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Welcome to the December 2009 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
STORIES
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The architecture used by the I-WAY project mixes information gathered by the in-vehicle subsystems and from the external transport system. The in-vehicle subsystem consists of five modules, which are located in the interior of the vehicles: the vehicle sensing module, the data acquisition module, the mobile interfaces of the vehicle, the situation assessment module and the communication module. The external transport system includes the roadside equipment, which is responsible for data acquisition referring to the road environment in locations where vehicles cannot precisely recognize dangerous conditions. The road management system includes an application and a database server which holds and manages the real-time road information.
However, this project is far from completed. Some progress has also be done on the car-to-car information front. "If another car encounters a hazard, it can broadcast that information to nearby vehicles. Similarly, roadside sensors and communication systems, used by the highway control centre to track road conditions, can transmit important information to drivers as they pass by. The team developed in-car cameras to monitor the driver as well as grip and electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors on the steering wheel. The grip and ECG sensors, combined with the eye-tracking internal camera, can reveal the state of the driver, if he or she is stressed, for example." The I-WAY website contains many other details about the project.
Password managers help, and single sign-on solutions for an array of sites are useful, and devices like smart cards and biometric devices save us remembering a whole array of combinations. But what if you're away from your primary computer? You still need to remember all of the sequences and mishmashes of letters and numbers whether you like it or not. Facebook Connect has also helped out greatly. OpenID has the right idea, but it works in a similar way to university federation services and doesn't really share any unique factor. Even CBS Interactive sites like ZDNet, TechRepublic, and BNET have a good idea by sharing the same login details across sites so you don't need to re-register. But again, all these systems fall short.
Most users would like something to change but simply don't see a system being implemented to supplant what already exists. So for now, this thirty-year solution may have to stick with the byline of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Then again, how would you fix it?
Standing wave ultrasonic motors are electric motors with an ultrasonic vibrating stator (the stationary part of a rotor system), that causes the move-able part, the disc-like rotor, to be both rotated and lifted. Through investigation of the types of dough tossing, the researchers discovered the analogy that a disk of dough spins just like a motor's rotor because the chef tosses the rotor just like a motor does. The system's dynamics explains why certain tossing motions are used by dough-toss performers for different tricks: a helical trajectory is used in single tosses because it maximizes energy efficiency and the dough's airborne rotational speed, a semi-elliptical motion is used in multiple tosses because it is easier for maintaining dough rotation at the maximum rotational speed These same scientists previously helped develop the world's smallest useful motor, only a quarter of a millimeter wide that could potentially be used for minimally invasive neuro-microsurgery. According to these scientists, "it could be used in the propulsion system of miniature machines to swim through the bloodstream to inaccessible places, potentially revolutionizing future surgical procedures."
SCM allows for complicated, functional folded structures that move using elastic deformation rather than through the use of traditional mechanical elements like pin joints or bearings. It integrates large flexible joints, created by a laser micro-machining and lamination, with novel actuators. The result is a robot made up of composite materials that can not only withstand a drop from a tall building, but also immediately dash off, undamaged. DASH is but one of several ongoing projects underway at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. Among the goals of the researchers is to, "Harness features of animal manipulation, locomotion, sensing, actuation, mechanics, dynamics, and control strategies to radically improve millirobot capabilities."
David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard states, "Reverse engineering a biological visual system-a system with hundreds of millions of processing units-and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task. It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do." The challenge has led neuroscientists and roboticists to re-framed approaches. For instance, European researchers have recently developed an algorithm that enables a robot to combine data from both sound and vision to enable depth perception and to help isolate objects.
David Cox and Nicolas Pinto, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT and their team of Harvard and MIT researchers, have recently demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems. The team drew inspiration from genetic screening techniques whereby a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Cox feels that reverse and forward engineering the brain will lead to breakthroughs. He concludes,"tightly coupling experimental neuroscience and computer engineering holds the promise to greatly accelerate both fields."
The research is reported in the August 28 issue of Science magazine. According to IBM, though in recent years progress has been made in research of nanostructures on the atomic scale with AFM, imaging the chemical structure of an entire molecule has never been achieved with atomic resolution. The Science magazine article follows another piece published two months ago in the June 12 issue of the magazine covering the "determination of atomic charge states." The results discussed in both of these articles will open new possibilities for investigating how charge propagates through molecules or molecular networks.
Understanding the charge distribution may lead to building computing elements at the atomic scale. This is the Holy Grail of semiconductor research and development. IBM research scientist Gerhard Meyer said, "It is accepted that in the future this work can contribute to assemble prototypical structures of molecular systems and the idea is these circuits could have much lower power consumption and reduce fabrication costs. This is an important step, but one of many that will need to be achieved to build computing elements at the atomic scale."
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