Drive by Wire
The Dream Becomes an Incremental Reality
The drive-by-wire concept calls for the transfer of the control of a vehicle from the driver to an automated system that controls the vehicle’s steering, engine throttle, and brakes.
Today’s automotive engineers are now taking an incremental approach to turn new car safety technologies, over time, into an autonomous vehicle navigation drive-by-wire system.
How close are we now to the dream?
Self-Healing Materials A New Material-Science Breakthrough
Today's construction materials corrode or just disintegrate over time. Infrastructure built with these materials eventually need repair or replacement.
New self-healing materials can repair their own structures without human intervention.
Electron Microscope Image
The Robotic Parking Garage
This garage replaces ramps, driveways and parking attendants with a robotic system that squeezes 67 cars into an area that conventional parking could at best only fit 24. Your car is transported to its parking space by a multitasking robotic system that includes a great deal of redundant computer power to prevent accidents.
The cars are stored two deep. If the car against the wall is the first one to be picked up, the robotic system jockeys the front car to another location to gain access to the buried car. The system even includes a rotating table that turns the vehicles around before they are lifted back up to the drop-off/pick-up point in the lobby of the garage.
"Cellular Aluminum"
Up until now, it was impossible to increase the energy absorption zones of a car without dramatically increasing the car’s weight. Metcomb Nanostructures, has made a metallurgic and manufacturing breakthrough that should soon revolutionize the way car crush zones are made.
When the company’s cellular aluminum is layered with other materials it not only absorbs the energy of car crashes, it can also absorb the energy of bullets and bombs while holding onto their fragments.
"The SHIFT Bike"
Once the bike is in motion the section where the two rear wheels touch the ground move closer together transferring the balancing act from the bike to the rider. As the bike slows down the opening of these two rear wheels once again expands making it much easier for the new rider to learn how to safely stop the bike.
From Printed books to Digital
Searchable Files
A book to be scanned is first placed in the bed of the machine. When the machine is activated a set of vacuum fingers gently lifts and a machine arm turns the page. The arm carries the page over to the opposite side of the book to expose the next two pages for scanning.
"THUMS"
Engineers at Toyota Motors asked themselves this same question back in 1996. For the last eight years they have been quietly developing the technology that will eventually place most automobile industry test dummies on unemployment lines.
"Smart Windows"
The change in transparency of SPD glazing materials is a reaction to an electrical voltage change that affects suspended particles that are sandwiched in a middle layer of film in the glass.
"The Personal Airbag"
A vest that brings the safety net of an airbag to individuals exposed to dangers without the safety cage of a car or other vehicle.
Parachute Away (Full Plane Parachute)
In just one second this simple action would cause a solid fuel rocket to pull the parachute out from the mounting on the airplane's fuselage and carry the parachute at over 100 miles per hour to its opening position above the airplane.
Cambridge Crude
The MIT Liquid Fuel in a New Battery Architecture
January 2012
Goto: TechDirections On Line
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
The future automobile will run on electricity not gasoline! This could quickly happen if you could pull up with your EV to a "gas" pump to recharge your car with a liquid electric fuel.
Cambridge Crude, the nickname of a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) liquid battery recharging system will let you do just that. This new liquid charge goes in as the old one goes out for re-charging by the fueling station; to be used over and over again.
MIT "Engine"
Turns a Liquid into Electricity
May 2012
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
TechDirections Magazine
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The Friction-Stir Welding process welds metals without melting them. It works on metals including aluminum, a metal that cannot easily be joined using other metal fusion processes.
NASA engineers have recently reengineered this technology so that it can now be used on materials that vary in thickness and even weld objects with very complex shapes.
Friction-Stir Welding
September 2012
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
TechDirections Magazine
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The flowing water in your home can be turned into electricity. With funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Rentricity is starting to prove that you can turn flowing drinking water into electricity. Their engineers are now installing new valve/generators that will use wasted pressure to generate electricity.
Generating Electricity From Drinking Water
October 2012
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
TechDirections Magazine
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From liftoff to landing,Curiosity flew 352 million miles in 245 days. Because of the
distance between planets, NASA Mission Control didn’t even know if the landing worked until Curiosity had been on the ground for seven minutes.
The computer controlled landing depended on a computer program that contained half a million lines of code. Why and how this landing succeeded is covered in this column.
The Curiosity Martian Landing
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Baxter the Unconventional Robot
February 2013
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
Baxter the unconventional robot writes its own programming code. Baxter is a new type of robot, with toy-like features, that has been designed to work next to people.
Baxter was created by Rodney Brooks the former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Before he established Rethink Robotics and created Baxter, he founded iRobot. A company that builds consumer robotic cleaning machines, military warrior bots, and rescue robots. Rodney Brooks is called the go-to guy for artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics.
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May 2013
By Alan J. Pierce EdD
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You learned in science that vulcanization is a process that changes the structure of rubber, making it indestructible. The Fraunhofer Institute of Germany and two American companies have demonstrated that they can turn old vulcanized rubber tires into a powder that can once again be bonded together by the heat and pressure of an extrusion machine or the injection molding process. The full story tells how they are now starting to turn old rubber particles into new high quality products.
Reversing the Vulcanization Process
Reversing the Rubber Vulcanization Process
Engineering
