Month: October 2018

WASHINGTON — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is moving ahead with plans to revise safety rules that bar fully self-driving cars from the roads without equipment like steering wheels, pedals and mirrors, according to a document seen by Reuters.

The auto safety agency, known as NHTSA, “intends to reconsider the necessity and appropriateness of its current safety standards” as applied to automated vehicles, the U.S. Transportation Department said in an 80-page update of its principles dubbed “Automated Vehicles 3.0” being made public on Thursday.

The department disclosed that in an upcoming rulemaking, NHTSA wants public comment “on proposed changes to particular safety standards to accommodate automated vehicle technologies and the possibility of setting exceptions to certain standards — that are relevant only when human drivers are present” for autonomous vehicles.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who will release the report at event at the department’s headquarters on Thursday, said in the report self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce traffic crashes and road deaths, but added the “public has legitimate concerns about the safety, security, and privacy of automated technology.”

Automakers must currently meet nearly 75 auto safety standards, many of which were written with the assumption that a licensed driver will be in control of the vehicle.

General Motors in January filed a petition seeking an exemption for the current rules to deploy vehicles without steering wheels and other human controls as part of a ride-sharing fleet it plans to deploy in 2019.

NHTSA has not declared the GM petition complete, a step necessary before it can rule on the merits. NHTSA said it plans to propose modernizing procedures to follow when reviewing exemption petitions.

Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service for the general public with no human driver behind the steering wheel in Arizona later this year. But unlike GM, Waymo’s vehicles will have human controls for the time being.

In March, a self-driving Uber Technologies vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian, while the backup safety driver was watching a video, police said. Uber suspended testing in the aftermath, and some safety advocates said the crash showed the system was not safe enough to be tested on public roads.

‘A more fundamental revamping’

The stepped-up regulatory focus by NHTSA comes as legislation in Congress to speed self-driving cars, which passed the U.S. House in 2017, has stalled and has only an outside chance of getting approved this year, congressional aides say.

The report said “NHTSA’s current statutory authority to establish motor vehicle safety standards is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the design and performance of different” automated vehicles.

But automakers have warned it could take too long for NHTSA to rewrite the rules to allow for the widespread adoption of self-driving cars without human controls.

The agency said it “may also consider a more fundamental revamping of its approach to safety standards” for automated vehicles and added future requirements “need to be more flexible and responsive, technology-neutral, and performance-oriented.”

NHTSA said it could require manufacturers “to use test methods, such as sophisticated obstacle-course-based test regimes” or it could also adopt computer simulation requirements as U.S. law “does not require that NHTSA’s safety standards rely on physical tests and measurements, only that they be objective, repeatable, and transparent.”

10 proving grounds dumped

The department also said it “no longer recognizes the designations of 10 automated vehicle proving grounds” announced shortly before then President Barack Obama left office in January 2017.

The sites, including a Michigan center that President Donald Trump visited last year, were named by Congress to be eligible for $60 million in grants “to fund demonstration projects that test the feasibility and safety” of self-driving vehicles.

The report said “given the rapid increase in automated vehicle testing activities in many locations, there is no need for U.S. DOT to favor particular locations.”

The Transportation Department also announced it will launch a study of the workforce impacts of automated vehicles with the Labor, Commerce, and the Health and Human Services departments.

The report also said the Trump administration will not call for ending human driving. The department “embraces the freedom of the open road, which includes the freedom for Americans to drive their own vehicles. … We will protect the ability of consumers to make the mobility choices that best suit their needs.”

Reporting by David Shepardson

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Two tiny, hopping robots now have a companion on the surface of the big asteroid Ryugu.

A shoebox-sized lander called the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) deployed from its mothership, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft, as planned at 9:57 p.m. EDT Tuesday (Oct. 2; 0157 GMT on Oct. 3) and came to rest on Ryugu shortly thereafter. The lander’s first photo of asteroid Ryugu shows a rocky world, and even MASCOT’s own shadow.

“It could not have gone better,” MASCOT project manager Tra-Mi Ho, from the DLR Institute of Space Systems in Bremen, Germany, said in a statement. (DLR is the German acronym for the German Aerospace Center, which built MASCOT in collaboration with the French space agency, CNES.) [Japan’s Hayabusa2 Asteroid Ryugu Mission in Pictures]

“From the lander’s telemetry, we were able to see that it separated from the mothercraft and made contact with the asteroid surface approximately 20 minutes later,” Ho added. 

MASCOT has already started gathering data with its four onboard science instruments—a camera, a radiometer, a spectrometer and a magnetometer—mission team members said. The 22-lb. (10 kilograms) lander must make haste, because its battery is expected to die just 16 hours after touchdown.

MASCOT took 20 photos during its slow descent toward Ryugu, and these images are stored aboard Hayabusa2 at the moment, mission team members said. And observations made by the magnetometer before separation (which occurred when Hayabusa2 was about 167 feet, or 51 meters, above Ryugu) have already made it down to Earth.

“The measurements show the relatively weak field of the solar wind and the very strong magnetic disturbances caused by the spacecraft,” MASCOT team member Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, from the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, said in the same statement. “At the moment of the separation, we expected a clear decrease of the interference field—and we were able to recognize this clearly.”

MASCOT is following in the footsteps of MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B, two 2.4-lb. (1.1 kg) rovers that deployed from Hayabusa2 on the night of Sept. 21. Both of those little robots aced their touchdowns and soon began exploring the surface of Ryugu.

Like the Japanese-built MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B, the autonomous MASCOT can move by hopping, which it does by manipulating a metallic “swing arm” inside its body. The lander can also use this arm to right itself on Ryugu’s surface—an important feature, because MASCOT needs to be right side up to gather data and beam it up to Hayabusa2.

The $150 million Hayabusa2 mission launched in December 2014 and arrived in orbit around Ryugu in late June of this year. The mothership may have one more rover deployment to go: It still carries the “optional” hopper MINERVA-II2, which could make its way to Ryugu’s surface next year.

And the orbiter itself will make its way down to the space rock in 2019 as well, after sending a nonexplosive impactor barreling into Ryugu. Hayabusa2 will grab pristine, previously subsurface samples from the newly created crater; this material is scheduled to come down to Earth in a return capsule in December 2020. 

Data gathered by the mission at Ryugu and by scientists who examine its returned sample should shed considerable light on the solar system’s early history and the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Ryugu may have played in life’s emergence on Earth, Hayabusa2 team members have said.

NASA has an asteroid-sampling mission of its own in operation, with broadly similar goals. The OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 m) asteroid Bennu on Dec. 31 and return samples to Earth in September 2023. 

Copyright 2018 Space.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Cruise, the self-driving car arm of General Motors, has an unexpected new ally in its bid to keep its corporate master at the forefront of an industry enduring its greatest period of change in generations: Honda.

In a deal announced today, the Japanese automaker will help San Francisco-based Cruise and its Detroit owner develop and mass produce a new sort vehicle for a world in which human drivers are no longer needed. Honda is opening its checkbook too, pledging to spend $2 billion on the project over 12 years, and immediately putting a $750 million equity investment into Cruise.

For Honda, the partnership offers entree into a self-driving space where it has thus far spent little time and effort. For Cruise and GM, the newcomer adds engineering know-how, especially with regard to interior design. That may not seem important today, while everyone is still figuring out how to make robots execute left turns and recognize pedestrians. But once the tech is ready, the ridership experience will hinge largely on how it feels to be inside the vehicle, like it does on airlines today.

Perhaps more importantly, Cruise gets Honda’s money. Self-driving research you see, is expensive. Cruise plans to launch a self-driving taxi service (somewhere) in 2019, and it’s hiring hundreds of engineers from a talent pool where demand exceeds supply. Autonomy could be a $7 trillion market by 2045, but nobody’s making money yet—and nobody knows when they will, or how much, or how, exactly. Maybe Waymo’s overseers at Alphabet and Uber’s investors can handle funding such a long term bet, but it’s a tougher sell for GM, which still has to run its existing business, building cars for humans to drive. That’s largely why Cruise and GM struck a deal with Softbank in May, in which the Japanese firm’s Vision Fund swapped $2.25 billion for a 19.6 percent stake in Cruise.

“It will de-risk our path to scale,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said on a conference call. “So once the timing’s right, we can really open up the throttle on this thing and get it going.”

As for the vehicle that will come of this deal, details are scant. GM President Dan Ammann declined to say what it will look like or when it will arrive. But the idea is clear: “It will be the first vehicle produced at scale that is freed from the constraints of having to think about vehicle design, having the driver at the wheel, and all of the traditional approaches to that,” Ammann said. Cruise has been using the electric Chevy Bolt for testing (which it does mostly in San Francisco), and GM plans to start that 2019 service with a version of the Bolt without a steering wheel or pedals. But in the long run, such services will call for vehicles made for riding, not driving. That could mean flexible interiors, new seating arrangements, new entertainment options, or a host of other things nobody has thought up yet.

The bigger takeaway from this newest deal is that, with rare exceptions, nobody thinks they can deliver on this dream alone. Just as today’s automakers rely on global networks of suppliers, dealers, and financiers, they’ll need a new web of similar deals to put robots on the road. From lidar makers to car designers to software developers to manufacturing gurus to the eternally necessary financiers, putting robot-cars on the road demands a new web of agreements, partnerships, revenue sharing schemes. On this ride to the future—as on any road trip—a good buddy or two can make all the difference.

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The Indonesian #earthquake caused “liquefaction” in areas near #Palu. These before and after images were taken on August 17th and October 1st, just south of the Mutiara SIS Al-Jufrie Airport. pic.twitter.com/iYLskCqED1

— DigitalGlobe (@DigitalGlobe) October 1, 2018

Relief workers can now use freely available satellite imagery to navigate destruction from the recent earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia.

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi suffered devastation when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck the island’s northern coast and produced a tsunami shortly after. The natural disaster hit the region on Friday (Sept. 28), and the death toll is reportedly over 1,350. The island’s coastal city of Palu was hit the worst.

The tsunami and earthquake damaged homes, large civic structures and bridges, and the damage is so extensive that relief workers are finding it difficult to bring aid to survivors.

The #earthquake and subsequent #tsunami that hit Indonesia has devastated Sulawesi island, and the city of #Palu. Seen here is the Teluk Palu Bridge. The before image is from August 17th and the after image is from, today, October 1st. pic.twitter.com/Xf0dXFAnri

— DigitalGlobe (@DigitalGlobe) October 1, 2018

Satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe “will publicly release data of the affected areas to support disaster response as it [the data] becomes available,” company representatives said in a statement yesterday (Oct. 2). This will be part of the company’s Open Data Program, and data about the Indonesia earthquake and tsunami is available here.

The imagery available through this program is licensed under Creative Commons license, which means that it can “quickly be integrated into first-responder workflows with organizations like Team Rubicon, the Red Cross and other nonprofits,” according to the statement.

Our Open Data Program has now activated for the #Indonesian #earthquake and #tsunami. To find out more information and how to access the data read our latest blog post. #Sulawesi #Palu #naturaldisaster #opendata https://t.co/QjBvJWzz0l pic.twitter.com/oX7TgshulB

— DigitalGlobe (@DigitalGlobe) October 2, 2018

Flows of mud and soil have wreaked havoc on the community in Palu. The flows’ destruction is visible in DigitalGlobe’s tweeted imagery. NASA’s Earth Observatory also shared “sobering satellite views” of Palu on their website. According to NASA, scientists think the earthquake also triggered an underwater landslide that may then have caused the 3-meter-tall (10 feet) waves of the catastrophic tsunami.

This natural-color image of Palu released by the Earth Observatory came from the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite and was taken today (Oct. 2).

This second image shows before and after views of the same region. “The false-color (bands 6-5-2) images above make it easier to distinguish between urban areas (purple-gray), vegetation (green), and mud and soil (brown and tan),” Earth Observatory officials said in the photo description.

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.