National Science Foundation and Others Award $37M in Co-Robot Funding

The development of co-robots in the U.S. has just received an injection in the arm.

This week the National Science Foundation (NSF)—in partnership with the DOD, DARPA, NASA, the NIH, and the USDA—announced a $37 million slew of awards to bolster the development of robots meant to work cooperatively with humans.

“Our engineers and scientists are creating a world where robotic systems serve as trusted co-workers, co-inhabitants, co-explorers and co-defenders,” saidPramod Khargonekar, NSF's assistant director for engineering. “The National Robotics Initiative serves the national good by encouraging collaboration among academic, industry, nonprofit and other organizations -- and by speeding the creation of the fundamental science and engineering knowledge base used by researchers, applications developers and industry.”

According to the NSF, the awards run the gamut of the development cycle, from fundamental research to prototyping and testing. Some examples of projects include improving brain-controlled prosthetic devices, designing robots for search and rescue efforts, and robots that can assist with healthcare tasks.

Toyota harbors big ambitions for 'partner robot' business

Toyota Motor Corp. is harboring big ambitions to become a significant player in the growing market for robots that help the elderly and other people get around in everyday life.

The company believes it can use its manufacturing expertise to become as crucial in a field it calls "partner robots" as it is to auto-making. Robotics engineers at Toyota currently number only 150 out of a worldwide staff of 300,000 but it is plowing money into research and development.

Toyota last month announced a $1 billion investment in a research company headed by robotics expert Gill Pratt in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics. It is already working with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on robotics.

New Microscope Creates Near-real-time Videos of Nanoscale Processes

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.

A Mysterious Radio Wave Coil Passing through Space

In 2001, West Virginia Univ. undergraduate student David Narkevic was poring through stellar data collected by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. What Narkevic stumbled upon would leave astronomers scratching their heads for years following. A powerful radio burst, estimated at originating some 1.6 billion light-years away, was picked up. According to New Scientist, the burst released energy akin to what the sun produces in a month in a manner of milliseconds.

Since then, scientists have detected 16 Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Now, an international team of scientists have linked FRBs with a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space.

“We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed,” said Univ. of British Columbia astronomer Kiyoshi Masui, the lead author of the study published in Nature.

Holometer rules out first theory of space-time correlations

There has never been anything like the Holometer.

Based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab in Illinois, the Holometer isn’t much to look at. It’s a small array of lasers and mirrors with a trailer for a control room. But the low-tech look of the device belies the fact that it is an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument, able to measure movements that last only a millionth of a second and distances that are a billionth of a billionth of a meter – a thousand times smaller than a single proton.

Our common sense, and the laws of physics, assumes that space and time are continuous. The Holometer challenges this assumption. We know that energy on the atomic level, for instance, is not continuous and comes in small, indivisible amounts. The Holometer was built to test if space and time behave the same way.

Advanced Reasoning Software

2015 Software/Services R&D 100 Award Winner

The amount of data streaming from cyber security appliances and logs is staggering. The number of raw data points is best measured in the millions of events per day, even for modestly sized institutions. Security analysts are trained to seek out and identify patterns that represent cyber threats hidden inside the massive data streams. Unfortunately, the velocity and volume of the streams are such that even large teams of analysts are typically forced into forensic mode, analyzing the data well after a compromise has occurred. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Champion Technology Co. Inc.’s CHAMPION (Columnar Hierarchical Auto-associative Memory Processing in Ontological Networks) advanced reasoning software system revolutionizes the detection of cyber threats. Behavior-based patterns are derived by combining subject matter expertise and knowledge of analysts with company-specific historical data, which allows security analysts to detect threats in near-real-time. Domain- and company-specific data programmed into the system for each specific user company makes the system domain agnostic.

New approaches for hybrid solar cells

Using a new procedure researchers at the Technical Univ. of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich (LMU) can now produce extremely thin and robust, yet highly porous semiconductor layers. A very promising material - for small, light-weight, flexible solar cells, for example, or electrodes improving the performance of rechargeable batteries.

The coating on the wafer that Professor Thomas Fässler, chair of Inorganic Chemistry with a Focus on Novel Materials at TU Munich, holds in his hands shimmers like an opal. And it has amazing properties: It is hard as a crystal, exceptionally thin and - since it is highly porous - light as a feather.

By integrating suitable organic polymers into the pores of the material, the scientists can custom tailor the electrical properties of the ensuing hybrid material. The design not only saves space, it also creates large interface surfaces that improve overall effectiveness.