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One day not long ago, an Uber driver picked up a passenger in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district. Let’s call our passenger Abby, because her real name has been lost to database anonymization, an effort to keep her identity private.
Abby needed to go to Noe Valley, a 25-minute drive that might ordinarily have cost about $15. But she had chosen UberPool, the ride-hailing company’s 18-month-old car-pooling program. In the process she had unwittingly initiated one of the service’s more epic recent trips.
Unlike a standard Uber ride, in which a single rider starts a one-time trip, UberPool works like a party line for cars. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, describes it as the future of his company — and thus the future of transportation in America.
Call up the app, specify your destination, and in exchange for a significant discount, UberPool matches you with other riders going the same way. The service might create a ride just for you, but just as often, it puts you in a ride that began long ago — one that has spanned several drop-offs and pickups, a kind of instant bus line created from collective urban demand.
The trip Abby started would last nearly an hour and meander over 10 miles across San Francisco, stopping nine times to pick up and drop off passengers. After Abby got in, the driver collected his second passenger — let’s call him Ben — a few blocks away. Ben got out after about a mile. A couple of blocks later, Carrie got in. By this time Abby might have been getting annoyed; fortunately, about six minutes later, the car reached Noe Valley. Abby got out, but Carrie was still in the car, so the trip went on. Danny got in after about a mile, then Carrie got out, then Edward got in, then Danny got out. Finally, after about 55 minutes of driving, the car reached Edward’s destination, and the trip was done.
In total, Uber collected about $48 for the ride, of which the driver kept $35. The company had collapsed five separate rides into a single trip, saving about six miles of travel and removing several cars from the road. For riders, the discounts amounted to savings of at least half of a standard Uber trip. For the driver, an hourlong trip with no idle time resulted in steady earnings (Uber drivers make money only when riders are in the car). And though Uber made less from the single ride than it would have from multiple rides, the company benefited by installing itself as a fixture in people’s lives.
“When rides get cheaper, it means that for more people in more cities, Uber is cheaper than owning a car,” Mr. Kalanick said in a recent interview. “And when Uber is cheaper than owning a car, we can become a mainstay of transportation in that city.”
Here’s another way to put it: UberPool may push us to re-evaluate how we think about Uber and its impact on the world.
The car service has long been polarizing. Though Uber is beloved by many riders, the way it has muscled into cities and the public consciousness, and the manner in which it has altered labor relations and urban planning, haverattled lawmakers, activists and even its drivers.
UberPool raises the stakes. Because it reduces price and increases volume, it suggests that if Uber ultimately succeeds, the company could have a much bigger impact on urban mobility, labor, the environment, local economies and the national transportation infrastructure than we’ve all supposed — and its effects could confound the expectations of its harshest critics.
Like most initiatives at Uber, Pool began as an experiment. Now 100 million pooled trips have been taken since the program began, and tens of millions more are occurring each month. The company once spurred demand for Pool with heavy discounts, but the service has grown beyond that — today, in many of the 29 cities where it operates, UberPool is profitable, Mr. Kalanick said.
“We had to lose millions of dollIn many cities, UberPool now accounts for more than half of Uber trips taken. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, more than 100,000 people take UberPool every week. In China, Uber is running 20 million UberPool trips a month.
A representative for Lyft, Uber’s primary American competitor, said its car-pooling service, Lyft Line, has also become a sustainable business. About 30 percent of Lyft rides are now pooled. In San Francisco and New York, Lyft’s biggest cities, the proportion is now more than half. On Tuesday, Lyft introduced a separate car pool service called Lyft Carpool, aimed at daily commuters.
Mr. Kalanick said it was likely that soon, in big cities and even in many suburbs, most Uber rides will be pooled, meaning each Uber car will be serving more than one rider most of the time.
If that occurs, and if Uber continues growing at its breakneck pace, it would represent a momentous transformation in how Americans get around. Car-pooling was popular in the earliest days of the automobile, but for much of the last 100 years, the numbers have been going in the opposite direction.Today most Americans drive to work alone.
Transportation scholars are now looking into whether car-pooling by ride companies could reverse these dismal numbers. Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has begun a study with the Natural Resources Defense Council to determine the environmental impact of Uber and Lyft’s car-pooling systems.
Ms. Shaheen said her study, the results of which are due this year, will seek to answer several questions: How many cars are pooled services getting off the roads? Are people using UberPool and Lyft Line instead of public transportation, or are people supplementing public transit instead — for instance, using cars when buses and trains aren’t running? Do cheap Uber rides push people to consider abandoning their own cars? Or if Uber rides are so cheap, are people now more likely to travel when otherwise they might have stayed home?
While that study is in progress, the early data suggests that by getting “more butts in seats” — a phrase that has become a mantra at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters — car-pooled services may already be reducing traffic, gas use and automobile emissions.
Uber has calculated the environmental impact of UberPool rides. In the first three months of 2016, the service has eliminated 21 million automobile miles; that’s about 400,000 gallons of gas and 3,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, it says. The company says that by reducing prices, the program has also expanded access to Uber.
Critics of Uber’s rise have long feared that cheaper rides could undercut support for public transportation, but a new study by the American Public Transportation Association, a trade group of transit organizations, found the opposite.
“The more likely someone is to use Uber and Lyft, the more likely they are to take public transportation, and for our industry that is very heartening,” said Darnell Grisby, the group’s director of policy development and research. People who use these services tend to own fewer cars, Mr. Grisby said. As a result, they become more interested in all forms of transportation — trains, buses, taxis, bikes — and see Uber and Lyft as a complement to other transit, not a replacement for it.
Uber’s data bears this out. In Los Angeles, 14 percent of UberPool trips start or end near a Metro station. In San Francisco during the morning commute, 10 percent of UberPool trips are to or from the Bay Area Rapid Transit train.
Uber and Lyft are expanding their car-pooling operations and theirpartnerships with transit systems. In Seattle, Toronto and Manila, Uber is testing high-occupancy sport utility vehicles that run along fixed routes during commuter hours. In Chicago, Uber has an option for commuters to pick up casual car-poolers, and Lyft is starting a similar program in San Francisco this week.
Mr. Kalanick said these experiments would continue, because reducing traffic was part of Uber’s mission.
“I grew up in L.A., and I spent almost 30 years of my life there, and I spent years of my life stuck behind the wheel, thinking about how to make this better,” he said. “So there’s going to be a big smile on my face if Uber can have any impact on reducing traffic on freeways. It would feel like a big deal.”ars in individual cities to make it work,” he said. “But at this point it’s no longer a bet in terms of financial investment — the only question is how much more efficient we can make it.”
ONE DAY ROBOTS COULD COME TO YOUR RESCUE. FIRST, THEY HAVE TO LEARN TO WALK.
F. Scott Schafer
Thormang 2 (Team Robotis)
One of the DARPA Robotics Challenge contestants.
In 2012, DARPA announced the most ambitious robotics competition in history. To kick-start the development of robotic first responders—machines capable of deploying to natural or man-made disasters—the Pentagon’s research agency proposed a series of challenges. Robots would be tasked with navigating and interacting with a mock disaster site. They would open doors, traverse rubble, climb stairs, and turn valves. At times, they would have to act with almost complete autonomy in order to simulate communications breakdowns in a real-life crisis.
Teams from around the world entered the two-year competition. The Pentagon gave some of them multimillion-dollar robots to program, while others received funding to develop their own machines. But despite the generous allotted time and resources, the DARPA Robotics Competition (DRC) would be extremely difficult. Legged robots, by far the most common design in the contest, are notoriously unstable, even when crossing level terrain. For most teams the concern was not winning the DRC. It was surviving it.
The DRC finals were held in June at the Fairplex fairgrounds in Pomona, California. And, sure enough, many robots were hauled away from the two-day event in pieces. Falls were rampant, and every tumble drew sympathetic howls from the thousands of spectators watching from the stands. One humanoid fell so hard, its head flew off its body.
In the end, three teams won a combined $3.5 million in prize money by completing eight tasks in less than an hour. But more to the point, the DRC served as a catalyst for robotics development. It forced many of the world’s leading roboticists to tackle some of the field’s hardest problems. None of the entries left the competition ready to respond to the next big disaster. But thanks to the DRC, the dream of robots that can function in the human world, whether that means pulling victims out of harm’s way or simply assisting the elderly, is closer than ever.
THE NEW F-35 FIGHTER JET IS SO SOPHISTICATED, SO AUTOMATED, SO CONNECTED, IT’S FUELING A DEBATE: DO PILOTS STILL NEED TO FLY?
Spencer Lowell
On a dusty tarmac, about 20 miles from downtown Phoenix, Capt. Joseph Stenger stands in 109-degree heat, barely sweating. A 32-year-old fighter pilot with the slicked-back hair, steady eyes, and ropey forearms you see on movie posters, he is admiring an equally impressive piece of flying machinery: the F-35 Lightning II fighter. In his green flight suit, and standing a little over 6 feet tall, Stenger is nearly face to snout with this menacing jet.
It’s his job to figure out what it can do in combat, and to teach that to hundreds of other fighter pilots.The F-35 started arriving here at Luke Air Force Base this past winter. It is the most sophisticated fighter ever built. It is stealthy, so it can appear the size of a golf ball to enemy radar, if it’s detected at all. It can also jam enemy radar—or make it seem there are 100 golf-ball-size targets in the sky. It can travel at Mach 1.6. It carries a 25 mm cannon, air-to-air missiles, two 2,000-pound guided bombs, and four external laser-guided bombs. But what truly sets it apart is its brain, 8 million lines of software code—more than any fighter in history—fusing navigation, communication, and targeting systems.
Stenger explains it like this: In older jets, he has to manually operate things like radar (pointing it at the ground to search for missiles shot at him, or at the sky, to look for enemy planes). He has to monitor a high-speed data link for plane-to-plane communications and texts from ground troops. He or his back-seat weapons guy must pick through data before locking on a target and firing. “You can imagine that’s pretty time consuming and requires a lot of cognitive processing,” Stenger says.
Spencer Lowell
The single-seat F-35 does much of this for him, by fusing and automating dozens of sensors. So, for instance, if his heat sensor picks up an enemy missile headed his way, a chime will sound, “like a doorbell” he says, and a computer voice will say, “Missile left, nine o’clock.” When Stenger looks there, a green circle pops up on his helmet’s face shield, pinpointing the missile’s site, along with its speed and time to impact. Just by looking at the circle Stenger can aim his weapon and fire at the enemy, then outrun the missile. Six external cameras also capture a 360-degree view outside the jet and feed it to his face shield. If Stenger looks down he can see through the cockpit floor to the ground.
Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that makes the F-35, will deliver thousands of these jets over the next few decades to the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The USAF will take 1,763, and Stenger will help train the aspiring F-35 pilots set to come through Luke’s sand-colored gates. With more than 200 flight hours in the F-35 so far, he knows it as well as any Air Force pilot here. When he’s not on the flight line, he spends days in classified briefing rooms, reading tactical manuals on the F-35’s capabilities. He can tick off the jet’s attributes like a new crush.
Stenger and most others in the military see the plane as the key to America’s continued air superiority, and yet it could also spell the beginning of the end for an iconic American profession. The F-35 is so high-tech, so automated, so smart, so connected, that in May, the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, declared: The F-35 “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”
To Mabus and others, the job of a fighter pilot has changed over the years. No longer do pilots sneak up on each other’s tails, train their crosshairs, and fire. They glean information from screens that look like iPads or from helmet displays. Electronic sensors, networked warfare, and air-to-air radar-guided missiles can take down enemy fighters from 100 miles away. Most of the time, pilots in a conflict never see one another at all. If that’s the case, many argue, why not have pilots on the ground—scanning the same screens and pushing the same buttons—out of harm’s way?
Stenger has considered this question before. As a pilot in Afghanistan, he flew more than 330 combat hours, doing things like blowing up Taliban fighters and safe houses, taking out missiles launchers, and providing cover for coalition forces. And yet, in his nine years in the Air Force, he’s never been in a dogfight or even encountered an enemy fighter—or any sort of enemy aircraft. When faced with the argument for unmanned fighter jets, he takes a philosophical line. “I wouldn’t offer up a conjecture because I’m a captain, and my job is to fly the F-35,” he says. “And that’s what I’m going to do. If another manned fighter comes up, great. If not, well that kind of stinks for the next generation because they’ll never get to know what being a fighter pilot is like.”
***
Luke is typically a busy Air Force base. Every 15 minutes, the desert air rumbles with the sound of jets taking off and landing. For the past 32 years, it has served as a major training base for the F-16 Fighting Falcons that sit in endless rows beneath sun canopies on the flight line. Those planes will be phased out as the F-35s arrive and squeeze them for space.
During flight training, Stenger’s students learn many skills, and dogfighting is still among them. With 1.7 million acres of Sonoran Desert and 57,000 cubic miles of airspace at his disposal, Stenger can orchestrate the kind of tactical dogfight scenarios seen in Top Gun. “We can set up 100 miles apart for air-to-air combat training,” says Stenger, seated in a bare second-floor office, which he moved into in July. In training, Stenger would pit two of his F-35 students against four F-16s fighter pilots. (This is the same class of fighter jet that Russia and China possess, and the type that could face off against the F-35.) “You employ the tactics you were taught, and you will kill them before they ever see you,” Stenger says, “well beyond visual range.”
Spencer Lowell
Air Force Capt. Joseph Stenger has 200-plus hours flying the F-35.
That phrase is crucial to the argument for unmanned fighter jets. Nearly every air-to-air engagement on the planet has been well beyond visual range since the early 1990s. That’s around the time modern militaries began relying on networked warfare: A system that combines GPS satellite locators, infrared radar, secure data links for ground and air-to-air communication, surveillance aircraft like Boeing’s E-3 Sentry, and, of course, radar-guided air-to-air missiles.
As networked warfare has risen, incidents of aerial combat have decreased. Since 1990, only 54 fighter jets have been shot down globally, says John Stillion, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and a former Air Force officer, who put together a database on all confirmed aerial victories between 1965 to 2013.
Of course, geopolitics can partially explain that trend. Few nation states with fighter jets have been warring with each other in that period. But Stillion argues that technology is driving change as well. The increase in sensor-driven flying and beyond-visual-range shooting, he says, has rendered a jet’s traditional strengths—things like high speeds, acceleration, and maneuverability—less important than they once were. What matters most now, he argues in a recent paper, “Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority,” are sensors, powerful and long-range weapons, aircraft flight range, and network connectivity.
“Those are things normally associated with long-range bombers,” Stillion says. “So maybe our future fighter jets resemble unmanned long-range strike platforms.”
It’s an interesting position, and one that makes both technical and fiscal sense. Drones can pretty much do—and in some ways do better—everything a manned fighter jet can. They can stay aloft 24 hours at a time, while manned fighters are limited to the amount of time a pilot can stay in a cramped cockpit seat, several hours at best. In addition, drones don’t need to be trained and retrained, as pilots do. And ending that practice could save a lot of money.
Spencer Lowell
The F-35 Lightning II uses 8 million lines of software code and can reach Mach 1.6.
The cost of training can be staggering: The Air Force spends $14,183 an hour to fly a single F-35A, according to the 2015 Department of Defense Budget. That’s just in peacetime training. Budgeting 13 hours of crew time per month, that equals $2.2 million a year, for one crew’s training. When its F-35 training program is fully running in a few years, Luke will have 144 of those planes. Each squad on the base will be made up of 24 aircraft with several hundred support personnel. When you do the math, people are expensive and impractical.
***
Though many agree that the role of fighter jets, and therein fighter pilots, will change in the future, how that will play out is up for debate. Stillion argues that the next-generation fighter jet should more closely resemble long-range strike bombers. Those planes are bigger than fighters, by far. They could carry a crew—one even big enough to swap out shifts—but they wouldn’t have fighter pilots, per se. Instead, the bomber would be equipped with long-range missiles and a complement of four drones, each of which would have its own advanced radar and medium-range missiles.
In a future dogfight against nations like China or Russia, Stillion envisions those drones flying in a picket line deep into enemy territory, and acting as lookouts. The bomber would follow about 100 miles behind them. The crew would control the drones and use them to double the bomber’s sensor-detection range. As Stillion depicts it, in a duel against eight fighter aircraft. At that point, the bomber team would fire long range missiles (good for about 250 miles), taking out up to six enemy jets at once.
Drones can pretty much do—and in some ways do better—everything a manned fighter jet can.
Stillion is not alone in reimagining aerial combat. Lockheed Martin’s experimental Skunk Works site in California has dozens of technicians combining unmanned systems with artificial intelligence. Its secret Minion project is developing a reconnaissance drone, like Stillion’s advance drones, that would also jam enemy radar, drop GPS-guided bombs, and shoot a high-powered microwave to disable electronics. “You could project forward to where there is a time when you can replace human cognitive capability with artificial intelligence,” says Bob Ruszkowski, director of advanced air dominance and unmanned systems at Skunk Works. But he also believes that there will always be a need for “a mixture of manned and unmanned working together.”
Northrup Grumman’s engineers are focused on the problem too. Its experimental X-47B unmanned combat jet has already made successful takeoffs and landings from an aircraft carrier (as well as made midair refuelings). The company believes a dogfighting drone is just years away.
What might slow progress are the ethical questions that arise when speaking about drone fighter jets. “Sometimes war is about breaking things, and sometimes it really is about killing people,” says Heather Penney, an Air National Guard F-16 fighter pilot who deployed twice to Iraq. “Even with remotely piloted aircraft, there are still humans in the loop. Regardless of how good Siri might become on your phone, I don’t think we as a society will ever get to the point where we trust weapons platforms to make autonomous decisions about life and death.”
Penney knows that work well. On the morning of September 11, 2001, as a rookie in the D.C. Air National Guard, and its first female fighter pilot, she found herself at Andrews Air Force Base taking off in an F-16. Her orders that day: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93, packed with passengers—and hijackers—headed for the nation’s capital. She had no ammunition. Rather, she was tasked with a suicide mission: Ram the plane if need be. The passengers ended up taking down the flight themselves.
Penney, who works as director of USAF Air Superiority Systems at Lockheed, personally believes Stillion’s concept makes a lot of sense. “But there are a lot of technological what-ifs that go along with it,” she says. Among the biggest is the development of directed-energy weapons—lasers that will travel at the speed of light to take out aircraft and destroy network data links and communications. Every major nation—the U.S., China, Russia, most of the European countries—are pursuing them.
So if most of your air force is made of drones, and they rely on data links, and if the enemy can fry those links with an electric pulse, then your drone says, “‘I’m not talking to my pilot anymore; I’m going to fly home because that’s what I’m programmed to do,’” Penney says. “Then the bad guy doesn’t even need to shoot it down. The effect is the same. They’ve won the air space.”
Actual pilots, on the other hand, will work toward a mission objective even as the battle space degrades, Penney says. “They can sit gracefully operating, with manner and intent, and to the best of their ability.” Penney also believes that only humans, not drones, can best figure out how to get in the enemy’s head and mess with it in a way that cripples him. “Your job is to create confusion in the enemy,” Penney says, “get in his line so you are making better decisions faster than he is, causing him to make mistake after mistake.” For that, she says, nothing can touch human cognition. So far.
***
Following my tour with Stenger, just as the Arizona sun is starting to bake Luke’s miles of tarmac, I head over to a freshly paved stretch of road in a far corner of the base. Things are quiet. There’s a rare three-day break in the flight schedule and the crews are taking advantage of the downtime. Despite the midday heat, teams of airmen play volleyball in a sand pit. Others sit on picnic tables, in the shade of pine trees, drinking Cokes and watching the games. The scene is so straight out of Top Gun that it conjures a Kenny Loggins backing track (though the heavyset airmen have none of the moves of Maverick and Iceman).
Nearby stands a two-story stucco building with a soaring atrium and a pitched roof that resemble jet wings. Recently constructed, it looks like a Southwestern high school, but it is a $47 million training center. Inside it smells like new carpet and holds some 18 classrooms, a 240-seat auditorium, a vast expanse of as-yet-to-be-used cubicles, and, tucked behind heavily guarded double security doors, space for 12 brand-new, state-of-the-art, F-35 flight simulators that cost $23 million apiece.
Spencer Lowell
Air Force Lt.Colonel Rhett Hierlmeier trains F-35 fighter pilots.
Lt. Colonel Rhett Hierlmeier heads up the center’s operations. The 38-year-old pilot used to fly F-15C Eagles out of Okinawa, mostly around the Pacific and Guam and Japan, and later F-22s. Both planes are air-to-air fighters. “So over the past 10 years, there’s really not been much for us to do,” he says, sitting in a sparse second-floor office, overlooking dozens of empty cubicles. “The deployments were really about presence, show of force.” He notes that the last time a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot shot down an enemy plane was in the late ’90s, during the Balkan Wars. “With Iraq, those guys ended up burying their jets because of our superior presence,” he says.
A former Air Force Academy instructor, Hierlmeier flew the F-35 for the first time three weeks earlier. His job here is to train up an instructor cadre who can then train hundreds of U.S. pilots, as well as pilots from eight coalition countries that have signed on to the buy the F-35. They include Australia, Norway, Canada, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The current class is small, including four Americans, three Norwegians, and one Italian, but it will grow to as many as 300 pilots each year.
Hierlmeier leads me through two locked doors and into a vertiginous hall that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book: Every 15 feet or so, asymmetrical arches painted in disorienting reds and gray, recede down the hall, flanked by blue police strobes. Hierlmeier is not sure why, but they seem meant to confuse intruders. From hidden speakers, a Thin Lizzy song overpowers our discussion: The drinks will flow and the blood will spill/and if the boys want to fight, you better let them. When I ask if it’s to amp up student pilots, Hierlmeier, who is serious, says: “No. There are a lot of classified conversations taking place behind these walls. It’s meant to cover them up.”
We stop at a double door the size of a loading dock. Hierlmeier opens it onto what looks like an amusement-park ride. A white dome, 11 feet in diameter, sits in the middle of the room, surrounded by a massive steel frame and 25 high-definition projectors. A replica F-35 cockpit sits on tracks that disappear into the dome. I ask if I can take a picture. No, says Hierlmeier. But he does invite me to sit in the cockpit, which I do. It’s like sitting in a low-riding Italian sports car. Before they ever get to fly an actual F-35, the student pilots must first spend a month in class practicing on computer monitors with joysticks. Then they do 30 hours inside these simulators, helmets on. Those helmets, made by defense contractor Rockwell Collins, are custom-built for each pilot and cost upwards of $400,000 apiece. “It’s like wearing a laptop on your head,” Hierlmeier says of their computing power.
Illustration by Peter Sucheski
Inside the F-35 Helmet
The Gen III helmet, by contractor Rockwell Collins, offers several new features, including: Six external cameras feed video to the face shield, allowing pilots to see through the jet; a cueing system lets pilots aim weapons with their eyes; built-in night vision allows for seeing in the dark; and a missile-warning system scans ground and air, alerting pilots to threats.
The sims are the most advanced virtual-reality experience on the planet. A pilot hops into the cockpit and rolls into the dome on the track. Clack. Clack. Clack. Once inside, the projectors shoot Google Earth-quality images of clouds and shadow, mountain ranges rushing past, dusty neighborhoods 30,000 feet below. There are rural landing strips, enemy jets ahead, and missiles whizzing your way. It’s an immersive 360-degree view—with sound effects. Like the F-35s themselves, the simulators are connected to a secure ground server and linked to each other. That way pilots can train together, in separate rooms, on tactical missions. These sims will one day be linked to other fighter-jet simulators at Air Force training bases around the U.S.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Hierlmeier is a student of technology, and grew up reading science fiction and watching Stars Wars. Standing outside the cockpit, he peers into the darkened dome, and says he believes we will one day fight our enemies from inside one of these things. When I ask what that will take, he says flatly, “Bandwidth.”
Bandwidth is a big challenge to networked warfare. And flying a fighter drone from the ground requires sending and receiving massive amounts of data in real time. So engineers are focused on things like improving artificial intelligence so planes can act with more autonomy, thus cutting down on communication bandwidth. If we get machines to think for themselves, we can equip them with a mission objective, rules for engagement, battle scenarios, and then send them on their way. Only by solving the problems of AI and operations autonomy, and onboard processing, says Ruszkowski, can we “reduce communications congestion and usage bandwidth.” Skunk Works has demonstrated that with automated ground-collision avoidance and airborne-collision avoidance systems. If Ruszkowski and his team can extend those capabilities to next-gen stealth fighters, he says, it would go a long way to solving the problem: “We believe that’s the foundation for future military systems.”
Hierlmeier, flanked by a pair of Lockheed Martin contractors and an Air Force PR person tapping her smartphone, leans on the cockpit and considers that future. “I don’t want to be the horse cavalry guy at the start of World War I,” he says. “I’m hoping we’ll see a day when man is not in the machine, in the jet, but man is in the loop. We’ve got to embrace that. I see a day when you’re driving into this dome, and you’re fighting the fight from right here.”
Nike Unveils 'Back to the Future'-Style Self-Lacing Sneakers
ans of the "Back to the Future" film franchise have likely been counting the days until time machines, hoverboards and flying cars are a reality, but at least one of Marty McFly's futuristic gadgets — self-lacing sneakers — could soon inject a little innovation into your wardrobe.
Nike has announced it will begin selling self-lacing sneakers later this year. The new HyperAdapt 1.0 shoes will feature so-called adaptive lacing, which could offer a more comfortable experience for runners.
"When you step in, your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically tighten," Tiffany Beers, a senior innovator at Nike, Inc., and the project's technical lead, said in a statement. "Then there are two buttons on the side to tighten and loosen. You can adjust it until it's perfect." [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]
Nike said the HyperAdapt 1.0 shoes are the culmination of extensive digital-, electrical- and mechanical-engineering research, and the finished product will not only solve existing problems with fit, but could also lead to revolutionary advances in adaptive performance. In other words, people can customize the shoes to fit their individual preferences, and athletes can also manually make modifications while wearing the sneakers.
"It is amazing to consider a shoe that senses what the body needs in real time," Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, who has designed some of the company's most popular sneakers, including many in the Air Jordan and Nike Air Max lines, said in a statement. "That eliminates a multitude of distractions, including mental attrition, and thus truly benefits performance."
For example, the shoes could make micro adjustments on the fly. Runners who accidentally tie their shoes too tightly will no longer have to stop to relieve the pressure. Alternatively, those who fail to tie their shoes tightly enough and find their feet slipping around inside their running shoes will be able to remedy the problems without slowing their pace.
"That's an important step, because feet undergo an incredible amount of stress during competition," Hatfield said. [7 Common Exercise Errors and How to Fix Them]
Beers and Hatfield are spearheading the project, and one of their earliest ideas included a snowboarding boot with an external generator. While the technology is too cumbersome to be practical, Beers and Hatfield have since refined it to be compact enough to fit within a running shoe, robust enough to stand up to everyday wear and tear, and flexible enough to move with an athlete's body.
"It's a platform," Beers said, "something that helps envision a world in which [the] product changes as the athlete changes."
The designers see the HyperAdapt 1.0 (as the "1.0" in its name suggests) as a first step in the field of adaptive performance. While the shoes are currently manual — meaning the athlete still controls the modifications — the technology opens up new possibilities for how sneakers could function almost seamlessly with a person's feet, Hatfield said.
"Wouldn't it be great if a shoe, in the future, could sense when you needed to have it tighter or looser?" Hatfield said. "Could it take you even tighter than you'd normally go if it senses you really need extra snugness in a quick maneuver? That's where we're headed. In the future, [the] product will come alive."
Nike's HyperAdapt 1.0 shoes will be available exclusively to Nike+ members during the 2016 holiday season. The company has not released additional information about the product's price, or when the shoes would be widely available for consumers.
By implanting electrodes into the muscles of beetles, scientists can now precisely control how cyborg insects walk — an ability that may help these bugs carry out complicated tasks, researchers said in a new study.
For decades, scientists have looked to insects for inspiration when designing robots, with the hope of learning from millions of years of evolution. After all, insects may be the most successful animals on Earth, making up about 75 percent of all animal species known to humanity.
In the past two decades, instead of attempting to create intricate robots that mimic the complexity of the insect form, researchers have tried hijacking bugs to turn them into robots themselves. Scientists can already control the flight of live moths using implanted electronics. Such cyborg insects could find a wide variety of uses, from espionage to search-and-rescue missions. [Video: It Walks! Scientists Turn Beetle Into 'Cyborg']
Although the researchers acknowledged that cyborg insects do have a number of drawbacks compared to true robots, such as limited life spans, they have several advantages, too. For example, insects are ready-made platforms, so inventors wouldn't have to devise and integrate countless tiny parts. Cyborg insects also consume about 100 times less power than robots of comparable size and do not "need complicated code to overcome obstructions" as robots do, study co-author Hirotaka Sato, a mechanical engineer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told Live Science. "We can just shut off our controls and let the insect overcome the obstructions by itself."
Scientists implanted electrodes into the muscles of beetles to turn them into "cyborg" insects. Credit: Cao Feng and Hirotaka Sato, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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Previous research used electrical signals to spurcyborg insects to walk via electrodes wired to their antennas or brains. However, such connections could often prove unreliable, and scientists had no control over the speed or gait of the insects, the researchers said.
Instead of wiring the insects' antennas or brains, Sato and his colleagueswired the insects' muscles to control the way they walked — a strategy the researchers say can improve the agility of cyborg insects toward practical applications. [Robots on the Run! 5 Bots That Can Really Move]
Scientists experimented with Mecynorrhina torquata, a giant beetle native to central Africa that can grow to be up to 3.3 inches (8.5 centimeters) long. The researchers experimented with live male beetlespurchased from a beetle company in Taiwan. (The males are the larger sex of the species.)
The scientists implanted eight pairs of electrodes in each beetle. These electrodes controlled eight muscles in the front legs of each beetle. Electrically stimulating the muscles could make the legs extend or retract, and lower or lift, the researchers said.
The scientists analyzed the natural 3D motions of the beetle legs to understand what sequences of motions normally occurred when the insects walked. Next, they developed sequences of electrical stimulation designed to precisely alter the beetles' step frequency, which, in turn, adjusted their step length and walking speed.
A future goal of this research is to control all six legs of insects, Sato said. The scientists also want to introduce systems to help monitor the positions of the cyborg insects and steer their paths toward specific targets, he added.
