Vibrating steering wheels tell you when to turn

Jacob Aron, technology reporter
Ever been distracted and missed your satnav's instructions? It's all very well having a clever box to tell you when to turn, but it's very easy to watch a junction pass by if the radio is blasting or the kids are screaming in the back. Now, a team of engineers is offering a solution: the vibrating steering wheel.
Cagatay Basdogan and colleagues at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, say that equipping a steering wheel with a pair of vibrating motors similar to those found in mobile phones makes it easier for drivers to navigate. Their system augments existing GPS devices by vibrating on the left or right side of the wheel when you need to make a turn, and vibrating on both sides when approaching a roundabout.
The researchers tested the idea with a driving simulator, asking 12 volunteers to navigate a virtual city while hearing loud noises or distracted by a passenger attempting to strike up a conversation. On average the participants made three-and-a-half navigation errors when using a non-vibrating steering wheel, but this dropped to just one error when the motors were switched on.
Basdogan and his team have embedded the motors into a leather cover that can be placed over the steering wheel of any car, but future cars could also have motors built into the wheel. He plans to test their system in a real car soon, and his team is also experimenting with adding extra motors to convey even more navigational information. They will present the system at the World Haptics conference in Istanbul later this month.

Smarter car algorithm shows radio interference risk

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
Smarter than the average car (Image: Melanie Gonick)
An experiment at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology has highlighted some of the hidden risks inherent in (supposedly) smart cars that will depend on radio-based Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) for extra safety on the road.
In an ITS system, in-car computers communicate with each other over vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) microwave radio links, while the cars also communicate with traffic lights and roadside speed sensors over a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) radio signalling system (the infrastructure transmits information about cars that are too old to have ITS systems fitted). When two cars are approaching a junction and the V2V/V2I speed signals suggest they are going to crash, a warning can be sounded or a software algorithm can choose to make one of the cars brake, for instance.
I tried this out on the Millbrook test track in Bedfordshire, UK, in 2007: speeding towards a junction in a Saab my brakes were automatically applied to allow a speeding Opel to pass in front of me. It was by turns scary and impressive. But if it hadn't worked I'd have been toast.
But MIT engineer Domitilla Del Vecchio says such systems can be over-protective, taking braking action when there is no real threat. "It's tempting to treat every vehicle on the road as an agent that's playing against you," she says in an MIT research brief issued today.

All-electric F1 could boost electric car research

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)
The success of the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS), the battery-assisted speed booster introduced to Formula One cars this season, has motorsport executives believing that an all-electric version of the F1 competition could spur development of longer range electric road cars.
"We'll definitely see an electric F1 one day," says Nick Fry, the influential chief executive of the Mercedes grand prix team, and who previously ran Brawn, the 2009 F1 championship winner. "To start with it'd be in parallel with regular F1, like the electric version of the Isle of Man TT motorbike race runs alongside the TT. Everyone thought an electric TT a bit of a joke to start with but now it's being taken very seriously."
KERS comprises a combined motor/generator fixed to an engine's drive shaft and a tray of lithium-ion batteries slung beneath the car. During braking, the generator converts kinetic energy to electricity to charge the batteries. Once a lap, the driver can get a 6.6 second speed boost by dumping that charge into the motor, gaining a power boost of 60 kilowatts (80 horsepower in old money).

Burt Rutan's flying car takes to the air

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

(Image: Scaled Composites)
When Burt Rutan, the doyen of aircraft and spacecraft designers takes an outlandish aviation idea seriously it's probably time to sit up and take notice. The founder of Scaled Composites, the Mojave, California-based maker of record breaking planes, has designed and built his own "roadable aircraft" - a car that can be converted into a plane. His involvement in this nascent - and oft-derided - field adds considerable credibility to the notion that personal flight will one day become a reality.
Called the BiPod, the twin fuselage vehicle has two half-litre internal combustion engines that charge lithium-ion batteries in each nose. On the road, the BiPod's wings are stowed between the fuselages and the batteries power a 15-kilowatt electric motor to drive the rear wheels.

How to unlock and start a car - with a text message

Jamie Condliffe, contributor

Thought your shiny new car looked pretty impregnable? Think again. Two researchers have shown that they can unlock a car  - and even start the engine - using a simple text message.

Don Bailey and Matthew Solnik, researchers at iSEC Partners presented their work at the Black Hat 2011 security conference in Las Vegas, explaining how they can use an Android phone to carry out a  technique they've dubbed "war-texting". The new technique relies on intercepting text messages, which many devices use to send commands or even firmware (permanent software programmed into a read-only memory) updates.

By setting up a local GSM network in the vicinity of a Subaru Outback, the team were able to intercept password authentication messages sent between the electronic key fob and the vehicle. What happens next is not exactly known, because the researchers haven't divulged all their secrets as a courtesy to the manufacturer.

However, what we do know is that intercepting those authentication messages allowed the team to understand the basic commands required to communicate with the security system of the car. Once they knew those details, they were able to send their own messages to the system in order to reverse-engineer the firmware - effectively learning how the entire device works.

Equation helps keep tyres on the road longer

Jamie Condliffe, contributor

Ever wondered how long it's going to be until you have to change the tyres on your car? Wanted to calculate how far around the world one set of treads could take you? Or even just felt like spending a long weekend doing some complex math?

The solution could well be here. A team of researchers from the School of Automobile Studies at Tongji University, China, have developed a new equation that predicts the rate at which tyres wear. The results could help save the haulage industry millions of dollars - and they might even ease the strain on your pocket, too.

As you'd expect, their results, published in Journal of Vibration and Control, show that wear is related to the contact area on the road, the physical properties of the rubber, the friction between the road and tyre, any skidding that occurs, and the weight of the vehicle.

More interesting than the equation, though, is the analysis that the team performed to find out which parameters affect tyre wear the most - not least because it might mean you don't need to shell out for new tyres so often.

You won't be surprised to find out that the biggest factors contributing to wear are side slip, speed, and the mass of the car itself. That means that if you want your tread to last longer, you should cut down on the skids and speeding, and kick out any unwanted passengers while you're at it. Other big offenders are low tyre pressures - so keep them pumped up - and ambient temperature.

But maybe the biggest shock is that the car's suspension and the road surface that's driven on make hardly any difference to tyre wear at all. So boy racers whose cars feature suspension lowered so far they have to drive slowly down rough streets to avoid damage have one saving grace - they're caring the planet, four tyres at a time.

Control your phone with a kick

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Going hands-free with your phone normally involves using voice control, but that could soon change thanks to researchers who have another interpretation: kick gestures.

Sriram Subramanian and colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK and the University of Manitoba, Canada say there are many situations where your feet are the best choice of input. "For example, a mother holding a baby or a shopper carrying bags may not be able to answer their call or skip to the next song on their phone without putting down the baby or the shopping bags," he says, adding that people with dirty or gloved hands could also benefit.

To find out what kick gestures can do the researchers connected a Kinect sensor to a tablet computer held by the user. The Kinect tracked the user's foot motion and turned it into an on-screen kick, moving a virtual football in the desired direction.

Subramanian found that people could accurately distinguish between five different kick zones separated by an angle of 24 degrees - any more and it became difficult to aim in the right zone. He also found people could kick at two distinct speeds. These results, presented at the Mobile HCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden last week, suggest a number of useful kick gestures could work, such as kicking to flick through different screens or to navigate a menu with multiple options.

The current Kinect setup isn't very portable, but Subramanian expects that future phones will be paired to accelerometers in your shoes - the technology is already used by Nike and Apple to let iPhone owners track their running stats. "We have made some progress with our implementations and we can now detect many of the foot gestures with just accelerometers placed on both the feet," he says.