Ground travel

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Synopsis: Transport & travel: Ground travel:

from gauging distances between cars in adaptive cruise control to mapping forest canopies and detecting the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere.

oemeat sugar) and the 1894 diary of a woman traveling east from Oregon by wagon.

expensive jewelry and fancy cars. For some, it still does. But for many consumers, the new luxury is something seriously different.

Bargain in the bag Its no accident that Coach, whose handbags used to start at about $250 and

Beyond that, Coach has added more bags at lower price points and made them more function for women carrying devices from iphones to ipads,

president of Coachs North american retail division. oethe last thing I want you to get from this is that Coach got cheaper.

Coach sales are up 8%for first nine months of its fiscal 2010 Value, of course, is in the eye of the purchaser.

if its been added to your basket or to someone elses cart. In two years, Gilt Groupe has amassed more than two million members,

Unilever, GE, Blackmont Capital, Lucent Technologies, First Data, Boeing, Ford motor Company, Qwest, Allied Signal, Hunter Douglas, Direct TV, Capital One

Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,

Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,

he is ferried around town by a car and driver; the snowy Swiss hamlet, which is too small and awkward for limos,

when he d take the crosstown bus each day to the United nations International School. That evening, Elerian was catching a flight to London.

and it won t be streetcars, monorails, Segway s, or electric vehicles. It will be self-driving cars,

and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation planning.

Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 150 000 driverless miles on highways.

In this competition, 4 driverless electric vans successfully drove from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on October 28, 2010.

Many car companies including General motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and Volvo have begun early testing of driverless car systems.

General motors has stated that they will have a driverless model ready for final testing by 2015, going on sale officially in 2018.

Even though car companies are making plans for the transition planning departments are not. Most local and regional transportation departments are working with models that assume 20 years from now transportation systems will be basically the same, with only slight variations around the edges.

Along with fewer accidents will come the eventual elimination of traffic cops, traffic courts, stoplights, and parking lots. Look for rapid advancement in this area

Full-time aerial drone pilots needed to help manager our growing fleet of surveillance, delivery, and communication drones.

In October 2011, Ford demonstrated three SYNC apps offering in-car health monitoring for drivers to track chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever.

Elevated Tube Transport Engineers The next big infrastructure project on planet earth will be a human and cargo transport system designed around a network of vacuum tubes with maglev tracks.

Operating at less than 2%of the cost of today s car, truck, jet, ship, and train systems, this emerging tube transport system will be a massive undertaking that demands talented new-age thinkers for decades to come.

More details here. The Dismantlers Over the coming years will see a number of industries dismantled requiring a skilled workforce of talented people who can perform this task in the least disruptive way.

Robotic Earthworm Drivers The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills

which transfers the string s vibration to its own sound cell. 3d nylon printed bicycle designed by Andy Hawkins

this bike is constructed from a manufacturing process known as additive layer manufacturing (ALM), which is used also in the manufacturing of satellites.

The world s first fully 3d printed car called, The Urbee The Urbee is a hybrid vehicle that has its entire body

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries#ithout the need to invest in new infrastructure and train

In todays cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks.

The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.

The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will only accelerate the software shift#lectric cars are controlled completely computer.

And the creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car companies.

Todays leading real-world retailer, Wal-mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.

which is thought best of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached.

And in Japan, people have been swiping phones at convenience stores and bus stations for several years. Other global markets may have a single dominant mobile carrier

So what if you could sample that cashmere coat from your cell phone before adding it to your shopping cart?

Texture data fed into a machine s piezoelectric drivers can re-create vibrations and temperature on a touch screen can simulate that feel,

Some of this capability is available now in rudimentary form in computer games where the controller shakes to indicate an on-screen car collision. 2. Seeing the forest,

if a cell phone caller is in a car with an engine running at 2, 000 rpm,

if the driver is stuck in traffic or moving smoothly,#Meyerson said. By embedding sensors in flood prone areas,

but is better for them. 5. A nose that knows Breath analysis can do drunk more than keep drivers off the road.

riding bikes, from running water etc. There is early traction there. Los angeles is testing advanced flywheel technology as a way to reap wasted energy from braking trains

and re-apply it when trains accelerate. And Pavegen is building sidewalk tiles designed to capture energy from walking pedestrians.

They sold one of their cars, gave some possessions to relatives and sold others in a yard sale, rented out their six-bedroom house

as varied as developers and U. P. S. drivers. That number rose 39 percent in less than a year.

A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution.

#said Frans van Houten, Philips s chief executive. The window of opportunity to bring manufacturing back is before that happens.#

The next generation of robots for manufacturing will be more flexible and easier to train. Witness the factory of Tesla Motors,

which recently began manufacturing the Tesla S, a luxury sedan, in Fremont, Calif.,on the edge of Silicon valley.

#It still houses a dingy, unused Toyota corolla assembly line on which an army of workers once turned out half a million cars annually.

Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day#roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year#will be produced at the factory.

Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth factory outside Beijing that can produce a million vehicles a year using more robots

They watch over a four-story cage with different levels holding 168 rover#robots the size of go-carts.

Each rover is connected wirelessly to a central computer and on command will race along an aisle until it reaches its destination#a case of food to retrieve

Then a forklift operator summoned by the computer moves the cube to a truck for shipment.

assembly work that requires tactile feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside airplanes, boats or cars;

and unload its trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds,

repairmen and delivery drivers#that offer little of Silicon valley s riches or glamour. Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas,

And we all got two tacos from a taco truck. That was our surprise. Two tacos.#

And they installed electric streetcars lines in towns. All of these other gadgets gave us the light bulb.

Although the skintight shorts are being marketed to athletes and coaches, they could be useful for the deskbound.

One driver gets too close to another and has to brake, as does the driver behind,

as does the driver behind him#pretty soon, the first driver has sent a stop -and-go shock wave down the highway.

One driving-simulator study found that nearly half the time one vehicle passed another, the lead vehicle had a faster average speed.

All this leads to highway turbulence, which is why many traffic modelers see adaptive cruise control (A c. C.)#which automatically maintains a set distance behind a car and the vehicle in front of it#as the key to congestion relief.

Simulations have found that if some 20 percent of vehicles on a highway were equipped with advanced A c. C.,

and smoothing driver reactions. One study shows that even a highway that is running at peak capacity has only 4. 5 percent of its surface area occupied.

More sophisticated adaptive cruse control systems could presumably fit more cars on the road. When a quarter of the vehicles on a simulated highway had A c. C,

In another simulation, giving at least a quarter of the cars A c. C. cut traffic delays by up to 20 percent.

an estimated 6. 9 million cars each year will come with A c. C. 7. Anti-theft Handlebars Here s an old idea

The bearing system that allows the bike to turn can be locked so that a thief can t steer his stolen bike.

The lock is internal, meaning that he d have to destroy the bike to ride it away. 8. No more Greasy Chains An updated shaft drive

#which replaces the chain with a rod and internal gear system#would be perfect for urban riders.

Doctor On board Your car is already able to call for help when an accident occurs, but within a few years, it ll tip paramedics off to probable injuries too.

Researchers at the University of Michigan International Center for Automotive Medicine have created the predictive models by cross-referencing the crash data provided by sensors on cars, like speed and location of impact, with 3-D

The Rolling Arcade The industrial designer Jiang Qian has conceived of a subway strap that s also a video game.

while the train is in motion is part of the challenge. And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you

Instead of plastic crawl tubes, there should be tall, steep slides. And balance beams. And rope swings.

human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial.

In fact, the avatars were moving 2 percent faster, and the human cyclists matched them, reaching new levels of speed.

Lying is obviously not a long-term strategy#once you realize what s going on, the effects may evaporate.

The Mind-reading Shopping cart In February, Chaotic Moon Labs began testing a robotic shopping cart that acts a bit like a mind-reading butler.

To start it up you can text message the cart s built-in tablet computer. Now it knows who you are and

what you need for dinner. The cart uses Microsoft s Kinect motion-sensor technology to track

and follow you through the store, pointing you#in a synthy voice reminiscent of A g. P. S. navigator#toward products on your list.

Still only a prototype, the cart isn t nearly as nimble as its human-powered cousin,

Items you add to the cart can be scanned automatically and you can finalize your purchase from the device,

These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy:

and invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. Ford had its Evos concept car on display at CES 2012 turning heads with style and design,

but little true innovation Transportation At CES, Ford motor Company unveiled its first-ever zero emissions, electric passenger vehicle, following in the footsteps of Tesla and Nissan.

And they jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon with the new Evos Concept Car. But behind the flashy surfaces

chrome wheels, and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities. 5.)Driverless cars The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars,

and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation and urban planning.

Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. 6.)Ground-Based Delivery Drones Before we have sold driverless passenger cars in any sizable quantities

we will see ground-based delivery drones hauling point-to-point cargo. Better to practice without passengers onboard to perfect the technology.

Railroads and trucking companies should be worried as this will displace much of their industry. Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES AR Drone 2. 0 Flying Drones

Delivery Drones-Can you imagine a flying drone with UPS or Fedex on its side? Thinking beyond traditional delivery systems, flying drones could be used to deliver food, packages, water,

change out the batteries in your home, remove trash and sewage, and even vacuum the leaves from your front lawn.

Automatic Pothole Detector/Reporter The connected city of the future will see cars automatically reporting

Powering electric cars, boats, and farm equipment may not be that far off. 19.)Plant Monitors-Urban agriculture is catching on like wildfire,

#At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car,

Long-time students head home from evening class in automated taxi pods, which can be called by mobile phone,

Henry ford s vision of the Sky Car is now here and the popular Aeromobil models can often be spotted over the capital,

Many commuters travel to finance jobs in Dubai and Karachi or to oversee manufacturing in Iraq

Audi, BMW, GM and Google tested them first. The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicted that autonomous cars would account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040.

#Google s self-driving car. Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights,

signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids.

and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.

The driver in the lane to my right. He s twisted halfway around in his seat,

taking a picture of the Lexus that I m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski.

Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour,

He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so.

His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas,

and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.

Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes,

#oeself-Driving Car.##Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute.

He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o clock, waves goodbye to his fianc e and their son,

While other drivers are gawking at him he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car s sensor logs,

analyzing traffic flow, and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is

or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen:#

as the Lexus took us across the Dumbarton Bridge.##oethis is more like Charles Lindbergh s plane.

As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, #oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves,

an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company? We ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.#

#Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#

a self-driving car will save your life. The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction:

this year s model of last century s Make it belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs

In 1939, at the World s Fair in New york, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General motors Futurama exhibit.

Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio-guided cars.##oedoes it seem strange?

A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes inside.#

no driver fatigue.##From 1977: Engineers huddle around a driverless Ford on a test track.#

#oecars like this one may be on the nation s roads by the year 2000!##Levandowski shook his head.#

smart roads and smart cars. General motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties.

Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,

like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal

and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets,

alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car#oeslow down, sharp curve ahead.#

#Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex. They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them,

In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,

By 1995, Dickmanns s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense,

Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were controlled strictly environments.

is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve.

build a car that can drive a hundred and forty-two miles without human intervention. Ernst Dickmanns s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn,

but always with a driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand Challenge would be empty,

and the road would be rough: from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways, it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns;

instead of road signs and lane lines, G. P. S. waypoints.##oetoday, we could do it in a few hours,

and recalled that her son used to play with remote-control cars as a boy, crashing them into things on his bedroom floor.

He would build the world s first autonomous motorcycle. This seemed like a stroke of genius at the time.

Tasked with building a machine that could shoot the most Ping-pong balls into a tube, the students came up with dozens of ingenious contraptions.

drop a ball into the tube, then cover it up so that no others could get in.

The motorcycle could be like that, Levandowski thought: quicker off the mark than a car and more maneuverable.

It could slip through tighter barriers and drive just as fast. Also, it was a good way to get back at his mother,

who d never let him ride motorcycles as a kid.##oefine,#he thought.##oei ll just make one that rides itself.#

a motorcycle can t stand up on its own. It needs a rider to balance it#r else a complex,

The other racers had no such problem. They also had substantial academic and corporate backing:

the Carnegie mellon team was working with General motors, Caltech with Northrop grumman, Ohio State with Oshkosh trucking.

No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project. Then he added a hundred thousand dollars of his own.

#oeshe hated the motorcycle project.##There came a day when Goldberg realized that half his Ph d. students had been working for Levandowski.

They d begun with a Yamaha dirt bike, made for a child, and stripped it down to its skeleton.

#bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over#ore than six hundred times in a row.#

#oewe built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark, #Smart told me.#

#oeit s like one of my colleagues once said:##You don t understand, Charlie, this is robotics.

Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.

When the bike tipped to one side, Krasnov had it steer ever so slightly in the same direction.

This created centrifugal acceleration that pulled the bike upright again. By doing this over and over, tracing tiny S-curves as it went,

the motorcycle could hold to a straight line. On the video clip from that day, the bike wobbles a little at first,

like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field#s if guided by an invisible hand.

Caltech s Chevy Tahoe crashed into a fence. Even the winner, Carnegie mellon, earned at best a Pyrrhic victory.

As for the Ghost rider, it managed to beat out more than ninety cars in the qualifying round#mile

the bike sputtered forward, rolled three feet, and fell over.##oethat was a dark day,

he let his car teach itself. Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks,

modelled on those in the brain. As he drove around Pittsburgh, they kept track of his driving decisions,

the car was going about two to four miles an hour along a path through a park#ou could ride a tricycle faster,

#In 1996, the car steered itself from Washington, D c, . to San diego with only minimal intervention#early four times as far as Ernst Dickmanns s cars had gone a year earlier.#

#oeno Hands Across America,#Pomerleau called it. Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.

A self-taught car can come to some strange conclusions. It may confuse the shadow of a tree for the edge of the road,

It s like a baby in a stroller deducing the world from the faces and storefronts that flicker by.

sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy.##oeput too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,

#Sebastian Thrun told me. The second Grand Challenge put these two approaches to the test.

Stanford with its puny Volkswagen Touareg, nicknamed Stanley. It was an even match. Both teams used similar sensors and software,

Rather than program the car with models of the rocks and bushes it should avoid,

The lasers on the roof scanned the area around the car, while the camera looked farther ahead.

Carnegie mellon, with two cars to Stanford s one, decided to play it safe. They had Highlander run at a fast clip#ore than twenty miles an hour on average#hile Sandstorm hung back a little.

Five cars finished the hundred-and-thirty-two-mile course; more than twenty cars went farther than the winner had in 2004.

In one year, they d made more progress than darpa s contractors had in twenty.#

I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks. So they were doing things in their home shops,

built a self-driving#oedoom Buggy#that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs.

A Ford S. U. V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley.

His motorcycle embodied that evolution. Although it never made it out of the semifinals of the second race#ripped up by some wooden boards#he Ghost rider had become, in its way,

Two years later, the Smithsonian added the motorcycle to its collection; a year after that, it added Stanley as well.

and a row of what look like clown bicycles parked out front, free for the taking. When you walk in,

and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates, #Brin said.##oeit s a huge tax on the land.#

#Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they re parked on the street or in driveways and garages.

But if cars could drive themselves, there would be need no for most people to own them.

and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls. They d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis#y some calculations,

they d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars#nd far more flexible than buses or subways.

Streets would clear highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland.##oewe re not trying to fit into an existing business model,

#Brin said.##oewe are just on such a different planet.##When Thrun and Levandowski first came to Google, in 2007,

Five years earlier, Page had strapped a video camera on his car and taken several hours of footage around the Bay Area.

Google engineers went on to jury-rig some vans with G. P. S . and rooftop cameras that could shoot in every direction.

Then they equipped a hundred cars and sent them all over the United states. Google street view has since spread to more than a hundred countries.

to train more than two thousand data processors to create new maps and fix old ones. When Apple s new mapping software failed so spectacularly a year ago,

Would he be interested in building a self-driving pizza delivery car? Within five weeks, he and a team of fellow Berkeley graduates and other engineers had re

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