Hasta La Gadget!

If human space exploration is going to extend to celestial bodies farther away than the moon or even Mars, we need to develop a tremendous amount of new technology in order to do it. At this weekend’s Long Now-sponsored “Long Conversation” event, NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden outlined what the agency is doing to create that future.

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” Worden himself was fired by President George W. Bush.

The most important near-term development is electric propulsion. The chemical rockets we use to launch shuttles into space are too expensive and inefficient for longer trips; the current generation of propulsion devices we use for deep-space probes and satellites are too slow.

“Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds,” Worden said.

Worden also thinks development of a high-power, high-efficiency electric propulsion system could have huge implications for air travel here on earth. Given the rapidly accelerating growth of travel in the developing world and the environmental impact of current airplane technology, the status quo is unsustainable.

“The long-term answer is a ‘Tesla in the air’,” Worden said, “using high-density batteries powered off ground-based solar grids, so your airliner stays plugged in overnight, and it’s got an electrical engine rather than a chemical engine. I think within ten years we’ll have small-scale business-level ones, and within 20, they’ll be the airliners. If we don’t, I think aviation’s through.”

Other technology in NASA Ames’s research pipeline (both near- and long-term) includes microwave thermal propulsion, to remotely generate power that can be transmitted to a spaceship using 140 GHz beams; synthetic biology to help human beings survive on other planets; and a new DARPA-funded “Hundred Year Starship” program to develop long-distance space travel technology.

“We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Worden added.

One of those billionaires might be Google’s Larry Page, who is keenly interested in space travel and NASA Ames’s research.

“Larry asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?,’” Worden told the Long Now audience. “So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”

Image: Microwave Thermal Propulsion. Credit: NASA Ames / Kevin Parkin. Story via Kurzweil AI. Thanks, Meredith!

See Also:

• NASA's Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack
• NASA's New Jumbo Jet Keeps Giant Eye on Heavens
• Why NASA Is Sending a Robot to Space That Looks Like You
• Launching a Shuttle: NASA Countdown to Blastoff
• NASA's Mini X-Plane Completes Initial Flight Testing
• SpaceX Rocket Achieves Earth Orbit on First Flight
• Caribbean Island to Offer Rides Into Space
• The Beginning of the End of the Space Shuttle
• Video from NASA's Biggest Party Ever
• Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth's Orbit

The French city of Toulouse is testing a system that displays available parking spots on drivers’ smartphones. The system can also tell when someone is illegally parked or hasn’t fed the parking meter.

“This technology comes from space travel,” says Patrick Givanovitch. “They were supposed to help find landing spots on Venus.” The French space agency CNES and Givanovitch’s Toulouse-based start-up company Lyberta helped develop the street-level sensors and refit both their hardware and software to map urban parking spaces. Over time, they plan to add data from global positioning systems as well.

“We know in real time where there is parking available in the city,” Givanovitch says. In addition to helping drivers find spaces and easing congestion, the hope is that city planners will be able to use the data to optimize traffic flows and parking arrangements throughout the city.

The sensors actually work by electromagnetism. They’re placed just below the street and connected in a network using ordinary coaxial cable. An occupied parking spot has a different magnetic profile than an empty one. If a garbage bin or service truck is parked in the space, they can sense that too.

Since they can detect the exact time a car parks and leaves in a space, the sensors can bust meter-cheaters as easily as overhead intersection cameras can detect cars running red lights. Just as the information that a spot is open can be relayed to a driver looking for a space, information that a car’s gone over its time limit can be relayed to the police.

Toulouse’s pilot program will eventually be expanded to cover the entire city; city planners in Paris and Los Angeles are also interested in implementing the technology.

Relief for Harried Drivers: The Parking Space that Finds You [Der Spiegel]

Image by Stefan Simons for Der Spiegel

See Also:

• Groups Build Parks From Parking Spaces
• May 13, 1935: Enter the Parking Meter
• San Francisco Parking Meters Adjust Prices Depending on Demand …
• Smart Parking Meters Hacked — Free Parking For All!
• Our Bike Racks, Ourselves: Crowdsourcing Two-Wheeled Parking …
• "Smart" Parking Meter Implementations, Globalism, and You
• Cell Phones, Internet Bring Parking Meters into the 21st Century …

University of Illinois chemistry professor Alexander Scheeline has developed software that turns a camera phone, an LED, and a few other cheap tools into a spectrometer. Armed with these, he thinks we can bring high-end analytic tools to high school chemistry labs all over the world.

“The potential is here to make analytical chemistry a subject for the masses rather than something that is only done by specialists,” Scheeline said. “There’s no doubt that getting the cost of equipment down to the point where more people can afford them in the education system is a boon for everybody.”

Purpose-built spectrophotometers are essential tools in analytic chemistry. By measuring the electromagnetic spectrum a substance absorbs or emits, you can determine its molecular composition. They’re also expensive, which is why they’ve generally been confined to universities. Scheeline has already brought his cellphone spectrometers to high schools in Atlanta and Hanoi. Other high-school chemistry and physics teachers doing professional development at Illinois have also brought Scheeline’s tools to their classrooms.

Initially, Scheeline hadn’t been looking for ways for students to use their phones in class. Instead, he wanted students to build their own spectrophotometry tool, to better understand their instruments and their limitations. Putting together the LED as a light source, diffraction gratings and cuvettes were easy; finding a small sensor to capture the light was hard.

“All of a sudden this light bulb went off in my head: a photodetector that everybody already has! Almost everybody has a cellphone, and almost all phones have a camera,“ Scheeline said. “I realized, if you can get the picture into the computer, it’s only software that keeps you from building a cheap spectrophotometer.”

Scheeline with the analysis software he’s developed for the cell-phone spectrometer.

Scheeline wrote a Windows desktop program to analyze the students’ JPEG files from their phones. One advantage of this approach over developing a smartphone application to do the analysis directly: Because the phones are used only to take the photographs, it doesn’t matter what operating system a student’s phone is running.

Scheeline then published his source code, a compiled executable application and the cellphone spectrometer instructions for anyone to download from the Analytical Sciences Digital Library. He also published an article on the device and its potential in chemistry education in the academic journal Applied Spectroscopy.

“Science is basically about using your senses to see things – it’s just that we’ve got so much technology that now it’s all hidden,” Scheeline said. “The student gets the impression that a measurement is something that goes on inside a box and it’s completely inaccessible, not understandable – the purview of expert engineers.”

“In order to get across the idea, ‘I can do it, and I can see it, and I can understand it,’ they’ve got to build the instrument themselves,” he added.

Can you analyze me now? Cell phones bring spectroscopy to the classroom [University of Illinois]

All images by L. Brian Stauffer via news.illinois.edu

See Also:

• Cellphones In The Classroom: Bad Idea, Inevitable, Or Both …
• Android App Uses Cellphone Camera to Measure Air Pollution …
• New Screening Tech Misses Nothing
• Spectroscopy and Collimated light
• Tech Sniffs Out Bad Meat
• Classroom Clickers Make the Grade
• How the iPhone Could Reboot Education
• MacArthur Fellow Teaches Teens How to Build Robots

SAN FRANCISCO — A Berkeley company on Thursday introduced a battery-powered exoskeleton to get paraplegics out of their wheelchairs and walking on their feet.

Called eLEGS, the exoskeleton consists of a robotic frame controlled through crutches. The crutches contain sensors; putting forward the right crutch moves the left leg, and vise versa. The eLEGS battery can enable a user to walk for one day before it needs to be recharged, according to the product’s developer Berkeley Bionics. (See video below.)

“With every step I feel more confident, and it’s truly liberating,” said Amanda Boxtel, a paraplegic for 18 years who demonstrated the eLEGS exoskeleton at a press conference Thursday. “I’m usually in a wheelchair and 4 feet tall, staring up at people’s nostrils. Now I’m able to look at the world.”

Exoskeletons — wearable, artificially intelligent bionic devices — have primarily been developed for military usage to enhance soldiers’ strength and endurance in the battlefield. In the medical industry, doctors are also studying exoskeleton applications to assist the physically disabled.

The implications of exoskeletons in the health field go beyond giving paraplegics robotic legs. They could also teach people to learn how to walk on their own again. Currently, rehabilitation centers use much larger, stationary and extremely expensive devices to assist with temporary walking. (Wired.com’s Tim Carmody points out that “Getting time on these devices is like getting telescope time for an astronomer.”)

Being able to walk with an exoskeleton enables users to do rehabilitation anywhere and anytime — and that could be especially beneficial to people who are recently injured, Boxtel says in the video below, because they can begin load-bearing rehabilitation exercises while they still have the muscle memory for walking.

“There’s huge therapeutic benefits for this device that will then become a preventative measure in the long term because our bodies are meant to be walking upright and moving,” Boxtel said.

Berkeley Bionics based the eLEGS exoskeleton design on Lockheed Martin’s Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) exoskeleton, a system designed to help military soldiers traverse through rough terrain without injuries.

Berkeley Bionics modified the HULC to make the eLEGS extremely user friendly with a Velcro strap, backpack-style clips and shoulder straps; anybody should be able to slip it on and off in a minute or two. The eLEGS will fit most people between 5′ 2″ and 6′ 4″, weighing 220 pounds or less, and Berkeley Bionics said it was especially important to make the exoskeleton thin, lightweight and very quiet when operated.

“Today I’m going to rekindle a hope among [those with] spinal cord injuries,” said Eythor Bender, CEO of Berkeley Bionics. “[eLEGS] will help people to get out of wheel chairs, stand up, walk, sit down and do other things as we develop it forward.”

The eLEGS will initially be available at select rehabilitation centers starting July 2011, according to Bender.

The company also plans a mobile version of eLEGS for home use. People will be able to strap it on in the morning and use to walk around as they go about their days, according to CEO Eythor Bender.

See below for a video from Berkeley Bionics explaining eLEGS.

See Also:

• Raytheon XOS 2 Exoskeleton (Unedited) – Video – Wired
• Iron Man For Real: Raytheon XOS 2 Exoskeleton – Video – Wired
• Real-Life Iron Man: The Raytheon XOS 2 Exoskeleton – Video – Wired
• Lockheed Martin HULC Exoskeleton – Video – Wired

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com; video: Michael Lennon/Wired.com

Pondering the problem of philosophy, and how to achieve the necessary leisure to practice it, Aristotle concluded that slaves are an unfortunate but necessary evil. How else manage the drudgery of menial tasks and squeeze in a few solid hours of thinking?

As Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance blog noted recently, Aristotle did contemplate another solution:

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves.
This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that

“Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus”


as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.

So robots will make us free. Or, more precisely, they will make our servants free. Sounds incredibly prescient.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell if he meant that ironically, drawing as he does from magical examples in poetry. “There is only one condition” sets this up as a ridiculous possibility, completely out of reach. So, if this was a joke, maybe it was on him. Or us?

See Also:

• Recent Gadget Lab robots coverage
• Video: Robots Now Guarding Nevada Nuke Site
• Wired 14.01: The 50 Best Robots Ever