Alfred Jones Talks About The Challenges Of Designing Fully Self-Driving Vehicles

The leap to self-driving cars could be as game-changing as the one from horse power to engine power. If cars prove able to drive themselves better than humans do, the safety gains could be enormous: auto accidents were the #8 cause of death worldwide in 2016. And who doesn’t want to turn travel time into something either truly restful or alternatively productive?

But getting there is a big challenge, as Alfred Jones knows all too well. The Head of Mechanical Engineering at Lyft’s level-5 self-driving division, his team is building the roof racks and other gear that gives the vehicles their sensors and computational hardware. In his keynote talk at Hackaday Remoticon, Alfred Jones walks us through what each level of self-driving means, how the problem is being approached, and where the sticking points are found between what’s being tested now and a truly steering-wheel-free future.

Check out the video below, and take a deeper dive into the details of his talk.

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Remoticon Video: Firmware Reverse Engineering Workshop With Asmita Jha

Taking things apart to see how they work is an important part of understanding a system, and that goes for software as much as for hardware. You can get a jump start on your firmware reverse engineering skills with Asmita Jha’s workshop which was presented live at the Hackaday Remoticon. The video has just been published, and is found below along with a bit more on what she covered in her hands-on labs.

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Kipp Bradford Discusses The Entanglement Of Politics And Technology

Kipp Bradford wrapped up his keynote talk at the Hackaday Remoticon with a small piece of advice: don’t built bridges in the middle of the ocean. The point is that a bridge must connect two pieces of land to be useful and if technology isn’t useful to humanity, does it matter at all?

In reality we build bridges in the middle of the ocean all the time as each of us finds nonsensical reasons to learn new skills and try things out. But when it comes time to sit down and make an organized end goal, Kipp wisely asks us to consider the impact we’d like that work to have on the world. Equally importantly, how will we make sure completed work actually gets used? This is where the idea of politics in technology comes to play, in the sense that politics is a major mechanism for collective decision-making within a society.

Currently the CTO of Treau, and a Lecturer and Researcher at Yale, Kipp delivered this keynote live on November 7th. Kipp was an expert judge for the Hackaday Prize in 2017 and 2018. The video of his talk, and a deeper look at the topics, are found below.

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Today At Remoticon: Sunday Live Events

Hackaday Remoticon is a worldwide virtual conference happening now!

Public Livestreams (all times are PST, UTC-8):

Hackaday YouTube and Facebook Live:

  • 12:00pm SDR Workshop
  • 2:15pm Hacker’s Guide to Hardware Debugging Workshop

Hackaday Twitch:

  • 11am SMD Challenge: Remoticon Attendees (Heat 2)
  • 1pm SMD Challenge: LayerOne Badge Team
  • 3pm SMD Challenge: Remoticon Attendees (Heat 3)

Hackaday Twitch Two:

  • 12:00pm Design Methodology Workshop
  • 12:45pm 0 to ASIC Workshop
  • 2:45pm IC Reverse Engineering
  • 3:30pm How to Create Guides People Will Actually Use

Today At Remoticon: Saturday Live Events

Hackaday Remoticon is a worldwide virtual conference happening now!

Public Livestreams (all times are PST, UTC-8):

Hackaday YouTube and Facebook Live:

Hackaday Twitch:

  • 6am SMD Challenge: Badge.team
  • 8:15am Solder Techniques Demonstration
  • 12pm SMD Challenge: Hackaday Writers
  • 2pm SMD Challenge: Remoticon Attendees (Heat 1)
  • 4pm SMD Challenge: Queercon Badge Team

Hackaday Twitch Two:

  • 12:00-2pm Demos
  • 5:30pm World Tour Robot

Today At Remoticon: Bring-a-Hack

Last Chance Tickets:

General admission tickets for this weekend’s Hackaday Remoticon are only available for two more hours! These are free, but you need to have one to get in on tonight’s Bring-a-hack.

Today’s Live Events:

The Community Bring-a-Hack meetup for all general admission ticket holders begins today at 16:00 PST. Check the ticketing hub page for your link to the event which is being held on Remo.

Live streaming events open to the public will begin on Saturday at 10:00 PST with open remarks and Kipp Bradford’s keynote talk. Workshops and the SMD Challenge will live-stream all day. And Alfred Jones will present his keynote at 18:30 PST followed by the Hackaday Prize Ceremony. Follow our media channels to be notified of all live streams:

Flexible Actuators Spring Into Action

Most experiments in flexible robot actuators are based around pneumatics, but [Ayato Kanada] and [Tomoaki Mashimo] has been working on using a coiled spring as the moving component of a linear actuator. Named the flexible ultrasonic motor (FUSM), [Yunosuke Sato] built on top of their work and assembled a pair of FUSM into a closed-loop actuator with motion control in two dimensions.

A single FUSM is pretty interesting by itself, its coiled spring is the only mechanical moving part. An earlier paper published by [Kanada] and [Mashimo] laid out how to push the spring through a hole in a metal block acting as the stator of this motor. Piezoelectric devices attached to that block minutely distorts it in a controlled manner resulting in linear motion of the spring.

For closed-loop feedback, electrical resistance from the free end of the spring to the stator block can be measured and converted to linear distance to within a few millimeters. However, the acting end of the spring might be deformed via stretching or bending, which made calculating its actual position difficult. Accounting for such deformation is a future topic for this group of researchers.

This work was presented at IROS2020 which like many other conferences this year, moved online and became IROS On-Demand. After a no-cost online registration we can watch the 12-minute recorded presentation on this project or any other at the conference. The video includes gems such as an exaggerated animation of stator block deformation to illustrate how a FUSM works, and an example of the position calculation challenge where the intended circular motion actually resulted in an oval.

Speaking of conferences that have moved online, we have our own Hackaday Remoticon coming up soon!

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