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Phil The Editor

Hi there again friends – it has been a little while hasn’t it.  Anyway, I thought that I would visit a number of things that caught my eye in the technical press to get you thinking about which way some technologies are heading.

You will all have heard of the famous engineer’s KISS principle: “Keep It Straightforward and Simple”.  Mimicking nature is one way of ensuring that the solution is practical in technical terms but will it pass muster commercially?

Have you ever been annoyed with that fly buzzing about your office or home and defying all your attempts to catch it?  One solution is to to buy a venus fly trap or a pitcher plant to attract and capture it and its many cousins over the following weeks.  However in the weeks and months ahead it won’t work be working for much of the time.  The problem with this idea is that such plants need high maintenance.  Well, reading the New Scientist this week, I saw this intriguing article about bug-catching robots powering themselves.

Venus Fly Trap

According to the New Scientist,    Seoul National University researchers have created a robotic Venus fly trap using two clam-steel carbon fibre leaves that act like those on the Venus fly trap leaves, and a connecting micro-spring made of shape memory materials that has two stable configurations.  When subjected to heat,  electricity or force,  they suddenly flip from the one shape to the other.  In this case, the fly lands on the spring and causes it to contract suddenly and pulls the two clamshell leaves together; thus trapping it.  To open the trap, electricity is passed through the spring and thus opens it again.

There is clearly a race on to commercially exploit this unusual application of technology.  The University of Maine are developing a different method using electrically charged polymer membrane leaves covered with tiny gold sensors.  The fly triggers the sensors which then uses a power source to reverse the charge on one of the leaves thus causing the leaves to close together.

The Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK have already come up with their Ecobot which uses bacteria to digest the fly including its exo-skeleton in-situ and also to generate small amounts of dc power that can be stored in a battery.  The trick is now to establish a non-powered resource to act as a lure.  Apparently, they have not yet come up with such a lure.  This is where I reckon the KISS principle comes in.  The good old Venus fly trap uses scent and colour to attract them.  This will require another biological research team to come up with such a lure.   No doubt a commercial developer will come up with an integrated system that will be seen by the million in years to come.  Perhaps they will make a mosquito -sized version to reduce the misery of malaria in the warmer climes.

Another piece of technology recently seen in the news on the BBC’s  technology programme Click is the soon-to-be-launched Lytro post-focusing digital camera.   The camera uses plenoptic technology that was postulated nearly a 100 years ago but only recently has been technically possible.  The principle is that you have millions of sensors on a retinal plate that not only record the intensity of each “ray” of light hitting it, but also it’s colour and direction.

The idea certainly uses the KISS principle in its concept as it allows one digital device to simulate many cameras  to record one scene.  The digital information is recorded in such a way so that it can be manipulated in the manner of a RAW image later to change the focal distance of any object in the image set.  You can see the effect by playing with the images on the Lytro website.

Moreover, it is possible to extend the effect by changing the point of view.  However, the quality of image at launch is likely to be inferior to a single focus digital camera image.  No doubt this will change with time as digital imaging companies vie for supremacy in the months and years to come.

I have a strong feeling that we will be visiting this topic again before long.

Chao