Contour Crafting:The Future of Construction?

Hey guys your host Akib here, just been really busy these days, I haven't posted in a while. I will get back to posting about awesome stuff regularly in a couple of weeks. So this is just a quick post so you realize that the Blog is stills alive. I came across this awesome technology called "Counter Crafting". Though I would share with you guys.

So Counter Crafting is basically bringing 3D printing technology (Rapid Prototyping) to the Construction Industry. The brain child behind this technology is Mr. Behrokh Khoshnevis a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering, and is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT). He is also a Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California.

So getting back to Counter Crafting well, I would say is basically printing a house just like you would print a part with a 3D printer, only difference being the proportions of things and the materials used are big and its more complicated cause you have to install electrical, piping and stuff. The 3D Printer (Counter Crafting machine) can be assembled at site. It could be put on a truck and taken to any location and its not completely autonomous like a 3D printer. It  require assistance in building a complete residable home.
The concrete used for the process is different, its called fiber reinforced plastic.

Virginia Tech's Robotic Jelly Fish: Another way to spy

In the past few years the US armed forces and other US Government agencies have been spending a lot of their funds on funding and allotting their projects to Universities and technical  institutes across the United States. Most recent projects are robotic projects that mimic animals and can be used for potential surveillance and assistance to the armed forces both on and off the battlefield.

Here is another awesome potential spying/surveillance robot being developed by the Graduate students of Virginia Tech College of Engineering. This time its a Jelly Fish and its called 'Cryo'.

Click to see enlarged view

Cryo is basically a prototype robot that looks very much like a giant jelly fish. Its 5.7 feet wide (1.7 meters) and weighs in at 170 lbs (77kg) and its designed to be neutrally buoyant. The inspiration for the design is the 'Lion's mane jellyfish' also termed the 'Cyanea capillata' by biologist, that's were the name 'Cryo' comes from.

VelociRoACH: Robotic Cockroach (hexapedal millirobot)

The Pestilent Cockroach have been here on planet earth for millions of years, and part of the reason of their evolutionary success is the shear speed at which they move. Most of the times the best engineering solution for a problem is mimicking nature, but mimicking nature obviously is very difficult. However day by day year by year we are getting closer and closer to doing that, specifically when we talk about legged robots.

Mr.Duncan Haldane and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkely), have been studying the six-legged pests to improve their millirobots. The 'VelociRoACH' as its called is the fastest legged robot in the world at the scale, however the fastest legged robot title stays with the LS3 from Boston dynamics (The Cheetah Robot).

Taking about specifications and technical details. The VelociRoACH can move with a velocity of 2.7 m/s actually making it faster than a real cockroach which do a maximum 1.5 m/s.

The secret of the the velocity of the VelociroACH is in the shape of its legs. Shaped like a 'C' they provide the spring action need to propel the robot really fast and at the same time absorbing the impact of the legs hitting the ground almost 15 times a second. The legs are similar to that of the R-Hex from Bostan Dynamics but don't work in the same way. Its body has been fabricated out of a good type of cardboard. Although it can lift 4 times its own weight. It weighs a mere 30 grams and is 10 cm long. To keep it stable, it must have 3 of the six legs making contact with the ground all time.

Your smartphone is a Desktop too with Ubuntu OS for smartphones.

Today smartphones have become more powerful than ever before. We have smartphones which have high clock speed Quadcore processors, upto 2gigs of RAM and also a great deal of storage, well that's a lot of processing power in the palm of your hands. But all people end up doing with it hardly utilizes the full potential of the hardware they paid for. Practically  its just a waste of hardware resources. Although that's not the users fault, Its the industries fault, The top three smartphone operating systems, the Android from Google, iOS from Apple and Windows Phone from Microsoft also have a separate PC OS. Why didn't these IT giants never though of developing an OS that works for/on both the devices or rather, just getting a Smartphone to do the work of an entry level PC. 
Well Apple and Microsoft in the recent past made some effort and big talks about the Desktop-Mobile convergence but never made serious effort towards it, may be the industry was never ready enough for it cause they were already making good money by kinda fooling people.

That being said Ubuntu backed by Canonical may have set a spark to revolutionize the IT industry for good, by just doing that, Building an OS that works both on smartphones and PC, rather a smart phone that's also an efficient desktop computer when connected to a screen, keyboard and a Mouse. 

In a recent announcement Ubuntu backed by canonical announced a new smartphone OS that's just the same as the PC OS, just with a Mobile friendly interface. What that means is you can convert your smartphone into a PC by just connecting it to a Screen, keyboard and a Mouse. Ubuntu is already available for Android Smartphones with a Dual core processor for free. What that means is you can run the full PC Ubuntu OS on a compatible smartphone.

A Homemade Spacecraft (DIY Tech)

Hey guys your host Akib here, I came across this really interesting short documentary about how amateur Engineers and entrepreneurs Kristian von Bengston (worked at NASA) and Peter Madsenin in Denmark are working on a project to build a suborbital spacecraft to carry a human into space and then release a capsule to return the passenger back to safety.

The Team calls themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals, a not-for-profit  which started off  in 2008 and now comprises of  20 plus specialists determined to create the first homemade, manned spacecraft to go into suborbital flight.  The idea is to prove that fact that rocket technology is not something beyond the reach of a common individual. The rockets that are undergoing testing are made from off the shelf components that are easily available to anyone. The project is completely open sourced you can have all the access to information and designs if you want to create your very own spacecraft.

Hexacopter and hexapod union looks like a robotic insect

Hexacopter and Hexapod are amongst  the latest and the most popular remote control robotic toys out there. How about combining them together to create a new walking and flying-walking hybrid machine. I bet you never though of that before. That's what the guys at Mad Lab Industries (MLI for short) have come up with. MLI is a  fresh start up that sells robotic components online and on the side they do cool stuff too.

So the basic idea behind this unnamed project is to integrate a remote controlled Hexapod Robot with a remote controlled Hexacopter. With this idea, they received a PhantomX AX Hexapod kit from Trossen Robotics.

The PhantomX AX Hexapod

Now the integration wasn't an easy task, considering the fact that the PhantomX was originally designed to be tough and was quite heavy to be  taken to the air. So it had to undergo a lot of surgery, the frame originally made of ABS plastic parts had to be replaced with lighter carbon fiber parts. Despite the fact, it was still heavy for it to be taken in the air by a quadcopter. Rather it needed a Hexacopter which has a much greater lifting force and was much stable than a quadcopter. A quadcoptor would have been cheaper considering the fact that it would have reduced the cost of 2 BLDC motors and ESC (Electronic Speed Controller).