Hybrid cars use a combination of electric and gasoline engine power to get you where you're going. The Chevy Volt uses only electricity. The companion gasoline engine is to dynamically recharge the lithium-ion batteries as the vehicle is in use.
As of 2008, every car sold in America will be required to have a low cost controller area network (CAN) to link all the components of an automobile. Reading the data off the vehicle for diagnostic or test purposes will require a CAN device that interfaces the car with the computer.
The Fab Lab at Lorain County Community College in Ohio is only one of two types of personal manufacturing labs in the United States. Using common manufacturing machines in uncommon ways puts fabrication in the hands of the individual.
Hanson Robotics is focused on emulating a person in robotic form that is capable of over 62 facial reactions and uses advanced Artificial Intelligence software to allow the systems to walk, talk, maintain eye contact, recognize faces and speech patterns, and simulate a real person's personality.
At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, NASA engineers control space vehicles on a daily basis. It takes almost three years of training to do what they do, and today, we'll get a feel for what it's like to sit in the chairs at Mission Control.
Army testing has shown that Chatten Associates' Head-Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV) more than doubles the mission performance of remote operations. It can be controlled by either a joystick or the operator's head motions. Both of these gimbals are available with a high-precision option, offering sub-milliradian accuracy and 300 degree per second slew rates in azimuth.
Atair Aerospace is a high-technology defense contractor dedicated to modernizing military and government logistics by creatively solving complex aerospace and engineering problems that integrate the state-of-the-art in parachute designs and guidance, navigation, and control systems.
Quantum 3D is taking the battlefield and making it virtual through tactical visual computers, wireless, wearable and immersive equipment. Entire squads can train over and over on a mission and make their mistakes in cyberspace before actually mobilizing. From the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
Personal mobility was changed with balancing vehicles, however most personal transports require you to stand. Toyota now introduces the iSwing, a sit-in personal transport that is design to move among people or go on the road.
Robots playing soccer my not seem like a huge accomplishment, until you see DARWIN. Short for Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot With INtelligence, this robot can track a ball and respond to it's movement, all the while under it's own programmed autonomy.
FPGAs applications aren't all boring, some are fun and games. National Instruments demonstrates the use of FPGA-controlled pads to make an arcade game from the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
Operating an unmanned vehicle in a battlefield situation is common these days; operating one in commercial airspace is totally new. Quantum 3D has developed a software package that allows piloting large aircraft from the ground.
