Category Archives: Engineering

A Robot to Clean Your Room

Robot learns to grasp everyday chores

Cleaning up a living room after a party is just one of four challenges the project has set out to have a robot tackle. The other three include fetching a person or object from an office upon verbal request, showing guests around a dynamic environment and assembling an IKEA bookshelf using multiple tools.

Developing a single robot that can solve all these problems takes a small army of about 30 students and 10 computer science professors—Gary Bradski, Dan Jurafsky, Oussama Khatib, Daphne Koller, Jean-Claude Latombe, Chris Manning, Ng, Nils Nilsson, Kenneth Salisbury and Sebastian Thrun.

Related: robotics related posts

100 Innovations for 2006

Popular Science has selected the Best of What’s New. Previous posts talk about some of these, such as: One Laptop Per Child, New Soccer Ball, Grand Canyon Skywalk. And they discuss other breakthroughs like: Memory Spot, Sony Reader. They seem to be stretching a bit to reach 100 – still there are some cool items and it is a fun read. And where are some others: Lifestraw, Lego Mindstorm, Re-engineered Wheelchair…

Related: Inventions of the Year

Lifestraw

Lifestraw is an excellent example of an engineered appropriate technology solution.

At any given moment, about half of the world’s poor are suffering from waterborne diseases, of which over 6,000 – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

Today, more than one billion people of the world’s population are without access to safe water, causing lack of safe water supply to rob hundreds of women and girls of dignity, energy and time.

Safe water interventions, therefore, have vast potential to transform the lives of millions, especially in crucial areas such as poverty eradication, environmental upgradation, quality of life, child development and gender equality.

Lifestraw is a filter solution that allows water to be purified for about 6 months (before needing to be replaced) at a cost of just $3.50.

Related: Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel – Clean Water Filter – New straw to kill disease as you drink – Safe Water Through Play – Millennium Development Goals

Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology

LIFT2 (Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology) is an innovative professional learning program for middle and high school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers. It is designed to help experienced and developing teachers relate classroom curriculum to authentic and relevant applications in the 21st Century workplace.
The program is based on a unique combination of graduate coursework, company sponsored externships in industry, the cornerstone of the program, and membership in an active community of learners.

Related: Direcotry of resources for k-12 STEM teachers – Report on K-12 Science Education in USA – K-12 Program for Engineering Students – Purdue Graduate Fellows Teach Middle School Science – Math and Science Teacher Shortage

Nanotechnology Experiment Accidentally Discovers Forger Fix

Security that is small and imperfectly formed by Michael Pollitt:

“One day the chip fell off the paper backing that it was being tested on and the laser just hit the paper instead. Whereas we would have expected to have got no signal, we actually got a signal that had all of the right characteristics for a security device. That was enormously surprising,” says Cowburn.

Rather than reaching for the glue, Cowburn investigated further and found that ordinary paper gave robust security signatures. The random pattern of the paper fibres scattered back the laser beam to detectors, giving far better results than the microchip.

After tuning the laser system, he also discovered that the probability of two pieces of paper producing an identical reading was unimaginably remote.

Related: Discoveries by Accident – Statistics for Experimenters

Wireless Power

Wireless energy could power consumer, industrial electronics

Soljacic realized that the close-range induction taking place inside a transformer–or something similar to it–could potentially transfer energy over longer distances, say, from one end of a room to the other. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, a power transmitter would fill the space around it with a “non-radiative” electromagnetic field. Energy would only be picked up by gadgets specially designed to “resonate” with the field. Most of the energy not picked up by a receiver would be reabsorbed by the emitter.

Related: Engine on a Chip: the Future Battery – Physics promises wire-less power – Recharge Batteries in Seconds

Global Engineering Education Study

Global Engineering Education Study includes a great deal of useful information. Universities partnering in the study include: Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany; Georgia Institute of Technology, USA; MIT, USA; Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and University of Tokyo, Japan.

This unique collaboration will study the influence and importance of technological expertise and education on the competitiveness of nations, people, and companies. At the heart of this initiative is a comprehensive study designed to reflect a broad spectrum of topics dealing with all aspects of engineering and natural sciences.

Recommendations include:

  • Global competence needs to become a key qualification of engineering graduates
  • Transnational mobility for engineering students, researchers, and professionals needs to become a priority
  • Global engineering excellence depends critically on a mutual commitment to partnerships, especially those that link engineering education to professional practice
  • Research on engineering in a global context is urgently needed

Related: The World’s Best Research Universities – Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education – Science and Engineering in Global Economics

Nanoscale Images Using an X-ray Laser

Scientists capture nanoscale images with short and intense X-ray laser

Using the free-electron laser at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Livermore scientists, as part of an international collaboration led by LLNL’s Henry Chapman and Janos Hajdu of Uppsala University, were able to record a single diffraction pattern of a nanostructured object before the laser destroyed the sample. A Livermore-developed computer algorithm was then used to recreate an image of the object based on the recorded diffraction pattern. This “lensless” imaging technique could be applied to atomic-resolution imaging because it is not limited by the need to build a high-resolution lens. The flash images could resolve features 50 nanometers in size, which is about 10 times smaller than what is achievable with an optical microscope.

Nanotechnology Research

Brave nano world by Nate Birt:

At the federal level, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has requested more than $1 billion for nanotechnology research and development in 2007. The initiative is a network of 25 federal organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense, that fund nanotechnology research at their own labs and at universities around the country, including MU.

Former President Bill Clinton started the initiative in 2000, and it became a part of the federal budget in fiscal 2001. Back then, the federal government spent an estimated $464 million on nanotechnology

Related: MIT Energy Storage Using Carbon Nanotubes – Nanotechnology Overview – R&D Spending in USA Universities