Tag Archives: robotics

#437230 How Drones and Aerial Vehicles Could ...

Drones, personal flying vehicles, and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery, and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

An Aerial Age
Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high-resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms, and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.

These vehicles are familiar to sci-fi fans. The late Syd Mead’s illustrations of the Spinner VTOL craft in the film Blade Runner captured the popular imagination, and the screens for the Spinners in Blade Runner 2049 created by Territory Studio provided a careful design fiction of the experience of piloting these types of vehicle.

Now, though, these flying vehicles are reality. A number of companies are developing eVTOL with electric multi-rotor jets, and a whole new motorsport is being established around them.

These aircraft have the potential to change our cities. However, they need to be tested extensively in urban airspace. A study conducted by Airbus found that public concerns about VTOL use focused on the safety of those on the ground and noise emissions.

New Cities
The widespread adoption of drones and VTOL will lead to new architecture and infrastructure. Existing buildings will require adaptations: landing pads, solar photovoltaic panels for energy efficiency, charging points for delivery drones, and landscaping to mitigate noise emissions.

A number of companies are already trialing drone delivery services. Existing buildings will need to be adapted to accommodate these new networks, and new design principles will have to be implemented in future ones.

The architect Saúl Ajuria Fernández has developed a design for a delivery drone port hub. This drone port acts like a beehive where drones recharge and collect parcels for distribution. Architectural firm Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2, a design for a modular apartment building of the future, includes a cantilevered drone port for delivery services.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a drone port for delivery of medical supplies and other items for rural communities in Rwanda. The structure is also intended to function as a space for the public to congregate, as well as to receive training in robotics.

Drones may also help the urban environment become more sustainable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed a re-configurable architectural roof canopy system deployed by drones. By adjusting to follow the direction of the sun, the canopy provides shade and reduces reliance on ventilation systems.

Demand for air taxis and personal flying vehicles will develop where failures in other transport systems take place. The Airbus research found that of the cities surveyed, highest demand for VTOLs was in Los Angeles and Mexico City, urban areas famous for traffic pollution. To accommodate these aerial vehicles, urban space will need to transform to include landing pads, airport-like infrastructure, and recharge points.

Furthermore, this whole logistics system in lower airspace (below 500 feet), or what I term “hover space,” will need an urban traffic management system. One great example of how this hover space could work can be seen in a speculative project from design studio Superflux in their Drone Aviary project. A number of drones with different functions move around an urban area in a network, following different paths at varying heights.

We are at a critical period in urban history, faced by climatic breakdown and pandemic. Drones and aerial vehicles can be part of a profound rethink of the urban environment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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#437227 DIGIT: A high-resolution tactile sensor ...

To assist humans in completing manual chores or tasks, robots must efficiently grasp and manipulate objects in their surroundings. While in recent years robotics researchers have developed a growing number of techniques that allow robots to pick up and handle objects, most of these only proved to be effective when tackling very basic tasks, such as picking up an object or moving it from one place to another. Continue reading

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#437224 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

VIRTUAL REALITY
How Holographic Tech Is Shrinking VR Displays to the Size of Sunglasses
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“…researchers at Facebook Reality Labs are using holographic film to create a prototype VR display that looks less like ski goggles and more like lightweight sunglasses. With a total thickness less than 9mm—and without significant compromises on field of view or resolution—these displays could one day make today’s bulky VR headset designs completely obsolete.”

TRANSPORTATION
Stock Surge Makes Tesla the World’s Most Valuable Automaker
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“It’s a remarkable milestone for a company that sells far fewer cars than its leading rivals. …But Wall Street is apparently very optimistic about Tesla’s prospects for future growth and profits. Many experts expect a global shift to battery electric vehicles over the next decade or two, and Tesla is leading that revolution.”

FUTURE OF FOOD
These Plant-Based Steaks Come Out of a 3D Printer
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“The startup, launched by cofounders who met while developing digital printers at HP, created custom 3D printers that aim to replicate meat by printing layers of what they call ‘alt-muscle,’ ‘alt-fat,’ and ‘alt-blood,’ forming a complex 3D model.”

AUTOMATION
The US Air Force Is Turning Old F-16s Into AI-Powered Fighters
Amit Katwala | Wired UK
“Maverick’s days are numbered. The long-awaited sequel to Top Gun is due to hit cinemas in December, but the virtuoso fighter pilots at its heart could soon be a thing of the past. The trustworthy wingman will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence, built into a drone, or an existing fighter jet with no one in the cockpit.”

ROBOTICS
NASA Wants to Build a Steam-Powered Hopping Robot to Explore Icy Worlds
Georgina Torbet | Digital Trends
“A bouncing, ball-like robot that’s powered by steam sounds like something out of a steampunk fantasy, but it could be the ideal way to explore some of the distant, icy environments of our solar system. …This round robot would be the size of a soccer ball, with instruments held in the center of a metal cage, and it would use steam-powered thrusters to make jumps from one area of terrain to the next.”

FUTURE
Could Teleporting Ever Work?
Daniel Kolitz | Gizmodo
“Have the major airlines spent decades suppressing teleportation research? Have a number of renowned scientists in the field of teleportation studies disappeared under mysterious circumstances? Is there a cork board at the FBI linking Delta Airlines, shady foreign security firms, and dozens of murdered research professors? …No. None of that is the case. Which begs the question: why doesn’t teleportation exist yet?”

ENERGY
Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ Could Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
Daniel Oberhaus | Wired
“Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It’s called triso fuel, and it’s like a radioactive gobstopper.”

TECHNOLOGY
A Plan to Redesign the Internet Could Make Apps That No One Controls
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Techology Review
“[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘home of Mind’ is ruled today by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—a small handful of the biggest companies on earth. Yet listening to the mix of computer scientists and tech investors speak at an online event on June 30 hosted by the Dfinity Foundation…it is clear that a desire for revolution is brewing.”

IMPACT
To Save the World, the UN Is Turning It Into a Computer Simulation
Will Bedingfield | Wired
“The UN has now announced its new secret recipe to achieve [its 17 sustainable development goals or SDGs]: a computer simulation called Policy Priority Inference (PPI). …PPI is a budgeting software—it simulates a government and its bureaucrats as they allocate money on projects that might move a country closer to an SDG.”

Image credit: Benjamin Suter / Unsplash Continue reading

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#437216 New Report: Tech Could Fuel an Age of ...

With rapid technological progress running headlong into dramatic climate change and widening inequality, most experts agree the coming decade will be tumultuous. But a new report predicts it could actually make or break civilization as we know it.

The idea that humanity is facing a major shake-up this century is not new. The Fourth Industrial Revolution being brought about by technologies like AI, gene editing, robotics, and 3D printing is predicted to cause dramatic social, political, and economic upheaval in the coming decades.

But according to think tank RethinkX, thinking about the coming transition as just another industrial revolution is too simplistic. In a report released last week called Rethinking Humanity, the authors argue that we are about to see a reordering of our relationship with the world as fundamental as when hunter-gatherers came together to build the first civilizations.

At the core of their argument is the fact that since the first large human settlements appeared 10,000 years ago, civilization has been built on the back of our ability to extract resources from nature, be they food, energy, or materials. This led to a competitive landscape where the governing logic is grow or die, which has driven all civilizations to date.

That could be about to change thanks to emerging technologies that will fundamentally disrupt the five foundational sectors underpinning society: information, energy, food, transportation, and materials. They predict that across all five, costs will fall by 10 times or more, while production processes will become 10 times more efficient and will use 90 percent fewer natural resources with 10 to 100 times less waste.

They say that this transformation has already happened in information, where the internet has dramatically reduced barriers to communication and knowledge. They predict the combination of cheap solar and grid storage will soon see energy costs drop as low as one cent per kilowatt hour, and they envisage widespread adoption of autonomous electric vehicles and the replacement of car ownership with ride-sharing.

The authors laid out their vision for the future of food in another report last year, where they predicted that traditional agriculture would soon be replaced by industrial-scale brewing of single-celled organisms genetically modified to produce all the nutrients we need. In a similar vein, they believe the same processes combined with additive manufacturing and “nanotechnologies” will allow us to build all the materials required for the modern world from the molecule up rather than extracting scarce natural resources.

They believe this could allow us to shift from a system of production based on extraction to one built on creation, as limitless renewable energy makes it possible to build everything we need from scratch and barriers to movement and information disappear. As a result, a lifestyle worthy of the “American Dream” could be available to anyone for as little as $250/month by 2030.

This will require a fundamental reimagining of our societies, though. All great civilizations have eventually hit fundamental limits on their growth and we are no different, as demonstrated by our growing impact on the environment and the increasing concentration of wealth. Historically this stage of development has lead to a doubling down on old tactics in search of short-term gains, but this invariably leads to the collapse of the civilization.

The authors argue that we’re in a unique position. Because of the technological disruption detailed above, we have the ability to break through the limits on our growth. But only if we change what the authors call our “Organizing System.” They describe this as “the prevailing models of thought, belief systems, myths, values, abstractions, and conceptual frameworks that help explain how the world works and our relationship to it.”

They say that the current hierarchical, centralized system based on nation-states is unfit for the new system of production that is emerging. The cracks are already starting to appear, with problems like disinformation campaigns, fake news, and growing polarization demonstrating how ill-suited our institutions are for dealing with the distributed nature of today’s information systems. And as this same disruption comes to the other foundational sectors the shockwaves could lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Their solution is a conscious shift towards a new way of organizing the world. As emerging technology allows communities to become self-sufficient, flows of physical resources will be replaced by flows of information, and we will require a decentralized but highly networked Organizing System.

The report includes detailed recommendations on how to usher this in. Examples include giving individuals control and ownership of data rights; developing new models for community ownership of energy, information, and transportation networks; and allowing states and cities far greater autonomy on policies like immigration, taxation, education, and public expenditure.

How easy it will be to get people on board with such a shift is another matter. The authors say it may require us to re-examine the foundations of our society, like representative democracy, capitalism, and nation-states. While they acknowledge that these ideas are deeply entrenched, they appear to believe we can reason our way around them.

That seems optimistic. Cultural and societal change can be glacial, and efforts to impose it top-down through reason and logic are rarely successful. The report seems to brush over many of the messy realities of humanity, such as the huge sway that tradition and religion hold over the vast majority of people.

It also doesn’t deal with the uneven distribution of the technology that is supposed to catapult us into this new age. And while the predicted revolutions in transportation, energy, and information do seem inevitable, the idea that in the next decade or two we’ll be able to produce any material we desire using cheap and abundant stock materials seems like a stretch.

Despite the techno-utopianism though, many of the ideas in the report hold promise for building societies that are better adapted for the disruptive new age we are about to enter.

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#437204 Artificial skin heals wounds and makes ...

Imagine a dressing that releases antibiotics on demand and absorbs excessive wound exudate at the same time. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology hope to achieve just that, by developing a smart coating that actively releases and absorbs multiple fluids, triggered by a radio signal. This material is not only beneficial for the health care industry, it is also very promising in the field of robotics or even virtual reality. Continue reading

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