On January 26, Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car program, requested renewal of the company’s Experimental Authority for radio transmitters operating in the 76 GHz range. These are almost certainly long-range radars fitted to Google’s prototype self-driving cars. The heavily-redacted filing notes that the mobile transmitters are currently located in M...
The proposal to pave the way for self-driving cars over the next decade was unveiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation in the wake of President Obama’s final State of the Union address. One proposed milestone includes developing testing and performance standards for fully autonomous vehicles within the next six months. Another half-year goal is to develop a “model...
The tests are a milestone in the company's efforts to develop self-driving vehicles, which include plans to develop an autonomous bus in the next three years and mass-produce them within five years, according to a Reuters report. Baidu joins Google and Apple, among other technology companies, in the race to develop sensing, positioning, infotainment and other software...
The SPS IPC Drives on November 25 in Nuremberg marked the launch of the Europe-wide Integrated Drive Systems Roadshow. The tour plan takes in over a dozen European countries and is scheduled to run on into 2016. Under the banner of “Extra Value Integrated”, the IDS truck will be touring with application-specific exhibits and live demos over an area of 65 square meters to...
The future belongs to electric motors, and commercial vehicles are no exception. To date, however, many attempts to develop electric motors for commercial vehicles have stalled at the prototype stage or are extremely expensive: Usually electric models cost between two and three times as much as their conventional equivalents. The reason for this is the lack of suitable t...
This technological step-up will give the flying billboards more speed and passenger-carrying capability than the company had with blimps. But the tire company is also going to continue referring to the airships as Goodyear blimps, even though they aren't. The new aircraft have a rigid structure inside the outer envelope. This lets the three engines be mounted high up on ...
Barcelona, Spain – You think you know what a connected car is and then you actually experience one and it’s something else altogether. That was my experience at Mobile World Congress after taking the driver’s seat in a concept vehicle based on an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) platform that supports VoLTE and Rich Communications Services (RCS). Summit Tech brought the...
The unmanned Atlas rocket — and NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft — soared into a clear late-night sky, right on time. Within two hours, all four observatories were flying free. "Just picture-perfect," launch manager Omar Baez said early today. "Everybody's cheering... Can't ask for any more." The quartet of observatories is being placed into an oblong or...
The technique, which has been proven for the first time by researchers at the university, has been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications. The research proposes a new kind of engine for producing energy based on the Leidenfrost effect – a phenomenon which happens when a liquid comes into near contact with a surface much hotter than its boiling poi...
The company will be will be receiving an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, fixed-price contract for Domestic Charter Airlift Services. The combined face for the contracts is around $61.2 million. The project will be worked on through the country and should be finished by Sept. 30. According to the DoD, the “type of appropriation is fiscal year 2015 Transportation ...
The larger of Northrop Grumman's two deals is a $146.6 million cost-plus-incentive-fee Navy contract which will aid the design, development, fabrication, assembly, integration, furnishing, test and evaluation support, and documentation for several systems supporting the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye aircraft. Those systems include: Accelerated Mid-Term Interoperability Improveme...
Middle school and high school teams will launch their rockets to an altitude of one mile, deploy onboard science experiments and land safely using a system of recovery parachutes. University and college teams will participate in either the Mini-Mars Ascent Vehicle (Mini-MAV) or the Maxi-Mars Ascent Vehicle (Maxi-MAV) divisions. Mini-MAV teams must use a robotic system to...
It’s self-evident that cars must become lighter in order to reduce fuel consumption. For most car designers this principally means body parts, but the powertrain system, which includes the engine, also accounts for a large proportion of the vehicle’s weight. Until now, carmakers have relied on aluminum to reduce the weight of engine components such as the cylinder block....
There were three companies, and their craft, vying for the funds: SpaceX (Crew Dragon), Boeing (CST-100) and Sierra Nevada (Dream Chaser). Only two of three would be picked to receive funding and speculation suggested that SpaceX would be a winner, with Sierra Nevada likely to take the second spot. On Sept. 16, however, we got the news that the odd man out was Sierra Nev...
He related that the national trade association, Composites UK (Herts), held an event to introduce composites to the rail industry for consideration on future projects such as High Speed 2, the high speed rail project to begin construction in 2017, initially extending from London to Birmingham (Phase 1) and then branching to both Manchester and Leeds (Phase 2). Cunningha...
Three months from now, for the first time in the history of space travel, a lander will touch down on the surface of the four-kilometer-wide comet. DC motors manufactured by maxon are part of this pioneering feat. On August 6th, the big day finally arrived: After a journey of more than ten years, the Rosetta space probe reached the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, kn...
They’re already being used by farmers to survey fields, real estate agents to survey properties, and by rescue teams to look for people in difficult to reach places. Lately there have been attempts to use drones for medical applications, such as ferrying automatic external defibrillators and emergency medicines faster than ambulances. In the latest Air Medical Journal, t...
Four types of autonomous vehicles under trial - including a shuttle that looks like a larger golf cart and a compact two-seater "pod" car - were unveiled in London. Officials and journalists tried out the shuttle at the event, taking short rides around a public square. The project was "still in the early days," Transport Minister Claire Perry said, but she added the n...
Aircraft electric power characteristics are critical in present-day designs. Design engineers of system blocks, ranging from central processing units to control surface actuators/motors, are increasingly concerned with voltage holdup and quality during transition times between external power aircraft electric system, emergency back-up power, or transient-induced voltage ...
Jet engines come in an array of sizes and speeds, and as with many engineering projects, there is a balance between power and efficiency. Fighter jets use low-bypass turbofans to achieve fast bursts of speed, while commercial airliners use slower, more efficient high-bypass turbofans. GE Aviation engineers have taken this task to heart as they attempt to marry the best o...
orget military UAVs. For my money, there’s nothing cooler than sweet DIY projects like a chocolate drone or a custom-built quadcopter that looks like a TIE Interceptor from Star Wars. Read: This drone is made from chocolate The intrepid creator — who goes by the social media handle “Olivier C” (and deserves a Nobel Prize for his efforts) — designed a custom chassis...
The first upgrade rolled in mid-August 2014, but didn’t begin much work until 2015. A 30-ton Manitex 30112S has begun to phase out their 28-ton Manitex 2892c. With more capacity, 20 more feet of main boom, and 20 more feet of total tip height, this machine will remain in the same price category as its predecessor. A brand new 33-ton National 1400A replaced an aging ma...
Ammann plans to launch its latest compaction equipment at Intermat, including its new APH 110-95 vibratory plate – the most powerful model it has ever built. With an operating weight of 825 kg, a working speed of 37 m/min and working widths of up to 950 mm, this vibratory plate can achieve surface coverage of 2,109 m2 per hour, equal to the performance of a 7 tonne si...
The enhancements, announced Thursday, are intended to minimize the amount of damage involved in car-to-car contact and reduce the amount of debris littering the track — or hurdling over catch fences and into spectator areas. Some drivers, however, sounded skeptical about how much engineers could to with new fastenings and bolts to prevent pieces of carbon fiber from b...
Equipped with a 5-liter Cummins V8 that pounds out 310 horsepower and 555 lb-ft of torque, the company's 2016 Titan XD, unveiled just ahead of this year's North American International Auto Show in Detroit, represents a conscious effort at Nissan to serve an open niche between the half-ton and ¾-ton entries and "fill in the white space," as Rich Miller, head of the Titan ...
The company reported that the process uses press forming and was based on three intermediate material forms: Unidirectional carbon fiber, isotropic carbon fiber and long fiber thermoplastic pellet. Then, in December 2011, Teijin announced that it and General Motors (GM) had created a joint venture to work on this high-speed molding process together. Soon after, in early...
The test effectively ended the U.S. monopoly on fission-based nuclear weaponry and launched the decades-long arms race that became the hallmark of the Cold War. The natural tendency for the Americans was to attempt to regain the upper hand, either by building more fission weapons in effort to stay ahead of the Soviets, or build a bigger weapon. The bigger weapon would b...
The space exploration industry, as many CW readers know, is in the early stages of substantial reorganization as NASA backs away from some of its traditional technology development work and toward integration of private companies that are or will provide everything from space vehicle launch systems to freight and human delivery craft. In this early formative era, many c...
With more than 2,600 orders from 50 customers received since its 2010 launch, this “new engine option” A320 — note the A320 Family includes the A318, A319, A320 and A321 models — has captured roughly 60 per cent of the single-aisle commercial airliner market. Final assembly of A320neo #1 began last month with the joining of its forward and aft fuselage sections, which...
Aluminum maker Alcoa has teamed up with battery developer Phinergy to make a battery that’s capable of powering a car for over 1000 miles (1600 km). The only catch: the battery isn’t rechargeable, at least not in the traditional sense. The Phinergy-Alcoa team is proposing a combination of batteries for electric cars: the main power source would be comprised of recharg...
More than 30,000 visitors, 130,000 kilometers and 290 stops: Siemens is saying goodbye to its Energy Efficiency Roadshow. On its way through Brazil, China and Europe, people were informed on how to optimize industrial processes and to improve competitiveness in a sustainable way. As a result, partnerships were formed and contracts entered. Some of these will be introduce...
“We are studying airplane improvements that will extend today’s 777 efficiencies and reliability for the next two decades or longer, and the engines are a significant part of that effort,” said Bob Feldmann, vice president and general manager for the 777X development project at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. The Boeing 777 is the world’s most successful twin-engine, lon...
Being one of the most customer-centric industries, automotive manufacturers are strained to constantly evolve their product design and manufacturing processes to meet the ever-growing customer demands, without neglecting the environmental requirements. A recent research from McKinsey on the future of global automotive industry suggests, that the global automotive indu...
It is a great time for engineers, as computer aided design and computational analysis allows them to engineer automotive product design and build vehicles that are exceedingly fuel efficient, sleek and glamorous. The vehicle engineering industry has gone through a revolutionary phase with the CAD and CAE advancements, and now engineers can conceive designs and test ca...
In 1993, NHIndustries, mainly owned by the Eurocopter group (now Airbus Helicopters), started to design the NH90, a medium-sized military helicopter. Thirteen years later, it entered service. The pace of technological change has increased so rapidly and the competition has become so fierce that helicopter manufacturers usually have no more than four years to develop t...
Growing demand from consumers for these lightweight vehicles has been reported in Europe, the US and the booming BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China as well. As a result, car manufacturers worldwide are developing their own urban car models to tap into this burgeoning market. An urban – or city – car is a small, lightweight passenger vehicle intended for...
