MagicSaw: Robot carpenter makes custom article of furniture

Researchers have repurposed existing robotic technology therefore it's able to produce custom wood article of furniture, a move they are saying can greatly improve safety.

The team at the Massachusetts' Institute of Technology (MIT) changed existing technology, as well as the popular vacuuming mechanism Roomba, to form the system.

The cluster aforesaid the goal wasn't to exchange human carpenters however to permit them to specialize in a lot of necessary tasks like style.

It is hoped systems like this may also improve safety.

"Every year thousands of carpenters injure their hands and fingers doing dangerous tasks like sawing," the team aforesaid.

AutoSaw might let "non-experts customise completely different things that may then be created with the assistance of robots".

Robotics have long been accustomed manufacture factory-made, flat-pack {furniture|piece of article of furniture|article of furniture|furnishings} however MIT's work might pave the means for robots to form custom furniture for specific functions and areas.

The robots can cut the wood properly, adding the holes required to assemble it, and carry the element elements round the space.

Compared to existing machines employed by carpenters, AutoSaw is significantly cheaper and a lot of mobile. also as Roomba, the project uses 2 robots from German firm Kuka - tho' the actual model utilized by MIT's team has since been out of print.

Easy access

But hardware specifics aside, the important goal of MIT's work is to demonstrate that high-quality, customisable article of furniture is a lot of accessible than before - and safer to provide.

"Robots have already enabled production, however with computing they need the potential to alter mass customisation and personalisation in virtually everything we tend to turn out,” aforesaid Daniela Rus, quoted in a piece written by MIT's in-house publication.

Ms Res and her team area unit a part of MIT's technology and computing Laboratory, based in 2004.

The group's analysis paper on the system aforesaid the robots were capable of size up and cutting the wood required to create a chair, shed, table and decking.

Assembly remains distributed by humans, as if it were a typical flat-pack product.

“Our aim is to democratise furniture-customisation,” Ms Charles Munroe Schulz aforesaid. 

“We’re making an attempt to open up a realm of opportunities therefore users aren’t absolute to what they’ve bought at Ikea. Instead, they'll create what most closely fits their desires.”

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How to tackle the rubbish dump in orbit? Nasa go over it

It was a breathtaking sight. Two Falcon Heavy boosters performed a synchronised vertical landing and, minutes later, another indelible image entered the world’s imagination. A bright red sports car orbited the Earth. The man responsible, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, received widespread acclaim for launching the largest rocket since Apollo’s Saturn V. The car divided opinion.

It was either a cheerleader for space science, a marketing masterpiece or, as the mannequin astronaut enjoyed planetary selfies, another potentially dangerous temporary piece of space junk.

There are over half a million pieces of debris that are not much larger than a marble, littering the Earth’s orbit and over 20,000 the size of a cricket ball or larger. These bigger pieces range from an astronaut’s glove to dead spacecraft and disused rocket stages. Yet size does not always equate to the greatest danger.

As we enter a new space race, with more nations like China and India joining the quest to explore the cosmos, we will be adding more and more of this flotsam into orbit. The next generation of space scientists face a big challenge: how to ensure our future wave of spacecraft survive this ever-increasing belt of rubbish.  

Watch: The teenage scientist tracking a sea of space junk 

The search is on for ways to keep the world’s space agencies one step ahead of this potentially lethal debris.

“Millimetre-sized orbital debris pose the highest penetration risk because of the high impact speed to most operational spacecraft in low-Earth orbit,” says Nasa’s chief scientist for orbital debris, Jer Chyi Liou.

These tiny fragments far outpace the punch of a moving bullet, with maximum speeds approaching 30,000mph (48,000km/h).

The debris ranges from pieces as small as a fleck of paint to disused satellites (Credit: Nasa)

In early February 2018 in Vienna, during the United Nations’ 55th Session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, Liou presented an update on the space debris environment and the US space agency’s operations and research. In 2017 alone, 86 launches around the world placed more than 400 spacecraft into orbit around the Earth.

“The total amount of material in Earth orbit is more than 7,600 tonnes,” Liou says. “About 23,000 large objects are being tracked by the US Strategic Command’s Space Surveillance Network (SSN). In addition, there are tens of millions or more debris too small to be tracked by the SSN but still large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions.”

There is also the risk, known as the Kessler Syndrome or Kessler Effect, where one piece of debris breaks off and hits another so that it becomes a cascade, which could end up polluting an entire orbit for satellites. Space is already part of everyday life, from telecommunications to disaster monitoring, the loss of any satellite is a significant issue.

The sheer amount of debris requires constant observation and prediction – by any means necessary

The amount of debris escalated sharply in 2007 when China deliberately destroyed its Fengyun-1C weather satellite as part of an anti-satellite device test. Two years later an American Iridium 33 communications satellite collided with a spent Russian Cosmos 2251 spacecraft. Both these incidents will have ramifications for some time.

Last year, Nasa was involved in 21 collision avoidance manoeuvres by uncrewed spacecraft. Four were to avoid debris from Fengyun-1C; two to avoid parts from the Iridium 33-Cosmos 2251 collision.

Moving an object out of the way by altering its orbit is one method of diverting a potential crash, but the sheer amount of debris requires constant observation and prediction – by any means necessary.

“Nasa uses a combination of radars, telescopes, and in-situ measurements to monitor, but not track, objects down to sub-millimetre in size,” says Liou.

Nasa’s Space Debris Sensor orbits the Earth on the International Space Station. The sensor, a one-metre-square bit of kit around 20cm thick, was attached to the outside of the space station’s European Columbus module in December 2017. It will detect millimetre-sized pieces of debris for at least two years, providing information on whatever hits it – such as size, density, velocity, orbit – and will determine whether the impacting object is from space or a man-made piece of space debris.

Nasa tests panels in labs by firing fragments at speeds up to 17,00mph (Credit: Nasa)

The United States is responsible for only around one-in-three of all known pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit so Nasa isn’t the only organisation working on the problem. This is an international effort that affects every space-faring nation; Russia’s space agency has already signed an agreement to install a new debris-tracking telescope in Brazil.

There is also a market for private initiatives to monitor space debris and sell data to satellite operators. This includes ExoAnalytic Solutions in the US and Space Insight in the UK – the latter operates a ground-based system of sensors in Cyprus. In Spain, the Deimos Sky Survey uses a network of telescopes to track near Earth objects such as asteroids as well as space debris. It also spotted Elon Musk’s car in space.

But not every piece of debris can be dealt with by collision avoidance. In April, the first European Active Debris Removal mission will launch from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on its way to resupply the International Space Station. Called REMOVEdebris, the satellite will contain two cubesats that will release simulated space debris so that it can then demonstrate several ways of retrieving them.

Four key technologies will be tested, says Guglielmo Aglietti, director of the UK’s Surrey Space Centre, which is coordinating the mission. These include a visual navigation system, a net and a harpoon used to capture debris and a de-orbit sail use to slow the debris so it falls into the Earth’s atmosphere.

We will have demonstrated that space debris removal could be done using relatively low-cost technologies - Guglielmo Aglietti, Surrey Space Centre

A harpoon in space sounds far-fetched but, for larger pieces of debris, it could be all that is needed. For this demonstration, the harpoon, built by Airbus Defence & Space in the UK, is the size of a pen.

The mission will deploy a 10-sq-cm panel on a boom 1.5m (5ft) away. The tethered harpoon will then be fired from the spacecraft to pierce and retrieve the panel. The net idea is similarly simple; it will surround and trap debris.

The experimental drag sail, which is a plastic membrane, can only be tested after the other technologies. “During a real mission this would be the last phase,” says Aglietti, “when the platform and the debris that it has captured are deorbited together.”

If REMOVEdebris is a success, this will be the start of further missions. “We will have demonstrated that space debris removal could be done using relatively low-cost technologies,” says Aglietti, “and therefore we hope that commercial ventures could follow and perform removal of the debris that poses the highest threat.”

Even the International Space Station has to evade debris left from earlier missions (Credit: Nasa)

Testing technologies on controlled simulated pieces of debris is an important step forward. The next stage – using technologies on uncontrolled pieces of debris – will be more complex and Esa is proposing a mission called e.deorbit to its member states at the end of 2019.

“E.deorbit will demonstrate that we can remove an uncontrolled object safely from orbit,” says Holger Krag, head of Esa’s space debris office. “It could be an Esa satellite that’s defunct and will no longer react to any command from the ground. We would, for the first time, apply technology to a target satellite that’s real.”

The removal spacecraft will be equipped with a sensor suite in order to approach the satellite safely. This is no mean feat. “It is a challenge to approach a controlled object like the ISS for docking,” says Krag, who is based at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

We take space debris seriously because we are operating a fleet of 20 satellites – Holger Krag, Esa

The uncontrolled satellite could also be tumbling or spinning. “If it’s tumbling you have to synchronise yourself and then somehow capture it. You could use a robotic arm, net or harpoon and the next step then is to apply a manoeuvre in order to bring it down.”

Esa has already had a close call. In August 2016 a centimetre-sized particle hit one of the solar arrays on Esa’s Sentinel 1A satellite and produced a small reduction in power and a slight change in the spacecraft’s orbit and orientation.

“We take space debris seriously because we are operating a fleet of 20 satellites from here in Darmstadt,” says Krag. “Ten of them are flying in a very densely polluted area of space and we regularly have to conduct collision avoidance manoeuvres.”

But Krag is also pragmatic about the scale of the problem. “We can limit the risk but cannot completely avoid the risk between collisions,” he says. “We can just do our best.”

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Future cities? How it will look? Lets See It

Imagine a town of the long run. does one see clean streets, flying cars and robots doing all the work?
Or maybe your vision is a lot of dystopian, with a giant Brother-style authoritarian regime, dark alleys choked with crime, and folks forced to measure in hermetically sealed pods as a result of war or another disaster has rendered whole swathes of the town uninhabitable.



No-one extremely is aware of what the long run holds, however the truth now could be that our urban areas square measure overcrowded and impure.

Almost half the world's population presently lives in cities, and by 2050 that's projected to extend to seventy fifth, however what quite town can they be living in?

The time is ripe, say specialists, to start out planning smarter urban environments, each new cities required to sustain Associate in Nursing ever-growing population, and retro-fits on those that we've lived certain centuries.

Greenification

If the cities of the past were formed by folks, the cities of the long run square measure probably to be formed by concepts, and there square measure lots of competitory ones regarding however such a futurist urban house ought to look.


How can we create our cities greener?

Some of these revolve round the concept smarter equals greener. property specialists predict carbon-neutral cities choked with electrical vehicles and bike-sharing schemes, with air quality most improved that workplace employees will really open their windows for the primary time.

Green City is the most famous city as future city

Visions of a inexperienced town usually embrace skyscrapers wherever living and workplace house compete with floating inexperiencedhouses or high-rise vegetable patches and green roofs, as we have a tendency to attempt to mix urbanisation with a come back to our pastoral past.
Behind such greenification of cities lies a really pressing want.

"Cities square measure reaching edge," says professor David Gann, World Health Organization heads up Imperial College's Digital Economy laboratory. "Traffic jams are becoming worse, queues longer and transport networks a lot of vulnerable to delays, power outages a lot of common."

The answer might roll in the hay massive knowledge and also the questionable net of things, wherever objects antecedently dumb square measure created good by being connected to every alternative.

A network of sensors can, the argument goes, offer a bunch of information regarding however a town is playacting. this may enable systems to be joined up and ultimately work a lot of expeditiously.

The internet of things might herald new developments that may provide privacy specialists nightmares, like Minority Report-style digital collection - billboards that communicate with passers-by with personalized messages.

But it'll additionally bring inconceivable new services to voters, thinks professor Gann.
Technology corporations like Siemens, IBM, Intel and Cisco, believe that the cleverest cities are going to be people who square measure hooked into the network.

Many cities wish to form traffic systems smarter
IBM presently has two,000 comes in progress in cities round the world, from crime interference analytics in Portland, Oregon, to water databases in Golden State, to smarter transport systems in Zhenjiang, China.

Its flagship project is in Delaware Janeiro|Rio|city|metropolis|urban center} de Janeiro, wherever it's engineered Associate in Nursing operations centre, that it describes because the "nerve centre" of the town.

Built at first to assist trot out the floods that often vulnerable the town, it currently co-ordinates thirty government agencies and provides mobile applications to stay voters in-tuned with potential accidents, traffic black-spots and alternative town updates.

The fact that massive companies have become thus heavily concerned in planning town infrastructure has diode critics to question however quickly such a town might, just like the laptop systems they're hoping on, become obsolete.

Saskia Sassen, co-chair on the Committee on international Thought at university and a number one knowledgeable on good cities, attracts parallels with the workplace buildings of the sixties, that she describes as "low-ceiling places currently standing unhappy and empty as advanced technologies render them useless".

She is additionally involved regarding privacy and also the role that voters can play within the grand plans of IBM et al..

"When will sensored become censored?" she asks.

IBM's Rick Robinson is fast to disregard issues.

"The behaviour of a town is regarding the behaviour of voters. Unless systems will become the material of their lives, nothing goes to vary," he says.

Most of the comes IBM undertakes involve consulting with community teams yet as town councils, and any data-collecting schemes need the consent of users, he said.

He points to a project the firm completed in town, Iowa, wherever households were offered access to data regarding their water consumption.

The majority quickly modified habits and saved water once confronted with the information. apparently those additionally given access to their neighbours' data were doubly as probably to form changes.
The power of the group are going to be crucial to the cities of the long run, thinks Carlo Ratti, MIT's head of Sense-able Cities. He sees a battle ahead between what companies wish to sell to cities and what voters really want.

The power of the group are going to be vital as cities get smarter

"Truly good - and real - cities don't seem to be like a military regiment walking in lockstep to the commander's orders," he says.

"They square measure a lot of sort of a shifting flock of birds or shoal of fish, {in that|during which|within which} people reply to delicate social and behavioral cues from their neighbours regarding which thanks to move forward."

As good cities move from conception to reality, gamete analyst Joe Dignan contains a word of caution for those hoping to grab a bit of the action.

"Companies turn out videos of glass homes of pretty folks doing Minority Report-style stuff, however show American state however this may facilitate folks sitting within their council flat twenty storeys in the sky?"

His words echo those of yank author and urbanist author World Health Organization warned many
decades ago: "Cities have the potential of providing one thing for everyone, solely as a result of, and only, they're created by everyone."

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