What's Next In Science & Technology

New research published this week has identified the fundamental differences between two and four legged animals that explain what limits their top speeds.

The research, published in the journals Nature and Biology Letters and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), shows how a human running into a high-speed corner is forced to slow down and increase the amount of time their foot is in contact with the ground in order to withstand increased centripetal forces. Four legged animals do not appear to have this limitation.

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The Varioptic lens is based on the principles of electro-wetting. This is the tendency of liquid to spread on a substrate.

"It means we can tune the shape of the drop to create a lens. Think about a tunable lens, like in the human eye."

The lens has a simple structure: two liquids, of equal density, sandwiched between two windows in a conical vessel. One liquid is water, which is conductive. The other, oil, acts as a lid, allowing the engineers to work with a fixed volume of water, and provides a measure of stability for the optical axis.

The interface between the oil and water will change shape depending on the voltage applied across the conical structure. At zero volts, the surface is flat, but at 40 volts, the surface of the oil is highly convex.

The first product will be the auto focusing lens for cell phone cameras, but Varioptics will soon have a true zoom capability, using two of the liquid lenses.

While these liquid lenses will allow us to take better pictures with our digital cameras, the largest potential is in the medical imaging and biometry/identification fields.

With its response time of 2/100 of a second, the variation rate of the liquid lens is a major asset for character reading, bar codes, or other biometrical identification elements such as iris and fingerprint recognition.

Medical uses include endoscopy, imaging by confocal microscopy, laser beam focus, control on tumours...

Ophthalmology can also take benefit of the adaptive liquid optics, perhaps eventually fashioning a life-like artifical eye for those who suffer from ocular diseases.

Researchers from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and their colleagues from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands jointly unveiled a new breed of energy-efficient, two-legged, powered robots with a surprisingly human gait.

"These innovations are a platform upon which others will build. This is the foundation for what we may see in robotic control in the future," says Michael Foster, NSF expert on computer and information science and engineering and one of the managers who oversaw this research.

a) Cornell University, b) Delft University, c) MIT

By applying concepts rooted in "passive-dynamic walkers"--devices that can walk down a shallow slope powered only by the pull of gravity--the engineers have crafted robots that, in the case of the Cornell biped, can walk on level ground yet use as little as one-half the wattage of a standard compact fluorescent bulb.

The MIT walker provides a platform to study motor learning with a passive-dynamic design. In simple terms, the robot can teach itself to walk in as little as 10 minutes, adapting to terrain as it moves.

All three robots verify a long-held hypothesis that suggests motors can substitute for gravity in passive-dynamic walking devices. A slope is not required, only careful engineering.

Representing fundamental developments in computer and mechanical control, the robots are helping researchers understand bipedal motion and revealing processes that underlie human locomotion and motor learning. Applications are already on the horizon, with one researcher exploring how the new approach to robotics can aid development of increasingly energy-efficient prosthetic devices.