Harvesting energy from insects in quest to create tiny cyborg first responders

An insect fitted with piezoelectric generator to harness the energy from the insect's wing.
Insects have served as the inspiration for a number of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that could be deployed to monitor hazardous situations without putting humans in harm's way. Now researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are proposing using actual live insects enhanced with electronic sensors to achieve the same result. The insect cyborgs would use biological energy harvested from their body heat or movements to potentially power small sensors implanted on their bodies in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.

To harvest energy from insects, the researchers have designed a spiral piezoelectric generator that converts the kinetic energy from the insect's wing movements into electricity. This power would be used to prolong the battery life of devices implanted on the insect, such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor. The prototype piezoelectric generator was fabricated from bulk piezoelectric substrates and was designed to maximize the power output in a limited area.

"Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack," said Professor Khalil Najafi, the chair of electrical and computer engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. "We could then send these 'bugged' bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go."

The U-M team examined several techniques to scavenge energy from wing motion with their results were published in a paper titled "Energy scavenging from insect flight," which was recently published in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. The university is now pursuing a patent for the technology and is seeking commercialization partners to bring it to market.

Getting the insects to go where their handlers want them to is another part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before insect cyborgs can be deployed. But DARPA has been working on this, having put out a call some years back for research proposals for Hybrid-Insects-Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) interfaces to control the movement of living insects. Combining the two technologies could be just the thing to take insect cyborgs to the next level and see them used to monitor hazardous situations in the not to distant future.


sources : http://www.gizmag.com/insect-cyborgs/20596/


Shredder Clock




There is a new clock that makes you wanna wake even if you don't want to cause you can't afford not to.
The Shredder Clock is just a concept, but it’s a pretty good idea, and a new spin on the notion that money is a great morning motivator. Other alarm clock inventions force you to feed them money before they’ll shut up, or automatically donate to charities that you hate until you get out of bed, but this one lets you see your money going to waste.
You could conceivably shred anything you find precious, from letters to pictures, not just money even summons if you want to risk going to jail.
This actually seems like a decent DIY project — it probably wouldn’t take much work to sync a paper shredder to your alarm clock although the outcome won't be as good as this.


Janken with 100% Winning Rate Robot

The game Janken or rock-paper-scissors is so famous that almost everyone know how to play it. In fact, recent news in the world of technology reveals the ability of a robot hand to play this game, and you'll never beat it.
The robot hand on the right is designed to have 100% winning rate
This robot was developed by Ishikawa Oku Laboratory (Japan, obviously) and with the super-duper high-speed sensor that'll read opponent's hand gesture, the robot will make a counter move that will beat the human's move.

Here's the video.
The purpose of this highly frustrating machine (cause you play the game and lose everytime) is to demonstrate its ability in real world situation where the robot must be able to react like human when necessary.

I hope the researchers can tweak the algorithms so that it can play rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock just like in the series The Big Bang Theory.
Here's the graphical representation as to what Sheldon Cooper said in the video.

Certainly technology has advance quite fast and hopefully all of these achievements can give benefit to human in a peaceful way.