Cruise Will Soon Hit San Francisco With No Hands on the Wheel

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-hit-san-francisco-no-hands-wheel


Last week, Waymo, the self-driving vehicle developer owned by Alphabet, expanded a first-of-its-kind service offering rides to paying passengers around Phoenix—with no one behind the wheel. Videos shared by Waymo and others show its minivans navigating wide, sunny streets with ease.

Now rival Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, has taken a step towards running its own self-driving taxi service—on the hilly, winding, pedestrian-swarmed streets of San Francisco. On Thursday, Cruise said the California Department of Motor Vehicles had granted it a permit to test up to five of its modified Chevy Bolts without anyone behind the wheel. In a blog post, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said truly driverless cars would operate in the city before the end of the year.

Most of the more than 60 companies with DMV permits to test autonomous vehicles in California must keep at least one safety driver inside, who sits behind the wheel and monitors the technology. Four other companies—Waymo, Amazon-owned Zoox, delivery robot company Nuro, and AutoX—have received permits to test totally driverless vehicles in the state. But none is testing its driverless cars in areas as hectic as San Francisco.

The permit is a sign that companies like Cruise “are transitioning out of the development phase of the technology,” says Kyle Vogt, the company’s CTO.

How a chaotic skunkworks race in the desert launched what’s poised to be a runaway global industry.

So as not to freak out the neighbors, Cruise says its driverless car rollout will be gradual, and will begin in just one neighborhood; it declines to specify which one. DMV’s permit limits the five vehicles to speeds under 30 miles per hour and prohibits operating them in heavy fog or heavy rain. The slow rollout will “start to introduce people to the concept that maybe driverless cars are coming,” says Vogt. “Maybe not in the timeline [people] thought a couple of years ago, but they’re coming and expect that and start to acclimate to it.”

Cruise, like much of the industry, has admitted that the technical challenges of self-driving cars are more difficult than once thought. It had initially planned to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service by the end of 2019. Vogt has learned his lesson: He says it’s no longer “reasonable to put a hard, hard deadline or date” on when fleets of truly driverless vehicles might ferry paying passengers in San Francisco.

Among the challenges, Vogt says: Cruise needs to know that the vehicle will perform safely and prudently if, say, an internal wire is loosened. It needs to know that the car will react safely facing a situation it hasn’t been trained to deal with. To that end, Cruise has been testing driverless cars at a General Motors’ facility in Michigan for months.

A driverless Chevy Bolt tests at General Motors’ proving grounds in Milford, Michigan.

Courtesy of Cruise

San Franciscans have not always been comfortable with the self-driving testing in their midst. In the five years since Cruise began testing in the state, its cars have reportedly been involved in slap-fights with cabbies, and taken at least one errant golf ball to the windshield. Collision reports posted by DMV indicate that self-driving vehicles testing in California are involved in occasional fender-benders. The most recent reports, from September, show Cruise vehicles testing in autonomous mode have been rear-ended, bumped into, and involved in collisions, which according to the reports sometimes leave the company’s safety drivers with neck or back pain. Self-driving advocates say that while vehicles driven by software will never be perfect, they’ll keep the roads safer than humans, who are sometimes distracted, tired, or drunk. Neither the San Francisco mayor’s office nor the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency responded to questions about Cruise’s new permit.

That future can be hard to visualize, but Cruise has some ideas. The company earlier this year staged a San Francisco launch event for a vehicle it’s calling Origin, a six-seat electric vehicle meant for autonomous ride-hailing and delivery. “It’s what you would build if there were no cars,” Ammann, the CEO, said.


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October 15, 2020 at 06:00PM

FAA cuts the red tape for commercial rocket launches (and landings, too)

https://www.space.com/faa-streamlines-commercial-space-launches-landing-regulations


Commercial space is about to become more accessible than ever before. 

Today (Oct. 15), the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration‘s (FAA) Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) announced that it has published a new launch and re-entry rule known as the Streamlined Launch and Re-entry Licensing Regulation-2 (SLR2). The new rule aims to increase launch and reentry access for commercial space companies while maintaining safety. 

“We’ve seen the first launch of American astronauts into orbit aboard an American-built rocket since the end of the space shuttle program in 2004, to the International Space Station,” United States Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, said in a news conference today, referring to SpaceX’s two-month Demo-2 mission, which lifted off on May 30. 

“Our country is headed towards a record year in commercial space, and our goal in finalizing this new regulation is to keep it that way,” Chao said.

“We’re cutting the red tape that has held this industry to the launch pad for far too long,” FAA assistant administrator for communications Brianna Manzelli said at the news conference.

Related: Trump’s Space Policy Directive 2 could make life easier for SpaceX & others

This new rule is rolled out under the President’s Space Policy Directive-2 (SPD-2), which was enacted in 2018. SPD-2 guides the Secretary of Transportation to create a new regulatory structure for launch and re-entry activities. The directive also advises the Secretary to consider allowing commercial operations to launch and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere with just a single license (as opposed to having to get a new license for individual activities).

And with SLR2, the FAA has done just that. Now, only a single license is required “for all types of commercial space flight launch and re-entry operations,” according to SLR2, which “increases flexibility for launch and re-entry vehicle operations.” 

With SLR2, the FAA aims to streamline launch and re-entry procedures, so, “while it is laser-focused on public safety, it only regulates to the extent necessary,” Wayne Monteith, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said during the news conference today. “The goal is to simplify the licensing process and a lot of novel operations, reduce costs and positioning both the industry and the FAA for the rapid increase in the number of launches that are coming, all without compromising safety.”

One interesting component of this new regulation sort of gets rid of the old rules that stated that the license for a launch would “begin” or take effect upon arrival at the launch site — for example, the gate at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

Instead, now, “an individual company can, in essence, negotiate with us when they want the license to begin,” Monteith said. “It reduces [the] burden on the individual stakeholder. And it certainly reduces [the] burden on government to monitor operations that have little to no impact on public safety.”

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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October 15, 2020 at 04:44PM

4000° Real Life Retractable Plasma LIGHTSABER Test [Video]

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2020/10/15/4000-real-life-retractable-plasma-lightsaber-test-video/

Youtuber The Hacksmith recently built a real life retractable plasma lightsaber that can actually cut through metal, but he only released the demo video of it in action today. For those who are curious, the beam is made from a mix between liquid propane gas and oxygen, “mixed in a really fancy laminar flow gas nozzle.” Check it out below!

[The Hacksmith]

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October 15, 2020 at 04:32PM