[Updated 1:15 pm. See below] It’s been a busy week for Boston-area company financings, but it’s particularly interesting to zero in on some progress in cleantech.

Somerville, MA-based XL Hybrids, a startup that converts commercial fleet vehicles into hybrids, said it has raised an additional $2 million from undisclosed investors. The company also has formed a partnership with U.K.-based Ashwoods Automotive, which makes a retrofitting kit that XL Hybrids plans to use in the U.S. The news was first reported by the Boston Globe.

Last July, Tod Hynes, XL’s president, told me the company was targeting town cars, duty vans, and other commercial vehicles that travel more than 30,000 miles a year and get low gas mileage. XL’s approach is to retrofit these vehicles with lithium ion batteries, electric motors, and other integration and control technologies so as to reduce their fuel consumption by 15 to 30 percent, he said.

The company has been running pilot tests in the Boston area to prove the concept. Reached by e-mail today, Hynes says to stay tuned for more information on pilots in the coming months. He adds that Ashwoods Automotive is “one of the leading hybrid conversion companies in the world,” and that it recently won an award as the fastest-growing cleantech company in Europe. “We are working very closely with them to co-develop their system for the American market,” he says. [This paragraph was updated with comments from Hynes---Eds.]

XL Hybrids was founded in 2009 by a team of MIT alums, including Hynes. The company has raised a little more than $3.8 million to date from angel investors and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund. XL currently has 10 full-time employees, according to the Globe report.

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OK, a flying Humvee doesn’t sound like a very green vehicle—but the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency isn’t interested in green.

DARPA is interested in improving the safety and lethality of U.S. troops in dangerous environments. And it is willing to pay handsomely for it—to the tune of a five-year, $65 million research program to develop what it calls a “Transformer” vehicle that works like a Humvee on land, but can also fly.

No, this isn’t an Onion article. The goal is to be able to carry four troops and their gear (1,000 pounds) over a distance of 280 miles on one tank of fuel, by any combination of air and land, the agency says. The vehicle must be able to take off and land vertically—meaning it will fly like a cross between a helicopter and a plane (see drawing above). And, oh yeah, it has to be piloted by an average Marine Corps soldier without any flight experience. In other words, it needs to fly mostly by itself.

If it works—a big if, indeed—such a vehicle could swoop over obstacles or tough terrain, and potentially could help troops avoid ambushes and improvised explosive devices in roads. It could also be used for evacuation or rescue missions where it would be very useful to scan the situation from the air and then drop in at the right spot—in urban combat operations, say—while maintaining some mobility on the ground after landing. (You can read more details and speculation in this Popular Mechanics article.)

A key participant in the DARPA program is Woburn, MA-based Terrafugia. You might know it as the “flying car” company, though the firm much prefers the drier term “roadable aircraft.” Terrafugia was founded in 2006 by five MIT-educated pilots, and has been developing a light sport plane, called the Transition, that can be driven on roads and is slated for testing and production next year. The company declined to comment on its involvement in the DARPA program beyond the information in its press release this week. But it’s clear that Terrafugia’s expertise in combining flying and driving vehicles is valuable here.

Indeed, Terrafugia is “one of the few companies that has experience blending the disparate ground vehicle and aircraft requirements into a single functional concept,” says Stephen Waller, the program manager for the DARPA project, in an e-mail. “This is the primary challenge to successfully develop the Transformer vehicle.”

Terrafugia is one of several companies participating in the program—and a few have connections to the Boston area. Virginia-based aerospace firm Aurora Flight Sciences, which has a research and development office in Cambridge, MA, and technical consulting firm Metis Design, based in Cambridge, both have received small-business research grants to work on the project. For its part, Terrafugia is the largest subcontractor to AAI, a Maryland-based aerospace and defense company owned by Textron, a multi-industry conglomerate headquartered in Rhode Island. AAI is one of the two main contractors on the DARPA project; defense tech giant Lockheed Martin is the other (see drawing on left for Lockheed’s competing design concept).

Meanwhile, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has been awarded $988,000 to develop an autonomous control system for the vehicle. Sanjiv Singh, a professor in CMU’s Robotics Institute, is leading that effort. And rocket engine company Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is working on the engine and propulsion technology for the … Next Page »

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Panasonic’s $30 million investment in Palo Alto, CA-based Tesla Motors, announced by the company on November 3, has been confirmed in a regulatory document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing reveals that the equity sale took place on November 2, just one day before the public announcement.

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It’s a big day for U.S. innovation strategy. The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship is holding its first official meeting at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today—and Xconomy has some exclusive details.

The council, made up of 26 national leaders in business, technology, and academia, is charged with helping the Obama administration “develop a broader strategy to spur innovation and enable entrepreneurs to develop breakthrough technologies and dynamic companies, and to create jobs all across America,” according to a statement made earlier this summer by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

In July, Locke, the former Governor of Washington, announced the members of the advisory council at a forum held at the University of Michigan. They include Tom Alberg, co-founder of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group; Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI International; Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution and co-founder of AOL; Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and GoLoco; Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan; Desh Deshpande, chairman of A123Systems, Sycamore Networks, and Tejas Networks; Ken Morse, former head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and former president of MIT; and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. (Carlson, Chase, Morse, and Vest are “Xconomists,” informal editorial advisors to Xconomy.)

Group members reported that Steve Case, co-chair of the council (along with Coleman and Deshpande), hosted a dinner for the group at an area restaurant last night. Xconomy also has it on good authority that Case went to high school with President Barack Obama at the Punahou School in Honolulu, HI, back in the day.

Robin Chase, who’s based in Cambridge, MA, says she recently took part in a small pre-meeting of council members from her region to discuss ideas they might bring to the meeting today. Some ideas that came up included: having a program where university students who want to start a company could have an advisor and get credit for it; and giving students work-study pay for working on their startup ideas.

“As I think about my recommendations, the things that have come up, they’re almost all about reducing impediments,” says Chase. Some people, she says, feel that the best way to help entrepreneurs is to provide more money. Her view is different. “Those that will be successful are the ones who will have to scramble. It’s evolution. It’s Darwinian,” she says. “Money isn’t the impediment, but there are other impediments.”

Curt Carlson of SRI wrote in an e-mail: “Major improvements in innovation outcomes are possible…Innovation is an essential element of the solution, if we are to address our debt and job creation problems. Many/most areas of America must be improved: taxes, regulations, R&D, government services, university education, K-12, etc.” Asked what he hoped would be discussed or accomplished at the council meeting, Carlson wrote, “I always point to treating new companies differently—and better—than big ones. That is where the jobs are created.”

Today’s meeting wasn’t a secret, but it doesn’t seem to have been promoted in any way. To help prepare for it, members of the council received a copy of President Obama’s September 2009 whitepaper on national innovation policy, which talks about promoting competition, strengthening the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and pushing such areas as clean energy, advanced vehicles, and healthcare, among other things. We might have more to report after the meeting, so watch this space.

Robert Buderi contributed reporting to this story.

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Get your legislators to create regulatory exemptions for vehicles that are sold in small annual volumes.

Right now, it costs about $250 million to bring a new vehicle through all the safety and other regulatory requirements and $1 billion to build the factory that can produce such vehicles in volume. Is it any wonder that there is so little innovation happening in the automotive industry?

I know that the UK has such an exemption, and I think that the rest of Europe does too.  If we want innovation in vehicles we need to be able to experiment, adapt, iterate and evolve.

Right now, that just can’t happen. Metro-Detroit and Michigan is filled with willing and experienced innovators whose hands are tied by regulation. We need to open that up!

[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes his son Cam and eight-year-old grandson Alex, had already arrived and were busy setting up for the day—a table of coffee and donut holes for the crew and onlookers, a Subaru converted into a mobile data acquisition center, and several barrels of fuel at the ready.

For Shadle, 68, and his partner and co-owner of the North American Eagle, Keith Zanghi, 55, the day’s engine test was just one stop along a more than 11-year journey to build the fastest land vehicle in the world. The goal: 800 miles per hour.

Shadle and his crew, all based in Washington state, were busy lowering the Eagle, a 56-foot-long tubular car forged out of the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, from the trailer. The nose and tail cones had been removed for transport, reducing the car to 48 feet in length—just short enough to fit inside the trailer. Other crew members busily prepared the steel cables that would anchor the car to two gravel-filled trucks, weighing 80,000 lbs in all, and to a nearby tree with deep roots—a “safety precaution,” the crew said. This setup procedure was nothing new for them.

“We’ve probably been out to this airport maybe 25 times, and we tie up to our favorite tree back there,” Zanghi said. “Luckily it’s not raining. It could be worse.”

For both Shadle and Zanghi, the thirst for speed was born out of a love of drag racing at an early age. And naturally, like any “typical teenager of that era,” as Shadle calls himself, drag racing led to more racing at higher speeds, and eventually, flight.

“For me, it started back when I was just a kid back in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. My uncles were all back from World War II and they got into stock car racing—the old jalopies running on dirt tracks. And of course we used to go to the races, so I’d hang out in the pits and watch my hero uncles,” Shadle said. “My first drag race on a real strip was at an airport. We raced on Friday nights for 50 cents and you could race all night.” Later, in his 20s, Shadle joined the Air Force and developed his career as a pilot.

“Just like Ed, we all grew up with the space program. The Mercury astronauts were my heroes—the Gemini and Apollo [as well]. All I did was build model airplanes when I was a kid,” Zanghi said.

The shared passion for flight, speed, and all the machinery behind them brought Shadle and Zanghi together in the 1990s when they both found themselves on a team working to build a vehicle that could break the land speed record. They were beat out, however, by Great Britain’s Richard Noble and Andy Green, who in 1997 achieved the current record of 763.1 mph with the ThrustSSC.

“At that time, the record was 633 mph, which is about 140 mph below the speed of sound, so we were building a car that was designed to go sub-sonic.” Zanghi said. When the British team broke the record, their car went supersonic. “As soon as that happened, we knew our car was obsolete,” he said.

When their project folded, Shadle and Zanghi decided to team up on a brand new endeavor, and in 1999 they bought the Eagle’s junked F-104 fuselage, without wings, for $25,000. The single-engine supersonic interceptor had its heyday flying with the U.S Air Force from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.

According to Zanghi, the F-104 had the ideal shape for land speed racing. The body was … Next Page »

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Around the time Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPad, a funny Photoshopped picture began making the rounds on the Web, showing Jobs with four iPhones crudely lashed together with duct tape. The picture’s unspoken message, of course, was that the iPad is just a big iPhone.

Well, something like that is actually coming true in the automotive battery field. It turns out that you can make a pretty good battery for a hybrid electric vehicle by assembling lots of small lithium-ion laptop battery cells—up to 2,000 of them, in fact—into one big pack.

This is the approach being pursued by Boston-Power, the Westborough, MA, startup best known for making the environmentally friendly Sonata batteries used in many Hewlett-Packard notebook computers. And in a sign that Boston-Power is getting serious about marketing its so-called Swing cells to electric-vehicle makers, the company is expected to announce today the appointment of retired General Motors executive Robert Purcell to its board of directors.

As the leader of GM’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Group from 1994 to 2002, Purcell helped to launch the EV-1, GM’s first modern electric vehicle, as well as an electric pickup truck and early hybrid cars. He went on to lead global sales, planning, and strategic alliances for GM’s Powertrain Group, managing $2 billion a year in direct engine and transmission sales and $1 billion in licensing activity.

In other words, he’s been around the block a few times in the automotive industry. And while he says he’s “seen a lot of things” in his work with GM and its partners, he’s never seen a car powered by the equivalent of 2,000 laptop batteries.

“Of course, this isn’t just as simple as strapping together a bunch of laptop cells,” Purcell told Xconomy last week. “It’s about integrating from cell to module and then from module to pack. Boston-Power has some very clever ideas about how to do that in a cost-effective way. And this isn’t a science fair project—they are doing the hands-on work to move from cell to module to pack in a way that will work in a typical light-duty passenger vehicle.”

Boston-Power has been eyeing the transportation market since 2008, when it expanded the R&D facilities at its Westborough headquarters and began to build prototype battery packs for power-assisted bikes and scooters. So far, the company has tested Swing-based battery packs in just a few hundred cars—but Christina Lampe-Onnerud, the company’s founder and CEO, predicts that eventually the Swing and other lithium-ion batteries will completely … Next Page »

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“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

It’s one of the many memorable exchanges from “The Matrix.” But next time, Keanu Reeves should just talk to Christina Lomasney about getting some Modumetal armor—so he truly won’t have to worry about dodging anything.

Lomasney is the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based nanotech startup Modumetal, which has grand plans to reinvent the metals industry, not just body armor. Three months ago, Modumetal announced it had raised more than $1.5 million from the Alliance of Angels, Second Avenue Partners, and WRF Capital, to advance its development of nanolaminated structures—fundamentally new kinds of metals that are stronger and lighter than steel and can be used to make better armor, structural components, and corrosion- and heat-resistant coatings. The 17-person company has also raised just under $1 million in government contracts and grants.

But first, let’s flash back to 2007. In a formative meeting, Lomasney and her fellow co-founder (and former University of Washington physics labmate) John Whitaker were talking with Dan Rosen, chair of the Alliance of Angels, about the idea behind their company. “They looked like the cat that ate the canary,” Rosen recalls. “My comment was, ‘Do you guys really understand what you have there?’”

In what can be a telling exercise for any entrepreneur, Rosen asked them to write the Wall Street Journal article that would appear the day Modumetal was successful. They wrote two. The first said that all U.S. auto manufacturers had adopted Modumetal to make their cars, increasing their fuel efficiency by 50 percent. The second said the military had announced that new vehicles using Modumetal technology have saved 10,000 lives. “Both were very interesting glimpses of the future,” Rosen notes.

Fast forward to last week when I sat down with Lomasney (see photo, left), a Boeing alum, to discuss where things are going with Modumetal, hear more about its strategy, and get a tour of the facilities. Those ambitious Wall Street Journal milestones haven’t been met yet, but if anything, the vision for the company has grown.

Lomasney is not one to make speculative or unfounded claims. Her one-word summary of Modumetal’s culture is “competent.” Last summer, she said the company was transitioning from military to transportation applications. So when she now says, “We’re the next ArcelorMittal”—the world’s largest steel maker—you sit up and take notice. As she explains, the metals industry has not changed that … Next Page »

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Local Motors, the Wareham, MA startup building crowd-sourced cars, has announced that starting at noon Wednesday, customers can go online to get in line to buy a Rally Fighter, the company’s first production vehicle. The $50,000 car, which we’ve described in the past as “half muscle car, half dune buggy,” contains a 265-horsepower, 3.0-liter, clean diesel BMW engine. Buyers can put down $99 today to buy a number in line, put down $5,000 later to lock in a build date, and pay the remaining $44,901 on delivery.

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Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of unmanned aircraft systems, announced today it has received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to provide technologies to support Canadian forces’ operations in Afghanistan. The contract, which includes two additional one-year options, specifically calls for small unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

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Paul Allen just got a new addition to his Flying Heritage Collection of vintage aircraft. Yesterday, the Paine Field facility in Everett, WA, held a media event in which the museum hoisted a full-scale replica of SpaceShipOne to the ceiling. Just thought Xconomy readers would be interested to see these photos (courtesy of Jennifer Bragg and Adrian Hunt).

SpaceShipOne was funded by Allen and received the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 as the first low-cost, civilian, manned spacecraft launched into suborbital flight (to an altitude of around 100 kilometers). The craft, and its replica, were built by Mojave Aerospace Ventures and Scaled Composites. The original ship is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Back in August, Luke took a tour of the Everett hangar facility, which opened to the public last June. It looks like the SpaceShipOne replica will feel right at home, as it is placed near the collection’s ME-163, the world’s first operational rocket-propelled aircraft—an inspiration to the design team of SpaceShipOne.

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Bill Klehm may not be aware of his wordplay when he says, “We’re seeing significant traction in the European bicycle market and in light electric vehicles.”

Klehm, 45, is the chief executive of San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies, a startup that has been developing an innovative transmission without gears. The company says its “NuVinci” technology is scalable and improves acceleration, performance, cost, and overall vehicle efficiency over conventional transmissions.

Fallbrook’s transmission, designed by San Diego inventor Don Miller, is known as a continuously variable planetary transmission, or CVP.

Unlike a conventional transmission, which uses a set of gears with specific fixed-speed ratios, a CVP uses a mechanism that changes seamlessly as a drive train accelerates and decelerates. In effect, the system provides an infinite number of gear ratios between its highest and lowest speeds.

At a time when U.S. automakers are reeling from the 2008 spike in gasoline prices and a litany of other problems, Klehm says, “I can accurately describe us as being overrun with requests to build transmissions for electric vehicles and for hybrid vehicles.”

The company, which has raised about $25 million from more than 80 private investors is not yet profitable. But Klehm remains optimistic, saying Fallbrook Technologies has been extending its business beyond bicycles and light electric vehicles such as golf carts.

Fallbrook’s seven-member board of directors includes Gary Jacobs, a San Diego investor and son of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs; Gary Weiss, whose Weiss Group provides management, advisory, financing and executive search services to growth companies; and James Bartlett, a retired principal of Cleveland-based Primus Venture Partners.

Miller, a bicycle enthusiast, developed his original CVP design while tinkering in his garage to develop his concept for “the world’s fastest bike.”

Other continuously variable designs use belts, pulleys, and various doughnut-shaped designs, but Fallbrook’s design uses a set of steel balls to vary the transmission’s speed ratio. The balls … Next Page »

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OK, so this isn’t technically a Seattle story. But how can we resist a bizarre new flying machine being built by Boeing to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth? This week, Boeing announced it is teaming up with Calgary, Alberta-based SkyHook to develop a “heavy-lift rotorcraft” that can carry a 40-ton load up to 200 miles without refueling. The JHL-40 (couldn’t they come up with a catchier name?) is designed to support drilling and mining operations in the Canadian Arctic and Alaska.

It certainly looks cool. It’s an airship, the length of a football field, with four helicopter rotors spinning alongside it. The ship will be filled with helium to make it neutrally buoyant—that keeps the vehicle and its fuel in the air—while the rotors provide lift and thrust to support whatever it’s transporting. The 40-ton capacity would be twice that of the world’s most powerful vertical lift aircraft, Russia’s MI-26 transport helicopter. Boeing is under contract from SkyHook to build two prototypes at its Rotorcraft Systems facility in Pennsylvania. Once built and tested, the craft will need to be certified by Transport Canada and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

But there are some major safety and technical issues involved, which most news outlets aren’t talking about yet. Remember the Hindenburg? In 1977, my family spent a year in Germany, and I recall seeing the newsreel footage of the fiery disaster—it was the 40th anniversary of the German airship’s demise (the exact cause is still a mystery). Those images have always stuck with me, and with a lot of people, which is a big part of why zeppelins went out of style. Of course, today’s blimps don’t use flammable hydrogen for buoyancy, which was the Hindenburg’s fatal flaw. There are, however, other issues to consider—some of which helped to sink German company Cargolifter AG, which tried to build an airship capable of lifting 160 tons but went bust in 2002 after its prototype was destroyed in a storm.

To get the inside scoop on modern rotorcraft design, I went to Robert Breidenthal, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington who has done consulting work for Boeing. Breidenthal points to three main challenges of the JHL-40′s design, which will need to be worked out before it can become a viable transport ship.

1. Vulnerability to turbulence
This is a “classic problem with neutrally buoyant vehicles,” says Breidenthal. “It might be necessary to limit operations to relatively tranquil atmospheric conditions, securing it during turbulence,” he says, adding that this might not be a problem in the Arctic, which has long periods of calm weather. But if a storm is coming, look out.

2. Aerodynamic control
Because the spinning rotors are close to the hull, they will affect the airflow and pressure along the side of the craft. That could lead to “substantial side forces,” says Breidenthal, which would need to be managed in flight. “It would be fun to work all the fluid mechanics of that out,” he says.

3. Price of helium
Because it’s so light, helium eventually escapes from the atmosphere into space, and is hard to find in the first place (only in natural gas wells). It is a “strategic resource with unique and valuable characteristics” so it’s under high demand, Breidenthal says. Helium prices have already, umm, ballooned by about 50 percent in 2008, and could keep going up.

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Last Halloween, a Boston startup called Untravel Media published a multimedia walking tour called “Boston’s Little Lanes and Alleyways” that guides listeners through some of the city’s oddest secret passageways and back streets. I took the tour myself, and found that its dramatic combination of photography, music, and narration taught me about a side of the city that even most Bostonians know nothing about. (Untravel also has a number of other interesting tours, including a brand new one about the historical neighborhoods around Harvard Square.)

In the spirit of “Little Lanes,” I thought I’d tell you about another strange and mostly-forgotten piece of Boston’s past: the half-abandoned cloverleaf where I-95 meets I-93, on the western edge of the Blue Hills reservation between Canton, MA, and Milton, MA. I stumbled across this forlorn, fascinating place last fall at the end of a hike around the reservation. And while highway construction may sound like an odd subject for a column that’s supposed to be about technology and the Web, I see the Canton cloverleaf as an important technological artifact in its own right. It’s a telling symbol of our own occasional indecision about what we value more: technological conveniences (automobiles, in this case) or coherent, livable communities.

The ghost cloverleaf, which connects to the reservation’s trail system, is an odd sight indeed: a network of curving ramps and a disused six-lane expressway that suddenly dead-ends in a dense, marshy forest. It’s fully outfitted with curbs, drains, and lane markings, but is used today mainly as a refuse dump and long-term parking lot for construction equipment owned by the Massachusetts Highway Department. As you walk along the empty pavement, the main sounds are the chirping of crickets and the distant roar of cars on I-93. (The photo here conveys a bit of the spot’s strange, lonely atmosphere.)

I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about great half-built or never-built projects, so I immediately wanted to know what happened here. As I learned from an assortment of websites, the cloverleaf was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.

From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).

Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.

Think of the city you know, and then think of a 300-foot-wide right-of-way thrust along the following route: from I-93 near Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street in Roxbury west to the Ruggles T station; then across Huntington Avenue, flattening the Museum of Fine Arts and slicing through the Emerald Necklace where the Fenway joins the Riverway; then turning north to cross Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, intersecting with the Mass Pike in a huge tangle of ramps, and soaring across the Charles River on a tall, ugly, concrete bridge overshadowing the BU Bridge (click on the map at left for a larger depiction of this monstrosity); then descending back into Cambridgeport, paralleling Pearl Street and Prospect Street and blighting Central Square and eastern Somerville; and finally curving eastward along Washington Street and rejoining I-93.

Demolition to make way for the Inner Belt began on the Roxbury end of the route in 1962. But in one of the first examples of a major community uprising against a … Next Page »

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Local battery powerhouse A123Systems is delving further into the automotive market, thanks to a three-way deal involving itself, Norwegian electric car company Think, and General Electric. A123 has signed a deal to put its lithium-ion rechargeable batteries into Think’s vehicles.

Think is making an electric car, the City, that has a top speed of 60 mph and can go about 120 miles between recharges. It’s already on sale in Norway, and should be available internationally later this year. The company is also developing the Ox, a five-seater it says is close in size to an SUV, but lighter and more aerodynamic. That’s due out in 2009. (I didn’t speak to anyone at Think, but I’m guessing the name “Ox” is supposed to suggest oxygen, rather than a lumbering beast of burden. Maybe they’ll rename it if they move into the American market.)

Both vehicles are designed to rely on either a sodium or a lithium battery. In addition to A123, which makes the “Nanophosphate” lithium-ion battery, Think is working with Enerdel of Indianpolis, which makes a lithium-manganese system.

A123 batteries contain nanomaterials that let them hold more energy, run longer, and recharge faster than traditional lithium-ion systems. To build batteries for electric cars, the company has to take its individual battery cells and design them to operate in connected stacks that work with the car’s electrical system. The two vehicles, which will have different operating ranges, will require two different battery-pack designs, says David Vieau, CEO of A123. That’s why A123 is teaming up with battery-pack design experts at GE’s Global Research Center. The collaboration will “accelerate the timeline,” according to Vieu.

Meanwhile, another branch of General Electric, GE Energy Financial Services, is putting money into both companies to help advance the development of the electric cars. GE invested $4 million in Think, and increased its investment in A123Systems to more than $20 million. Vieau wouldn’t say exactly how much GE put in as part of this latest deal, but overall it’s the largest cash investor in A123, which has raised $148 million in financing to date.

He said both GE and A123 had been in talks with Think about battery systems, and the multi-party deal just made sense. “All of it kind of came together at the same time,” he says.

A123 has also been working with General Motors to provide the battery for GM’s electric vehicle, the Volt, and with BAE Systems to help power hybrid buses. Vieau says the deal with Think is yet another step into the transportation market.

But that doesn’t mean it will be solely a car parts company. A123 is also continuing its relationship with Black & Decker—among its first commercial products were batteries for high-power, longer lasting power tools. Still, Vieau says, “The transportation market is going to be our largest overall.”

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A robot car built by MIT faculty and students was one of just six autonomous vehicles to successfully complete the DARPA Urban Challenge competition this weekend. However, when the results were announced Sunday afternoon, Team MIT had missed out on the big prize money, which went to the first three finishers: Tartan Racing (led by Carnegie Mellon University), the Stanford Racing Team, and VictorTango from Virginia Tech.

The challenge, presented by the Defense Advanced Research Agency, was designed to advance the state of the art for autonomous vehicles for use by the military. After semi-final qualifying rounds in late October, 11 teams were chosen for the finals, which took place on Saturday at the abandoned George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. Their task was to navigate a mock-city environment that contained busy four-way intersections and other obstacles designed to simulate conditions that vehicles might encounter in a military supply mission. The event offered $3.5 million in prize money, with $2 million going to the winner, $1 million to the second-place finisher, and $500,000 to the third-place team.

MIT’s robot vehicle, dubbed Talos, was one of just six of the 11 finalists to complete the three challenges given the finalists and finish the course in under six hours. We checked in throughout the day Saturday to watch the competition via DARPA’s live webcast. By noon EDT, all 11 teams were successfully on the course. But almost immediately, some ran into trouble. Intelligent Vehicle Systems, an entry from Ford, Honeywell, and Delphi, got stuck right out of gate and had to be manually backed up and restarted. Similarly, Team Oshkosh Truck, which looked like a giant yellow Tonka truck, also encountered early difficulties.

Around this time came what might have been the world’s first autonomous vehicle traffic jam—seven vehicles piled up at a four-way intersection. A little over an hour and a half into the challenge, Oshkosh (oh gosh), Annieway (from Germany and the only team led by a woman), and ISV were being removed from the course. A half-hour after that, the Knight Rider bot (University of Central Florida) drove into a house, unfortunately a disqualifying error.

But given all the challenges of an urban environment, with stop signs, intersections, moving traffic, and various additional obstacles, it was impressive that even six robots finished the course. Indeed, with many of the vehicles at times traveling very quickly while obeying all traffic rules, it was sometimes difficult to believe they were completely autonomous. In addition to the four already mentioned, Team Cornell and the Ben Franklin Racing Team (University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University) completed all the tasks.

MIT’s robot, with by far the most sensors of any robo-vehicle in the race, according to commentators, might have been done in by its own sophistication. The car carried 40 computing cores cooled by a rooftop air conditioning unit, all of which was powered by a 6-kilowatt generator. It seemed to get stuck repeatedly. And indeed, webcast commentators began asking such questions as, ‘Does MIT’s car think too much?’

“They’ve got enough going on in there to operate two or three cars,” said commentator Jamie Hyneman, co-host of the hit Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. “You don’t hear the car, you hear the generator and the air conditioner.” However, he added, “once they get those bugs worked out, watch out, it’s quite a vehicle.”

At 4:44 pm, Stanford’s “Junior,” became the first team to finish all three missions. One minute behind it was Tartan Racing (the winner was not just selected by time, but based on its overall performance throughout the challenge, much like an equestrian competition). When Talos finally completed the course, the commentator enthused, “MIT, in their first-ever DARPA challenge, finishes fifth across the line.”

We reached MIT aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of the team leaders, for comment late Sunday. “I congratulate CMU, Stanford, and Virginia Tech on excellent performances,” How wrote in an e-mail. “While we trailed them by some time, we are very pleased that we finished the full 55 miles and came in fourth place. I think this was a great accomplishment for a first time team, and think that the students and postdocs did an outstanding job. I am very proud of what the team was able to accomplish in the past year and a half.”

“By the way,” How continued, “I thought the race was going to be fun, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be that much fun. It truly was amazing to watch these robots driving around at speed with all that traffic on the road. What a blast.”

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It wasn’t a shoo-in, according to MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jonathan How. But Team MIT learned this afternoon that it has won a qualifying berth in the DARPA Urban Challenge finals on Saturday, when observers will learn which competing institution’s autonomous vehicle is best at navigating a complex mock-city environment replete with moving traffic, busy four-way intersections, and numerous obstacles.

A surprising number of prominent teams, including Team Caltech, Team Princeton, and Axion Racing, were definitively eliminated after qualifying events held at George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA, from October 26 through 31. And while MIT wasn’t one of the teams eliminated, it also wasn’t among a group of six teams named by DARPA as qualifiers on Wednesday, creating considerable suspense as to whether the MIT “supercomputer on wheels”—a Land Rover loaded up with sensors, servers, and software by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students from MIT and Olin College—would be allowed to compete for the $2 million grand prize on Saturday.

But officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsors of this year’s challenge as well as two previous robot-car races in 2004 and 2005, released a list of five more qualifying teams this afternoon, including MIT. In the end, 24 of the 35 teams who traveled with their robot cars to Victorville were eliminated from the competition. MIT was the only team from New England to make the finals (or even the semi-finals).

How, who spoke with me from his office at MIT before boarding a plane for California, says he listened in on the announcement remotely as a colleague in Victorville held up a cell phone. “It’s nice to get this far,” How says. “There are good friends of mine who did not, and it would have been tough to have done this amount of work and not get through. I really feel bad for those guys. But I’m just hoping we can go out there and put on a good show so that MIT can be proud.”

How says the main point of the qualifying events was “to make sure that every vehicle in the race is sufficiently safe that they can just leave the robot driving around.” That’s probably a good thing, given that the environment on Saturday will be more complex than anything any of the teams have dealt with before. All 11 robot cars will be on the course simultaneously, along with as many as 80 other vehicles, including chase cars and spectator vehicles. “It’s going to be a lot of fun to see what happens,” How says.

According to How, Team MIT didn’t make it into the first group of qualifiers because the Land Rover had trouble with one particular event, a loop designed to test how well the robot cars could merge into moving traffic. “You’re facing two lanes of oncoming traffic,” explains How. “You turn left across that traffic, merge with moving traffic, drive around a loop, cut across traffic again, join moving traffic again, and so on. The question was how many laps could you do in 20 minutes.” Tartan Racing—one of the first six qualifiers—completed 16 loops in the given time. Team MIT completed six or seven. (Stanford’s team, the defending champions from the 2005 Grand Challenge, did well in the qualifing events and was on the list of six teams announced Wednesday.)

Every team had two chances at the merging-traffic event, and some were able to fine-tune their planning and navigation software sufficiently to improve on the second go-round. Others weren’t. “The traffic was only moving at 10 miles per hour, so a human would probably have been okay with it, but it is a hard problem” for robots, How remarks.

Past DARPA challenges simply involved getting a robot car from the start line outside Los Angeles to a finish line near Las Vegas. Saturday’s finals, where all team members will be forced to look on from spectator stands at the edge of a suburb-like test course, “will be quite a bit different,” How says. “We’ll get to see [the cars] over an extended time. And once the robots start meeting up, then it really becomes stochastic”—a big word for completely chaotic.

How’s own specialty, as I wrote after visiting MIT’s Urban Challenge team in early September, is developing path-planning algorithms like those used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to cross unknown territory safely. And that, as it turns out, is the exact problem the robot cars will face on Saturday. “Say there’s a robot blocking the road. Do you sit there and wait? What if he is waiting for you? Do you move back? You need a very general strategy that’s able to handle many different scenarios,” How says. How well MIT’s car handles such unpredictable situations will be evident in a couple of days—when the event will be webcast live at http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/.

UPDATE 11/2/07 2:40 p.m.: DARPA has released the list of all 11 teams that have advanced to Saturday’s finals.

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Driving in urban traffic is a stupendously tricky task demanding a constant stream of split-second, almost subconscious decisions. In fact, if you give it too much thought—Am I driving inside the lane markers? How much space should I give the car ahead of me? Who got to this intersection first? Is that old lady going wait for the walk signal?—you’ll probably steer yourself right into an accident. Yet creating an autonomous vehicle that can handle such decisions in real time is the whole point of the DARPA Urban Challenge, the third major robot-car competition mounted by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. And to meet that challenge, a team at MIT has built what amounts to a supercomputer on wheels.

On August 9, DARPA named the MIT team as one of 36 semi-finalists for the Urban Challenge, to be held October 26 through November 3 at the urban military training facility at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. The institute’s team will be the only one representing New England in the DARPA challenge, and believe it or not, it’s the first time MIT has won a berth in a DARPA robot-car event, which this time around carries a $2 million first prize.

That creates just a “little bit” of stress for Team MIT, acknowledges aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of four principal investigators (PIs) leading the school’s effort. “The MIT name is on the side of the car,” How pointed out last week as we peered into the team’s extensively pimped-out Land Rover 3. “Is it possible to add more pressure? I don’t know.”

How’s specialty is developing path-planning algorithms of the type used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to chart safe trajectories through unknown territory. And planning will be one of the big tasks preoccupying the 40 CPUs, or “cores,” bolted into in the way-back of the Land Rover, which currently occupies the Aero/Astro hangar in MIT’s Building 33. With all that computing power on board—more than any other team’s vehicle will be carrying, as far as How knows—the MIT car will, in theory, be able to think its way out of dilemmas that may stymie other vehicles navigating the DARPA course (the details of which are kept secret until the day before the competition). “We have algorithms in place that are using 15 to 18 of our cores,” says How. “If you didn’t have 40 computers you couldn’t do it that way—so we have a design freedom that others may not have.”

Ostensibly, How and co-PI Seth Teller, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), invited me over to the hangar to show off the Land Rover. (See a brief slide show of my visit here.) But we spent most of our hour together talking about its sensors and planning algorithms—which is probably a sign of how the field of autonomous-vehicle research has progressed.

Teller and How explained that thanks in part to technology developed and tested during DARPA’s previous competitions, it’s now fairly easy to equip a car for autonomous operation. Attach electric servo-motors up to the gas pedal, brakes, and steering column, and throw in a few dozen off-the-shelf automobile radars, laser range finders, and video cameras, and you’re done—well, if you have the expertise of several MIT departments and a team of undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering* to call on.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s going to drive so well in an urban setting,” says How. That’s because the real challenge in the DARPA competition lies in building the software that will give the vehicle the ability to picture its surroundings and respond to encroaching hazards, all the while moving toward the finish line.

Vehicles participating in the DARPA challenge will need every ounce of awareness their builders can provide, given that the race itself has become much more complex since its earlier incarnations. In the 2004 and 2005 DARPA robot challenges, cars zoomed through the open Mojave desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. (Or rather, in 2005 they did; five vehicles crossed the finish line that year, with Stanford taking first prize, whereas the best team in the disastrous 2004 competition progressed no further than about 7.5 miles.) This time, cars will have six hours to navigate along a series of checkpoints, such as intersections, that will be handed to teams 24 hours prior to the competition.

Each robot car must plan its own route between the checkpoints and make the journey completely autonomously, using only sensor data and GPS systems to navigate. The cars must also obey all California traffic laws, such as ceding the right-of-way to preceding vehicles at four-way intersections. Judges will deduct points if cars fail to avoid obstacles such as lane markers, curbs, or traffic barrels.

“There are at least three levels of planning happening in the car,” Teller explains. “There is the long-range planning of ‘What intersections do I visit?’ Then there’s ‘What is the next few hundred meters of trajectory? What road segment should I choose to advance the mission?’ And then there’s, ‘What’s coming up in the next five or 10 meters, or the next few hundred milliseconds?’ [And] how should the gas and steering and brakes be moved so that the car meets the higher-level trajectory goals.” (See video of the MIT vehicle in action here.)

“It’s a lot more dynamic than previous challenges,” sums up How. It’s also, arguably, more socially relevant. As Teller notes, “If you could have safe autonomous cars, you might be able to avoid many of the 40,000 highway deaths we have every year in the United States. You could probably save a lot of fuel by having cars drive in a more smoothly coordinated fashion. And you could improve productivity by letting people read or work in the back seat while their cars drive.”

That relevance is part of the reason MIT threw its weight behind the project this year. But students from MIT’s Aero/Astro, Mechanical Engineering, and EECS departments also had a fair bit to do with it, say Teller and How. MIT didn’t send a team to the challenge at all in 2004. A student-led group raised $100,000 to build a vehicle in 2005, but the institute provided minimal additional support, and the team failed to qualify. A self-critical article in the November/December 2006 MIT Faculty Newsletter argued that “MIT can do much better” in supporting student projects. The new effort reflects that philosophy, and has also won the sponsorship of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, the Ford-MIT Alliance, and a number of other sponsors.

“We have had a very motivated group of graduate students who very early, in June 2006, basically banged on the table and said, ‘We really want to do this,’” Teller says. “We were game to do it, but to have them come and basically insist that we do it pushed us over the edge.”

Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun, who led his team to victory in the 2005 competition and will again head the Stanford entry in Victorville, says he welcomes the new competition. “I was sad to see MIT absent in past Grand Challenges,” Thrun says. “I am a big fan of the MIT team, since it has recruited world-class robotic researchers…I predict the level of technical innovation will be remarkable for this team in the 2007 race.”

Indeed, when MIT faculty enter a competition, they enter to win. At least, that’s the impression I got from inspecting the team’s Land Rover, which is bristling with sensors on the outside and stuffed with processing power on the inside. To gather information about its position, the car carries an inertial sensor to track short-term changes in direction, precise odometers to measure the amount of ground the car has covered, and a high-end GPS receiver. To see what’s around it, the car is also equipped with mid-range laser scanners or “LIDAR” (for light detection and ranging) that project a skirt of laser beams around the body, detecting objects within about 60 meters. This is supplemented by about 15 longer-range automotive radars of the same type used on luxury passenger cars for adaptive cruise control—and, to provide an extra level of awareness, a fleet of video cameras, which are mainly used to detect road edges.

All in all, the car’s sensors sweep a disk-shaped area about 150 meters in radius. “Within that disk, we have pretty good situational awareness of what we have to avoid,” says Teller. From there on, it’s a matter of finding the way between checkpoints and adapting to last-minute changes in the course, doubling back if necessary—which is all the job of How’s planning algorithms.

On the final day of the competition—November 3, regardless of rain or fog—the most important task will be “establishing what you know and what you don’t know, and planning effectively through that in an uncertain world,” says How. “I think what we have here is a car that, both from a sensing perspective and a computing perspective, will achieve sufficient understanding so that we can proceed. That’s the only thing we’re thinking about right now. That, plus winning the race, of course.”

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