DustCart Robot Does the Dirty Work

July 10, 2009

I've written about recycling robots before, but they can't even touch the DustCart, a trash and recycling robot that's been tested on narrow Italian streets. Besides being adorable, it has the potential to change the way we deal with discards.

Sure, you might have seen it featured on Engadget, Inhabitat, and TreeHugger but the DustBot pilot project is worth a closer look. The project aims to design and autonomous robots that improve urban municipal waste management. If all goes well, DustCart could lead to smarter and more efficient trash and recycling collection, as well as pollution-monitoring.

Recently DustCart rolled around Peccioli, a tiny town in Italy. Where trash trucks can get stuck in the narrow 8th Century streets, DustCart turns the corners with ease. The robot is programmed to respond to residents who call and tell it what they're tossing--organic waste, recyclables. It shows up at the door, opens its belly, and then drops everything off at a waste-collection facility, all while sensors monitor pollutants in the air. Anyone who has been awoken by dump trucks in the middle of the night will appreciate that it runs quietly on lithium ion batteries. 

There are definitely drawbacks to the DustCart. One of these little guys clearly can't replace a fleet of dump trucks in urban areas, plus it could pose a Segway-like problem for traffic and big eyes can't always override human skepticism. Fortunately, the robot will undergo more tests in Spain, Japan, and St. Louis this year--if it isn't stolen by rabid WALL-E fans first.

Photo: The Dustbot enjoys the sights in Italy. Credit: Fulvio Paolocci/Global Post.

Wide Angle: Dumb Appliances Get Schooled

July 08, 2009

General Electric, with help from energy management startup Tendril, just announced that it will start selling smart appliances this year. This heralds an end to paying overtime for appliances that already clocked out.

What in the name of microwave lasagna does this actually mean? It means that the world's largest company is going to make refrigerators, washers, water heaters, dishwashers, and microwaves embedded with technology that allows utility companies to communicate with them. Your refrigerator will be able to talk to a smart electric meter that's also in touch with the local utility.

To avoid brownouts, or even blackouts during peak hours, utilities will be able to ask your appliances to power down slightly or even delay a wash cycle for a little while. Mindful that this might freak some people out, the appliances have override options. According to Tendril, these demand response appliances will save consumers hundreds of millions of dollars yearly. Now if they could just build a fridge that shouts warnings about eating too much ice cream.

Photo: Prepare for cheaper electric bills. Credit: Mike DelGaudio.

Wide Angle: Getting the 411 On Flash Floods

July 07, 2009

It makes sense that in the midst of a recession researchers would go, "Let's create a better way to predict floods...with what we've already got." As a result, a team from the University of Tel Aviv is casting a new light on cell phone towers.

Geophysics professor Pinhas Alpert and electrical engineering professor Hagit Messer Yaron recently reported in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that they successfully used radio wave data from cell phone towers to accurately predict flash floods in Israel.

Moisture in the air affects the way radio waves are transmitted and cell phone towers are hubs of such humidity-related information. Working in cooperation with two cellular companies, the researchers paired data from the towers with data from surface stations to understand what was happening in places where it was previously difficult to gather reliable air moisture information.

"Wireless communication networks are, in effect, built-in environmental monitoring facilities," the researchers reported. Plus, the cost to implement the system is minimal since service providers already gather this information. While high winds and rain did make accurate data collection a challenge, one day we might be able to maximize the existing cell phone tower grid to predict Katrina-like floods--with time to spare.

Photo: A cell phone tower in Richmond, British Columbia. Credit: Richard Smith.

GET MORE OF THE WIDE ANGLE
Grids smarten up right quick:

News: Community Genome Could Produce Biofuels

Puzzle: Plugging Into the Smart Grid

Blog: Micro-Curtailment to Curb AC Use

HowStuffWorks: How Living Off the Grid Works

Planet Green: How to Choose a Home Energy Monitor

TreeHugger: Dip Your Toes Into Smart Home Integration

Lightening Up the Dark Side of Fireworks

July 03, 2009

Every year around July 4, I look at the glittering, smoky sky and a little voice in the back of my head goes, "Hey, all that stuff is probably not so great for the environment." But who wants to be that person? Fortunately, scientists are on it and there's a flash of optimism here.

What's actually up there: Fireworks contain heavy metals that produce the bright colors, oxygen-rich perchlorates that accelerate the explosions, and they produce particle-filled smoke at the end. TreeHugger's Michael Graham Richard points out that firework-filled new year celebrations in China tripled pollution levels there. Eek.

There is debate about whether the metals in fireworks do any real damage. Science-minded folks are quick to point out that the small amounts are combusted in the sky. But it's the perchlorates that make environmentalists most nervous because at high levels they can cause thyroid problems. The EPA issued a health advisory for the compound, but is waiting on more info from National Academy of Sciences before deciding whether to regulate it.

Emily Sohn at Discovery News reports that DMD Systems, a pyrotechnic research and development company in Los Alamos, New Mexico, has developed nitrogen-based fireworks that cut out the perchlorates, require much less barium, and produce less smoke. Greener fireworks remain pricier than their traditional counterparts, but what goes up has a good chance of coming down.

Photo: Micro fireworks. Credit: Flickr user Pixel Addict.

And One Charger To Rule Them All

July 02, 2009

Amid all the downer news and rain lately, I spotted this bright tidbit on the New York Times site: the European Union just decided to introduce standard cell phone chargers.

In the future, micro-USB connectors are going to be it, no matter what brand cell phone Europeans buy. The European Commission came to the agreement voluntarily and secured pledges of support from ten major international retailers that sell their phones in the EU.

The New York Times points out that this could mean retailers will eventually sell chargers separately from phones to further reduce waste. The States might be a holdout on the metric system, but I imagine that those influential retailer pledges will eventually translate into a standard on this side of the pond. Before the commission made a decision, my blogosphere cousins at TreeHugger reported that voltage and battery variations remain challenges to standard-makers. Now that the standard EU chargers are scheduled to go into effect next year, perhaps making the micro-USB truly universal can't be far off.

Photo: Kiss superfluous chargers goodbye. Credit: Asim Bharwani.

Wide Angle: Seeking Programmers for the People

June 30, 2009

You might remember Joel Selanikio as the guy behind EpiSurveyor, an efficient way for health care workers to take down survey data in developing areas. Recently I caught up with him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was picking up a $100,000 check from the Lemelson MIT folks in recognition of his work.

During his visit, eager high school inventors at EurekaFest were busy corralling passersby. So I asked the pediatrician, programmer, and humanitarian about the tech these kids will need to develop in order to save the world later on. Here are excerpts:

Tell me about an ideal future, for you.

The best technology is the technology that can be repurposed by the end user. In 1995, if you wanted to put stuff on the World Wide Web you had to hire an HTML programmer. The solution wasn’t training everyone to become a programmer—the solution was programs like Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Blogger that lowered the bar to involvement.

I’ve seen enough programs where you pay a million dollars and you get programmers to make a system to distribute information about HIV/AIDS. We don’t need any more pilot programs to show that we can send text messages. The system may be useful, but it’s not scalable.

How come I can’t send a text message that says “create group” and my friends can join the group? Would that be useful? Yes. Would that be as good as Twitter or Google Groups or a Cray supercomputer in my basement? No. I think we fail to recognize that many people—the majority of the people in the world—don’t have access to the tools we have. We’re not saying this is the cure to cancer but it would be immensely useful and nobody is making it.

How do we get to the point where this exists?

We try at my organization, DataDyne, to do this in the context of health, but we’re an organization of 10 people. Let’s think of ways we can build tools that people in Botswana can actually use to build what they want.

If you had to write an ad to fill your job, what would it say?

What I actually do is deal with management, coordinate travel schedules, and a lot of mundane stuff. What I enjoy is trying to imagine what to do with this communications infrastructure we have. In most of the countries where I work, there’s nothing like an electronic medical records system. Now everyone has a cell phone in their pocket. Why are we giving them paper cards with vaccination records? Why aren’t we storing that information on a SIM card?

Why not me, too? Who knows where my records are.

It’s like aliens landed and gave us this technology. I think, What do I like to do on the World Wide Web and how do I get that to work on a cell phone? Could you get that functionality on any cell phone in the world? Ten percent is better than nothing when you’re talking about life-saving issues like the number and hours for an HIV clinic. The field is wide open. The difficult part is figuring out how to get money to do that on the phone and get money to continue.

You’re used to doing a lot with very little. Are you MacGyver?

[Laughs] No, no, no.

Are you sure?

Actually once, you know those cable locks that connect to your laptop? I was driving across rural Kenya and the muffler fell and was dragging below the vehicle. I had to crawl under the vehicle and use the cable lock with a knife to tie up the muffler. But most of what I do is not on the fly.

Photo: Selanikio takes the wheel during a DataDyne trip to Amboseli, Kenya. Credit: Joel Selanikio, used with permission.

Agribike Sends Seeds to Spinning Class

June 26, 2009

Just when I thought I'd seen one of the best bike inventions ever--the bicilavadora--another group of students has come up with one that turns agricultural labor into a fun ride.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, drought-resistant sorghum and millet are choice food staples. The problem: threshing the seeds from the stalk or "panicle" is a work-intensive process, requiring women and children to beat the grains with a giant mortar and pestle for hours every day in order to produce just enough to eat. A team of home-schooled high school students from Bridgewater, New Jersey, created a better way.

The Teen Technology Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam--a 501(c)(3)--worked with Jeff Dahlberg, a research director for the National Sorghum Producers to build a simple human-powered threshing machine that beats the stick hands down. The students were inspired by the rotating brushes inside a vacuum cleaner. A stationary bike component rotates a thresher drum, which is dotted with pegs that effectively shear the seeds from the panicle. Air blows through, sending the lighter material up and the heavier seeds down through a chute into a bucket.

Initial results were great: the bike produced 13 kilograms per hour compared to the traditional method's five. And it required far less energy to operate, too. Eleventh-grader David Schmidt told me at EurekaFest that the team is thinking about how the bike, which cost roughly $100 to build, could be made from indigenous materials. "You don't need [these] pedals," he says. "You could use wood."

Here's a short video I shot that shows it in action:

Photo: Pedals Pass the Pestle. Credit: Alyssa Danigelis.

Wide Angle: Meet the Captain

June 24, 2009

The microbiologist Dickson Despommier has been called a trailblazer in the medical ecology field. You might know this soon-to-be emeritus professor best for his work on vertical urban farm planning--an idea that grew 10 years ago from his students' frustration with the limits of rooftop gardening to feed city-dwellers.

Despommier spoke to me about his cool job from Portland, Oregon, where he's speaking at the city's Summer Sustainability Series. Here are the highlights:

What are you working on now?

The Vertical Farm Project has grown to the point now where it’s consuming every waking moment of my life. I’m in the process now of trying to build one. We’ve been invited by Jordan and Qatar to explore the possibility of establishing an experimental versions of vertical farming in both of those countries, and I’m going over there in another week.

Teaching Old Transistors New Tricks

June 23, 2009

An interesting little tidbit crossed my computer screen recently: researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had created the fastest LED ever. With electronics fresh on the brain, I asked the record-breakers what this means for the rest of us slowpokes.

Engineering professor Nick Holonyak Jr., who actually invented the LED in 1962, was one of the researchers for the study. "Computer and data processing, because of speed and massive issues of data processing, are beginning to choke," he told me via email. "All of this is taking too much energy."

Holonyak, along with engineering professor Milton Feng and researchers from Malaysia, created what they call a "tilted-charge light-emitting diode." I call it an LED-transistor mash-up. Previously, LEDs maxed out at a signal speed of 1.7 gigahertz. The University of Illinois team, by incorporating transistor tech into the LED, pushed that speed to a record-breaking 4.3 gigahertz. Then, with some tweaks, they achieved 7 gigahertz. Simply, this could translate into cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient computing.

Today's supercomputers--which are basically a bunch of computing power amassed in the same place--require multimillion-dollar climate-controlled buildings. In the future, Feng and his fellow researchers envision supercomputers fitting in a small box or notebook. How's that for efficient?

Photo: Milton Feng (left) and Nick Holonyak (right) in a 2006 photo. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer.

Wide Angle: TV Tech Crawls Out of the Past

June 19, 2009

This week our in-depth look at the future of television wraps up, for now, with a top 10 list of spectacular and defunct TV tech. The Smithsonian's Elliot Sivowitch loaned his expertise to my hackneyed ideas and illuminated short-lived TV-related inventions in history.

Of course, the list was highly subjective so inevitably there are glorious obsolete television-related technologies that I overlooked. What are they? What do you remember wanting to throw out the window? Feel free to write your comments below.

Now, into the future. Many of us still have a separate television and computer, even though there are combos on the market. One option I just spotted: Clickable TV--a system that adds interactivity to your set. However, it does require a "special set-top box." And we know what usually happens to those.

Photo: Bye bye rabbit ears. Credit: Flickr user dailyinvention.