Electronic Everything!

When Pantelis Georgiou and his fellow biomedical engineers at Imperial College London decided to design an intelligent insulin pump for diabetes patients, they started at the source. "We asked ourselves, what does a pancreas do to control blood glucose?" Georgiou recalls. The answer is pretty well known: The organ relies primarily on two populations of cells—beta cells, to secrete insulin when blood glucose is high, and alpha cells, which release a hormone called glucagon when glucose levels are low. "We simulated them both in microchip form," Georgiou says. This biomimetic approach diverges from today's dominant method of delivering only insulin using a relatively simple control system.

When the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller appeared in 2005, it featured a set of female pin headers exposing most of the pins of the ATmega168 for easy hacking and for connecting accessory boards known as 'Shields'. The purpose of a shield is to provide new plug-and-play functionality to the host microcontroller, such as circuit prototyping, motion control, sensor integration, network and radio communication, or gaming interfaces, without worrying too much about the hardware implementation details. Seven years after the birth of the original Arduino, new shields keep coming out and are being cataloged on http://shieldlist.org/, a testament to the versatility of the design. It is also simple to build a DIY shield when nothing out there will meet your needs or when you want to understand how the shield concept works from the ground up.

There are severe flaws within the Harmonic-Balance and SPICE programs now widely used. Mentioned as far back as within an abstract of Session WSO at the 2008 IEEE International Microwave Symposium: "Even though nonlinear circuit-analysis software has been in use for many years, users still have difficulty obtaining valid results with existing methods.  Recognized problems include poor accuracy, convergence difficulties, long simulation times, and unstable results (i.e., results that vary greatly with minor changes in parameters).  These problems are encountered in both harmonic-balance and time-domain simulations."

D-Wave Systems, which in 2009 partnered with Google to test a prototype quantum computer for detecting vehicles in images, announced that it has now sold the first commercial quantum computer. The D-Wave quantum computer, called Rainier, solves discrete optimization problems using quantum annealing. The computer was sold to Lockheed-Martin for an undisclosed price. It is supercooled, requires 15 kilowatts, and supports APIs in multiple programming environments including Python, Java, C++, SQL, and MATLAB.

During the Google IO event, two new great features of the popular Android OS were announced. The most important from a robotics point of view is the Android Open Accessory standard that is Arduino based and enables Android devices to integrate with hardware via usb (or bluetooth in the near future). You can read more in the posts on engadget.com and robots-dreams.com (where the video is from). Also engadget reports on the Android @ Home framework that aspires to interconnect every home appliance, device or gadget to an integrated network. More information and details will be announced soon from Google but already the potential for various robotic applications that could take advantage of these projects looks promising.

The embedded world is constantly changing. You might not have noticed, but if you take a minute to recall what a microcontroller system was like 10 years ago and compare it to today's latest microcontroller systems, you will find that PCB design, component packages, level of integration, clock speed, and memory size have all going through several generations of change. One of the hottest topics in this area is when will the last of remaining 8-bit microcontroller users start to move away from legacy architectures and move to modern 32-bit processor architectures like the ARM Cortex-M based microcontroller family. Over the last few years there has been a strong momentum of embedded developers starting the migration to 32-bit microcontrollers and, in this multi-part article, we will take a look at some of the factors accelerating this migration.

With the introduction of the WEBENCH Online Design Environment in 1999, National Semiconductor made it possible for design engineers to create a reliable power supply circuit over the internet in minutes. The user specified the circuit performance and the WEBENCH Toolset delivered. Today, WEBENCH Designer creates and presents all of the possible power, lighting, or sensing circuits that meet a design requirement in seconds. This enables the user to make value based comparisons at a system and supply chain level before a design is committed. This expert analysis is not possible anywhere else.

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.

A new form of propulsion that could allow microrobots to explore human bodies has been discovered. The technique would be used to power robots and other devices such as microfluidic pumps from a distance. Finding a propulsion mechanism that works on the microscopic scale is one of the key challenges for developing microrobots. Another is to find a way to supply such a device with energy because there is so little room to carry on-board fuel or batteries. Now a team lead by Orlin Velev at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, has found that a simple electronic diode could overcome both these problems. Velev and Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK, floated a diode in a tank of salt water and zapped the set-up with an alternating electric field.

From multicore to many-core to hard-to-describe-in-a-single-word core

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: