Automotive technology: desire vs reality.

I've wanted to be the owner of an electric car since the very first, very expensive Tesla roadster came on the market. Cool factor for one thing and yeah, saving the planet. We have to move away from fossil fuels at some point. There is only a finite amount of them and as population increases and we need more energy to power our gadgets there will be less and less to share. The oil, gas and coal will eventually run out. Before we found new technologies to extract more of those precious resources from the ground, many were predicting we'd run out in 20 to 40 years. We've gotten a bit of a reprieve but ultimately they will run out. 

Then there is the issue of greenhouse gases from car emissions. The EPA estimates that cars contribute about 29% of the CO2 generated that contributes to global warming. 

Sure the manufacturing of an EV (electric vehicle) and batteries add some gases but far less than internal combustion engines (ICE).

Switching over to all EVs would definitely help but the infrastructure and the power grid to support the charging demands is a huge issue. Maybe in another five or ten years, the battery and charging technology will improve enough and we'll have enough charging stations that range anxiety will be a thing of the past and fade into the fog of memory. Just not yet. And a lot depends on your driving. Here in America we love our road trips. A former colleague who was an immigrant took his family on cross country road trips visiting national parks and museums during the summer when school was out. I loved and envied his posts. He went to places I have yet to visit. Mapping out a trip like that with an EV would take a lot more work.

So what is this about? The lease on our car is up later this year and we had pondered going all out electric. The wife had acquiesced and said we could get an EV as the next car. We don't make a lot of road trips. We do travel to Florida as snowbirds to hide from winter and it is currently roughly a thousand miles. Likely would turn into a four day trip with charging stops.

At this point, I've given up on the EV dream and have turned my searchlight to plug in hybrids (PHEVs). For in town trips most have a range of about 20 to 30 miles so a run to a grocery store or to visit friends would allow the car to be in the all out electric mode. Gasoline engine wouldn't engage if you were fully charged. My head space is considering that as a compromise.  The engineer part of my brain says: "Whoa! Do you know how much more complicated those vehicles are? An ICE and and electrical engine. EV's mostly don't have what we'd really call a transmission, that complex thing that converts the rotational energy of the engine through various gear combinations and converters to move that power to the wheels. I have not yet mastered all the intricacies of what that entails. At least one vehicle I looked at, has a separate transmission, others share the same transmission but you still gotta switch seamlessly from electric to ICE. Way more complex. And with complexity comes the possibility of more things going awry.  Who is trained to work on these beasts? Unless you have a really old car, the day of the Saturday mechanic is an anachronism.  I've seen estimates that there are over 1000 IC chips in a car. Some of these are full blown microcomputers, others are for specific functions, basically a one-off logic circuit. How do you work on these vehicles? 

There is so much more to talk about in this kingdom. More later.

  

 Recently watched a video on Elon Musk's Optimus Robot. It walks a bit like the older Honda, Asimo robot, a slow, stately, slightly weird motion. I'm old enough to remember hippies of the 1970s who wore earth shoe sandals. I don't know if it was the design of the shoe or the people who wore them but they had a funny, gliding walk. Optimus moves that way.

The most significant item I saw in the video was the humanoid robot folding a shirt. Back when I was teaching, a clothes folding robot was a holy grail. The ones available were big industrial machines with two arms and something like 17 degrees of freedom on each arm. The object was to have the machine autonomously fold clothes from a pile. Even folding a simple towel or washcloth took a good bit of computing power. The bot needs to have a definite visual capability, object recognition (is this the towel or pants or a shirt), enough dexterity in its manipulators to handle the material and the ability to know when it has completed the task and maybe even stack the folded items.

This was more of a software problem than hardware. 

Back to Optimus--it was a little too smooth and Musk later admitted it wasn't acting autonomously. It was mimicking a human operator. Still, I can see where that might be useful in dangerous environments. 

Boston Dynamics robots are the ones to beat. If you haven't seen the videos of their incredible machines. Take some time and search them out.

 I was still teaching at Fairmont State University when I started this blog. I retired from teaching in 2015 after doing a stint as a coordinator for the Mechatronics Program at Pierpont Community College. 

Back then, I saw robotics as the future and wanted to make that an integral part of the University curriculum. It was not to be. Even with grant funding, administration was not on board. 

Heavy sigh and move on.. .

Upon retirement, I moved to writing, sci-fi and creepy stuff, not horror per se, though some of the stories may fall into that category. 

New tech. Things have changed a lot since 2009. The Tesla Model 3 was introduced in 2017, cars have a ton of robotic features: built in nav systems, lane change warnings, back up cameas, lidar/radar obstacle warning. Average car now contains thousands of chips, though the numbers are hard to count. I would suggest that actual processors, those things that take inputs, use software or firmware to process the data and make changes, are far less, perhaps a few hundred.

And we have Google self driving cars, Tesla has that feature--sort of...

We have robotic assisted surgery.

I will be posting more soon.

Link to my writing web page:  https://rgeneturchin.com/

Wired For War

Just, last night, started reading, 'Wired for War" which is about robots being deployed in the battlefield. So many questions come to mind as some of these products have "kill" capability. They cannot really identify friend and foe at this stage. A microcontroller sends a logic True output on a certain pin. The pin drives a solenoid which pulls the trigger on a 50 cal sniper rifle. The processor can't know it may be doing a bad thing, nor can the solenoid. Do we need to start thinking about this?

Robot Controllers

Robot controllers are microprocessor, small computers, that are used to create small robots. At this point there hundreds on the market. Some are very simple and cheap while others are complex and expensive. Some are a mix of both.
The big players in the field are Lego and Vex. Both companies produce kits that are relatively inexpensive, fairly easy to program, have very good curriculums for teaching and are accessible to school systems and hobbyists. The Lego Mindstorms NXT has several processors inside but the main processor is a 32-bit ARM computer. The language that comes with the kit is called NXT-G and is a graphical language that uses icons to create the program. It is easy to teach younger kids how to use the language in a very short time. For the more sophisticated user, there are quite a few options. RobotC was developed at Carnegie Mellon University and is a nice C-like language that teaches the basics of C coding while being easy to use. Cost is pretty minimal for individuals and educational institutions. At this time, it is $30 bucks for a single license and $265 for a 12-seat classroom. I was able to use it to do a very short class with high school students and have them program the robot to make turns around a tape maze in less than an hour's time.
Here is the link to Lego.
RobotC link.

Robots in Japan

It seems to be a given that the Japanese are ahead of us in robotics. There are bright spots here though. The people at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, are doing great things with robots and trying to share their knowledge and experience with others.
Check this giant robot this giant 'bot being built in Japan. I don't think it does much but is sure is cool looking.

This will be a link where you can learn about Robots, Engineering and new technologies. There will be some tutorials, how-to's and links to other sites that have cool and neat tech things. There will be ideas that you might be able to develop to use technology to improve the world that we live in.