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How Etak Paved the Way to Personal Navigation

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Dan Maloney

Our recent “Retrotechtacular” feature on an early 1970s dead-reckoning car navigation system stirred a memory of another pre-GPS solution for the question that had vexed the motoring public on road trips into unfamiliar areas for decades: “Where the heck are we?” In an age when the tattered remains of long-outdated paper roadmaps were often the best navigational aid a driver had, the dream of an in-dash scrolling map seemed like something Q would build for James Bond to destroy.

And yet, in the mid-1980s, just such a device was designed and made available to the public. Dubbed Etak, the system …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Car Navigation Like It’s 1971

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Dan Maloney

Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns, and the far too frequent stops at dingy gas stations for the humiliation of asking for directions. It took forever sometimes, and though we got where we were going, it always seemed like there had to be a better way.

Indeed there was, but instead of waiting for the future and a constellation of satellites to guide the way, some clever folks in the early 1970s had …read more

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MIT Invented a Tool That Allows Driverless Cars to Navigate Rural Roads Without a Map

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Tracey Lindeman

Mapping rural areas is a barrier to autonomous vehicles operating in those areas, but cars might not need maps at all. Continue reading MIT Invented a Tool That Allows Driverless Cars to Navigate Rural Roads Without a Map→

Shoes That Tell You Where to Go

Posted on April 14, 2018 by Kristina Panos

The worst thing about walking around while trying to follow directions is that you have to keep looking down at them to get the next turn. At best, you’ll miss out on the scenery; at worst, you might walk into traffic.

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to look down? Yes it would, and with Walkity, there’s no need to look down. Walkity is a set of cuffs that slip on the backs of your shoes, pairs with your phone, and uses haptic feedback to tell you where to go. Each one has an Arduino Mini Pro, an …read more

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Using Moiré Patterns To Guide Ships

Posted on April 7, 2018 by Steven Dufresne

[Tom Scott] ran across an interesting visual effect created with Moiré patterns and used for guiding ships but we’re sure it can be adapted for hacks somewhere. Without the aid of any motors or LED animation, the image changes as the user views it from different angles. When viewed straight on, the user sees vertical lines, but from the left they see a right-pointing arrow and from the right, they see a left-pointing arrow. It’s used with shipping to guide ships. For example, one use would be to guide them to the center point of a bridge. When the pilots …read more

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MIT Breaks Autonomous Drone Speed Limits By Not Sweating Obstacles

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Will Sweatman

How does one go about programming a drone to fly itself through the real world to a location without crashing into something? This is a tough problem, made even tougher if you’re pushing speeds higher and high. But any article with “MIT” implies the problems being engineered are not trivial.

The folks over at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have put their considerable skill set to work in tackling this problem. And what they’ve come up with is (not surprisingly) quite clever: they’re embracing uncertainty.

Why Is Autonomous Navigation So Hard?

Suppose we task ourselves with building …read more

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Suspected mass-spoofing of ships’ GPS in the Black Sea

Posted on September 26, 2017 by Lisa Vaas

One ship’s navigation system reported that it was actually on land Continue reading Suspected mass-spoofing of ships’ GPS in the Black Sea→

Visual Scanner Turns Obstacles into Braille

Posted on June 10, 2017 by John Baichtal

This interesting project out of MIT aims to use technology to help visually impaired people navigate through the use of a haptic feedback belt, chest-mounted sensors, and a braille display.

The belt consists of a vibration motors controlled by what appears to be a Raspberry Pi (for the prototype anyway) with a distance sensor and camera connected as well. The core algorithm is designed to take input from the camera and distance sensors to compute the distance to obstacles, and to buzz the right motor to alert the user — fairly expected stuff. However, the project has a higher goal: …read more

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Head-Up Display Augments Bionic Turtle’s Reality

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Dan Maloney

There’s a harsh truth underlying all robotic research: compared to evolution, we suck at making things move. Nature has a couple billion years of practice making things that can slide, hop, fly, swim and run, so why not leverage those platforms? That’s the idea behind this turtle with a navigation robot strapped to its back.

This reminds us somewhat of an alternative universe sci-fi story by S.M. Stirling called The Sky People. In the story, Venus is teeming with dinosaurs that Terran colonists use as beasts of burden with brain implants that stimulate pleasure centers to control them. While the …read more

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