Boston + Robots = Awesomeness

Greeting from the North! I’m in Boston, and oh is the whether dandy.

You know what else is quite dandy? Robotic snails! On Monday, Discovery Channel’s Tracy Staedter and I checked out a snail-like robot at MIT. Professor Peko Hosoi has been studying the movements of snails in order to create robots that can move over any surface in hopes of one day using them in search and rescue missions. I mean, who needs Robocop when we have Robosnail?

Hosoi has found that a snail’s amazing ability to stick and move along any surface can be attributed to both the manner in which it contracts and expands its body as well as the slime that it excretes. The robot that Hosoi engineered is capable of similar actions, and the slime that the robot uses has a consistency similar to that of mayonnaise. Yummm, robotic snail mayonnaise.

Later on that day we spoke with Mort Webster about governmental climate change policy in relation to actual climate change. Webster believes the US government falls inline with a theory called “path dependency.” In this context, path dependency refers to the fact that governmental bodies have historically been unable to keep up with climate change. Webster maintains that policy reform simply moves too slow in relation to a fast-moving like phenomenon like global warming. Essentially, the US government is running a race that it simply is not winning. Webster maintains we need to get ahead… and fast!

After finishing up the day’s interviews and some rather pleasant couch crashing that night by yours truly, Tracy and I headed 2 ½ hours west to University of Massachusetts Amherst to meet up with a few folks who have figured out a way of making gasoline from woodchips. Personally, I could not stop thinking of Back to the Future when Marty shoves whatever waste he could find into the DeLorean. In this situation – replace waste with wood and Marty with some chemical engineering PhD students, and it’s pretty much the same thing. So, how does it work? These chips referred to as biomass are combined with a catalyst, the catalyst then makes it way inside the molecules of biomass, and out comes glorious gasoline! The folks working on the project have been experimenting with a ton of catalysts and have found some work better than others.

Tracy and I tried collecting some sticks outside to make enough gas to get back to Boston, but were soon scolded.

Our last stop on the trip was with a few engineers that are working on a robot that can interact with foreign environments and objects. One of the large drawbacks until now has been that robots are unable to recognize pretty much anything unfamiliar to them. However, these engineers have created a gigantic rolling arm named UMAN that has been programmed to interact with whatever is in front of it. To do this, UMAN pushes around what it sees and scans what moves and does not move. The robot then tries to approximate where joints are located in the objects it’s touching, thus allowing it to pick up what it sees.

Well, my dogs are barkin’ and my half-opened eyes are telling me it’s time to go back to DC to get some rest. Hmmm. Maybe I should bring UMAN along so he could point me in the direction of the plane.

Stay cool,
Matt