For everything from family to computers…
Sensor technologies once limited to luxury cars are increasingly available in the mass market.
Fully autonomous self-driving cars are still far from the market, but a wide range of features—including sensor systems that warn of lane departures and imminent crashes, and can even apply the brakes if you don’t—are rapidly showing up in midmarket cars.
At 23, Seth Priebatsch has a life that’s all about winning, and not much else.
Seth Priebatsch comes to his office door in bare feet and a wrinkled orange polo shirt. Even at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, this isn’t normal garb for the CEO of a company of 100 people. But Shoeless Seth isn’t your typical CEO. For one thing, he’s 23. For another, his formal title is Chief Ninja.
It makes my day when new technology promises to make life’s most tedious tasks more interesting. Take laundry, for example. I would loathe it so much less if I had a friendly robot to help me fold my socks. Or perhaps if I had this waterless washing machine, which would levitate my clothes and scrub them clean with dry ice in a matter of minutes.
The Orbit uses a battery-filled ring to levitate a supercooled superconductive metal laundry basket. The basket is coated in two layers of shatterproof glass and chilled using liquid nitrogen. The batteries inside the ring produce a magnetic field, and the basket levitates inside this field as its electrical resistivity drops.
The laundry orb, which is opened and controlled using a ceramic-based touchscreen interface, blasts sublimated dry ice at supersonic speeds toward your clothes. The carbon dioxide interacts with the organic materials in your laundry and breaks them down. Then the dirt and grime is filtered out through a tube that you can rinse, and the CO2 is removed and re-frozen (though it’s not clear how, because this would require lots of energy). Voila, clean and dry clothes.
At this point it’s just a concept by designer Elie Ahovi, but it’s not hard to imagine these types of cleanerballs in apartments of the future. Anything that will cut down on time spent doing laundry.
[via Treehugger]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
A technique inspired by pop-up books could enable quicker production of tiny robots and other electrical devices, according to Harvard engineers. Usually, building a micro aerial vehicle – or any other robot – requires a painstaking assembly process, with each little wing or sensor folded and machined just so. Now it can come together in a single fold.
It works by combining all the robots’ component layers, sandwiching each piece of metal or carbon fiber into a single sheet. First each layer is laser-etched into the proper design, and the sheets are laminated together. The end result is a hexagonal sheet with a small assembly scaffold, with the whole thing the size of a U.S. quarter.
The entire assembly has 137 folding joints. The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on – in this case, it’s the Harvard Monolithic Bee, or Mobee.
“This takes what is a craft, an artisanal process, and transforms it for automated mass production,” said doctoral candidate Pratheev Sreetharan, who co-developed the technique. Before this, students were dipping tiny wires into superglue and using microscopes to ensure they aligned the parts correctly.
If this sounds like an obvious solution, it’s because it’s very similar to the process used to make printed circuit boards, in which electronic pathways are etched from successive layers of conductive material. So it would theoretically be pretty easy to convert this process for high-speed robot manufacturing, and even to automate it – you could have robots manufacturing other robots.
Why would you want lots of tiny robots? The Mobee project’s goal is to have a fleet of bio-inspired robots that can behave autonomously as a colony, for various research goals. This process dramatically speeds the production cycle, Sreetharan said.
The team is publishing a paper about this manufacturing style in the March issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
[via Science Daily]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
A tiny clam-like robot made out of DNA releases its drug payload only when it meets and identifies a cancer cell
A small Swiss satellite could grab a dead compatriot and drag it to a fiery death in the atmosphere as early as 2016
