Using underwater robots for a better understanding of the underwater world

 

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It is where we all came from and it is vital to our future, but Earth's oceans, seas and waterways remain a mystery to us -- a final frontier. The Sunrise project is at the forefront of a revolution in communications, creating an underwater 'internet of things', that will mobilise robots to work in groups, interacting together and passing back information to us on life underwater.

The internet is omnipresent and has become a part of how we live, but now this connectivity is being extended from where we all take it for granted to where it has never been before -- underwater.

Thanks to the SUNRISE project, supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme , underwater robots will be able to work autonomously, having received instructions. For the first time they will be able to communicate to each other and send data back to computers through the Internet, regardless of swiftly changing circumstances and challenges to data transmission.

'The gaps in our knowledge of the underwater world are extensive. We know so little despite the fact that marine ecosystems are central to the health of our planet and vital to our economies,' project leader Dr Chiara Petrioli says. Identifying threats to oil and gas pipelines, monitoring the environment, protecting archeological sites and finding out more about the geology of our planet -- the ways teams of aquatic robots could help us learn more is endless, 'This list is as extensive as your imagination,' says Dr Petrioli.

Designing robots which can communicate in rapidly changing environments

Those changing environments are one of the key challenges the project faces. The robots communicate to each other using acoustic signaling, as do marine mammals. But whereas a dolphin will adapt the way it signals according to what is around it, robots need to be programmed to do so, presenting researchers with the task of developing machines capable of responding to a rapidly shifting set of variables. 'Salinity, temperature, interference in the form of waves or passing shipping, all these will change the range of effective communication,' explains Dr. Petrioli. This unpredictable environment is one of the key ways the internet of things underwater differs from our land-based use of WiFi and the internet.

The need to respond reliably to the shifting environment means multiple robots are needed so if one can't communicate temporarily, another will take over the signaling. Schools of robots will carry a greater number of sensors and cover a larger area, cooperating and communicating together. Those operating them will send messages through modems transmitting acoustic waves. The waves are modulated to send information -- but bandwidth is limited meaning transmission rates are slow. Additionally, sound waves only travel 1 500 metres a second, five orders of magnitude slower than radio communication in the air. Only a relatively limited range of tone will travel well -- high tones don't go so far.

'These challenges can only be met by bringing together a cutting-edge team with partners from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Netherlands, Turkey and United States . This is the biggest scale endeavor in this field, globally. We are putting Europe at the frontier of this type of work,' says Dr Petrioli. The international dimension means that the project's labs also include underwater zones as diverse as the Baltic and the Mediterranean, 'We get to try our prototypes in environments that present completely different challenges, making for stringent testing.'

Results are starting to come in…

Work done in summer 2014, in Porto, showed the team that their ambitions were feasible: the components communicated, the robots responded to their instructions, the scientists were thrilled. On the practical side, they've already helped to find a lost container in the port of Porto. 'The scientists are more enthusiastic than ever now we can see that we are on the right track,' says Dr Petrioli.

Now that the project has working prototypes, the next stage is to bring in new partners from different areas of interest and set up centers off the coast of the USA, in Dutch lakes, and in the Black Sea in Turkey.

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The above story is based on materials provided by European Commission, CORDIS. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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The Dawn of Mass Computing: Promotional Photos

 

Posted by Steve Hauben

Remember the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, reel-to-reel tape drives, green or amber monitors, terminals, big mainframes, big daisy-wheel printers, and more? Here is a selection of vintage promotional photos showing computing equipment of yesteryear.

 

Every Healthy Morning Habit You Should Adopt Right Now

 

 

Ever wonder why your life isn't any better than it is? It's probably because you aren't engaged in a series of time-tested healthy habits bright and early in the a.m. to get your day rarin' to go. Healthy, successful, beautiful people do certain things first thing upon waking, and so should the rest of us. Studies show!

Assuming you live to the typical life expectancy, you'll have 25,000 adult mornings — wait, that makes them sound NSFW — it seems like there is nothing but advice out there as to how to spend yours the best possible way to maximize The Ultimate Existence™. But it's safe to say that in this, as in all things, we're doing it wrong.

What you're doing right now upon waking up? Probably checking your phone. Your email. Then weather. Then social media. Something with a computer.

What you should do?

Wake up early.

It's just better in practically all regards than sleeping late. It's just the one thing these crazy successful people do every morning!

But get enough sleep.

However, no point in getting up early if you didn't get a full night's sleep.

Maybe.

Not everyone needs a full 8 hours, though — adults who sleep between 6 and 7 hours a night have a lower death rate.

Smile!

You're alive! Ugh, also awake.

Go outside.

Studies show that people exposed to even moderately bright light in the morning had lower BMIs regardless of diet, exercise, other stuff.

Drink water. 16 ounces of water.

It does these things: kickstarts metabolism, rehydrates you, flushes out toxins, plumps the brain, makes you eat less.

Drink warm water with lemon in it.

It really helps flush toxins in the a.m.

Drink warm lemon and cayenne pepper water first thing in the morning.

It super-duper stimulates detox.

Drink green tea.

Better than coffee.

Drink coffee.

But not until 9:30 or 10.

Eat before morning workout.

So you don't feel sluggish or eat too much after.

Just eat fruit.

And only fruit, on an empty stomach, to benefit optimally from the nutrients.

Eat healthy things.

It's what nutrition experts eat first thing.

Just make sure it's actually healthy.

Too many people don't get enough fiber, protein, healthy food, and amount of food in the morning.

Eat within an hour of waking.

The longer you wait, the harder it is to be satisfied later.

Go outside and look at the morning sky.

Because it's nice. (Also drink water: "Turns on the gut.")

Meditate.

Meditation teachers say you should do it "first thing in the morning" because you've just left the sleep state.

Stretch.

Sun Salutations'll do.

Flex and point your feet for 15 to 30 seconds.

To "gently activate your musculature."

Move your body.

20 minutes of cardio upon waking.

Go for a morning walk.

"It's a blessing for the whole day."

Shower.

It gets you clean, but also decreases stress and could increase fertility! Boo-ya! One assumes this means a hot shower, though cold showers are gaining in popularity (among nutjobs).

"Slather your body in lotion SLOWLY."

Not sure how you've got the time, but OK.

Dry-brush your skin.

It's gets the circulation going, among other things.

Do some journaling.

Gets your brain working.

Visualize.

Focus on your success!

Map your day.

Self-explanatory, but not with a literal map.

Eat that frog.

This bewildering phrase means do the most daunting thing on your to-do list for the day immediately.

Ask yourself "morning power questions."

Such as:

• What do I have to look forward to today?
• What's absolutely perfect about my life?
• How can I make today absolutely awesome?
• What's the best thing that could happen today?
• What am I grateful for?

Listen to music or something uplifting.

I can only assume that means that one song by Enigma.

Do all 12 of these things within ONE HOUR or else:

Say 10 morning affirmations (quick!)

Hydrate your body

Brush your teeth (and tongue)

Stretch

Meditate (different than affirmations)

Warm up your voice

Make a fresh green juice

Eat something light (air?!)

Read something stimulating

Review your goals for the day

Drink loose leaf tea

Set an intention for the day

Get dressed.

"Choose an outfit that reflects well on you as a person and doesn't disrespect your body." I hate it when my clothes disrespect me.

Don't forget your beauty routine.

You should be:

Applying antioxidant serum

Sunscreen

Misting your face with mineral water

Choosing a fragrance with citrus for stress relief

If you've dutifully completed all these things first thing in the morning, it should be around 8:30 p.m. by now. Seriously, what time do you people have to get to work?

Image via Maridav/Shutterstock.

Why hippies thought smoking banana peels could get you high

 

Every hear of (or see) someone smoking a banana peel to get high? Neither have I. However, the smoking of banana peels has a history dating to the late 1960s in the United States and Canada, with smokers allegedly receiving a hallucinogenic trip.

Where did this phenomenon start, and are there any hallucinogens tucked away in a typical banana?

Spreading the banana gospel

In the late 1960s, stories of the hallucinogens hidden in local grocery stores and fruit stands spread through North America. According to these tales, separating, boiling, baking, and drying bananas would allow a user to extract the chemical bananadine and enter into a potent psychedelic experience.

In 1967, Country Joe McDonald, lead singer of Country Joe & the Fish, found a large banana previously used as part of decoration of a parade float. The band strapped the banana to a car and drove around the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco to promote their band.

During this afternoon, the band announced from a bull horn that smoking banana peels would induce a hallucinogenic response. Country Joe & the Fish also passed out banana peel joints to audience members at concerts.

Later in 1967, the Berkeley Barb, a counterculture newspaper published a recipe for turning a batch of bananas into powerful hallucinogen, initiating the spread of the banana gospel. The Berkeley Barb did not use the term bananadine in the article, a fictional chemical later believed to be responsible for hallucinogenic effects accompanying the smoking of banana peels.

A ghastly and difficult recipe
The combination of underground word of mouth and a desire for a cheap and easy to acquire hallucinogen led to the proliferation of rumors supporting the smoking of banana peels. At least one New York area banana seller offered rebates to each customer who returned their banana peel.

Various recipes for preparing banana peels spread across the United States and Canada, with the process detailed in William Powell's The Anarchist Cookbook. Powell included the recipe in the "Drugs" section alongside procedures for purifying and using LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. The inclusion of an odd recipe for a banana peel extract next to these hallucinogens lent a sense of credibility to the practice. Over time, enthusiasts lent the fake chemical name bananadine to the extract, with bananadine annotated within the scientific name for a type of banana The Anarchist Cookbook.

Recipes for creating a hallucinogen using bananas are often comical, if only from the perspective of their difficulty level. The recipe does not make use of the yellow exterior of bananas, but the white mushy part lining the interior of the peels. Most recipes, including the one published in The Anarchist Cookbook, require fifteen to twenty pounds of bananas and several days to create a single batch of bananadine extract.

In later recipes, alcohol and the chemical use dichloromethane (a carcinogen often used to strip paint) are used in order to obtain crystals of bananadine. One could easily get a buzz by combining alcohol and dichloromethane — when those two chemicals are included in the recipe, the bananas are no longer necessary.

Government response and current recipes
The alleged hallucinogenic possibilities of prepared banana peels raised the eye of the Food and Drug Administration. Researchers at NYU determining that banana peels contain nothing out of the normal – the only high associated with smoking the fruit is a placebo effect, with the FDA concurring. Additionally, the chemical "bananadine" has not been discovered or isolated. These research findings failed to stop the bananadine craze, with counterculture enthusiasts dismissing the reports as a government constructed conspiracy.

Current variations of the recipe include notes for speeding up the process including microwaving the bananas. Annotations state this is a safe practice as bananadine is not "microwave soluble" — a type of solubility I never came across in graduate school. Another recipe touts that the addition of crushed peanut shells to the the banana extract makes it orally active, removing the need to smoke your final product.

Banana extracts are still sold and peels are smoked by those looking for an available high and gullible enough to satisfy themselves via placebo effect. Banana peel extract does have (at least) one positive use — it decreased the enlargement of prostate glands in mice according to a 2009 study.

Top image by Emillian Robert Vicol/Public Domain Photos/Flickr. Additional images from the 1989 edition of the Anarchist Cookbook and the Dodd Center. Sources linked within the article.

US NSF - Neuroengineering

 

 

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Artificial neural networks mimic brain learning

Understanding and reverse-engineering the brain's powerful circuitry have tantalized researchers for decades. Today, new tools and techniques provide unprecedented access to the nervous system, increasing our understanding of the brain and creating exciting new opportunities. Engineers investigate how the brain calculates, learns and controls the body, and tap into the nervous system's capabilities to create intelligent systems and better assistive technologies. They also study how these technologies affect our society. In the future, neurotechnologies will become a seamless part of life.

Helping People, Helping Society

Technologies can now be integrated with the human body to give people new sight with artificial retinas and improved hearing with cochlear implants. Those who are paralyzed may soon have new options for mobility with mind-controlled machines and regrown nerves. Numerical models are leading to better insight into how basic principles underlie complex behavior and injuries.

Exploring the Neuro-realm

From flexible electronic "tattoos" and advanced electrodes that tap into brain activity, to new techniques that use laser light to manipulate neural signaling, cutting-edge tools and technologies help us explore the brain. Imaging techniques have been critical in advancing our knowledge, but a number of engineering challenges remain. Technologies may even help the damaged brain rewire itself in conditions such as stroke and Parkinson's disease.

Beyond the Brain

Engineers are translating the brain's abilities into innovative technologies, creating neural networks to manage smart power grids, chips that learn like the brain, and brain-like computers capable of massively parallel calculations. Students can explore what the brain can do through games and other prototypes.

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Video: The complexities and promise of brain research

Engineers Ed Boyden, Bin He and Todd Coleman develop new tools to map, control, use and observe the brain's dynamic circuits.

Related Websites:
NSF Understanding the Brain is a place to learn about NSF's cross-foundational activities and advances in brain research, including the BRAIN Initiative.
The NSF BRAIN Initiative YouTube Channel shows exciting discoveries in neuroscience and neuroengineering and engaging researcher interviews.
BrainFacts.org brings together the basics about the brain and how it works along with brain-related news from around the web.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations presented in this material are only those of the presenter grantee/researcher, author, or agency employee; and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Rising carbon dioxide levels make forests work overtime / Science Nation

 

Rising carbon dioxide levels make forests work overtime -- Science Nation Rising carbon dioxide levels make forests work overtime You might never know it, but the seemingly quiet Harvard Forest in Massachusetts is actually hard at work. Like other forests, it's busy doing some serious global housekeeping, which is being monitored by scientists at Harvard University. "There's this enormous sucking sound, metaphorically speaking, that is happening across the New England landscape and the eastern US. It's the carbon being brought down out of the atmosphere, into our forests, which is reducing the amount that is up in the atmosphere," says David Foster, who is director of the Harvard Forest, which stretches for 3,000 acres, near Petersham, Mass., about 60 miles west of Boston. With support from NSF, Foster and other researchers here study forest ecology. That research includes determining how the forest responds to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Credit: National Science Foundation

 

Rising carbon dioxide levels make forests work overtime -- Science Nation

Rising carbon dioxide levels make forests work overtime
You might never know it, but the seemingly quiet Harvard Forest in Massachusetts is actually hard at work. Like other forests, it's busy doing some serious global housekeeping, which is being monitored by scientists at Harvard University. "There's this enormous sucking sound, metaphorically speaking, that is happening across the New England landscape and the eastern US. It's the carbon being brought down out of the atmosphere, into our forests, which is reducing the amount that is up in the atmosphere," says David Foster, who is director of the Harvard Forest, which stretches for 3,000 acres, near Petersham, Mass., about 60 miles west of Boston. With support from NSF, Foster and other researchers here study forest ecology. That research includes determining how the forest responds to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Credit: National Science Foundation

Toward optical chips: Promising light source for optoelectronic chips can be tuned to different frequencies

 

Of the three chief components of optical circuits -- light emitters, modulators, and detectors -- emitters are the toughest to build. One promising light source for optical chips is molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), which has excellent optical properties when deposited as a single, atom-thick layer. Other experimental on-chip light emitters have more-complex three-dimensional geometries and use rarer materials, which would make them more difficult and costly to manufacture.

In the next issue of the journal Nano Letters, researchers from MIT's departments of Physics and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science will describe a new technique for building MoS₂ light emitters tuned to different frequencies, an essential requirement for optoelectronic chips. Since thin films of material can also be patterned onto sheets of plastic, the same work could point toward thin, flexible, bright, color displays.

The researchers also provide a theoretical characterization of the physical phenomena that explain the emitters' tunability, which could aid in the search for even better candidate materials. Molybdenum is one of several elements, clustered together on the periodic table, known as transition metals. "There's a whole family of transition metals," says Institute Professor Emeritus Mildred Dresselhaus, the corresponding author on the new paper. "If you find it in one, then it gives you some incentive to look at it in the whole family."

Joining Dresselhaus on the paper are joint first authors Shengxi Huang, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Xi Ling, a postdoc in the Research Laboratory of Electronics; associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science Jing Kong; and Liangbo Liang, Humberto Terrones, and Vincent Meunier of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Monolayer -- with a twist

Most optical communications systems -- such as the fiber-optic networks that provide many people with Internet and TV service -- maximize bandwidth by encoding different data at different optical frequencies. So tunability is crucial to realizing the full potential of optoelectronic chips.

The MIT researchers tuned their emitters by depositing two layers of MoS₂ on a silicon substrate. The top layers were rotated relative to the lower layers, and the degree of rotation determined the wavelength of the emitted light.

Ordinarily, MoS₂ is a good light emitter only in monolayers, or atom-thick sheets. As Huang explains, that's because the two-dimensional structure of the sheet confines the electrons orbiting the MoS₂ molecules to a limited number of energy states.

MoS₂, like all light-emitting semiconductors, is what's called a direct-band-gap material. When energy is added to the material, either by a laser "pump" or as an electrical current, it kicks some of the electrons orbiting the molecules into higher energy states. When the electrons fall back into their initial state, they emit their excess energy as light.

In a monolayer of MoS₂, the excited electrons can't escape the plane defined by the material's crystal lattice: Because of the crystal's geometry, the only energy states available to them to leap into cross the light-emitting threshold. But in multilayer MoS₂, the adjacent layers offer lower-energy states, below the threshold, and an excited electron will always seek the lowest energy it can find.

Mind the gap

So while the researchers knew that rotating the layers of MoS₂ should alter the wavelength of the emitted light, they were by no means certain that the light would be intense enough for use in optoelectronics. As it turns out, however, the rotation of the layers relative to each other alters the crystal geometry enough to preserve the band gap. The emitted light is not quite as intense as that produced by a monolayer of MoS₂, but it's certainly intense enough for practical use -- and significantly more intense than that produced by most rival technologies.

The researchers were able to precisely characterize the relationship between the geometries of the rotated layers and the wavelength and intensity of the light emitted. "For different twisted angles, the actual separation between the two layers is different, so the coupling between the two layers is different," Huang explains. "This interferes with the electron densities in the bilayer system, which gives you a different photoluminescence." That theoretical characterization should make it much easier to predict whether other transition-metal compounds will display similar light emission.

"This thing is something really new," says Fengnian Xia, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Yale University. "It gives you a new model for tuning."

"I expected that this kind of angle adjustment would work, but I didn't expect that the effect would be so huge," Xia adds. "They get quite significant tuning. That's a little bit surprising."

Xia believes that compounds made from other transition metals, such as tungsten disulfide or tungsten diselenide, could ultimately prove more practical than MoS₂. But he agrees that the MIT and RPI researchers' theoretical framework could help guide future work. "They use density-functional theory," he says. "That's a kind of general theory that can be applied to other materials also."

Soft robotics 'toolkit' features everything a robot-maker needs

 

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Do-it-yourself soft robotics.

A new resource unveiled today by researchers from several Harvard University labs in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin provides both experienced and aspiring researchers with the intellectual raw materials needed to design, build, and operate robots made from soft, flexible materials.

With the advent of low-cost 3D printing, laser cutters, and other advances in manufacturing technology, soft robotics is emerging as an increasingly important field. Using principles drawn from conventional rigid robot design, but working with pliable materials, engineers are pioneering the use of soft robotics for assisting in a wide variety of tasks such as physical therapy, minimally invasive surgery, and search-and-rescue operations in dangerous environments.

The Soft Robotics Toolkit is an online treasure trove of downloadable, open-source plans, how-to videos, and case studies to assist users in the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. It will provide researchers with a level of detail not typically found in academic research papers, including 3D models, bills of materials, raw experimental data, multimedia step-by-step tutorials, and case studies of various soft robot designs.

"The goal of the toolkit is to advance the field of soft robotics by allowing designers and researchers to build upon each other's work," says Conor Walsh, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

By creating a common resource for sharing design approaches, prototyping and fabrication techniques, and technical knowledge, the toolkit's developers hope to stimulate the creation of new kinds of soft devices, tools, and methods.

According to Walsh, who teaches a popular course in medical device design at SEAS and is founder of the Harvard Biodesign Lab, soft robotics is especially well suited to shared design tools because many of the required components, such as regulators, valves, and microcontrollers, are largely interchangeable between systems.

Dónal Holland, a visiting lecturer in engineering sciences at SEAS and graduate student at Trinity College Dublin, is one of the lead developers of the toolkit and is especially interested in the toolkit's potential as an educational resource.

"One thing we've seen in design courses is that students greatly benefit from access to more experienced peers -- say, postdocs in a research lab -- who can guide them through their work," Holland says. "But scaling that up is difficult; you quickly run out of time and people. The toolkit is designed to capture the expertise and make it easily accessible to students."

Just as open-source software has spurred far-flung innovation in computing, "open design" hardware platforms -- coupled with advances in computer-aided engineering and more accessible prototyping capabilities -- have the potential to foster remote collaboration on common mechanical engineering projects, unleashing crowdsourced creativity in robotics and other fields.

"Open design can have as disruptive an influence on technology development in this century as open source did in the last," says Gareth J. Bennett, assistant professor of mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin and a coauthor of a paper in Soft Robotics that describes the toolkit development. Additional coauthors are Evelyn J. Park '13, a SEAS research fellow in materials science and engineering, and Panagiotis Polygerinos, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard Biodesign Lab at SEAS and the Wyss Institute.

Much of the material included in the toolkit sprang from the labs of Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, and chemist George M. Whitesides, Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, two researchers whose work has helped establish Harvard as a leader in soft robotics. Wood and Whitesides are also core faculty members of the Wyss Institute.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EYFlJhga24

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The above story is based on materials provided by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

More physical education in schools leads to better grades, study suggests

 

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More physical education in schools leads to better motor skills and it can also sharpen students' learning ability. This is shown by Assistant Professor Ingegerd Ericsson at Malmö University in a unique study where she followed more than two hundred schoolchildren for nine years in Malmö in southern Sweden. The differences are especially clear among boys.

 

"The differences are significant between children who underwent expanded teaching in physical education and children who had regular instruction," says Ingegerd Ericsson.

Ingegerd Ericsson monitored three cohorts of children in grades 1-3 at Ängslätt School and Sundsbro School in Bunkeflostrand in Malmö. She compared the development of children in an intervention group that received scheduled physical education five days a week, plus extra motor training, with the development of a control group. For nine years Ingegerd Ericsson registered motor-skills observations, such as balance and coordination, in a total of 220 students. She also compared their results on diagnostic tests in grade 2 and their final grades in grade 9.

Now she has compiled the report, which shows that:

• 96 percent of the intervention group compared to 89 percent in the control group achieved the goals of compulsory school and were eligible to go on to upper-secondary school. It is primarily the boys' achievements -- with 96 percent vs. 83 percent -- that lies behind this outcome. Moreover, the boys in the intervention group had significantly higher grades in Swedish, English, Mathematics, and PE and health than the boys in the control group.

• In grade 9, 93 percent of the students in the intervention group evinced good motor skills compared to 53 percent in the control group.

The study is unique. There are no previous findings that statistically show the effects and impact of an intervention over so many years. The reliability of the findings is further enhanced by the homogenity in the groups under investigation: the children are the same age, go to the same school, and have parents with comparable education, income, and interest in physical activity.

"Physical education has been pared down from three lessons a week to one or two. We scientifically confirm here that daily timetabled physical education and adapted motor skills training not only improves motor skills but also school achievement. With more physical education and health considerably more students attain passing grades," says Ingegerd Ericsson.

Professor Magnus Karlsson at the Orthopedic Clinic at the Scania University Hospital is co-author of the study. Magnus Karlsson has previously shown that daily physical education in Bunkeflostrand schools has an excellent effect on the development of the skeleton and muscles, and that children who were most physically active had the least tendency to develop overweight and risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

 

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Expertanswer. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Shrink-wrapping spacesuits: Spacesuits of the future may resemble a streamlined second skin

 

September 19, 2014

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft's power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body.

The MIT BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit that offers improved mobility and reduced mass compared to modern gas-pressurized spacesuits.

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft's power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body.

The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form.

Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active, "second-skin" spacesuit: Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) -- a type of material that "remembers" an engineered shape and, when bent or deformed, can spring back to this shape when heated.

The team incorporated the coils in a tourniquet-like cuff, and applied a current to generate heat. At a certain trigger temperature, the coils contract to their "remembered" form, such as a fully coiled spring, tightening the cuff in the process. In subsequent tests, the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.

"With conventional spacesuits, you're essentially in a balloon of gas that's providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," says Newman, who has worked for the past decade to design a form-fitting, flexible spacesuit of the future. "We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure -- applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."

The coil design was conceived by Bradley Holschuh, a postdoc in Newman's lab. Holschuh and Newman, along with graduate student Edward Obropta, detail the design in the journal IEEE/ASME: Transactions on Mechatronics.

How to train a spacesuit

While skintight spacesuits have been proposed in the past, there's been one persistent design hurdle: how to squeeze in and out of a pressurized suit that's engineered to be extremely tight. That's where shape-memory alloys may provide a solution. Such materials only contract when heated, and can easily be stretched back to a looser shape when cool.

To find an active material that would be most suitable for use in space, Holschuh considered 14 types of shape-changing materials -- ranging from dielectric elastomers to shape-memory polymers -- before settling on nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys. When trained as tightly packed, small-diameter springs, this material contracts when heated to produce a significant amount of force, given its slight mass -- ideal for use in a lightweight compression garment.

The material is commonly produced in reels of very thin, straight fiber. To transform the fiber into coils, Holschuh borrowed a technique from another MIT group that previously used coiled nickel-titanium to engineer a heat-activated robotic worm.

Shape-memory alloys like nickel-titanium can essentially be "trained" to return to an original shape in response to a certain temperature. To train the material, Holschuh first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight, millimeter-diameter coils then heated the coils to 450 degrees Celsius to set them into an original, or "trained" shape. At room temperature, the coils may be stretched or bent, much like a paper clip. However, at a certain "trigger" temperature (in this case, as low as 60 C), the fiber will begin to spring back to its trained, tightly coiled state.

The researchers rigged an array of coils to an elastic cuff, attaching each coil to a small thread linked to the cuff. They then attached leads to the coils' opposite ends and applied a voltage, generating heat. Between 60 and 160 C, the coils contracted, pulling the attached threads, and tightening the cuff.

"These are basically self-closing buckles," Holschuh says. "Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you, and pull closed."

Keeping it tight

The group's next challenge is finding a way to keep the suit tight. To do this, Holschuh says there are only two options: either maintaining a constant, toasty temperature, or incorporating a locking mechanism to keep the coils from loosening. The first option would overheat an astronaut and require heavy battery packs -- a design that would significantly impede mobility, and is likely infeasible given the limited power resources available to astronauts in space. Holschuh and Newman are currently exploring the second option, looking into potential mechanisms to lock or clip the coils in place.

As for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit, Holschuh is contemplating several designs. For instance, an array of coils may be incorporated into the center of a suit, with each coil attached to a thread that radiates to the suit's extremities. As the coils activate, they could pull on the attached threads -- much like the strings of a puppet -- to tighten and pressurize the suit. Or, smaller arrays of coils could be placed in strategic locations within a spacesuit to produce localized tension and pressure, depending on where they are needed to maintain full body compression.

While the researchers are concentrating mostly on applications in space, Holschuh says the group's designs and active materials may be used for other purposes, such as in athletic wear or military uniforms.

"You could use this as a tourniquet system if someone is bleeding out on the battlefield," Holschuh says. "If your suit happens to have sensors, it could tourniquet you in the event of injury without you even having to think about it."

"An integrated suit is exciting to think about to enhance human performance," Newman adds. "We're trying to keep our astronauts alive, safe, and mobile, but these designs are not just for use in space."

This research was funded by NASA and the MIT Portugal Program.

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Jennifer Chu. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.