Month: May 2021

Remote piloting and automated assistance software is slowly creeping into non-commercial aircraft. Compared to self-driving tech, these systems have had an easier ride with air safety regulators due to their co-existence with human operators. But, a handful of fledgling autonomous flight companies are striving to change that. Today, one of those startups, Boston-based Merlin Labs, is announcing a partnership that will bring its on-board automation software to a fleet of 55 King Air utility aircraft. 

The pact with aerospace company Dynamic Aviation coincides with Merlin’s emergence from stealth mode, marking the first time its tech for fixed-wing aircraft will be used publicly. Over the past several months, the startup has been quietly testing its proprietary software on a range of planes, including twin turboprop aircraft, at its dedicated flight facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port. The trials include the first aircraft from its Dynamic Aviation partnership.

Merlin says it has raised $25 million in funding from backers including Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Alphabet. We already know that Google co-founder Larry Page has previously bankrolled flying car startups Aero and Kitty Hawk, so the company’s involvement here is hardly surprising. The search giant’s parent also operates a self-driving car division in Waymo.

Like its chief rival Reliable Robotics, Merlin’s ultimate goal is to populate the heavens with a whole host of pilotless planes shuttling passengers and cargo. The company says its autonomy platform is “aircraft agnostic” allowing it to be retrofitted to existing and new models. “This deal represents a major commercial milestone as well as Merlin’s commitment to support larger and more complex aircraft,” said Matthew George, Merlin co-founder and CEO.

It’s a peaceful evening in the sky above O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The air is still, barely a hint of clouds overhead. Visibility extends for miles. Conditions are perfect for flight. In fact, air traffic control just gave a pilot word that they are clear for takeoff. The sky’s the limit, it would seem. But the controller isn’t seated at O’Hare, and neither is the pilot. They are located thousands of miles apart, brought together by a Discord channel and a multiplayer server for Microsoft Flight Simulator, both operated by a bustling community known as fsATC, or flight simulator air traffic control.

Formed in the summer of 2019, fsATC is one of a number of communities that have cropped up around flight simulators with the goal of keeping the game as realistic as possible.

Perhaps you remember entering the cockpit of a classic version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and buzzing the Eiffel Tower or landing on the Golden Gate Bridge—the type of reckless feats that become possible only within a video game. Members of fsATC and others in the flight sim community would rather not have the skies littered with daredevils. Instead, they fly by staying grounded in reality. Air traffic controllers keep tabs on flying conditions and are tasked with clearing flight plans proposed by pilots looking to complete a journey. Success is declared when a plane safely lands at its designated destination.

If this sounds a little mundane, well, consider that a virtue. When everything goes right—when air traffic controllers and pilots cooperate—planes take off and land without the slightest hint of a problem. The community as a whole operated on a similar premise: As long as everyone kept the cooperative spirit, it continued to grow. That worked until one founding member of fsATC, like a pilot flouting the directions of air traffic control, decided to go rogue and veered directly into turbulence that shook the whole community.

Evan Reiter, a real-life airline pilot and cofounder of the Flight Simulation Association—an organization dedicated to the growth of the flight sim community—says that the flight simulators, a relatively forgotten genre of games that seemed to be relegated to memories from the early 2000s, have been given new life in recent years. This is thanks in large part to the release of Flight Simulator, a reboot of the classic Microsoft title that dropped last year. The two versions of Flight Simulator available through Steam—Microsoft Flight Simulator X and the newer Microsoft Flight Simulator—average more than 6,500 concurrent players combined at any given time, according to SteamCharts. That’s enough to put the games around the top 100 most played.

“There has been an influx of people, new ideas, and support for enthusiast flight simulation with the recent Microsoft Flight Simulator release,” Reiter says. “We’ve seen plenty of new simmers, but also lots of people who had dropped the hobby coming back, both due to the new release and the pandemic.”

One of the primary appeals of the title is its emphasis on realism and the capability of modern computers to reliably deliver a simulation experience. According to Reiter, the title has “made it much further into the real world, both gaming and aviation, than other simulator platforms.” He says that he has seen more people involved in the aviation industry, “from aerospace engineers to airline pilots,” talking about flight simulation, and Flight Simulator is the biggest driver.

Reiter says that the flight simulator community has done such a solid job accurately replicating the flight experience that he believes some “could probably manage to fly an aircraft, at least for some period of time and in the right conditions”—though he notes he’d rather stay on the ground for those flights.

A Community Takes Flight

A member of the fsATC community who goes by DorkToast said he got sucked in by the realism after briefly becoming obsessed with all the ins and outs of air traffic control. “I went in there and you had these people ranging from real pilots to real air traffic controllers that actually do this in their spare time because they love air traffic control,” he explains of his first visits to the fsATC Discord.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Mario Borunda, Associate Professor of Physics, Oklahoma State University

The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system.

If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction.

In Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, humanity can travel from planet to planet, star to star or across the universe using jump drives. As a kid, I read as many of those stories as I could get my hands on. I am now a theoretical physicist and study nanotechnology, but I am still fascinated by the ways humanity could one day travel in space.

Some characters – like the astronauts in the movies “Interstellar” and “Thor” – use wormholes to travel between solar systems in seconds. Another approach – familiar to “Star Trek” fans – is warp drive technology. Warp drives are theoretically possible if still far-fetched technology. Two recent papers made headlines in March when researchers claimed to have overcome one of the many challenges that stand between the theory of warp drives and reality.

But how do these theoretical warp drives really work? And will humans be making the jump to warp speed anytime soon?

Compression and expansion

Physicists’ current understanding of spacetime comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. General Relativity states that space and time are fused and that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. General relativity also describes how mass and energy warp spacetime – hefty objects like stars and black holes curve spacetime around them. This curvature is what you feel as gravity and why many spacefaring heroes worry about “getting stuck in” or “falling into” a gravity well. Early science fiction writers John Campbell and Asimov saw this warping as a way to skirt the speed limit.

What if a starship could compress space in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it? “Star Trek” took this idea and named it the warp drive.

In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican theoretical physicist, showed that compressing spacetime in front of the spaceship while expanding it behind was mathematically possible within the laws of General Relativity. So, what does that mean? Imagine the distance between two points is 10 meters (33 feet). If you are standing at point A and can travel one meter per second, it would take 10 seconds to get to point B. However, let’s say you could somehow compress the space between you and point B so that the interval is now just one meter. Then, moving through spacetime at your maximum speed of one meter per second, you would be able to reach point B in about one second. In theory, this approach does not contradict the laws of relativity since you are not moving faster than light in the space around you. Alcubierre showed that the warp drive from “Star Trek” was in fact theoretically possible.

Proxima Centauri here we come, right? Unfortunately, Alcubierre’s method of compressing spacetime had one problem: it requires negative energy or negative mass.

A negative energy problem

Alcubierre’s warp drive would work by creating a bubble of flat spacetime around the spaceship and curving spacetime around that bubble to reduce distances. The warp drive would require either negative mass – a theorized type of matter – or a ring of negative energy density to work. Physicists have never observed negative mass, so that leaves negative energy as the only option.

To create negative energy, a warp drive would use a huge amount of mass to create an imbalance between particles and antiparticles. For example, if an electron and an antielectron appear near the warp drive, one of the particles would get trapped by the mass and this results in an imbalance. This imbalance results in negative energy density. Alcubierre’s warp drive would use this negative energy to create the spacetime bubble.

But for a warp drive to generate enough negative energy, you would need a lot of matter. Alcubierre estimated that a warp drive with a 100-meter bubble would require the mass of the entire visible universe.

In 1999, physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly, to just about the mass of the sun. A significant improvement, but still far beyond all practical possibilities.

A sci-fi future?

Two recent papers – one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz – provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality.

Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way, they could remove the need to use negative energy. This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy. He used a different geometric approach to solve the equations of General Relativity, and by doing so, he found that a warp drive wouldn’t need to use negative energy. Lentz’s solution would allow the bubble to travel faster than the speed of light.

It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models. As a physicist, I won’t fully trust models until we have experimental proof. Yet, the science of warp drives is coming into view. As a science fiction fan, I welcome all this innovative thinking. In the words of Captain Picard, things are only impossible until they are not.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. 

BERKELEY, Calif. — Tesla will drop a radar sensor in favor of a camera-focused Autopilot system for its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America starting this month.

The move came amid growing scrutiny by regulators and media about the safety of what Tesla dubs “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” features, following a series of crashes.

“Pure vision Autopilot is now rolling out in North America,” CEO Elon Musk said in a Tweet.

He said it plans to release an improved “FSD beta V9.0” based on the pure vision system about three weeks later. “FSD subscription will be enabled around the same time,” he said.

In October, Tesla rolled out the test version of its new FSD system to a limited number of people, enabling cars to navigate on city streets in semi-autonomous mode as well as highways. A wider launch has been delayed.

While most companies like Waymo equip autonomous cars with cameras paired with sensors like lidars and radars, Tesla relied on cameras and one radar to detect and analyze objects.

Tesla’s approach helped reduce costs and commercialize its driver assistant features, but experts and other companies have raised safety concerns.

Tesla said the transition to a camera-focused system may result in limitations of some features such as lane-centering and parking assistance, saying those functions will be restored via software updates “in the weeks ahead.”

All new Model S and Model X cars, as well as all vehicles built for markets outside North America, will still be equipped with a radar, Tesla said.

A radar sensor uses radio waves and sensors to detect objects.

In March, Tesla told California regulators it might not achieve full self-driving technology by the end of 2021.

Related video:

Valve is apparently getting back in the “Steam console” business. According to data mined from Steam files and independent reporting, the company is in the process of building a handheld gaming PC to run Steam games–and it seems like it’ll be quite similar to a Nintendo Switch.

The rumor of the Steam handheld was originally posted on Steam Database’s Twitter account, which stated that hints were hidden in the latest Steam client beta update. Later, Ars Technica reported that it was able to independently confirm many of the details of the handheld, which may be called the SteamPal. Although that name is based on Steam DB’s review of the client files, it has not been confirmed.

The console will literally be a miniaturized PC ergonomically designed to hold in your hands like a Nintendo Switch, and it’ll run a version of Linux. It will have gamepad controls and a touchscreen, much like the Switch (but without removable controllers). The SteamPal’s comparisons to the Switch don’t stop at its form factor: It will also allow you to connect to a larger screen via a USB-C port.

Ars reports that the PC probably won’t feature an Nvidia microchip (sorry, no 30-series GPU in this particular device), and that Valve will source chips from either AMD or Intel. Also, because this device will run Linux, it will almost certainly be highly customizable and be able to operate more or less like a normal Linux computer.

There’s no word yet on what the SteamPal might cost or be officially called, but Ars suggests that it has the potential to be released this year. This isn’t the first time that Valve has explored small, contained, pre-built machines for running Steam games. Wayback in 2015, the company worked with PC manufacturers to launch Steam Machines, which were pre-built PCs running SteamOS (a custom version of Linux). They shipped with Steam Controllers. Although Steam Machines are more or less dead at this point, some aspects of the Steam Controller–particularly the touchpads–may be included in some form on the SteamPad.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com