Archives for July 22, 2019

The student engineering challenge is getting even harder.

In a departure from previous years, next year’s Hyperloop competition will be held in a six mile curved vacuum tunnel. Previously, the competition was held in a straight ¾ mile test tunnel which is located at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Elon Musk made the announcement on Twitter shortly after the 2019 Hyperloop Pod competition.

The Hyperloop competition is a student engineering challenge where teams are invited to design and build a prototype vehicle to travel in the potential Hyperloop network. The vehicles must be self-propelled and achieve maximum possible speeds without crashing.

At this year’s competition, in which a team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) reached a top speed of 288 miles per hour before damage occurred and an emergency stop had to be performed, Musk mentioned the possibility of expanding the competition to include tunneling as well.

“We’ll consider a tunneling competition,” Musk said at a Q&A about the competition, TechCrunch reports. “I think a tunneling thing would be pretty exciting. Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively — it’s harder than it seems.”

In 2017, the TUM team won the competition with a small electric vehicle that achieved 200 miles per hour, and Musk said he believed that speeds of up to 500 or 600 miles per hour were possible. The same team won again in 2018, this time getting up to 290 miles per hour.

Tunneling has been one of the big issues for the Hyperloop project. Between problems getting permits to dig and the need to reinforce the tunnels to stop them collapsing, building the infrastructure for the project has been as much of a challenge as designing the vehicles.

Even digging a six mile test tunnel will take a lot of time, so it remains to be seen whether Musk and co. will be able to build a tunnel of that length in time for next year’s competition. We don’t know exactly when the next competition will be held, but based on previous years we can expect it in summer 2020.

Microsoft’s AR headset is making an impact both on and off the planet.

AR headsets haven’t exactly caught on with the general public — especially after the Google Glass debacle. Mixed reality technology has garnered a sizable amount of interest in a variety of professional industries, though, from medicine and education to design and engineering. Since 2015, the technology has even made its way into aerospace where NASA and its partners have leveraged Microsoft’s HoloLens platform to revolutionize how spacecraft are constructed and astronauts perform their duties while in orbit.

Microsoft and NASA’s partnership began on June 28th, 2015 as part of Project Sidekick when a SpaceX supply rocket docked with the ISS and delivered the headsets to the waiting astronauts. “HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program at NASA said in a 2015 press release. “This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars.”

Aboard the ISS, crews utilized the HoLolens’ “Remote Expert Mode” in many of their tasks. Remote Expert connects the wearer with an Earth-based technician from the flight control team via Skype, allowing them to see what the astronaut is seeing and advise accordingly. The headsets could also be deployed in Procedure Mode, which played locally-stored animated holographic illustrations for times when an expert wasn’t available.

Project Sidekick was short lived, only running until the following March. However, a few months later in the summer of 2016, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida launched “Destination: Mars,” a mixed reality guided tour of the Red Planet narrated by none other than Buzz Aldrin. Visitors were taken on a walking tour of several Martian sites using images captured by the Curiosity Mars Rover.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualization producer at JPL, said in a press release at the time. The OnSight application, which actually stitched those captured images together, went on to win NASA’s 2018 Software of the Year award.

Augmented reality has also found its way into spacecraft design and production with incredible results. Take the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, for example. It’s currently being developed by NASA and the ESA and built by Lockheed Martin. The 4-person crew capsule is designed to ride atop the Space Launch System during the Artemis lunar exploration missions as well as to Mars.

It’s also a fantastically complex piece of engineering. The Orion’s assembly manual alone is a 1,500 page behemoth, requiring technicians to constantly flip back and forth between the instructions and the task at hand. But that’s where the HoloLens comes in.

“Manufacturing was a good place to start because it’s easier to quantify what we’re seeing in terms of a comparison between traditional methods and what AR helping would take,” Shelley Peterson, the principal engineer for Augmented & Mixed Reality at Lockheed Martin Space, told Engadget.

Using the same Procedure Mode as aboard the ISS, Lockheed’s teams were able to drastically reduce the amount of time needed to assemble the spacecraft’s various systems. The team was able to cut down the time spent joining components and torquing bolts to precise specifications by 30 to 50 percent. Rather than having to thumb through the instructions to know how many pounds of pressure a specific bolt requires, that information is displayed directly atop the bolt by the HoloLens, Peterson explained.

“More recently, we’ve been working with position alignment of objects,” she continued. It really just changes things when you can see within your environment where you’re needing to place an object, instead of having to measure or use other methods. It’s a fantastic way to represent the data.”

What used to take a technician a full 8-hour shift to complete can now be done in 15 minutes, Peterson said. What would take a pair of technicians three days to do can now be done by a single technician in two and a half hours. “At Kennedy Space Center, we had an activity that normally takes eight shifts,” Peterson said. “They completed it in six hours.”

The HoloLens doesn’t just reduce the amount of time (and money) spent putting the Orion together, it also helps to mitigate uncertainty in the manufacturing process and prevent costly mistakes. “If [the technicians are] trying to interpret a 2D drawing or 3D model on a 2D screen, and make that mental translation to what it means to the object in the room, there’s still some questions,” Peterson explained, “and they’d like to be absolutely certain when they’re working on the spacecraft.”

Peterson also points to the headsets’ ease of use. A technician typically needs less than a half hour to get orient themselves with the system before jumping into their tasks. “They’re able to put it on and just start working,’ she continued. The current iteration of the HoloLens is still a bit heavy to be worn all day, though technicians can wear them for up to three hours before tiring, or simply pop the headset on and off as needed throughout the day.

The only major sticking point that Peterson notes is the difficulty in entering data. “We need a better way to type or to take the place of typing — voice doesn’t quite do it just yet,” Peterson said. “There’s times where we need to enter data, or capture data as we’re working and they have to move across to a Bluetooth keyboard.” That takes the technician out of their workflow, which is what the HoloLens was designed to minimize in the first place.

Lockheed isn’t the only organization leveraging AR technology in its manufacturing process. Rival aerospace company BAE has also paired with Microsoft, using HoloLens to eliminate the need for paper assembly manuals in its electric bus division, while a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have used the tech to design their Dragonfly rotorcraft lander.

The Dragonfly will be heading deep into our solar system when it launches towards Saturn’s moon, Titan, in 2025. It’ll take a whopping nine years to get to the moon’s surface but once there, the Dragonfly’s exploration will help unlock the mysteries of our home system and maybe even — fingers crossed — give us our first glimpse at extraterrestrial life.

The Moterra and Habit NEO can handle rougher rides.

Cannondale has electrified a significant chunk of its bicycle lineup, and now it’s determined to conquer the mountain biking world in earnest. The company has unveiled a redesigned Moterra e-bike for the harsher climbs and a brand new Habit NEO (below) that’s designed for “fast and flowy” rides — say, a trip through a winding forest instead of an arduous hill climb. Both bikes aim to make electric riding easier than before, including through raw power.

The Moterra and Habit NEO share a new 250W Bosch drive unit that promises more torque and overall power even as it reduces the weight. Cannondale hasn’t shared range figures, but it’s betting that the 500Wh and 625Wh batteries will ease range fears.

After that, changes mostly come down to purpose. Moterra riders have 160mm of travel, 29-inch wheels and “beefier” components, with the descent-focused Moterra SE packs a 180mm fork, a Super Deluxe Piggyback Shock and stickier Maxxis Assegai tires. You won’t have quite as rough a ride down the hill, then. The Habit NEO shares the same wheel size, but switches to 140mm front and 130mm rear suspension to make it nimbler. All of the new bikes tout carbon fiber frames and a “proportional response” suspension that changes with the size of the frame.

You’ll have to wait until the fall to pick up one of Cannondale’s new offerings, and it’s clear that high-performance mountain e-bikes don’t come cheap. The Habit NEO ranges from $5,500 to $7,000, and you’re looking at between $6,000 to $9,000 for the Moterra line (the Moterra SE costs $8,500). These are for riders determined to overcome most any terrain and don’t mind paying a premium.

Who needs more screen when you can wave your hand?

Those rumors of the Pixel 4 sporting hand gesture control just became more tangible. Ice Universe has obtained photos that reportedly show the detached bezels for the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4XL, including a rather conspicuous ovoid hole on the right side. Given that this hole hasn’t been visibly occupied by cameras or other visual sensors in previous leaks, this appears to be a cutout for the Project Soli radar that would let you perform gestures without poking at the screen.

The other holes are effectively spoken for. You could expect dual selfie cameras on both Pixel models, a central speaker and what’s believed to be a face recognition or depth sensor.

Outside of Google’s teaser, you’re unlikely to hear official news about the Pixel 4 and its sensor layout until early fall. Should this leak prove accurate, though, it could represent one reason why notched displays appear to be vanishing on higher-end Pixels — the sheer number of sensors makes it impractical. Any aesthetic improvement would represent a mere bonus.