Month: February 2020

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Learning or perfecting a skill by watching YouTube videos is known as attending YouTube University. GM Authority picked up on one of the video site’s more fascinating courses, hosted by Gale Banks; in a fair world, he should be referred to as Professor Banks when it comes to diesel engines and truck tuning. A few months after GM introduced the updated L5P 6.6-liter Duramax diesel V8 in the 2020 Chevrolet Silverado HD and GMC Sierra HD that ships with 454 horsepower and 910 pound-feet of torque, Banks decided he wanted to methodically tune the engine to death. The purpose of the resulting series, called “Killing a Duramax,” is to push more power out of the engine in order to discover which parts break and when — or, as Banks puts it, force-feed the Duramax “until the crank hits the street and the heads hit the hood.” With that knowledge, Banks can figure out all the weak points on his way to building what he calls a “Superturbo,” that being a supercharged, twin-turbo race engine with more than 1,000 hp.

What makes the series fascinating is Banks’ knowledge, paired with the company’s comprehensive iDash engine monitoring system that keeps tabs on a glut of parameters every step of the way. So for instance, you get Banks explaining the differences between inches of mercury and barometric pressure, how those are different from the water content of the air measured in grains, then showing those readouts on the iDash, then explaining in detail how they affect the air density in the Duramax system. The stock Borg-Warner variable turbo gets a lot of airtime — Banks accuses it of being “out to lunch” because he feels it’s the weakest link on the engine. That turns into a turbo teardown and a deep explanation of performance pitfalls, such as when air pressure on the turbine begins to diverge from the boost pressure coming from the compressor. Banks says he can keep close tabs on where power’s coming from, because the iDash monitors the horsepower contribution provided by the ambient air, the turbo, and the intercooler separately.

The major changes so far are a stouter Precision 7675 turbo and TurboSmart wastegate (episode 5), a twin intake (episode 6), a custom liquid-cooled intercooler from a marine engine, a new GM oil cooler and synthetic oil (episode 10), and new injectors (episode 11). What makes the series surprising is that after nearly a year of hard running beyond maximum listed specs and through 11 episodes, the Duramax has been tuned to 852 hp on its stock block and internals and shows no sign of dying. 

For the diesel-inclined and tech-minded, “Killing a Duramax” is a treat. Any time you get a free 20 minutes, as Banks says, “Spool is in session.” 

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“Extracting information out of those 1,000 signals in an analytical way—it’s very, very hard to do,” says Ciocarlie, who developed the system. “I would venture to say that it’s impossible without modern machine learning.”

Machine learning comes into play when they’re calibrating the system. They can stick the finger on a table, point it upward, and use a separate robotic arm to prod the finger in precise spots, using a specific amount of pressure. Because they know exactly where the robotic arm is jabbing the finger, they can see how the photodiodes detect light differently at each location. (If you take a look at the GIF above, you can see the system both localizing the touch and the intensity as the red dot swells with more pressure.) Despite the large amount of data collected per jab, with machine learning, the system can crunch it all.

“So that’s the missing piece, the thing that’s really become available to the field really in the last maybe five years or so,” says Ciocarlie. “We now have the machine-learning methods that we can add on top of these many, many optical signals, so that we can decipher the information that’s in there.”

This mimics how humans learn to wield our own sense of touch. As children, we grab everything we can, banking our memories of how objects feel. Even as adults, our brains continue to catalog the feel of things—for example, how much resistance to expect from a steering wheel when you’re turning left, or how hard to bang a hammer against a nail. “If we were to put you into the body of another person somehow, you would have to relearn all the motor skills,” says Columbia electrical engineer Ioannis Kymissis, who developed the system with Ciocarlie. “And that’s one of the nice things about the plasticity of the brain, right? You can have a stroke, you can knock out half of the brain and still relearn and then function.”

This new robotic finger, though, has its limits. While it can gauge the pressure it’s placing on an object, it’s missing out on a bunch of other data that people can sense through our own hands but often take for granted, like temperature and texture. But interestingly enough, the researchers think they could listen to the robotic finger’s slip, or its motion as it slides over a surface.

“When you have slip, there’s a little bit of a singing—if you ever put your ear against the table and run your finger on the table,” says Kymissis. If you’re holding on to, say, a wet glass, the slip might happen on a small scale, then “spread” to your hand’s entire contact area as the glass slides out of your grasp. By listening to the characteristic noise of an object slipping out of a robot hand equipped with these new fingers, the machine could correct its grip before the slip spreads across the whole hand.