What if an ultra-advanced flying robot designed for extreme military missions could join the fight to combat wildfire alongside human fire crews?
The biggest wildfire in Californian history is raging, with fire officials stating earlier this week that an area almost the size of Los Angeles has been compromised.
It is actually expected to burn through the rest of August, and experts predict the escalation in frequency and scale of wildfires will only continue going forward.
Engineers at Caltech have developed a new control algorithm that enables a single drone to herd an entire flock of birds away from the airspace of an airport. The algorithm is presented in a study in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
The project was inspired by the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese shortly after takeoff and pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles were forced to land in the Hudson River off Manhattan.
“The passengers on Flight 1549 were only saved because the pilots were so skilled,” says Soon-Jo Chung, an associate professor of aerospace and Bren Scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science as well as a JPL research scientist, and the principal investigator on the drone herding project. “It made me think that next time might not have such a happy ending. So I started looking into ways to protect airspace from birds by leveraging my research areas in autonomy and robotics.”
In July 2018, The Engineer examined how modular fabrication techniques are reshaping the construction industry, enabling clean builds that are cost-effective and time efficient. But while off-site assembly brings many advantages, it can also be restrictive. This has prompted a new wave of engineers to bring the latest technology on-site, elevating the pre-fab to the fabulous.
According to Andrew Watts, CEO of engineering technology firm Newtecnic, this trend is part of a new era of digital construction where robots and drones will become commonplace on site. Digitalisation has penetrated virtually every aspect of design and engineering, but in many ways physical construction itself has remained a stubbornly analogue process, centuries of accumulated human expertise resisting the allure of ones and zeroes, and human hands still doing much of the heavy lifting. Newtecnic’s Construction Labs concept is aiming to change that, merging modular building with on-site construction to deliver perfect finishes on major public buildings.
“We’re using Construction Labs to realise complex projects,” Watts told The Engineer. “Its specific use is in the construction of facades and applications and connections for primary structures.”
The Block 5 is the only Falcon 9 the company will fly from now on.
Early Sunday morning, SpaceX is slated to launch its second Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket — the final and most powerful version of the vehicle the company plans to make. After launch, SpaceX will attempt to land the vehicle on one of its autonomous drone ships in the Atlantic. And landings should become fairly routine now, as all of SpaceX’s missions will utilize the Block 5 from now on.
The Falcon 9 Block 5 is optimized for rapid reusability, according to the company. It boasts a number of improvements that make the vehicle easier to land after launch, as well as upgrades that minimize the amount of refurbishment the rocket needs between flights. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claims that the Block 5s won’t need any major refurbishment for the first 10 flights or so, and could potentially fly up to 100 times before being retired. The company’s ultimate goal is to turn these vehicles around in just 24 hours after landing. The fastest SpaceX has been able to manage so far is two and a half months.
Starting July 22, SpaceX will have the chance to further cement itself as the best wide receiver in the aerospace game. Elon Musk’s rocket company is scheduled to make a total of five recoveries in less than two weeks, including three Falcon 9 autonomous spaceport done ships recoveries, a rocket fairing recovery, and a Dragon capsule retrieval.
This will require SpaceX’s fleet of recovery vessels to kick into overdrive. Both of its drone ships — Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean and Just Read The Instructions in the Pacific — will be serving as a landing platform for two separate Falcon 9 rockets. While two boats, including the newly upgraded Mr. Steven and NRC Quest will be tasked with bringing back a Falcon 9 fairing and the Dragon Capsule, respectively.
SpaceX prides itself on pioneering the use of reusable rocket parts and space vessels to make space travel more affordable than it has ever been. These five recoveries will put the company’s most iconic retrieval systems to the test.
Not long ago, getting a virus was about the worst thing computer users could expect in terms of system vulnerability. But in our current age of hyper-connectedness and the emerging Internet of Things, that’s no longer the case. With connectivity, a new principle has emerged, one of universal concern to those who work in the area of systems control, like João Hespanha, a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. That law says, essentially, that the more complex and connected a system is, the more susceptible it is to disruptive cyber-attacks.
“It is about something much different than your regular computer virus,” Hespanha said. “It is more about cyber physical systems—systems in which computers are connected to physical elements. That could be robots, drones, smart appliances, or infrastructure systems such as those used to distribute energy and water.”
In a paper titled “Distributed Estimation of Power System Oscillation Modes under Attacks on GPS Clocks,” published this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Hespanha and co-author Yongqiang Wang (a former UCSB postdoctoral research and now a faculty member at Clemson University) suggest a new method for protecting the increasingly complex and connected power grid from attack.
