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Bot that watches while you work can catch slip-ups
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Wind whips plastic grass to produce power Yang worked on the project with Zhong Lin Wang’s group at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The goal was to tap energy not just from steady winds, but from the choppy gusts
Bot that watches while you work can catch slip-ups
work in the office and kitchen, Watch-Bot was about 60 per cent accurate in shining a laser pointer at the missed task, such as returning milk to the fridge. Ashutosh Saxena and Chenxia Wu, at Stanford University in California and Cornell University in New York, built Watch-Bot by mounting a depth-sensing camera on a tripod and connecting it to a computer and a laser pointer. The robot learns unaided, finding patterns in human movements it observes. “The good thing about unsupervised learning is you don’t need to annotate a lot of data, which means it’s cheaper,” says Yezhou Yang at the University of Maryland. Watch-Bot could help people with
ELLIE works on a car engine assembly line. Despite her best efforts, she occasionally forgets to screw in one of the bolts, but a laser beam from the ceiling highlights the loose piece as the engine passes, reminding her to tighten it. This imagined scenario could soon be reality. A robot called Watch-Bot can watch people work, learn the steps that make up the task, then remind people when they forget a step. In 24 trials watching humans at
Oleg Moiseyenko/Getty
THE wind flowing over your roof is packed with energy, if you could only harness it. A new type of wind power generator can do just that, by carpeting a surface with plastic strips that sway in the wind like grass. It produces renewable energy where traditional windmills would be impractical. The generator is made by fixing flexible strips of plastic to a board, so they stand upright like rows of dominoes. The strips have nanowires etched on one side and a coating of indium tin oxide (ITO) on the other. When the strips flail in the wind, the nanowires slap against the ITO surface of neighbouring strips. This temporary contact allows electrons to leap from one material to the other, creating a current through a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect. Covering a 300-square-metre rooftop with the strips “would be expected to deliver 7.11 kilowatts, which should mostly power a household,” says Weiqing Yang at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China.
typical of built-up areas too. “Compared with a wind turbine, our triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is effective at harvesting the energy from natural wind blowing in any direction,” says Yang. He adds that the harvesting system is simple to make, and easy to scale up. So far, the generator has only been tested in the lab, aiming an electric fan at a model rooftop
covered with 60 strips. This generated enough electricity to light up 60 LEDs. The strips work at wind speeds as low as 21 kilometres per hour, but the most useful power was generated with direct wind at almost 100 km/h – or storm force 10. That’s neither easily available nor desirable, says Fernando Galembeck, who investigates energy harvesting at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. “Significant amounts of power are obtained but we are still far from installing these devices on our rooftops and building walls.” Galembeck says that, as with any energy scavenging technique, energy storage will be crucial for the system’s success, allowing the variable amounts of power generated in gentle winds to be stored until needed. Yang says they are seeking a storage solution, as well as working on integrating the nanogenerator with solar panels to boost output. Galembeck also points out that indium tin oxide isn’t a suitable material, due to its poor mechanical properties, cost and toxicity. “The concept is highly promising but its realisation depends on shifting to other materials,” he says.
–Wind power without windmills– James Urquhart n
daily activities – not just annoyances like taking your keys with you, but safety issues like turning the stove off. Saxena and Wu see their bot someday helping elderly people live independently. Something like Watch-Bot could even be used in homeland security or the military, says Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “One of the problems is recognising hostility or hostile intent. Could these systems recognise what hostile intent was? If they could do
“Watch-Bot could help people remember daily activities like turning the stove off”
this unsupervised, it would be very interesting.” Saxena and Wu are not comfortable trusting their bot with tracking vital safety tasks until they can improve the accuracy. They also want to find out if the robot fills a need and whether people like it. The beauty of Watch-Bot is its simplicity, says Saxena. “A robot with a camera is very easy to manufacture and ship. All a company needs to do is take that robot and let it sit there. Just by doing that, the robot can become useful over time.” After about a week of sitting in a workplace or home, Saxena thinks Watch-Bot will learn enough to give helpful reminders. Anna Nowogrodzki n 9 January 2016 | NewScientist | 19
Wind whips plastic grass to produce power Yang worked on the project with Zhong Lin Wang’s group at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The goal was to tap energy not just from steady winds, but from the choppy gusts
Bot that watches while you work can catch slip-ups
work in the office and kitchen, Watch-Bot was about 60 per cent accurate in shining a laser pointer at the missed task, such as returning milk to the fridge. Ashutosh Saxena and Chenxia Wu, at Stanford University in California and Cornell University in New York, built Watch-Bot by mounting a depth-sensing camera on a tripod and connecting it to a computer and a laser pointer. The robot learns unaided, finding patterns in human movements it observes. “The good thing about unsupervised learning is you don’t need to annotate a lot of data, which means it’s cheaper,” says Yezhou Yang at the University of Maryland. Watch-Bot could help people with
ELLIE works on a car engine assembly line. Despite her best efforts, she occasionally forgets to screw in one of the bolts, but a laser beam from the ceiling highlights the loose piece as the engine passes, reminding her to tighten it. This imagined scenario could soon be reality. A robot called Watch-Bot can watch people work, learn the steps that make up the task, then remind people when they forget a step. In 24 trials watching humans at
Oleg Moiseyenko/Getty
THE wind flowing over your roof is packed with energy, if you could only harness it. A new type of wind power generator can do just that, by carpeting a surface with plastic strips that sway in the wind like grass. It produces renewable energy where traditional windmills would be impractical. The generator is made by fixing flexible strips of plastic to a board, so they stand upright like rows of dominoes. The strips have nanowires etched on one side and a coating of indium tin oxide (ITO) on the other. When the strips flail in the wind, the nanowires slap against the ITO surface of neighbouring strips. This temporary contact allows electrons to leap from one material to the other, creating a current through a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect. Covering a 300-square-metre rooftop with the strips “would be expected to deliver 7.11 kilowatts, which should mostly power a household,” says Weiqing Yang at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China.
typical of built-up areas too. “Compared with a wind turbine, our triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is effective at harvesting the energy from natural wind blowing in any direction,” says Yang. He adds that the harvesting system is simple to make, and easy to scale up. So far, the generator has only been tested in the lab, aiming an electric fan at a model rooftop
covered with 60 strips. This generated enough electricity to light up 60 LEDs. The strips work at wind speeds as low as 21 kilometres per hour, but the most useful power was generated with direct wind at almost 100 km/h – or storm force 10. That’s neither easily available nor desirable, says Fernando Galembeck, who investigates energy harvesting at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. “Significant amounts of power are obtained but we are still far from installing these devices on our rooftops and building walls.” Galembeck says that, as with any energy scavenging technique, energy storage will be crucial for the system’s success, allowing the variable amounts of power generated in gentle winds to be stored until needed. Yang says they are seeking a storage solution, as well as working on integrating the nanogenerator with solar panels to boost output. Galembeck also points out that indium tin oxide isn’t a suitable material, due to its poor mechanical properties, cost and toxicity. “The concept is highly promising but its realisation depends on shifting to other materials,” he says.
–Wind power without windmills– James Urquhart n
daily activities – not just annoyances like taking your keys with you, but safety issues like turning the stove off. Saxena and Wu see their bot someday helping elderly people live independently. Something like Watch-Bot could even be used in homeland security or the military, says Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “One of the problems is recognising hostility or hostile intent. Could these systems recognise what hostile intent was? If they could do
“Watch-Bot could help people remember daily activities like turning the stove off”
this unsupervised, it would be very interesting.” Saxena and Wu are not comfortable trusting their bot with tracking vital safety tasks until they can improve the accuracy. They also want to find out if the robot fills a need and whether people like it. The beauty of Watch-Bot is its simplicity, says Saxena. “A robot with a camera is very easy to manufacture and ship. All a company needs to do is take that robot and let it sit there. Just by doing that, the robot can become useful over time.” After about a week of sitting in a workplace or home, Saxena thinks Watch-Bot will learn enough to give helpful reminders. Anna Nowogrodzki n 9 January 2016 | NewScientist | 19