3D-printed canal home

3D-printed canal home takes shape in Amsterdam

By Colin GrantClick, BBC World Service

The architects intend to use the house as an education centre to help promote 3D printing

Continue reading the main story

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It sounds like the ultimate do-it-yourself project: the print-your-own-home.

In place of bricks and mortar and the need for a construction crew, a customisable building plan which transforms itself from computer screen graphics into a real-world abode thanks to the latest in 3D printing technology.

That dream is still beyond our reach, but several teams of architects across the globe are engaged in efforts to take a major step towards it by creating the world's first 3D-printed homes.

Amsterdam-based Dus Architects is one of the firms involved - it plans to print a canal house in the Dutch capital.

It's worth taking a moment to reflect on that premise; the machine will not modestly 3D-print the usual cup, curtain ring or piece of jewellery, but an actual building.

Objects are created by printing thin layers of the construction materials on top of each other

The printer that will make this possible - the KamerMaker - is a marvel in itself. The name translates from Dutch as "room-maker".

With a shiny metallic exterior, built from the carcass of a shipping container, it is 6m (19ft 8in) tall and would easily fill the average sitting room.

Using different types of plastics and wood fibres, the device takes computer-drawn plans and uses them to make first the building's exterior walls, then the ceilings and other parts of individual rooms and then finally its furniture.

The pieces will be assembled on site like a huge jigsaw with parts attached to each other thanks to some of their edges having being shaped like giant Lego pieces, and the use of steel cabling to "sew" the elements together.

Each part is created using a layer-by-layer process in which solid objects take shape by printing thin "slices" of the construction materials, one level at a time, which bind together.

When I interviewed the architects involved - Hedwig Heinsman and Hans Vermeulen - for the BBC World Service's Click - I was able to stand comfortably with them inside the machine.

Looking across I could see the device's huge print head was connected to a flexible tube running down from the ceiling through which it could pour the heated plasticised material that will ultimately form the house's structure.

As with its smaller counterparts, the print head moves firstly horizontally and then vertically building up salami slices of the 3D object.

The enormous contraption will be able to fabricate individual life-sized rooms in one print session.

One of the house's window frames was among the first parts to be printed

I was shown a rosette window frame that had recently been "printed'" as a demonstration.

The young architects were visibly excited. Architecture is normally a slow and painstaking discipline. After graduation their first conventional building, from commission to execution, was six years in the making. This 3D project should be concluded in a fraction of that time.

By the end of this year the fully printed facade of the building will be erected, though it will be several more years before the project is completed.

"We are makers at heart and a 3D printer offers us a DIY kit," says Ms Heinsman.

Mr Vermeulen adds he believes his industry is "at the forefront of new industrial revolution".

Their firm has formed a collective that includes designers and computer scientists who are sharing their expertise and drawing on open-source computer tools to build this canal house.

The 3D printer stands like a work of modern sculpture on a grassy patch outside the collective's slightly raffish offices.

It's not just that it would it be too big to fit inside their offices, the team wants the public to be able to see the virtuosity of this 3D printer in action.

They also have a more regular-sized 3D printer inside their offices which is used to build doll's house-sized architectural models of the canal house on a scale of 1:20. Critically, the instructions for building these small versions are from the same computer files that the architects have designed for the actual house.

The canal house will be built over time from the bottom up.

Ms Heinsman says you might notice a change in the aesthetic of the building as your eyes travel up it.

1:20 scale models were built from the computer blueprints to help optimise the design

"The top part of the facade will be the most beautifully ornamented because by then we will have perfected our knowledge of how the printer works," she explains.

It is unlikely that the finished KamerMaker 3D-printed house will be built as cheaply as conventional canal houses which are mass-produced by developers. But the architects are treating it as an experiment which provides a proof of concept and proof of the unbound limits of 3D printing.

It may seem like science fiction or the kind of fantastical vanity project expected of a millionaire, but this is really a visionary concept of idealistic but level-headed architects operating with modest budgets, whose focus is on social housing.

Developers may not be quaking in their boots just now but 3D printing has the potential to disrupt construction and the very look of our towns 

Happiness rises with travel

11 April 2013

Twitter study: Happiness rises the further you travel

Philip Ball

(Copyright: Thinkstock)

People’s tweets get significantly more positive in mood the greater the distance they are from home.

Feeling low? Over-worked, anxious, bored with life? A holiday will do your mood the world of good. Really it will: there’s now scientific proof. A team of researchers at the University of Vermont in the United States has found that tweets contain significantly more happy words the further from home they are sent.

This is the latest dispatch from an emerging discipline in which social-networking media are mined to gauge people’s moods and opinions. Twitter is one of the most fertile sources of information for this kind of study, partly because the comments are less guarded and self-conscious than responses to questionnaires (the social scientist’s traditional means of sampling opinion) but also because huge amounts of data are available, with automatically searchable content. What’s more, Twitter feeds sometimes come accompanied with useful information such as the tweeter’s profile and location.

Previous studies in the field of “twitterology” have, for example, monitored the spread of news, the demographics of different languages, and the correlations between obesity and expressions of hunger in particular populations. Since changes in public mood like brewing social unrest will show up on Twitter and other social media, governments, police forces and security organisations are showing an increasing interest in mining networks, raising questions about the right balance between privacy and security. Meanwhile, spotting the emergence and propagation of trends are a gift to marketing departments.

The new study of the link between happiness and geographical location by Christopher Danforth and colleagues at Vermont takes advantage of the “garden hose” public-access feed for Twitter, which makes freely available a random 10% of all messages posted. This provided the researchers with four billion tweets from the year 2011 to analyse.

Since Danforth and colleagues were interested in how the mood expressed in the messages correlated with the location from which they were sent, they sifted through this immense data set to pick out those tweets that were accompanied by the precise latitude and longitude of the sender’s mobile phone – a facility optionally available for tweets, which uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate the message’s origin within a 10m (32ft) radius. About 1% of the messages included this information, giving a data set of 37 million messages sent by more than 180,000 individuals from all over the planet.

However, identifying where the sender is situated doesn’t in itself reveal what the researchers wanted to know. They were interested in how the message content varied with distance from home. But how could they know where “home” was?

It turns out that positional information disclosed by our mobile phones reveals this pretty clearly. In 2008 a team of researchers in the US used the locations of mobile phones – recorded by phone companies whenever calls are made – to track the trajectories of 100,000 (anonymised) individuals. They found that, as we might imagine, we tend to return over and over again to certain places, especially our homes and workplaces, and only rarely venture very far from these locations.

In much the same way, Danforth and colleagues could figure out the most common locations for each individual in their survey, and how widely the person tended to roam from those places. They found that people generally have two such preferred locations, just a short distance apart, which they attributed to the home and workplace.

How, then, do the messages differ when individuals are at home, at work, or further away? To assess the “happiness” of a tweet, the Vermont team has developed what they call ahedonometer: an algorithm that searches the text for words implying a positive or enjoyable context (such as “new”, “great”, “coffee” and “lunch”) or a negative one (“no”, “not”, “hate”, “damn”, “bored”). On this basis the hedonometer assigns each message a happiness score.

The authors report that the average happiness score first declines slightly for distances of around 1 km (0.62 miles) – the kind of distance expected for a short commute to work – and then rises steadily with increasing distances of up to several thousand kilometres. What’s more, individuals with a larger typical roaming radius use happy words more often – a result that probably reflects the higher socioeconomic status of such jet-setting types.

So it seems we’re least happy at work and most happy when we are farthest from home. At least, that’s the case for the roughly 15% of American adults who use Twitter, or to be even more cautious, for the English-speaking subset of those who chose to ‘geotag’ their tweets. One key question is whether this sample is representative of the population as a whole – Twitter is less used among older people, for example. It’s also an open question whether expressions of happiness in tweets are a true indicator of one’s state of mind – are you less likely to tweet about your holiday when the weather is awful and the family is fractious? But such quibbles aside, you might want to consider that costly flight to Bermuda or Kathmandu after all.

If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Web link

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130411-want-to-be-happy-travel-further

10 April 2013

Robot truck platoons roll forward

Steven Ashley

• 

  Future convoy

  Truck platoon technology aims to create semi-autonomous trains of vehicles under the command of a lead vehicle. (Copyright: Scania)

Convoys of wireless-linked semi-autonomous vehicles could soon be hitting our roads, giving drivers a chance to put their feet up on the morning commute.

Imagine cruising down a three-lane highway and rounding a bend to find four trucks rolling along in single-file. They are all traveling close together – perhaps too close – but otherwise everything seems normal.

Yet as you pass the trailing truck, you look up through the sun roof to see the driver on a mobile phone. He should know better, you think as you slide by. Passing the next one, the driver appears to be sipping a cup of coffee and you could swear that he’s watching TV. That can’t be right, but you power on regardless. Then, coming alongside the third, there seems to be no driver at all. You must be mistaken, you tell yourself, as the truck stays in lane and otherwise rides as per usual.

By the time you glance up at the lead truck, you glimpse a driver concentrating on the road. Perhaps your mind was playing tricks on you after all.

Or maybe not. In February this year, a similar line-up of four large trucks circled an oval test track in Tsukuba City, Japan to help get so-called “truck platooning” technology ready for real-world use.

This technology aims to create semi-autonomous road trains, where convoys of vehicles enter a snaking train of vehicles under the command of the lead vehicle. The drivers of the “drones” are then free to do whatever they like – read a book, take a nap or just sit. When they are ready to leave, the driver takes back control and exits the train. In theory the technology offers several benefits, such as cutting down on accidents and improving fuel efficiency.

“We think that this new technology can also lead to a reduction in the amount of road space used by vehicles, which would help to reduce traffic congestion,” says Nobuo Iwai, senior researcher on the project. In fact, some estimates suggest it could double the capacity of existing highways.  

Platoon prototype

The Japanese demonstration was the latest of a couple of projects set up to trial and develop the technology. A couple of years ago a project at RWTH Aachen University in Germany operated a platoon of four trucks spaced at 10m (33ft) intervals. In the US, research at the University of California, Berkeley put three-truck caravans on the road with spacing from 3 to 6m. And last year, the Scania Transport Laboratory in Sweden tested aspects of truck platooning on a 520km (325 miles) shipping route between the cities of Sodertalje and Helsingborg.

In addition, a recently completed European project led by Volvo called Safe Road Trains for the Environment (Sartre) has explored using cars and lorries simultaneously. Its platoons cruised at 85 km/h (50mph) with a gap between each vehicle of 6m. The study vehicles put in some 10,000 km (6,200 miles) of road, and – like the Japanese study – indicated that platooning could offer substantial benefits.

“Sartre showed that it is possible for vehicles – trucks and cars – to automatically follow a lead vehicle controlled by a trained driver,” says Carl Johan Alquist, traffic product safety manager at Volvo Trucks in Gothenberg, Sweden.  “Technically speaking, truck platooning is not that far away; it’s the other safety and functional issues that remain to be sorted out.”

The Japanese demonstration which was conducted by researchers from the semi-governmentalNew Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (Nedo), was intended to address some of the challenges in making the technology ready for public use by ensuring bulletproof safety and reliability. “Our target is to enable both large and small trucks to safely maintain a 4m distance between vehicles in single file while driving 80km/h,” says Iwai.

To do this, Iwai and his colleagues developed – or modified – a suite of technologies including an automated steering system, automatic vehicle-following system and cooperative adaptive cruise control.

In the trials, the lead vehicle – driven by a specially trained driver – took control of the caravan and led it round and round the test track issuing commands on the fly. For example, the speed of the leader was communicated wirelessly every 20 milliseconds to allow the train to make constant adjustments and to ensure that they were driving at both an optimum and safe distance.

But the second, third, and fourth vehicles are not dumb either – they were also equipped with millimeter-wave radar and infrared laser radars to detect obstacles and recognize lane markings, as well as a series of algorithms and fail-safe controls to better manage the vehicles.

Although the set-up sounds complex, Iwai believes that it would be a relatively simple task to upgrade modern trucks, many of which are already fitted with most elements of the technology. “We think that the eventual system/product would be sufficiently affordable for truck owners.”

Crucially, the demo also showed that the trucks’ fuel economy improved by 15% or more on average, by allowing the vehicles to slip stream each other like drafting Tour de France riders. It also showed that the lead truck can benefit from less drag at its rear as the ‘bow-wave’ of the tailing vehicle in-effect “pushes” the lead truck forward.

The tests were the first of a series for the organization. “Our next step is to obtain a permit and test this technology on public roads,” says Iwai. “In order to ensure safety and reliability of the system, we need to conduct many field demonstrations. In addition, we think it will be necessary to establish international technical standards.”

Obstacles ahead

In fact many questions remain before the system rolls out into common use. The biggest one of these is whether the public are ready for semi-autonomous vehicles to trundle alongside them. And then there is the question of whether truck drivers will put their faith in the technology.

At the same time several technical wrinkles need to be ironed out, such as automating the process of lane changing, or figuring out how drivers will merge with and leave the platoon. Ensuring that long road trains do not present a barrier to vehicles entering or exiting traffic flows will also have to be addressed.

Trials like the one in Japan also raise less obvious questions, such as how windscreens will deal with being pelted by grit and stones kicked up between vehicles or how the view-obscuring spray of rain water from long trains will affect other road users.

And if convoys go co-ed and mix cars and trucks, there are new road rules to think about, such as whether trucks only go at the front to accommodate to their longer stopping distance and therefore how new trucks insert themselves into the train.

But engineers and planners working on the technology believe none of these issues are insurmountable and that road trains could be cruising highways sometime in the next decade. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, you yourself will commute to work on a robotic conga line, along with a line up of other drivers not paying attention to driving.

If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Web link

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130409-robot-truck-platoons-roll-forward

TECHNOLOGY

9 April 2013 Last updated at 07:43 ET

Long-distance 3D laser camera unveiled by Edinburgh team

A camera able to create 3D images up to one kilometre (0.62 miles) away has been developed by a team in Edinburgh.

Physicists at Heriot-Watt University developed a technique which uses lasers to scan almost any object.

With extra research, the camera's range could extend to 10km (6.2 miles), the team said.

It will primarily be used to scan objects such as vehicles - but is unable to detect human skin.

The reason is that skin does not reflect the laser in the same way as most other objects - meaning for those wishing to evade the camera's gaze, stripping naked is an option.

Beyond capturing images of objects, the technology could also be used to keep track of the movement of rocks, or foliage growth.

Highly accurate

The camera works, the team explained, by bouncing lasers off distant objects, and measuring the time it takes for the light to travel back to the detector.

The camera is able to record its subject to an accuracy of one millimetre.

With further modifications to the system's image-processing software, the team said it believed the same technology could be used to measure an object's speed and direction.

"Our approach gives a low-power route to the depth imaging of ordinary, small targets at very long range," said Aongus McCarthy, a research fellow at Heriot-Watt.

Mr McCarthy added: "It is clear that the system would have to be miniaturised and made more rugged, but we believe that a lightweight, fully portable scanning depth imager is possible and could be a product in less than five years."

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8 April 2013

Radical roads drive robot cars

Jon Stewart

(Copyright: Thinkstock)

A lot is written about the rise of autonomous cars, such as those developed by Google, but these vehicles will also change our highways forever.

One of the world’s most famously gridlocked cities in the world may be about to shed its image and get on the move again.

Los Angeles in California has just finished installing $400m of technology to synchronise its traffic lights. The Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system uses an array of cameras and sensors in the road to measure traffic flow, and a centralised computer system to make constant tweaks and changes to the city’s 4,400 lights to keep traffic running as smoothly as possible. In theory, it is now possible to cross the city without ever stopping.  

“By schronising our traffic signals we will spend less time waiting, and less time polluting,” says Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The system, which was started in 1984 when Los Angeles hosted the Olympics and has taken until now to finish, is estimated to increase travel speeds by 16% and cutting journey times by 12%.

The figures are impressive, but other congested cities looking on in envy may do well to wait a few more years before rethinking their own traffic systems. While the LA system may seem cutting edge now, it could seem as outdated as a traffic officer guiding traffic with white gloves in a few years time. That is because engineers are planning a radical rethink of our streets that will change just about every aspect of how we drive – including who is in control of the vehicle.

Car talk

In this new world, cars are packed nose to tail travelling at speeds in excess of current limits. They weave their way through unmarked junctions, with no traffic lights. Lane markings are non-existent, and stretches of road switch from being one-way in one direction, to the opposite, with no warning. Perhaps most alarming of all, very few of the “drivers” have even passed a driving test.

It may sound like an impossibly chaotic scene, where accidents are inevitable. But this is one future based on predictions about the uptake of autonomous cars.

In the United States the Instititute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) predicts that driverless cars will account for 75% of all vehicles on the roads by 2040. Vehicles, such as Google’s self driving car,  are already leading the way.  And small-scale trials of linked-up roads are being conducted in some cities

Far from being pandemonium, “intelligent” vehicles running on an intelligent road network have the potential to smoothly synchronise traffic, eliminating gridlock and accidents forever.       

In this new world, information flow will govern traffic flow. Vehicles will be much more aware of their own positions and those of the vehicles around them, and will not rely on crude coloured lights to tell them when to stop and go.

“In the future smart intersections may not need lights,” says Azim Eskandarian, director of the IEEE’s Center for Intelligent Systems Research.  “These intersections will very efficiently harmonise and synchronise speeds in one direction, and then the other.”

So-called vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication will allow cars to share their the route they plan to take, their destination and current position with a central command center – like a supersized version of the one running LA’s streets.

The groundwork for this is already being laid in the US by the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium, a group of car manufacturers trying to develop specific applications and protocols for a system. And just outside Detroit in the town of Ann Arbor, there is already a pilot project that has equipped 29 intersections with instruments that allow a team of researchers to direct traffic lights in order to make the traffic move more efficiently.

The hub of the future will take this to an extreme - accumulating all the data across a metropolis and plan traffic loads and optimise routes accordingly. It will also send commands back to the vehicles about when to safely enter an intersection, and what speed to hold to minimize stop-start driving.

Meanwhile the cars will also talk to each other, using vehicle-to-vehicle communication, constantly checking their environments and positions relative to other cars around them.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is already in development.  In 1999, the United States Congress set aside a region of the 5.9 GHz radio frequency band – already used for wireless – specifically for the purpose. And a host of manufacturers are already developing applications.

The trial being run in Ann Arbor also points towards the type of application that could become standard. For example, drivers get an audible warning if they try to change lane with a car in their blind spot, or if the car in front of them brakes hard and the driver doesn’t seem to notice. The car can also give warnings at blind corners and junctions that another vehicle is about to pull out.

“When multiple vehicles are communicating with each other, when there is slowing, there is plenty of time to communicate that to cars behind so they can start braking earlier,” says Professor Eskandarian.

This type of communication, he says, “will really solve a lot of the problems” that result in severe crashes.

No licence, no problem

Cars that talk to each other can also match their speeds, and drive more closely together without risk of the car in front suddenly braking. As a result, many envisage the idea of “car platooning” that will link together cars on high-speed highways to travel faster, more safely, and using less space. Various trails of this technology are already taking place, with one of the most advanced run by an EU consortium called Satre, which demonstrated trains of vehicles travelling at speeds of up to 90km/h sometimes travelling just 4m apart. 

Lane markings will be unnecessary when cars can accurately determine their own position using an inbuilt array of sensors, radar and laser-range finders, meaning a much more fluid use of road space. Currently, some cities dedicate lanes on busy roads or bridges to funnel traffic into the city in the morning rush hour, and out of the city in the evening. In the future the changeovers could happen more quickly and more often to dynamically adjust to traffic flow.

Rebuilding  and redefining the road infrastructure may also brign with it new opportunities. For example, researchers at Stanford university in the US have been experimenting with roads that continually charge electric cars as they drive along. The system uses magnetic coils buried in the road that automatically couple with another coil on the bottom fo the car. Such arrays could be built into future roads as they are wired up to the sensors and systems they will need.

Finally, these new roadways could also allow mixed use roads, allowing trains and trams to easily share information between them, allowing them to cohabit on the roads.

As a driver, this new system may sound horribly confusing. But, perhaps the most radical prediction about the rise of these new roads is that humans will barely do any of the driving. Instead, we will be asked to put our faith in the system.

“What will a driver’s licence mean?” asks Prof Eskandarian.

“All you need is to be able to operate something like a GPS to input your origin and destination, and the rest will be taken care of autonomously. We don’t need a pilot’s licence to ride on an aircraft.”

Asking people to trust the technology will be a huge obstacle. But it is not the only bump in the road. The cost of this infrastructure will be significantly higher and will require huge investment form governments.

But Prof Eskandarian believes it will slowly creep into everyday life.  First of all, we may see a single lane dedicated to autonomous vehicles, the way they currently are for busses or carpools. At the same time cars will gradually become more and more intelligent, sharing more and more information with each other and the road around them. Then decades from now, the road system will be indistinguishable from the one we drive on today.  

Perhaps they will come just in time to stop Los Angeles grinding to a halt again. 

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Web link

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130405-radical-roads-drive-robot-cars