Top TechTop Tech #145: Painting Robot, Ring Tests STDs, Ion Engine To Mars
Important innovations in science and technology
By Paul Worthington
Monday’s Top Tech:
• Eye signals direct painting robot
• Put a Ring on it — to test for STDs
• Ion engine could get to Mars more efficiently
Eye signals direct painting robot
Not that there is huge need for robots that paint where your looking, but researchers in London have made just that.
Of course, it’s the implications of the technology demonstration that are important: low-cost eye tracking that could allow paraplegics to control technology through eye movement.
Developed at Imperial College London, the system “extends the human body by providing it with a third, artificial arm,” New Scientist reports. An off-the-shelf eye-tracker follows a person’s gaze and sends instructions to an industrial robot arm. They’ll next try a robotic hand to manipulate objects, “allowing the system to be adapted for paralyzed people or amputees.”
Here is a previous research report.
Put a Ring on it — to test for STDs
The Hoope let’s you “get engaged with your health,” its developers say.
The ring is billed as an affordable, easy device for painless and rapid testing for the 4 most common curable STDs: syphilis, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis and chlamydia infection.
The ring has electrodes that transmit current to block the sensation of pain, and a retractable needle for “painless collection of blood.” Then the “lab-on-a-chip” detects antibodies with a low-cost paper based microfluidic device that uses capillary action and does not require pumps or additional power source, the developers say.
PSFK reports here that the “idea originated from a NASA camp.”
Ion engine could get to Mars more efficiently
“Mars and back on one tank of fuel.”
A student at the University of Sydney claims his ion engine “smashes NASA record for fuel efficiency.”
He’s already got patents and his own company to propagate the design: Neumann Space, where he claims to have “built a brand new kind of ion engine that has just broken the world record for specific impulse previously held by NASA’s HIPEP thruster. This level of fuel efficiency is so good that one of these engines could send a probe to Mars and back on a single fuel rod.”
The engine “could also be great for keeping satellites in their proper position in orbit, or cheaply sending all the heavy equipment ahead of a manned mission somewhere.”
The Neumann Drive uses solid fuel and electricity to produce thrust. It is a wire-triggered pulsed cathodic arc system that “works kind of like an arc welder.”
The university has a write-up here.
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