Lifeboat Foundation

The future of computing may be analog.

The digital design of our everyday computers is good for reading email and gaming, but today’s problem-solving computers are working with vast amounts of data. The ability to both store and process this information can lead to performance bottlenecks due to the way computers are built.

The next computer revolution might be a new kind of hardware, called processing-in-memory (PIM), an emerging computing paradigm that merges the memory and processing unit and does its computations using the physical properties of the machine—no 1s or 0s needed to do the processing digitally.

A team at Swiss-Mile, a spinoff of ETH Zurich has improved upon its ANYmal robot by giving it wheels—the result is known as the Swiss-Mile Robot. And by giving it wheels, the robot is now classified as a car, a quadruped and a humanoid robot, depending on its activity at any given time. Like the original ANYmal, the Swiss-Mile has a cartoonish look about it, as if it rolled out of one of the Pixar “Cars” movies.

It is also deceptively agile. In car mode, it rolls on the ground like a remote-controlled toy car but with much better abilities. It can roll up and down stairs and over objects it has never encountered without hesitation. It keeps on rolling with gusto, moving over any obstacle in its path, lifting up whatever wheels may need lifting, making it a rolling, stepping quadruped. But then it lifts its front end off the ground and rolls or walks on its two rear wheels, like a human on roller skates. Adding wheel lock has really given the robot a lot of options, allowing it to stop rolling, if need be, and to walk on two or four feet.

Continue reading “A wheeled car, quadruped and humanoid robot: Swiss-Mile Robot from ETH Zurich” »

Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) scientists announced they’ve made significant advances toward creating a chip that can grow DNA strands in a tightly packed, ultra-dense format for large storage capacity at very low cost.

Police departments all over the world are warming up to electric vehicles and their findings after using EVs on a daily basis are encouraging.

Earlier this year, the Westport Police Department in Connecticut shared some interesting conclusions after buying a Tesla Model 3 in December 2019. They found the EV to be not only cheaper to buy than the Ford Explorer SUV they typically use but also more affordable to modify, maintain, and run, leading to savings of about $6,000 a year.

Continue reading “DNA Data Drives Point Toward Exabyte Scale” »

Police departments all over the world are warming up to electric vehicles and their findings after using EVs on a daily basis are encouraging.

Earlier this year, the Westport Police Department in Connecticut shared some interesting conclusions after buying a Tesla Model 3 in December 2019. They found the EV to be not only cheaper to buy than the Ford Explorer SUV they typically use but also more affordable to modify, maintain, and run, leading to savings of about $6,000 a year.

Now, new data is coming in from the UK, where several Tesla Model 3s custom built by Tesla UK as patrol cars have completed nine months of initial trials with the police. Max Toozs-Hobson, account manager and emergency services lead at Tesla, shared the findings on LinkedIn and said the Model 3 police cars have been “getting some great results.”

Israeli drone manufacturer Airobotics has collaborated with Israeli solar farm services company Solar Drone to develop and supply to Solar Drone a unique solar panel cleaning drone system. The fully automated system will include a drone docking station for automatic battery replacement and cleaning fluid replenishment, enabling the system to operate continuously.

While solar power and solar panels are essentially maintenance-free systems, but solar panels do require cleaning from time to time to enable proper function. Dirt, dust, mud, and bird dropping greatly reduce solar panel efficiency, impacting power output. Frequent cleaning is expensive and time-consuming, especially when panels are remote, difficult to access, or difficult to clean.

Continue reading “Airobotics, Solar Drone to develop new drone for solar panels cleaning” »

Extracting oxygen from regolith would also require substantial industrial equipment. We’d need to first convert solid metal oxide into liquid form, either by applying heat, or heat combined with solvents or electrolytes. We have the technology to do this on Earth, but moving this apparatus to the Moon – and generating enough energy to run it – will be a mighty challenge.

Earlier this year, Belgium-based startup Space Applications Services announced it was building three experimental reactors to improve the process of making oxygen via electrolysis. They expect to send the technology to the Moon by 2025 as part of the European Space Agency’s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) mission.

Google said Tuesday it has moved to shut down a network of about one million hijacked electronic devices used worldwide to commit online crimes, while also suing Russia-based hackers the tech giant claimed were responsible.

The so-called botnet of infected devices, which was also used to surreptitiously mine bitcoin, was cut off at least for now from the people wielding it on the internet.

“The operators of Glupteba are likely to attempt to regain control of the botnet using a backup command and control mechanism,” wrote Shane Huntley and Luca Nagy from Google’s threat analysis group.

Uganda is preparing to launch its first satellite by August 2022. The satellite, PearlAfricaSat-1, is the latest mission from the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite project. The initiative began in October 2019 as part of a directive by Uganda’s President to develop a National Space Agency and Institute.

Uganda signed the collaborative research agreement with the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech), Japan. The agreement involved enrolling and upskilling three graduate engineers to design, build, test, and launch the first satellite for Uganda. Consequently, Japan registered three Ugandan graduate engineers, including; Bonny Omara, Edgar Mujunu, and Derrick Tebuseke.

The core missions for PearlAfricaSat-1 are a multispectral camera payload. The Multispectral Camera mission will provide about 20-metre resolution images for Uganda to facilitate water quality, soil fertility, and land use and cover analysis. The satellite will play a vital role in the oil and gas operation by monitoring the East African crude oil pipeline. This will enable accurate weather forecasts by gathering remote sensor data for predicting landslides and drought. Once the satellite reaches orbit, an Uganda ground station will monitor its health status for a few days before it starts executing its mission.

Scientists from the Division of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Kanazawa University developed a prototype pipe maintenance robot that can unclog and repair pipes with a wide range of diameters. Using a cutting tool with multiple degrees of freedom, the machine is capable of manipulating and dissecting objects for removal. This work may be a significant step forward for the field of sewerage maintenance robots.

Various sewer pipes that are essential to the services of buildings require regular inspection, repair, and maintenance. Current robots that move inside pipes are primarily designed only for visual surveying or inspection. Some robots were developed for maintenance, but they couldn’t execute complicated tasks. In–pipe robots that can also clear blockages or perform complex maintenance tasks are highly desirable, especially for pipes that are too narrow for humans to traverse. Now, a team of researchers at Kanazawa University have developed and tested a prototype with these capabilities. “Our robot can help civic and industrial workers by making their job much safer. It can operate in small pipes that humans either cannot access or are dangerous,” explains first author Thaelasutt Tugeumwolachot.

One of the main challenges with designing a robot of this kind is how to achieve a snug fit inside pipes of different sizes. Previous models can expand or contract their width by only about 60 percent. Here, the researchers used six foldable “crawler” arms around the body of the robot. This adjustable locomotion mechanism allowed it to work in pipes with sizes between 15 to 31 cm, a range of over 100 percent. Another design challenge is how to crowd complex and tough arm mechanism into small space. This robot equipped a compact arm which enables complicated cutting movements by being driven via gear train from several motors inside the robot body.