Located off I-4 between Orlando and Tampa, SunTrax is a large-scale, cutting-edge facility being developed by the Florida Department of Transportation and Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, dedicated to the research, development and testing of emerging transportation technologies in safe and controlled environments.
SunTrax will be the first “purpose-built” facility for the testing of autonomous-vehicle technology, Satchfield said. He said two comparable projects — the American Center for Mobility in Michigan and GoMentum Station in California — employ existing road networks.
SunTrax was originally conceived for a more limited purpose, the development of toll technology. As planning progressed, Satchfield said FDOT leaders realized the 200-acre infield would be an ideal site for testing connected and autonomous vehicles.
Ikea’s smart home ambitions first became visible in 2015 with the introduction of tables and lamps that could wirelessly charge Qi-compatible phones. In 2017, it expanded into affordable smart lighting, before partnering with Sonos for this month’s launch of relatively inexpensive whole-home audio. Ikea’s first smart blinds will start sales in the US on October 1st (in vid). What’s next?
Ikea’s just the latest corporate behemoth to wager on smart home riches, joining Google, Apple, and Amazon. Fortunately for them, Ikea has so far taken a platform agnostic approach, supporting the Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa ecosystems through its Tradfri gateway. IDC predicts global sales of about 830 million smart home devices in 2019 before doubling to 1.6 billion in 2023. It’s no wonder then that the company is so optimistic about expanding beyond conventional home furnishings.
Quartz magazine writes "Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships—and another 41 from large ferries—an average of about 1.5 people per month. The cruise industry says that accidental “falls” don’t happen when passengers are behaving responsibly. And online commenters on cruise forums generally dismiss those who go overboard as drunk, careless, or stupid, and see these events, while unfortunate, as no more than a Darwinian culling of the vacationing population."
Just in 2018, over 28 million passengers took a cruise, so only a tiny fraction have fallen overboard since 2000. Still the disruption from search and rescue missions, the stress on the passengers and crew and the negative PR is significant. Cruise lines are starting to use thermal cameras, sensors and other technologies for timely detection of such incidents.
MSC Cruises has piloted with Bosch and HPE to deploy "a comprehensive shield of intelligent optical and thermal video cameras which provide nonstop comprehensive surveillance alongside the relevant exterior parts of the ship. All captured video images are streamed in real-time to a Central Security Room where the video stream is monitored together with all other inputs from the 1,200 HD CCTV cameras on board the ship."
MARSS promises low false alarms with their product called MOBtronic
Multiple radars simultaneously monitor ship wall ensuring falling objects are detected and tracked
Radar tracks are confirmed by collocated independent radar sensors
Behavior of confirmed track is analyzed (based on speed, fall direction, shape, strength)
MOB radar track is verified with infrared signature (heat, object shape, dimension, range)
Visual confirmation by crew based on video replay; within seconds crew can confirm MOB alarm
If all goes as planned in August, a freight train will chug down a track near Pueblo, Colo.—entirely controlled by computers. Humans in the locomotive will merely observe, as the latest in artificial intelligence and sensor technology puts thousands of tons of steel through its paces.
The experiment, on 48 miles of track at the railroad industry’s advanced testing ground, is a big step in the push for autonomous train technology. The outcome could fundamentally alter the railroad industry.
While still a huge, highly profitable business, railroads move less freight than they did 10 years ago, and their biggest customer—the coal industry—is in long-term decline.
At the end of the pilot, CurbFlow will submit a heat map, showing city officials who’s using those parking spaces and when. Eventually, it would like to charge to use the spot, just like a parking meter. At least some companies seem ready to pay a bit of money to do what is, today, mostly free. “We feel like curb management, and looking at the curb as dynamic, rather than static, is the way forward,” says Mariah Ray, who leads public policy and partnerships at DoorDash.
When you think of a tiny house, you likely think of something like Walden—living amongst nature in spartan accommodations. But there’s plenty of room for tiny homes in cities around the world, if you count their rooftops. These often-underused spaces represent as much as 30% of additional developable real estate in some cities. Building additional housing on rooftops isn’t simple or inexpensive, but as real estate prices and rents skyrocket, many building owners are already converting rooftops into living spaces.
Frank Markus who writes the regular Technologue column summarizes trends in auto tech over 37 years
"By my count, this is MotorTrend's 263rd Technologue column, stretching back to May 1982.
In all, we've covered 183 future technologies—77 percent of all Technologue topics. Of the concepts highlighted, 36 percent have been developed to the point of production, after an average of 4.4 years. Extensive Googling suggests another 20 percent—including most of the recent topics—still have active research ongoing. If they all pan out, we'll be batting .500!
Topics-wise, I've covered 27 alternate-fuels technologies, 20 battery/EV/HEV concepts, 16 advanced combustion engine ideas, 15 electronics/infotainment topics, and 14 columns each covering chassis and safety.
Another 37 of my favorite columns defy such easy classification—like the HondaJet, the odor-fighting seat upholstery made of shrimp shells, the thorium-powered car, Ford's braille window film that helps blind passengers enjoy scenery, and the Toyota/JAXA lunar rover."
Interesting results from Ikea's 2018 Life at Home survey
"In the past two years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people who say they feel more at home in places other than the space they live in. We found that at any given moment we are doing things normally associated with the home, elsewhere. Did you know for example that over a third of us shower or bathe outside of the home multiple times a week? Life is changing, and it’s time for home to catch up.
So what does this mean?
Well, we’ve learned much more about what goes into creating the feeling of home, and how to make it feel better. We’ve learned how important neighbourhoods and communities are in our homemaking experiences. In fact 64% of people globally would rather live in a small home in a great location as opposed to a large home in a less than ideal location, and 23% of people feel they have to leave the home to find alone time.
We are entering a new era of life at home.
60% of people are ready to create a home that’s different from the one they were brought up in."
Each Barcelona superblock comprises a three-by-three, nine-block neighborhood of traffic-calmed and shared streets. Local traffic can enter only along the center block of each side, drive slowly around that block, and reemerge on the street from which it entered, which limits through-traffic to the perimeter. Within the block, the scheme liberates more than 70 percent of the surface previously occupied by cars, reducing noise, improving air quality, and providing much-needed public space.
The clustering of blocks, exclusion of traffic, and installation of picnic tables, play areas, and potted trees may seem like an analog initiative, but it rests on “data-integrated decision-making,” says Salvador Rueda, director of the Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Bar- celona (BCN Ecologia) and originator of the superblock program. Rueda first proposed the superblock concept in 1987 (even then, noise and poor air quality were marring city life), but a lack of reliable projections about traffic impacts stalled it. Now, with contemporary sensing and simulation technologies, says Rueda, “we can use data to advocate, to plan, and to verify.”
For example, increasingly sophisticated monitoring equipment has enabled the creation of a network of fixed and moving sensors that connect with ICTs and a cloud-computing process. These make it possible to assess a range of air-quality parameters—particulates, nitrogen dioxide, and other pollutants—and to generate accurate, real-time estimates of doses inhaled daily by residents and commuters. Similarly, traffic flow is measured with sensors (mainly cameras) positioned in intersections, superblock access roads, and calmed streets.
“Singapore is a city-state, and there’s rarely the room for us to experiment with our plans,” according to Siau Yong Ng, director of the Singapore Land Authority’s geospatial division. So, in a global first, the city is synthesizing all of the 3-D efforts of its various government agencies, along with vast stores of associated data from existing geospatial and other platforms, to create a digital twin of the entire city.
The $54 million project, scheduled for phased deployment beginning this year, will provide a single, authoritative digital platform for government and private-sector users, as well as researchers and the public, to better understand the city and to explore ways to improve it. Users will be able to pretest concepts and services that range from energy and food production to mobility, from development proposals to long-term land-use planning.
Astonishingly detailed for such an enormous construct, the platform’s semantic 3-D modeling provides information on terrain attributes, transportation infrastructure, and buildings and their geometry and components, right down to floorplans and materials composition. Multiple sources of static, dynamic, and real-time city data, including information from government agencies, the internet, and Internet of Things devices, enrich the platform with demographics, traffic, and weather. According to a statement from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), which led the development of the model, “the potential uses of Virtual Singapore in tackling livability issues are limitless.”
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