Global Positioning System for Car

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) developed by the United States Department of Defense. It is the only fully functional GNSS in the world. It uses a constellation of between 24 and 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, which enable GPS receivers to determine their current location, the time, and their velocity. Its official name is NAVSTAR GPS. Although NAVSTAR is not an acronym, a few backronyms have been created for it. The GPS satellite constellation is managed by the United States Air Force 50th Space Wing. GPS is often used by civilians as a navigation system.

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use as a common good. Since then, GPS has become a widely used aid to navigation worldwide, and a useful tool for map-making, land surveying, commerce, scientific uses, and hobbies such as geocaching. Also, the precise time reference is used in many applications including the scientific study of earthquakes. GPS is also a required key synchronization resource of cellular networks, such as the Qualcomm CDMA air interface used by many wireless carriers in a multitude of countries.

The first satellite navigation system, Transit, used by the United States Navy, was first successfully tested in 1960. Using a constellation of five satellites, it could provide a navigational fix approximately once per hour. In 1967, the U.S. Navy developed the Timation satellite which proved the ability to place accurate clocks in space, a technology that GPS relies upon. In the 1970s, the ground-based Omega Navigation System, based on signal phase comparison, became the first worldwide radio navigation system. The design of GPS is based partly on similar ground-based radio navigation systems, such as LORAN and the Decca Navigator developed in the early 1940s, and used during World War II. Additional inspiration for the GPS came when the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik in 1957. A team of U.S. scientists led by Dr. Richard B. Kershner were monitoring Sputnik's radio transmissions. They discovered that, because of the Doppler effect, the frequency of the signal being transmitted by Sputnik was higher as the satellite approached, and lower as it continued away from them. They realized that since they knew their exact location on the globe, they could pinpoint where the satellite was along its orbit by measuring the Doppler distortion.

from :wikipedia.org

Robot Car 1

The MIT Smart Cities research team's car. Image: Franco Vairani/MIT Department of Architecture

It is not every day that a concept car re-writes the rules of more than 100 years of motoring. In development for four years by a team of architects and engineers led by William Mitchell, former head of the school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as part of his Smart Cities research group, a new MIT car is borne of a complete rethink of people's relationship with their cars in the ever-expanding cities of the future.

Prof Mitchell expects we will share cars that will be easier to drive in congested cities, will be pollution-free and can be customised at will.

The city car concept, with styling input by architect Frank Gehry, will be completed and delivered by MIT to General Motors early next year.

"Primarily we're interested in urban living," says Ryan Chin, an architect and engineer at MIT's media lab and a member of Prof Mitchell's research group. "Everything scales down from what we think the city of the future is."

The Smart Cities group focused on how cars could be better adapted to get round familiar problems of city life, namely congestion, pollution and parking. Motor companies are well aware of the issue. But the group felt the companies had missed the point, even with city cars such as the Smart, the iconic two-passenger cars introduced by Swatch and Mercedes in 1998.

"We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems," says Mr Chin. While Smart changed the way people think about parking and size, the MIT engineers felt that, as it had not been widely adopted and congestion and pollution problems had got no better, its success had been limited.

So the MIT team started from scratch to come up with their own concept: a stackable, shareable, electric, two-passenger car. "Imagine a shopping cart - a vehicle that can stack - you can take the first vehicle out of a stack and off you go," says Mr Chin. "These stacks would be placed throughout the city. A good place would be outside a subway station or a bus line or an airport, places where there's a convergence of transportation lines and people."

The precedent for this type of shared personal transport is demonstrated with bicycle-sharing schemes in European towns and the ZipCar and FlexCar projects on the east and west coasts of the US respectively.

The MIT concept car is a complete re-think of vehicle technology. For a start, there is no engine, at least in the traditional sense. The power comes from devices called wheel robots. "These are self-contained wheel units that have electric motors inside," says Mr Chin. "The interesting thing is that the wheel can turn a full 360 degrees so you can have omni-directional wheel movements. You can rotate the car while you're moving, any direction can be front or back and you can do things like crabbing or translate sideways. It's almost like you imagine yourself driving a computer chair."

The wheel robots, complete with their own suspension, remove the need for a drive shaft and even the engine block, freeing up designers to make new use of the space in the car.

"Essentially the car will comprise four wheel-robots plus a customisable chassis," says Chin. "The frame can be built specifically for each customer."

Add wafer-thin, programmable displays that cover the interior and exterior of the car like a layer of paint, and you have a vehicle that can be customised at will. "You can imagine signalling being not just a static signal light but something more dynamic," says Mr Chin, who suggests the words "reversing" or "turning left" could roll across the car's body to declare the driver's intentions. "From a heating and cooling point of view, you might want your car to be darker or lighter depending on weather. On the interior, you can customise your dashboard for each person. If I'm an elderly person, I probably want a very large speedometer so I can see it; if I'm a race-car driver, maybe all I want is a tachometer."

The close proximity of cars in cities increases the risk of accidents, and the MIT car has a host of radical ideas to deal with this problem. Chief safety features include responsive seats that do away with the need for seat belts and air bags: these are based around a spine at the back of the seat with a number of "fingers" to embrace a passenger and hold them in place if the car detects that it is involved in an accident. And the cabin would absorb the impacts of crashes using new materials. "There is a new development in fluids that can be magnetised so that they move from liquid to solid state within a nanosecond. You can imagine using these fluids as a way of absorbing energy in an impact."

Over the next few months the MIT team will complete the final design and present their results to General Motors, which will build the first prototype. Beyond that, Mr Chin is already trying to arrange a public test in the Far East. "We might do this in Hong Kong or in Singapore," he says. "The interest in those places is that they are very dense, have mass transit and limited range. An island like Hong Kong would be a perfect place to test this because you have all those conditions."

Whether the city car concept appears on garage forecourts as designed by the Smart Cities group or whether the technologies are taken forward individually remains to be seen. Chin says the group would be happy with either outcome.

from:http://www.guardian.co.uk

Electric Vehicle

image of Prius (one of Toyota's top sellers in the United States). There are over 1 million worldwide


An electric car is a type of alternative fuel car that utilizes electric motors and motor controllers instead of an internal combustion engine (ICE). The electric power is usually derived from battery packs in the vehicle.

In general terms an electric car is a rechargeable battery electric vehicle. Other examples of rechargeable electric vehicles are ones that store electricity in ultracapacitors, or in a flywheel.

Vehicles using both electric motors and other types of engine are known as hybrid electric vehicles and are not considered pure electric vehicles (EVs) because they operate in a charge-sustaining mode. Hybrid vehicles with batteries that can be charged externally to displace are called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and are pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs) during their charge-depleting mode. Electric vehicles include automobiles, light trucks, and neighborhood electric vehicles.

A hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is a hybrid vehicle which combines a conventional propulsion system with a rechargeable energy storage system (RESS) to achieve better fuel economy than a conventional vehicle. It includes a propulsion system additional to the electric motors, to be not hampered by range from a charging unit like a battery electric vehicle (BEV).

Modern mass-produced HEVs prolong the charge on their batteries by capturing kinetic energy via regenerative braking, and some HEVs can use the internal combustion engine (ICE) to generate electricity by spinning an electrical generator (often a motor-generator) to either recharge the battery or directly feed power to an electric motor that drives the vehicle. Many HEVs reduce idle emissions by shutting down the ICE at idle and restarting it when needed (start-stop system). An HEV's engine is smaller than a non-hybrid petroleum fuel vehicle and may be run at various speeds, providing more efficiency.

HEVs became widely available to the public in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius. HEVs are viewed by some automakers as a core segment of the future automotive market. Futurist magazine recently included hybrid electric vehicles as cars of the near future.

Obama Clean Energy and Fuel Policy

Barack Obama doesn't think much of John McCain's $300 million Clean Car Challenge, treating it as if it's some new reality show on the Discovery Channel masquerading as energy policy, his energy policy and greenhouse credits policy will serve to enable us to swap our cars and air conditioners with China and India for thier bicyles, horses and carts.

Over the longer term, we know that the amount of fuel we will use is directly related to our land use decisions and development patterns, much of which have been organized around the principle of cheap gasoline. Barack Obama believes that we must move beyond our simple fixation of investing so many of our transportation dollars in serving drivers and that we must make more investments that make it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access other transportation alternatives.

He will “launch” the energy policy that before he began his on off-shore drilling. Interestingly, he’ll push it in Lansing, Michigan, where the oil supply crisis has created dark times for auto manufacturers. According to the AP, Obama’s plan looks long on redistribution and short on real solutions, especially those that will help Michigan’s biggest industry.

Obama says he wants to tax oil companies’ windfall profits and use some of the money to help motorists pay for more expensive gasoline. He says he also wants to use $50 billion to help jump-start job creation and help local communities struggling in the economic downturn.

Obama already has an energy policy on his website, one that has been part of his campaign for months. The word “drill” does not appear anywhere in this policy, even today. The word “oil” never appears in the context of increased domestic production. Instead, Obama refers to “big oil” and the need to reduce our use of oil by 35% over the next twenty years.

How do we get there? Keep inflating those tires, folks:

• Increase Fuel Economy Standards
• Invest in Developing Advanced Vehicles
• Build Biofuel Distribution Infrastructure
• Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities

Any strategy for reducing carbon emissions must also deal with coal, which is actually the most abundant source of energy in this country. To keep using this fossil fuel, I believe we need to invest in the kind of advanced coal technology that will keep our air cleaner while still keeping our coal mines in business. Over the next two decades, power companies are expected to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants, and countries like India and China will build hundreds. If they use obsolete technology, these plants will emit over 60 billion tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere. We need to act now and make the United States a leader in puting in place the standards and incentives that will ensure that these plants use available technology to capture carbon dioxide and dispose of it safely underground.
But of course, one of the biggest contributors to our climate troubles and our energy dependence is oil, and so any plan for the future must drastically reduce our addiction to this dirty, dangerous, and ultimately finite source of energy.

Increasing the production and use of locally grown, renewable fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol offers us an opportunity to produce and use fuels within our region, enhance our nation's security by reducing dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil, strengthen the Southeastern agricultural economy, and help slow global warming.

Emissions for E85 relative to gasoline:

• 15% reduction of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)
• 40% reduction of Carbon Monoxide
• 20% reduction of Particulate Matter
• 10% reduction of Nitrogen Oxides
• 80% reductions of Sulfates
• Lower toxics and hydrocarbons
• Increased acetaldehyde and ethanol emissions

(Source: EPA 2002)


A Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was passed as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requiring $7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be produced in the United States by 2012. However, the industry has grown at an unprecedented rate. In 2007, the Energy Independence and Security Act was passed which expanded the RFS to 36 billion gallons by 2022. The new RFS significantly expands the required production of fuel from cellulosic feedstocks and outlines lifecycle greenhouse gas reduction requirements?a critical element to ensure that the industry develops sustainably and without further advancing global warming.