ROBOTICS-HUMANOIDS

Is it possible that we will have robots in our homes,offices...?the answer to this question is yes!!!!!!!!!!.Here are some prototypes which will be soon available... 
Rosie, the robot who kept house for the title family in "The Jetsons," a 1960s animated television show, has at last come alive—sort of. Before you'll see a robot slicing cucumbers in your kitchen, researchers will need to make these mechanical servants smarter. Here's how three teams are tackling this challenge.

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Some videos on Robotics

RoboCup Kicks Off in Singapore This Week

Humans aren't the only ones playing soccer right now. In just two days, robots from world-renowned universities will compete in Singapore for RoboCup 2010. This is the other World Cup, where players range from 15-centimeter tall Wall-E-like bots to adult-sized advanced humanoids.
The RoboCup, now in its 14th edition, is the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence competition with more than 400 teams from dozens of countries. The idea is to use the soccer bots to advance research in machine vision, multi-agent collaboration, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and other areas of robotics and AI.
But its participants also aim to develop autonomous soccer playing robots that will one day be able to play against humans. The RoboCup's mission statement:

By 2050, a team of fully autonomous  humanoid  robot soccer  players shall win the game, complying with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.

It may seem far-fetched that robots will ever be able to compete with the likes of Messi or Kaká but 40 years is a long time in terms of technology. And what's wrong about dreaming big? Just think of the days when people would say a computer would never beat humans in chess -- until IBM's Deep Blue did just that in 1997. For now researchers explore fundamental questions in robot development: How well can robots move and think on their feet? And how well can they score goals? But maybe soon they'll be building PeléBot.

Robotics

A new generation of legged robots will navigate the world's trickiest terrain

Scooped up a year ago in California’s Mojave Desert and transplanted to a lab at Georgia Tech, the lizard holds our interest because of its truly peculiar feet. Those long, bony toes allow the reptile to navigate over sand, rocks, and the many other types of terrain it may face in the desert. In the lab, the bed of glass beads stands in for desert sand, and by blowing air through it or packing it down, we can make the ground looser or more solid. We then study how the lizard copes with the changes.

observations of the lizard, the crab, and the scorpion have helped shape our theory of sand locomotion

Indeed, with physics models built into their feet and brains, robots should one day be able to scramble across a rocky or sandy environment and learn, on their own, how to handle the changes in terrain from footstep to footstep. We can imagine thousands of SandBots scouring the surface of another world, stepping from a pile of rubble to a sandy patch with ease. That’s still a big challenge for today’s machines, but it’s something even a hatchling sea turtle can handle. Despite having appendages that are better suited for swimming, these remarkable animals must climb out of a deep hole in the ground, clamber over grass and debris, and move across sand to reach the water, where they will spend much of the rest of their lives.

Downsizing Nuclear Power Plants

A standard nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt or more of low-carbon power, a boon in this age of anxiety over climate change. The problem is getting the thing built in the first place: At US $7 billion to $10 billion apiece, nuclear plants are tough for even the largest utilities to finance.
President Obama proposes to handle the problem by tripling federal loan guarantees to such plants, to $54 billion. But now a more economical solution is coming under scrutiny: downsizing nuclear plants from gigawatt scale to more affordable units that can be built by the dozen. ”Size matters. In this case, small size,” says Andrew Kadak, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT.
Small modular reactors, or SMRs, of 70 to 210 megawatts are under construction in China and Russia, and a mix of start-ups and established nuclear technology firms, such as Westinghouse Electric Co., General Atomics, and the Babcock & Wilcox Co., are shopping similarly modest designs in the United States.
This strategy overturns the drive toward economies of scale that has pushed nuclear designers toward ever-larger reactors since the industry’s inception. Now the designers may instead rely on the ”economies of multiples” that accrue to the mass production of everything from cars to iPhones.

Go Green!!!!

Go green is the motto of this post!!!,so what can we can do about it?how can we help??just think of anyway which can help the environment in some way or other and try to improvise it.you can post it here in my blog and we can discuss about it.Recently i noticed that almost 60% of energy spent in an urbanized area consisting of home and official buildings is on Air Conditioning.Now,if we try to reduce it, we can save a lot of energy,as it is a huge chunk of energy consumption.There are some ways which i noticed which can help in reducing power consumption,but one of them enticed me to speak to you about it.It is the use of geothermal energy.Actually,geothermal energy is much underutilized compared to other renewable sources of energy.It is very reliable and cost effective.Geothermal pump.The main idea is to use a geothermal heat pump which takes advantage of the fact that at some point below the surface, the ground remains a constant 10 °C all year round. So, using this fact that the temperature remains constant, we can regulate the temperature
by the principle of heat transfer.This point at which the temperature is 10 degree Celsius,
is normally around 2-3 meters below the ground. The simple idea is to pump water into
the ground, which then goes through a heat exchanger (i.e ground) that collects the
heat from the ground in winter and pulls heat out of the building in summer, this takes
care of temperature regulation of the building. It can easily be built and integrated.

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MATLAB

hi friends,i just wanted to emphasize the  importance of Matlab.Matlab is becoming increasingly popular due to extensive applications in all fields of engineering and beyond  engineering. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, and Fortran.It would be advisable to learn matlab.It is becoming a requirement in all industries.I would post some matlab tutorials in  some time.

Memristor

This is the talk of the town.This is considered as the greatest breakthroughs in the history of semiconductor technology.What is actually a memristor? A memristor(a  "memory resistor") is a passive two-terminal circuit element in which the resistance is a function of the time history of the current and voltage through the device. Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper.This is the wikipedia defination of memristor.The memristor is as fundamental an electronic component as the resistor, the inductor, and the capacitor.A memristor is a passive two-terminal electronic component for which the resistance (dV/dI) is proportional to the amount of charge that has flowed through the circuit. When current flows in one direction through the device, the resistance increases; and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases. When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active. The number of simultaneous calculations achieved by the memristors is the square of the number of transistors, tripling a 1000-transistor chip’s size by adding memristors would yield a thousandfold improvement in computing power with a negligible increase in power drawn.so,it will be very revolutionary in the semiconductor field.

Wireless Power.

Recently there was a competition about technical reviews,i was wondering what to do,then suddenly was glancing through one of  IEEE magazines there i saw Wireless Power Transmission,i was at first dazzled  then i researched about wireless power transmission.It is one of the revolutionizing technologies of this century.The principle behind this wonder is electromagnetic resonance.Though it seems complex at beginning ,it was easy to get a picture of this technology.I would explain using  an example,consider a normal transformer the principle behind it's working is electromagnetic induction,the magnetic flux linkage takes place ,the core helps in magnetic flux linkage without it would be impossible to link flux.Now,let us modify a little by now taking out the core and replacing it by air,so now there will only primary coil and secondary coil.The problem in this will be that the flux linkage will be almost negligible.To overthrow this ,we use the principle of resonance to link  both,simply adding a capacitor in parallel with inductor will create L-C oscillator circuit,then the primary and secondary will be critically tuned to same frequency,thereby linking maximum possible flux.

  At MIT in 2007,an experiment was conducted using a 60watt bulb at a distance of 2m and resonant frequency used was 9.9MHZ,there was an efficiency of 40%.