Video: Watch Flying Robots Build a 6-Meter Tower

What happens when you put a bunch of roboticists and architects together in an empty art gallery?
This is what happens:

This is the Flight Assembled Architecture, an installation that opened yesterday near Paris and is still going up as I write this. It's the result of a collaboration between ETH Zurich roboticist Raffaello D'Andrea and architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, also from ETH.
D'Andrea, an IEEE Fellow and IEEE Spectrum editorial board member, is known for his amazing robotic sculptures and flying robot stunts, and Gramazio and Kohler, who run their own design studio, are pioneers in bringing together robotics and architecture. But for an installation at the FRAC Centre, in Orléans, near Paris, they wanted to do something entirely new and bold.
How about using a fleet of quadcopters to build a 6 meter (20 feet) twisting tower out of 1500 foam bricks? Sure!
D'Andrea tells me they're using four flying robots at the same time. First, the robots grab foam bricks from a special brick dispenser on the ground. Next the quadcopters receive the exact coordinates of where the bricks should go based on a detailed digital blueprint of the tower. Then they fly off.

The robots fly autonomously, but they get help from the environment: The ceiling of the room where the assembly is taking place was equipped with a motion-capture system. A computer uses the vision data to keep track of the quadcopters and tell them where to go -- the same approach used at ETH's Flying Machine Arena. (More technical details here.)
When a robot's battery runs low, it automatically lands on a charger and a new quadrotor takes its place. The assembly is happening at a pace of one brick per minute on average, D'Andrea says. Glue on the bottom of the bricks keeps them in place (the installation will become part of FRAC's permanent collection).
The foam tower is actually a 1:100 model of a "vertical village" conceived by Gramazio and Kohler. It would have a height of 600 meters and living space for 30,000 people, with each "brick" housing multiple apartments.
This week, after some test runs in Zurich, D'Andrea, Gramazio, and Kohler gathered their teams, packed their robots and bricks, and started the setup at the FRAC space. Last night, the museum opened its doors, and a crowd filled the room, letting off "lots of oohs and ahhs," reports Markus Waibel, a member of the D'Andrea team.

MEDELEC 2011 - Embedded systems for medical devices

MEDELEC is the only technical event in the UK which focuses specifically on the increasingly important role that electronics components and embedded systems is playing in the design, development and manufacture of medical devices. 

MEDELEC 2011 will take place in Cambridge on the 29th November and expects to attract engineers from across Europe. The organisers have also announced Med-Tech Innovation as main media sponsor for MEDELEC 2011. Med-Tech Innovation is a brand new online and print media platform for the UK and Irish medical device research, design and manufacturing community, and is the only dedicated media of its type. www.med-techinnovation.com

The MEDELEC one-day conference and exhibition will be of value to electronics engineers and technical managers working in the clinical and healthcare sectors. This event will be an opportunity for them to learn about the very latest advances in medical electronics through the technical seminar programme and workshops. They will also be able to view demonstrations of innovative software and hardware technologies, and network with peers.

The MEDELEC organisers have arranged for the conference programme to be set by an independent judging panel of experts to address the needs of medical device manufacturers, covering topics such as diagnostics, patient monitoring, miniaturisation, and remote monitoring to optimise patient care. This includes technologies used in operating theatres, hospitals, clinics, doctor's surgeries, and home devices.

More information and registration at www.medelec.co.uk

Climbing Robot Tank Can Corner Like a Gecko

This is not the first sticky-treaded robotank, but as far as I know, it's the first one that can manage to go around corners and make that tricky transition from horizontal to vertical. The somewhat unfortunately named "Tailless Timing Belt Climbing Platform" (or TBCP-11) comes from Simon Frasier University way up there in Canada. It weighs 240 grams, and has no problems climbing up whiteboards, glass, and other slick surfaces.

The sticking power of those treads comes from the same handy little Van der Waals forces that geckos use to effortlessly stick to, well, everything. Instead of tiny hairs, though, TBCP-11 uses tiny mushrooms, which provide a substantial amount of conformable surface area for the robot to use to adhere to walls.

Maximizing compliant surface area has been an issue for gecko-type (aka dry-adhesion) climbing robots for a long time; the material itself is spectacular, but the tough part is getting enough of the material to make contact with your climbing surface. For example, check out the picture of Stickybot III's toes in this article, and notice how little of the adhesive the robot is relying on to stick. This is one of the advantages of the TBCP-11: the continuous loops of adhesive material provide a lot of adhesion power.

While this robot does have some autonomous capability, it's still tethered for power, since batteries are heavy. It's going to take a little extra work to increase the strength of the adhesive so that the TBCP-11 can bring its power source onboard, and the SFU researchers are also trying to figure out how to get the thing to turn without the treads coming loose and causing the TBCP-11 to plummet to its doom.

OSRAM Developers Reach New Milestone in LED Technology

OSRAM developers have achieved a milestone in LED technology by producing a 124,000 candelas rating for an LED flashlight with 7.5 degrees as the coverage angle. So, by combining a warm white colour temperature and an excellent colour rendering, LED spotlights can now achieve a power range that has been achieved till now only by high-intensity discharge lamps. 

 This type of spotlight is of special interest for shop illumination and architecture, where they can be used for novel applications. This breakthrough achieved by OSRAM has changed the focus of the lighting market towards semiconductor-based technologies.

Breakthrough for the researchers at OSRAM: for the first time ever an LED spot has achieved a rating of 124,000 candelas in a coverage angle of 7.5 degrees. Credit: OSRAM

Thus far, high-intensity discharge lamps have been predominant, however, the new OSRAM LED spotlight, when joined with a standard commercial reflector in continuous operation, can attain a rating of 124,000 candelas with a 7.5 º coverage angle. Nevertheless power consumption is only 60 W. When compared, a reflector with coverage angle of 9 ° and one spotlight with a standard 70 W high-intensity discharge lamp can achieve a rating of roughly 82,000 candelas. The phosphors and the connection technology were modified for maximum results to achieve these high ratings.

OSRAM Opto Semiconductors’ new generation of chip technology, the UX3, enables the functioning of the LEDs at a higher current. Here, the power supply does not flow through the chip surface, but it is combined within the chip itself. Therefore, the light is beam is focused uniformly and reaches the illuminated object more uniformly compared to other methods.

The new LED module exceeds the minimum rating of 3,000 Lux for flashlight illumination and it reaches a rating of 124,000 Lux from a distance of 1 m and 5,000 Lux from a distance of 5 m. Therefore, constructions and exhibits can be lighted from a greater distance without disturbing the visual effect.

Source: http://www.osram.com/

Ultrafast Semiconductor Lasers for High-Speed Optical Data Transmission

Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) researchers have conceptualized an ultrafast semiconductor laser to enable high-speed data transmission over the Internet. They have utilized the spin of electrons and their intrinsic angular momentum for overcoming the existing limits to modulation speed. 

 

 The global information society and the networked world require semiconductor laser-based optical data transmission. The highest speed achievable by semiconductor lasers has limited the speed of optical data transmission. The desire for transmitting higher volume of data and expanding networks have been the motivation for the development of faster transmission systems.

Current modulation frequencies of conventional semiconductor lasers are lower than 50 GHz. RUB researchers have used spin lasers for overcoming the modulation speed limits. In spin lasers, electrons whose spin state has already been determined are injected, but in conventional lasers the electrons’ spin is arbitrary.

The injection of the spin-polarized electrons forces the laser to work with different frequencies in two laser modes. Dr. Nils Gerhardt stated that the birefringence in the resonator can be used to tune the differences in the frequencies. This could be done by bending the microlaser. Coupling of the two laser modes within the microresonator leads to an oscillation with a frequency of over 100 GHz, theoretically.

The study has been conducted at the collaborative research centre 491 at the Universities of Bochum and Duisburg-Essen. The research has been published in the Applied Physics Letters journal from the American Institute of Physics.

Source: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/