features you want from a smartphone. For example, you can have one-to-one calls, or group in more people, although they will need a Beartooth to participate. If you’ve got a friend you want to send a text message to, that’s as easy as using your phone. There’s even a confirmation of message receipt built into the phone, and you can also send out an SOS signal if you need it, making this crucial for campers and outdoorsy types. Also useful is the fact that another battery is built into the case, doubling the life of your phone.
The Great Outdoors
The simple fact of the matter is that if you’re going outdoors and getting out of contact range, you should probably have a radio, signal beacon, or other tool available to reach help if you get stuck. So, just by that standard, the Beartooth is a useful tool to have in your camping gear. And, also, it means you can send text messages to your friends when you’re waiting for the food to cook, so that’s useful time spent right there.
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