Control Engineering

If only our cars COULD be powered with a $1 bill.  I have been stuffing $50's in my car's tank, and I bet that you have been too for a "fill up" recently.  I called the Cherryland Electric Cooperative which provides the electric power to my workshop and the neighborhood I live in to see what the latest rules are for selling electricity to the grid.  Having operated powerplants up to 100 MW, I am considering generating a little bit of electricity in my spare time to sell to the grid.  Perhaps this will become a new cottage industry.  The person who ans...Read More

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The new symbol of USA national independence.
 
Ensuring our nation's security and prosperity could be as simple as a windmill.  Talk of President' having making the hard choices that will break our nation's dependence on foreign owned oil and ensure our economic prosperity by meeting tomorrow's energy needs is good, but makes it sound a lot more difficult than it is. 

Modern designed windmills are well suited to the task and are very simple and readily available.  How many would you like?  Wind turbine generators and their associated equipment such as concrete anchors, steel towers, etc, can be build by workers...Read More

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MSWord Clip Art Photo

GRADUATE, THEN ON TO OJT (on the job training)
OK, so graduating from college has turned out to be just the start of your real world education. You thought you were done with textbooks, lab fees, and classrooms. Then you discover that to keep your edge in fields like robotics, where the technology is constantly changing, you have traded textbooks for technical manuals and data sheets. You have traded lab fees for piles of wrecked test equipment and burned out components tested to destruction, and time that was spent in class rooms is now time spent at technical conferences and seminars.

Learning, in a constantly changing field, neve...Read More

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BigDog - Boston Dynamics

ROBOTS WITH LEGS
Wheels only get you so far on the planet surface.  Tank treads get you a little farther.  To go everywhere you need legs.  The US Army has found itself needing to go places that only pack mules can go.  DARPA money is allowing Boston Dynamics to look into what it would take to build robotic pack mules for the US Army and they have made remarkable progress in the area of robots with legs.  BigDog, shown in the ...Read More

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CONNECTIONS
Carole Heiderer, (231) 883-3301 a Realtor in the Traverse City, MI area, is an AIM Team supporter and widow of the developer of the HMMWV. From talking to her I get the impression that her whole life, the secrets of government research and development have swirled around her. She is a supporter of our project because we apparently have picked up where her husband left off. The last project he was working on and died before finishing was called the "black box" which would allow HMMWV's to drive themselves. The last time she saw it, it was being sent to a small electronics company in NJ to see if they could reverse engineer it and preserve her patent rights to the design. ...Read More

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TFD (Torque Feedback Device), 4" x 4", - Danaher Motion

ELECTRIC STEERING
For those of us working on installing electric steering, both automatic and drive-by-wire, there are a lot of specialized parts available now.  One of the clever and usefulf devices for drive-by-wire is the Torque Feedback Device like those made available by Danaher Motion.

Torque feedback helps close the loop between human operator and what the steering system is doi...Read More

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Anthony Levandowski, Test & Measurement World's 2005 Engineer of the Year award winner. 

WYSI not necessarily WYG
Technical journals and the popular press can interpret the same story two very different ways.  You hall have probably seen the news clips of Anthony Levandowski's driverless dirt bike falling over.  You probably have not seen the clips of it working.  I have seen the Anthony Levandowski - DARPA Dirt Bike clip many times now....Read More

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"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."   --   John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address - January 20th 1961.  

The implications of these few words are enormous.  They moved a generation to action and for those who heard them are still calling people to public service.  They are part of what drives some of the AIM Team volunteers to spend their free time learning how to automate a US Army truck, because it is something we can do for the country.
...Read More

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AIM SHOP
Brakes hook up.

Linda Graham's Sword, a Special Projects Award, displayed on a high shelf at the AIM Technical Library where she volunteers.  The box is an old ammo crate, to keep the Defense theme going, recycling with a theme to it.  The background is an old Union Jack from a Navy ship.  One more thing before she takes it home, the name plate.... still waiting for it to arrive from the engravers.  The award was made possible by donations made specifically for volunteer awards.  

DEFENSE SPECIAL PROJECTS AWARD
On July 25, 2008, long-standing AIM Team member Linda Graham was presented with an anti...Read More

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Change is happening rapidly in AGVs.

The debate in the press now has shifted to how best to use the DARPA Urban Challenge technology and what the far reaching, perhaps unintended consequences of their introduction may be.  No longer is the discussion about if it is possible or when in the future it may happen.  The big car companies have said when they plan to introduce their driverless models and people seem to accept that.  People are grabbing onto the idea that this technology is available and are speculating on how it will affect eve...Read More

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RoboCars Episode 5
The DARPA Urban Challenge is an international competition to develop a truly autonomous vehicle: a car that can think and drive itself.  The first place prize is $2-million cash, second place is $1-million, and third place is $500,000. Itʼs the third robotics competition sponsored by the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The first two were in the desert. This challenge, however, takes place in an urban environment requiring the “robocars” to have more sophisticated driving skills.  A total of 89 teams entered, including defense contractors, large universities, small colleges and entrepreneurial teams. This ep...Read More

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RoboCars - Episode 4
Years in the making, the day of the DARPA Urban Challenge final race has finally arrived.  Of the original ten teams RoboCar has been following, nine made it to the semi-final round, but just four – Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Oshkosh – have qualified for the final competition. With a $ 2-milion dollar first prize at stake, the teams scramble to prep their bots for the starting gate. After months of hands-on problem solving, the teams have to step back and let their robots do their thing - auto...Read More

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