Mar 30

There Is No Point Making Robots Look and Act Like Humans

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, Robots, Today's Chili

By Olivia Solon, Wired UK

The Terminator, C-3PO, the Cylons, and the Jetsons’ robotic maid Rosie are all highly agile and memorable humanoid robots from science fiction. They are intelligent, nimble, dexterous, autonomous and you never see them plugged into an energy source, waiting to refuel.

Now take Asimo, described by its maker Honda as “the world’s most advanced humanoid robot.”

There is no denying that the robot is spectacular, walking and even running with ease on two legs, responding to voice commands and mapping its environment using camera “eyes”. However, it requires at least one person (and preferably two) to control it, almost a day to set up and can operate for just one hour on a single 51.8v lithium ion battery which requires three hours to recharge.

Despite wonderful technological advances, the humanoids that we have created so far fall extremely short of those we have imagined within movies and books. At the Innorobo robotics summit in Lyon last week, I saw all sorts of delightful and adorable humanoids (Acroban, Nao and Darwin to name a few), but witnessed them fall over, run out of batteries, fail to understand people and break down completely. These are lovely, and very expensive, toys — as opposed to viable butlers, nurses or companions. Our expectations are, frankly, too great.

We need to shift away from the idea of a humanoid butler who comes to the house, understands our needs, and uses our hoover, our washing machine and our oven and think about how to “robotise” the things that we already have in our house. This is not only representative of the way things are moving (particularly when it comes to the  internet of things) but is also likely to be much more cost-effective.

Francesco Mondada, researcher in AI and robotics at Switzerland’s national robotics centre, agrees. He told the Innorobot audience: “We should improve objects instead of creating one device that is exterior to the other objects that can interact with the regular household. Instead of having a robot butler to park my car, we should be getting the car to park itself. This is the way things are moving.”

He added: “The day that a humanoid understands all of our feelings even when my wife doesn’t, will be great. But not even someone I’ve been married to for 25 years can understand me, so a robot has no chance.”

Humanoid robots might be wonderful to behold, but the robots that are gaining traction in the real world resemble other things — such as the disc-shaped Roomba, the military Packbot and the robotic seal companion Paro.

Roboticists are keen to create carer robots to help tend to the elderly — with nursing shortages and an ageing population, there could finally be a viable market for domestic robots. However, there is a big debate as to whether these devices need to be purely functional or whether they need to be social.

Those on the functional side of the debate say that elderly people need help performing physical tasks, remembering to take their medicine and generally making daily activities easier. They do not need a robotic “friend”.  Mondada argued that a person’s social life will of course be affected if they are physically dependent, but this doesn’t mean we should be creating social, humanoid robots for them to talk to because they can’t go and see their friends.

They need a functional robot to help them to do the things that they can no longer do. The most social interaction they want from a robot is the level of engagement one might otherwise get from a dog or a cat — it should not be a substitute for visits from the family.

Those on the social side say that in order to garner acceptance from technophobes, robots need to be appealing and social. They need to be able to communicate in the same way a human does, rather than rely on complicated interfaces and provide companionship where necessary.

The second argument misses the point. It seems entirely possible that you can have a simple communctions interface for a purely functional robot. You could summon a telepresence device to call your friend or relative using voice activation, without needing the telepresence device to have its own personality. A domestic robot could learn about your preferences and habits without needing an opinion on the latest news.

Of course, in the future we will be able to overcome the shortcomings of current humanoids and create jaw-droppingly agile bipedal, emotionally responsive devices that will know you better than your wife does.

But beyond the realms of research, what’s the point?


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Mar 30

Handlebar Bike Lock Possibly More Effective Than String

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, security, Today's Chili

Bach Nguyen’s handlebar lock is impossible to defeat

Bach Nguyen’s Handlebars concept is a lock built in to the handlebars of a bike. To use it, you press a couple buttons up on top of the bars, pull the two newly-released bars around the immovable object of your choice and push them back together, whereupon they lock into place. If you have ever collapsed and re-attached the handlebars on one of those aluminum micro-scooters, you have the general idea.

It’s utterly foolproof. As we all know, cable bike locks are notoriously impossible to cut, and there’s practically no chance of a bicycle thief slipping a small Allen wrench from his pocket and quickly unscrewing the handlebar stem.

The wheels are safe, too. After all, who would steal a wheel if they couldn’t have the rest of the bike, too?

I guess there may be one tiny problem, though, as pointed out in the comment on the Yanko Design post that brought this wonderful invention to light. “My front teeth are already hurting when I think about one of these handles coming loose when driving over a bumpy road.” says Eddd222. Ouch.

Handlebar Bike Lock [Yanko]

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Mar 28

SmartBird Flaps and Flies Like the Real Thing

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, Robots, Today's Chili

This beautiful, swooping bird is actually a robot. It’s called the SmartBird, and it is made by Festo.

The wonders of this robot bird are manifold, not least the bird’s outward design, which looks like a King of the Rocketmen-era spacecraft.

The bird weighs just 450g, or around one pound, and has an ingenious drive mechanism. Inside, a motor controls the up/down movement of the wings by spinning two wheels inside the torso. These are connected, like the wheels on a steam-train, by rods that produce the periodic up-down movement. The complex rod design uses levers to make the wing tips flap faster.

The second part uses “torsional motors” to adjust the angle of the wings. On the up-stroke, the front edge of the wing points up. This reverses as the wing pushes down, forcing the bird forward.

Steering is done by moving the tail, and the eery, is-that-thing-alive? effect is achieved by moving the head from side to side, as if it can see you.

The light weight and sophisticated, yet simple design let the bird almost glide, and it can even take off and land unassisted. You can control it with a Zigbee radio, or you can just let it glide through the skies alone.

But the most striking thing is just how much like a real bird this SmartBird moves. Until you get a closeup of its cyberman-like exterior, it could easily pass for the real thing. The military surely has its eye on this, although adding much in the way of a payload may mess up the power-to-weight balance. But imagine a flock of these all gliding quietly and gracefully towards you, you unsuspecting dolt, and then raining down fire and death from above.

I would be fine. Ever since a dream I had as a child, I have never, ever trusted evil seagulls. I actually plan to catch a few of these SmartBirds and make a real-life Angry Birds right up on my roof terrace.

SmartBird – bird flight deciphered [Festo]

How-it-works animation [Festo]

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Mar 23

New Electrode Tech Could Recharge Batteries in Two Minutes

Posted in: power, R&D and Inventions, Today's Chili

Left: diagram of a lithium-ion battery constructed using a nanostructured bicontinuous cathode. Right: scanning electron microscope image of the nanostructure, a three-dimensional metal foam current collector coated with a thin layer of active material. Image courtesy of Paul Braun, University of Illinois.

by John Timmer, Ars Technica

Batteries are an essential part of most modern gadgets, and their role is expected to expand as they’re incorporated into vehicles and the electric grid itself. But batteries can’t move charge as quickly as some competing devices like supercapacitors, and their performance tends to degrade significantly with time. That has sent lots of materials science types into the lab, trying to find ways to push back these limits, sometimes with notable success. Over the weekend, there was another report on a technology that enables fast battery charging. The good news is that it uses a completely different approach and technology than the previous effort, and can work with both lithium- and nickel-based batteries.

The previous work was lithium-specific, and focused on one limit to a battery’s recharge rate: how quickly the lithium ions could move within the battery material. By providing greater access to the electrodes, the authors allowed more ions to quickly exchange charge, resulting in a battery with a prodigious capacity. The researchers increased lithium’s transport within the battery by changing the structure of the battery’s primary material, LiFePO4.

The new work is quite different. The authors, from the University of Illinois, don’t focus on the speed of the lithium ions in the battery; instead, they attempt to reduce the distance the ions have to travel before reaching an electrode. As they point out, the time involved in lithium diffusion increases with the square of the distance traveled, so cutting that down can have a very dramatic effect. To reduce this distance, they focus on creating a carefully structured cathode.

The process by which they do this is fairly simple, and lends itself to mass production. They started with a collection of spherical polystyrene pellets. By adjusting the size of these pellets (they used 1.8µm and 466nm pellets), they could adjust the spacing of the electrode features. Once the spheres were packed in place, a layer of opal (a form of silica) was formed on top of them, locking the pattern in place with a more robust material. After that, a layer of nickel was electrodeposited on the opal, which was then etched away. The porosity of the nickel layer was then increased using electropolishing.

When the process was done, the porosity — a measure of the empty space in the structure — was about 94 percent, just below the theoretical limit of 96 percent. The authors were left with a nickel wire mesh that was mostly empty space.

Into these voids went the battery material, either nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) or a lithium-treated manganese dioxide. The arrangement provides three major advantages, according to the authors: an electrolyte pore network that enables rapid ion transport, a short diffusion distance for the ions to meet the electrodes, and an electrode with high electron conductivity. All of these make for a battery that acts a lot like a supercapacitor when it comes to charge/discharge rates.

With the NiMH battery material, the electrodes could deliver 75 percent of the normal capacity of the battery in 2.7 seconds; it only took 20 seconds to recharge it to 90 percent of its capacity, and these values were stable for 100 charge/discharge cycles. The lithium material didn’t work quite as well, but was still impressive. At high rates of discharge, it could handle 75 percent of its normal capacity, and still stored a third of its regular capacity when discharged at over a thousand times the normal rate.

A full-scale lithium battery made with the electrode could be charged to 75 percent within a minute, and hit 90 percent within two minutes.

There are a few nice features of this work. As the authors noted, the electrodes are created using techniques that can scale to mass production, and the electrodes themselves could work with a variety of battery materials, such as the lithium and nickel used here. It may also be possible to merge them with the LiFePO4used in the earlier work. A fully integrated system, with materials designed to work specifically with these electrodes, could increase their performance even further.

Of course, that ultimately pushes us up against the issue of supplying sufficient current in the short time frames needed to charge the battery this fast. It might work great for a small battery, like a cell phone, but could create challenges if we’re looking to create a fast-charge electric car.

Nature Nanotechnology, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2011.38 (About DOIs).

Originally published as Electrode lets lithium batteries charge in just two minutes on Ars Technica.

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Mar 23

Solar Screens May Make Phone Chargers Obsolete

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, solar power, Today's Chili

How would you like to have a cellphone that never needed to be charged? That’s the promise of French company Wysips, which wants to turn your phone’s screen into a solar charger.

It works like this: a transparent photovoltaic film covers the screen of your device, and provides 250mW of power to trickle-charge the battery. The film is thin — just 100 microns or 0.1mm — and won’t dim the screen when incorporated into the LCD panel. Wysips says the film will typically add just a dollar to the cost of a phone, and hopes to have shipping units within a year.

The beauty of the design is that it scales. The bigger the screen of a device, the bigger the solar panel. A typical phone will be fully charged in six hours, and the second-gen version will give you a half-hour’s worth of power with just one hour of charging.

The real winner here will be ebooks. These typically sip power anyway, and have pretty big screens. While you may still have to plug in an iPad to charge it at night, a Kindle with Wysips’ tech in its screen would likely never, ever need to be charged, especially as you can only read it when there’s enough light to do so.

Wysips product page (Wysips)

No More Chargers! Wysips Breakthrough Turns Phone Screens into Solar Panels [Laptop Mag]

Video: Laptop Mag

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Mar 17

Silicon Art Hidden Inside Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, samsung, Today's Chili

Engineers hid a microscopic warning deep within an Infineon chip. Image courtesy Chipworks

Silicon chips have billions of transistors in every square inch. But sometimes there’s enough room left over for chip engineers to insert a little joke.

While using a scanning electron microscope to examine the microcircuitry of a chip found in Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S phone, consulting company Chipworks discovered a surprise.

Underneath six layers of aluminum and silicon dioxide circuitry, almost at the level of the polysilicon wafer that underlies the entire chip, engineers concealed a tiny, tiny message.

Below the letters IFX (the stock symbol for Infineon, the company that makes the chip) is a tiny warning, made out of letters just two microns (2 µm) high:

IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE MUCH TOO CLOSE

“You would never find this message unless you were seriously looking for it,” says Chipworks marketing manager Rob Williamson.

The chip, the Infineon PMB5703, provides radio-frequency transmission and reception functions relating to the devices’ baseband and 3G features.

The tiny message is hidden in the upper right corner of the Infineon chip, in the square highlighted here. (Click the image to see a large photo of the full chip.) Image courtesy Chipworks

Chipworks has put many chips under the scanning electron microscope and has discovered dozens of hidden images and messages like this one. Constructed of the same materials as the chip’s circuitry — silicon dioxide, aluminum, copper and the like — the artwork can include cartoons, icons, or merely the initials of the chips’ designers.

In many cases, this artwork is not only tiny, it’s completely invisible unless you are disassembling the chip. Before it found this message, for instance, Chipworks had to delaminate the chip, layer by layer, putting each layer under the microscope. The purpose of that project was to understand the chip’s architecture, not to find hidden messages, but sometimes these Easter eggs pop out.

The makers of the Infineon PMB5703 must have had some extra time on their hands, because Chipworks found no less than four other images on the chip, including a smiley face, a drummer, a baby duck  called Calimero and a smiling dragon named Grisu.
– – –
“Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet“

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Mar 14

Build a Bone Machine With 3-D Printed Skeletons

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, Today's Chili

Open 3-D Printing’s rather macabre new project is 3-D printing in bone. 3-D printing works by building up a shape from 2-D layers, so in theory you can print with any material as long as you can get its powdered form to fuse. In the case of bone, the binder required is urea-formaldehyde (UF) glue, a strong, water-soluble wood glue.

After early experiments with bonemeal mixed with sugar, the Open3DP folks tried a 5:1 mix of bonemeal to glue, and the results were very strong skeletal parts.

But why on earth would you want to make anything from bone? Weird alien skeletons are the obvious choice, but as I happened to be listening to the Pixies this morning, I thought you might actually build a bone machine, full of skeletal cogs and axles. You could also make novelty bones for your dog (note: according to Wikipedia, urea-formaldehyde “may cause cancer in humans and animals”), or simply delight the sweet but sad goth in your life with custom bone jewelry.

Or you could live out your serial-killer fantasies without all that pesky, messy killing, and just print up some human skeletons to bury in the yard (don’t forget to add a few small animal skeletons to “flesh out” your fake psychological profile). The morbid opportunities are almost endless.

Bone Yard – 3DP in Bone [Open3DP via i.Materialize. Thanks, Joris!]

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Mar 04

Scientists Make Bendy E-Readers From Silk

Posted in: e-readers, R&D and Inventions, Today's Chili

Silk Screen. Photo: Steven Depolo / Flickr

Researcher in Taiwan can make flexible e-reader displays out of silk. The material not only allows for bendy e-books, but the material is also cheap compared to existing tech.

The process starts out with “liquid silk”, which is turned into insulating membranes that are then used to make the TFT (thin-film transistor) screens found in e-readers and LCD panels. Professor Hwang Jenn-Chang of the National Tsing Hua University calls the process “quite viable.”

It is also cheap. The silk required to make a screen works out at just three cents per device.

This of course brings some nightmarish scenarios to mind. I imagine a Kindle factory, probably underground, where endless rows of silkworms toil day and night to bring us naturally produced, possibly “organic” bendy e-books. Where will this madness end? What next? Books made out of paper?

Taiwan researchers turn to silk for flexible e-devices [PC World]

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Feb 23

Bike Purifies Water with Pedal-Power

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, Today's Chili

The CycloClean from Nippon Basic

CycloClean is a Japanese designed bike which purifies water with pedal-power. Aimed at the developing world, the bike can suck up, scrub clean and then store water from pretty much any source. Then all you need to do is ride home.

It works like this. You park up next to a muddy river or dubious looking lake. Lower a hose into the water, hitch the bike up on its stand, and climb back on. The rear wheel is kept off the ground, and the pedals now power a pump. Water is forced through a primary filter before moving on to an activated carbon filter, like the one you may have in a Brita jug at home. Finally, the water passes through a “micro-filtration membrane filter” before being stored in the vessel of your choice.

The CycloClean can process three tons of water in ten hours (you might want to take turns riding it). That’s enough to supply 1,500 people for one day. some smaller figure may be easier to understand: you’ll get five liter (1.3 gallons) in a minute. Filters should last for up to two years.

The bikes have already been deployed by the maker, Nippon Basic, from Kawasaki, outside Tokyo. They cost ¥550,000 each. That’s around $6,650. As you can see, they’re not going to be selling to residents, but the company has shifted 200 of them in five years. The bikes themselves are made to last, with non-puncture tires and redundancies so that you can still use the bike for transportation or pumping when the filters have expired, for example, and one great use for this sturdy beast is on the ground at disaster sites.

I love it (except the price). Not just because it will save lives and prove a money-spinner for some smart developing world entrepreneur, but because it yet again shows how awesomely flexible bikes are.

CycloClean product page [Nippon Basic via Physorg. Thanks, Chuck!]

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Feb 08

Lever-Powered, Off-Road Wheelchair for Developing World

Posted in: R&D and Inventions, Today's Chili

Amos Winter’s LFC, or Leveraged Freedom Chair, is a wheelchair for the developing world. It’s designed for off-road use as well as for speeding along the odd good, flat road, and because it is built from bicycle parts, it can be repaired anywhere that bikes can be repaired, which is pretty much the entire world. In fact, its simple design means that it can actually be made by anyone with a few spare parts and some welding gear.

First, it’s long, and therefore stable on hills and other rough-terrain. And because not even a strong, able-bodied person would want to push themselves and a heavy steel chair up a bumpy slope, it has “gears”. Those two long levers are what drives the chairs, via bike chains and freewheels (both sides are independent, to allow steering). Grab low down the levers and you can get up some speed. When the going gets harder, you grab the tops of the levers and use the mechanical advantage they provide to shift down and power up hills.

The LFC has undergone tests, and is starting a pre-production clinical trial right now in India. Hopefully that will go well, but this story really shows the importance of communication in the developing world. If you show a photo of this chair to anyone with a workshop, anywhere in the world, and they would be able to start building it right away.

The Leveraged Freedom Chair [MIT Media Lab via Core77]

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