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Spherical Motor Creation
There's an interesting story concerning the development of a circular based-motor. What's interesting about this motor is that it can spin to apply force in three dimensions -- some researchers at Johns Hopkins unveiled it recently. It looks pretty cool -- many magnets involved in it.
There are few things that humans need. A good smack upside the collective head would be a good start. Robots are ok, and graceful robots will be fun, but they won't change the stuff that really matters, and more leisure time (for whom? the rich who own the robots, that's whom) is not going to solve our problems.
Technology as a panacea has fallen flat on its ass, and I don't think anybody here can name me a technology that has fulfilled this oft-repeated promise of turning our lives from Pb into Au.
More involvement and commitment to building up the fund of the Common Good is the only "solution" to improving life for everyone. And no system that produces these machines is going to care much about that. So, three guesses what this technology will be use for?...
You got it. Weapons.
Isn't it nice to have a mechanism that can accurately track a moving object in three dimensions without the "wiggle" of traditional solutions? Whether its on the nose of a refitted A-10 or on a mobile SDI particle beam carrier, this will give Air Force-types around the world wet dreams and the cold sweats.
Sure, you could use it for telescopes and civilian rocket motors and benevolent articulated thingamadoohickies, but this stuff will be expensive in its first couple of generations, and by the time it gets down to us it will have been heavily patented. (Even though public money was invested in the research phase.) The forms we will be allowed to use it in will be tightly-controlled by corporations. Nothing unprofitable may exist.
What we need isn't dancing robots. It's the freedom to rip off these ideas for ourselves, and pass along the benefits. We need to grow up, take some fucking responsibility, and stop playing "Hollywood" and "Wall Street"... two of the sickest games we've ever dreamt up. I support the theft of intellectual property. I would like some anarchist group (Open Source will do) is hard at work reverse-engineering this as I write. Hope springs eternal.
thex23
Thieves. Liars. Poets.
Spherical joint? Cool! How do I roll one?
Dwarf wheet.
Land survay and scientific laying of irragation (my great grandparents could barely make a living on 100 acres of farm land, their decendents use the exact same 100 acres and have not just plants but also dairy cows)
A vast many other improvments that allow the current population to live (twenty years ago we couldn't have made enough food). .
Oh, fire was good. The wheel wasn't bad either, but not as good as fire.
Go read slouching towards utopia if you want more examples, and a well reasoned argument about where technology is taking us (some slower then others).
Suddenly the engine is the tires. :-) The only engine you'd need on the car itself would be something to generate the power for the magnets.
Remember, you saw it here first. So dig back here when someone tries to patent this. :)
- the Crazy Fraggle
There are basically two applications that spring to my mind:
First, an "omnidirectional" wheel. Ok, for this you do not need 3D as 2D will be sufficient. Plus you need a pretty clean surface, else the motor suspension = drive axis will be clogged up with dirt. A smooth "wheel" (=ball) will be better for high motor efficiency, but will increase slipperiness, too. So I guess directly using this drive as motored wheel is not the best choice.
Second, yu can cinstruct a spherical joint similar to the human hip or shoulder joint. With this you limit the movement arc to a cone with ~140 degrees opening. Spherical joints are especially interesting for major static/suspending joints - like hip or shoulder. But there are the shortcomings of this design:
The major problem will be the low torque and missing self-locking. Self-locking means, that the system does not have to use energy to keep the joint in that position. Excellent example for this is the worm-gear: nearly completely self-locking and high torques possible. In comparison this 3D-"freely spinning" joint is a (low power) direct driven, low-torque, non-locking.
As you have to use distributed permanent (=low power) magnets, the torque cannot be increased much (compared to classical e-motors with exclusively electro-magnets). Plus - as you need a high number of e-magnets - the motor is quite heavy.
All in all a nice idea, but not a good choice for most current uses IMHO.
The article speaks about using the motor to run robotic arms - Without an ridged axis (it's a unconnected ball) how exactly would that work? There no force to hold the weight of the arm up, is there?
There might of course be lots better ways than a real stirling engine at that scale. Perhaps even a microwave antenna pickup (then you could use a maser). This still would introduce inefficiencies, and it doesn't address the locking problem (brake shoes, perhaps?) And the absolute torque would be partially dependent on the amount of power transmitted (and that could be lost as heat).
A tricky design problem with lots of room for incremental improvements. Could eventually be quite interresting. Probably only suited for certain scales of activity, but it could eventually get to be quite useful for things between the size of a match-head and a terrier (caution: This is a wag with no calculation behind it!)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You mean like that Jamiroquai video?
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Somebody get this guy a PlayStation!
The article noted that the idea of creating a spherical motor has been around for a while, but that the placement of the magnets was what was holding it back. They go on to say that the key was equidistant placement of the magnets...
This sounds wrong to me - they have great minds working on this, but no one in a long time thinks about placing the magnets equally distant from each other (sorta like, uh, I don't know - like a NORMAL AXIAL MOTOR?)...
They also go on to say that the math to equidistantly place the magnets was difficult, but did anyone see that the pattern looked similar to that of the vertices of a geodesic sphere? The math for creating geodesic spheres has been around for quite a while...
I am not saying this couldn't be a useful invention - but something just seems odd that it took so long to create (looking at it, I bet you could build one yourself using parts from a hardware store, All Electronics, and the pet store - for hamster play balls)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'm curious if anyone has ever worked with ligament-based motors; basically simulating the arm by having a ball-join with dozens or hundreds of fibrous "ligaments" or tendons. A computer could control which fibers to pull in order to achieve semi-universal motion.
Of course one of the biggest limiting factors would be a highly limited range of motion, but unlike the human arm, it's possible for this configuration to be locking (through the use of worm drives for the wheels tugging on each ligament.
The main reason I bring this up is because the space shuttle's robotic arm was mentioned, which I don't believe requires continuous circular motion.
Course I'm still waiting for the mechanical tenticles with whip-like mobility, and the strength of locking steel. Still sci-fi I guess.
-Michael
-Michael
Here's the angle from the more interesting pen of the Beyond 2000 online editors. http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Jan_01/story_975.ht ml
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
This isn't the first spherical motor. A similar device has been built as an eyeball-like pan-tilt mechanism for robotic cameras. That's a nice application for a spherical actuator, and yields small, steerable cameras. So far, though, nobody has produced such devices at Webcam/surveillance camera prices. There's a product for somebody.
Perhaps a battery, capacitor, or something of that nature could be used inside the ball, along with a coil of sorts, so that induction could power internal electromagnets. The coil would input the energy into the battery/capacitor, (with a AC to DC rectifier) wich in turn would smooth the current flow, then on from there to the coils inside the sphere. There surely has to be a way to do that without interfering with the magnetic fields associated with motion. A high frequency switching between the motion magnets and the charging magnets perhaps? That may even allow the electromagnets themselves to recharge the battery, a regenerative system of sorts. As the AC current switches between posative and negative current, a simple diode could allow one way to charge the battery, and the other swing to charge the magnets. I suppose that some inefficency has to be accounted for, that would be almost like perpetual motion, so some coils could do double duty while others are strictly charging coils, and could provide current to the battery/capacitor on both cycles.
It may help extract more torque from the system, but without some sort of physical gear reduction, it will probably still consume high power while having the ability to do very little work. Still and all, it's range of motion and accuracy may prove to be more important in many applications than sheer power.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Think about it, you couldn't just have loose bearings beneath you - you'd need something that held its position and could move any direction to correct your movement to make it feel as if you're on solid ground.
If you could make them about half the size of marbles, wow, the possibilities would be endless. That one idea of the spinning discs on tables to rearrange things is already outdated. This would rock!
That's going to happen to humanity eventually. We keep packing more and more into less and less (for example, more schooling in shorting time frame - you easily knew twice as much by your senior year in HS than your parents).
We're going to need to take the smaller and more trivial tasks off our hands. There will be no alternative. What's the solution? Certainly not a group of people engineer to be simple/stupid (Brave New World), but rather, machines.
Right now, robots are unfriendly, imposing, and insanely clumsy. We *need* them to be able to move and act naturally as we do. We need them to not be scary. We need them to be more fluid. They'll inevitably have to interact with us in a personal fashion.
And if you're still unconvinced, think about the applications of robotics technology with fluid, human-like motion in medicine. Wouldn't it be nice to give amputees brand new arms that move flawlessly when compared to the real thing?
I'm tired, so I'm not going to go on any longer... but wow, the possibilities!