Convoys of Automated Trucks Set to Point Way to Driverless Cars

Platooning: Two trucks follow a lead driver in a semiautonomous convoy from Stuttgart to Rotterdam.

As reported by Bloomberg: Michael Kropp typically spends his days behind the wheel of a big, freight-hauling truck, navigating the high-speed curves, offramps, and stop-and-go traffic typical of European highways. On a recent trip to Rotterdam, he was able to relax and take in the sights. Kropp was one of about 30 drivers participating in a test of a new automated driving technology called platooning, which links trucks via Wi-Fi, GPS, sensors, and cameras so they can travel semi-autonomously behind one another. The leading rig dictates speed and direction, while the rest automatically steer, accelerate, and brake in a closely spaced convoy. “It was a little eerie to hand over part of my role as driver,” says Kropp, a 55-year-old test driver for Daimler who piloted the second vehicle in the caravan. “But it was really comfortable, especially in heavy traffic or boring stretches of road.”

Although driverless cars grab headlines, it may take decades before truly autonomous vehicles rule the road. In the meantime, semiautomated convoys can help manufacturers hone the technology while cutting emissions and fuel consumption, says Anders Kellström, who managed Volvo’s test run to Rotterdam. “Platooning is one of the first steps toward automated driving,” he says. “The technology is mature.”

Drivers will still be needed—by law they’ll have to keep their hands on the wheel. But letting the rig do some of the work will result in less passing, quicker braking, and fuel savings of about 10 percent for the following trucks and a smaller gain for the lead vehicle, according to Daimler. And it will help reduce congestion. When a human is at the wheel, a truck in some countries must maintain a distance of about half a football field from the vehicle in front of it to stop safely in an emergency. With automation, that distance shrinks to about 50 feet. “Traffic on the whole will become calmer,” says Andreas Renschler, who heads the Scania and MAN truck brands for Volkswagen.

Manufacturers expect platooning to start taking off in 2020. Most trucks made in the past decade have sensors that alert drivers when they wander out of a lane or get too close to the vehicle ahead of them, relying on cameras and radar similar to those found in high-end Mercedes-Benz and BMW sedans. Adding automated steering and braking wouldn’t be complicated, vehicle makers say. Lori Tavasszy, a logistics professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says half the European fleet of big rigs—750,000 trucks—could be platoon-ready by 2025. “The technology for this is there,” says Erik Jonnaert, secretary general of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. “The bottleneck is regulation and how it can be deployed commercially so freight companies pick it up.”

In Brussels, lawmakers are considering Europewide regulations for things such as the minimum legal distance between vehicles—164 feet in Germany, but simply “a safe distance” in the Netherlands—and adopting standard rules about dissolving platoons at busy highway junctions. On April 14 transport ministers, the European Commission, and industry representatives agreed to cooperate on connected and automated driving, focusing on traffic rules and making testing easier. Close cooperation “is needed if we want a wide-scale introduction of platooning,” says Harrie Schippers, who heads DAF Trucks, the European unit of Paccar, a manufacturer based near Seattle.

In April’s dry run, six convoys of two or three trucks each—including Kropp’s—traveled to Rotterdam from Sweden, Germany, and Belgium. Three Scania trucks covered the longest distance, starting near Stockholm, crossing the 10-mile Oresund Bridge and tunnel to Denmark, heading south to Germany and then into the Netherlands. Each caravan in the test completed the journey as a unit, but manufacturers envision convoys forming on an ad hoc basis, with drivers following a leader for anywhere from a few exits to hundreds of miles as individual vehicles pull off to make deliveries or take alternate routes to their final destinations. Daimler says cars seeking to leave the highway can effectively nudge their way into a convoy: The truck behind recognizes the interloper and increases its distance accordingly, then closes the gap once the car exits. If a vehicle pulls out in front of the first truck, the lead driver hits the brakes and the followers begin to slow almost immediately.

Even though the initiative started in Europe, the manufacturers say platooning may be even more relevant in places with wide-open roads such as Australia or the western U.S., where distances traveled are greater. “The event in Rotterdam really broke the ice,” says Odile Arbeit de Chalendar, an official of the Conference of European Directors of Roads, who helped set up the April test. “For the first time, we put platoons on the road, in real traffic, across borders, and long distance.”

Tesla Autopilot Saves Driver From Collision

As reported by Mashable: Tesla's Autopilot feature is often mentioned in the context of the vehicle driving itself, but it's actually much more of an assistance for the driver — and in certain situations, it can save you from an imminent crash.

That's what happened to Model S driver Joshua Brown, whose car automatically moved out of the way of a truck that nearly collided with the Tesla. 

Brown posted a YouTube video of the incident and described it. 

"I was driving down the interstate and you can see the boom lift truck in question on the left side of the screen on a joining interstate road. Once the roads merged, the truck tried to get to the exit ramp on the right and never saw my Tesla. I actually wasn't watching that direction and Tessy (the name of my car) was on duty with autopilot engaged. I became aware of the danger when Tessy alerted me with the 'immediately take over' warning chime and the car swerving to the right to avoid the side collision," he wrote. 

The video did not escape the attention of Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who shared it on Twitter on Monday. 

Ever the prolific tweeter, Musk recently focused on SpaceX's successful drone ship landing. We'd be surprised, though, if he doesn't soon reveal the current number of Tesla Model 3 pre-orders, which is now likely very near (or even past) 400,000. 

GPS 2.0 Outline Calls for Open Interfaces

As reported by The Register: The group that created GPS wants it opened up so it's easier for people to compete on its individual components.

Californian nonprofit The Aerospace Corporation also wants to address the weaknesses that have emerged in GPS in the decades since it was first created – things like jamming and resiliency – without compromising accuracy.

Its so-called “Project Sextant” – outlined in detail in this document (PDF) obtained by Breaking Defense– also notes that while there are many alternative PNT (position, navigation and timing) proposals around, the vertically-integrated nature of GPS makes it hard to adopt them.

For example, there are lots of potential sources of position information that could supplement GPS, for example if the satellite signal is degraded: the world's full of terrain maps, cell towers, Wi-Fi hotspots, individual smartphones, or inertial guidance systems.

In the absence of APIs and interfaces that let this information be plugged into the GPS environment, what happens instead is that others (for example Google and Apple) take the GPS data and try to supplement it with (say) Wi-Fi base station locations.

The paper proposes instead that the individual components of GPS (image below) could be decomposed to allow competing systems to slot into each layer of GPS 2.0.

This would come from the creation of an “open source PNT”, which would “distribute PNT over many devices, technologies and phenomenology” (the latter referring to the phenomena that lies beneath timing, such as atomic clocks).

Another piece of the GPS 2.0 proposal is to give users something analogous to the signal strength indicator they get for mobile signals. That way, the end user can tell (for example) whether a system is operating at degraded accuracy, or even in the presence of a suspected jammer.

Project Sextant's authors say a new, independent body should be put in charge of evaluating and coordinating alternative PNTs for critical applications.

SpaceX is Planning to Reuse the Rocket it Just Landed on a Barge in the Ocean — Here’s Why That’s a Huge Deal

As reported by Business Insider:On April 8, SpaceX made history, landing its Falcon 9 rocket on a lonely barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

After three failed attempts, the landing marks SpaceX’s first successful attempt at guiding a 229-foot-tall rocket to a vertical landing on a floating target.

Rockets like the Falcon 9 play an integral role in launching satellites into space and sending supplies to the International Space Station. But the rockets we use today cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. And as of right now, these rockets have a very short shelf-life. After their brief moment in the sun, they're essentially sent to a great junkyard, never again to be seen.

Now, private spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing to design and build rockets that could be reused anywhere from 10 to 100 times.

Last November, Blue Origin became the first company to successfully land a reusable rocket. But this rocket was much less powerful than SpaceX' Falcon 9, traveling slower and less high.

While Blue Origin only plans to use suborbital rockets to carry tourists for very short periods of times, SpaceX uses its rockets to transport supplies to the International Space Station into low Earth orbit. The company celebrated its first safe return of a rocket to a site on land last December. 

One small step for a Falcon 9 and one giant leap for the future of reusable rockets

Tech Insider

Unlike the first Falcon 9 that SpaceX succesfully landed, the oceanfaring Falcon 9 is already being prepared for its second trip. CEO Elon Musk has announced that they expect to reuse the Falcon 9 from the barge landing within two months, making it the first orbital rocket to make a second venture into space.

The plan to reuse rockets is far from perfect. And the news that SpaceX is planning on reusing this rocket — the first one it's successfully landed at sea — comes as a bit of a surprise. 

In practice, withstanding the drastic temperature changes and the intense pressure and winds of the atmosphere would leave the rockets with a few scrapes and bruises. NASA’s Space Shuttle, which was also designed to be reusable, ended up being more trouble than it was worth, costing up to over a billion dollars per launch. The rocket would probably need to be refurbished before its next launch.

But the Falcon 9 is much less complex than the Space Shuttle. Even with the cost of refurbishment, reusable rockets like the Falcon 9 would slash the toll of spaceflight significantly. And they could cut the time between launches from a few months to a few weeks. CEO Elon Musk has announced that they expect to reuse the Falcon 9 from the barge landing within two months.

The landing of the Falcon 9 was an important milestone in rocket technology, signifying one small step for a Falcon 9 and one giant leap for the future of reusable rockets.

Waze Will Warn You When You're Speeding

As reported by Engadget: If you drive in unfamiliar areas often enough, you've probably run into situations where you couldn't spot a speed limit sign or were too busy finding your way to notice. However, Waze has some relief in sight: it just started rolling out an alert feature that makes it clear when you're breaking the speed limit on a given street. You can tell it whether or not to sound an alert, and even force the alert to show only when you run over the limit by a set percentage -- helpful for those fast-paced roads where obeying the limit actually makes you a hazard.

The catch? If you're reading this, you probably can't use the alerts... yet. Waze is launching the feature in just 16 countries, most of which are in mainland Europe and Latin America. The rest of the world is getting it "soon," though, so don't despair if you tend to keep a heavy foot on the accelerator.

Elon Musk Reportedly Visited Mobileye to Test Tech for Next Gen Tesla Autopilot

As reported by electrek: A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.

According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”

The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.

Mobileye is already a supplier in Tesla’s Autopilot program and last year the automaker committed to keep using the firm’s technologyin future iterations of its self-driving and assisted-driving programs.

The Globes described the tech in the demo Musk reportedly witnessed:

“Among the technologies are a system called DNN (digital neural network), which enables the vehicle to “learn” by gathering data on the move, and even to identify different kinds of road surface; free-space, which enables the automatic vehicle’s systems to identify areas without defined objects such as hard shoulders of roads, sidewalks, and so on, and avoid collisions and deviations from the road; a “holistic path prediction”, which enables a vehicle to select the correct path – on an open road, for example – even when there are no visual hints in the environment; and a sign identification system that can identify over 1,000 signs and road markings in use around the world.”

The current version of Tesla’s Autopilot is believed to already have self-learning capacity, similar to the “DNN” described above, built on top of Mobileye’s system. Tesla also recently hired a few machine learning experts to improve its system.

Tesla is expected to release more features through over-the-air updates utilizing the same hardware, but the system, which consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree sonar sensors, is limited and not expected to achieve fully autonomous driving.

Last year, Mobileye’s CEO Ziv Aviram confirmed that his company is working a new system which he described as a  “more sophisticated” and that could allow fully autonomous driving. He also confirmed that one OEM is already implementing it in a vehicle:

“Today we are already preparing with one of the OEM, a first vehicle based on 8 cameras, one radar and ultrasonic around the vehicle. So this is much wider implementation of the first introduction of semi-autonomous driving and the trifocal is going to be here as we planned, but additional 4 cameras around the vehicle and one camera looking back. The system will run on 5 EyeQ3 chips and all of them will be connected.”

Aviram didn’t disclose which automaker is testing the system, but he said during a recent conference that Tesla is willing to push the envelope “faster and more aggressively than any other OEM”. He also hinted that the new system could find its way into a commercial product within a year and we know that Tesla has been testing a similar hardware suite with more cameras.

Both Musk and Aviram agree that a fully autonomous system could be developed using only camera sensors and radar, without the need for LiDAR technology.

SpaceX Is Ferrying a Prototype Space Hotel Up to the ISS

As reported by Popular Mechanics: Bigelow's inflatable space habitat has been under development for a few years, but now it seems that the prototype for the someday space hotel is ready to fly. On April 8, SpaceX will launch a resupply mission to the International Space Station, taking the inflatable habitat aboard for a round of testing in orbit.

Bigelow has sent up a few uncrewed prototypes before, and has made no secret of its ambitions to get larger and larger space stations in orbit. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is a good step toward this. The 565 cubic-foot habitat will stay on the ISS for two years to further test if it has the right stuff to make viable for a longterm stay in space.

While inflatable habitats may seem like a strange idea, the idea is nearly as old as the space race, albeit never fully implemented. The first such idea, the TransHab, would have gone up early in the 21st century had it not been cancelled by Congress. However, Bigelow picked up that patent and developed it into their line of habitats. 

At just eight feet in diameter, inflatable modules like this are much easier to get into space than other components of the ISS that have to be launched one by one and constructed in orbit. If the BEAM module is successful, there could be a whole lot more in like it in orbit this coming decade.