Story 1: World’s first 100 percent bio-based 3D-printed home created in Maine
Source: InterestingEngineering.com Story by Loukia Papadopoulos
Link: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/100-percent-3d-printed-home-unveiled
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJixbUiMezE
- Late last month the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center unveiled the world’s first 3D-printed house [called BioHome3D] made entirely out of bio-based materials.
- First, a couple of explanations:
- A 3D-printed home refers to one made using computer-guided robotic arm-like devices that typically deposit layer upon layer of concrete to create foundations and walls.
- And “bio-based” refers to products that are “derived from plants and other renewable organic agricultural, marine, and forestry materials.”
- So, instead of using something like concrete, the University of Maine team used a mixture of wood waste from sawmills and bio-resin to print the floors, walls, and ceiling as separate components off site in a factory-like building.
- Then the components for the 600-square-foot experimental home [with electrical wiring, windows, and doors pre-installed] were transported to the home site and assembled on site.
- The house is fully recyclable and highly insulated, and its production produced very little waste due to the precision of the 3D printing process.
- This achievement is worth noting as it demonstrates the viability of using only renewable bio-based materials to 3D print affordable homes that can be mass produced quickly.
Story 2: Researchers show that quadriplegic people can navigate using mind-controlled wheelchairs
Source: Scitechdaily.com
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4AYbfmUo2c
- Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently demonstrated that by translating a user’s thoughts into mechanical commands, a mind-controlled wheelchair can help a quadriplegic paralyzed person gain new mobility.
- Three volunteers underwent training sessions 3 times a week for up to 5 months.
- The participants wore a skullcap that detected their brain wave activities through electroencephalography.
- The detected electrical brain impulses were converted by a computer-based brain-machine interface algorithm/device to generate mechanical steering commands for the experimental wheelchairs.
- The participants were asked to control the direction of the wheelchair by thinking about moving both hands to turn left and both feet to turn right.
- By the end of the training, the participants maneuvered their wheelchairs around obstacles such as a room divider and hospital beds, which were set up to simulate a real-world environment.
- Two of the three volunteers finished the task successfully.
- But despite the failure of one participant, this still marks a very promising step forward!
Story 3: New four-legged, robot that can traverse almost any land obstacle
Source: Carnegie Mellon University News Story by Aaron Aupperlee
Link: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2022/november/visual-locomotion.html
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N70CqROzwxI&t=1s
- Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a low-cost robotic system that enables a small, four-legged, dog-like robot to climb and descend stairs nearly its height and easily traverse rocky, slippery, uneven, and steep terrain.
- It can also walk across gaps; scale rocks and curbs; and even operate in the dark!
- The researchers trained his amazing little robot [which looks a lot like the small dog-like robots made by Boston Dynamics] using 4,000 clones of it in a computer simulator, where the simulated clones practiced walking and climbing on challenging terrain environments.
- The simulator also stored the motor skills it learned during training in a neural network that the researchers copied to the real robot.
- The computer simulator’s speed allowed the robot to gain six years of real-world simulated experiences in a single day!
- Now, this is not the first 4-legged, dog-like robot, but here’s what makes this little robot so exciting:
- Most mobile robotic systems use cameras to create a map of the surrounding environment and then use that map to plan movements before executing them.
- But this system uses vision and feedback from the body directly in real-time as input to generate commands to the robot’s motors.
- By using this technique, if the robot slips on stairs, it can recover. And it can go into unknown environments and autonomously adapt on-the-fly!
Story 4: Purdue University engineers pick top 10 toys to stimulate young minds
Source: Smithsonian Magazine Story by Carlyn Kranking
- If you’re looking for a holiday gift for the little geek in your life that can help build spatial reasoning, problem solving, coding, and design thinking skills, the team at Purdue University’s Inspire Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering has put together has put together a guide to skill-building, mind-stretching science, technology, engineering, and math toys.
- It’s a list of their top 10 toy picks for this year.
- In the show notes you’ll find a link to see all 10 of the recommendations.
- Here’s one example – a toy called “Intro to Gears” for ages 3 and up.
- Kids can follow instructions to build four geared machines or use their creativity to make whatever they want.
- For kids as young as 3, simply placing the gears on the construction board and spinning them is an entertaining activity that will teach resistance: That is, when a gear doesn’t spin, they’ll have to make some changes to the design to correct it.
- Older kids can create more advanced constructions by placing the gears at 90-degree angles from each other.
- You can find Intro to Gears on Amazon for $39.95.
Here’s another great toy:
- Switcheroo Coding Crew [for ages 4 and up] consists of an electronic toy car, with three colored shells that kids can slide onto the vehicle to turn it into different kinds of trucks.
- Challenge cards lead children through storylines that encourage them to complete a task in the game board city, perhaps driving to a certain location to help put out a fire.
- Kids press buttons to code the car to perform its actions in a particular order—drive forward three beats, then turn left, for example.
- The game builds patience for trial and error, and it encourages children to identify problems and find solutions.
- To think like a computer programmer is to step outside of how a human might approach a task and imagine what sort of prompting a machine would need to get the same thing done.
- Available on Amazon for $29.54 – and many other outlets too!
AMAZING MOVIE/DOCUMENTARY RECOMMENDATION: “Good Night Oppy”
See the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4t58Yruhds&t=5s
- The film follows Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover affectionately dubbed Oppy by her creators and scientists at NASA.
- Launched July 7, 2003, Oppy was originally expected to live for only 90 days, but she ultimately explored Mars for nearly 15 years.
- Oppy was one of two twin rovers, the other being Spirit.