Top TechTop Tech #84: toys fly, Ford focuses, Water splits
Important innovations in science and technology, every day
By Paul Worthington
Thursday’s Top Tech:
• New horde of connected drone toys
• Ford focuses around corners
• Water splitter yields hydrogen fuel
New horde of connected drone toys
We cover a lot of robots here.. . Maybe you want one of your own?
Early quadcopter popularizer Parrot has expanded its line up of robotic drones with a bunch of “ultra-technological toys that are ready for action on the ground, in the air, and on the water.”
You can pilot the miniaturized robots with a smartphone or a tablet. Most have a wide-angle camera that streams live views on the screen of the piloting smartphone. They take pictures and videos which are directly stored on the internal 4GB flash memory.
— The $190 Jumping Drones are billed as smart terrestrial robots, with a patented spring-mounted system that lets these tumblers jump up to 2.5 feet and always land on their wheels. They have a speaker and a microphone, so in the walkie-talkie mode, you can talk and listen through them.
Pre-programed acrobatic movements include spins, jumps, and rolls. The Night model has LED lights; the Race version accelerates to 8 mph (twice as fast as the Night).
— The flying acrobatic robots are “ultra-compact and light-weight” at 1.2 pounds, and “have remarkable flight stability” thanks multiple technologies:
• a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope that “measure and analyze each movement or inclination of the drone and, thanks to the autopilot, rectify the position of the minidrone.”
• every 16 milliseconds, the camera compares a new image of the ground to the previous one to determine the drone’s speed.
• an ultrasound sensor analyzes flight altitude up to 13 feet high.
• a pressure sensor controls the altitude above that height.
They fly at 11 mph, and have preprogrammed turns and flips.
The $130 Night model has LED lights; the $99 Cargo version can carry small items.
— And finally, there’s the new Hydrofoil model that can “rise out of the water to hover over the surface and rush like the racers in a sailing match.”
With four propellers, “it slides through the water and stays about 2 inches above the surface with amazing stability and agility.” It’s $179.
(No, this post wasn’t an ‘advertorial.’ These just seem cool and fun — and they point out how quickly high tech comes down to consumer goods these days.)
Ford focuses around corners
Automotive giant Ford says its new vehicle camera technology “can help see around corners even when drivers cannot.”
The split-view camera feature “helps drivers see traffic and obstacles that enter the vehicle’s path from the side by displaying a 180-degree view of the area in front of or behind a vehicle.”
The viewer combines real-time video feeds from two wide-angle cameras, one each in the front grille and tailgate. “A tri-panel display in the 8-inch screen helps customers understand quickly whether an obstacle is coming from either side or straight on,” the company says.
The view “automatically shuts off when vehicle speed reaches 6.2 mph.” Weird how a visual can be billed as a safety aid, but at a certain speed becomes a distracting hazard.
Ford adds that it plans to make rear-view cameras standard on all of its North American light passenger vehicles by 2018, and front cameras available on a majority of its vehicles globally by volume by 2020 — meaning the company plans to put more than 2 million new cameras a year on the road.
Also upcoming: up to seven cameras for lane-keeping assistance, and enabling customers to see more angles around a truck and trailer.
Water splitter yields hydrogen fuel
Hydrogen can be a great source of power, and burning it produces only water — but getting it can demand more energy than it yield, or depend on fossil fuels for source material.
Now however, engineers at Stanford report they’ve developed an inexpensive way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The device uses a low-voltage current and a low-cost catalyst, and it can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to a report in Nature.
