Month: April 2019

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc has held talks with at least four companies as possible suppliers for next-generation lidar sensors in self-driving cars, evaluating the companies’ technology while also still working on its own lidar unit, three people familiar with the discussions said.

The moves provide fresh evidence of Apple’s renewed ambitions to enter the autonomous vehicle derby, an effort it calls Project Titan. The talks are focused on next-generation lidar, a sensor that provides a three-dimensional look at the road.

Apple is seeking lidar units that would be smaller, cheaper and more easily mass produced than current technology, the three people said. The iPhone maker is setting a high bar with demands for a “revolutionary design,” one of the people familiar with the talks said. The people declined to name the companies Apple has approached.

The sensor effort means Apple wants to develop the entire chain of hardware to guide autonomous vehicles and has joined automakers and investors in the race to find winning technologies.

Current lidar systems, including units from Velodyne Inc mounted on Apple’s fleet of self-driving test vehicles, use laser light pulses to render precise images of the environment around the car. But the systems can cost $100,000 and use mechanical parts to sweep the laser scanners across the road.

That makes them too bulky and prone to failure for use in mass-produced vehicles. The shortcomings have spurred $1 billion in investment at dozens of startups and mature companies alike to make lidar smaller, cheaper and more robust.

Apple’s interest in next-generation lidar sensors comes as it has sharply increased its road testing while bringing on key hires from Tesla Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.

It remains unclear whether the goal of Apple’s Project Titan is to build its own vehicle or supply the hardware and software elements of self-driving car while pairing with a partner for the entire vehicle.

But what is clear from Apple’s interest in cheaper lidar systems is that it wants to control the “perception stack” of sensors, computers and software to drive an autonomous vehicle, regardless of who makes the vehicle, another person familiar with the talks said. The three people familiar with the talks declined to be identified because the discussions are not public.

In addition to evaluating potential outside suppliers, Apple is believed to have its own internal lidar sensor under development, two of the people said.

Alphabet-owned Waymo has taken a similar path, assembling a sensor and computer system while inking deals to buy vehicles from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

Apple gets “a lot of optionality by working on the perception stack,” said the second person familiar with the talks. “Bringing a passenger car to the market is really, really hard, and there’s no reason right now they need to jump into it.”

Reducing costs

The designs Apple is seeking could potentially be made with conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques, all four people familiar with the talks said.

That has the potential to lower prices from the many thousands to the hundreds of dollars as the sensors are produced in larger numbers, similar to chips in phones and other devices. Apple also wants sensors that can see several hundred meters (yards) down the road.

The long-distance requirement shows Apple is interested in fully self-driving vehicles, versus the more limited features such as adaptive cruise control used today, two people familiar with the matter said.

“They’re not happy with most of what they see,” the first person familiar with the matter said. “They’re looking for a revolutionary design.”

A third person familiar with the matter said Apple is seeking a “design-oriented” sensor that would be sleek and unobtrusive enough to fit into the overall lines of a vehicle.

Apple declined to comment.

Apple once investigated building its own vehicle. The company had a team of more than a dozen engineers dedicated to detailed work such as ensuring doors closed quietly instead of slamming shut, a fourth person briefed on the matter said.

Apple last year re-hired Doug Field, an Apple veteran who was serving as Tesla’s engineering chief, to work on Project Titan. The project has about 1,200 people, according to a count in court documents.

Field has been putting his stamp on the effort, laying off about 190 workers but also bringing on key hires such as Michael Schwekutsch, who oversaw electric drive train technology at Telsa. Apple also ramped up its testing miles in California, driving nearly 80,000 last year compared to 800 the year before.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Greg Mitchell and Cynthia Osterman)

NASA’s newest planet hunter has discovered its first Earth-size alien world.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spotted the planet, as well as a weird “sub-Neptune” world, circling the star HD 21749, which lies about 53 light-years from Earth, a new study reports.

“It’s so exciting that TESS, which launched just about a year ago, is already a game-changer in the planet-hunting business,” study co-author Johanna Teske, of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

Related: NASA’s TESS Exoplanet-Hunting Mission in Pictures

TESS soared to Earth orbit in April 2018 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to hunt for planets around some of the closest and brightest stars in the sky. This work involves looking for the tiny brightness dips that occur when alien worlds cross their host stars’ faces from the spacecraft’s perspective.

NASA’s recently deceased Kepler space telescope also used this “transit method,” and to great effect; Kepler has found about 70% of the 4,000 exoplanets discovered to date. But TESS’ total tally should end up topping that of Kepler, NASA officials have said.

Astronomers hope TESS spots some potentially habitable worlds in systems that are near enough for other instruments — such as NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope — to study in detail. James Webb, which is due to launch in 2021, will probe the atmospheres of such planets, looking for gases that might be signs of life.

But the newfound Earth-size world, HD 21749c, doesn’t seem to have good life-hosting potential. It circles its host star very tightly, completing one orbit every 7.8 Earth days, and is therefore probably quite hot. (The star HD 21749 is no tiny, dim red dwarf; it’s about 80% as massive as the sun.)

TESS’ data indicate how much of the stellar disk a planet blocks during a transit, which in turn allows researchers to determine a world’s size. But figuring out an exoplanet’s mass requires data from other instruments — specifically, ground-based spectrographs that measure the gravitational tug the world exerts on its host star. (This “radial velocity” method is also used to discover planets.) 

The study team used data from various spectrographs, including the Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) instrument on the Magellan II telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, to nail down the newfound sub-Neptune’s mass. 

This exoplanet, known as HD 21749b, is about 23 times heftier than Earth and 2.7 times wider than our home world. Those numbers suggest HD 21749b is gaseous rather than rocky, but not as puffy as its closest comparisons in our solar system, Uranus and Neptune. 

HD 21749b has an orbital period of 36 Earth days — the longest of any TESS planet to date, study team members said. The exoplanet’s surface temperature probably hovers around 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degrees Celsius), the researchers said in January, when they announced the existence of HD 21749b and hints of its smaller neighbor.

That newly confirmed neighbor, HD 21749c, appears to be about the same size as Earth, but its mass is tough to nail down at present. 

“Measuring the exact mass and composition of such a small planet will be challenging, but important for comparing HD 21749c to Earth,” study co-author Sharon Wang, also of the DTM, said in the same statement. “Carnegie’s PFS team is continuing to collect data on this object with this goal in mind.”

Though HD 21749c does not seem to be suitable for Earth-like life, other TESS finds may well fit that bill, researchers said.

“For stars that are very close by and very bright, we expected to find up to a couple dozen Earth-sized planets,” study lead author Diana Dragomir, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in the same statement.

HD 21749c “sets the path for finding smaller planets around even smaller stars, and those planets may potentially be habitable,” she added.

The new study was published online today (April 15) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read a preprint of it for free at arXiv.org.

Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons tested cellphone-jamming technology at the state-run maximum security Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, last week, the Associated Press reported, in what the Verge noted may be a prelude to state prisons gaining more power to keep incarcerated persons out of contact with the outside world.

Jamming is the intentional disruption of radio frequencies to interfere with legitimate communications, and it is generally banned and subject to heavy penalties in the U.S. outside of limited use by federal agencies. According to the AP, Department of Justice officials said the test ran over five days in a housing unit at the prison, with Assistant Attorney General Beth Williams saying that it was the first such joint federal-state test.

South Carolina Corrections Director Bryan Stirling received special deputy federal marshall status. That gave him the authority to carry out a so-called “micro-jamming test,” which is supposed to interfere with communications in a very small area, the AP wrote:

Micro-jamming technology was tested last year at a federal prison—where officials said they were able to shut down phone signals inside a prison cell, while devices about 20 feet (6 meters) away worked normally—but a decades-old law says state or local agencies don’t have the authority to jam the public airwaves.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is free to use jamming technology, though the AP separately reported earlier this month it hasn’t been used outside of limited testing. In both federal and state penal facilities, contraband access to cell phones is common, which prison officials have long alleged they need more tools to address.

Those officials have cited security concerns like contact with outside criminal elements, saying prisoners could deal drugs, engage in organized crime, or order retaliatory hits on law enforcement and prison personnel. Those behind bars have often alleged it has more to do with protecting lucrative arrangements restricting them to expensive, exploitative phone lines run by private contractors.

As the Verge noted, the Federal Communications Commission has previously loosened rules to allow prisons to run managed access systems, which are systems in which facilities partner with mobile companies to set up networks that can only be used by whitelisted devices. Tests of those systems have faced challenges in “fine-tuning the signal, refining the approved devices list, and establishing good working relationships with commercial carriers,” according to the National Institute of Justice, and are also often riddled with “holes” allowing devices to connect to commercial networks. They can also be damaged or deliberately sabotaged (something that would also be true of a jammer).

Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham also recently introduced legislation to allow state prisons to use jammers, while similar legislation was proposed in the House. According to the AP, the FCC has also been receptive to concerns raised by prison officials.

However, critics have also warned that allowing state prisons to run cell phone jamming systems would weaken the federal ban on jamming.

As io9 noted all the way back in 2010, there are all kinds of businesses that might have an interest in jamming cellular networks. Some uses may sound innocuous, like preventing cell-phone use movie theaters, but it could be used in search of profit (say, sports venues restricting mobile data in favor of paid wifi access). Police forces in the U.S. have also occasionally interfered with the normal operation of wireless networks to disorient protesters or prevent them from organizing. There’s also the possibility of more widespread jammer use interfering with day-to-day wireless communications.

North Carolina-based wireless communications expert Ben Levitan told Motherboard last year, “Allowing jamming technology is a very slippery slope, and once that door is opened we can never turn back. I’ve been in this business for 30 years. If someone is advocating for new technology they probably know someone who sells equipment or has a piece themselves.”

“There is money to be made,” Penn State University telecommunications chair and X-Lab founder Sascha Meinrath told Wired. “Prisons are just easy use-test cases for private companies to demonstrate technology because it’s a vulnerable population. As soon as its approved to work there, other venues will be clamoring to roll it out. Then where can we draw the line?”

[Associated Press via the Verge]