One of the current projects in development here at CATLab is the Project54 mobile software for the Dover Police Mounted Patrol Unit. Combined with the Motorola Symbol MC5574, our Project54 mobile software allows the mounted officers to fill out their required contact cards quicker and more efficiently than writing the information on the card directly. The video below depicts a side-by-side comparison between writing a Dover Police Field Contact Card versus filling out the same information using our Project54 mobile software on the Motorola Symbol MC5574.

Mark Taipan

Recently, users of Project54 have reported that the USB devices connected to their in-car computers at random would not power up correctly. Typically, a system reboot would solve the problem and power up the devices, but this situation is not ideal. The police officers using the Project54 application need all USB devices to consistently perform, and rebooting their computers is time consuming. Carol Perkins and I set up a diagnostic test in which 5 USB devices, including a GPS, wireless antenna, touch screen monitor, video adapter, and scanner, were set up in 5 different USB port configurations with a CoolGear USB hub. As shown in the figure below, two devices, the video adapter and the Symbol Scanner DS6707, had issues booting up. The Symbol Scanner did not power on 14% of the 50 trial runs. Of these 7 failures, twice the device booted initially, but eventually powered down without instruction. The figure below also shows that the power failures occurred while connected to 4 different ports, so we concluded that the reported problem was not due to any power allocation problems within the USB hub. When powered correctly, this scanner performs exceptionally well, so users will be asked to unplug and then replug the scanner when a power up is not successful. 

- Erika Swanson

These Lycra gloves are part of a new MIT prototype for a new gesture-based computing system. Graduate student Robert Wang and Associate Professor Jovan Popović developed this system that improves upon other techniques that use interfaces that adapt to human movement, such as the Nintendo Wii. Lycra gloves made of irregularly shaped patches are part of a system that rapidly produces 3-D images of the gloves on the screen using a new algorithm to produce images in a fraction of a second. Rather than incessantly calculating individual sets of data to determine the position of a hand, instead the algorithm searches through a database of various hand positions and selects the corresponding digital model.

I think it’s especially interesting that the motions used to control the screen on a Multi-Touch Table, in my experience, are very similar to the motions used with this gesture-based system in a virtual world, as shown in the video below. This prototype is faster and less expensive than the current methods to track the movements of the human body, and has the potential to increase the usage of such technology in areas like evaluations of athletic performances, animation, and of course video games.

Erika Swanson

A recent post on Slashdot led me to this interesting video produced by the folks at Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Using their Vision Chip, a CMOS image sensor with a parallel image processor, they created an in-air, finger motion based interface for a mobile phone. While I do not believe that in-air typing is the right application for this interface (a lack of tactile feel will I think turn off users), this certainly is a fascinating project that may be what we see commercially in the next couple of decades! Take a look at their video below. Also, if you haven’t done so, check out Zeljko’s post about Project Natal – a similar input interface for the future Xbox 360.

Mark Taipan

A memory resistor or memristor, is a controllable resistor that stores information it has acquired, hence the memory part. The memristor is a combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. It is on the cutting edge of memory, but it has now been found that the memristor may also be able to perform logic functions. This opens up the possibility of performing computations on the same chip as the memory is located, greatly increasing speed.

Memristors offer the advantages of requiring less energy to operate, being faster, and storing over twice as much data as solid state technologies (flash). Since they store information, they can be used like a computer that doesn’t need to boot up. HP Labs is on the front line of development for architectures to harness the immense potential of the memristor. Probably the most exciting part is that the memristor acts like human memory, which could lead to computations like the human brain, rather than following the von Neumann architecture. (Check out the article on the link HP Labs above)

Michael Litchfield

A couple of weeks ago our ECE department hosted Bret Harsham of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) as a part of the ECE900 graduate seminar. Bret gave a very interesting lecture about the ways of shortening voice dialogs through using a contextual push-to-talk button. The title of the lecture was “Contextual Push-to-Talk: Shortening Voice Dialogs to Improve Driving Performance.”

The focus of the lecture was on a prototype in-car voice user interface (VUI) which was tested during my MERL internship last summer. As opposed to the contemporary in-car VUIs, which use only one push-to-talk button for issuing commands, this work presents a way of utilizing multiple push-to-talk buttons depending on the context of the query. For example, if we have three domains of interest, we can associate one push to talk button for each of them. Therefore, we skip multiple steps which are otherwise required in order to switch to a desired domain and initiate a voice search.

This work was recently accepted for publication at MobileHCI 2010 conference.

Zeljko Medenica

This summer I have had a great opportunity to be an intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA. This is not only a great prospect for my professional career, but also a chance to experience how working in a real company looks like.

MERL is a daughter company of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation from Japan and therefore they have close collaboration. As the name implies, it is a research facility where people work on many different areas, such as digital communications, multimedia, user interfaces, speech interaction, mechatronics and many others. Their overwhelming publications page just confirms how important research is in this institution.

As a MERL intern, I am a member of the speech group. My advisor here is Bret Harsham and for this summer we have been working on testing an in-car speech user interface which was developed here at MERL. This interface enables contacts, music and points-of-interest selection using voice commands. The experiments will be concerned with the influence this interface may have on driving performance and will be performed on their driving simulator (shown in the picture below).

The driving simulator is based on a racing game simulation and consists of three huge DLP projector screens which create a very wide field-of-view, force feedback steering wheel and pedals, and a motion chair. The motion chair is very powerful, because it simulates the vibrations caused by road surface and engine, as well as the tilting of the car caused by acceleration and deceleration. The feeling it produces is very realistic and it may help prevent simulator sickness which was so common in our simulator studies.

We are looking forward to publishing the results of this interesting study. So, stay tuned for more info on this topic.

Zeljko Medenica

Microsoft is either loved or hated by most of society these days. But no matter where you stand on the company, you have to agree that the vision they show in the video below is amazing, and displays great contributions to society. The video is an envisioned future of 2019, just ten years ahead. It’s amazing how Microsoft takes the time to make such a production out of their ideas for future technology, so that the rest of society can understand their vision. My favorite part is the personal devices that people carry around, which interact with many other devices wherever they go. Enjoy.

Mike Litchfield

In this article from MSNBC.com, the Associated Press explains how Cyberdyne, a Japanese Robotics company has been showing off their newly designed rehabilitation suit. The HAL (hybrid assistive limb) is aimed to help those with weak leg muscles and mobility issues in daily life. It has sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin and sends them to the mechanical leg braces that are strapped to the thighs and knees, as well as belted to the waist.

Although it is very expensive now, it may be more affordable in the future, and definitely seems like a more portable option for some people with disabilities.

Mike Litchfield

Last week an interesting lecture was held by Dr. Frank Rudolph of Beacon Power about flywheel energy storage systems as part of the UNH’s energy club series of seminars on renewable energy.

Flywheels are not a new concept, but the technological development in the last 10 years or so made it feasible to become a commercial product. How a flywheel storage system works? The concept is actually pretty simple: it absorbs energy from the grid and stores it in a high-density rotating flywheel. The flywheel thus acts as a kinetic energy battery. Since it spins at very high speeds (>20000 rpm) it is capable of providing very high bursts of energy in a very short period of time. It consists of an electric motor enclosed in a vacuum container and suspended on magnetic bearings. This way almost no losses are encountered due to inertia in the bearings and the surrounding air. After the power loss the motor acts as a generator, converting stored kinetic energy into electric energy.

There are many possible uses for flywheels: trains, cars, uninterruptible power supplies, pulse power, but one of the most interesting is the frequency regulation of the grid. By observing frequency changes it is possible to determine if the power demand is higher (frequency drops) or lower (frequency rises) than the supply. Given the property of the flywheels to deliver high amounts of energy in short periods of time, it sounds like a very promising solution to a very complex problem of power management.

Zeljko Medenica