Technology

Seemingly every industry is finding ways to use drones in some way or another, but deep underground ita different story. In the confines of a mine or pipeline, with no GPS and little or no light, off-the-shelf drones are helpless — but an Australian startup called Emesent is giving them the spatial awareness and intelligence to navigate and map those spaces autonomously.

Drones that work underground or in areas otherwise inaccessible by GPS and other common navigation techniques are being made possible by a confluence of technology and computing power, explained Emesent CEO and co-founder Stefan Hrabar. The work they would take over from people is the epitome of &dull, dirty, and dangerous& — the trifecta for automation.

The mining industry is undoubtedly the most interested in this sort of thing; mining is necessarily a very systematic process and one that involves repeated measurements of areas being blasted, cleared, and so on. Frequently these measurements must be made manually and painstakingly in dangerous circumstances.

One mining technique has ore being blasted from the vertical space between two tunnels; the resulting cavities, called &stopes,& have to be inspected regularly to watch for problems and note progress.

&The way they scan these stopes is pretty archaic,& said Hrabar. &These voids can be huge, like 40-50 meters horizontally. They have to go to the edge of this dangerous underground cliff and sort of poke this stick out into it and try to get a scan. Itvery sparse information and from only one point of view, therea lot of missing data.&

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Emesentsolution, Hovermap, involves equipping a standard DJI drone with a powerful lidar sensor and a powerful onboard computing rig that performs simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) work fast enough that the craft can fly using it. You put it down near the stope and it takes off and does its thing.

&The surveyors aren&t at risk and the data is orders of magnitude better. Everything is running onboard the drone in real time for path planning — thatour core IP,& Hrabar said. &The dev teambackground is in drone autonomy, collision avoidance, terrain following — basically the drone sensing its environment and doing the right thing.&

As you can see in the video below, the drone can pilot itself through horizontal tunnels (imagine cave systems or transportation infrastructure) or vertical ones (stopes and sinkholes), slowly working its way along and returning minutes later with the data necessary to build a highly detailed map. I don&t know about you, but if I could send a drone ahead into the inky darkness to check for pits and other scary features, I wouldn&t think twice.

The idea is to sell the whole stack to mining companies as a plug-and-play solution, but work on commercializing the SLAM software separately for those who want to license and customize it. A data play is also in the works, naturally:

&At the end of the day, mining companies don&t want a point cloud, they want a report. So itnot just collecting the data but doing the analytics as well,& said Hrabar.

Emesent emerged from Data61, the tech arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, an Australian agency not unlike our national lab system. Hrabar worked there for over a decade on various autonomy projects, and three years ago started on what would become this company, eventually passing through the agency&ON& internal business accelerator.

&Just last week, actually, is when we left the building,& Hrabar noted. &We&ve raised the funding we need for 18 months of runway with no revenue. We really are already generating revenue, though.&

The $3.5 million (Australian) round comes largely from a new $200M CSIRO Innovation fund managed by Main Sequence Ventures. Hrabar suggested that another round might be warranted in a year or two when the company decides to scale and expand into other verticals.

DARPA will be making its own contribution after a fashion through its Subterranean Challenge, should (as seemly likely) Emesent achieve success in it (they&re already an approved participant). Hrabar was confident. &Itpretty fortuitous,& he said. &We&ve been doing underground autonomy for years, and then DARPA announces this challenge on exactly what we&re doing.&

We&ll be covering the challenge and its participants separately. You can read more about Emesent at its website.

A little known fact about Swedes: when they get angry, they will often scribble down a note on paper — sometimes anonymously — and leave it where it will be seen, rather than confront a person face-to-face.

One extremely angry Swedish pro-freedom internet provider took that passive aggression to a whole new level.

On Thursday, Stockholm-based Bahnhof was ordered by a Swedish copyright court to block Sci-Hub, a pirate site dedicated to free access to academic papers and research. The site, operated by a Kazakh student Alexandra Elbakyan, has faced court orders and threats of site blocks across Europe, following lawsuits from academic publishers like Elsevier, which brought the most recent case.

Bahnhof was forced to block 20 domains associated with Sci-Hub, according to the companyresponse to the court order.

Resigned to the fact that it was unlikely to win an appeal, the internet provider called the publisher &greedy opportunists,& and then blocked Elsevierown website in protest.

&Bahnhof opposes to censorship in every way, shape and form, but it looks like we won&t be able to dodge Elsevierblocking requirement,& the company said on a holding page that Bahnhofcustomers would see when trying to access Elsevierwebsite. The internet provider put up the block &to make sure that they themselves also get a taste of the blocking they&re currently evoking against others.&

The page, featuring a dial-up modem sound and a retro late-1990font and layout, was a jab at what the internet provider sees as a regressive step in the internethistory.

Elsevier, a Dutch academic publisher, has had Sci-Hub in its sights for years. The company suedits creator, Elbakyan, in 2015 as the site continued to grow in submissions and popularity. The site gave reporters and journalists, activists, the generally curious public — and even academics — access to expensive and paywalled content.

Sci-Hub now has more than 70 million academic papers and journals, helping millions to skirt Elseviersubscription costs — in some cases millions of dollars per year.

Many colleges and institutions have been critical of the academic publishing business. Harvard University specifically called out &certain publishers& in 2012 that the rising costs of subscriptions would render their ongoing contracts &untenable.&

&Their business model is also constructed in such a way that the universities and research institutes must pay even to access their own papers, because they have been published through Elsevier,& said Bahnhof.

Academics, too, have mixed views on Sci-Hub, though many have come out in support of the pirate site — despite its illegality — to promote free and open access to academic research. Dr. Holly Witteman, an associate professor in medicine at Université Laval in Quebec City, explained in a tweet thread earlier this year how academic papers are published.

(Spoiler alert: most academics aren&t paid.)

&The reason most academic authors are delighted to share our papers is because itour job to create and share knowledge!& she said.

Elsevier spokesperson Tom Reller confirmed the publisherlegal action, adding that Sci-Hub &infringes intellectual property rights on a massive scale.&

&The risks posed by Sci-Hub and other illegal sites are exacerbated by the way they operate: subverting authentication technology, and reportedly using stolen user credentials and phishing attacks,& the spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. &Sci-Hubillegal activities harm learned societies who are reliant on subscription income to support their important work; it is a threat to the scholarly communications ecosystem, the sustainability of high quality journals as well as the ability to invest in new journals and fields.&

Bahnhofinterstitial page isn&t a hard block — users can click through to go to Elsevierwebsite.&This page you are in front of right now is the result, this is what is expected in the future where private interests can regulate community information,& the page says.

&Is it really this way our judiciary should be used No, we do not like either,& it adds.

When internet providers get angry, they get even.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is laying down the law — literally. Today, Herreraoffice announced a $2.25 million settlement with two property owners in the city. The landlords, Darren and Valerie Lee, ran &an illicit hotel chain during San Franciscohousing crisis rather than lawfully renting the units to residential tenants,& Herreraoffice wrote in a press release.

As part of todaysettlement, the Lees are not allowed to rent out any of their units as short-term rentals until at least May 2025. The property owners must also pay the city $2.25 million to cover the costs of the investigation and other penalties.

&These are not the type of hosts we want on our platform and are glad the City has the tools it needs to enforce the rules,& an Airbnb spokesperson told TechCrunch. &We are proud homesharing is legal in San Francisco and look forward to continuing to work with the City.&

Herrera first sued the owners in April 2014 after the two evicted tenants from their property and proceeded to use that property for short-term rentals. The Lees settled in May 2015 for $276,000 but then went on to violate a court-authorized injunction that prohibited them from continuing to offer any of their properties as short-term rentals. As part of a two-year investigation, Herreraoffice found that the Lees violated the injunction more than 5,000 times in the first 11 months of the injunction. In that time, according to Herreraoffice, the Lees booked more than $900,000 in short-term rentals and made a profit of $700,000.

It was only after this rash of later violations was uncovered that the Lees finally stopped their illegal conduct. To ensure that the Lees did not get to keep their ill-gotten gains — and to send a message to anyone else considering this scheme — Herrera filed a motion in court to enforce the injunction in May 2018, prompting todaysettlement. The $2.25 million settlement will cover the costs of the investigation and fund future consumer protection enforcement, including of the Cityshort-term rental law.

As part of city law, San Francisco requires property owners renting out units for less than 30 days to register with the cityoffice of short-term rentals, as well as be a permanent resident of that unit.Airbnb, however, did not take that new law well. In June 2016, Airbnb filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco aiming to block the law from going into effect that coming August. Fast-forward to May 2017, and Airbnb settled its lawsuit with the city.

The settlement required Airbnb to supply the city with a monthly list of all homes listed on Airbnb, along with information to enable San Francisco to confirm that the unit is registered. Atthat time, there were only 2,100 short-term rental hosts registered in San Francisco, but more than 8,000 listed on Airbnb.

In the case concerning the Lees, the city attorneyoffice said none of the 14 units in question were ever registered with the city.

I&ve reached out to Airbnb and will update this story if I hear back.