Category Archives: Engineering

The Second 5,000 Days of the Web

The web has been around for 5,000 days. In this talk at TED, Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web.

Samsung Transparent OLED Display

The webcast shows another cool TV display. This transparent OLED display could for example be used for displaying directions and GPS information to someone driving a car.

Toyota Software Development for Partner Robots

Toyota Discusses Software Development for Partner Robots

Yamada: What was unique about the software development for the partner robots exhibited at Aichi Expo was the fact that Toyota entirely disposed of its assets from the past.

Toyota owned some software assets because it had been developing partner robots for some time before developing the robots for the exposition. But those assets were all one-offs. No one but the developers themselves could comprehend their architectures.

As Toyota was developing more than one partner robot for the exposition, the number of developers involved increased. Considering that we can never complete any development if we use the past assets that rely on an individual developer’s skill, we made everything, including the platform, from scratch again.

Toyota developed the platform focusing on promoting design review by visualizing the control logic. Therefore, the company thoroughly separated control sequences and algorithms. To be more specific, it used state transition diagrams.

Each algorithm is stored in a different block in a state transition diagram. With such diagrams, developers can easily comprehend the flow of the control and review the design even if they do not understand each algorithm. The company employed this method because each algorithm such as a bipedal walking algorithm is too complicated for anyone but their developers to understand it.

Scientists Study Saskatchewan Meteorite

Scientists unravelling mysteries of Saskatchewan meteorite

Video surveillance cameras at motels and gas stations captured the flashes of brilliant light and the shadows they cast. A week later, Milley was part of the team led by U of C geologist and geophysicist Alan Hildebrand at Buzzard Coulee. It was she who spotted the first meteorite fragment in a frozen pond.

Later, she studied the flashes and shadows from the various surveillance and amateur videos. She used the information to plot the fireball’s path as it fell to Earth and then tried to figure out its orbit. Milley’s tentative conclusion, which she discussed in Saskatoon Monday, was that it didn’t look like the space rock came from beyond the orbit of Mars.

“It looks like it’s a very kind of tight inner solar system orbit,” she said. “It’s not something that’s extended into the asteroid belt.” If she’s correct, it would be the first time researchers have found debris from a meteorite so close to Earth, Milley said.

In terms of the composition, Milley and her colleagues have determined it’s a relatively common type of meteorite with a high iron content. However, there is still much more to learn about it, they say. More than 100 fragments have already been recovered, but this spring, researchers will be resuming their search for more.

Lunacy – FIRST Robotics Challenge 2009

The For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotic Challenge is a great way to get high school students involved in engineering. Lunacy is the 2009 competition which mimics the low friction environment on the moon (using a slick surface and slick wheels on the robots). For more information see the competition manual and related documents.

Teen Goalie Designs Camouflage Pads

Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots

Leahy sketched out new leg pads that blend into the goal netting behind him. He wanted pads, a trapper, and a blocker that are white with a raised double-stitched design, just like the goal. He applied for a design patent and had them custom-made by a Canada-based pad maker.

“When the shooter comes down and only has a split second to shoot the puck, they’re looking for net,” said Leahy, a senior from Hampton, N.H., who grew up in Byfield. “If you put the net on the pad, they’ll shoot at the pad instead of the goal.”
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Exactly what will happen to the pads after this season is unclear. Leahy said he would like to play hockey in college, probably at the club level, and wants to market the idea. “It would definitely be cool to get it out there and get other guys in the future wearing it,” he said.

MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins

IBM team boosts MRI resolution

The researchers demonstrated this imaging at a resolution 100 million times finer than current MRI. The advance could lead to important medical applications and is powerful enough to see bacteria, viruses and proteins, say the researchers.

The researchers said it offered the ability to study complex 3D structures at the “nano” scale. The step forward was made possible by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting very small magnetic forces.

In addition to its high resolution, MRFM has the further advantage that it is chemically specific, can “see” below surfaces and, unlike electron microscopy, does not destroy delicate biological materials.

Now, the IBM-led team has dramatically boosted the sensitivity of MRFM and combined it with an advanced 3D image reconstruction technique. This allowed them to demonstrate, for the first time, MRI on biological objects at the nanometre scale.

That is very cool.

How to Develop Products like Toyota

Sobek also says Toyota tends to stay as flexible as possible until relatively late in the development stage. He cites as an example Toyota’s practice of leaving manufacturing tolerances to be set by die makers rather than by design engineers creating the prints. Die makers make die dimensions as close as practical to those in the CAD database, but have the flexibility to modify them so body parts fit together well. Manufacturing engineers then set tolerances around manufacturing capabilities.
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“Test first, then design. First run simulations and understand where the boundaries of solutions lie. Once you understand the alternate spaces between competing choices, you narrow the options in what are called integrating events.”

Integrating events are an opportunity to eliminate weak opportunities. It is only after these events are complete that detailed design commences. “The point is that you don’t get to detailed design until everything works,” says Kennedy. “That is the reason Toyota focuses so intently up front on understanding trade-offs.”

This is very similar to agile software development practices. Though due to different processes, software versus car manufacture the two process are not identical.

Though Toyota is adept at developing products, it may be a mistake to adopt its practices wholesale, no matter how good they are. “Much of the lean community tries to crow-bar Toyota’s approach into their own very different business model,”

This is always true. Copying what others do does not work. You can learn from others by understanding the benefits of their process and then adapting the ideas to your organization.

Toyota has several tools that help its engineers organize the tasks at hand. One of the most well known is called the A3 document, named for the size of the paper its information is written on. An A3 holds a distillation of project goals and customer wants. During development, it can serve as a crib sheet for engineers as they set priorities and make trade-offs. “A3s enforce the plan-do-check- act methods of quality,” explains Kennedy. “The A3 becomes the basis for Toyota’s entire review process.”

On my management improvement blog I discuss the Toyota Production System often, you can follow those posts if you are interested.

Student Invents Solar-Powered Fridge

solar powered refrigerator illustration

Student Invents Solar-Powered Fridge for Developing Countries

21-year-old student/inventor/entrepreneur Emily Cummins has designed a brilliant portable solar-powered refrigerator that works based upon the principle of evaporation. Employing a combination of conduction and convection, the refrigerator requires no electricity and can be made from commonly available materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.
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Simply place perishable foods or temperature-sensitive medications in the solar refrigerator’s interior metal chamber and seal it. In-between the inner and outer chamber, organic material like sand, wool or soil is then saturated with water. As the sun warms the organic material, water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner chamber to a cool, 6 ÂºC [43 ÂºF] for days at a time!

After winning Â£5,000 from York Merchant Adventurers for her idea, Emily delayed going to college for a year to take her refrigerator to Africa for further development.
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At 16 Emily won a regional Young Engineer for Britain Award for creating a toothpaste squeezer for people with arthritis, and the next year went on to win a Sustainable Design Award for a water-carrier made from wood and rubber tubing. In 2007 Emily was named the British Female Innovator of the Year, and last year was short-listed for Cosmopolitan’s 2008 Ultimate Women of the Year Competition.

Update: some readers seem confused by what related means below. Those links show previous post to related items and include previous similar designs to keep things cool, including “Refrigerator Without Electricity” which is a clay pot design by Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria for the Pot in Pot Cooling System that received the 2000 Rolex award.

Moving Closer to Robots Swimming Through Bloodsteam

Pretty cool. Tiny motor allows robots to swim through human body

James Friend, of Monash University, said that such devices could enter previously unreachable brain areas, unblocking blood clots, cleaning vessels or sending back images to surgeons. “The first complete device we want to build would have a camera,” Professor Friend said.
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Professor Friend said they had shown the motor, which is a quarter of a millimetre wide, had enough power to navigate this type of nanorobot through the bloodstream of a human artery. Tests of their prototype device in a liquid as viscous as blood were also promising. “It swam.”
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The team plans to conduct animal tests of a nanorobot driven by their motor later this year or early next year. But Professor Friend cautioned that many technical hurdles needed to be overcome.

Their miniature motor was connected to an electricity supply and a way would need to be found to power it remotely. The construction of the flagella also needed refinement.