Google Goes to Washington to Lobby for Self-Driving Cars

Photo by Allen Tran

Google is evidently taking its campaign to make its driverless cars legal on U.S. roads from state capitals to the nation’s capital. A Google robo-Prius was spotted last Tuesday roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., only a day after Nevada became the first state to legalize autonomous vehicles on the Silver State’s roads.

U.S. News & World Report speculated that Google was in town to appeal to federal policymakers, and possibly take them for joyrides in one of the company’s self-driving Prius hybrids. The outlet also noted that Google has racked up a reported $5 million legislative lobbying tab in the first quarter of 2012 alone – more contributed to candidates’ coffers in the same time period than Apple, Facebook and Microsoft combined.

Getting lawmakers in the seat of a self-driving Prius has become Google’s M.O., according to Matthew Newton, editor of DriverlessCarHQ.com, a site dedicated to covering autonomous cars. “Google has been giving free rides to policymakers in California, Nevada and Florida,” Newton told Wired from his home base in Melbourne, Australia. “So it makes sense that they would do it in D.C.”

Now that Google has largely cleared the technical hurdles of getting self-driving cars on the road, the next step is gaining public acceptance – and winning over policymakers, Newton added. And due to its considerable lobbying war chest and cultural clout, Google apparently has no problem getting access to powerful politicians. Some, in fact, are seeking out Google rather than the other way around.

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SpaceX Counting Down For Historic Launch To Space Station

Photo: NASA

Elon Musk is one step closer to his end goal of making human life multi-planetary. No, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket hasn’t boosted the Dragon spacecraft into its rendezvous orbit with the International Space Station quite yet. That launch is scheduled for Saturday morning at 4:55 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral in Florida. But as Floridians were drifting off to sleep last night, halfway around the world a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off with a pair of cosmonauts and an American astronaut bound for the ISS.

Last night’s launch was part of the reason SpaceX delayed the launch by about two weeks from its previously scheduled lift off. NASA and SpaceX wanted to avoid a potential traffic jam in orbit with two separate spacecraft scheduled for trips to the space station. And the successful launch was one of the final variables before SpaceX will finally get the chance to test its Dragon capsule.

The last scheduled SpaceX launch on May 7 had to be scrubbed due to more software testing. There is a manual override option, but the Dragon will mostly be an autonomous, robotic spacecraft during its rendezvous in orbit. In fact, the manual override is one of the many things being tested during the test flight. The entire mission includes two separate demonstrations by SpaceX to fulfill requirements NASA has set for commercial companies to be able to deliver cargo payloads to the ISS.

The SpaceX delays should make things a bit easier for the ISS crew currently in orbit. The three man crew was expecting to handle the SpaceX rendezvous and berthing on their own. But now with the Soyuz capsule currently in orbit, three more crew members are expected to be on board the space station on Thursday. The original three are still expected to handle the rendezvous and berthing of the Dragon using the station’s large robotic arm – the picture above is from a rehearsal session from inside the Cupola observatory module where the berthing will be orchestrated. But the three extra crew members should make the laborious unpacking and cargo transfer much easier.

If successful – and SpaceX, Elon Musk and NASA have all reiterated the fact this is a test flight and therefore a big “if” – the Dragon spacecraft will be the first commercially developed, launched and operated spacecraft to deliver supplies to the ISS some time early next week. There will be just over 1,000 pounds of supplies and gear on the way up, and the Dragon will carry several hundred pounds of cargo back to earth as well.

According to NASA, nothing on board the Dragon is essential to the operation of the ISS or the crew. But for several groups of young students, the payload is very important. Tucked inside Dragon along with some food, clothes, batteries and a laptop, are 15 experiments chosen from from 779 student teams that submitted proposals for doing research in low earth orbit.

The winning teams were scheduled to fly their experiments on a Soyuz rocket, but in the rarely predictable scheduling of rocket launches, the manifest changes meant the middle and high school student projects are set to launch on the Falcon 9 this Saturday. All of the experiments are housed in a single modular housing and include research on microbial life and water purification in a micro-gravity environment.

For Musk the success of this week’s mission may not be guaranteed, but he told us last month that there will be other opportunities for flights to the ISS later this year and he’s absolutely confident that SpaceX will deliver to the ISS. The cargo mission and eventual contract with NASA is just one step in Musk’s grand plan of traveling to Mars. Something he believes will happen in the not too distant future and one day will be available for anybody who wants to spend $500,000 for the roughly 130,000,000 mile trip.

Wired will have live coverage of Saturday’s launch over at our new Open Space.

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OnStar Files Patents for Minority Report-Style Billboards

Two weeks ago, a patent filing by General Motors was uncovered that proposed using data collected from its OnStar service to tailor public advertisements to individual drivers.

Like the billboards Tom Cruise encountered in Minority Report, the OnStar-linked ads would be tailored to passing motorists based on personal information they’d shared with their telematics service. Perusing the patent’s text, nightmare scenarios flooded our thoughts. Kids in the backseat? Be prepared to see ads for Happy Meals and nearby amusement parks. Headed to the doctor’s office? A friendly reminder to schedule a colonoscopy, in flashing 40-foot letters.

The most alarming aspect of the patent is how it proposes gathering personal data. Expectedly, the patent covers the use of location-based information from OnStar’s turn-by-turn navigation system. But more intrusively, it also includes the use of in-vehicle cameras to determine unspecified demographics of vehicle occupants. Even power seat positions could be used to estimate the age of a driver.

Scary stuff. But put away the roll of tinfoil, because this patent probably isn’t going anywhere soon – or ever.

Like any tech company, OnStar routinely files hundreds of patents for any innovation that might be even remotely valuable to their future business interests. Patents are filed as soon as new ideas are conceived, and the process is often done just to make sure nobody else profits off the idea in the future.

In OnStar’s case, the company let us know it files about one patent application every five days. This one was filed in August of 2010 and sat through a quiet period of public comment until Jalopnik took note of it. Submitting paperwork to the patent office is as far from implementing a new technology as putting a poster of a Porsche 936 on the wall is to driving like Hurley Haywood.

As for the billboard patent, “It doesn’t mean we’re ever going to do something about it, and we don’t have any plans to ever leverage it in the near future or at all,” said Nick Pudar, OnStar’s vice president of business development. “We were surprised that anyone noticed it,” Pudar admitted.

Sounds pretty cut and dry, eh? Or maybe that’s exactly what OnStar wants us to think. Still paranoid, we asked automotive privacy expert and Santa Clara Law professor Dorothy Glancy to take a look at it.

It turns out that OnStar joins Honda, Bridgestone, Apple, RIM and GM itself when it comes to filing patents that cover the interaction between telematics services and advertising. “From what I can see at the Patent Office, there are a lot of issued patents in this technology area,” Glancy said, estimating that there are 35,000 targeted advertising patents, 143 of them specifically dealing with vehicle telematics.

“All of this goes to say that the patent application is pretty unremarkable in the patent world,” she said. “If this patent ever does issue, it would likely be much narrower than what is claimed in the application.”

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Space Industry Veteran (Re)Entering The Commercial Space Race

Image: ATK

The Utah company that built the solid rocket boosters for the now retired space shuttle program announced plans to enter the next phase of American space flight with its own private launch system. Alliant Techsystems, or ATK as it is better known, says it plans to build a complete rocket and spacecraft package to transport astronauts and cargo to and from low earth orbit. The announcement adds another potential company aiming for NASA contracts as pressure from lawmakers and former astronauts is pushing to trim the selection to a single option.

The new launch system from ATK will use its Liberty rocket which was submitted as part of the NASA’s current Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, but was not selected. Instead programs from SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corporation are participating in this round of CCDev funding and testing.

Liberty will be the name of the new program, and this time it will include a capsule spacecraft, launch abort system and the rocket itself. ATK plans to begin flight testing in 2014 and is aiming for a crew flight in 2015.

The spacecraft for the Liberty launch system is a seven seat, composite capsule that originated as a research project to see if composites could serve as an alternative to the aluminum materials NASA was using to develop the Orion spacecraft. Orion is a capsule being built by Lockheed Martin for NASA missions beyond low earth orbit, namely asteroids and eventually Mars. ATK says the composite spacecraft will land in the water and will be reusable up to 10 times.

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Siemens’ New Electric Trucks Hanging On A Wire

 

German conglomerate Siemens has introduced a new electric truck that uses overhead electrical wires to power hybrid trucks.

Unveiled at the Electric Vehicle Symposium in LA this week, the ”eHighway of the Future” concept puts overhead catenaries over heavily-traveled trucking routes. When hybrid diesel-electric trucks pass below, they run on electric power only. No wires? No problem: The trucks’ diesel engines will do the heavy hauling.

Its a system that Siemens says has many applications. It could work on a busy highway where electric power can reduce emissions, or be used in city centers where a diesel engine makes too much noise.

The setup is similar to streetcars and trains, and it takes the issue of range completely out of the equation when it comes to hauling freight with electrified trucks. All that trucking companies need are rigs equipped with hardware that connects with catenary wires and software that can switch from diesel to electric power.

On the infrastructure end, things get a little more complicated. Overhead wires would have to be installed over at least one travel lane of an interstate highway, and just like a train or electric streetcar a truck would have to run directly beneath them. We’re not sure how that would work when it comes to merging. Trucking companies would also have to pay electric bills to whichever agency ran the eHighway infrastructure.

Already, the system is being tested in Germany. Here in the US, the first trials will be at the heavily congested ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Videos: Siemens

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