MARKANGELCOMEDY BLOG

British mobile carrier EE has unveiled plans to use a fleet of drones and miniature blimps to supply cell phone coverage to rural areas of the UK. The company says its “air mast” network could be used in the wake of natural disasters as well as during events like soccer matches, where crowds congest mobile networks. The company, which is owned by BT, expects to deploy the technology in the field for the first time this year.

Like Facebook’s drones and Google’s balloons, the basic idea is to use airborne craft to beam signal down to users below. The blimps and drones are equipped with miniature mobile sites, including a basestation and antenna, and supply LTE coverage (or 4G, as it’s known in the UK). The blimps hover at a height of roughly 150 feet and can cover an area 4 kilometers wide. The drones are a more temporary measure, and can provide coverage over an area 2 kilometers wide for a few hours at a time.

In a press statement, EE CEO Marc Allera said technology like this would “revolutionize the way people connect.” “We're developing the concept of 'coverage on demand',” says Allera. “What if an event organizer could request a temporary EE capacity increase in a rural area, or a climber going up Ben Nevis could order an EE aerial coverage solution to follow them as they climb?”

More prosaically, though, these blimps and drones provide a PR-friendly face for EE’s management of the UK’s Emergency Services Network or ESN. This is a comms network dedicated to emergency services. For this, though, EE won’t be using its drones or blimps, but a fleet of 32 “rapid response vehicles” — Mitsubishi trucks retrofitted with 11-foot mobile masts. In an emergency situation, or when networks are down due to maintenance, these trucks will be deployed to ensure that the police, fire service, and ambulances never lose signal.

Earlier this month, a company named Agility Robotics unveiled its first ever robot: a bipedal creation named Cassie that looks like a headless, wingless ostrich. Cassie has reverse knees, motor-powered ankles, and can walk over different sorts of terrain at a decent clip. It can even survive a kick to the abdomen (the fastest way to test a robot’s self-balancing capabilities, though not the kindest). But are bipedal robots like Cassie really the future? Why not use wheels, tracks, or just more legs? Why make life difficult?

Well, according to Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton, there are good reasons for using bipedal bots, but it’s taken a while for the technology to catch up. He says the biggest advantage is that legged bots operate seamlessly in locations made for people.

“If you consider humans from a design standpoint, what we were designed for is being extremely agile in an extremely cluttered environment,” Shelton tells The Verge. He says when it comes to “legacy buildings” — i.e., those with stair-only access, or difficult steps or ledges — legged bots are going to be much more capable than those with wheels. “Or, if you want to be at ground level for the task you’re doing — like package delivery or on-site inspection.”

Shelton offers the example of 3D-scanning a rail yard. You could map a yard with a drone, but it would have to hover around, navigating in and out of buildings, and might require supervision. A wheeled or tracked robot would also have problems climbing stairs or making its way over uneven terrain. But a robot with legs would be as mobile as a human. Other use cases in a similar vein include scouting for the military and disaster response scenarios, like exploring a failed nuclear reactor or the epicenter of an earthquake.

“We’re not saying it’s the right solution for everything,” says Shelton. “In particular highly engineered environments, like inside modern factories where you need heavy lift capacity. Yeah, use wheels for that!”

Though Agility Robotics is confident in the possibilities of bipedalism, the approach has unique challenges. When replicating human movement, engineers turn to the human musculoskeletal system as a model, swapping organic muscles for mechanical equivalents. At this point, says Shelton, we don’t have motors as strong or efficient as human muscles, and that makes the resulting robots slow, clunky, or reliant on external energy sources.

Take Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, for example. It’s not just bipedal, but humanoid, with arms as well as legs, all powered by hydraulics. Using hydraulics allows for precision and strength, but they can be difficult to control in way that fluidly mimics human movement.

Agility Robotics approach is to use an “under-actuated” design, meaning it has fewer motors than you’d need for full, like-for-like emulation. Instead, Cassie uses spring elements that mimic the passive feedback of organic systems. This lessens some of the challenges of controlling its behavior super-precisely.

“A good analogy is car suspension, where the mechanical design of the system determines a lot of behavior,” says Shelton. “Cassie will do a certain set of things mechanically without being told to by a computer. By having some springs in the system, we don’t have to handle impacts with the ground, for example.”

Sangbae Kim, who creates bio-inspired robots at MIT like this Cheetah bot, says that stability is still a big problem for bipedal bots. The likes of Cassie and Atlas might be able to survive the odd kick or poke, but ANY more than that and they’RE LIKELY topple over. Kim’s answer? Add more legs.

“Being quadrupedal is about having redundancies,” he tells The Verge. “Imagine you’re climbing and hiking in the mountain; in the most challenging situations you will use your hands. You won’t stay bipedal.” Kim says that humans probably became bipedal in order to free up their hands for using tools (it’s one of a number of explanations), and that four legs are just better suited for stability. “I strongly believe that quadrupeds have higher advantages when it comes to just mobility,” he says. “From leopards to mountain goats, quadrupeds can reach every corner of the land.”

Antoine Cully, a roboticist at Imperial College London, agrees that recent advances are making bipedal bots more viable, but says cost and robustness will continue to be a constraint in the near future. “They are very complex machines and this complexity increases their cost and their propensity to become damaged,” he says over email. “For these reasons, I think that the first commercial applications will be limited to domains that can support and afford these additional costs.”

Cassie is Agility Robotics’ first major prototype. The next iteration of Cassie will focus on bringing down the cost by increasing volume, with the firm aiming for a price tag “well under $100,000” in the next couple of years. The end goal is for a single Cassie to cost “less than a car.”

Currently, Cassie can reach speeds of around three meters a second and operate for 10 hours, shifting between walking and standing. The brains controlling the bot are dedicated to immediate movements rather than ranged navigation, but Shelton is confident those sorts of control functions can come later.

“I actually think we’re on the curve of something similar to self-driving cars,” says Shelton. “We’re probably not closer than four or five years to having bipedal robots go fully mainstream, but certainly not more than seven or eight.”

It might not be time for proper 5G devices just yet, but ZTE is bringing us a step closer, announcing today that it will show off one of the first gigabit LTE smartphones at Mobile World Congress this month. Called — fittingly — the ZTE Gigabit Phone, the Chinese company says the device will make 360-degree VR, 4K video, and instant cloud storage possible on the move.

The first devices to be capable of supporting gigabit LTE were announced last year, when Qualcomm joined with Netgear, Ericsson, and Telstra — the largest Australian carrier — to produce a mobile hotspot that technically allowed 1 Gbps downloads via Telstra’s existing networks. Earlier this year, Qualcomm announced that its gigabit LTE-capable X16 modem would be included in its Snapdragon 835 mobile platform, an upgrade on the previous X12 modem and its 600 Mbps maximum download speed.

ZTE is saving full details of the Gigabit Phone for MWC itself, but the device looks set to become one of the first smartphones on the market to support such speeds, and a stepping stone on the way to 5G.

A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers today introduced a bill that would require US police agencies to obtain a warrant before deploying cell-site simulation surveillance devices known as “stingrays,” reports USA Today. Stingrays are typically used by police to triangulate a criminal suspect’s location based on data emitted from their smartphones or wearable devices with cellular connectivity.

Stingrays are a controversial form of surveillance technology as it can accurately pinpoint a suspect’s location, but can also intercept data from innocent bystanders. Lawmakers are hoping the bill, titled the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, can curb potential abuse of the technology and promote transparency when police agencies use the device.

"As we welcome innovative technologies that help fight crime, we must be mindful of the potential for abuse." Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, said. "When individuals are tracked in this way, the government is able to generate a profile of a person’s public movements that includes details about a person’s familial, political, professional, religious, and other intimate associations,” Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich, added.

A recent investigation found that the Justice Department and Homeland Security spent $71 million and $24 million, respectively, on stingray devices between fiscal years 2010 and 2014. FBI Director James Comey has also made public statements in favor of stingrays, calling them crucial to finding and capturing criminals.

“It’s not about intercepting their calls, their communications,” he said in 2014. “It’s how we find killers. It’s how we find kidnappers. It’s how we find drug dealers. It’s how we find missing children. It’s how we find pedophiles.”