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What made me fall of my chair is the methodology/architecture part of this statement. It’s hard enough (but doable) to use RDF to map philosophically similar APIs. It’s a non-starter to use it to bridge architectural and methodological differences. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Semantic Web technologies in the context of modeling IT systems (see the “semantic tech” category of this blog). While I think they would be a great foundation I don’t see them ever coming anywhere near what Reuven describes.

UC3M's ASIROV Robotic Satellite Chaser Prototype ASIROV, the Acoplamiento y Agarre de Satélites mediante Sistemas Robóticos basado en Visión (Docking and Capture of Satellites through computer vision) would use computer vision tech to autonomously chase down satellites in orbit for repair or removal. Image courtesy of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Spanish robotics engineers have devised a new weapon in the battle against zombie-sats and space junk: an automated robotics system that employs computer vision technology and algorithmic wizardry to allow unmanned space vehicles to autonomously chase down, capture, and even repair satellites in orbit. Scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) created the system to allow for the removal of rogue satellites from low earth orbit or the maintenance of satellites that are nearing the ends of their lives, prolonging their service (and extending the value of large investments in satellite tech). Through a complex set of algorithms, space vehicles known as “chasers” could be placed into orbit with the mission of policing LEO, chasing down satellites that are damaged or have gone “zombie” and dealing with them appropriately.

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

The e-reader market took the company E-Ink and its low-power, easy-on-the-eyes digital paper technology mainstream. But no one says E-Ink is perfect; the displays, to date, don’t do flexibility or full color well. And they aren’t cheap enough to move into budget-conscious applications, like the long-dreamed of grocery store shelf tags that could be updated remotely to display new prices. E-Ink and its brethren continue to advance down their technology development paths. But a startup company based in Saratoga, Calif., says they’re heading in the wrong direction.

South Korean researchers have recently made a flexible nonvolatile memory based on memristors—fundamental electronic circuit elements discovered in 2008—using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate—they could be printed on rolls of plastic sheets and used in plastic RFID tags or in the wearable electronics of the future. "We think graphene oxide can be a good candidate for next-generation memory," says Sung-Yool Choi, who leads flexible devices research at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Choi and his colleagues reported their device last week in Nano Letters.

Opus is Octasic's high-performing, ultra low-power, asynchronous DSP technology optimized for basestations, video processing and media gateway solutions. Asynchronous designs deliver similar computing performance to synchronous designs, but use less silicon and less power. No clock tree No state-elements Less sensitive to process and temperature variations

The Care-O-bot® research initiative aims at making Care-O-bot® 3 available as high-tech research platform. The main objectives to reach this goal are to provide a common open source repository for the hardware platform provide simulation models of hardware components provide remote access to the Care-O-bot® 3 hardware platform

The goal of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is to achieve higher data rates through more efficient transmission, and thus improving the cellular phone user experience by enabling powerful new devices. The changes required in this technology present new challenges for base station vendors and their suppliers. Supporting 4G systems efficiently requires a number of innovations in DSP design; these innovations are moving the industry toward SoC architectures to support such systems. This paper will explore how TI's new architecture enables the key features in 4G systems.

It’s hard enough to set up a reliable wireless network at home on Earth, let alone space. I harbor a personal grudge against my two-foot-thick 19th century brick/plaster wifi-killing walls and don’t get me started with my router or my ISP. So how does NASA connect with the ISS 300 to 400 kilometers above the Earth travelling at nearly 28000 km/h? In this case, engineers took advantage of the station’s existing communication link, which relies on the Ku radio band. The Ku band is the most common portion of the frequency spectrum used for satellite communication and is not reserved for restricted use. Among the companies that use the Ku band for commercial purposes are satellite internet providers and news networks broadcasting on satellite from remote locations.

Ever since graphene was first produced in a lab at the University of Manchester in 2004, researchers around the world have been fascinated with its potential in electronics applications. Graphene possessed all the benefits of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), namely its charged-carrier mobility, but it didn’t have any of the down sides, such as CNTs’ need for different processing techniques than silicon and the intrinsic difficulty of creating interconnects for CNTs. But all was not easy for applying graphene to electronics applications. One of the fundamental problems for graphene was its lack of a band gap, which left it with a very low on-off ratio measured at about 10 as compared to in the 100s for silicon. Now this fundamental hurdle has been overcome. Based on research led by Phaedon Avouris at IBM’s IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, IBM is reporting that they have created a significant band gap in graphene.

Mahru-Z is the robotic maid that can make breakfast!. Given certain voice commands the robot can perform functions such as working a microwave, delivering toast, and other tasks such as washing clothes. The robots can see with stereoscopic vision and can identify what objects are and even decide what jobs needs to be done with the objects. In the video, one robot appears to be tethered and the other is not making me wonder if they are really self contained. Also, one is wearing a dress and the other not, so are they both maids or is one a butler? Shouldn't they just call them robotic servants or is that redundant? Regardless, although not apparently sentient, these do appear to be advanced robots. I only wonder if they washed their hands before and after handling the food?