Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. While scientists are finding ways to make them smaller but even more powerful, problems can arise when these batteries are much larger and heavier than the devices themselves. University of Missouri(MU) researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

“To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density(密度)”, said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. “The radioisotope(放射性同位素) battery can provide power density that is much higher than chemical batteries.”

Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, presently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro / nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS). Although nuclear batteries can cause concerns, Kwon said they are safe.

“People hear the word ‘nuclear’ and think of something very dangerous,” he said, “However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.”

His new idea is not only in the battery’s size, but also in its semiconductor(半导体). Kwon’s battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.

“The key part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor,” Kwon said, “By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.”

Together with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, Kwon is working to build and test the battery. In the future, they hope to increase the battery’s power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.

A group of researchers in Europe have announced a 3-year project called Odeuropa to collect information about the important smells of Europe, from the 1500s to the early 1900s. The European Union has given Odeuropa $3.3 million to spend over the next three years.

The people behind the project believe that smell is an important part of history, but one that is often pretermitted. Through pictures, photos, videos and audio(声音) recordings we have records of how things looked and sounded. But we don’t have records of how they smelled. And yet smell is an important sense. As the project’s website says, “Much more so than any other sense, our sense of smell is linked directly to our emotions(情感) and our memories.”

For the first year and a half, the project will focus on collecting information about European smells going back to the 1500s. To achieve this goal, the group plans to create digital versions of historical books in seven different languages. Then, they will use the scanned information to train an artificial intelligence (AI) system to look for anything related to smells. Once the system is trained, it should be able to automatically collect information on the smells of all sorts of things.

The final part of the project is even more complex. The team will work with chemists and people who make perfume to try to make the smells which aren’t around anymore come back to life. The team hopes to give new life to about 120 different smells. Odeuropa will then offer the smells to museums across Europe to help them do a better job of using smells in their exhibits, which is one way for museums to include people who have lost other senses, such as sight or hearing.

When robots and humans interact in the same environment, it is important for them to move in techniques that monitor an environment, predict the future actions of humans, identify secure track for a robot and control its movements accordingly.

Predicting human behavior and movements, however, can be incredibly challenging. Determining the future movements of a robot, on the other hand, could be far easier. If human users could anticipate the movements of robots and the effects these will have on the surrounding environment, they should then be able to easily adapt their actions in order to avoid accidents.

With this in mind, researchers at Kyushu University in Japan recently created a near-future perception system named Previewed Reality that allows human users to forecast future changes in their environment, which could then inform their decisions and guide their actions. This system compiles (编译) a data-set containing information about the position of objects, humans and robots within the same environment, to then produce simulations (模拟) of events that could take place in the near future. These simulations are presented to human users via Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) headsets.

To collect information about the position of different objects, robots, and humans in the same environment, the researchers used a number of strategically placed sensors, including optical trackers that monitored the movements of objects or robots, and a RGB-D camera which mainly tracked human actions. The data gathered by the sensors was then fed to a motion planner and a dynamics simulator. Combining these two system components allowed the researchers to forecast changes in a given environment and synthesize (合成) images of events that are likely to occur in the near future, from the viewpoint of a specific human. Human users could then view these synthesized images simply through a VR headset or an AR display.

“This system provides human-friendly communication between a human and a robotic system.” the researchers explained. In their next studies, they plan to expand and simplify the perception system, for instance by creating a lighter and more affordable version that can operate on smart phones or other portable devices.