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telomerewhythere writes “Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. ‘The system Strano’s team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.’”

Source: Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT

destinyland writes “Today MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil ‘like paper towels soak up water,’ absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly ‘digesting’ the oil by burning it off. Powered by 21.5 square feet of solar panels, the ‘Seaswarm’ robots run on the power of a lightbulb, and with just 100 watts ‘could potentially clean continuously for weeks’ without human intervention, MIT announced. The swarm uses GPS data and communicates wirelessly to move as a coordinated group to ‘corral, absorb and process’ oil spills, and MIT researchers estimate that a fleet of 5,000 could clean up a gulf-sized spill within one month.”

Source: MIT Unveils Oil-Skimming Robot Swarm Prototype

Earlier this week, DISCOVER brought you oil-cleaning bacteria. Today, we bring you oil-cleaning bots.

This weekend in watery Venice, Italy, MIT scientists will demonstrate a creation called Seaswarm, a fleet of autonomous swimming bots intended to skim the water’s surface; each bot would drag a sort of mesh net to collect the crude sitting there. According to their creators, the machines will be able to find oil on their own and talk to one another to compute the most efficient way to tidy it up.

The Seaswarm robots, which were developed by a team from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water [CNN].

The bots’ belts can hold 20 times their own weight in oil, the MIT scientists say. And once the belts have collected to capacity, the machines can exact the oil back out it the head—that yellow part—where it can be burned off.

The Seaswarm robot, which is 16 feet long and seven feet wide, uses two square meters of solar panels for self-propulsion. With just 100 watts, the equivalent of one household light bulb, it could potentially clean continuously for weeks [MSNBC].

The researchers say they plan to enter their fleet of bots into the X-Prize Foundation’s million-dollar contest for the best way to clean up an oil spill, inspired by the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Seaswarm’s creators say that a fleet of 5,000 bots like theirs could tackle a spill like BP’s in about a month—at least what’s on the surface, anyway. For massive wandering undersea plumes of oil, thankfully we have those bacteria.

Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

Source: MIT Invents a Swarm of Sea-Skimming, Oil-Collecting Robots

aarondubrow writes “Researchers at MIT have created an experimental system for smart phones that allows engineers to leverage the power of supercomputers for instant computation and analysis. The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve engineering and fluid flow problems on the phone and visualize the results interactively. The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices.”

Source: Supercomputing, There’s an App For That

An anonymous reader writes “The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It’s one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT’s educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but ‘part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.’”

Source: NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project

Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land.  MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.

Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]

Video after the break.

Tedrake and Cory developed a computer program to control the glider with a steering motor attached to its tail. The program predetermined the best flight paths to bring the glider to a safe landing, and also how to correct or switch courses if it veered too far off the path.

For a range of launch conditions, they used the model to calculate sequences of instructions intended to guide the glider to its perch. . . . Cory and Tedrake also developed a set of error-correction controls that could nudge the glider back onto its trajectory when location sensors determined that it had deviated from it. [MIT]

They launched the 90-gram craft from 12 feet away from its landing wire, in winds between 13 and 19 miles per hour. Though they don’t predict a passenger plane landing like this anytime soon, they think the technique might prove useful for flying robots that could perch and recharge their batteries on a power line. With more research, they might also make craft that use other bird strategies.

The researchers say they are continuing the research and will next be moving outside into real-world conditions. They also plan to explore the use of flapping wing vehicles as well as more typical propeller driven aircraft. [Wired]

Image: Courtesy of Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL).
Video courtesy of Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory

Source: Experimental Glider Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Bird

An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about a microplane that perches on power lines to recharge its batteries being developed as a surveillance device at MIT. As you can imagine, landing on a power line is hard to do… and charging off transmission lines has its own problems.

Source: Micro Plane That Perches On Power Lines

An anonymous reader writes “Ben Bitdiddle of MIT fame sends an open letter to system administrators encouraging them to stop patching their systems so they can play ‘Security Vulnerability Bingo.’”

Source: Security Vulnerability Bingo

eldavojohn writes “Ugaritic has been deciphered by an unaided computer program that relied only on four basic assumptions present in many languages. The paper (PDF) may aid researchers in deciphering eight undecipherable languages (Ugaritic has already been deciphered and proved their system worked) as well as increase the number of languages automated translation sites offer. The researchers claim ‘orders of magnitude’ speedups in deciphering languages with their new system.”

Source: Automated Language Deciphering By Computer AI

Perhaps it’s a fitting tribute. The Japanese–designers of some of the world’s most ingenious robots–can now watch a traditional art form get a robotic makeover. As described in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT and Harvard researchers have made self-folding origami that can mold itself into a boat or an airplane.

Why? Origami is just a first step; researchers picture the “shape-shifting” robots used for everything from “smart” cups that could change from grande to venti based on how much coffee you need to a “Swiss army knife” that will bend to its user’s will, forming a variety of tools.

Study coauthor Robert Wood, an electrical engineering professor at Harvard, described the work as a proof of concept for future application.

“Imagine foregoing all the tools in your toolbox and instead using a stack of self-folding sheets to produce the tools and structures you need for a particular job,” says Wood. [New Scientist]

The square sheet is a little larger than 1.5 inches wide and about 2 hundredths of an inch thick. To make the square, researchers attached fiberglass triangular sections with flexible silicone rubber–the places where the sections join are the equivalent of origami folds. Strips of metal alloy along the joints that contract and expand when heated and cooled (as current runs through them) serve as the folding robot’s muscles.

When the alloy strips reached 178 degrees F, they bent, taking the whole sheet with them. The sheets folded into a variety of shapes in a matter of a few seconds, and magnetic closures helped them stay in place. Eventually, the 32-tile sheets folded into boats and airplanes. [MIT computer scientist Daniela] Rus says the key was figuring out algorithms for folding. It was like learning origami. [Popular Science]

One might picture “programmable matter” like this in the depths of space. Perhaps it could have been handy as a folding solar sail like the one on the Japanese Ikaros solar-sail project? Given other morphing robots, might we also see folding robots crawl under doors in search and rescue attempts? In fact, perhaps the least of its benefits will be folding paper, where we, humans, continue to rule:

The researchers note that although the algorithms produce a workable folding pattern to make a given shape, human experts are often able to design a more efficient scheme. “It doesn’t know how to get creative, and sometimes human origamists can see a few moves ahead, like a chess player,” Rus says. “You see patterns that are not obvious to a computer program that does a step-by-step process.” [Scientific American]

Video: Robert Wood, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Daniella Rus, MIT/CSAIL.

Source: Origami Robot: Don’t Bother, I’ll Fold Myself