2016's Top Tech Cars: Audi Autonomous RS7

Price: US $136,650

Power train: 96-kW (129-hp) AC electric motor with 1.5-L 170-kW (228-hp) three-cylinder gasoline engine

Overall fuel economy: 8.4 L/100 km (28 mpg) on gasoline; electric equivalent of 3.1 L/100 km (76 mpge)

       Audi’s autonomous cars are becoming quite the world travelers: Recall the much-ballyhooed first robotic drive from San Francisco to New York City, about a year ago. Impressive stuff, though honestly, humans can hold their own at pulling into a rest stop.

Here in Spain, the man-vs.-machine competition will be at higher speed and for higher stakes. I’m about to take on Robby, the autonomous RS7 sport sedan that’s designed to rock a racetrack at speeds that would blister Google’s cartoonish bubble car. If a human driver can’t keep up, it occurs to me, then our obsolescence draws that much closer. It’s only a matter of time before governments and automakers pry the ignition keys out of our fallible, accident-prone hands for good.

Robby is looking cool and confident in the pits at Parcmotor Castelloli, near Barcelona. And for good reason: The Audi weighs 400 kilograms (882 pounds) less than Bobby, the RS7 that holds the world speed record for autonomous cars, at 240 kilometers per hour (149 miles per hour).

I take to calling the newer car Robby the Robot, after the glass-skulled automaton from the 1956 sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet. Miklos Kiss, Audi’s head of predevelopment for driver assistance systems, introduces us to his two autonomous brainchildren. Popping Bobby’s hatch, we find it full to bursting with computer gear. Robby’s, in contrast, has plenty of room left over for luggage. There’s a single MicroAutoBox brain and power supply and two other small computers.

Incredibly, Audi’s latest differential GPS unit can fix Robby’s position to within 2 centimeters, vastly better than today’s GPS standard of roughly 1.5 meters. This price-no-object system also uses redundant cameras to triangulate and thus to confirm the car’s location. Keeping a fully autonomous vehicle safely within lanes will require zeroing in to 50 cm (around 20 inches).

Controllers adjust the engine, electric steering, transmission, and brakes, with redundant fail-safes: There’s a spare power supply and brake controllers if the first ones conk out. A 4.0-liter biturbo V-8 produces a villainous exhaust note that echoes off the dusty canyon walls.

I slide into Robby’s shotgun seat with some trepidation, thinking that the driver’s side will remain spookily unoccupied. But surprise! There’s an Audi engineer in the seat, along for the passive ride but holding a plunger connected to a cord. If something goes wrong and he lets go of the plunger’s button, the Audi will slow and halt on the track. Theoretically.

The checkered flag waves. The RS7 launches itself down the front straight and charges into the first corner, the steering wheel twirling, the ghosts fully in charge of this machine. The brake and throttle pedals aren’t moving at all because the computer commands are bypassing the old analog connections.

Before I arrived, Audi engineers had manually driven Robby around this Spanish track to measure its barriers and “geo-fence” a safe zone beyond which Robby will not go. Like a real-life slot car, the Audi locks onto its programmed track line, its path varying by only a few centimeters. Yet the RS7 also reacts in real time to conditions such as a slippery track or wearing tires, dialing back power or correcting the steering if it begins to slide off its satellite-guided path.

/image/MjczMTc2NA

Photo: Audi

Brain in a Boot: The Audi RS7’s computing hardware fills the trunk space.

Robby turns out to be a smoothy, a race-instructor type who puts up great, flowing lap times yet keeps the car utterly balanced and composed. Its dead-consistent laps vary by less than 0.3 second, including a best this day of 2:09.2.

Now, it’s my turn, and I jump aboard a production Audi RS7. Suddenly, I’m John Connor taking on Skynet, a human fighting for his increasingly pitiful and superfluous species. After one reconnaissance lap on this unfamiliar track, I turn the Audi loose. Please, Lord, don’t let me lose to a stinking machine.

I drive back into the pits and dash over to the timer. A few Audi engineers applaud, a bit grudgingly, I’m thinking. But my lap of 2:05.4 is nearly 4 seconds quicker than Robby’s. Even after hundreds of laps in recent weeks, Robby’s best is still 2 seconds behind my first trip around Castelloli. Take that, you remorseless Terminator, German accent and all.

But as my adrenaline subsides, I’m forced to concede that adrenaline is among my biological advantages. Robby may know speed, but the words “race” or “win” simply aren’t part of his vocabulary. Yet.

Where I punished the tires and pushed the limits, Robby stayed emotionless, programmed to run safe, endlessly repeatable laps. The last thing Audi needs is for a self-driving car to disintegrate against a wall or injure its passengers, setting back autonomous driving by a few years. A few tweaks of the algorithms, a few more generations, and Robby’s offspring will be chip-enabled Michael Schumachers. (Please, Audi, name your next car Ricky Bobby.) They’ll scan and pick out us humans up ahead and make us eat their digital dust, if they choose. Or they’ll chauffeur our miserable hides straight to the police if we act up, as did Tom Cruise’s 2054 Lexus in Minority Report. What’s to stop them?

Yes, the rise of the machines seems inevitable. But as my race with Robby showed, some humans will still put up a fight before going to the scrap heap.

929

The Tesla Model 3

       The $35,000 Tesla Model 3 is finally here. It is sleek, quick as hell, and meant for the masses. And it is the most important car the company will ever build.
The Model 3 is the car Tesla Motors has promised since the company’s founding, the car that CEO Elon Musk is convinced will push EVs into the mainstream and the technology to an inflection point. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is the car Musk believes will change the world.

“It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport,” Musk said on stage. “This is really important for the future of the world.”

In person and on paper, the Model 3 is a stunner. It’s a handsome sedan, with four doors and five seats, and all the comfort and practicality you’d expect of an upscale mid-size sedan. The battery is good for a 0 to 60 mph time under six seconds, a range of 215 miles. It’s packed with tech, stylish, and a bargain if Tesla can deliver it at the $27,500 base price Musk promises you’ll pay after the federal tax credit.The specs and price are key, because so far Tesla Motors has aimed squarely at the affluent. The company’s first three models—the innovative Roadster sports car, exquisite Model S sedan, and tech-slinging Model X SUV—made electric cars fun, cool, and compelling. The Model 3 is meant to do something greater: sell the masses on electric propulsion.
Tesla is hardly alone in hoping to do this and, frankly, got beaten in the race to build a $30K EV wth a triple-digit range by General Motors. In January, the Detroit stalwart introduced the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt, a battery electric hatchback with a range of 200 miles and a price of 30 grand after the $7,500 federal tax credit.
Still, Musk isn’t the slightest bit worried and, to be fair, has little reason to be. The Bolt is lovely, but Tesla has a proven ability to get people excited, and there’s no denying the company has a cachet many automakers do not. You don’t often see people lining up outside dealerships simply to place a $1,000 deposit on a car they haven’t even seen—something that happened at many Tesla stores this week. By the time Musk pulled the sheet off the color Model 3 at the sprawling Space X campus here in Hawthorne, California, 115,000 customers had put their money down.

“They’ll absolutely have a wow factor, because it’s Tesla,” says Gary Silberg, an automotive analyst with KPMG. “They’ll know how to market it, and from that perspective, there’s no doubt in my mind it’s gonna be a big success.”

Tesla doesn’t have to worry about creating a market for the 3. Nor does it have to worry about actually building it. No, the upstart automaker has to do something much harder.
If the company is to truly influence, let alone change, how humanity moves around, it must become more than a niche automaker building luxury vehicles and playing gadfly to the big players. That means producing vehicles on a massive scale and generating sustainable profits. To do that, Tesla must think and act a lot more like the very automakers Musk is so quick to ridicule as out-dated and old-fashioned.

It’s time for Tesla to grow up.

558

The super-efficient autonomous intersection

       As you know if you've driven anywhere ever, traffic lights are part of a vast conspiracy designed to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible for you to get where you want to go. Lights change from green to red because someone might be coming from another direction, which isn't a very efficient way to run things, since you spend so much of your travel time either slowing down, speeding up, or stopped uselessly.

The only reason that we have to suffer through red lights is that humans in general aren't aware enough, quick enough, or kind enough to safely and reliably take turns through intersections at speed. Autonomous cars, which are far better at both driving and cooperating, don't need these restrictions. So, with a little bit of communication and coordination, they'll be able to blast through even the most complex intersections while barely slowing down.

These autonomous intersections are "slot-based," which means that they operate similarly to the way that air traffic control systems at airports coordinate landing aircraft. Air traffic controllers communicate with all incoming aircraft, and assign each one of them a specific place in the landing pattern. The individual aircraft speed up or slow down on their approach to the pattern, such that they enter it at the right time, in the right slot, and the overall pattern flows steadily. This is important, since fixed-wing aircraft tend to have trouble coming to a stop before landing.

The reason that we can't implement this system in cars is twofold: we don't have a centralized intersection control system to coordinate between vehicles, and vehicles (driven by humans) don't communicate their intentions in a reliable manner. But with autonomous cars, we could make this happen for real, and if we do, the advantages would be significant. Using a centralized intersection management and vehicle communication system, slot-based intersections like the one in the video above could significantly boost intersection efficiency. We've known this anecdotally for a while, but a new paper from researchers at MIT gives our hunches about the increase in efficiency empirical heft. The MIT team also suggests ways in which traffic flow through intersections like these could be optimized.

Rather than designing traffic management systems so that they prioritize vehicle arrival times on a first come, first served basis, the researchers suggest sending vehicles through in batches—especially as traffic gets heavier. This would involve a slight delay for individual vehicles (since they may have to coordinate with other vehicles to form a batch), but it's more efficient overall, since batches of cars can trade intersection time better than single vehicles can. The video above shows the batch method, while the video below (from 2012 research at UT Austin) shows a highly complex intersection with coordination of single cars rather than batches.

Simulations suggest that a slot-based system sending through groups of cars could double the capacity of an intersection, while also significantly reducing wait times. In the simplest case (an intersection of two single-lane roads), cars arriving at a rate of one every 3 seconds would experience an average delay of about 5 seconds if they had to wait for a traffic light to turn green. An autonomously controlled intersection would drop that wait time to less than a second. Not bad. But the control system really starts to show its worth as traffic increases. If a car arrives every 2.5 seconds, the average car will be delayed about 10 seconds by a traffic light, whereas the slot-based intersection would hold it up for a second and a half. And as the arriving cars start to overload the capacity of our little intersection at 1 car every 2 seconds, you'd be stuck there for 99 seconds (!) if there's a light, but delayed only 2.5 seconds under autonomous slot-based control.

We should point out that this only works if all of the cars traveling through the intersection are autonomous. One human trying to get through this delicately choreographed scrum would probably cause an enormous number of accidents due to both lack of coordination and unpredictability. For this reason, it seems likely that traffic lights aren't going to disappear until humans finally give up driving. An interim step, though, might be traffic lights that stay green (in all directions) as long as only autonomous cars are passing through them, reverting to a traditional (frustrating and inefficient, that is) state of operation when a human approaches.

The researchers point out that the advantages of slot-based control go beyond just saving time: they reduce fuel consumption, and along with it, the amount of carbon that would otherwise get pumped into the atmosphere by legions of cars idling at traffic lights.

It will take a lot of work to implement something like this. And because it's heavily dependent on having autonomous cars replace today’s human-controlled vehicles, let's hurry up and let the robots take over so that we can all benefit.

882

Nanocones and what they mean for solar power

       Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) in Australia have created an entirely new nanostructure they have dubbed a “nanocone”. It combines the upside-down physics of topological insulators with the easier-to-explain process of plasmonics. The result is a nanomaterial that can be used with silicon-based photovoltaics to increase their light absorption properties.

Topological insulators have the peculiar property of behaving as insulators on the inside but conductors on the outside and plasmonics exploits the oscillations in the density of electrons that are generated when photons hit a metal surface. What the RMIT researchers have done by bringing these worlds together is create a plasmonic nanostructure that has a core-shell structure that lends itself to being topological insulator.

“This is the first time that a nanocone with intrinsically core-shell structure has been fabricated,” said Min Gu, the RMIT professor who led the research, in an e-mail interview with IEEE Spectrum. “The nanocone has a topologically protected metallic shell and a dielectric (insulating) core. They do not need a particular fabrication method and the unique nanostructure has the intrinsic properties of topological insulators.”

The topological insulator nanocone arrays could enhance the light absorption of solar cells by focusing incident sunlight into the silicon, according to Gu.

In research described in the journal Science Advances, this enhanced light absorption is achieved by the insulating core of the cone providing an ultrahigh refractive index in the near-infrared frequency range. Meanwhile, the metallic shell provides a strong plasmonic response and strong backward light scattering in the visible frequency range.

The researchers predict that then when a nanocone array is integrated into a silicon thin-film solar cell, it can help enhance light absorption for the cell up to 15 percent in the ultraviolet and visible ranges.

“With the enhanced light absorption, both the short circuit current and photoelectric conversion efficiency could be enhanced,” said Gu.

In future research, Gu and his colleagues plan to investigate plasmonics in other types of topological insulator nanostructures, such as nano-spheres and nano-cylinders and try to achieve plasmonic nanostructures that respond to a broad spectrum of light: from ultraviolet down to THz in all in a single core-shell nanostructure. He added: “In particular, we want to apply these nanostructures into ultra-thin PV devices.”

379

Warp Speed: Science Fiction and Reality

        Faster than light travel has appeared in multiple Sci-Fi shows and movies, however, it hasn’t been figured out yet. NASA has made plans for FTL-drive starships, but very few of them are within reach because many of them are too expensive, they break the laws of physics, or we don’t have that level of technology yet.
So, the verdict is we either need to figure out how to break the laws of physics or create something that goes near the speed of light (NFTL). My idea for an NFTL system is like a slingshot. Like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, only bigger, this slingshot would accelerate a ship inside its main tube, then it would shoot it very much like a softball pitch across the stars.

On the other side of this field, we could use a theoretical Boson Cloud Exciter, which I heard about on a TV show called Eureka. This BCE would theoretically be used as a catcher’s mitt for a FTL jump. Another idea would be to figure out how to convert an entire ship into photos or some other type of energy that can travel at or faster than the speed of light, shoot it at a target planet, where it would be converted back into the original matter of the ship and its content. The risk with this is if something blocks the some of the particles, then the ship and all of its content would be scattered throughout space.
NASA had an idea of having a starship project a “warp bubble” that has positive particles behind it pulling and negative particles in front pulling. However, physics once again caused problems, because you can’t project something in front of you at the speed of light because it breaks the law of special relativity.

This warp bubble is actually called Alcubierre’s Warp drive and it’s used like a “moving sidewalk”. As an example, imagine you are on one of those moving sidewalks that can be found in some airports. Although there may be a limit to how fast one can walk across the floor (light speed limit), what if you are on a moving section of floor that moves faster than you can walk (moving section of spacetime)? In the case of the Alcubierre warp drive, this moving section of spacetime is created by expanding spacetime behind the ship (coming out of the floor), and by contracting spacetime in front of the ship (back into the floor). This has roots in the Big Bang (inflationary universe), in which the universe inflated faster than the speed of light.
So, to attain NFTL or FTL travel, much more research, attention, and money will need to be pumped into this technology and related technologies.
For more information check out the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_prt.htm

476

It's alright, the Chinese malware won't hurt your selfies

       The security track record of Apple’s locked-down mobile operating system has been so spotless that any hairline fracture in its protections makes headlines. So when security researchers revealed that a new flavor of malware known as AceDeceiver had found its way onto as many as 6.6 million Chinese iPhones, the news was covered like a kind of smartphone bird flu, originating in Asia but bound to infect the globe. But for iPhone owners, the lesson is an old one: Don’t go to extraordinary lengths to install sketchy pirated apps on your phone, and you should be fine.

“Everyone’s blown this way out of proportion,” says iOS security researcher and forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski. “In its current form, this isn’t dangerous except to the exceptionally stupid.”

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday published a detailed blog post revealing that Chinese software has been using a set of clever techniques to bypass Apple’s security restrictions. The hack was pulled off by the developers of a Chinese-language desktop program for Windows called AiSiHelper, designed to interface with iPhones to let anyone jailbreak phones, back them up, and install pirated apps. When AiSiHelper is installed on a PC and an iPhone or iPad is connected to it, the desktop program automatically plants its own rogue third-party app store app on your iPhone or iPad, which then prompts you for your AppleID and password and sends any credentials you enter to a remote server. (Palo Alto Networks notes that it’s not clear if those credentials have yet been abused for fraud.)

To circumvent Apple’s installation restrictions, the AiSiHelper developers used two significant tricks: They snuck three versions of their app into the App Store by making them appear to Westerner as benign wallpaper apps while hiding their password-demanding features in the versions tailored to the Chinese market. And more importantly, they took advantage of a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in Apple’s Fairplay anti-piracy system that allowed the developers to continue to install their apps on iPhones from their desktop software even after the apps had been detected by Apple and removed from the app store. Apple didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on that Fairplay vulnerability or the company’s failure to catch the sketchy apps in its App Store code reviews.

According to Palo Alto Networks, AiSiHelper has 15 million downloads and 6.6 million active users, and its rogue app installation targets people in mainland China. It’s not the first time that unsavory developers have taken advantage of the popularity of pirated apps in China to spread nasty code: A piece of password-stealing malware infected 225,000 jailbroken iPhones last year. But AceDeceiver has spooked the security community by breaking Apple’s security restrictions even on non-jailbroken iPhones.

Security researchers are more concerned that AceDeceiver’s disturbingly clever techniques could be replicated to attack people who weren’t already seeking to install unauthorized apps on their phone. If hackers could quietly install a piece of malware on your desktop machine—as opposed to Chinese iPhone owners’ voluntary installation of AiSiHelper on their PCs—they might be able to pull off the same Fairplay man-in-the-middle trick to inject malicious apps onto your iPhone, too. “It’s likely we’ll see this start to affect more regions around the world, whether by these attackers or others who copy the attack technique,” wrote Palo Alto researcher Claud Xiao in the firm’s blog post.

Despite AceDeceiver’s innovations, however, even Palo Alto’s own researchers admit that it doesn’t pose much of a very realistic threat to anyone who’s not actively seeking to put shady apps on their device. Instead, argues Palo Alto researcher Ryan Olson, it’s more likely that incautious people like those who installed AiSiHelper will again use the technique to install pirated, unauthorized programs that come with unwanted side effects. “We likely will see this attack used again in the future, but …it’s probably going to be in a similar model,” says Olson. “People installing software to pirate apps which abuses this loophole and may introduce malicious behavior, rather than widespread infections.”

As for the scenario where the same technique is repurposed by invisible desktop malware to smuggle an evil app onto the user’s iPhone, iOS security researcher Zdziarski argues it’s possible, but farfetched. The technique would first require sneaking that evil app past Apple’s app store security review. The victim’s desktop machine would have to be infected with malware. And even then the malicious app would be restricted to its own “sandbox” on the device and unable to access other apps’ processes or data. And if an attacker has access to a desktop, Zdziarski points out, why try to install a rogue app when he could just install ransomware or spyware directly on the PC, or even take iCloud tokens from the computer to steal the person’s iPhone’s secrets? “The technical capability is there, but I’m not sure how useful this is to an attacker,” Zdziarski says. “Why screw around installing an app that asks for their password when you already have full access to their data?”

In other words, it’s unlikely that AceDeceiver’s techniques would make an attacker’s job easier unless someone is actively seeking to circumvent Apple’s protections. The lesson for iPhone owners remains: If you don’t want rogue apps plaguing your pristine device, don’t go looking for them.

883

An Actual Hoverboard

       In the fall of 2014, Arx Pax unveiled what was essentially the first real, working hoverboard. It used proprietary “Magnetic Field Architecture” which enabled its Hover Engines to float over a passive conductive surface (copper or aluminum, but copper works best). It’s the board you saw Tony Hawk ride in a metal half-pipe, and it lifted the likes of Buzz Aldrin and a sumo wrestler.

We All Float On
For starters, you can see that it’s more skateboard-ish. It uses a traditional longboard deck which is mounted to the battery-pack body. The four Hover Engines are spread out a little wider to add stability, but they are now attached to the main body via skateboard trucks. Those trucks tilt the Hover Engines and actually allow you to steer, accelerate, and brake.

Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome. Note that neither copper nor aluminum are “magnetic.” They are, however, conductive. The Hover Engines on the board create a magnetic field, and when that field interacts with a conductive surface it creates small closed loops of electricity called “eddy currents.” The eddy creates a secondary magnetic field within the conductive surface, and because the two fields are essentially mirror images of each other, they repel each other. Lift is generated—and motion, if it’s angled properly. Basically, it creates little electromagnetic waves and you get to surf them. Which is awesome.
The press saw it working on a smaller scale with Arx Pax’s developer hardware, known as the Whitebox+. As you might guess, the Whitebox+ is, well, a white box. It’s 10 x 10 inches across the top and 5 inches deep. It uses the same technology as the larger board, but everything’s shrunk down to a smaller size so developers can test their tweaks without risking injury. It has four miniature Hover Engines on the bottom, and you can control it with a standard dual-joystick radio control. As the engines tilt, the box scoots off in the direction they’re leaning. It felt much like flying your standard quad-copter.

The point was further driven home when I tried another developer device, the Pika. It’s just a single Whitebox-sized Hover Engine set into a 3D printed housing so you can hold in your hand. When you tilt it in different directions over the floor, you and really feel it push against you. It offered much better lateral thrust than the dumb electric leaf-blower stunt I tried.

It may look like the Hendo 2.0 doesn’t float as high as the Hendo 1.0 did, but that’s not exactly true. New on the Hendo 2.0, the Hover Engines each reside in their own little housings. This protects each engine from bumps and significantly reduces the noise level (the 1.0 had a deafening shriek). The housings extend below the pods a little bit, which make it look like it’s not hovering as high.

But as cool as the hoverboard is (and it is), what Arx Pax is really selling here is the Hover Engine. It’s something the company thinks would be especially adept at transporting goods and humans. Specifically, its taking aim at traditional maglev systems, which often require a powered track. Since Arx Pax’s Magnetic Field Architecture system requires only a passive conductive system, it may have lower power needs. The MFA system also has the advantage of being omnidirectional in its propulsion, so it could not only carry cars along a track, but it could theoretically leave the track once it reached its destination terminal, and then carry riders off to their specific destination, self-driving car style. Of course, that would only work over conductive surfaces, and U.S. roads currently aren’t equipped for the job.

The place we’re most likely to see this technology applied is in a system like the proposed Hyperloop, and it shouldn’t surprise you that Arx Pax is courting Hyperloop designers hard.

In January, its co-founder and CEO Greg Henderson sent out an open letter to the Hyperloop community extolling the virtues of MFA to participants in Texas A&M’s Hyperloop pod design competition. The company even built its own pod for the competition to demonstrate its unique capabilities. Arx Pax is reportedly in talks with most of the winners, so we may well see a number of the Hover Engines in action in this summer’s upcoming Hyperloop pod race in Hawthorne, CA. Arx Pax is selling its Hover Engine kits for $20,000 each. That’s a significant chunk of change, but Henderson says they’re still having to hustle to keep up with demand.

I assumed Henderson was merely pitching Magnetic Field Architecture as a means of levitation, but then the pod would require an additional method of propulsion to reach the high speeds (over 700 mph) that Elon Musk and others have quoted. He said he thinks the MFA system would be enough to support both levitation and propulsion. “To date we have modeled speeds up to 500 mph with some very promising results...I predict that before the Hyperloop is built, we will have technology limited more by time and the human body’s tolerance of G-forces than in the speed of our propulsion systems.”

Other places we might see this technology? Surprisingly, Arx Pax is looking at some biotech applications. Lots of animals use magnetic fields to aid in navigation. One of those animals is the mosquito. The company is exploring the possibility that its technology could be a chemical-free way of mitigating the number of mosquitoes in a certain area.

As for the hoverboards? Well, ten lucky, well-heeled Kickstarter backers are each receiving their own Hendo 2.0, having spent over $10,000 each in the crowdfunding campaign. And of course Arx Pax will keep a few on hand for demonstrations, but these will continue to be very rare beasts. Maybe someday we’ll see lavish, all-copper skate parks emerge where kids can rent these boards and experience this incredible gliding sensation. For now, though, it’s a spoonful of sugar to get us talking about hover technology, which isn’t such a bitter pill to swallow anyway.

1015