#Increasingly, Robots of All Sizes Are Human Workmates Most industrial robots are far less friendly than the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner,
which is safe enough to be a surprisingly popular means of feline transportation. Industrial robots often sit behind metal fences, their mechanical arms a blur of terrific speed and precision;
to prevent serious injury to humans (or worse), these robots are normally shut down when anyone enters their workspace.
In recent years, however, the fences have started to disappear as a gentler breed of robot has entered the workplace
and new features have made even conventional industrial robots safer to be around. This shift is altering the dynamics of labor in many factories
and workshops, allowing humans and robots to work together in efficient new ways. Human-robot collaboration is aining an enormous amount of momentum,
says Henrik Christensen, executive director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. n the past,
and a cartoonish face shown on a touch-screen display, is very easy and safe to work with.
To program the robot, a worker simply moves its arms through an operation to show it what to do.
And should anyone get in the robot way, it will either stop or, at worst, hit the person too gently to leave a bruise.
000 when many conventional robots cost several hundred thousand dollars. Another robot maker, the Danish company Universal Robots, offers small, more conventional-looking robot arms that are similarly cheap ($31, 000 each), simple,
meaning they can perform complex work and either step in for a human worker or work alongside one.
RSS Manufacturing, a company in Costa Mesa, California, that produces custom automobile and plumbing components,
But more powerful conventional robots are starting to work in closer proximity to humans, too.
New sensors and software allow these machines to predict collisions and avoid them as humans go about their work.
Kuka Robotics, an industrial-robot manufacturer with headquarters in Germany, is testing robots equipped with such safety systems. ences are expensive,
and it takes time to work in and around the fences, says Stuart Shepherd, CEO for The americas at Kuka. hen there are some applications that don work
unless you have man-machine collaboration. Shepherd says some manufacturing tasks, such as the production of small transmission components, may require a robot to do the physical labor
and robot workers to operate side by side. For other jobs, like lifting an engine block so that it can be worked on,
#An Easy Interface for the Internet of things With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves,
making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance,
But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New york city company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.
Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a hingto its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this weeting.
visit Dweet. io with your computer or mobile phone, click ry it now, and youl see raw data from your device itself:
its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation;
another click stops this sharing. Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform.
and Openremote (see ree Software Ties the Internet of things Together, with different business models and levels of complexity.
Big companies like General electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms. Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because t the easiest to use, says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford motor.
Prasad showed how Freeboard could quickly unlock the value of vehicle-generated data. He been experimenting with Freeboard using a car data interface called Open XC.
Prasad took data on the on-off state of windshield wipers to come up with a prototype of a warning alert that could someday be dispatched to a car a few kilometers back to warn the driver of wet roads. set it up
and did it in a matter of a few minutesnd I don code for a living,
he says. In theory, anything could be connected: a bicycle or other object could get wired with the help of an emerging class of cheap gadgets that report GPS co?
rdinates to cellular networks (see he Internet of things, Unplugged and Untethered and easily be turned into a weet streamof location or other data.
Semmelhack showed off one application a Freeboard dashboard of a whiskey still in Washington built by of one of his developersfathers.
It showed real-time temperature and humidity and a video stream of the apparatus h
#Shape-Shifting Touch screen Buttons Head to Market As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet,
some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds:
a featureless surface for watching video and buttons that rise out of it when you need to type.
and elastic blisters to make buttons rise up from a device screen and then disappear without trace when theye no longer needed.
Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has modified now equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside.
Wistron is one of the world largest electronics manufacturers; it made devices for brands including Blackberry, Apple, and Acer.
The company also recently became an investor in Tactus. The first fruit of the tie-up will go on sale later this year in the form of a protective case with Tactus technology inside for Apple ipad Mini.
The design includes a transparent screen protector that covers the front of the device. However, sliding a mechanical control on the side of the case raises up a transparent set of buttons
or guides on the screen protector, over the touch keyboard, to make typing easier. Sliding the control back will cause those buttons to melt away
leaving a clear, smooth pane of glass. sers will still type on the screens as they do today,
but with better performance, confidence, and satisfaction, says Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla. Tactus won reveal the exact design of the case launching this year,
or of a similar one slated to launch next year. Nor will it say which brands are behind them.
But it did let MIT Technology Review try out an internal prototype case for the ipad Mini with the same basic design.
Sliding the control on the left pushed fluid into a set of guides that rose up between keys on the virtual keyboard.
That they were ever there is discernable only by a close examination of the screen protector in the right light
But the panel feels noticeably less smooth to a finger swiping the surface. The guides provide physical feedback
when the fingers don directly hit a key, something that lacking on a typical touch screen.
The relationship with Wistron could lead morphing buttons to appear in tablets and other devices.
Tactus has demonstrated both a prototype seven-inch tablet with its technology fully integrated into its display
and an off-the-shelf tablet modified to include the technology. When the buttons are built into a device in that way their movements are driven by a small electric pump.
when the keyboard appears. e are only at the beginning of what we expect to be a multiyear partnership,
starting with mobile computing, says Ciesla. He says the two companies have begun working on the design of products and prototypes for carriers, electronics brands, and retailers.
One project is a notebook-style device that has a second, morphing screen where the keyboard would usually be
#Microrobots, Working Together, Build with Metal, Glass, and Electronics Someone glancing through the door of Annjoe Wong-Foy lab at SRI International might think his equipment is infested by ants.
Dark shapes about a centimeter across move to and fro over elevated walkways: they weave around obstacles and carry small sticks.
A closer look makes it clear that these busy critters are in fact man-made. Wong-Foy, a senior research engineer at SRI, has built an army of magnetically steered workers to test the idea that icrorobotscould be a better way to assemble electronics components,
or to build other small structures. Wong-Foy robotic workers have already proved capable of building towers 30 centimeters long from carbon rods,
and other platforms able to support a kilogram of weight. The robots can work with glass, metal wood, and electronic components.
In one demonstration they made a carbon truss structure with wires and colored LEDS mixed in to serve as the lab Christmas tree. e can scale to many more robots at low cost,
says Wong-Foy, who thinks his system could develop into a new approach to manufacturing. Many electronic components are the right size to be handled by his microrobots,
he says, and teams of them might prove a good way to lay them out onto circuit boards.
SRI wants to create a version of the microrobot system that could be sold to other research labs
and companies to experiment with. ee demonstrated the basic platform and are now looking at how we can transfer out of the lab as a research platform,
They can move only when placed on a surface with a specific pattern of electrical circuits inside.
Wong-Foy has written software to do that, and used it to choreograph the movement of over 1, 000 tiny robots in a complex circulating pattern.
That shows it should be possible to have them work in large teams, he says.
But creating teams of robots with different types of arms makes it possible to do complex work.
Building a truss structure requires three types of workers. One operates a kind of toothpick dispenser,
and then uses surface tension to pick up the rod. A third robot visits a glue station,
The software controlling the robots can also move the platform they are sitting On it moves the platform each time a new layer is complete so the robotsworking space stays the same as the structure theye building grows.
Much like 3-D printing technology, microrobots promise to be a more efficient way to make complex objects in small quantities than conventional mass-production technology,
Helping to make circuit boards in small batches for prototyping new electronic devices is one possible application.
Hobbyists and small companies working on electronics hardware today make few prototype circuit boards due to the time it takes to assemble them by hand
and the expense and delay of paying for small runs at dedicated plants. Wong-Foy also thinks his approach might be useful for assembling devices that combine electronic and optical components, for example to interface with fiber optic cables.
that industry often uses manual assembly to put them together. n the field of optical electronics people have not found a good way to integrate indium phosphide lasers with silicon components,
Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywherehey power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon musk, CEO of Tesla motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United states three years from
now that will more than double the world total lithium-ion battery production. The plan is still in its early stages,
but already four states are negotiating with Tesla in the hope of becoming the factory home.
People have come to expect bold plans from Musk. In addition to founding Tesla, he started his own rocket company, Spacex,
First, Tesla sold 23,000 cars last year. The gigafactory, which would start production in 2017,
would by 2020 make enough batteries for 500,000 electric cars. It would produce enough batteries annually to store 35 gigawatt hours of electricity, hence the name.
Second, battery companies normally announce factories only after theye funded and a site is selected. And they typically scale up gradually.
Why announce plans to build such an enormous factory specially when electric car sales so far come nowhere close to justifying it?
The project seems more puzzling in light of the hard times at other electric car battery factories in the United states. In 2009,
President Obama announced an ambitious $2. 4 billion grant program intended to launch an electric car battery industry in the United states. That effort,
so far, has failedactories were built, but sales have been poor because electric car sales have been slow. All of the battery makers involved have struggled (see oo Many Battery factories, Too Few Electric cars,
and one, A123 Systems, went bankrupt. Musk is betting that Tesla can generate a much bigger market for electric cars.
To keep the factory humming he will have to sell more than 10 times as many electric vehicles in a year as Nissan managed last year
(and Nissan has sold more electric cars than any other automaker). Musk has some reason for confidenceast year Tesla sold as many electric cars as Nissan in the United states,
even though Tesla Model S costs two to three times as much as Nissan electric car, the Leaf. He seems to be betting that a huge factory will significantly reduce the cost of making batteries,
which remain the most expensive part of electric cars. In the ideal scenario, that cost reduction would help Tesla produce a mass-market car similar in cost to the Nissan leaf or Chevrolet volt but that,
crucially, will be able to go more than twice as far on a charge (the car would also be able to accelerate faster than the Leaf).
Yet it not clear that a huge factory would deliver the needed cost reductions. According to a presentation to investors, it would lower costs by 30 percent.
Tesla has a good track record for reducing battery costs (see riving Innovation, and even incremental improvements at conventional factories could reduce costs by 15 percent by 2020,
says Menahem Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries. But it unclear where the remaining 15 percent might come from.
Economies of scale could help lower production costs to some degree, but Tesla says the unusual design of the gigafactory,
with batteries built from raw materials rather than assembled, will also help. Usually, the components of batteries are made in many different places.
Electrolytes are made often at a large chemical plant and graphite electrodes at a plant that also makes graphite for tires and other applications.
The electrolytes and electrodes are packaged then into cells at a plant dedicated to cell making,
and the cells are assembled into complete battery packsith cooling systems and electronic controlsn yet another factory.
Musk plans to bring almost all of this under one roof. Raw materials, processed into electrodes, electrolytes,
containers and other parts, go in one end; complete battery packs come out the other. The factory will also be able to take old batteries apart to recycle the materials,
and Musk even plans to use solar and wind to help power the factory. Brett Smith, codirector for manufacturing, engineering,
and technology at the Center for Automotive Research, says having control over every part of the process could indeed help reduce costs.
Tesla would need to bring in a great deal of expertise to make this work. What more, there are benefits to making different parts in different places.
For example, it can be cheaper to make electrolytes in a large chemical plant that makes other chemicals
too. Panasonic, Tesla current battery cell supplier, benefits from the know-how of workers in Japan, many of whom have decades of manufacturing experience. anufacturers have tried both approaches.
Either approach can work, says Jack Hu, a professor of industrial operations and engineering at the University of Michigan.
But Hu says such a plant would need to be flexible. t is possible to build a gigafactory,
he says. he key lies in the how. Battery manufacturing is a complex process involving many steps.
If these steps are all dependent on each other, then the gigafactory would be a bad idea:
difficult to run, a lot of down times; difficult to identify quality problems. Beyond the technical challenges, Tesla may struggle to convince partners to go along with the scheme.
The factory would cost $5 billion, with $2 billion coming from Tesla. If Tesla can sell as many cars as it hopes,
there would likely be no alternative market for those batteries, making it a risky investment.
One potential market, using batteries for storing electricity power on the grid, is still in early stages of development.)
Whether the gigafactory is built actually, and whatever the final factory looks like, the way Musk has been promoting it may prove to be a savvy business move.
Announcing the factory at an early stage, and with an ambitious size, could be good for negotiations with states,
especially given the proposed size of the factory. Some states are even reconsidering laws that restrict how Tesla can sell cars in their state,
which could help open new markets for the automaker. Proposing such a huge undertaking might also make it more likely that Panasonic
or some other partner will later go along with a less ambitious planay, a factory to supply 100,000 cars. anasonic can afford to lose the business,
says Anderman. And yet, as grand as Musk plan is, it worth noting that 500,000 cars is still a tiny fraction of the worldwide auto industry.
GM sold nearly 10 million cars last year. If electric vehicles are ever to make a dent in the world auto market,
then gigafactories will need to become a reality
#The Latest Chat App for iphone Needs No Internet connection Mobile app stores are stuffed with messaging apps from Whatsapp to Tango and their many imitators.
But Firechat released last week for the iphone stands out. It s the only one that can be used without cellphone reception.
Firechat makes use of a feature Apple introduced in the latest version of its ios mobile software ios7 called multipeer connectivity.
This feature allows phones to connect to one another directly using Bluetooth or Wi-fi as an alternative to the Internet.
If you re using Firechat its nearby chat room lets you exchange messages with other users within 100 feet without sending data via your cellular provider.
Micha Benoliel CEO and cofounder of startup Open Garden which made Firechat says the app shows how smartphones can be set free from cellular networks.
He hopes to enable many more Internet-optional apps with the upcoming release of software tools that will help developers build Firechat-style apps for iphone or for Android Mac and Windows devices.
This approach is very interesting for multiplayer gaming and all kinds of communication apps says Benoliel.
Anthony Dipasquale a developer with consultancy Thoughtbot says Firechat is the only app he s aware of that s been built to make use of multipeer connectivity perhaps
because the feature remains unfamiliar to most Apple developers. I hope more people start to use it soon he says.
It s an awesome framework with a lot of potential. There is probably a great use for multipeer connectivity in every situation where there are people grouped together wanting to share some sort of information.
Dipasquale has dabbled in using multipeer connectivity himself creating an experimental app that streams music from one device to several others nearby.
The new feature of ios7 currently only supports data moving directly from one device to another and from one device to several others.
However Open Garden s forthcoming software will extend the feature so that data can hop between two iphones out of range of one another via intermediary devices.
That approach known as mesh networking is at the heart of several existing projects to create disaster-proof
or community-controlled communications networks (see Build Your Own Internet with Mobile Mesh Networking). Apps built to exploit such device-to-device schemes can offer security
and privacy benefits over those that rely on the Internet. For example messages sent using Firechat to nearby devices don t pass through any systems operated by either Open Garden
or a wireless carrier (although they are broadcast to all Firechat users nearby). That means the content of a message and metadata could not be harvested from a central communications hub by an attacker or government agency.
This method of communication is immune to firewalls like the ones installed in China and North korea says Mattt Thompson a software engineer who writes the ios and Mac development blog NSHIPSTER.
Recent revelations about large-scale surveillance of online services and the constant litany of data breaches make this a good time for apps that don t rely on central servers he says.
As users become more mindful of the security and privacy implications of technologies they rely on moving in the direction of local ad hoc networking makes a lot of sense.
However peer-to-peer and mesh networking apps also come with their own risks since an eavesdropper could gain access to local traffic just by using a device within range.
Open Garden s main product is an app that allows Android devices to share their Internet connections (see Could You Spare Some Internet access?.
However Benoliel says that won t be coming to the iphone anytime soon because the feature that Firechat relies on cannot be used to share data connectivity.
Peer-to-peer mobile communications and mesh networks could prove especially important in countries with minimal communications infrastructure.
You can see Google spending billions on fiber and balloons but this is not going to solve the problem of ubiquitous mobile connectivity Benoliel says.
He argues that the spread of cheap Android phones across the world will make mesh networking feasible.
We need to create small Internets that can function on their own and then connect them to the big Internet t
#Yeast 2. 0 Designer changes in the first artificial yeast chromosome could help advance synthetic biology.
Scientists have synthesized an entire yeast chromosome, the first artificial chromosome for the kingdom of life that includes humans, plants, and fungi.
Yeast with the artificial chromosome appeared to be just as happy as their aturalcounterparts, reports the team.
The methods developed to create the designer genomic structure could help synthetic biologists better use the single-celled fungi as biological factories for chemicals like biofuels and drugs.
Humans have been manipulating yeast for thousands of years, first turning wild strains of the fungus into the life-affirming fermenters that give us beer and bread.
Yeast also has long been a lab organism for studying molecular biology and genetics; in fact, a lot of what we know about cancer genetics comes from research on our fungal friends.
In recent years, scientists have figured out how to engineer new biochemical pathways into yeast, creating living factories for medicines, biofuels,
and more (see icrobes Can Mass-produce Malaria Drugand iofuel Plant Opens in Brazil. The report of the first artificial, designer yeast chromosome suggests ways for researchers to produce new chemicals in the microbes
or potentially make their biological production more efficient. Six years ago, the J. Craig Venter Institute built the first artificial chromosome,
which encompassed the complete genome of a bacterium (see ynthesizing a Genome From scratch. Two years later
that 582,970 base pair manmade genome was transplanted into a cell which successfully began to carry out its instructions (see ynthetic Genome Reboots Cell.
The first synthetic yeast chromosome, reported in Science on Thursday, represents just part of that organism complete genome
and is 272,871 base pairs long. The Johns hopkins university-led team first designed the chromosome on a computer, streamlining the natural chromosome sequence
so that it had less repetitive sequences and other tweaks. Undergraduate students in a class called uild-A-Genomeat Johns Hopkins used molecular biology tricks to string together snippets of DNA around 70 nucleotides (A
T, G and C) long into 750-base pair blocks. Then, other researchers continued to assemble those blocks into longer stretches of the chromosome,
and eventually the largest chunks were delivered into yeast cells, which took over the last assembly steps to create the whole, artificial chromosome.
The artificial chromosome is a designer version of just one of the yeast 16 chromosomes,
and the smallest one at that. But the work is an important step forward for synthetic biology
and a milestone in an international effort to build a completely synthetic yeast genome, project Sc2. 0 (from the scientific name for baker yeast,
Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In addition to deleting some unnecessary sequences from the code of their designer chromosome, the researchers also flanked many genes on the chromosome with tiny bits of DNA that act as landing sites for a protein that can be used to create on-demand mutations.
With these designer changes, the researchers say they will be able to test how many mutations a yeast genome can tolerate at once
and potentially discover beneficial mutations that could give rise to strains that can survive in a wider range of conditions
or perhaps be better factories for useful molecules like fuels and drugs. Already the researchers have shown that inducing mutation in yeast using the designer sites led to some cells that grow more slowly,
and yet others that grow more quickly. Lead researcher Jef Boeke tells The Verge that the team plans to create these mutation-ready additions in all 16 chromosomes.
That fountain of variability could be key to finding ways to push our fermenting friends to more efficiently create biofuels and other chemicals f
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011