Recently in Flying cars Category

Wired: Get Ready To Kickstart Project Hexapod:

"Meet Stompy. He’s a hexapod – a six-legged robot being built by a team of 15 students and three instructors at Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts. And if the rendering above didn’t tip you off, Stompy holds two passengers, can walk over a car and takes up nearly two lanes of road. Needless to say, Stompy is awesome."

Bloomberg: 'Jetman' Soars Over Rio: Video

"Yves 'Jetman' Rossy, a record-holding Swiss aerialist, flew his carbon-kevlar jetwing over Rio de Janiero on Thursday morning. During his 11-minute flight he reached a speed of 186 mph and an altitude of almost 4,000 feet."

Amanda Erickson @ Atlantic CitiesGreening Traffic Lights By Turning Them Off :

"But how's this for an idea to make traffic patterns greener (and, proponents say, safer): stop using traffic lights altogether. The so-called "naked streets" movement has gained traction across Europe, even in major cities like London."

Antiplanner: Semi-Driverless Cars Available Soon :

"Continental Automotive, a company that makes tires and other parts, has put together a semi-driverless car for Nevada. Under the rules in that state, which legalized driverless cars last year, a car must successfully go 10,000 miles without an accident before being marketed in the state. Continental’s car, which is based on a Volkswagen Passat, should pass that mark this week."

KurzweilAI: New York to Beijing in two hours without leaving the ground? :

"The Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system (U.S. Patent 5950543, assigned to ET3.com, Inc.) would take passengers from New York to Beijing in just two hours. Advocates of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) claim it is silent, cheaper than planes, trains, or cars and faster than jets.

How it would work: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. Passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows."

h/t Brendan Nee: Uber Blog » Uberdata: The Ride of Glory:

"One of the neat things we can do with our data is ask about rider patterns: are there weekend riders that only use Uber post-party? What about the workday commuters who use us every morning? It was while playing around with this idea of (blind!) rider segmentation that we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG)."

The Hive Mind (via the NY Times) predicts the future:Imagining 2076: Connect Your Brain to the Internet:

"2024: PRACTICAL ROBOT CARS “By 2018, freeway car pool lanes will be opened to robot-driven cars.” Larry Smarr, the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Readers moved this date 646 times.

2060: FLYING CARS “By 2040, more people will use personal air vehicles for their daily commute than cars.”
Sebastian Thrun, developer of Google’s self-driving car. Readers moved this date 1338 times."

IEEE Spectrum asks When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners? - : "To win over the public, the autopilots of tomorrow will have to start today by exploiting niches where civilian pilots can't or won't work—just as was the case in the military. With time, the systems will improve and eventually fan out to conquer additional segments of the broader market."

Adam Ozimek @ Modeled Behavior describes The rise of micro-markets: "I also sometimes comfort myself knowing I would be outbid in micro-markets. If I’m two minutes late for a train and I find myself thinking “surely the welfare gain to me of them waiting two minutes is bigger than the loss to all the other passengers for being two minutes late!”. But then I consider an auction where I had to buy off every riders’ extra two minutes, and I know I would not win that auction, which I find comforting in a way. When micro-markets like the one I imagine here are real and widespread people will have a less hard time deluding themselves like I initially do. The angry guy in line behind you in line who is mumbling about how late he is running will have less grounds to be angry if he can offer you to buy your place in line but it is not worth it to him."

Getting Around Minneapolis finds maps of the diffusion of street pavements1895 Paving Map , See also 1899 and 1910.

Speaking of autonomous vehicles, TS sends along these videos showing state of the art in robots:

Quadrocpter ball juggling

A Robot That Balances on a Ball

Big Dog

KurzweilAI: Electric multicopter flies manned for the first time:

"The e-volo electric multicopter has been taken on its first manned test flight by inventors Thomas Senkel, Stephan Wolf and Alexander Zosel in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The e-volo prototype measures approximately 5×5 meters and allows for a payload of about 80 kg. 16 propellers provide it with the necessary uplift, and it can be landed safely even with a malfunction of up to four eco-friendly electrical engines.

A position sensor ensures the correct position in space and permanently balances position changes with rotary speed adjustment, which allows the e-volo to stay still in the air. The electrical power is supplied by lithium batteries and enables a flight time of up to 20 minutes, depending on payload. They are controllable by an iPhone or other devices."

The Economist worries about too many Segways. Segway tours: Two wheels good, two legs bad : "The proliferation of Segways speeding around major tourist attractions is not without controversy. In June, Boston banned the vehicles from its pavements and parks, attracting the ire of burgeoning Segway tour companies. To prove his point, a city councillor got a Segway-mounted colleague to ram into him (“Let me tell you, it hurt”). The gizmos have long been prohibited in public places in New York City, Hong Kong and London. Wherever Segways are allowed, someone is probably making an effort to rein in their use on safety grounds"

John Gruber @ Daring Fireball does not like vision videos: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos:

"DeVilla isn’t the only one who accused me of Apple-biased hypocrisy regarding my stance on Microsoft’s “Future Visions” vs. Apple’s “Knowledge Navigator”. It is true that when I linked to Andy Baio’s post about “Knowledge Navigator” a few weeks ago, I didn’t add any commentary.

But the exact same criticism I have for Microsoft today applies to 1987 Apple. “Knowledge Navigator” encapsulates everything that was wrong with Apple in 1987. Their coolest products were imaginary futuristic bullshit. The mindset and priorities of Apple’s executive leadership in 1987 led the company to lose what was then an enormous usability and user experience lead over the rest of the industry, and eventually drove the company to the precipice of bankruptcy. That 1987 Apple was a broken company is so painfully obvious from today’s vantage point that I didn’t think it needed to be mentioned." [links and emphasis added]

This applies to planning as well, which is very much about "imaginary futuristic bullshit" which most people either (a) can't grasp, (b) dislike, (c) naively believe religiously, or (d) find underwhelming.

I think you need both a vision to shape direction and concrete incremental decisions to move you in that direction. Whether a vision helps or hinders incrementalism depends on the vision and who it is pitched to. (The classic argument of "Perfect being the enemy of the Good" often delays useful projects to the point nothing is accomplished). I am sure Steve Jobs had an internal vision, but he did not want to reveal it before it was ready. He was dealing with private goods.

Public works on the other hand cannot really be sprung on the public anymore. Hence visions, and plans.

A major downside is getting locked into a bad vision, a misguided line on the map, or a poor investment strategy because the vision or plan became an implicit contract. Unlike vision videos, which if wrong or distracting can easily be discarded, the plan somehow becomes permanent.

From David King:

So what is exciting for the future? Flying helicopters with your mind, of course! Clever researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed software that allows the user to fly around the Minnesota campus by thinking hard while wearing a special hat. Here is the paper, and video is at this io9.com link. Let's see more views of the future with mind control, autonomous cars and other technologies that fundamentally change the things we do (so we can do different things) instead of marginal improvements of what we already do. After all, we're still waiting for the telecommuting revolution to kick in.

I, Cringely The Final Frontier :

"For all but the last century man has functioned strictly in two dimensions, traveling the earth and seas but only marveling at the air. Invention of the airplane changed that a little, yet today less than a quarter of a percent of Americans know how to fly. What if we all could fly? A decade from now we just might.

Technology exists today for people to fly by themselves, quickly, quietly, with little or no pollution, from anywhere to anywhere in any weather, asleep or awake, because the real pilot is a computer. A decade from now, thanks to Mooreʼs Law, this technology will be the price of a car.

What would the world be like if you did not need a road or even a driveway? How would demographics change? Would our crumbling infrastructure still need repair?

Meet George Jetson. He has an electric aerial vehicle that takes him where he needs to go. But he does not fly it; the vehicle flies itself, knowing to the centimeter where it is anywhere on earth, lighting like a dandelion fluff with thirty thousand other such fluffs over a major city, each going its own way yet aware of all the others. This is where transportation is headed."

CNET: Google driver crashes autonomous car:

"Automotive blog Jalopnik got a tip this week that one of Google's autonomous cars, a Prius, got in a fender bender near the search giant's Mountain View campus. Google issued a statement noting that the car was being driven by its human pilot when the accident occurred."

(Via David King.)

Ground-effect robot could be key to future high-speed trains:

"Source: IEEE Spectrum — May 10, 2011

Japanese prototype of a train that levitates on cushions of air (credit: Tohoku University)

A robotic prototype of a free flying ground-effect vehicle has been developed by a Japanese research group at Tohoku University.

The ground-effect vehicle takes advantage of fast-moving air and uses stubby little wings to fly just above the ground, like a maglev train. The vehicle is controlled more like an airplane than a train; the operator has to deal with pitch, roll, and yaw as well as a throttle.

The researchers are looking to use this robot to generate a dynamic model of how vehicles like these operate, which they hope to apply to a manned experimental prototype train that can travel at 200 kilometers per hour in a U-shaped concrete channel that keeps it from careening out of control."

(Via Kurzweil.)

TED - Sebastian Thrun: Google's driverless car (on Hulu)

Why robot cars (autonomous vehicles), as demonstrated by Google this week (and randomly captured by Robert Scoble in the video above), matter.

1. Safety - cars would be safe if only there weren't drivers behind the wheel. Driverless cars seldom get distracted or tired, have really fast perception-reaction times, know exactly how hard to break, and can communicate (potentially) with vehicles around them with Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. But this improves not only vehicle safety, it improves the safety and environment for pedestrians and bicyclists.

2. Capacity - 'bots can follow other driverless cars at a significantly reduced distance, and can stay within much narrower lanes with greater accuracy. Capacity at bottlenecks should improve, both in throughput per lane and the number of lanes per unit roadwidth. These cars still need to go somewhere, so we need capacity on city streets as well as freeways, but we save space on parking (see below), and lane width everywhere. If we can reduce lane width, and have adequate capacity, we can reduce paved area and still see higher throughput. Most roadspace is not used most of the time now.

3. Vehicle diversity - Narrow and specialized cars are now more feasible with computers driving and increased overall safety. Especially if we move to cloud commuting (as below), we can have greater variety, and more precision in the fleet, with the right size car for the job.

4. Travel behavior - if the cost of traveling per trip declines (drivers need to exert less effort, and lose less effective time, since they can do something else), we would expect more trips (my taxi can take me wherever) and longer trips and more trips by robocar.

5. Land use - if acceptable trip distances increases, we would expect a greater spread of origins and destinations, (pejoratively, sprawl), just as commuter trains enable exurban living or living in a different city.

6. Parking - my car can drop me off at the front door, and go fairly remotely to park, so we don't need to devote valuable space to parking ramps (garages) (we still need space, it is just far away), searching for parking is also less critical. On street parking can be abolished.

7. Transportation disadvantaged - children, the physically challenged, and others who cannot or should not drive, are now enabled. Parents, friends, and siblings need not shuttle children around, the vehicle can do that by itself. The differences between transit and private vehicles begin to collapse. We can serious consider giving passes to driverless taxis for the poor, since costs should drop with lower labor costs, and if the point below holds, paratransit services become much less expensive as well.

8. Reduced auto ownership - cloud commuting becomes possible.People no longer need to own a car, they can instead subscribe to a car sharing service.

From KurzweilAI Skylifter airship could carry 150-ton buildings : ""

Australian company SkyLifter has designed a heavy-lifting, vertical ascent and descent aircraft that will operate as a practical flying crane. The aircraft is designed to take off where helicopters leave off, with vertical pickup and delivery capability of over-size, fragile or bulky items up to 150 tons, and potentially more. The long flight duration of 24 hours ensures a good distance range and adds flexibility to logistics. The aircraft can loiter over a ground location for long periods using minimal energy.

Why Schmidt should tone down tech utopia talk | Relevant Results - CNET News: "For example, take driving. 'Your car should drive itself,' Schmidt said. 'It's amazing to me that we let humans drive cars. It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.'"

(H/T David King)

Shweeb: ""

"This may be one of the silliest, most impractical ideas I've ever heard get funding. It can only have two stops, one at each end. It only goes as fast the slowest rider. And there's no way to return the cars without riders. And where do you put your stuff? How about this: build a bike path. All the advantages, probably 1/100th the cost and you get all the same political challenges!"

The solution to the mass transit perception problem:

Motoring enthusiast builds 367mph bus - Telegraph

Tom Vanderbilt has curated the Nimble Cities project at Slate.

There are some good ideas (nothing I haven't seen before, unfortunately, though lots that has yet to be implemented). Clearly the voting was gamed by at least some of the participants. ("Humanity's Highway to a Sustainable Society Submitted by George Schrader"). I am pleased to see the Land Value Tax ("eliminate the property tax") getting some love (if not some gamesmanship), as well as ultra-narrow cars. Lots of attention for bicycles (3 of top 10), especially given their current mode share in US cities.

Reallocating roadspace (modally, directionally, by vehicle type, dynamically, etc.) needs far more attention than it gets.

Via David Brin, Popular Science has an Archive Gallery: Cities of the Future which shows the future of cities through the eyes of the techno-optimists of Popular Science magazine. While none have come to pass exactly, in a sense, they are almost all here, examples below. This reinforces the William Gibson quote "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. " ...

Image 1: Exurbia
Image 2: Paris: La Defense
Image 3: Urban Highways
Image 4: Underground City Montreal
Image 5: Elevated Urban Highways (again)
Image 6: Brasilia
Image 7: International Space Station
Image 8: Biosphere (okay, we don't really have domed cities)
Image 9: Mars (okay, we don't really have a Mars colony yet)
Image 10: Masdar

Via Kurzweil, NPR writes: New Way To Guide A Car: With Your Eyes, Not Hands

German researchers have developed a new technology that lets drivers steer cars using only their eyes. ... "The car can do everything. It can drive autonomously or it can be guided by a driver's eyes," Rojas said. The compromise is a mode that has the car driving on its own, basing its decisions on input from scanners and cameras, and only requires the driver to give guidance at crossroads.

"The car stops at intersections and asks the driver for guidance on which road to take," the researchers say. A few seconds of attention with the driver looking in his desired direction get the car flowing again.

To demonstrate the car's autonomy, Rojas at one point jumped in front of the car -- which was at that moment driving at perhaps 10 miles per hour -- and the Dodge was immediately stopped by the cameras that had detected the obstacle.

One can see the issues with this without looking very far, but interesting technology nonetheless.

From New Scientist: Look, no hands: Cars that drive better than you

Ekmark says we are now entering an era in which vehicles will also gather real-time information about the weather and highway hazards, using this to improve fuel efficiency and make life less stressful for the driver and safer for all road users. "Our long-term goal is the collision-free traffic system," says Ekmark.

Ultimately, that means bypassing the fallible humans behind the wheel - by building cars that drive themselves. Alan Taub, vice-president for R&D at General Motors, expects to see semi-autonomous vehicles on the highway by 2015. They will need a driver to handle busy city streets or negotiate complex junctions, but once on the highway they will be able to steer, accelerate and avoid collisions unaided. A few years on, he predicts, drivers will be able to take their hands off the wheel completely: "I see the potential for launching fully autonomous vehicles by 2020."

This is a nice summary of the state of affairs in driverless cars. Deployment in 2020 seems likely, but the way it is with these things it seems it will be forever-off (it is 10 years in the future and always will be, like useful fusion, or peace in the Middle East) until it happens, and then it happens really quickly (if it is useful) (i.e. we will almost turn over the fleet within 10 years (perhaps 5) if this proves useful, with a few antiques (human-driven vehicles) allowed out on Sundays). I am convinced that autonomous vehicles will be perceived as quite useful by travelers, etc. (everyone except the anti-mobility crowd who will now have to explain why diesel powered driverless commuter trains enabling exurban development are good, but driverless electric powered cars enabling exurban development are bad).

Convoys, like the EU SARTRE plan, seem much more doubtful since they require far more coordination than autonomous driverless vehicles, for very little gain (slightly faster times on freeways for other people, slightly more freeway capacity) that does little for most trips (which are mostly non-freeway).

I was interviewed by the Jim Foti of the Strib last month for their beginning of the decade article The next big things

My bit below:

COMMUTING New light-rail lines, many more MnPass lanes and cars that make driving decisions for you are in the commuting forecast for the next decade, says David Levinson, a civil engineering professor at the University of Minnesota.

Congestion levels won't change much, he said. The Twin Cities area will have more residents, but the aging population will be working less, and increased telecommuting will mean that people won't go into work as often.

The Southwest and Central Corridor rail lines are scheduled to start mid-decade, and one or two Minneapolis streetcar lines could be in the mix. Levinson expects highway expansion to mainly take the form of new MnPass lanes, which are for carpools, buses, motorcycles and toll-paying solo drivers.

He sees plug-in hybrids as the dominant car, meaning drivers will be buying less gas, so a per-mile fee will be implemented to replace lost tax revenue. Cars will keep getting safer, he said, with features such as automatic emergency braking and cruise control that adapts to the speed of surrounding traffic.

JIM FOTI

Link from Bruce Sterling: ElectroSmog:
International Festival for Sustainable Immobility

From the site:

"ElectroSmog is a new festival that explores the concept 'Sustainable Immobility' in theory and practice. Sustainable Immobility is first of all a critique of the growing global crisis of mobility. Current forms of hyper-mobility of people and products in travel and transport are ecologically increasingly unsustainable. The will to slow down, however, seems thoroughly absent. The economic crisis may have temporarily slowed matters down, long term projections still point towards exponential growth of worldwide mobility and exploding energy needs. Alternatives for the current state of hyper-mobility need to be designed urgently."

This group dislikes hyper-mobility, arguing it is unsustainable. Yet, isn't life unsustainable? Doesn't astro-physics tell us the sun will immolate the earth?

If this group's radicalism is really to take root, at the extreme, we should all be trees - giving us sustainable (for everyone else) hyper-immobility.

Anyway, I look forward to local food every winter in Minnesota. Some bark or snow anyone?

From CNET Nissan's robot cars mimic fish to avoid crashing

Okay, they are still quite small, but a nice proof of concept.

From Engadget (h/t Kurzweil): Honda's U3-X Personal Mobility Device is the Segway of unicycles

From BBC 'E-Rockit' hits German fast lane. An electric motorbike you pedal up to 50 mph (80 km/h). The end of the video shows them using this on a German freeway. Not wise I suspect.

From Memestreams Cloudy With a Chance of Satellite

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

...POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND...OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS...RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME RESIDENTS...AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY...FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

(h/t to CV)

From last week:

For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

It happened Tuesday.

On Ars Technica: The Future of Driving, Part I: Robots and Grand Challenges

Part 2: Life After Driving

Once upon a time, people kept their life savings on their person or at their homes, stored in physical material like gold and jewelry and property. Then money was invented as a medium of exchange, and people stored a surrogate of their wealth. Then banking was invented, and people centralized their holdings in a bank, and were paid interest for the privilege. Why were they paid? Because the banks could reuse their money by lending it out, at an even greater rate of interest. Money is fungible. I do not lose anything by storing it at the bank (and allowing them to lend it) except the privacy of keeping secret how much money I have, and risk that the bank will be unable to pay me back. The first is resolved through regulations, and the use of multiple banks, the latter by insurance. In any case, it is much safer than storing the money in a mattress at home.

Once upon a time, people kept their life's information on their person or on computers at their home or work, stored in physical material like floppy disk drives, hard disk drives, solid state drives, CDs, DVDs, and USB chips. Then the internet was invented, and centralized servers were made inexpensively and redundantly, and people could store their information in the "cloud". In many cases the cloud is free, or charges only a small fee. In exchange, the recipients agree to allow their personal information to be used to generate customized advertising targeted at them personally. But imagine their were a way for the cloud to earn interest on information much the same way banks earn interest on money, by synthesizing it and "lending it out". Since information is not rivalrous, this may prove viable with sufficient artificial intelligence aimed at developing ontologies and computer intelligence. The risk is the loss of privacy. Alternatively the customer pays the cloud for storage and computation, retaining privacy, in exchange being relieved of duties of backup, which when neglected lead to all too much data loss.

Once upon a time people kept their personal transportation near their person, parking cars and bikes at their homes, workplaces, or other destinations. This was the only way to guarantee point to point transportation in a timely way where densities were low, incomes high, and taxis scarce. Then "cloud commuting" was invented, cars from a giant pool operated by organizations in the cloud would dispatch a vehicle that drives to the customer on demand and in short order, and then deliver the customer to the destination. The vehicle would have the customers preferences pre-loaded (seat position, computing ability, audio environment). The customer benefits of course by not tying up capital in vehicles, nor having to worry about maintaining or fueling vehicles. The fleet is used more efficiently, each vehicle would operate 2 times or 3 times or more miles per year than current vehicles, so the fleet would turnover faster and be more modern. Fewer vehicles overall would be needed. It is likely customers would need to pay for this service (either as a subscription or a per-use basis), there is no obvious analogue to financial interest payments (and while advertising might offset some costs, surely it would not cover them). However stores might subsidize transportation, as might employers, as benefits for the customers or staff.

The tension between centralization and decentralization has been continuous through the history of technology, each has its advantages and disadvantages (and strangely, each also has religious zealots convinced there is one true way). This is ultimately a question of costs and benefits, and who bears the costs and benefits.

I am skeptical that cloud commuting can be made to work quite yet, there are still a few more technologies to perfect. Having tested Zipcar, their system lacks in several ways, much the ways the first banks failed frequently. Zipcars are still not local enough, they charge too much for lateness, the technology is still imperfect. But imagine we have cars that drive themselves. (and to PRT-advocates, these will be cars driving on streets, there are not enough resources to build a new infrastructure network for specialized vehicles). Smart cars solve the localness problem, since the cars come to you. In a way it also solves the lateness problem, because there is no need to reserve a specific car for a specific window, any unused fleet car can be dispatched. There would need to load balancing features, and maybe coordinated carpooling at peak times. (It also saves on parking, especially parking in high value areas).

Related links:

* Technological change, part 2: Autonomous vehicles

* The Future of Cars