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 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: Surgery Light, MacGyver-Style

May 04, 2009

Periodic power outages are more than just annoying. They're dangerous, especially if one happens in the middle of surgery. Enter the pie-plate-bike-part-LED-battery lamp, designed by a University of Michigan student group.

Michigan Health Engineered for ALL Lives, or M-HEAL, designs and repairs medical equipment in the developing world. A team led by engineering student Stephen DeWitt came up with a lamp prototype that can switch to battery power for short-term outages and could be hooked up to solar systems or hand cranks during longer ones. (Hat tip to GOOD magazine's blog.)

The students wanted to incorporate existing resources into their design and noticed that China was exporting a large number of LEDs to Sub-Saharan Africa. Their lamp connects eight LEDs to a pie pan for the light source. A automotive rear-view mirror serves as a joint connecting the pie pan to a bike break on the arm so the lamp head can be adjusted up and down. The whole thing costs about the same as a hand-held flashlight, which is what medical personnel have to resort to when the lights cut out mid-suture.

"Our end goal is to distribute plans to these lamps so anyone in developing countries can start building these lamps on their own," DeWitt says in a video about the project. Currently the lamp is being tested in Uganda. Using pie pans for the greater good is such a sweet idea.

Photo: Members of the M-HEAL lamp team with their prototype.

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Saving the world with technology:

News: Technology Saving the World 

Blog: Tracking The Spread of the H1N1 Flu Virus

Video: Text Messages Save Lives

Top 10: Ways Cell Phones Help People Living in Poverty

Top 10: Innovations for Impoverished People

Wide Angle: Inventors Wanted

April 20, 2009

This week your trusty tech team is taking on invention. From Leonardo da Vinci to modern-day master inventors, there's plenty of inspiration to go around...especially if you're thinking about the greater good.

While searching for invention engines that help turn smart ideas into reality, I came across several particularly cool catalysts:

Innocentive  Solar king Mark Bent first introduced me to this site, which takes an open-source approach to innovation. Pick a challenge, come up with a viable solution, and you could be eligible to receive financial awards up to a million dollars.

Ashoka's Changemakers  Full disclosure: I do some work for the nonprofit org Ashoka. A look at their online competitions and you'll see why. Take on some of the world's biggest problems through an open process that encourages constructive feedback from an entrepreneurial community. Even the entries that don't win can go on to succeed with outside grant money.

MIT Clean Energy Prize  It wouldn't be an invention-related list without at least one MIT entry. This annual contest is open to student teams from any university in the nation. The grand prize winner walks away with $200,000 in cash plus serious support to put the plan into practice. Speaking of MIT, a shout-out also goes to the Lemelson program for student inventors, which gets greener every year.

Intellectual Ventures  This company, founded by scientists, is based on the idea that capital + invention = awesome. Historically, inventors were off by themselves tinkering away and few made a business out of it. Intellectual Ventures sees beyond the standard product cycle. They organize sessions designed to cull the best that the brightest have to offer and then seed those ideas with investments.

What's your favorite invention engine?

Photo: Brendan Mauro.

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Put your thinking cap on...

News: Solar Engine Whips Waste Heat Into Power

Feature: Super Soaker Inventor Invents New Thermoelectric Generator

Top 10: Unsung Inventions

Top 10: Accidental Inventions

Slideshow: Da Vinci's Inventions

Wide Angle: All the Cool Kids Have Them

March 27, 2009

What if you had a little companion that could unobtrusively figure out what kind of transportation you were taking and tell you the environmental effect? Several high school students recently turned to their new phones to find out.

Starting in February, 25 students at the Urban School of San Francisco participated in a pilot project organized by the Go Green Foundation. The foundation worked with Nokia, AT&T, and UCLA to hook the kids up with special GPS-enabled cell phones that tracked their carbon emissions. Just knowing the cumulative effect of actual trips caused the students to rethink car rides to school.

After hearing about it on NPR, I asked Jeff Burke, a researcher at UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, how this works. Burke's group created a "personal environmental impact report" or PEIR application. The phone's GPS sends data to a server every 30 seconds and a special algorithm cleverly detects the mode of transport based on location, speed, and other factors. Carbon emissions are calculated using the California Air Resources Board's model. The application can also figure out how much particulate matter you generated and much you were exposed to (*cough*).

Finally, the application generates a Web-based report showing a map, details about your trips, and trends over time. "The idea here is looking at habits in a continual fashion," Burke says. "You have an opportunity to see changes and make decisions." The app can run on phones with the Symbian operating system and Windows Mobile, and Burke expects they'll have an Android client shortly.

Go Green Foundation's Martín Gutierrez says the Urban School students are planning to compete against other school groups equipped with the phones. Get ready for a green team bracket.

Photo: The Go Green Foundation Nokia phone with AT&T service, courtesy Martín Gutierrez.

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Take a drive down the highways of the future:

Video: Future Roads

Video: Robot Cars

Top 10: Parts of a Smart Highway

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Wide Angle: The Bright Side of Green Energy

March 12, 2009

Ex-marine Mark Bent is the solar man. He's not an engineer or scientist, but this entrepreneurial Texan is constantly coming up with creative ways to put sunlight to work for people with few resources.

Bent spent years as a diplomat in Africa and started SunNight Solar, which makes solar BoGo lights, after seeing a need for solar-powered light in Eritrea. The lights are now used far and wide. (Matthew McDermott of TreeHugger did a short video recently demonstrating why the flashlights are so cool.)

"I'm the most unlikely flashlight guy," Bent says. "I've lived in the developing world for a long time and Google really well." Inspired and egged on by the InnoCentive.com website, he has been working with scientists and engineers to create:

A water filtration system that uses carbonized coconut shells to filter out large particles and heavy metals. A small solar panel powers up an ultraviolet LED, which then sterilizes the water. Bent envisions the filtration system as part of a small business model for women in Africa. In exchange for a fee, these female "water rangers" could take dirty water and make it clean. Bent is currently working with engineers from the University of Colorado in Boulder on a prototype.

An anti-malarial trap that tricks female mosquitoes into thinking they're going after a human and then--haha!--they get stuck on wax that has been warmed by the sun during the day. A sweatband that has been worn around a human's ankle provides the lure. Will the prototype actually work? "To me, this is the coolest side of science," Bent says. "Even if it's only 50 percent effective, wow!"

And my favorite, a tennis-racket mosquito zapper. Bent points out that mosquitoes don't like to travel far, so if you can get a bunch of 'em at all at once, you can really put a dent in the population. A solar-charged racket, also in the developmental stages, would only zap mosquitoes. Bent's wife suggests that it be programmed to say "ouch" every time you get one.

"Go for the shoot-the-sky thing," Bent says of his work. "Those are the fun challenges--the ones that are really hard."

Images: An early prototype of the UV water filter (top), a rendering of a solar-heated mosquito zapper (middle), and a prototype of the mosquito racket (bottom). Courtesy Mark Bent.

Check Out That Rack!

March 06, 2009

Milwaukee School of Art and Design senior Rob Podell designed a sleek eco-friendly drying rack for the millions of Americans who don't have access to clothes dryers in their homes or apartment buildings. And for the women in his life who were driving him nuts.

They hung undergarments everywhere in the apartment--over shower rods, door knobs, on furniture. "You had trouble using the shower or closing doors without damaging some expensive bra," Podell wrote in an email. "I started looking at drying racks, and I hated all of them. Most were plastic, some where chrome-plated mild steel. All were relatively obnoxious-looking and hard to store."

So he came up with a wall-mounted unit made from bamboo--which is renewable and naturally moisture-resistant--and recycled aluminum parts. It could be shipped flat, Ikea-style, keeping the cost down. The sculptural drying rack design came in third place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition recently. Fortunately Podell had come to New York for the conference and spoke up from the audience when judge Saul Griffith scoffed, saying that one could achieve the same effect with a piece of string. As someone who owns "dry flat" delicates, the rack would beat string any day.

Image courtesy Rob Podell.

Greener Gadgets...Or Objets d'Art?

February 28, 2009

This week, I grabbed a recyclable ID tag and checked out the Greener Gadgets conference in New York. The prevailing vibe was impatient excitement with a heavy dose of gallows humor.

It has been a little while since An Inconvenient Truth premiered, so inventor and genius Saul Griffith lit the fire under us again. Yep, the Earth is screwed. Griffith displayed his painstakingly recorded energy consumption from 2007, down to the energy used to make his newspapers and daily glasses of wine. He admitted that, for someone who thought he was green, he's actually "a planet f@!#er." And so are we, from the looks of his last graphs.

Griffith's conclusion: We have a choice. We can turn back the clock somewhat if we start thinking in an entirely different way. Coke should be selling fizzy tablets that we add to tap water instead of actual cans of the stuff, he said. Cans could be cut and polished to make solar thermal mirrors. We should create heirloom products instead of "gadgets." Cell phones should be good for 25 years. And next year's conference could be called "Greener Objets d'Art." I thought, If things get really bad, maybe we'll have to keep our phones for that long anyway.

After the conference (which had remarkably few gadgets on display), I met up with fellow green bloggers, including the friendly Daily Green folks and my blogosphere cousins from TreeHugger. A Tesla rep was expected to bring a Roadster and take a few lucky ducks for a spin. Sadly, the $100,000 sports car had broken down the day before. No, really. Who knew the Subway could be more reliable than a Roadster? Maybe Saul Griffith.

Photo: Saul Griffith shows his wheel of watts.

Really Clean Tech: The Laundry Bike

February 25, 2009

After blasting unsustainable tech ideas and a mailbox service straight out of 1996, it's time for a low-tech comeback this week. Imagine how psyched I was to see that MIT students and staff invented a pedal-powered washing machine.

The bicilavadora--which combines the Spanish words for bicycle and washing machine--started as an idea that won graduate student Radu Raduta first place in MIT's 2005 IDEAS competition. Fast forward to January, when D-Lab instructor Gwyndaf Jones led a team to Peruvian slums with a prototype of Raduta's concept.

In places without electricity, laundry is an extremely time-consuming process that can pollute waterways. The bicilavadora, easily constructed from locally-available parts, could help. It's essentially an oil drum, two pieces of plastic bolted together, and a bicycle frame. Changing gears takes it from washing to spin cycle.

The prototype was tested in the Ventanilla orphanage, where the 670 children could really use a washing machine. While the team encountered some issues, including water leakage, the overall design held up. If they manage to iron out the kinks, the bicilavadora could clean up.

Photo: MIT junior Lisa Tacoronte tests the bicilavadora outside an orphanage in Ventanilla, Peru. Credit: Gwyndaf Jones.

And the Unsustainable Tech Prize Goes To...

February 23, 2009

Usually I'm quick to point out bright, hopeful technology that promises to help us live more sustainably. Today is my chance to do the opposite. Here comes a rundown of the first annual Landfill Prize.

UK-based journalist and author of "Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More," John Naish leads the enoughism charge. He and several fellow writers just announced the 2009 Landfill Prize winners, which are "the most needless, wasteful uses of our planet's precious resources that you've seen, bought or been given in the past year." 

Coming out on top: A motorized ice cream cone, which is not only a waste of batteries but seems like a cleanup nightmare. (Plus, it's a Jay Leno joke in the making: "How lazy are we?!") The top 10 list also included a USB chameleon that doesn't do anything, a camping chair for fishermen equipped with speakers, and an electronic jump rope.

I'm not sure how I felt about the Toyota Prius, Nintendo's Wii Fit, and Guitar Hero making the list, though. Shouldn't the Hummer be on there? And Guitar Hero--really? Sounds like someone had trouble getting past the easy level...

Image: Perpetual Kid's Motorized Ice Cream Cone.

A Smart Grid, Powered By Google

February 12, 2009

Now that you're an expert on vehicle-to-grid technology, you know that one key step is to create a national smart electric system that can communicate with the appliances at the end of each plug. A new Google.org prototype could help get us there.

One autumn day, I remember looking at my electric bill in irritation. How had it jumped up so quickly? What had I done? A utility company rep didn't know, but we spent a half an hour trying to figure it out. It would have been nice if I had Google.org's PowerMeter, a prototype dashboard application that connects to a smart electric meter and tells you right away what kind of electricity your appliances are using.

 "We believe that consumers have the right to know how much energy they are using and how much it costs, and to have that information available in a format that is easily accessible and understandable," Google.org told the California Public Utilities Commission. Agreed! While I'm a little uneasy about ultimately giving the utility company the ability to remotely control my AC (which was the culprit...I think), what if they could use the data in a different way? In theory, a computer program could detect consistent spikes and then the utility company could send me an email offering a rebate on a new energy-efficient appliance. No long and fruitless phone calls necessary.

Photo Credit: Sookie via Flickr. Image: Google.org.