The Gaven

The University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute is set to begin car-to-car communication tests on up to 3,000 cars. This is a big step towards autonomous driving. With a $14.9 million grant from the government, the institute will equip the cars with short range radios in their ambitious test.

The cars will create a real-world test environment for communications, control and automation systems being developed by consortia of automakers and academics. In the U.S. the main group is the Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Consortium (based as Univ. Michigan rival Ohio State University). In Europe it’s the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium – a semi-coordinated association of eight automakers, most of which actually started working together on C2C systems almost 10 years ago.

DoT predicts some level of practical C2C safety systems will become standard technology in as little as 10 years.

Well, they’re in The Gaven, so they’d better hurry up and perfect it.

While we are constantly reading about Google’s driverless car, China has just completed their test of a driverless car. It traveled for 286km on a highway, completely on its own.

“We only set a maximum speed and then left everything to the car itself. It knew the speed limits, traffic patterns, lane changes and roads using video cameras and radar sensors to detect other cars. It was all controlled by a command center in the trunk.”

Technical details are limited but it is claimed that GPS wasn’t used to navigate the car and it relied on its sensors not only to stay on the road but to work out which road to stay on. Unlike Google’s the Chinese driverless car uses computer vision to navigate aided by laser range finders. As a result it cannot drive and night and so the entire journey had to be completed during daylight. It also encountered some problems with fog and indistinct road markings. It could be argued that relying on computer vision is a more sophisticated approach than using GPS and laser range finders but without more information it is difficult to be sure. As well as just driving in a single lane the car overtook other cars a reported 67 times at an average of 87km/h.

The researchers say that, while this car is good, they want to build a better, commercially viable version for use on the roads.

An undergraduate student has overcome a major obstacle in developing invisibility cloaks.

An undergraduate student has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by adding an optical device into their design which not only remains invisible itself, but also has the ability to slow down light.

The optical device, known as an “invisible sphere,” would slow down all of the light that approaches a potential cloak, meaning that the light rays would not need to be accelerated around the cloaked objects at great speeds — a requirement that has limited invisibility cloaks to work only in a specified region of the visible spectrum.

This new research, published 9 August in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, could open up the possibility for a potential invisibility cloak wearer to move around amongst ever-changing backgrounds of a variety of colors.

Institute of Physics release reports that Hungarian-born Janos Perczel, who is studying Logic, Philosophy of Science, and Physics at the University of St Andrews and who works under the guidance of Professor Ulf Leonhardt, acknowledged the huge potential of the invisible sphere and was able to fine-tune it so that it was a suitable background for cloaking.

You can read all the technical details about the cloak at the New Journal of Physics.

More cool technology used in The Gaven still being worked on.

Xiang Zhang and colleagues note that invisibility cloaks, which route electromagnetic waves around an object to make it undetectable, “are still in their infancy.” Most cloaks are made of materials that can only hide things using microwave or infrared waves, which are just below the threshold of human vision. To remedy this, the researchers built a reflective “carpet cloak” out of layers of silicon oxide and silicon nitride etched in a special pattern. The carpet cloak works by concealing an object under the layers, and bending light waves away from the bump that the object makes, so that the cloak appears flat and smooth like a normal mirror.

Although the study cloaked a microscopic object roughly the diameter of a red blood cell, the device demonstrates that it may be “capable of cloaking any object underneath a reflective carpet layer. In contrast to the previous demonstrations that were limited to infrared light, this work makes actual invisibility for the light seen by the human eye possible,” the scientists write.

You have to start somewhere. Start small, make it better, then make it bigger. It’s still pretty exciting.

First proposed in 2008, scientist have now developed an acoustic cloaking device that makes objects invisible to sound.

It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.

Those approaches are mostly based on so-called metamaterials, man-made materials with properties that do not occur in nature. The metamaterials are designed such that they force light waves to travel around an object; to an observer, it is as if the object were not there.

But researchers quickly found out that the mathematics behind bending these light waves, called transformation optics, could also be applied to sound waves.

All the proposed theories in The Gaven are quickly becoming probable instead of something in the near future.