Standardized field testing of assistant robots in a Mars-like environment

Controlled testing on standard tasks and within standard environments can provide meaningful performance comparisons between robots of heterogeneous design. But because they must perform practical tasks in unstructured, and therefore non-standard, environments, the benefits of this approach have barely begun to accrue for field robots. This work describes a desert trial of six student prototypes of astronaut-support robots using a set of standardized engineering tests developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), along with three operational tests in natural Mars-like terrain. The results suggest that standards developed for emergency response robots are also applicable to the astronaut support domain, yielding useful insights into the differences in capabilities between robots and real design improvements. The exercise shows the value of combining repeatable engineering tests with task-specific application-testing in the field

Merit - An evaluation tool for 100% renewable energy provision

Islands represent an interesting challenge in terms of energy supply. A great deal of work has been carried out to look at specific aspects of this issue on different islands. Unfortunately, results from one study cannot be easily applied to other islands due to island-specific resources and energy-use profiles. A quantitative evaluation tool (MERIT) is presented here, which is able to match half-hourly energy demands (heat, electricity, hot water and transport) with local supplies. The program examines the energy balance on any scale, from an individual building through to an entire country, thereby providing a powerful and generic aid to decision making. This paper demonstrates the generality and usefulness of MERIT by using it to analyse the options for creating an energy-autonomous community on a typical, small island off the west coast of Scotland. Results are presented showing the feasibility of accomplishing 100% renewable provision on this island using available local resources

The role of built environment energy efficiency in a sustainable UK energy economy

Energy efficiency in the built environment can make significant contributions to a sustainable energy economy. In order to achieve this, greater public awareness of the importance of energy efficiency is required. In the short term, new efficient domestic appliances, building technologies, legislation quantifying building plant performance, and improved building regulations to include installed plant will be required. Continuing these improvements in the longer term is likely to see the adoption of small-scale renewable technologies embedded in the building fabric. Internet-based energy services will see low-cost building energy management and control delivered to the mass market in order that plant can be operated and maintained at optimum performance levels and energy savings quantified. There are many technology options for improved energy performance of the building fabric and energy systems and it's not yet clear which will prove to be the most economic. Therefore, flexibility is needed in legislation and energy-efficiency initiatives

Public crises, public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analyzing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support

Creating citizen-consumers? Public service reform and (un)willing selves

About the book: Postmodern theories heralded the "death of the subject", and thereby deeply contested our intuition that we are free and willing selves. In recent times, the (free) will has come under attack yet again. Findings from the neuro- and cognitive sciences claim the concept of will to be scientifically untenable, specifying that it is our brain rather than our 'self' which decides what we want to do. In spite of these challenges however, the willing self has come to take centre stage in our society: juridical and moral practices ascribing guilt, or the organization of everyday life attributing responsibilities, for instance, can hardly be understood without taking recourse to the willing subject. In this vein, the authors address topics such as the genealogy of the concept of willing selves, the discourse on agency in neuroscience and sociology, the political debate on volition within neoliberal and neoconservative regimes, approaches toward novel forms of relational responsibility as well as moral evaluations in conceptualizing autonomy

Transform-limited X-ray pulse generation from a high-brightness self-amplified spontaneous-emission free-electron laser

A method to achieve high-brightness self-amplified spontaneous emission (HB-SASE) in the free-electron laser (FEL) is described. The method uses repeated nonequal electron beam delays to delocalize the collective FEL interaction and break the radiation coherence length dependence on the FEL cooperation length. The method requires no external seeding or photon optics and so is applicable at any wavelength or repetition rate. It is demonstrated, using linear theory and numerical simulations, that the radiation coherence length can be increased by approximately 2 orders of magnitude over SASE with a corresponding increase in spectral brightness. Examples are shown of HB-SASE generating transform-limited FEL pulses in the soft x-ray and near transform-limited pulses in the hard x-ray. Such pulses may greatly benefit existing applications and may also open up new areas of scientific research

Large anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic insulator-topological insulator heterostructures

We demonstrate the van der Waals epitaxy of the topological insulator compound Bi2Te3 on the ferromagnetic insulator Cr2Ge2Te6. The layers are oriented with (001) of Bi2Te3 parallel to (001) of Cr2Ge2Te6 and (110) of Bi2Te3 parallel to (100) of Cr2Ge2Te6. Cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy indicates the formation of a sharp interface. At low temperatures, bilayers consisting of Bi2Te3 on Cr2Ge2Te6 exhibit a large anomalous Hall effect (AHE). Tilted field studies of the AHE indicate that the easy axis lies along the c-axis of the heterostructure, consistent with magnetization measurements in bulk Cr2Ge2Te6. The 61 K Curie temperature of Cr2Ge2Te6 and the use of near-stoichiometric materials may lead to the development of spintronic devices based on the AHE.Comment: Related papers at http://pettagroup.princeton.ed