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Before the advent of GPS, especially at sea, navigation meant finding your position by looking up at the stars. Today, when the Global Positioning System isn’t workingor gets jammed by electronic warfaredrones are learning to do something similar, orienting themselves by looking down at the Earth instead. This concept underpins a growing wave of efforts to use cameras, sensors, and AI to keep drones aware of their surroundings, allowing them to complete their missions or pursue their targets without the use of GPS, or even any communication signal. This week satellite giant Maxar entered the fray with Raptor, a suite of software that can determine a drone’s position on the planet by matching its camera feed with the companys giant collection of 3D Earth data. The system began taking shape about a year ago, says Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Maxar Intelligence. By then, he says, it reached a fever pitch of people in defense realizing that all of a sudden, all of these systems that had been designed with GPS would not work in a modern battle space.” An array of technologies for autonomous navigation and alternative positioning have emerged in recent years, driven by the rise of cheaper and more powerful drones, cameras, sensors, and chips. But even as other companies have tapped 2D and 3D imagery for GPS-free navigation, they werent leveraging the abundance of satellite data that Maxar had. “As one of the leaders in this kind of 3D mapping, especially globally, you can either wait for customers to do that development or you can do it yourself,” says Wilczynski. Compared to the basemaps used by other vision-based positioning systems, Wilczynski says Raptors 3D foundation offers advantages particularly at low altitudes, and during nighttime operations, especially with infrared cameras, and in complex terrain, with an accuracy of around three meters. Maxars 3D globe, totaling 125 petabytes in size, now covers 90-million-plus square kilometers, with about three million square kilometers added every month. The imagery comes from Maxars space unit, which operates a constellation of 10 earth observation satellites that provide imagery to defense and intelligence, government, and industry customers. Last year, it added WorldView Legion, a fleet of six high-performing satellites that expanded its ability to more quickly revisit the most rapidly changing areas on Earth. [Photo: Maxar] Acquired in 2022 by private equity firm Advent International for $6.2 billion, the company is a giant in a fast-growing commercial satellite industry, which has been propelled by cheaper flights to low earth orbit on SpaceX rockets, as well as a surge in interest following Russias invasion of Ukraine. Some of the earliest public reporting of the Russian military buildup along its border in 2022 came from nonclassified Maxar imagery, and its satellites have provided key intelligence for the countrys offensive and defensive operations. The importance of that imagery became even clearer earlier this month, when the Trump administration temporarily suspended Ukraines access to the Defense Dept.-funded, Maxar-run cloud platform that U.S. agencies and allies use to task satellites and access images. The suspension cut off free imagery access to Ukraine, though it did not apply to paid access to Maxar’s imagery within Ukraine and did not impact the provision of imagery to U.S. allies including France and the U.K. The war “emphasized the criticality of these technologies,” says Wilczynski, “and especially as Europe starts rearming and starts to think about what does a European continental defense system look like, it really does push a lot of those countries to think much more seriously about space-based reconnaissance technology.” As satellites criss-cross the Earth far above Ukraine, drones have filled its skies, along with the electronic attacks intended to disable their navigation or communication systems. Some Russian counter-satellite systems have been so powerful that they have degraded the encrypted “M-Code signals” used by the U.S.’s constellation of GPS satellites. To survive the jamming and spoofing, Russian and Ukrainian military units have taken to flying drones attached to their controllers by miles-long fiber-optic cables, controlling them by wire rather than over the airwaves. Defense officials around the globe are taking notice. The U.S. has put an emphasis on unmanned and autonomous systems, especially fleets and swarms of attritable drones, designed for one-way trips. Ret. Army General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that within the next 10 to 15 years, up to a third of the U.S. military could consist of robotic systems. (U.S. policy still requires a human to pull the trigger.) [Photo: Maxar] Maxars GPS-free positioning system is designed to work with existing front-facing drone cameras and on-board inertial navigation units. Performing the real-time image matching on the fly necessitates a GPU, either installed on a computer at a ground station or embedded in the drone itself, which would allow it to operate offline. In addition to helping provide positioning for vehicles, remote operators working alongside drone controllers can use the software on commercial laptops to extract real-time target ground coordinates from the drones’ full-motion aeril video feeds. As with Maxar’s imagery data, the system is designed to integrate with workflows in map-based command and control systems, including software from Esri, Palantir, Lattice, and SitaWare. Raptor represents a larger shift for Maxar, from 2D to 3D mapping, and a new business strategy that expands beyond overhead imagery and data. Wilczynski declined to name any Raptor customers, but said the company has already begun conducting operational tests with drone manufacturers in conflict areas, and plans to work with defense primes in Europe and the U.S. to upgrade existing non-GPS resilient technologies. You can upgrade the existing technology in situ without having to do a whole hardware refresh, he says. A push for autonomy without GPS (or maps) In Ukraine, where the domestic drone industry could produce three million drones this year, autonomy has become a major focus. Government officials have said that more autonomous drones with AI targeting will arrive on the battlefield this year, potentially making way for real drone swarm uses. American startups are also developing software and sensors to help drones fly autonomously, without communication or GPS signals, and find and attack ground targets and other drones. U.S. defense tech hotshot Anduril recently debuted an autonomous drone it tested in Ukraine, while drone maker Red Cat announced a partnership with Palantir to integrate visual navigation software into its Black Widow drones. YCombinator startup Theseus builds a small sensor unit for GPS-denied navigation that has attracted the interest of Special Operations Command. Four U.S. autonomy specialistsCX2, Swan, Auterion, and KEF Roboticsare also working with Ukrainian drone makers to develop their systems, with endorsement from the Pentagon. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-based Swan and Arlington, Va.-based Auterion were chosen to compete in a Defense Innovation Unit project called Artemis, in which they will partner with Ukrainian attack-drone makers to develop prototype units that can fly in GPS-denied skies by the end of fiscal year 2025. Another Pittsburgh startup, KEF Robotics, has formed a joint venture with Kiev-based augmented reality company Sensorama Lab to build its autonomous-navigation systems for drones. The new venture, Blue Arrow, has already won a $50,000 award in a DIU hackathon, and is now preparing to test its plug-and-play software and hardware on the front lines in Ukraine. Blue Arrow takes two appraoches to navigating and finding targets in GPS-denied environments. Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), like Maxars Raptor, matches ground features with onboard maps, using machine learning to correct for outdated mapping data. Another approach, ideal for shorter distances, called visual inertial odometry (VIO), works without maps: instead, the system relies on the drone’s inertial data and computer vision techniques like optical flow estimation and simultaneous localization and mapping. We’ve constrained our algorithms and our software to a point where it doesn’t even need a full processor, so we can use just a very small part of the brain of an airplane,” says Olga Pogoda, a co-founder of Blue Arrow. Researchers are developing more outlandish ways of giving drones geospatial awareness. Last year, NILEQ, a subsidiary of British missile-maker MBDA, introduced a low-power visual navigation system that relies on neuromorphic cameras, which, rather than processing a whole image, can operate more efficiently by measuring the differences between pixels in a moving image. The stars can still be useful, too. Last year, engineers at the University of South Australia demonstrated a new, low-cost prototype system that merges vision-based algorithmic computing with celestial triangulation for UAVs flying at night. Accuracy remains a challenge. Maxar is now developing methods to use 2D satellite imagery and drone video to more quickly update its 3D reference map, enabling more up-to-date mapping, especially in areas of rapid change. Improving accuracy is also a priority, especially at lower altitudes; eventually, Raptor could help replace GPS for ground-based autonomous vehicles, too. Beyond positioning and navigation, Raptor represents a broader vision at Maxar for a shared, dynamic “living globe,” says Wilczynski, one capable of connecting disparate systems and sensor data in near real-time. That project has been in the works since at least 2015, when Maxar predecessor DigitalGlobe entered into a joint venture with defense manufacturer Saab to produce photorealistic 3D digital elevation models for enterprise and government use. In 2020, Maxar acquired Saabs stake in that company, Vricon, and it began developing Raptor last year, after it hired Wilczynski, a former executive at data fusion giant Palantir. “This general GPS-denied problem space really gave us a natural way to fuse together 2D data from drones, 2D data from satellites into a 3D world,” says Wilczynski. Among its biggest customers for the 3D Earth data is the U.S. Army, which pays Maxar to power its One World Terrain (OWT) program, a global simulation environment for use in military training. The company won the $95 million OWT contract in June 2019, with its most recent extension awarded last year. “We have this belief that mapping over he next 10 years is going to shift from predominantly 2D to predominantly 3D, he says.
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Featuring Gene Eidelman, Cofounder, Azure Printed Homes; Kate McLeod, Cofounder and Formulator, Kate McLeod and Nicole Richards, CEO, Allonnia. Moderated by Rebecca Barker, Editorial Event Producer, Fast Company. It’s not enough for companies to declare their commitment to the environment. As the federal government rolls back environmental programs and policies at a head-spinning pace, businesses are on their own to maintain momentum in the push toward sustainability. Hear from leaders who are spearheading climate-positive practices by tackling forever chemicals, reimagining what’s possible with recycled plastic and packaging, and more.
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As Americans struggle under backbreaking rental prices, builders are turning to innovative ways to churn out more housing, from 3D printing to assembling homes in an indoor factory to using hempyes, the marijuana cousinto make building blocks for walls.It’s a response to the country’s shortfall of millions of homes that has led to skyrocketing prices, plunging millions into poverty.“There’s not enough homes to purchase and there’s not enough places to rent. Period,” said Adrianne Todman, the acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under former President Joe Biden.One way to quickly build more is embrace these types of innovations, Todman said. “I can only imagine what our housing situation would be like now if we could have made a decision to be more aggressive in adopting this type of housing.”So what are these new ways of building homes? And can they help reduce the cost of new housing, leading to lower rents? Factory-built housing put together in a week In a cavernous, metal hall, Eric Schaefer stood in front of a long row of modular homes that moved through the plant, similar to a car on an assembly line.At a series of stations, workers lay flooring, erected framing, added roofs and screwed on drywall. Everything from electrical wiring to plumbing to kitchen countertops were in place before the homes were shrink-wrapped and ready to be shipped.The business in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Fading West, has pumped out more than 500 homes in its just over three years of operation, each taking just five to seven days to build, even in the coldest winter months, Schaefer said.Once assembled in the plant, the narrow townhouse-style homes with white trim, balconies and front porches, are about 90% done. At their final destination they are move-in ready within six weeks, Schaefer said.The company works with towns, counties and housing nonprofits to help address the shortage of affordable homes, mostly for workers who’ve been squeezed out by sky-high prices in ritzy mountain towns.That includes Eagle, Colorado, not far from the Vail ski resort, where Fading West worked with Habitat for Humanity to install modular homes at affordable rents for teachers and other school district employees. The homes tend to be on the smaller side, but can be multifamily or single family.“You can build faster. The faster you buildeven at a high qualitymeans the lower the price,” Schaefer said. “We see this as one of the pieces to the puzzle in helping solve the affordable housing crisis.”There’s a hefty upfront cost to build the factory, and part of the challenge is a lack of state and federal investment, he said. A patchwork of building codes governing how a structure can be built also makes it difficult, requiring changes to the construction depending on the town or county it is being sent to.Manufactured housing is similar to modular housing, but the units are constructed on a chassislike a trailerand they aren’t subject to the same local building codes. That’s part of the reason they are used more broadly across the U.S.Roughly 100,000 manufactured homes were shipped to states in 2024, up from some 60,000 a decade earlier, according to Census Bureau data. Estimates of modular homes built annually often put them below 20,000. 3D printing is innovative but still ‘a long game’ Yes, there’s technology to 3D print homes.A computer-controlled robotic arm equipped with a hose and nozzle moves back and forth, oozing lines of concrete, one on top of the other, as it builds up the wall of a home. It can go relatively quickly and form curved walls unlike concrete blocks.Grant Hamel, CEO and co-founder of VeroTouch, stood inside one of the homes his company built, the wall behind him made out of rolling layers of concrete, distinct to a 3D printer. The technology could eventually reduce labor costs and the time it takes to build an abode, but is farther off than manufactured or modular methods from making a dent in the housing crisis.It’s “a long game, to start chipping away at those prices at every step of the construction process,” Hamel said.The 3D printers are expensive, and so are the engineers and other skilled employees needed to run them, said Ali Memari, director of the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, whose work has partly focused on 3D printing. It’s also not recognized by international building codes, which puts up more red tape.The technology is also generally restricted to single-story structures, unless traditional building methods are used as well, Memari saidIt’s “a technology at its beginning, it has room to grow, especially when it is recognized in code,” Memari said. “The challenges that I mentioned exist, and they have to be addressed by the research community.” A hemp-and-lime mixture called hempcrete has ‘a bright future’ Hempthe plant related to marijuanais being used more and more in the construction of walls.The hemp is mixed with other materials, most importantly the mineral lime, forming “hempcrete,” a natural insulation that’s mold- and fire-resistant and can act as outer wall, insulation and inner wall.Hempcrete still requires wood studs to frame the walls, but it replaces three wall-building components with just one, said Memari, also a professor at Penn State University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Memari is now helping oversee research into making hempcrete that doesn’t need the wood studs.As much as a million hemp plants to be used for hempcrete can grow on one acre in a matter of months as opposed to trees, which can take years or decades to grow.The plant is part of the cannabis family but has far less of the psychoactive component, THC, found in marijuana. In 2018, Congress legalized the production of certain types of hemp. Last year, the International Code Council, which develops international building codes used by all 50 states, adopted hempcrete as an insulation.Confusion over the legality of growing hemp and the price tag of the machine required to process the plant, called a decorticator, are barriers to hempcrete becoming more widespread in housing construction, Memari said.Still, he said, “hempcrete has a bright future.” Associated Press video journalist Thomas Peipert contributed to this report from Buena Vista, Colorado. Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Jesse Bedayn, Associated Press/Report for America
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