Lifeboat Foundation

Spherical tire takes autonomous cars sideways into the future.

http://www.gizmag.com/goodyear-tires-autonomous-cars/42135/

Continue reading “The Goodyear Eagle-360 concept tire” »

Mercedes-Benz has developed a car that would be grown in a lab rather built on a production line.

Could this Quantum Technology inertial sensors be utilized to provide more reliable navigation to driverless autos? Quantum again proves to serve multiple usages.

Advances in laser cooling of atoms have produced a new generation of inertial sensors based on matter-wave interferometers, which are becoming an essential technology for accurate positioning or geodesy.

Driverless cars, like the one Google launched in 2012, are touted for their potential energy savings, but engineers say we should consider the possibility that the technology will intensify car use.

If people can work, relax, and even hold meetings in their cars, they may drive more.

Sydney has been having a big problem with oversized trucks driving into tunnels that are too low. So Sydney needed a stop sign that is absolutely impossible to miss. Here it is and it’s amazing.

It’s a curtain of water with a stop sign projected onto it. You can have as many overhead stop signs as you want, but as this 10 News video report shows, truck drivers still crash their trucks into these low-overhead tunnels. Sydney was tired of the delays, the costs of the damages, and the threat that a truck crash would get someone killed.

That’s why in 2007 they put in this water curtain sign on its harbor tunnel, designed by light show company Laservision. They work brilliantly.

Continue reading “Australia’s Water Curtain Stop Signs Are A Great Idea” »

NASA has commissioned engineers to design a new kind of jet that can travel faster than the speed of sound, but without the telltale sonic boom. Instead, the aircraft will produce a soft thump as it breaks the sound barrier, which the researchers are adorably calling a “supersonic heartbeat”.

It’s hoped that the new jet could eventually fill the commercial gap left by the retirement of the Concorde — which travelled at twice the speed of sound (Mach 2) and could get passengers from London to New York in just 3.5 hours — but without all the noise complaints.

From an engineering point of view, we’ve long had the ability to travel at supersonic speeds — which is generally anything over 1,234 km/h — but when we do, it triggers a sound explosion that can travel thousands of metres in a jet’s wake, rattling houses and cars as it goes. As you can imagine, not exactly ideal for heavily trafficked flight paths.

Continue reading “NASA’s designing a passenger jet that’ll break the sound barrier WITHOUT the boom” »

When The Verge began covering “drones” three years ago, we got a lot of grief about using that word: drone. These were just remote control toys, they couldn’t fly themselves! When drones got smart enough to navigate using GPS, and to follow people around, the naysayers pointed out they still couldn’t see anything. It could follow you, sure, but not while avoiding trees. At CES the last two years we finally saw drones that could sense and avoid real-world obstacles. But those were just tech demos, R&D projects which so far haven’t been made commercially available.

That all changes today with the introduction of DJI’s new drone, the Phantom 4. It’s the first consumer unit that can see the world around it and adjust accordingly, the next big step towards a truly autonomous aircraft. Try and drive it into a wall, the Phantom 4 will put on the brakes. If you ask it to fly from your position to a spot across a river, and there is a bridge in between, it will make a judgement call: increase speed to clear the obstacle or, if that isn’t possible, stop and hover in place, awaiting your next command.

The Phantom 4 accomplishes this feat with the help of five cameras: two on the front and two on the bottom, plus the main 4K camera that has always been onboard to capture video. The images captured by these cameras are run through computer vision software which constructs a 3D model of the world around it that the drone can intelligently navigate.

Continue reading “DJI’s revolutionary Phantom 4 drone can dodge obstacles and track humans” »

Israel is building a train that travels using magnetic levitation.

A simple electric train made of neodymium magnets, copper wire and a dry cell battery. It runs not only inside but also “outside” the coil.