Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

2013-05-03

Controlled Flight of Insect-Scale Robot

BBC News - Robotic insect: World's smallest flying robot takes off

Scientists in the US have created a robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile manoeuvres of the ubiquitous insects.
This "robo-fly", built from carbon fibre, weighs a fraction of a gram and has super-fast electronic "muscles" to power its wings.






Robotic insects make first controlled flight — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences


Cambridge, Mass. - May 2, 2013 - In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m.—subject line, "Flight of the RoboBee."

"I was so excited, I couldn't sleep," recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.

Robotic insects make first controlled flight

The RoboBees project "provides a common motivation for scientists and engineers across the university to build smaller batteries, to design more efficient control systems, and to create stronger, more lightweight materials," says Harvard engineering professor Robert J. Wood. "You might not expect all of these people to work together: vision experts, biologists, materials scientists, electrical engineers. What do they have in common? Well, they all enjoy solving really hard problems." (Credit: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University.)

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

"This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," says Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, Wyss Core Faculty Member, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project. "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well."

Controlled Flight of a Biologically Inspired, Insect-Scale Robot

Science
Vol. 340 no. 6132 pp. 603-607
DOI: 10.1126/science.1231806

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2013-04-22

Norway plans world's first ship tunnel

Norway plans world's first ship tunnel | Construction News | The Construction Index


It would bypass the Stad peninsula in Selje, which is a very exposed area of the coast.
The Norwegian government said that the tunnel will reduce accident risk and improve conditions for sailors along the coast. "This is a spectacular project that we are looking forward to taking on," said coastal director Kirsti Slotsvik.


BBC News - Who, what, why: Why build a ship tunnel?

The Norwegian government has backed an ambitious plan to create the world's first ship tunnel. But why has nobody tackled this engineering feat before?

The answer

  • The Stad peninsula is a mountainous finger of land where fierce weather conditions disrupt and endanger ships
  • Shipping is Norway's second most important industry after oil and gas
  • They are also world-leaders in tunnelling technology, having completed the world's longest road tunnel

Norway to build world's first tunnel for large ships - Ship Technology

The government has agreed to provide NOK1.6bn ($274m) for the Stad Ship Tunnel, which will be built to a height of 45m, width of 36m and will span a length of 1.7km.
The proposed tunnel, which is being planned by Nordfjord Vekst, would bypass the Stadlandet (Stad) peninsula in Selje, Norway linking two fjords near the towns of Teigen and Berstad.
Peaking at 645m, the Stad peninsula is a mountainous divide between the Norwegian Sea to the north and the North Sea to the south.



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2012-11-22

Airbus' Eco-Climb Concept

Launching Airplanes from Catapults, Part 3: Airbus' Eco-Climb Concept - Core77


While many eyes in the commercial airline industry were undoubtedly watching the U.S. Navy's EMALS (Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System) testing, it is Airbus that has first stepped forward suggesting commercial applications. Earlier this year the manufacturer announced "Smarter Skies," a series of concepts and promotional videos revealing where they want to be by 2050.

One component in their plan is for an EMALS-like system, though they never directly refer to military subcontractor General Atomics' invention; instead the company calls it "Eco-Climb," writing that "Aircraft could be manoeuvred onto a track system and accelerated using either electro-magnetic motors built into the track or an inductive circuit within the aircraft itself." [...]


Eco-climb | Airbus, a leading aircraft manufacturer

How will it work?
Aircraft could be manoeuvred onto a track system and accelerated using either electro-magnetic motors built into the track or an inductive circuit within the aircraft itself.
Acceptable acceleration and deceleration limits of passengers would need to be determined, but the experience would be more akin to a comfortable children’s funfair ride rather than a high-octane white knuckle theme park.
The ultimate, albeit it very extreme, concept is to have a system that not only launches but also captures the aircraft, removing the need for landing gear.  This would require all airports to have the same system, to accommodate all routes along with alternative/diversion airports, and most likely is beyond 2050.

EMALS

Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) is a complete launch system designed to replace the existing steam catapult currently being used on aircraft carriers. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the first ship of the CVN-21 Future Aircraft Carrier Class, will use electromagnetic launch systems.
Source: EMALS



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2012-11-21

Brother's 'Last Typewriter' sent to Science Museum

The last U.K. typewriter has rolled off the production line - latimes.com

The last typewriter to be made in the U.K. has rolled off the production line -- and straight into London's Science Museum.

Brother has been making typewriters in the U.K. since 1985, the BBC reports, producing 5.9 million typewriters at its Wrexham factory. Since the advent of computers, demand has gone down. Way down.

[...]

The last typewriter will join 200 others in the Science Museum's collection. "This object represents the end of typewriter manufacture in the UK, a technology which has developed over the last 130 years and has been important to so many lives," said Rachel Boon, assistant curator of technologies and engineering. "This model will enable us to tell the story of how technology has evolved in accordance with our communication needs."


LAST EVER British typewriter manufactured in Wales • The Register

The first commercially successful typewriter
Brother stopped making typewriters in Britain because demand had fallen so much in the country, but it still sells Asian-made machines to the US market.

From as early as 1714, inventors were tinkering about with various "writing machines" and patenting their efforts, but none of the early inventions got much interest. It wasn't until Remington, then a manufacturer of sewing machines, signed an agreement with a patent holder in the 1870s that the Sholes and Glidden Type-writer was born, coining the name and the QWERTY layout that would prove so popular.

Brother started manufacturing portable typewriters in the 1960s and produced its first electronic typewriters in 1985.

Oh Brother! Last typewriter comes off production line at company's factory which made five million | Mail Online


The original: This machine dates back to July 1985 and was the first to be made at Brother's Wrexham factory


Made in Britain: Rachel Bloon from the Science Museum is handed the artefact by Craig McCubbin and Phil Jones from Brother UK


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2012-10-31

IBM's Nanotube Chip Breakthrough


I.B.M. research reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough (IBM Innovation Center Silicon Valley)

John Markoff writes in the New York Times:

I.B.M.scientists are reporting progress in a chip-making technology that is
likely to ensure that the basic digital switch at the heart of modern
microchips will continue to shrink for more than a decade.

The advance, first described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on
Sunday, is based on carbon nanotubes — exotic molecules that have long
held out promise as an alternative to silicon from which to create the
tiny logic gates now used by the billions to create microprocessors and
memory chips.

Ready for nanotech brains? IBM’s nanotube breakthrough gets us closer | VentureBeat

Carbon nanotubes are tiny wires that can conduct digital computer signals at five or 10 times the speed of traditional silicon chips. They have been around since the 1990s, but researchers have had a tough time getting them to behave. When they try to line these wires together in a useful grid as part of a computer design, the wires have a tendency to behave like wet spaghetti noodles.




Ready for nanotech brains? IBM’s nanotube breakthrough gets us closer | VentureBeat


[...] For the first time since research began on these carbon nanotubes, IBM has succeeded in placing them with near-perfect accuracy on the surface of a silicon chip in order to make electronic circuits.

Guha said the accomplishment is big one, though there are several obstacles that still stand in the way of mass production.

If those challenges are met, then we will see a huge leap in computing performance, as microprocessors for everything from PCs to smartphones will be able to take advantage of the technological advance. They could have applications in integrated circuits, energy storage and conversion, biomedical sensing, and DNA sequencing.

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2012-08-11

'Meshworm' a Soft Autonomous Robotic Earthworm

Soft autonomous robot inches along like an earthworm - MIT News Office

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach.

Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm. The robot, made almost entirely of soft materials, is remarkably resilient: Even when stepped upon or bludgeoned with a hammer, the robot is able to inch away, unscathed.

Sangbae Kim, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says such a soft robot may be useful for navigating rough terrain or squeezing through tight spaces.

Meshworm: The worm-like robot that can survive a hammer blow | Digital Trends

Researchers created the “artificial muscle” using nickel and titanium, producing a soft, flexible, mesh-like tube that stretches and contracts with heat.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Meshworm is its ability to withstand some pretty rough treatment. Clobber most robots with a hammer and it will likely result in some sparks, puffs of smoke and a major malfunction. Clobber Meshworm and it just continues crawling along as if nothing’s happened – as demonstrated in the video below. It can also survive someone stepping on it.


DARPA Funds MIT's Soft Meshworm Biomimcry Robot

Resilient Robots for the U.S. Military

Meshworm has the ability to survive a frightening degree of misuse, and that provides one clue into DARPA’s interest in the new technology.

As described by writer Jennifer Chu, the field of soft robotics is of growing interest to engineers. With little or no need for bulky hardware, soft robots are more durable and lend themselves to miniaturization more easily than their mechanical counterparts.

In terms of military purpose, soft robots like Meshworm could be air-dropped, launched or thrown over relatively long distances, land without damage, and set about crawling silently around, squeezing through tight openings and conducting surveillance.

Scientists Create Worm-like Robot That Can Inch Along the Ground

The Meshworm uses peristalsis, contracting and expanding different muscle segments, to inch across the ground. Image via MIT

But there might well be more benign uses as well. Kellar Autumn, a professor at Lewis and Clark College who studies biomechanics in robotics, told MIT that devices similar to the Meshworm could someday be useful for a wide range of applications, including both consumer technology and medical devices such endoscopes, implants and prosthetics. “Even though the robot’s body is much simpler than a real worm—it has only a few segments—it appears to have quite impressive performance,” Autumn said. “I predict that in the next decade we will see shape-changing artificial muscles in many products, such as mobile phones, portable computers and automobiles.”

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2012-07-20

Puralytics SolarBag 3L -- Reusable Sunlight Activated Water Purifier

Puralytic Solar Bag | The Filtered Files

Puralytics, a privately funded technology company located in Beaverton, Oregon is pioneering a new photochemical technology for water purification. They are building solutions to improve filtration for the global water challenges by combining the latest technological innovations with advanced engineering. The invention of the Solar Bag uses an effective and simple process for water purification.
The Puralytic Solar Bag has a backpack with handles that makes it easy to transport water to and from an available water source. Once the bag is filled with any water through the inlet debris filter, the bag is placed in the direct sunlight. It can either lie flat or hung from a tree or post. Once purified, the Solar Bag can be dispensed by a valve into a canteen or pot as required. By harnessing the power of the sun to purify water, the Puralytics Solar Bag will deliver clean drinking water that meets the World Health Organization (WHO) standards in remote areas.

Bag versus bottle? Puralytics’ new approach to pure portable water | SmartPlanet


It takes about three hours for the SolarBag to produce 3 liters of fresh water in direct sunlight (four to six hours if it is cloudy). It can be used several times per day, and Puralytics said the bag can be reused hundreds of times before it needs to be replaced.

The SolarBag exceeds U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for water purifiers, according to Puralytics. “The versatility and performance of the SolarBag makes it the best water purifier on the market for remote and emergency applications,” said Mark Owen, found and CEO of Puralytics. “It’s light, simple to use, easily transportable and reliable.”


Puralytics :: Pure Water




The Details

Sunlight, even on a cloudy day, activates our new, powerful purification capability, embedded in our nanotechnology coated mesh insert. This activates the 5 photochemical processes that purify water and reduce or destroy contaminants found in virtually all water sources.

Treats up to 9 liters of water per day. Reusable hundreds of times.


Easy to Use

Fill bag with water from any fresh water source using supplied cloth filter.

Place the SolarBag in an area open to the sky. Wait 2 - 3 hours on a sunny day, or 4 - 6 hours on a cloudy day or if the source water is tea-colored.

Enjoy your safe, purified water! Again, and again, and again...


TEDx The Future of Water - YouTube

In "The Future of Water" a TEDx talk presented at Oregon State University on April 17, 2012, Puralytics CEO Mark Owen presents the water crisis, defines that the conventional solution to this crisis - municipal water purification - does not and can not supply SAFE water to the world's people, and calls for the development of a new breed of intelligent, decentralized water systems using new technologies.




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2012-06-25

Twisted Waves Carrying Terabits of Data

BBC News - 'Twisted light' carries 2.5 terabits of data per second


Researchers have clocked light beams made of "twisted" waves carrying 2.5 terabits of data - the capacity of more than 66 DVDs - per second.
The technique relies on manipulating what is known as the orbital angular momentum of the waves.

Recent work suggests that the trick could vastly boost the data-carrying capacity in wi-fi and optical fibres.

The striking demonstration of the approach, reported in Nature Photonics, is likely to lead to even higher rates.
[...]
Our planet has "spin angular momentum" [OAM] because it spins on its axis, and "orbital angular momentum" because it is also revolving around the Sun.

Light can have both these types, but the spin version is the far more familiar - as what is commonly called polarisation, or the direction along which light waves wiggle. Polarising sunglasses and many 3D glasses work by passing one polarisation and not another.
[...]
Most recently, Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team of colleagues in Italy demonstrated the principle by sending beams made up of two different OAM states across a canal in Venice, an experiment they described in the New Journal of Physics.

BBC News - 'Twisted' waves could boost capacity of wi-fi and TV


In a highly publicised event in 2011, the team used a normal antenna and their modified antenna to send waves of 2.4 GHz - a band used by wi-fi - to send two audio signals within the bandwidth normally required by one. They repeated the experiment later with two television signals.


Encoding many channels on the same frequency through radio vorticity: first experimental test - IOPscience

Fabrizio Tamburini et al 2012 New J. Phys. 14 033001
doi:10.1088/1367-2630/14/3/033001

Abstract

We have shown experimentally, in a real-world setting, that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves, transmitted on the same frequency but encoded in two different orbital angular momentum states, to simultaneously transmit two independent radio channels. This novel radio technique allows the implementation of, in principle, an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques. This paves the way for innovative techniques in radio science and entirely new paradigms in radio communication protocols that might offer a solution to the problem of radio-band congestion.


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2012-06-23

The AWARE2 Gigapixel Camera

The Gigapixel Race Begins? | Compound Eye, Scientific American Blog Network

So your showoff neighbor brings home a new 36 megapixel Nikon SLR, and your previously top-of-the-line 18 megapixel gadget starts to seem… inadequate. The insolence! The injustice! What can you buy to put that jerk in his place?
How about raising the stakes an order of magnitude with a 960 megapixel supercamera?

The AWARE-2. (credit: Duke University Imaging and Spectroscopy Program)
Researchers at Duke University and the University of Arizona report in this week’s Nature they’ve built a functional prototype gigapixel-scale camera. The Orwellian-sounding AWARE-2 uses a 98 sensor-array mounted behind a single aperture to capture an enormous image in one go.

Next Cameras Come Into View - WSJ.com


The new camera collects more than 30 times as much picture data as today's best consumer digital devices. While existing cameras can take photographs that have pixel counts in the tens of millions, the Duke device produces a still or video image with a billion pixels—five times as much detail as can be seen by a person with 20/20 vision.

A pixel is one of the many tiny areas of illumination on a display screen from which an image is composed. The more pixels, the more detailed the image.
The Duke device, called Aware-2, is a long way from being a product. The current version needs lots of space to house and cool its electronic boards; it weighs 100 pounds and is about the size of two stacked microwave ovens. It also takes about 18 seconds to shoot a frame and record the data on a disk.



AWARE2 Multiscale Gigapixel Camera


This program is focused on building wide-field, video-rate, gigapixel cameras in small, low-cost form factors.  Traditional monolithic lens designs, must increase f/# and lens complexity and reduce field of view as image scale increases. In addition, traditional electronic architectures are not designed for highly parallel streaming and analysis of large scale images. The AWARE Wide field of view project addresse these challenges using multiscale designs that combine a monocentric objective lens with arrays of secondary microcameras.

The optical design explored here utilizes a multiscale design in conjunction with a monocentric objective lens [2] to achieve near diffraction limited performance throughout the field. A monocentric objective enables the use of identical secondary systems (referred to as microcameras) greatly simplifying design and manufacturing. Following the multiscale lens design methodology, the field-of-view (FOV) is increased by arraying microcameras along the focal surface of the objective. In practice, the FOV is limited by the physical housing.  This yields a much more linear cost and volume versus FOV.  Additionally, each microcamera operates independently, offering much more flexibility in image capture, exposure, and focus parameters.  A basic architecture is shown below, producing a 1.0 gigapixel image based on 98 micro-optics covering a 120 by 40 degree FOV.


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2012-05-23

The Leap: an Affordable Accurate Gesture Control Interface

A 'Leap' forward in gesture-control interfaces? - CNN.com




A company called Leap Motion wants to make that kind of gesture control a reality, and it hopes to take the first step with a new type of motion controller.
The Leap is a simple motion controller that you can plug into any USB port on your computer. Once it's plugged in and you've installed the Leap software, it turns the 8-cubic feet of air in front of it into "3D interaction space" — basically, it'll track any and all motion within that space, letting you use your hands to do whatever you could do with a mouse.


Leap Motion

Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard.

Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.

Source: Leap Motion

Leap Motion 3D motion-control device changes how we interact with computers - Tech Talk - CBS News


Currently, Microsoft Kinect is the biggest player in the 3D motion-control technology. However, Kinect is not accurate enough to track handwriting. Leap Motion says the Leap is 200 times more sensitive than existing technologies.

"It was this gap between what's easy in the real world but very complicated to do digitally, like molding a piece of clay or creating a 3D model, that inspired us to create the Leap and fundamentally change how people work with their computers," Leap Motion chief executive officer and co-founder Michael Buckwald said in a press release.




Leap Motion: 3D hands-free motion control, unbound | Cutting Edge - CNET News


"We want to create as vibrant a developer ecosystem as possible, and we're reaching out to developers in all sorts of" fields, CEO Michael Buckwald told CNET:
We want there to be world-changing applications that fundamentally transform how people interact with their operating system or browse the Web.... The goal is to fundamentally transform how people interact with computers and to do so in the same way that the mouse did, which means that the transformation affects everyone, both from the most basic use case all the way up to the most advanced use cases you can imagine for computing technology.


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2012-05-15

Virus-based Piezoelectric Energy Generation


Update 2012-08-14

Piezoelectric virus M13 bacteriophage could power your mobile phone | Mail Online

  • Virus can turn movement into electricity
  • Could one day power your mobile phone or a pacemaker as you walk

A team at the University of California, Berkeley has discovered how to generate electricity from a virus known as M13 bacteriophage.

The virus possesses a property known as piezoelectricity, which means it can translate mechanical energy into electrical energy.

The researchers believe the discovery could one day pave the way for mobile phones that can be charged while you walk and replace the toxic piezoelectric elements already used in mobile phones.

The team found the virus could provide 25% of the power produced by a AAA battery

Generating electricity from viruses as you walk | KurzweilAI

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The generator produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.


Berkeley Lab Scientists Generate Electricity From Viruses « Berkeley Lab News Center

The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.

Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.


The first part of the video shows how Berkeley Lab scientists harness the piezoelectric properties of a virus to convert the force of a finger tap into electricity. The second part shows the “viral-electric” generators in action, first by pressing only one of the generators, then by pressing two at the same time, which produces more current.
[...]
When pressure is applied to the generator, it produces up to six nanoamperes of current and 400 millivolts of potential. That’s enough current to flash the number “1” on the display, and about a quarter the voltage of a triple A battery.

“We’re now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” says Lee. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”


Virus-based piezoelectric energy generation : Nature Nanotechnology : Nature Publishing Group



a, The M13 phage [...]  b, Side view of the electrostatic potential of M13 phage [...]  c, Vertical cross-sectional view of the electrostatic potential of M13 phage.[...]  d, Side-view representation of the electrostatic potential of a single M13-phage [...]





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2012-05-14

Create 3D Models From your Photographs with Autodesk 123D Catch

New iPad App 123D Catch Turns Pictures Into Printable 3-D Renders | Popular Science

Autodesk, one of the premier 3-D printing companies out there right now--they make AutoCAD, the pioneering software--has a new app out for iPad that aims to make 3-D printing easier. Just snap a bunch of pictures of the object you want to reproduce from different angles, and the app, cleverly named 123D Catch, creates a 3-D rendering automatically.



Turn Your Photos Into 3D Models With Autodesk 123D Catch For Apple iPad - Forbes


Complementing the desktop and newly released web versions, the 123D Catch app allows users to capture the world around them in 3D while on the go.  Imagine the potential for photos of vacation memories, family or other mementos brought to life in 3D. Captures made in 123D Catch can also be used as the foundation for further 3D modeling, 3D animation, or used to create a 3D printed object. Some cool real-world uses below.
[...]
Real world uses of Autodesk 123D Catch:
  • AfricanFossil.org is a fossil preservation project with Kenyan Paleontologist Louise Leakey. This cool project is in its infancy to document specimens in the National Museums of Kenya and in labs around the country.
  • Coral Reef protection – there’s a team documenting how coral reefs deteriorate using 123D Catch and then stitching together the pieces.
  • Cities and physical locations of all types can use reality capture tools with 3D drones to take photos and video to model an area or building or roadway.


123D Catch iPad App | Geeky Gadgets

The 123D Catch app lets you take upto 40 photos which can then be uploaded for processing, and the app includes interactive startup guides you help you through the process of creating your first 3D object using the service.

The other app launched this week by Autodesk called 123D Make Intro, has been designed to work the other way and turn 3D models into 2D build plans with animated assembly instructions.

Download them both for free now from the iTunes app store: 123D Catch – 123D Make Intro.



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