Technology Trends

You probably remember the story which surfaced in May 2005 about monkeys using robotic arms as their own (check here or there to refresh your memory). Now, according to the ANBA press agency, Miguel Nicolelis, the professor of neurology at Duke University who was behind the experiments with the monkeys, wants to go further. He plans to install chips in humans’ brains in order to control prosthetic arms. Of course, there is still some work to do with animals before this kind of surgery can be practiced on humans. But the first surgery in the world to implant a neuro-prosthesis inside a human being is expected to be performed in a Brazilian hospital by 2008.

Here is the introduction of the ANBA report.

The Syrian-Lebanese Hospital, in the southeastern Brazilian city of São Paulo, is going to perform the first surgery in the world for implantation of robotic arms into a human being, to be moved by brain signals. The agreement for realization of the surgery was singed last month with the Santos Dumont Association for Support to Research. The surgery is scheduled to take place in three years.

According to the hospital’s corporate superintendent, Mauricio Ceschin, the technique consists on implanting a microchip into the human brain to translate the nerve pulses into electric pulses, making it possible for the patient to move robotic prosthetics.

Below is a diagram describing how a patient’s brain can control the prosthetics (Credit: Miguel Nicolelis’s Laboratory at Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering).

Of course, this will take time before this technique can be applied to a human.

According to Ceschin, up to the execution of the first surgery for implantation of robotic arms moved by brain signals, the Education and Teaching Institute of the Syrian-Lebanese hospital will have a laboratory turned to research in neuroscience, where new tests will take place before the first surgery.

The superintendent also stated that a team of hospital neurosurgeons is getting ready to apply the new technique. “It will still take between two and three years for tests to be concluded on animals. The doctors must feel secure,” he said.

For slightly more information, you also can read a former news release from the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital.

As you can guess, there is no scientific paper available on this subject. But if you want to read the latest research paper about this brain-machine interface, at least for monkeys, The Journal of Neuroscience has published “Cortical Ensemble Adaptation to Represent Velocity of an Artificial Actuator Controlled by a Brain-Machine Interface” (May 11, 2005, Vol. 25, Num. 19, Pages 4681-4693). Here is a link to the abstract.

Monkeys can learn to directly control the movements of an artificial actuator by using a brain-machine interface (BMI) driven by the activity of a sample of cortical neurons. Eventually, they can do so without moving their limbs. Neuronal adaptations underlying the transition from control of the limb to control of the actuator are poorly understood. Here, we show that rapid modifications in neuronal representation of velocity of the hand and actuator occur in multiple cortical areas during the operation of a BMI. Initially, monkeys controlled the actuator by moving a hand-held pole.

As the monkeys started using their cortical activity to control the actuator, the activity of individual neurons and neuronal populations became less representative of the animal’s hand movements while representing the movements of the actuator. As a result of this adaptation, the animals could eventually stop moving their hands yet continue to control the actuator. These results show that, during BMI control, cortical ensembles represent behaviorally significant motor parameters, even if these are not associated with movements of the animal’s own limb.

Sources: Marina Sarruf, ANBA (Brazil Arab News Agency), translated by Mark Ament, July 8, 2005; and various web sites

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Software Defined Radio (SDR) is an emerging wireless technology which allows an electronic device equipped with a radio chip to be remotely reconfigurable to perform new functions via software downloads. With SDR, instead of having an expensive multifunction device, your cheap cellphone would automatically morph into a camera or an MP3 player. NASA wants to use this technology to reconfigure its satellites on the fly to perform new tasks. And its engineers have already built an SDR testbed allowing the quick development of new navigation algorithms. These new communication scheme could be used within 3 to 5 years in SDR-enabled space missions. Read more…

For example, imagine the benefits for a mission such as NASA’s A-Train: below is an illustration showing the satellites of NASA’s A-Train formation.

A group of satellites could efficiently communicate directly with SDR, rather than using ground stations and uplinks. The A-train, shown above, is a constellation of 5 satellites that will collect complimentary data, and is an example of a network that would benefit from SDR technology. (Credit: Alex McClung, NASA).

[For more information about this 'train' of satellites and details about individual ones, you can read a previous story, "'Take the A-Train', from NASA."]

Please read the NASA’s article if you want to know more about the technology and let’s focus here about NASA’s plans.

Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are so enthusiastic about SDR that they have recently built an SDR test-bed — providing the necessary foundation for investigating SDR technologies and techniques. This test-bed allows for the rapid, low-cost development of communication and navigation algorithms that will be used in upcoming technology experiments, and eventually, in missions.

engineers could reconfigure future SDR-enabled NASA missions at will, allowing formerly independent satellites to be linked and give a more complete picture of a unique scientific event. In other applications, two satellites could interact and share information, or an older satellite could be updated with a new function and mission, extending its life and usefulness.

And when will this happen? Surprisingly, in a very near future.

“Many of our current satellites were developed with a fixed set of data rates and modulations, so they can only talk to the ground or the space network,” Jason Soloff, an SDR technologist. “SDR would allow us to switch between a ground network and a space network with simple uploads, making the satellite or instrument much more flexible.”

“The first true SDR components should make spaceflights within the next 3 to 5 years,” said Soloff — around the same time experts believe that everyday devices could start becoming SDR-enabled.

For more information about Software Defined Radio, you can visit these pages about SDR for NASA and a SDR definition.

Sources: Katie Lorentz, NASA’s Langley Research Center, June 24, 2005; and various web sites

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According to Reuters, a Canadian company, Zarlink Semiconductor, has developed a wireless chip for medical implants to be used for in-body communication systems. With such a chip, a pacemaker could wirelessly be monitored by a doctor or an hospital several miles away. The company thinks there are many other applications for the chip, such as in implanted blood glucose meters, which control insulin for diabetics. This is possible because the chip is sleeping most of the time, waiting for wake-up calls from a base station located far away. This allows the chip to use only 20% of the power needed by previous systems while sending much more data when awake. Read more…

Here are the opening paragraphs from the Reuters article.

Zarlink Semiconductor Inc. unveiled a ground-breaking chip for medical devices on Tuesday that it says could let doctors monitor a patient’s pacemaker or even control a diabetic’s insulin dosage from miles away using wireless technology.

The Ottawa-based company said it has the world’s first chip designed specifically for in-body communication systems, which wirelessly links implanted devices via base stations to a doctor or hospital.

“Baby boomers are getting older and they require pacemakers and defibrillators and various other devices,” said Steve Swift, general manager of Zarlink’s ultra low-power communications unit.

This diagram shows how the Zarlink’s in-body communications system works. It comes from “Wireless Revolution” (PDF format, 2 pages, 671 KB), in which Henry Higgins of Zarlink Semiconductor discusses the latest in radio frequency technology and in-body communications systems.

Some implants will require an almost constant two-way link, while others only require occasional communication initiated by a base station. Data can be stored in memory and transmitted in bursts on request from the base station. This means the implant can be put into sleep mode between data transmissions to save battery power and allow a longer operating time, with the base station sending a “wake-up” signal to the implant before data is transmitted.

Reuters adds that because the chip is sleeping almost all the time, it consumes only 20% of the power of rival products, while transmitting ten times more data to a distance up to two meters.

For more information about these in-body communications systems, you also should read “The Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Medical Device Revolution” published by Medical Electronics Manufacturing in April 2005. Here is the conclusion of this well-documented article written by Peter Bradley, who is a project engineer and system architect with Zarlink Semiconductor’s ultra-low-power communications division.

The design considerations for implantable radio-frequency (RF) communication systems require careful consideration of transceiver design, power consumption, and data integrity. Moreover, when designing an implantable RF communication system, it is essential to consider the issues related to remote management of these devices via the MICS band. The transceiver IC discussed in this article uses an architecture that provides the basic concepts of achieving low power and high data integrity.

These concepts will lead the way to high-performance, low-power RF communication. Such transceiver technology will facilitate clinically significant improvements in healthcare for the development of next generation of medical implants.

Now, a question remains. Who will license this promising new technology?

Sources: Susan Taylor, Reuters, May 31, 2005; and various websites

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Using a thin film of silver as the lens and ultraviolet (UV) light, scientists at UC Berkeley have built a superlens able to record images with a resolution of 60 nanometers and suitable for integration in today’s optical microscopes which have only a resolution of down to 400 nanometers. Scanning electron and atomic force microscopes can capture detail down to a few nanometers, but they need minutes to take an image, while this new superlens can take snapshots in a fraction of a second. In the short term, this superlens will lead to new nanoscale biomedical imaging devices. But it also can lead to other advances in nanoengineering such as higher density electronic circuitry or faster fiber optic communications systems. Read more…

Let’s start with a brief description of this achievement.

Using a thin film of silver as the lens and ultraviolet (UV) light, the researchers recorded the images of an array of nanowires and the word “NANO” onto an organic polymer at a resolution of about 60 nanometers. In comparison, current optical microscopes can only make out details down to one-tenth the diameter of a red blood cell, or about 400 nanometers.

At top (A) is the higher resolution image of the word NANO created with a silver superlens. Below that (B) is an image created during a control experiment in which the superlens is replaced by spacer layer. The averaged line width is 60 nanometers in image A with the superlens, and 321 nanometer in image B without the superlens. The scale bar in both images is 2 micrometers. (Image by Cheng Sun, UC Berkeley; legend from UC Berkeley).

Here is a link to a larger version (1,500 x 836 pixels, 214 KB).

[And here are the] detailed procedures of obtaining averaged line cross-section profiles (Color Scale 0-50nm): (A) AFM topography of NANO pattern of the recorded image; (B) Zoom-in AFM image of the letter “A”; (C) A further zoomed-in scan for sufficient digitization of individual lines (in this case each pixel measures 3.9nm) (Credit: UC Berkeley).

Here is what one of the scientists says about this superlens.

“The field of optics is involved in much of today’s technology, including imaging and photolithography, which is used to make semiconductors and integrated circuits,” said Xiang Zhang, UC Berkeley associate professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the study. “Our work has a far reaching impact on the development of detailed biomedical imaging, higher density electronic circuitry and ever-faster fiber optic communications.”

The biggest advantage of optical microscopes equipped with this new superlens over scanning electron and atomic force microscopes is the speed at which it can take images.

“Optical microscopes can capture an entire frame with a single snapshot in a fraction of a second,” said Nicholas Fang, [one of Zhang's former Ph.D. students,] who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“That opens up nanoscale imaging to living materials, which can help biologists better understand cell structure and function in real time, and ultimately help in the development of new drugs to treat human diseases.”

Besides using this superlens for optical imaging or high-density optoelectronics, these researchers have also long term visions — or dreams.

In the long run, this line of research could lead to even higher resolution imaging for distant objects, the researchers said. This includes more detailed views of other planets as well as of human movement through surveillance satellites.

Now, let’s go down to Earth.

The research work has been published by Science Magazine on April 22, 2005 under the title “Sub-Diffraction-Limited Optical Imaging with a Silver Superlens” (Vol. 308, Issue 5721, Pages 534-537). Here is a link (free registration required) to the abstract which is reproduced below for your convenience.

Recent theory has predicted a superlens that is capable of producing sub–diffraction-limited images. This superlens would allow the recovery of evanescent waves in an image via the excitation of surface plasmons. Using silver as a natural optical superlens, we demonstrated sub–diffraction-limited imaging with 60-nanometer half-pitch resolution, or one-sixth of the illumination wavelength. By proper design of the working wavelength and the thickness of silver that allows access to a broad spectrum of subwavelength features, we also showed that arbitrary nanostructures can be imaged with good fidelity. The optical superlens promises exciting avenues to nanoscale optical imaging and ultrasmall optoelectronic devices.

Finally, please note that the second image on this page has been extracted from the supporting online material for the article mentioned above (PDF format, 12 pages, 564 KB).

Sources: Sarah Yang, University of California at Berkeley news release, April 21, 2005; Science, Vol. 308, Issue 5721, Pages 534-537, April 22, 2005; and various websites

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Engineers at Purdue University have replaced the conventional evaporators used in our refrigerators, which can be one meter long over a large area, by “micro-channel heat sinks” which are just over a square inch. According to this news release, their devices can be attached to household fridges, but also to electronic components in military lasers, microwave radar and weapons systems. In fact, as future combat vehicles are expected to generate waste heat densities approaching 1,000 watts per square centimeter, new technologies like this one are necessary to dissipate these heat loads. And the same is true with the chips in your computers, even if the recent battle between AMD and Intel shows that chipmakers are increasingly paying attention to the heat generated by their microprocessors. So who will be the first to benefit from this new cooling technology, the military, your fridge or your computer? Read more…

First, here is a description of the problem.

Electronics for new weapons systems, as well as chips in future computers, will generate five to 10 times more heat than chips in conventional electronic products, requiring better cooling systems. Computers and other electronic equipment are typically cooled with bulky assemblies that use metal fins to dissipate heat and fans to circulate the hot air away from components. But electronic components in new weapons systems, such as advanced lasers and chips in future computers, will generate too much heat to be cooled with conventional systems that use fans, said Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the research.

So how did they solve this problem?

One possible solution is a “two-phase” cooling system – the same basic technology used in a conventional refrigerator — in which a liquid coolant absorbs heat, turns into a vapor and is then pressurized by a compressor and condensed back into a liquid to begin the cycle over again.

In work funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Mudawar’s team has successfully incorporated the micro-channel heat sink into an ordinary refrigerator. The device, which was attached to a heating element that simulates a hot electronic component, has been tested with a refrigerant called R134a, which is used in household air conditioners and refrigerators.

Now, let’s go to some details about the technology which was developed at the Boiling and Two-Phase Flow Laboratory at Purdue University.

The micro-channel heat sink is a copper plate containing numerous grooves 231 microns wide — or about three times as wide as a human hair — and 713 microns deep. The tubes in conventional air conditioner evaporators have diameters measured in millimeters or centimeters, depending on the size of the unit, meaning the conventional tubes are several times larger than the micro-channels.

“This is really pushing the envelope in how small you can go with these channels and still have a working device,” Mudawar said. “But there is another issue. In conventional systems, the evaporator is actually a very long tube that is wound around many times. So the tube might be a meter in length or more. In the micro-channel heat sink, we are doing everything in 1 inch square.”

The news release doesn’t give any details about when the technology will be available, but it looks pretty sure that the military forces will use it before you.

For more information, the research work has been published in two parts by the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer in its February 2005 issue (Volume 48, Issue 5, Pages 928-940 and 941-955) under the common title “Two-phase flow in high-heat-flux micro-channel heat sink for refrigeration cooling applications.”

Here are the links to the abstracts of the two parts of the paper, which are respectively focused on pressure drop characteristics and heat transfer characteristics.

If you don’t find the journal in your library, you can purchase the individual articles for $30 each. And that’s almost a bargain. The annual subscription fee for this journal is US$5,360!

Sources: Purdue University news release, April 13, 2005; and various websites

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Today, we’re using basically two ways to move data in our computers. Transistors carry small amounts of data and are extremely small, while fiber optic cables can carry huge amounts of data, but are much bigger in size. Now, imagine a single technology combining the advantages of photonics and electronics. This Stanford University report says a new technology can do it: plasnomics. (For more about plasmons, read this Wikipedia article.) Theoretically, it is possible to design plasnomic components with the same materials used today by chipmakers, but with frequencies 100,000 times greater than the ones of current microprocessors. There is still a challenge to solve before getting plasnomic chips. Plasmons can only travel a few millimeters before dying while today’s chips are typically about a centimeter across. Read more…

Let’s start with some technical explanations.

Surface plasmons are density waves of electrons — picture bunches of electrons passing a point regularly — along the surface of a metal. Plasmons have the same frequencies and electromagnetic fields as light, but their sub-wavelength size means they take up less space. Plasmonics, then, is the technology of transmitting these light-like waves along nanoscale wires.

“With every wave you can in principle carry information,” says Mark Brongersma, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. [...] “Plasmon waves are interesting because they are at optical frequencies. The higher the frequency of the wave, the more information you can transport.” Optical frequencies are about 100,000 times greater than the frequency of today’s electronic microprocessors.

But let’s get back to the technology.

Plasmons are generated when, under the right conditions, light strikes a metal. The electric field of the light jiggles the electrons in the metal to the light’s frequency, setting off density waves of electrons. The process is analogous to how the vibrations of the larynx jiggle molecules in the air into density waves experienced as sound.

Plasmon waves behave on metals much like light waves behave in glass, meaning that plasmonic engineers can employ all the same ingenious tricks — such as multiplexing, or sending multiple waves — that photonic engineers use to cram more data down a cable.

This sounds good, but is it possible to use this technology today?

Because plasmonic components can be crafted from the same materials chipmakers use today, Stanford engineers are hopeful they can make all the devices needed to route light around a processor or other kind of chip. These would include plasmon sources, detectors and wires, which the lab already has made, as well as splitters and even transistors.

While an all-plasmonic chip might be feasible someday, Brongersma expects that in the near term, plasmonic wires will act as high-traffic freeways on chips with otherwise conventional electronics.

And even Brongersma recognizes that more research needs to be done before getting plasnomic chips.

The potential of plasmonics right now is mainly limited by the fact that plasmons typically can travel only several millimeters before they peter out. Chips, meanwhile, are typically about a centimeter across, so plasmons can’t yet go the whole distance.

The distance a plasmon can travel before dying out is a function of several aspects of the metal. But for optimal transfer through a wire of any metal, the surface of contact with surrounding materials must be as smooth as possible and the metal should not have impurities.

For more information, you can check the following resources.

• “Plasmonic computer chips move closer,” an article published by New Scientist on March 17, 2005
  
  
• The Brongersma Group website and its current research projects
  
  
• The abstract of a presentation given on May 21, 2005 at the March 2005 Meeting of the American Physical Society, “Sub-wavelength confinement and the diffraction limit for surface plasmon waveguides”
  

Sources: David Orenstein, Stanford University Report, March 16, 2005; and various websites

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A few months back, in “Will Azul Reign on the Server Market?,” I wrote about Azul Systems and its new approach to computing named ‘network-attach processing,’ similar to the NAS approach for data storage. Now Shahin Khan, VP and CMO at the company, has written a rather provocative article for The Register, “Get ready to buy chips by the kilo.” He argues that we soon should be prepared to order CPUs by the thousands and be ready for some new language. “Do we say: 2.5 kilo CPUs? Do we call this kilo core, or mega core processing? And since it goes way past current multi-core technology, do we call it poly-core technology?” Jon Udell, from InfoWorld, also commented Khan’s views in “VM-enabled polycore computing.” Read more…

Basically, Shahin Khan says that we are now used to very large numbers when we talk about memory or disk space for servers, but that the vast majority of us is still counting processors using single digits.

But when it comes to CPUs, we still mostly dabble in single digits. An 8-way server feels like a pretty large system. The 32-way, 64-way, and 200-way systems feel just huge. Even when we scale out, anything beyond a couple of hundred CPUs begins to challenge our ability to manage and operate the systems. It’s no accident that they call these systems a “complex.”

A major shift is coming. Over the next few years, your ordinary applications will be able to tap into systems with, say, 7,000 CPUs, 50 tera bytes of memory, and 20 peta bytes of storage. In 2005, Azul Systems will ship compute pools with as many as 1,200 CPUs per a single standard rack (1.2 kilo cores! — I like the sound of that!)

Of course, these remarks are more valid for the commercial data centers. In the scientific and technical segments of computing, there are already many existing superclusters using thousands of processors.

Khan explains how this trend towards large numbers of processors will influence application design and offer new possibilities for managing a data center.

Deployment and administration of applications would also change dramatically. Do you ever worry about how much storage an individual user might need? Probably not. [...] Do you ever worry about the utilization level of an individual byte of memory? I hope not. You have so many bytes that you measure utilization at the aggregate level.

Logically, he doesn’t forget to mention his company.

If you had hundreds of CPUs in a miniaturized “big-iron” system that were available to your applications, you could adopt the same strategy for applications. No need to plan capacity for each individual application. Let all of your users share a huge compute pool and plan capacity across many applications. In the process, you also fundamentally change the economics of computing. Well, that’s exactly what Azul Systems is pioneering.

This is a whole new way of looking at the CPU, and therefore, the function of “compute.” This approach is gaining mainstream acceptance. The industry has reached 2 or 4 CPUs on a chip for large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems; and for systems limited to one chip, tens of functional units in one CPU. Some companies have announced future chips with as many as 8 CPUs on a single chip. With 24 CPUs on a chip that can be used in an SMP system, Azul has already set the bar much higher. And that’s just the beginning!

And before wishing us the best for 2005, Khan imagines a possible title for a 2005 press release.

Poly-core Technology to Enable Kilo Core Processing. Happy Apps Hail Freedom!!

Like in September 2004, I still don’t know if Azul Systems will be successful. But at least, I admire them for their innovative approach to computing with the additional risk of using their own custom chips.

Sources: Shahin Khan, VP and CMO at Azul Systems, for The Register, January 11, 2005; and various websites

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In this must-read article, MIS, from Australia, asserts than in 10 to 15 years, we’ll be unable to use today’s technologies to build electronic devices always smaller and more powerful. Instead, three disruptive technologies will converge and deeply change our lives: nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology. The author explains how this will influence molecular computing or quantum information processing. She also describes future advances in robotics, including nanobots. And the transportation industry will welcome the arrival of skycars, which are under development today. But will we travel anymore when holographic videoconferencing tools will be available? Please take a moment to check this fascinating article or read more below…

If nanobots and skycars sound more like sci-fi than a sane view of the future, then you may need to reprogram your mindset. Helene Zampetakis reports on the technology that will shape our lives in the decades to come.

A trio of disruptive technologies will converge over the next five to 15 years to overtake our incumbent systems and create new competencies that will profoundly change the way we organise our lives and the way we do business.

The driving principles behind modern technology are running out of steam: it is becoming prohibitively costly to continue to shrink technology, while Moore’s Law, which postulates the doubling of computer power every 18 months, is reaching its physical limits under current processes.

Luckily, help is coming with the convergence of three technologies.

But research that is underway today is expected to usher in a new technological era. Dubbed ‘embedded connectivity’ by Bob Hayward, vice-president and research fellow at Gartner, it will draw strength from nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology.

The embedded world of the future will harness the power of billions of microprocessors on a single device, wirelessly connected to others, that can read the environment and react accordingly. Scientists portray a future in which we attach these devices to our bodies to communicate, set them loose on our streets to do menial tasks, and embed them in the commonplace objects of our lives to address our daily requirements.

The underlying foundation for this new era of embedded connectivity is nanotechnology, which is based on the manipulation of molecules less than 100 nanometres in size. “Nanotechnology means that rather than taking a chunk of silicon and carving it down to size, we build from the bottom up by assembling single molecules and atoms,” says Dr Terry Turney, director of CSIRO’s nanotechnology centre.

Zampetakis then looks at electronic circuitry and how it will be transformed by molecular self-assembly technology. She also describes future quantum information processing and wireless networks of sensors.

Now, let’s look at what she says about robotics.

It will be at least 20 years before we see microscopic ‘nanobots’, the much-hyped molecular manufacturing systems that have generated sci-fi like fears of mutating swarms running amok. But miniature robots are in fact under serious investigation.

In 2000, for example, MIT’s Bioinstrumentation Laboratory unveiled the Nanowalker, a sugar-cube sized prototype of the first autonomous nanorobot. The Nanowalker is able to move with great precision at a speed of about 4,000 steps a second and communicate wirelessly to a central computer.

Nanorobots will eventually construct materials atom by atom to create products that do anything from surveillance to in vitro navigation.

Larger robots will also be present and will become more independent.

Currently robots operate in controlled environments designed around them, such as car assembly plants, but the next generation of machines will be designed to function in a less structured world and to cope with unexpected changes to their environment.

Robotics research today centres around embedding these devices with fuzzy logic skills using sensors that will allow them to perceive and respond. Dr Peter Corke, autonomous systems team leader at CSIRO, says we could expect to see this class of machine delivering mail or medication or stacking store shelves at low cost to replace human labour in five to 10 years from now. Larger versions could be used down mines; and indeed this research is principally funded by the mining industry, along with organisations interested in flying robots that can inspect assets such as power lines.

And after decades of science-fiction stories, skycars will finally be there.

These will let us travel “when and where but especially how we wish”, according to Mark Moore, personal air vehicle sector manager for NASA’s Vehicle Systems Program.

NASA’s area of focus is a skycar (or personal air vehicle — PAV) designed not for getting about the city, but for travelling at high speeds for distances of between 160kms to 800kms. That would allow people to live in regional areas and commute into urban airfields for work.

Over the next decade Moore expects to see flying cars priced at less than US$100,000 using automated functionality based on NASA’s EquiPT (Easy-to-use, quiet Personal Transportation) technology set.

Moore says an obstacle to PAVs has been the intensity of training required to fly them, so automation is critical. The goal is to have the vehicle controlled by a computerised brain that senses and responds to weather conditions or other crafts in the vicinity, and compensates for technical failures.

And did you know you could order a skycar today? Moller International, based in California, is developing the M400 Skycar and hopes it will be certified by 2006. And you can purchase a 4-passenger Skycar today for a cool $995,000!

But will we travel with the arrival of the next generation of videoconferencing tools?

The synergy of vastly increased bandwidth, three-dimensional video projection and interactive holography systems is expected to change the way we collectively communicate, according to James Anderson, country manager of Polycom.

Videophones as a standard business tool are a decade away but it will be more like 20 years before research from bodies such as MIT’s Spatial Imaging Group or 3D visualisation company, Actuality Systems, yields practicable holographic videoconferencing. By then, however, “we’ll be looking at life-size holograms in 3D that can move around the room in full motion”, says Anderson.

Finally, Zampetakis looks at changes in information technology likely to happen in the next five to ten years.

Now, I have a question for you. Is this message from the future a one you like? Personally, I do.

Source: Helene Zampetakis, Managing Information Strategies, Australia, December 17, 2004; Moller International

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