Robots are continuing to make inroads into the last bastion of labor-intensive industry -- farming and horticulture. In England, University of Warwick researchers are working on a number of robotics and automation products that could vastly reduce the labor costs of farmers and growers. The following are two of them:
Robotic mushroom picker: The robot's camera "eye" is calibrated to spot and select only mushrooms of the exact size required for picking, at a level of accuracy that far exceeds that of human labor. The mushrooms are then picked by a suction cup on the end of a robotic arm. While the speed of picking is currently just over half that of a human, the robot can pick 24 hours a day. The researchers hope to increase the speed of picking to a rate much closer to that of a human worker.
Robot grass cutter: Mowing the lawn is a problem for farmers and even golf course owners, because to manage such pastures, a skilled employee is required for each tractor. Researchers in the Warwick Manufacturing Group have developed a method of mowing that allows a grower to deploy multiple robotic grass-cutting machines at the same time, all under the supervision of just a single employee using a remote control. They are working to replace the remote control with a computer that will use data sensors attached to each mower, which will autonomously travel across fields, working in groups with other robotic mowers.
Groves of academe: Georgia Tech plots path to carbon-based electronic devices
Graphite, the material that gives pencils their marking ability, could be the basis for a new class of nanometer-scale electronic devices that have the attractive properties of carbon nanotubes but could be produced using established microelectronics manufacturing techniques.
Using thin layers of graphite known as graphene, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in collaboration with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, have produced proof-of-principle transistors, loop devices and circuitry. The researchers hope to use graphene layers less than 10 atoms thick as the basis for electronic systems that would manipulate electrons as waves rather than particles, much like photonic systems control light waves.
"We expect to make devices of a kind that don't really have an analogue in silicon-based electronics, so this is an entirely different way of looking at electronics," said Walt de Heer, a professor at Georgia Tech's school of physics. "Our ultimate goal is integrated electronic structures that work on diffraction of electrons rather than diffusion of electrons. This will allow the production of very small devices with very high efficiencies and low power consumption."
Because carbon nanotubes conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, they have attracted strong interest for use in transistors and other devices. However, serious obstacles must be overcome before nanotube-based devices can be scaled up into high-volume industrial products.
De Heer has helped discover many properties of carbon nanotubes over the past decade and believes their primary value has been in calling attention to the useful properties of graphene. Continuous graphene circuitry can be produced using standard microelectronic processing techniques, potentially allowing the creation of a road map for high-volume graphene electronics manufacturing, he said.
"We are doing lithography, which is completely familiar to those who work in microelectronics," said de Heer.
Difference engines: rationalist roots
The ancient Indian mathematician Pingala is credited with the first known description of a binary numeral system in the third century BC (coinciding with his discovery of the concept of zero). However, it was Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century who first fully described the modern binary system, in his article "Explication de l'Arithmetique Binaire." Leibniz's system, based on ones and zeros, was subsequently employed on all modern computers. He revisited that system throughout his long and varied intellectual career.
Leibniz's genius extended to many fields. Along with Spinoza and Descartes, he was one of the three great Rationalist philosophers. He developed integral and differential calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton and is usually considered the father of symbolic logic. Leibniz's work anticipated Lagrangian interpolation and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1934, Norbert Wiener claimed to have found in Leibniz's writings a mention of the concept of feedback, central to Wiener's later cybernetic theory.
In 1671, Leibniz began work on a machine that could execute all four arithmetical operations, inspired by (and competing with) calculating machines developed by Blaise Pascal and Sir Samuel Morland. Over several years, he gradually improved the design of the machine, which was the basis of his election to the Royal Society in 1673. A number of the machines were produced by a craftsman working under Leibniz's supervision. Leibniz didn't consider it an unambiguous success because it didn't fully mechanize the operation of carrying. Historian Louis Couturat reported finding an unpublished note by Leibniz, dated 1674, describing a machine capable of performing some algebraic operations.
Leibniz was groping toward hardware and software concepts worked out much later, in the first half of the 19th century, by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in which binary numbers were represented by marbles governed by a rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital computers replace Leibniz's marbles, which moved by gravity, with shift registers, voltage gradients and pulses of electrons, but otherwise, they run roughly as he envisioned. Most historians of science and technology acknowledge Leibniz's prophetic role in the emergence of calculating machines and formal computer languages.