Software

What Is Generative AI at the Edge?

Tyler Saltsman, CEO of EdgeRunner AI, joins the Aerospace & Defense Technology podcast to explain how the aerospace and defense industry can adopt generative AI at the edge.

Product of the Month

See the product of the month: Dewesoft's OBSIDIAN®, a breakthrough data acquisition (DAQ) instrument that combines the best features of a high-end DAQ system, a long-term datalogger, a real-time EtherCAT data server, and a signal conditioning front end.

New on the Market

See what's new on the market, including ASM's posiwire® sensors WST61, WST85, and WST21; Allegro MicroSystems' third product in its High Voltage Power-Thru™ portfolio; Sumida America's CDPQ/T150 Series of high-current power inductors; the advanced new series of USB Type C Plugs and Sockets from Keystone Electronics Corp.; Analog Devices, Inc.'s IMU; and binder's latest enhancements to its panel mount connectors in M12 size.

Harnessing Wind and Solar Power Via Neural Networks

The team hopes this project can better position renewable energy as the primary source of electricity in the industry sector. The project aims to enable researchers and renewable energy installation companies to determine the optimal number of solar panels and wind turbines needed to prevent over or under production.

AI Advances Heart Research

A promising way to study disease and test new drugs is to use cellular and engineered tissue models in a dish, but existing methods to study heart cell contraction and calcium handling require a good deal of manual work, are prone to errors, and need expensive specialized equipment. Researchers at Columbia Engineering unveiled a groundbreaking new tool today that addresses these challenges head-on: BeatProfiler.

Unique Datapath Architecture Yields Real-Time Computing

Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed and successfully flight tested a high-performance computing platform, known as the Descent and Landing Computer (DLC), to suit the demands of safe, autonomous, extraterrestrial spacecraft landings for robotic and human exploration missions.

Computer Vision Lends Precision to Robotic Grappling

Innovators at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) have developed computer vision software that derives target posture determinations quickly and then instructs an operator how to properly align a robotic end-effector with a target that they are trying to grapple.

Generative AI: Reshaping the Industrial Value Chain with the Industrial Copilot

Companies worldwide are faced with a shortage of skilled labor as experienced workers retire and not enough new talent enters the workforce to compensate. To address this, companies must find a way to capture knowledge from experienced workers and make it both accessible and enticing to new hires. Generative AI can help address this by transforming the way humans and machines interact and collaborate using solutions such as Siemens Industrial Copilot.

When Is Precision Motion Control the Right Choice?

Precision motion control solutions supply an even higher level of motor control, often synchronized over several axes of motion or motors. But when are they the right choice? Read this story to find out.

Ant Insights Lead to Robot Navigation Breakthrough

Have you ever wondered how insects are able to go so far beyond their home and still find their way home? The answer to this question is not only relevant to biology but also to making the...

Creating the Self-Healing Grid of the Future

It’s not hard to imagine the potential value of a self-healing grid, one able to adapt and bounce back to life, ensuring uninterrupted power even when assailed by a hurricane or a group of bad...

My Opinion: Who Was Grace Hopper?

My opinion: Some last-minute, posthumous nominations for the Tech Briefs Rising Star Award for Women in Engineering.

Creating Synthetic Cell Images for Enhanced Microscopy Analysis

The images that come out of this model are ready to be used to train segmentation models. In a sense, it’s doing microscopy without a microscope.

Product of the Month

See the product of the month: The new multi-purpose ICAM-B charge amplifier from Kistler, which is ideal for use with piezoelectric sensors.

New on the Market

See what's new on the market, including OnLogic's new Tacton Series of rugged panel PCs and industrial touchscreen displays; binder's M12 series of surface-mount devices; SINAMICS DriveSim Basic's new software solution; L. S. Starrett's latest Video System in its KMR Series: the new KMR-MX 200; and more.

A ‘Smarter’ Way to Protect an Electric Grid

The team, led by Data Scientist Sumit Purohit, is trying to create a tool that sorts and prioritizes cyber threats on the fly. The idea is to give grid operators a clear blueprint to identify and address the biggest threats first and to protect against them without a mad scramble for resources down the road.

‘Attacker’ Device to Protect AVs from Cyberattacks

To help improve the safety and security of AVs, researchers have devised a novel algorithm designed to mimic an attacking device. The algorithm lets researchers identify areas for improvement in autonomous vehicle security.

Innovative AI Approach Makes the Most of Sparse Sensor Data

An innovative approach to artificial intelligence (AI) enables reconstructing a broad field of data, such as overall ocean temperature, from a small number of field-deployable sensors using low-powered edge computing, with broad applications across industry, science, and medicine.

A Novel Technique to Create Energy-Efficient Microelectronics

Microelectronics face a key challenge because of their small size. To avoid overheating, microelectronics need to consume only a fraction of the electricity of conventional electronics while still operating at peak performance. Researchers have achieved a breakthrough that could allow for a new kind of microelectronic material to do just that.

Self-Powered Sensor for Harvesting Magnetic Energy

Because it requires no battery that must be recharged or replaced, and because it requires no special wiring, such a sensor could be embedded in a hard-to-reach place, like inside the inner workings of a ship’s engine. There, it could automatically gather data on the machine’s power consumption and operations for long periods of time.

New Products

See the new products, including Kollmorgen's latest update to its AKD2G Servo Drive, Teledyne FLIR IIS's Bumblebee® X series, Emerson's Movicon.NExT™ HMI/SCADA, Pleora Technologies' expanded eBUS Edge GigE Vision software transmitter solution, Bodine Electric Company's 12 new AC inverter-duty hypoid hollow shaft gearmotors, Linear Servo Motor from Moticont, and more.

ChatGPT Enables Roboticist to Choreograph Flying Robots

Professor Angela Schoellig from the Technical University of Munich uses ChatGPT to develop choreographies for swarms of drones to perform along to music. An additional safety filter prevents mid-air collisions. Read on to learn more.

Remote Robot Monitoring and Error Recovery Boosts Integrator Capacity, Slashes Downtime

When a robot cell experiences unplanned downtime, John Bridgen’s first priority as Director of Customer Satisfaction at Precision Cobotics is finding out exactly what happened. Traditionally, this “root cause analysis” and subsequent debugging has required onsite visits and, at least initially, a degree of guesswork. Read on to learn how the process has been ameliorated.

Improving Surveying Efficiency by Using Robots and Precision Positioning

In partnership with Point One, Civ Robotics is ensuring that precise construction layouts won’t be at odds with efficiency. Land surveying is a critical stage in the construction layout process, during which workers use various forms of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to mark specific locations for builders. Read on to learn more.

Generative AI that Imitates Human Motion

An international group of researchers has created a new approach to imitating human motion through combining central pattern generators (CPGs) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The method not...

Understanding Space Sustainability

The issue of space sustainability has been gaining more attention with the growing population of objects in low Earth orbit. This debris needs to be tracked to avoid collisions. Test your knowledge about space sustainability in this quiz.