Hermeus, a startup backed by venture capital, won a contract to develop an Air Force One plane that can fly at Mach 5, or hypersonic speeds.
Category: transportation – Page 403
Tesla challengers Xpeng and Li Auto step up US IPO plans
However, significant roadblocks lie ahead for these start-ups, including embryonic charging infrastructure and the relatively high cost of making an electric car versus one with an internal combustion engine.
Investors are supercharging China’s largest electric vehicle start-ups to expand in the world’s largest car market.
DARPA Awards Contracts for New X-Plane Program Based on Active Flow Control
DARPA has selected three performers to work on the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, which aims to demonstrate an aircraft design based on active flow control (AFC), an area not fully explored compared to traditional flight controls. The goal is to demonstrate significant efficiency benefits of AFC, as well as improvements in aircraft cost, weight, performance, and reliability.
“The performers are looking at using active flow control very early in the design scope. That’s the differentiating piece that hasn’t been done before,” said Alexander Walan, the program manager for CRANE in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “AFC has been explored at a component level, but not as an integral piece of aircraft design. By altering the design approach, CRANE seeks to maximize the chance of a successful X-plane development while also integrating AFC into the aircraft’s stability and control.”
The program is kicking off Phase 0, a long conceptual design phase to give performers time to evaluate flow control options before solidifying their demonstration approaches. The performers selected for Phase 0 are:
Researchers advance fuel cell technology
Washington State University researchers have made a key advance in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) that could make the highly energy-efficient and low-polluting technology a more viable alternative to gasoline combustion engines for powering cars.
Led by Ph.D. graduate Qusay Bkour and Professor Su Ha in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, the researchers have developed a unique and inexpensive nanoparticle catalyst that allows the fuel cell to convert logistic liquid fuels such as gasoline to electricity without stalling out during the electrochemical process. The research, featured in the journal, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, could result in highly efficient gasoline-powered cars that produce low carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.
“People are very concerned about energy, the environment, and global warming,” said Bkour. “I’m very excited because we can have a solution to the energy problem that also reduces the emissions that cause global warming.”
Yamaha unveils ‘extremely compact’ electric motors for e-motorcycles, cars
When it comes to electric vehicles, Yamaha’s electric bicycle division has been charging into the future while its electric motorcycle division has been oddly quiet and unproductive — at least outwardly.
But now we’re getting a new look at a series of electric motors that Yamaha has been developing — motors that could rapidly progress Yamaha’s EV efforts.
Vacuum Toilet
Vacuum toilets are flush toilets that use suction for the removal of faeces and urine resulting in a minimal requirement of water (0.5 to 1.5 litres). Vacuum toilets provide the same level of comfort as traditional flush toilets and they help saving costs due to the minimised amount of flush water. Due to the fact that the effluent has a high organic matter content, vacuum toilets are specifically adapted for the use in combination with separate greywater and blackwater treatment; or aerobic digestion treatment for biogas production. Vacuum toilet systems are applicable both in large and small buildings, trains, ships and airplanes.
DeepMind releases Acme, a distributed framework for reinforcement learning algorithm development
DeepMind this week released Acme, a framework intended to simplify the development of reinforcement learning algorithms by enabling AI-driven agents to run at various scales of execution. According to the engineers and researchers behind Acme, who coauthored a technical paper on the work, it can be used to create agents with greater parallelization than in previous approaches.
Reinforcement learning involves agents that interact with an environment to generate their own training data, and it’s led to breakthroughs in fields from video games and robotics to self-driving robo-taxis. Recent advances are partly attributable to increases in the amount of training data used, which has motivated the design of systems where agents interact with instances of an environment to quickly accumulate experience. This scaling from single-process prototypes of algorithms to distributed systems often requires a reimplementation of the agents in question, DeepMind asserts, which is where the Acme framework comes in.
