such as local buses and Amyris s experiment with GOL s planes. But dozens of other products are close to market,
Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken down carsare far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for,
That s why Google is doing self driving cars, and balloons floating in the air with Internet connections.
#Google s quest to popularize self-driving cars How a self-driving car sees the world.
At about 8am every morning, Anthony Levandowski gets into the driver s seat of his white Lexus for his daily commute to work.
He has a chauffeur and it s a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
By the time he points his car down the street, it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world.
Levandowski s car and those around him are represented by little white squares. The graphics are reminiscent of Pong.
And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s
but three DARPA Grand Challenges, in 2004,2005, and 2007, jump-started the field. Grand Challenge alumni now populate self-driving laboratories worldwide.
but also most of the major car manufacturers: Audi, Volkswagen, Toyota, GM, Volvo, BMW, Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder.
It s the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski s car, and it s used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.
This year will mark another key milestone in self-driving technology. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is expected widely to announce standards
and mandates for car-borne beacons that will broadcast location information to other vehicles on the road.
The beacons will warn drivers when a collision seems imminent#hen the car ahead breaks hard,
for example, or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic. Automakers may then use this information to take the next step:
program automated responses. Levandoswki s commute is 45 miles long, and if Chauffeur were perfect,
he might use the time napping in the backseat. In reality, Levandowski has to stay awake and behind the wheel,
because when Chauffeur encounters a situation in which it s slightly unsure of itself, it asks him to retake control.
while Chauffeur drives the freeways. Still, it s a lot better than driving the whole way. Levandowski has his hands on the wheel for just 14 minutes of his hour-long commute:
#he told automotive engineers attending the 2012 SAE International conference.##oewhen I arrive at work, I m ready.
He s the business lead of Google s self-driving-car project, an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars#asily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof#n average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500,000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year, where Governor Jerry brown signed California s self-driving-car bill into law, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said#oeyou
can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.##In other words, a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a#oeclick here to download#button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway, it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit, a litigious society,
and a host of technical catch-22 s. Right now, Chauffeur is undergoing what s known in Silicon valley as a closed beta test.
In the language particular to Google, the researchers are#oedogfooding#the car#riving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
It s not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
The company also wants to prove#n a statistical actuarial sense#hat the auto-drive function is safe:
not perfect, not crash-proof, but safer than a competent human driver.##oewe have a saying here at Google,
#says Levandowski.##oein God we trust#ll others must bring data.##Currently, the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will, on average,
travel 36,000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention. A mistake doesn t mean a crash#t just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees.
For example, it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road.
It s scary, but it s not the same thing as an accident. The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second.
Glitches occur about every 300 miles. This spring Chris Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D c,
. that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about.##oewe ve set the bar incredibly low,
How many seconds of warning should Chauffeur provide before giving back the controls? The driver would need a bit of time to gather situational awareness,
#So far, Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google.
A self-driving car near Google s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago#he Stone age,
the car was not in self-driving mode at the time, so the accident wasn t Chauffeur s fault.
It was due to ordinary human error. Human drivers get into an accident of one sort or another an average of once every 500
the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
#Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009,
The attack came from Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit s Big Three automakers, in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
#oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.#
#The voice-over is monotone, lifeless, ominous.##oewe ve seen that movie, #the voice intones.#
A year after the Dodge commercial aired, Levandowski showed up in Detroit as the keynote speaker at the SAE s annual shindig.
Google wants to make#oeavailable to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use,
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
automakers should focus on making the user experience their own. No one talks about the actual terms of the deal#egotiations with individual car companies were held behind closed doors#ut it shouldn t surprise anyone
For the car companies, the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
But at $75, 000 to $85, 000 each, Google s lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined, including the car itself.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration. Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask
whether he could make a next-generation lidar#ruggedized, standardized automotive component. The company wanted a design that it could hide (perhaps behind the windshield) that would wholesale for no more than $1, 000,
It would be many more years before a self-driving car is brought to market, prompting lidar orders in the hundreds of thousands.
Self-driving cars should be achievable in five years. It takes more than five years to engineer a new car from the ground up.
If Detroit started designing self-driving cars now around components that actually exist, there s no way the technology could get to the showroom by 2017.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one, Levandowski says. So what s the plan?#
#oei don t think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body style to come out to build the technology,
#However, without reinventing Chauffeur and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it, Hall doesn t see the point.
It too is filled with catch-22 s. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker s analysis of self-driving-car technology.#
#Detroit doesn t want to start making self-driving cars without legal clarity. And legal clarity will not arrive until self-driving cars test the law.
Bryant Walker Smith, a civil engineer, lawyer, and Stanford Law school fellow, is the leading expert on how existing law would apply to self-driving cars.
His book-length legal analysis has more than 650 footnotes, but the title sums up the situation:#
In those days, many of the world s drivers still had reins and a whip instead of a wheel and pedals.
And under the Geneva convention, a basic legal requirement for drivers#hether of animals or of cars#s the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work, the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
the person in the driver s seat. The Google car doesn t work without one,
as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10,20, or maybe even 30 seconds notice.
In Smith s analysis, the person behind the wheel satisfies the legal requirement of control#ut this theory hasn t been tested in court.
And even if self-driving cars do not violate an international treaty, myriad state laws imply that the driver must be human.
New york s vehicle code, for example, directs that#oeno person shall operate a motor vehicle without having at least one hand or
have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person either in the driver s seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
Nevada was the first to adapt the principle into state law: Its DMV even designed special license plates for the vehicles (they have an infinity sign.
California, Florida, and, most recently, the District of columbia have followed suit.##oewhat s going to happen, no matter what the law says,
the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows. But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.#
There s one last hazard to engineer out of the modern car: human error, which according to NHTSA, is the#oecertain#cause of 81 percent of all car crashes.
Cars kill roughly 32,000 people a year in the U s, . and in 2010, Levandowski s life partner, Stefanie Olsen, was one of the 2. 2 million per year injured.
She was nine months pregnant at the time.##oemy son s name is Alex, and Alex almost was born never,
He credits the safety features engineered into the car#Prius#or saving Alex s life.
should prevent oblivious drivers from causing harm. Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts
when human hands leave the wheel. It s not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another,
so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning, in
which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system.
The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would at least in theory, enable all makes
and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver.
A 2012 IEEE study estimates that widespread adoption of autonomous-driving technology could increase highway capacity fivefold, simply by packing traffic closer together.
In Volvo s real-world platooning tests, drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent#ut that,
Wayne Gerdes, the father of#oehypermiling,#can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Volvo s goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020 and its newest cars already start driving themselves
if they sense imminent danger, either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash.
and automakers could eliminate roll cages, returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage.
The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025;
NHTSA defines five levels of autonomous-car tech, with level zero being nothing. Level one cars include standard safety features such as ABS brakes, electronic stability control,
and adaptive cruise control (ACC). In level two, level-one features like lane centering and ACC tie together
and the car begins to drive itself. Level three has the Google-style autopilot. And level four is the holy grail#he car that can drive you home
when you re drunk and then go fetch another six-pack. Already NHTSA has mandated level-one technologies in every new car.
Several automakers have systems that approach level two on the test track, and Mercedes appears to be the first to market.
Mercedes offers Distronic Plus with Steering Assist as an option on the 2014 S-class luxury sedans.
GM anticipates its Super Cruise system will debut later this decade. Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of it. But the real engineering challenge is making sure the driver stays alert.#
#oeall kinds of problems crop up in real-world testing, #says auto-drive consultant Brad Templeton, who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.#
#oepeople start doing all kinds of things they shouldn t#igging around in the backseat, for example.
It freaks everybody out.##Level-two systems need constant human vigilance and oversight to guard against situations like a deer running into the road;
the car must be able to hand back control with no warning. But the temptation for drivers is to simply zone out.
So engineers have begun to design countermeasures. Mercedes, for example, requires two hands on the steering wheel at all times.#
#oeeveryone s looking for ways to keep the driver engaged, #says Dan Flores, a spokesman for GM.#
#oeas the car gets more and more capable, we want the driver to maintain driving expertise.##Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.#
#oeobviously, 99 percent just isn t good enough; we need 99.99999, #says Templeton.##oeand what people don t seem to realize is that the difference between those two numbers is huge.
It s not a one percent difference#t s an orders of magnitude difference.##Google is betting that established car manufacturers,
working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap. It s chosen a different technical path,
It believes its level-three system will make cars safe enough for people to daydream
NHTSA s former deputy director, Ron Medford, has signed just on as Google s director of safety for the self-driving-car project.#
and you ll see cars sponsored by e-cigarettes.##Those efforts to#oere-glamorize#smoking,
Every day, millions of plastic water bottles, cups and containers are transported around the world by exhaust-spewing steamships, trains,
and trucks, only to be discarded, thrown into landfills, and onto our streets. And most of our current bottles don t degrade.
You shouldn t give up on flying cars or hoverboards just yet. As technology continues to march on,
While currently focusing on people and cars, they d like to add animals and weather conditions soon. 3. Wireless Electricity The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think:
it could bring about an end to batteries as we know them. 2. Ultra-High Speed Tube Trains Magnetic levitation,
or Maglev, trains have been in development for quite some time. In Japan, a recent successful test run means that plans are underway to connect the whole country by 2045 with trains capable of reaching over 480 kph (300 mph.
They accomplish this by removing the wheels#nd thereby, contact and friction#rom the equation.
Maglev trains levitate above the track, suspended by an electromagnetic field. And while the Japanese model is impressive,
self-made billionaire who has led the design of revolutionary cars and rockets and he needs no introduction.
In the late 1980s, there was a spontaneous move to Lincoln, Nebr. to work on filament-wound structures#mix shafts for the food industry and rocket-motor casings.
#oei just decided I wanted to ride motorcycles with my dad for a few years while he still could,
4 3#high and 16 2#long, not far off the dimensions of a midsize car.
occasional linear motors en route maintain gaps between cars and subtly adjust speed, and linear motors at the destination do the braking,
winning back much of the acceleration energy through an analog of a hybrid car s regenerative braking system.
The cars are bigger roughly six feet high by 4. 5-feet wide, and long enough for 28 passengers.
one that could carry three cars). The tubes would host the vacuum-pressure equivalent of an altitude of 150,000 feet.
Rather than using maglev technology, Hyperloop cars float on a cushion of air. As with ET3, Hyperloop s minimizing air resistance
Oster says ET3 is 50 times more efficient than the best electric cars or trains; a 57-megawatt solar array atop the Hyperloop route would produce more than twice the average power needed to run the system, Musk estimates.
the limit for conventional trains is 0. 1g, and a maglev study found passengers get sick at 0. 2gs#not good,
when breached, create onrushing air tantamount to an onrushing train. In the case of Hyperloop, the proposed gap between the capsule s air bearings and the steel wall is as little as 0. 5 millimeters.
Musk went back to work on his spacecraft and electric cars; Oster is forging ahead on ET3. In his Rand report of 41 years ago,
Laid end to end, that many boxes#ach one containing anything from T-shirts to TVS to truck parts#ould stretch for 50 miles.
more than 90 percent of the rest#verything from clothes to cars to computers#ow travels inside shipping containers.#
Even cars and trucks#nown in the trade as#oeroro,#or#oeroll-on roll off#cargo#re increasingly being loaded into containers rather than specialized ships.#
There s the trucker who moves the box to a waiting ship in Xinjiang, the feeder ship that moves it to Singapore to be loaded onto a bigger Europe-bound freighter, the crane operator in Hamburg, customs officials, train engineers, and more.
Yet the container s uniformity smooths each step of the way. Trucks and trains are fitted to haul the identical boxes;
cranes are designed to lift the same thing over and over. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days.
#oeso long as cargo was handled one item at a time, with long delays at the docks and complicated interchanges between trucks, trains, planes,
An ambitious truck-company owner with little experience when it came to shipping, Mclean#ho had made a fortune in trucking in the boom years after WWII#as looking for a way to move goods up and down the East Coast s traffic-choked highways faster and more cheaply.
His inspired idea: Put truck trailers on ships and bypass the roads altogether. Trucks could roll their trailers onto ships in North carolina;
the trailers would be unloaded in New york and hitched to trucks, then driven the rest of the way to their destinations.
He soon refined the concept even further, doing away with the trailer wheels and axles,
which couldn t be stacked, and settling for just the trailer body. On April 26, 1956, Mclean s first container ship#military-surplus WWII tanker#ailed from Newark to Houston loaded with containers custom-built for his company, Pan-Atlantic.
Around the same time, other companies began introducing their own primitive containers#s much a response to theft and breakage as to inefficiency.
The boxes came in all shapes and sizes from 4. 5-foot-wide steel-framed crates with plywood sides to steel boxes 15 feet long.
Some were designed to be lifted in and out of ship holds using cranes, others with forklifts.
dozens of players#rom shipping companies to railroads and truck chassis manufacturers#ad to agree on a standard.
Mile for mile, transporting a single TEU using a modern container ship produces just a third of the CO2 it would take to move that same container with a truck.
Auto plants in California, accustomed to#oejust in time#deliveries of parts from Japan, found themselves chartering planes to bring in parts they otherwise would have had shipped, at a cost of $600 per car.
When Hurricane Katrina closed ports in and around Louisiana that handle a significant share of America s food imports and exports
Instead of shouting longshoremen, beeping trucks, honking horns, and growling engines, there s just the faint sound of gentle waves against the hulls of the ships
and shift container after container onto curious, truncated trucks. Seemingly nothing but wheels and chassis, the trucks are missing a key element:
drivers. It turns out Altenwerder is one of the world s few automated port facilities.
Underneath the terminal s blacktop, a grid of 19,000 sensors help guide driverless robot trucks#GVS,
or#oeautomated Guided Vehicles##long routes selected for maximum efficiency. The trucks are programmed to move containers from the shipside cranes to another set of cranes,
which stack them according to when they re scheduled to be picked up by trucks or loaded onto trains.#
#oeit s all done by software, #says Karl Olaf Petters, a spokesman for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), the company that runs Altenwerder and most of Hamburg s other cargo terminals.
So the next time a truck towing a metal box edges alongside you on the freeway,
Unicycle basketball, because playing the game was way too easy the other way!..The Beatles#oerubber Soul#vinyl albums being packaged.
and will be car-free. Mankind is rethinking how we build the structures we live and work in which is changing the way our cities look and feel.
new clothing by Amsterdam couture designer Iris Van Herpenelevates beyond the surface of the body and extends into surrounding space,
these#oeperi-urban#farmers PDF typically bring their goods to market by taxi or motorcycle, striking deals in advance by text message.
you ll often see police roadblocks capriciously set up to extract bribes from drivers. Rather than support their own producers,
The Tribine takes it one step further as it combines the two historic harvest functions with a third the grain cart, according to Ben Dillon, the developer of the machine.
ranging from saving the diesel fuel required to chase the grain cart around the field to the labor aspect of eliminating the person needed to run the grain cart.
but Dillon has said that he expects it will cost less than the combined cost of a conventional combine and a grain cart.
Potty train. Transition from whole milk to low-fat milk. Speaking from experience, only one of these things was easy.
2 percent or skim milk is probably not a major driver when it comes to childhood weight problems.
but we also want to drive that dazzling car, go on that dream vacation, or get those gorgeous shoes.
you could be driving your property in your air-conditioned truck and you notice a spot that received rain in the recent past and that has a flush of highly nutritious plants that would
because I don t want to be associated with the train wreck #I mean a major train wreck#that could happen through using this technology.
If you can be sitting in your office in Washington D c . and you program cows to move on your ranch in Montana,
What our team did initially was cannibalize a kids remote control car to send a signal to the device worn by the animal.
while they are waiting in public spaces (at bus stations and buses), the library has managed to stretch its resources even
Bookbike##oeusing a specially-designed three-wheeled bicycle, library staff, Pima County Bike Ambassadors and volunteers ride throughout our community to visit people
and ride in the motorcycle sidecar with Hagrid. Attendance now nears 3, 000 people.##Library Nurse Program Mangamania!!#
and publishing center (Sacramento Public library, Sacramento, CA) Wine tasting fundraiser Wine & Words (Huntington Beach Public library, Huntington Beach, CA) Food trucks and international food
##Dodge City Public library Kentucky Campbell County Public library: Lego club Teens writing a manga book online Class on making medieval weapons from office supplies Sit down aerobics for seniors#oecrafters Who Care##Needlework lovers meet to knit
photographing dioramas, antique dollhouse furniture displays, historic doll history/display, miniature war machines, trains, etc.
Jackson George Regional Library System) Car seat Rental-partnership with Citizens Against Needless Death in Youth CANDY.
Super bowl 101#Partnership with school coaches to bring football education and sports appreciation and to local community just in time for the Super bowl.
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