New Tabletop Fusion Technology, Mobile Robotics Standardizes and Contact Lenses for the Ears

This Week in Engineering

Nuclear fusion has been the Holy Grail of power generation for over half a century. The promise is considerable: clean, essentially limitless energy. Multiple approaches to sustained nuclear fusion have been tried and are currently in research, from giant multibillion-dollar tokomaks to mechanically induced shockwave driven liquid metal devices. Colorado-based Electric Fusion Systems claims that a new proprietary fuel combined with a relatively simple electric discharge device can create very low-cost electricity directly from fusion reactions, without nuclear waste.

Hearing loss is a serious global problem, one that is growing as Western populations age. Conventional hearing aid technology is limited by the fundamental part of his system: the transducer. Speaker technology based on coils has distinct limitations, but a Mannheim, Germany based startup, Vibrosonic, has developed a piezoelectric speaker element the firm calls a “hearing contact lens” which rests directly on the user’s eardrum. Direct stimulation combined with a very wide frequency response means enhanced understanding of speech for wearers of the new device.

Mobile robots are now commonplace in large industrial and warehousing operations but are still largely limited to the jobs formally performed by forklift trucks. A major problem in widespread adoption is finding a way to get robotics from different vendors to communicate with each other, allowing different robots doing different functions to operate seamlessly in a complex factory environment. Industry incubator MassRobotics has released a preliminary set of industry standards that will form a basis for future open-source communications protocols to enable effective use of mobile robotics across multiple industries. The development team included engineers from major robot manufacturers as well as influential end-users such as Procter & Gamble and DHL.

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