Day: October 26, 2020

https://www.engadget.com/mit-autonomous-roboat-ii-carries-passengers-140145138.html

We’ve heard plenty about the potential of autonomous vehicles in recent years, but MIT is thinking about different forms of self-driving transportation. For the last five years, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab have been working on a fleet of autonomous boats to deploy in Amsterdam. Last year, we saw the autonomous “roboats” that could assemble themselves into a series of floating structures for various uses, and today CSAIL is unveiling the “Roboat II.” What makes this one particularly notable is that it’s the first that can carry passengers.

The boat is pretty small, only two meters long, and can carry two passengers through the canals of Amsterdam. Roboat II has four propellors so it can move in any direction, and also includes LiDAR, GPS and inertial sensors to help it navigate. While an individual boat looks rather tiny, they’re modular, like the original Roboat. This means they can self-assemble into a larger vessel that’s commanded by a main “leader” boat.

MIT looked at the original Roboat as “quarter-scale” option, with the Roboat II being half-scale; they’re slowly working up to the point of a full-scale option that can carry four to six passengers. That bigger version is already under construction in Amsterdam, but there’s no word on when it’ll be ready for testing. In the meantime, Roboat II seems like it can pretty effectively navigate Amsterdam — MIT says that it autonomously navigated the city’s canals for three hours collecting data and returned to where it left with an error margin of less than seven inches.

Going forward, the MIT team expects to keep improving the Roboat’s algorithms to make it better able to deal with the challenges a boat might find, like disturbances from currents and waves. They’re also working to make it more capable of identifying and “understanding” objects it comes across so it can better deal with the environment it’s in. Everything the half-scale Roboat II learns will naturally be applied to the full-scale version that’s being worked on now. There’s no word on when we might see that bigger Roboat out in the waters, though.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 26, 2020 at 09:12AM

https://www.engadget.com/researchers-3-dprinted-a-microscopic-boat-to-see-how-bacteria-swim-105633277.html

Physicists at Leiden University in the Netherlands have 3D printed what could be the world’s smallest boat, a test object known as Benchy (via Gizmodo). At 30 microns long, it’s a third smaller than the thickness of a human hair and about six times larger than a bacteria cell. It’s not only small but surprisingly detailed, with an open cockpit that features some tricky geometry. The goal is to understand how “microswimmers” like bacteria and sperm move through liquids.

To 3D print an object that small, the team used a commercial Nanoscribe 3D microprinter using a process known as 2PP (two-photon polymerization), as shown in the manufacturer’s video below. The 3D prints are created inside droplets with material that hardens at the focal point of extremely accurate lasers.

“By moving the laser through the droplet in a controlled way, we can write the swimmer shape that we want,” said researcher Daniela Kraft. “Because the print is taking place inside the droplet, and we are printing layer by layer, we can maintain the open space [inside the tugboat cockpit].”

The team created the boat because it was “fun,” but also developed more research-specific shapes, including a spiral less than 5 microns in diameter. By tracking the motion, they were able to measure the speed and path of different types of particles.

The 3D printing technique opens the door to the creation of very specific shapes in order to emulate biological microswimmers or optimize their motion through fluids. “Ultimately, it will allow a greater control and design of the behavior of synthetic microswimmers, useful for applications in therapeutic diagnostics and drug delivery,” according to the research paper.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 26, 2020 at 06:06AM