R/C Car 100,000 Scale Mile Drive Experiment

RC Test Flight Goes Self-Driving to See if R/C Cars Can Hit 100,000 Scale Miles on a Buried Wire

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R/C Car 100,000 Scale Mile Drive Experiment
Four years after Daniel Riley first lashed remote-control crawlers to a backyard tether and asked whether any of them could rack up 100,000 scale miles, he ran the experiment again. This time the cars steered themselves. In the original 2022 test, a spinning line kept every vehicle on a circle, which also loaded one side of the drivetrain harder than the other and turned wear into a lopsided argument. For the Self Driving Edition, Riley laid a perimeter wire through his yard, borrowed the sensing idea from robot lawn mowers, and taught an Arduino to twitch a steering servo whenever a coil on the bumper drifted off the signal.

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ESOX X2 Unmanned Ground Vehicle UGV

First Look at ESOX X2, an Electric UGV with Four Quiet Motors and a Thousand Newton-Meters for the Last Mile

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ESOX X2 Unmanned Ground Vehicle UGV
Soldiers still burn hours and calories moving water, ammunition, and radios across ground that wrecks ordinary trucks. Pack animals once filled that gap. Conventional electric robots often stall in the same mud, sand, snow, and rubble because their motors sit in the middle of the chassis and feed torque through gearboxes and shafts that lose grip the moment the surface turns ugly. ESOX Group finished a compact uncrewed platform, called the X2, this summer that tries to skip that failure.

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Polymatt NASA Heat Shield Recreation Crack

Polymatt’s Avcoat Recreation of Orion’s Skip-Entry Crackup Showcases a Heat Shield That Works by Failing

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Polymatt NASA Heat Shield Recreation Crack
Chunks of Orion’s Avcoat came off Artemis I after splashdown, and the scare was real enough that a crewed flight sat in the hangar while investigators spent two years on the cause. Reentry heat itself was not the surprise. Skip entry was. Orion dipped, lifted, then came back in so the peak load would be gentler. That quieter stretch of heating left the outer char less open than a hard, continuous burn. Pyrolysis gases had nowhere to go, pressure rose inside the char, and pieces of the shield broke free. Ground tests that only hammered the material with a short, fierce pulse never showed it.

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