Lifeboat Foundation

We talk a lot about electric cars, and it’s evident that engineers are working toward fossil fuel alternatives for our land-based travel. But what about airplanes? In 2019, 18.27 billion gallons of fuel were used by planes. That’s far from carbon-neutral.

Soon though, we could feel less guilty about flying. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that’s able to propel itself forward using only electricity. Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020.

A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

Strategy accelerates the best algorithmic solvers for large sets of cities.

Waiting for a holiday package to be delivered? There’s a tricky math problem that needs to be solved before the delivery truck pulls up to your door, and MIT researchers have a strategy that could speed up the solution.

The approach applies to vehicle routing problems such as last-mile delivery, where the goal is to deliver goods from a central depot to multiple cities while keeping travel costs down. While there are algorithms designed to solve this problem for a few hundred cities, these solutions become too slow when applied to a larger set of cities.

Continue reading “Machine learning speeds up vehicle routing” »

Volvo’s recent investment in the Israeli startup Spectralics gives the Swedish company the opportunity to revolutionize the in-car user experience by turning the entire windshield into a heads-up display. According to the press release, the startup has a background in developing aerospace tech and is focused on developing better images. However, instead of working on just one aspect, the start-up is leveraging hardware, software, and even materials to improve the final product.

Of special interest to Volvo is the startup’s core product, multi-layered thin combiner (MLTC), a new type of optical film that can be applied on any type of surface or size. When applied to glass, it can be used to overlay images, making it an ideal candidate to make a full-scale heads-up display.

Car manufacturers have been tinkering with the idea of a windshield display for a few years now. While this is a great way to ensure that the driver does not take his eyes off the road, currently available displays are rather small, either due to cost constraints or to ensure that they do not become the cause of distraction.

Car sharing should become the norm to end “20th-century thinking” that values private vehicle ownership, as part of the drive to cut carbon emissions, a government minister has said.

Trudy Harrison, a junior transport minister, said the transport system would soon be designed around “access to services rather than what you own”.

She said the UK was “reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.”