Technology - Google News |
- Flying, insect-like robot flits closer to independent flight - Ars Technica
- Philips introduces new Bluetooth Hue bulbs that work without a hub - Android Police
- Samsung is so afraid of the Mate X, it might make a copycat before Huawei even releases it - BGR
| Flying, insect-like robot flits closer to independent flight - Ars Technica Posted: 26 Jun 2019 01:42 PM PDT  Enlarge / The RoboBee XWing without its power and electronics. Noah T. Jafferis and E. Farrell Helbling, Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory Just over six years ago, when researchers at Harvard announced that they had made tiny flying robots, they immediately began talking about the prospect of their tiny creations operating autonomously in complicated environments. That seemed wildly optimistic, given that the robots flew by trailing a set of copper wires that brought power and control instructions; the robots were guided by a computer that monitored their positions using a camera. Since then, however, the team has continued working on refining the tiny machines, giving them enhanced landing capabilities, for example. And today, the team is announcing the first demonstration of self-powered flight. The flight is very short and isn't self-controlled, but the tiny craft manages to carry both the power supply circuitry and its own power source. A matter of miniaturizationThere are two approaches to miniaturization, which you can think of as top-down and bottom-up. From the top-down side, companies are shrinking components and cutting weight to allow ever smaller versions of quadcopter drones to fly, with some now available that weigh as little as 10 grams. But this type of hardware faces some hard physical limits that are going to limit how much it could shrink. Batteries, for example, end up with more of their mass going to packaging and support hardware rather than charge storage. And friction begins to play a dominant role in the performance of the standard rotating motors. The alternative is bottom-up. Start with something similar to the flying insect-like robots and figure out how to expand their capabilities. Not surprisingly, since they built the insect-like robot, the Harvard team has chosen a bottom-up approach. Their original design had piezoelectric motors that could rapidly flap two wings, providing the robot with powered flight. Power with the high voltage and rapid oscillations was supplied externally. The same was true with flight control information: a camera system tracked the robot while in flight, and a computer figured out what adjustments were needed and sent the corresponding adjustments directly to the wings. The goal of this work is to get rid of some of that external hardware, shrinking it down so it can be placed on board the robot itself. For this new work, the researchers focused on the power source that keeps the robot airborne. Shrinking powerAs noted above, batteries have problems shrinking down to the sorts of weights needed for this, since things like the casing, wiring, and charge gathering materials will always contribute to weight, no matter how small the power storage is. The best battery the researchers could find weighed four times as much as the prototype robot. Instead, the team turned to photovoltaic hardware, where a 10mg device can generate more than 7 Watts of power when exposed to full sunlight. Flying their original hardware, however, would require about seven times that. So the researchers improved the efficiency of the robot's flight by increasing the wing area while slowing the flapping of the wings. And the simplest way to do that was simply to double the number of wings, with each actuator now flapping two wings. That addition, combined with a few improvements in the actuators themselves, allowed them to boost the lift generated by the wings by nearly 40%.  Enlarge / The full RoboBee X-Wing design, including the power and electronics. Noah T. Jafferis and E. Farrell Helbling, Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory The next issue was linking the piezoelectric actuators to the solar power source. The piezoelectric actuators require high voltage (200 Volts) and rapid switching (200 Hertz oscillations). These parts were put together using a mixture of off-the-shelf and handmade components. The ultimate design involves placing the solar panels on a stalk, a bit like an umbrella. This is done to keep the panels from interfering with the air flow driven by the wings. The electronics, by contrast, are left to hang off the bottom of the robot, providing a bit of balance. The whole package is only 90 milligrams and has a 4:1 lift:weight ratio. The authors call the somewhat awkward-looking result the RoboBee X-Wing. Flight in short burstsHow does it work? Well, the included video shows that it does fly, but only extremely briefly; typical flights are for less than half a second and require three Suns' worth of incoming light. The authors term this "sustained," which seems like it's stretching the definition of the word. The robot mostly handles control simply by not flying long enough to have to deal with it. A short video describing the new flying robots. But there's some significant room for improvement. While the existing robot only weighs 90 milligrams, it's capable of producing more than 350 milligrams of lift. The authors estimate that they could nearly double the craft's weight while still retaining sufficient lift for decent performance. On its own, this could easily be used to expand the solar panels to increase the power, include on-board sensors, or put the control processing system onto the craft—or perhaps more than one of these. The current RoboBee X-Wing design also has lots of overhead for improvement. The authors suggest that they could redesign the actuators to cut the required voltage in half, which would allow them to simplify the voltage conversion electronics. Those electronics could almost certainly be miniaturized, which would reduce the weight further. Another tweak to the electronics should allow the robot to recover some of the electricity it uses, effectively increasing the available power. The researchers also want to look at how air interacts with the robot's four wings in order to optimize lift further. That's a lot of room for improvements, and there's no doubt that the RoboBee Mark II will one day be closer to flight that can legitimately be described as "sustained." In this sense, the RoboBee X-Wing should be considered a second prototype, a follow-up to the first version meant to pioneer new technology. Arguing about the use of the word "sustained" is beside the point, since the goal of this machine is to find out whether a solar-powered version actually places the hardware on the right path to get it to sustained flight, possibly with a useful payload. Nature, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1322-0 (About DOIs). |
| Philips introduces new Bluetooth Hue bulbs that work without a hub - Android Police Posted: 27 Jun 2019 06:00 AM PDT  Set the perfect look and feel in your room with new Philips Hue with Bluetooth Use the Philips Hue Bluetooth app on your smart device for easy setup and control of your lighting, to create your desired atmosphere or complement your home decor Somerset, New Jersey – With today's introduction of Philips Hue with Bluetooth, Signify (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting, makes smart lighting even more accessible. Setting the mood in your room, whether you are hosting a dinner party or relaxing at the end of the day, is now as easy as screwing in a Philips Hue Bluetooth light bulb and tapping an app to set it up and control it. With Philips Hue Bluetooth smart lighting, there's no wiring or guesswork when it comes to choosing the right lighting for your space. You can use the lights to easily create the right ambiance for every occasion or use millions of colors to decorate your home. You can start with a single light bulb or instantly connect multiple Hue Bluetooth products, and later, seamlessly upgrade your system with the Philips Hue bridge to enjoy even more functionality. Using the Philips Hue Bluetooth app, you can: Turn the lights on/off and dim or brighten them to your preferred setting "People often underestimate the power that lighting can have on the look and feel of a room," said Jasper Vervoort, Business Leader, Home Systems & Luminaires, Philips Hue, Signify. "With our Philips Hue Bluetooth smart lighting, we're making it easy to experiment and have fun with light at home. All it requires is the smartphone you already have. We're confident that once you start, you'll want to keep exploring what else Hue can do." Do you have an Amazon Echo, Google Home smart speaker or Nest smart display? Connecting new Philips Hue with Bluetooth light bulbs to Alexa is easy. If you purchase the light bulbs on Amazon.com, using the same account associated with your compatible Echo device, just power on your light bulb, and Alexa can complete the setup process for you. Bulbs purchased elsewhere also easily connect to compatible Echo devices – power on your light bulb and say "Alexa, discover my devices." For Google Home and Google Nest devices, you can seamlessly set up your Hue Bluetooth lights in the Google Home app in a few simple steps. *Philips Hue Bluetooth smart lighting works directly with Amazon Echo Dot (3rd Gen), Echo Plus (1st and 2nd Gen) and Echo Show (2nd Gen), with support for additional Echo devices to be announced. Amazon Echo devices also support voice control of Philips Hue Bluetooth smart lighting through the Philips Hue bridge. Extend the possibilities Bluetooth Products Available Now For more information about the new Philips Hue Bluetooth products, please visit meethue.com. |
| Samsung is so afraid of the Mate X, it might make a copycat before Huawei even releases it - BGR Posted: 27 Jun 2019 04:31 AM PDT The worst things that Samsung could have imagined for its first foldable phone already happened. First, Huawei's gorgeous Mate X (image above), that was unveiled just a few days after the Galaxy Fold became official in mid-February, became the talk of the town in Barcelona, Spain, at MWC 2019. To date, the Mate X has the best foldable design out there, especially compared to the ugly Galaxy Fold. Then Samsung had to endure an even bigger humiliation in early April when advance Galaxy Fold units broke left and right forcing the company to recall the phone and postpone the launch so it can fix the screen durability issues. But it turns out that Samsung is so afraid of the Mate X that it wants to release a version of its own. And it wants to do it before the Mate X hits stores in September. Soon after the Galaxy Fold and Mate X were introduced, Samsung and Huawei traded punches, each criticizing the other's design and praising their own. Since then, we saw that Huawei is working on in-folding foldable phones like the Galaxy Fold, which look even better than Samsung's phone. Meanwhile, Samsung has a plethora of foldable phone patents of its own, as the company has been developing these devices for years. In the past few days alone, we saw a couple of distinct rumors that said Samsung is making an 8-inch Galaxy Fold version that would ship with a built-in stylus and that it's also developing a foldable phone that would a look a lot like Motorola's rumored foldable Razr handset. And Samsung has more foldable phones in the works, according to The Korea Herald.
The Mate X-like Samsung phone is supposed to launch before September, according to the report, which is when the Mate X is supposed to hit stores. Huawei said a few days ago that September is a worst-case scenario, as the company is waiting for 5G certification for the phone. Huawei postponed the launch of the Mate X recently, and we thought at the time that the Galaxy Fold's fate might be to blame. That's always a possibility that Huawei wanted to take extra steps to make sure the Mate X can't be easily destroyed. Then there's also the trade war and the import ban that cast a long shadow over Huawei's launch plans for any devices, Mate X included. So how can Samsung beat Huawei to market with a Galaxy Fold version that looks like the Mate X? Well, Samsung has been working on such technology for a while, so it's probably ready to mass-produce such a device. The report notes it had a prototype out last year, but went forward with the in-folding version instead. "The launch date has yet to be unveiled, but it's likely to be earlier than the date set for Huawei," a source spoke of the out-folding Galaxy Fold version. "Suppliers have already begun mass-producing major parts, and possibly even the phone itself." "By getting ahead of Huawei and producing the first mass-produced out-folding smartphones, Samsung can claim another world title," said an unnamed market watcher. Then again, all Samsung did so far is to announce the Galaxy Fold before Huawei unveiled the Mate X. The Galaxy Fold can't be purchased anywhere in stores because it hasn't been launched yet. If anything, Samsung can claim to be the world's first major smartphone vendor to recall a revolutionary phone before it ever shipped to buyers. The Herald also says that some people think Samsung has actually decided to skip the Galaxy Fold, and instead launch a next version of the handset as early as July, complete with 5G connectivity. Samsung Display recently said it was mass-producing foldable screens for the Galaxy Fold. Image Source: Chris Smith, BGR |
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