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New Wave of Fusion and Robot Innovation at MIT
An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."
Link directly to the cities.media.mit.edu info/scoot photo...
/.Soulskill/anonymous(again /.)/PM biz ...enjoy.
Bypassing the ever-silly:
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Scooter with ITRI and Sanyang Motors
RoboScooter - Clean, Green Mobility for Today's Crowded Cities
The RoboScooter is a lightweight, folding, electric motor scooter. It is designed to provide convenient, inexpensive mobility in urban areas while radically reducing the negative effects of extensive vehicle use - road congestion, excessive consumption of space for parking, traffic noise, air pollution, carbon emissions that exacerbate global warming, and energy use. It is clean, green, silent, and compact.
People Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Yaniv Fain, Sloan School Michael Chia-Liang Lin, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Arthur Petron, Mechanical Engineering Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Andres Sevtsuk, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning
SYM/Sanyang Motors Grand Wu Wan Ching Chang
ITRI Wen-Jean Hsueh Eugene Hsiao Ying-Tzu Lin Barbara Yeh
I don't know about anyone else, but I asked some nuclear physicists very nicely and they assured me that they would build me one...
... to power the mecha that I asked some robotics and mechatronics guys to build me.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
That's a great question!
I worked for two years at General Atomics trying to model and understand the interaction of fusion plasmas with the reactor walls. I've seen people here who have done more.
Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.
Once we discover a large reservoir of concentrated easy to mine hydrogen it will make sense to have a hydrogen energy economy. Currently, I can't think of many things more idiotic than burning carbon fuels to make energy at low efficiency, which is transmitted at low efficiency to a plant, which is harnessed at low efficiency to make hydrogen, which is transported by a familiar large infrastructure of energy using vehicles, to a station where you can fill up your hydrogen car that can burn the hydrogen at low efficiency. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of energy being consumed (at the plant) compared to the amount actually usable by the hydrogen car is near 1%. What a fucking waste.
Or we could just cut all that shit and have cars that run at 20-40% efficiency burning carbon fuels.