Amazing Robots for Around the House

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Lets admit it, who doesn't dream of having their very own robotic minion? I would achieve instant nirvana if someone is catering to my every need and taking care of all the mind-numbing household chores. Well folks robots may just be the future and lets all prey that one day we mere mortals can also afford them. Here are some of the best robots that will get the job done while you lounge around and do nothing!

Unless you are a budding Julia Child, chances are you detest cooking with a passion. Wouldn't it be great if you have your own little robot that does the needful? The HOAP-3claims to make a killer robot and we believe him from the video below.

Picture this, your favorite game is on and you're chilling with friends. The thought of leaving the couch to get a chilled beer kills you. This where the Asahi Robocco comes in play, as it pours beer for you!

Next time doesn't order Chinese; just tell your little robot to cook up a storm. Check out the video of the Computerized Chinese Self-Cooking Robot below. The video is in Mandarin but remember sloth transcends language.

Make your presence felt with the Telepresence Robot from Anybots. Interact remotely with your friends and colleagues from the ease of your home or office.

The Muiro is a robotic speaker on wheels, which means you have your own musical stalker. Miuro can connect your 802.11b/g wireless network to stream music and costs around 1000 bucks.

Don't fight over the remote with your partner and relinquish control to the FujitsoMaron-1 Robot. This little bugger can control your home appliances and entertainment system.

"Hello, my name is Wakamaru and I am at your service 24/7." Magical words aren't they? Designed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Wakamaru acts like a caretaker for the elderly and performs tasks, which require a lot of mobility.

It is not just Fujitso or Mitsubishi that are testing the waters. Check out this offering by Toshiba, which has wired controlled hands with three fingers and CCD cameras.

Spy, the twenty first century style! Meet Spykee, from Meccano, which talks, walks, chats on the phone and even takes snapshots. The robot has a WiFi card, so that you can control it remotely on the net.

The R100 PaPeRo can be your new best friend and the fact that its super cute makes us wants to give it a big hug!

When it comes to robots, the Japanese knows a thing or two. The coffee making robot is a godsend as who doesn't dream of coffee in bed? Check out this coffee babe in action.

The Litter-Robot isn't scared of getting down and dirty. Made in USA, it takes litter box scooping to a new tech level. You can be confident that your cats have a litter box that is cleaned automatically and reliably, again and again.

The Spykee Vox is a must have all audiophiles as the robot plays your iPod tunes, listens to voice commands and includes three microphones, a remote, USB plug, stereo loudspeakers, IR sensors and some killer moves.

Statutory Warning: Don't try this at home! The Forest Fire Prevention Robot by Jordan Guelde is mean, lean forest machine. It clears up areas of foliage so that forest fires don't spread. Governor Schwarzenegger aka the Terminator may just approve?

Legos are awesome. We love Legos. You know what we love more? Robots made from Legos! Check out the Lego Bartender Robot that pours you a strong one, in its own cool style.

Pepsi drinkers would switch in a heartbeat if Coke Robots could service them! Checks out Coke Zero model robot, which will quench your thirst the way it is suppose to be done!

The "Violin-Playing Robot" by Toyota will soothe those nerves. Who doesn't like musical prodigy at their disposable? Apart from playing the violin, it is also capable of performing a variety of tasks with its hands and arms.

No matter what your poison is the MotoMan RoboBar is equipped to satiate your alcoholic cravings. As a bartender not only is it lightening fast but also cheaper in the longer run.

Concentrating Solar Power

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Parabolic Trough

Trough technology is a clean and mature solar power solution with years of successful power generation behind it. Troughs have been in use since the 80s with outstanding results. The technology has been improving steadily for the last 30 years, and modern troughs operate more efficiently at lower cost. Today, there is more than 300 MW of CSP trough power in operation around the world, with 400 MW under construction and around 6 GW in development.

Introduction to Technology

A parabolic trough is a large, curved mirror that sits on a motorized base, allowing it to follow the movement of the sun throughout the day. The mirror's unique parabolic shape is designed to gather a great deal of sunlight and then reflect that light onto a single point, concentrating the solar power.

A receiver tube sits at the point where the mirror concentrates all the sunlight. The tube is filled with a synthetic heat transfer oil, heated by the mirror's light to around 750 F (400 C). This superheated oil is then pumped from the solar field to a nearby power block, where the oil's heat is converted to high-pressure steam in a series of heat exchangers. This steam pushes a conventional steam turbine, creating electricity.

Parabolic trough technology is the most developed CSP technology, and has been a major focus of Abengoa Solar's research efforts. Abengoa Solar is currently deploying parabolic troughs at the Solúcar Platform outside of Seville, Spain a collection of five 50 MW plants. Continue on [link] for more information about Abengoa Solar's use of parabolic trough CSP technology around the world.

Operating Scheme for parabolic trough technology

The main components of parabolic trough technology are:

The parabolic trough reflector: The cylindrical parabolic reflector reflects incident sunlight from its surface onto the receiver at the focal point. Typically, the reflector is made of thick glass silver mirrors formed into the shape of a parabola. Alternatively, mirrors can be made from thin glass, plastic films or polished metals.
The receiver tube or heat collection element: The receiver tube consists of a metal absorber surrounded by a glass envelope. The absorber is coated with a selective coating to maximize energy collection and to minimize heat loss. The glass envelope is used to insulate the absorber from heat loss, and is typically coated with an anti-reflective surface to increase the transmittance of light through the glass to the absorber. For high temperature CSP applications, the space between the absorber and glass tube is evacuated to form a vacuum.
The suntracking system: An electronic control system and associated mechanical drive system is used to focus the reflector onto the sun.
The support structure: Typically made of metal, the collector support structure holds the mirrors in accurate alignment while resisting the effects of the wind.
Abengoa Solar parabolic trough models are:

Parabolic trough on
Solnova 1

Solnova 1, 3 and 4, with 50 MW each, are the first three parabolic trough technology-based plants of a total of 5. At Abengoa Solar, we believe in this technology, and for this reason have research groups focused on parabolic trough technology.

For more information about tower technology, please download our Trough Technology White-paper

The Most Mature CSP Technology

The first commercial CSP plants were parabolic trough collector systems installed in the United Sates in the 1980’s. Continued research since that time has improved the technology making it more reliable and efficient. Troughs remain the most developed and commercially-ready CSP technology.

Requirements

Solnova I

Regarding Trough. technology, there are several variables to be analyzed when defining an installation. The most important requirements for a C.S.P. plant are:

Topography: the site needs to be level, preferably with a slope less than 1%
Irradiation: the direct normal insolation (DNI) should be a high as possible
Water Availability: water is needed for cooling in the power block
Electric Transmission: electric lines and transmission capacity are needed to convey solar power from the plant to the consumer

Land Requirements for 100 MW Plants

Individual parabolic trough collector modules are attached together to form a “collector” that can be from 100 to 150 m long. Collectors are configured together to form a collector row. Parabolic trough plants are made up of many parallel collector rows covering large rectangular areas of land. The table below shows the approximate surface of land needed for plant construction. Besides the surface specifications (acres), the approximate width (x in m) and length (y in m) of an intended rectangular plot have been included.

100 MW	Basic Trough	Trough w/storage 7 hs
Land requirements	475 acre x=4000 ft y=5167 ft	940 acres x=5150 ft y=8050 ft

Know more about parabolic throug technology

Intel’s Anti-Theft Technology for Laptops on its way

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Intel is pondering over introducing an anti-theft technology for its laptops. If your laptop is stolen, with this technology, you can be rest assured that your confidential and valuable data will not be stolen.

The Anti-theft technology on the laptops will lock up the system and the hard disk, thus keeping the valuable data and personal information secured from falling into wrong hands. This new technology will be added on Active Management Technology which is a part of the Centrino vPro. This technology is being developed due to the high rise in laptops being stolen, leading to high risk of data theft.

Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s mobility group said, “The technology focuses on asset recovery, theft management and data protection and will arrive in laptops by year’s end.”

At present it’s unclear as to how exactly will the technology lock the data, for which we will have to wait till the fourth quarter of this year. Even other companies like Lenovo Group, McAfee, Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Phoenix Technologies are working hard to get the anti-theft technology on to their mobile computers.

Megawatt Class VASIMR Plasma Rocket Cluster by 2013

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In an Interview in Seed Magazine, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz discusses the future of the VASIMR plasma rocket.

Once we’ve demonstrated a 200-kilowatt prototype engine operating at full power on the ground, the next step is testing an identical version in space. We’re already testing the prototype unit in our vacuum chamber here in Houston, and we’re designing the actual flight engine, which is called the VF-200. We signed an agreement with NASA last December to actually mount the VF-200 on the International Space Station in 2012 or 2013. Unfortunately, the space station doesn’t have 200 kilowatts to give us. So what we’ll do is use the solar arrays of the station to charge a battery pack that we’ll carry on board, which will allow us to fire the rocket at 200 kilowatts for up to 15 minutes. We’ll do this again and again for months to qualify the engine in space. In 2013 or 2014, we’ll make clusters of 200-kilowatt engines to give us something close to a megawatt of electricity, and deploy them with a very high-powered solar array. This will be a robotic reusable “space tug” that can refuel or reposition satellites, or even send packages to the Moon at a much lower price. By charging for those services, we hope to bootstrap our way into developing a megawatt-class rocket. That rocket would be too powerful to test on the ISS, but it could perhaps be tested on the surface of the Moon where solar power is abundant. Like the ISS tests, we’d fire the megawatt-class VASIMR continuously for a period of one month, then two months, to validate and verify that it could be used on a human mission to Mars.

Once we have this capability, Mars isn’t really the only place that we can go. With a megawatt-class VASIMR, basically we will have access to the entire solar system. Mars is an interesting place, but so are Europa and Ganymede and Enceladus and Titan. These are places where we might find extraterrestrial life. Even with the 200-kilowatt solar-powered VASIMR we could do amazing things. We’re developing a concept to drive it close to the Sun, between Venus and Mercury, where it can get a momentum boost and catapult a probe into the outer solar system at high speed. This would let us deliver a package to Jupiter in one-and-a-half years; otherwise that trip takes about six.

One thing we’d like to do is maintain the ISS in orbit. The ISS has to be reboosted every few months; otherwise it gradually falls and burns up in the atmosphere. These reboosts require about 7 metric tons of rocket fuel per year. How much does it cost to get 7 metric tons of rocket fuel into orbit? $140 million. That’s the bill someone has to pay, each year, just for hauling up the fuel. The 200-kilowatt solar-powered VASIMR can do the same thing with about 320 kilograms of argon gas per year, which still costs about $7 million, but it decreases the price by a factor of 20. Of course, we have to make a little money ourselves, so the price decrease won’t be quite that large, but it can still save NASA a lot of money and net us a handy profit.

We would hope that, if not the US, maybe the Europeans, the Chinese, the Russians, or somebody else will develop a nuclear-electric power capability that we can marry up to this rocket. We have to realize that the US is no longer the only player. The US may choose not to do this, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will follow—not anymore. We no longer live in a confrontational world like the one that fueled the Apollo program in the 1960s. We live in a world that has to cooperate, to collaborate. The US has a tremendous opportunity to still be the leader here, but if it isn’t, others will be. Information is traveling faster everywhere now; technology has gained a foothold and developed in the nooks and crannies of the planet. The world has changed, and the US no longer has a monopoly on knowledge. We need to collaborate to build a capable space infrastructure so that we can truly explore.