Buyers’ Guide
64
Choosing TheRight Bench Power Supply
38
Teach Your Drones To Do More Than Fly Tech Focus70
certiFications:72
“We can even create our own medical device and test it on our neighbour” —
Kalyan Varma, vice president - Business stream Products at tuV rheinland - tuV rheinland (india) Pvt Ltd
MicrocontroLLers:
“Most connected devices are nodes at the last centimetre of networks” —sanjay Gupta, director, automotive Bu, nXP semiconductors
Interviews
20
Artificial Intelligence A Beautiful Artificial Mind26 Embedded
Gate-Level Simulations: An Increasing Trend
30
Tech FocusA Sunrise Peppered With Drones
44
InnovationDiabeto: A 360-Degree Diabetes-Management Solution
48
Telecom5G: The Next-Generation Network
56
Test & Measurement The Latest In Scopes73 Manufacture
Wearable Devices: Essential Inputs for Design Engineers (Part 2 of 2)
76
EFY Plus DVDSoftware And Tools To Enrich Your Digital Electronic Utilities
78
EventIndia Electronics Week 2016: The New-Age Electronics Show
87
Make in IndiaMarket Survey: Keeping An Eye on India’s Surveillance Industry
eStyle
112
Buyers’ Guide: Buying A 127cm Flat- Panel TV114
Do-It-Yourself: Ten Things You Can Do With Your Old Android Device95 Making Arduino Shields Using Fritzing 97 Lossless Image Compression Using MATLAB 98 RGB Colour Generator
100 Infrared Motion-Sensing Relay Switch 102 PIN Diode Based Fire Sensor
104 Fridge Temperature And Humidity Indicator 106 High-Impedance Audio Buffer With JFET 108 Plus-Minus 5V Supply From 9V Battery
Do-IT-Yourself
06 Feedback 08 Q&A 10 Useful Websites 14 Tech News
84 Make in India: Industry News 92 New Products
110 First Look 115 Business Pages Ads 126 Electronics Mart Ads
130 Product Categories Index + Attractions During 2016 131 Advertisers’ Index
Regulars
C
ontents
• Intuitive Gesture Control• Test and Measurementequipment • Buying Noise Meters
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February 2016
Vol. 04 | No. 10 ISSN-2454-4426
Signal Processing With Sonic Visualiser ...I R: A Data-Analysis And Statistical-Computing Tool ... IV Let Us Learn how to Program 8085 ...VII
EFY Plus DVD
‘Spot An Error’
AWARD Winners
In ‘Things You Wanted to Know’ Q&A section of December 2015 issue, underQ2, details related to the Bluetooth module and Bluetooth dongle including Figs 1 and 2 are wrong. Fig. 1 should be HC-05 module. Fig. 2 should be Bluetooth dongle and not as mentioned in the third paragraph. Also, there is no figure of
BT 24 module as explained in the second paragraph.
Darshan Shah
In ‘Joystick Based Stepper Motor Angle Controller using AVR MCU’ article published in December 2015 issue, there
is mismatch between Figs 1 and 4. In Fig. 4, pins 5 and 6 of LCD should be connected to ground and PC1 of MCU,
respectively. In Fig. 1, VR1 should be connected to 5V and pin 15 of LCD should
be connected to 5V through resistor R2. Ramakanta Mohanta
In the PCB layout of ‘Sensing Peripheral Devices with MC1489A Receiver’ circuit
published in December 2015 issue, jumper J2 shorting the tracks of RC1 and
RC2 is wrong. Samiuddhin
YOUR SUGGESTIONS
FEEDBACK
Circuits and
Microcontrollers
From electronicsforu.com
I will try making ‘Ultrasonic Radar Model Using Microcontroller ATmega128’ circuit published in February 2015 issue. Thank you for
sharing the information!
Briju
EFY. Thanks for the feedback!
In ‘Motion Detector Using NE555 Timer’ article published in August 2015
issue, what is TP0 to TP2. Where can I get the PIR module?
Rakesh Kumar
EFY. TP0 through TP2 are test points.
Voltages given in Test Points table may be helpful for beginners during troubleshooting. PIR modules are easily available in electronic component shops.
In New Delhi, you can get these from Lajpat Rai Market. PIRs like HC-SR501 modules are easily available online on
websites such as www.ebay.in I liked ‘12V Battery Absorb and Float Charger’ circuit published in September 2015 issue. Which tool is used for designing the PCB? Can you
send the complete kit of this project?
Praveen
EFY. We used gEDA software for
designing the circuit and PCB layout. The complete kit of this project is not available with us right now. However, you may check www.kitsnspares.com
for similar projects.
EFY NEW LAYout DESigN
The new layout of EFY January issue is amazing. It is very attractive. EFY covers the latest technology and new products. I love DIY section and open source materials in every issue. I am very thankful to EFY!
Samiuddhin
Through email
EFY. Thanks for the feedback! Your
feedback is important to us for im-provement and to make a difference in a better way. We highly appreciate your support for the benefit of our readers and look forward to hearing from you in the future, too.
thANKS!
I thank EFY circulation team for their swift action and support. I made a complaint regarding non-receipt of December issue. I received the issue within three days!
V. Nagaraj
Through email
EFY. Thanks for the feedback!
FiRSt LooK
In eStyle First Look section in De-cember 2015 issue, specification for OnePlus X by OnePlus is wrongly mentioned. It should be 2.3 quad-core system on chip, instead of 2.3 quad-core CPUs.
Ravichandra Metri
Through email
EFY. We normally get all data from
the original manufacturer’s website. Specifications printed in the article are clearly mentioned on OnePlus website.
Quiz SEctioN
I am a subscriber to EFY and it is very
December 2015 issue, the simulator code is not given.
Rakesh
Through email
EFY. There is no source code used
in this article. However, Multisim simulation file is used that is already included in the DVD accompanying the relevant EFY Plus.
helpful. It is great that I could work on a number of projects based on DIY section. I request you to increase the number of articles that include details on the working of sensors.
I also request you to include a quiz section based on the articles and interviews in the current volume.
Mohammed Shan H.
Through email
EFY. Thanks for the feedbacks and
suggestions!
FREQuENcY ShiFt KEYiNg
In ‘Frequency Shift Keying Communi-cation Simulator’ article published inQ A
&
THINGS YOU WANTED TO KNOW!
Answers compiled by EFY senior application engineer, Nidhi Kathuria. Letters and questions for publication may be addressed to Editor, Electronics For You, D-87/1, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase 1, New Delhi 110020 (e-mail: [email protected]) and should include name and address of the sender
Ques.
How to operate
60Hz electrical
appliances at 50Hz?
Momtaz
ans.
First of all try to contact the manufacturer of the appliance for safely operating at 50Hz with the manufacturer’s approval. The manu-facturer may have a solution.It is possible to purchase 60Hz sine-wave power systems that take 240V 50Hz on input and produce 115V 60Hz on output. These solutions are generally very expensive, and it is usu-ally more cost-effective to replace the tool or appliance.
Visicomm Industries manufac-tures, sells and rents a broad range of rotary and solid-state frequency converters and changer products rated from 1kVA to 5000kVA.
A frequency converter can be for single or three phases and can sometimes also change voltage, thus functioning as a power converter from 60Hz to 50Hz, from 50Hz to 60Hz and from 50Hz/60Hz to 400Hz. It can also be used for continuous duty or for testing products designed for export.
Q2.
wHat are tHe
consid-erations in sMps design?
please provide links or
e-Books for tHe saMe.
Mahesh kumar
a2.
In an SMPS design, you have to consider power output, input condi-tions, thermal and heat-sinking issues, component quality, PCB area, layout and footprint, performance testing and much more. Please follow the link for more details: electronicdesign.com/power/7-critical-steps-switching-power-supply-design
You may refer to the following SMPS books: Switch-Mode Power
Sup-plies by C.P. Basso, Switching Power Supply Design by A.I. Pressman, and Modern DC-To-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits by R.P. Severns and
G.E. Bloom.
You can also find a complete e-guide on SMPS design from the following link: http://caxapa.ru/
thumbs/348441/Switchmode_Pow-er_Supply_Handbook_3rd_edi.pdf -- handbook and http://www.smps.com/ Knowledge/Articles/Step-by Step_Fly-back_SMPS_Design.shtml
You can design an SMPS circuit based on the following online simula-tors freely available: www.poweresim.
com and www.ti.com/lsds/ti/analog/ webench/power.page
Q3.
wHat types of
accel-eroMeter sensors are
availaBle in tHe Market?
wHat points sHould Be
considered wHen Buying
an acceleroMeter?
pamarthi kanakaraja
a3.
There are various types of acceler-ometers available in the market based on various sensing principles. These are capacitive, piezoelectric, piezoresis-tive, Hall effect, magnetoresistive and heat transfer, etc.Consider the following points when buying an accelerometer:
Analogue versus digital. This is
determined by the hardware that is be-ing interfaced with the accelerometer. Analogue style accelerometers output a continuous voltage that is propor-tional to acceleration, whereas digital accelerometers usually use pulse width modulation (PWM) for output.
Number of axes. For most projects,
two axes are enough. However, if you want to attempt 3D positioning, you will need a 3-axis accelerometer.
Maximum swing. If you only care
about measuring tilt using Earth’s
grav-ity, a ±1.5g accelerometer will be more than enough. If you are going to use the accelerometer to measure the motion of a car, plane or robot, ±2g should give you enough headroom to work with. For a project that experiences very sud-den starts or stops, you will need one that can handle ±5g or more.
Sensitivity. With more sensitivity,
you will get more accurate readings.
Bandwidth. For slow-moving
tilt-sensing applications, a bandwidth of 50Hz will probably suffice. If you intend to measure vibrations or control a fast-moving machine, you will need a bandwidth of several hundred Hz.
Impedance/buffering issues.
Mainly involving analogue accelerom-eters, use a low-input offset rail to rail op-amp as a buffer to lower output impedance.
Q4.
How can one develop
a digital speedoMeter
using a sensor attacHed
to tHe front or rear
wHeel tHat also displays
distance (kM) and speed
(kMpH)?
aman Madan
a4.
Please refer ‘Microcontroller Based Speedometer-Cum-Odometer’ article published in EFY magazine in November 2008 issue. In the article you will find the following features: digital readout, speed displayed in kmph, dis-tance travelled displayed in kilometers, readings saved in non-volatile memory (EEPROM), home-brewed speed trans-ducer/sensor, self-reset to zero after completion of 99,999.9km and easy-to-build-and-fix onto the bike.www.dronezon.com/latest-uavs-news-drone-uses-research-innovation www.myfirstdrone.com
www.diydrones.com
www.droneflyers.com lesson-1-platform-rtf-arf-kit-custom-13989
www.robotshop.com/blog/en/make-uav-Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are something that fascinates most of us.
This month we have some websites that will help you know more about these drones
Compiled by niraj sahay
DIY Drones is a community based on Ning social networking
platform, and anybody who registers (it is free and easy) can post their own blog entries.
It is explicitly built as a social network for drone lovers. There are different groups that discuss drones on this website. It also offers facilities to create a meet-up
page for local drone fans.
MyFirstDrone has been building, buying and flying quadcopters and various other RC drones and model aircraft for the past several years. Tutorials on this website aim
to help you in buying all parts, to building and learning how to fly a
quadcopter in no time.
This site is all about helping beginners with buying and flying quadcopters and other multirotors.
In general, it focuses on building, buying and discussing drones. It
is run by CHI Associates (Craig Issod), who have decades of experience in building online communities and forums. Starting
in April 2013, a number of major upgrades and features were introduced and www.droneflyers.
com became a go-to site for
consumers desiring information and education on new drones.
RobotShop is one of the world’s leading sources for personal and professional robot technology that help increase pleasure, knowledge, liberty and security of individuals. They specialise in personal and
professional robot technology and offer a wide range of robotic products and services in this sector.
The site has a section on learning how to build a drone. So if you
are looking to get into drones and UAVs, then the tutorial series available on the website will help you understand the emerging field of UAVs and guide you through the process of building your own UAV
using off-the-shelf parts.
diydrones.com
myfirstdrone.com
droneflyers.com
robotshop.com
DroneZon is all about the world of drones, multirotors and quadcopters. The site is full of drone videos, UAV news, interviews with drone companies, drone DIY tips and learning materials on drone technology for beginners. It also shows you how drones are been used commercially and in other areas of our lives.
dronezon.com
GETTING STARTED WITH DRONES
Drone that can catch another
by firing a net at it
TECHNOLOGY UPDATES
Tech
NEWS
Engineers from Human-Interactive Robotics Lab (HIRoLab) at Michigan Technological University have filed a patent for a prototype for a drone-catching system that fires a net to take other unwanted aircraft down.
They have named the project Robotic Falconry and have said that the drone, equipped with a net shooter, can intercept and physically remove any intruding multi-rotor drone from private airspace. It can be autonomous or remote-controlled while tackling a drone.
According to the researchers, the net-shooting technique can be effective when force-landing unmanned intruders that would otherwise put the public at risk.
Getting drones to fly around without hitting things is a huge task. Obstacle-detection and motion-planning are two of computer science’s trickiest challenges, because of the complexity involved in creating real-time flight plans that avoid obstacles and handle surprises like wind and weather.
Two teams of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed software that allows drones to stop on a dime to make hairpin movements over, under and around some 26 distinct obstacles in a simulated forest.
One team has shown a small quad-rotor doing donuts and figure-eights through an obstacle course of strings and PVC pipes.
In a second CSAIL project, PhD student Anirudha Majumdar showed off a fixed-wing plane that avoids obstacles without any advance knowledge of the space, and even in the face of wind gusts and other dynamics.
The approach was to pre-program a library of dozens of Researchers are teaching drones to fly autonomously without ever crashing (Image courtesy: www.news.mit.edu) Drone catches another by firing a net at it (Image courtesy: www.brunchnews.com)
Drone that can do donuts, figure-eights around obstacles
distinct funnels that represent the worst-case behaviour of the system, calculated via a rigorous verification algorithm.
Polymer super suit designed using
solar energy
The Grossman group of MIT has developed a transparent polymer that can store energy by using a solar cell and release controllable heat at any time. This newly-engineered material depends upon the Sun, which is a practically inex-haustible source of energy and stores energy in the form of chemical energy, releasing it later as heat.
Jeffrey Grossman, lead researcher, has said that the product could be a boon for the clothing industry, and provide humans with a new type of protective wear. The team also explained that this concept first came to their mind while analysing the concept of harvesting solar energy for long-term usage, as required in various sectors.
Conventionally, solar energy is converted to electrical energy and serves as an environment-friendly renewable energy source, but the researchers wanted to come up with something new and innovative by using similar ideas.
The layer-by-layer solar thermal fuel polymer film comprises three distinct layers (Image courtesy: www.news.mit.edu)
Designer crystals for next-gen
electronics
Liquid is often seen as the kryptonite of electronics, known for damaging and corroding components. This is why a new process that uses vapour instead of liquid to grow designer crystals could lead to a new breed of faster, more powerful electronic devices.
The method is invented by an international team of scientists from University of Leuven in Belgium, National University of Singapore and CSIRO. For the first time, researchers have shown how designer crystals known as metal organic frameworks can be grown using a vapour method that is similar to steam hovering over a pot of hot water.
The crystals are the world’s most porous materials, and if applied to microelectronic devices, could significantly boost their processing power.
17
WWW.EFYMAG.COM ELECTRONICS FOR YOU | FEBRUARY 2016
Bandage to automatically deliver
medicine to a wound
Researchers from MIT have developed a new type of bandage that incorporates electronics and drug reservoirs to monitor and care for a wound. The durable hydrogel bandage is supple and flexible, allowing for full range of movement even if it is applied to a knee or an elbow. It also has a few innovative features such as temperature-monitoring electronics that automatically release medicine to fight infections.
The smart wound dressing is made of a rubbery hydrogel matrix that is 90 per cent water, one designed specifically to replicate the qualities of human tissue. The gel creates a strong bond with materials such as titanium, aluminium, silicon, ceramic, gold and other substances that are commonly used to build electronics.
Titanium wire runs through the gel to make the bandage conductive, allowing a number of electronic devices to be embedded, such as semiconductor chips. LED lights are also used; these can flash when a wound reaches a certain temperature or drug reservoirs run low. Medicine reservoirs are drilled into the hydrogel and travel to the wound via channels cut in the matrix.
Smart bandage has embedded electronics to track and treat wounds (Image courtesy: www.popularmechanics.com)
Wireless, dissolvable sensors to
monitor brain
A team of neurosurgeons and engineers has developed wireless brain sensors that monitor pressure and tempera-ture inside the brain and are then absorbed by the body, so that there is no need for surgery to remove the devices.
Developed by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and engineers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the implants can be used to monitor patients with traumatic brain injuries.
The devices are made mainly of polylactic-co-glycolic acid and silicone and can transmit accurate pressure and temperature readings as well as other information.
Disney’s robot can climb walls
Disney Research Zurich, along with ETH, an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management univer-sity, has developed a robot that can climb walls.
It is called VertiGo and is capable of making a near-seamless transition from the ground to a wall. It is also capable of mind-boggling wall-riding owing to a pair of tiltable propellers that provide thrust onto the wall, effectively sucking it against the vertical surface.
With two steerable wheels, VertiGo can be operated as a radio-controlled car. But, unlike the radio-controlled car, VertiGo has two infrared distance sensors mounted on the front to estimate its orientation in space.
The robot has potential use in entertainment, such as providing visual effects, but is also a general technology for locomotion on walls with possible other uses such as industrial inspection.
lasting solution. They developed a fast and reversible thermo-responsive polymer switching material that can be incorporated inside batteries to prevent thermal runaway. The material consists of conductive graphene-coated spiky nanostructure (nano-spiky) nickel particles as the conductive filler, along with a polymer matrix having a large thermal expansion coefficient. These nano-spikes have high electrical conductivity and high thermal sensitivity.
In order to conduct electricity, the nano-spikes must be in close vicinity. As temperature rises, the polythene stretches, causing the spikes to move apart from each other and thereby break electrical contact.
While experimenting, when the battery was heated up to 70°C, the polythene film quickly expanded like a balloon, shutting off the battery. But when the temperature dropped down to 70°C, the polyethylene shrunk, particles came in contact and the battery started regenerating electricity.
Bio-inspired LEDs glow using proteins
A new type of hybrid light emitting diode (HLED) termed BioLED has been developed by a team of German-Spanish scientists. It features protein cascade coatings in the form of rubber to make the LEDs glow. Drawing inspiration from nature’s bio-molecules, the scientists developed this hybrid
device that introduces luminescent proteins into a polymer matrix to produce luminescent rubber. It uses luminescent proteins to convert the blue light emitted by a regular LED into pure white light. The rubber is used to cover the LED to convert the light.
Manufacturing of LEDs involves inorganic components such as cerium and yttrium that are already in short supply and hence would not be sustainable for long. BioLEDs are easy to manufacture, are bio-degradable and can be efficiently recycled and replaced. These also come with less than ten per cent loss in luminous efficiency for over 100 hours.
Rubber with red, green and blue luminescent proteins are used to produce the BioLEDs (Image courtesy: www.materialsgate.de)
VertiGo, a wall-climbing robot including ground-wall transition (Image courtesy: www.disneyresearch.com)
The researchers tested the sensors in baths of saline solution that caused these to dissolve after a few days. Next, they tested the devices in the brains of rats. Having seen that the sensors are accurate and dissolve in the solution and in the brains of rats, researchers now are planning to test the technology on humans.
Lithium-ion battery that automatically
shuts down before over-heating
A research group comprising chemical engineers from Stanford University has developed a lithium-ion battery that automatically shuts down before over-heating, and starts charging once the temperature falls.
Zhenan Bao, team leader at CE research group at Stanford, and postdoctoral scholar Zheng Chen, turned to nanotechnology to look for a reversible and
long-R
ay Kurzweil, American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist, once said, “Artificial intel-ligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilisation a billion-fold.”Evolution of AI
The human race has fantasised about thinking machines right from the time of classical Greece. Homer’s Iliad talks about robots that were made by Greek God Hephaestus. While some of these robots were like humans, others were mere machines such as the golden tripods that served food and wine at feasts.
With the advent of modern computers it became feasible to create programs that performed difficult intellectual tasks. The first half of the 20th century saw British mathematicians and philosophers Ber-trand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead publish Principia Mathematica, which revolutionised formal logic.
In 1923, Karel Kapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), staged in London in 1923, was the first to use the word robot in English language. Much later, in 1956, John McCarthy created the phrase artificial intelligence (AI) while looking for words to describe the key topic of a conference. The same year saw
the demonstration of the first running AI program, Logic Theorist (LT), written by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert Si-mon, who were eminent personalities from Carnegie Institute of Technology, USA.
In the decade spanning 1952 to 1962, Arthur Samuel from IBM wrote the first game-playing program, for checkers, with enough ability to challenge a world champi-on. In 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum from Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, created ELIZA—an interactive program that was capable of participating in a discus-sion on any subject in English language.
The first national conference of Ameri-can Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was held in 1980 at Stanford, USA. By 1990s, key advances had taken place in all areas of AI, with noteworthy achieve-ments in machine learning, intelligent tutoring, case based reasoning, multi-agent planning, scheduling, uncertain reasoning, data mining, natural language understand-ing and translation, vision, virtual reality, games and many other topics.
And, it was in 1997 that Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, beat the current world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. By late 1990s, Web crawlers and other AI based information extraction programs became indispensable in the widespread use of the World Wide Web.
An introduction to AI
AI is the science and engineering of mak-ing intelligent machines, more so, intel-ligent computer programs. In simple terms, if a computer performs a function which if a human was to do would be called intelligent, then we can say the computer has intelligence.
Intelligence is a combination of knowl-edge and reasoning power since reasoning power construes facts that are unknown to knowledge. This criteria for AI is a very challenging task given that computers work on binary logic. When a computer only knows yes and no, it is
demand-A Beautiful
ArtificiAl Mind
Deepak Halan is associate professor at School of Management Sciences, Apeejay Stya University Fig. 1: ELIZA, an interactive program, was based on a very basic level of AI (Image courtesy: www.scaruffi.com)
ing to achieve results that are not strictly defined.
For example, if we had to create an AI thermostat to cool a house, the program would need to have knowledge of all seasons, weather conditions like El Niño and passage of time, plus it must be able to un-derstand concepts like warm, cool or too cold, apart from other aspects.
While we do not really realise it, the simplest human functions trans-late to thousands of lines of com-puter code. Most current AI systems are designed for only a few specific applications. One of the most popu-lar examples of an AI application was a chess program running on Deep Blue, IBM’s massively-parallel-computing system.
Deep Blue managed to defeat world chess champion Gary Kasp-arov because it could search 50 to 100 billion positions in the three minutes that each player had, to make their move.
AI applications can be buck-eted as knowledge based or expert systems. A minor knowledge based system could be a series of condi-tional statements, such as:
IF
the animal is a bird it does not fly it swims
it is black and white THEN it is a penguin.
As this system becomes more complex, the time it takes for a com-puter to arrive at an intelligent out-come beout-comes unacceptably high. Expert systems try to solve this issue by acquiring more knowledge from a human being by asking questions. Over time, the program learns from
experience and can actually solve problems or give advice based on what it has learned.
Some application areas of AI
AI is being used in all spheres of everyday life in developed countries. Given below are some key areas.
Online shopping. e-tailing sites
such as www.amazon.com deploy a process called collaborative filtering to compare a customer’s purchase patterns with those of other custom-ers and provide suggestions. AI can take such processes to the next level to increase loyalty.
In the near future, we can expect semi-autonomous agents surfing the Web to help us, that is, their creators with diverse tasks. Intel-ligent bots will shop for you online, do your financial transactions and more, without your interven-tion. You would only be required to provide the bots broad inputs with respect to what you want to get done. Websites such as www.
AskJeeves.com are using AI in the
hope of making the Internet a more intuitive place, where you get things done the same way you would do in the real world.
e-broking. In the Internet trading
environment, an e-broker is a sys-tem where clients are the prospec-tive buyers and sellers. Each client has a particular wish-list. In security trading, a buyer can specify type of product, number of lots, maximum purchase price, expiry date, time and other details.
The seller can specify product, number of lots, minimum selling price, expiry date, time and the like. The system preserves a database of outstanding requests from prospec-tive buyers and sellers.
For a buyer, the system screens and shortlists a reasonable number of sellers for further analysis. The system matches buyers and sellers in the shortlist. For each buyer-seller pair, the system makes use of a set of rules and comes up with a
rating for the pair. It ranks possible sellers according to the ratings. Top-ranking sellers are recommended to the buyer.
In such a brokerage system, AI techniques are applied to the short-listing stage and the matching stage. The amount of computation increas-es sharply with a rise in the number of clients and requests. The focus of research is therefore on efficient strategies and algorithms so that the system can respond to clients’ re-quests within a short span of time. A security trading system is expected to complete several thousand transac-tions every day and the system has to answer in just a few seconds.
Bioinformatics. AI is critical
for the evolution of bioinformatics. Presently, molecular biologists are involved in some notable data-collection projects. Latest genome-sequencing projects are producing a huge volume of data linked to the function and structure of biological molecules and sequences.
Other complementary high-throughput technologies, such as DNA micro-arrays, are swiftly generating big amounts of data that are too overpowering for traditional methods for biological data analysis.
Understanding of this rich data could deeply impact our interpreta-tion of life at the molecular level. However, the illustration of biological knowledge is a very daunting job and increasingly demands more po-tent and refined computational tools.
AI and other heuristic methods (in particular, machine learning, data mining, cluster analysis, pat-tern recognition and knowledge rep-resentation) could possibly offer key solutions for the fresh hurdles posed by the progressive transformation of biology into a data-massive science.
Some key areas where AI ap-proaches are specifically encourag-ing and turnencourag-ing out to be fruitful are for prediction of protein’s structure and function, semiautomatic drug design, interpretation of nucleotide
Fig. 2: IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine, which defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov (Image courtesy: www.scaruffi.com)
sequences and knowledge acquisi-tion from genetic data.
There is no doubt that applica-tion of AI to computaapplica-tional molecu-lar biology demands exceedingly interdisciplinary and complementary skills, and these are seldom pro-vided for in most current aca-demic curricula. Interdisciplinary is interesting, however, unless AI and computational biology communities collaborate closely, development of new methodologies and algorithms is likely to lose pace.
Gaming. Another big area in
which AI plays a vital role is the gaming industry. In the 1990s, we saw the first attempts to mass-pro-duce AI based toys and games in the form of Tamagotchi dolls, Giga Pets, first widely-released robot, Furby and much more. Later an enhanced type of domestic robot, Aibo, a robotic dog with intelligent features and autonomy, was launched.
AI has also been applied to video
games in the form of video game bots, which are designed to stand in as opponents when people are either not available or are not de-sired. In a game called Left 4 Dead, AI based director decides where en-emies brood and how maps are laid out to be more or less demanding at various points of play.
It is important for gamers to feel that the characters that are inside the game are almost real. Certain games are based on neural network-ing technology, which is used to cre-ate characters that learn as the game progresses. Characters in a fighting game, for example, could be taught battle skills in the same manner as the humans.
Then there are computing machines available in the market, which can play master-level chess with you. These are based on some level of AI and use aggressive computation force in evaluating hundreds of thousands of different positions. To beat a world cham-pion by sheer computing force and known reliable heuristics requires evaluation of as many as 200 million positions per second.
Music and AI. Since long, music
has evolved with technology. Com-puter-science engineers have been trying to make computers match the activities of skilful musicians, using AI. Composition, performance, mu-sic theory and sound processing are some of the major areas on which research in music and AI is on.
Also, efforts to model music cog-nition with AI are generally looked upon as methods of improving our understanding of both human psychology and intellect. Once an effective model of the music listener has been accomplished, it can be improvised into a more complex model consisting of the listener, performer and composer, all put together. It then becomes a self-learning AI system. For example, a composing program can get all the required input information from its
environment by listening to musi-cal performances. Also, this more sophisticated model can be very insightful in terms of understanding the behaviour of musicians.
Conclusion
Haley Joel Osment played a robot created with the ability to have emo-tions, dreams and desires in Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a sci-fi adaptation of Pinocchio story.
There has been a certain level of resistance to AI due to the fear of the world being taken over by ma-chines, as the gap between humans and machines becomes narrower. However, there is also the belief that a machine can never be as good as a human being in making business decisions.
There is a school of thought that believes that human-level intel-ligence can be achieved by writing large numbers of programs but most AI researchers believe that new and creative fundamental ideas are re-quired. While it cannot be predicted by when human-level intelligence will be achieved, we do not really need to simulate conscious human thought as such.
The emphasis today is on developing computers that can be operated intuitively with minimum human involvement. This demands a system that can crunch data on a platform and in a device-agnostic manner. Ideally, development of meaningful AI will demand that ma-chines obtain some form of human consciousness to create useful and powerful assistants.
While there has been rapid pro-gress in hardware, storage and paral-lel-processing architectures, the field of artificial consciousness remains in its infancy stage. And much like the human body, this system is expected to carry out its functions and adapt to its user’s requirements without the need of the user to go into minute details of its functioning.
Fig. 4: A musician performing with robots inspired by AI (Image courtesy: www. classicalite.com)
Fig. 5: Haley Joel Osment played a robot in Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Image courtesy: www. spielbergfanclub.com)
Fig. 3: Aibo, a robotic dog with intelligent features and autonomy (Image courtesy: www. digitaltrends.com)
G
ate-level simulation (GLS) is used to boost the confidence regarding implementation of a design and can help verify dynamic circuit behaviour, which cannot be verified accurately by static methods. It is a significant step in the verification process.GLS overcomes the limitations of stat-ic-timing analysis and is increasing being used due to low power issues, complex timing checks at 40nm and below, design for test (DFT) insertion at gate level and low power considerations. For DFT, scan chains are inserted after the gate-level netlist is created; GLS is often used to de-termine whether scan chains are correct.
Technology libraries at 45nm and below have far more timing checks and complex timing checks than older process nodes. GLS may take up to one-third of the simulation time and could potentially take most of the debugging time. It is run after RTL code is simulated and synthe-sised into a gate-level netlist. It requires a complete reset of the design.
Reasons for running GLS are reset verification, X optimism in RTL, timing verification on multi-cycle/asynchronous
paths and basic heartbeat test.
In reset verification, GLS can verify sys-tem initialisation and show that the reset sequence is correct.
In X optimism in RTL, an RTL simu-lator may optimistically assign zero or one to a value that a GLS would identify as X (unknown).
In timing verification on multi-cycle/ asynchronous paths, static-timing analysis cannot identify asynchronous interfaces, and has constraint requirements that im-pact false and multi-cycle paths.
In the basic heartbeat test, some veri-fication teams may want to run a limited sanity check to verify the functionality at the gate level. As GLS runs much more slowly than an RTL simulation, it potential-ly has significant impact on the verification closure cycle.
Cadence incisive enterprise simulator has several features such as zero-delay simu-lation, built-in delay mode control functions to reduce simulation time, selectively disa-bling delays in sections of the model where timing is not currently a concern, detecting potential zero-delay gate loops, correcting race conditions that occur in zero-delay mode, disabling timing checks for the entire simulation or for selected blocks, control-ling the number of timing check violations, using multi-snapshot incremental elabora-tion to improve elaboraelabora-tion performance, using wave dumping only if required, avoid or use selectively command-line options that provide additional information and access to objects for debugging.
Incisive also offers a timing file that lets you turn off the timing for particular in-stances in a design. Palladium XP accelera-tor/emulator can offer speeds 10,000 times faster than simulation. If full debug access is needed, a switch can provide it. There is also an option (-ZLIB) that can compress snapshots and save disk space, while let-ting users set the level of compression.
Gate-LeveL SimuLationS:
An Increasing Trend
V.P. Sampath is an
active member of IEEE and Institution of Engineers India Ltd. He is a regular contributor to national newspapers, IEEE-MAS section, and has published international papers in VLSI and networks
Logic Equivalence
Check RTL
Synthesis
Gate Level Netlist Test bench
ATPG pattern Simulation S T A Linting Verification
Fig. 1: Gate-level simulation flow
Running GLS
The use of static tools to reduce GLS time should be used before running zero-delay information, especially for linting. Static-timing analysis can pro-vide information that is used to start GLS early in the flow.
There are many reasons for running GLS, some of which are given below: 1. To give confidence in verification
of low-power structures, absent in RTL and added during synthesis. It is a probable method to catch multi-cycle paths if tests exercising these are available. Power esti-mation is done on the netlist for power numbers
2. To verify the power-up and reset operation of the design and to check if the design has any unin-tentional dependencies on initial conditions
3. To verify DFT structures absent in RTL and added during or after synthesis. Scan chains are gener-ally inserted after the gate-level netlist has been created. Hence, GLS is often used to determine whether scan chains are correct. It is also required to simulate ATPG patterns. Tester pattern simulations are done on the gate-level netlist 4. To help reveal glitches on edge-sensitive signals due to combina-tion logic; using both worst- and best-case timing may be necessary 5. To check special logic circuits and design topology that may include feedback and/or initial state con-siderations or circuit tricks 6. To check if design works at the
de-sired frequency with actual delays in place. It is a probable method to find out the need for synchro-nisers, if absent in design. It will cause X propagation on timing violation on that flop
GLS execution strategy
In highly-integrated products, it is not possible to run gate simulation for all system on chip (SoC) tests due to the simulation and debug time required. Therefore the vectors
that are to be run in GLS have to be selected judiciously.
Possible candidates for such vec-tors are test cases involving initiali-sation and boot up, and all blocks of the design must have at least one test case for GLS, test cases checking clock source switching, cases check-ing clock frequency scalcheck-ing, asynchro-nous paths in design, test cases that check entry/exit from different modes of design and dedicated tests for tim-ing exceptions in the STA.
GLS targets the maximum desired operating frequency of the design. Some signals that are critical for GLS debug can be preserved during syn-thesis. A list of all synchroniser flops is generated using CDC tools.
Asynchronous paths where tim-ing checks need to be turned off are analysed and a complete list of such flops is prepared, which also includes reset synchronisers. Timing checks are turned off on all such flops to avoid any redundant debugging, otherwise these will cause X corruption in GLS. This work should ideally be done before the SDF arrives. It may happen that the names of the synchronisers in RTL and the netlist are different. All such flops should be updated as per the netlist. Also, correct stand-ard cell libraries, correct models of analogue blocks and more should be picked for GLS.
Unit-delay GLS for test bench cleanup setup is done for unit delay
GLS and test cases that are planned to be run on gate level are run with this setup to clean the test bench. This is done because unit-delay simulations are relatively faster and all test bench/testcase-related issues can be resolved.
Running unit-delay GLS is recom-mended because one can catch most of the test bench/testcase issues before the arrival of SDF. After SDF arrives, focus should be more on finding the real design/timing issues. So one must make sure that the time does not get wasted in debugging test-case-related issues at that time.
GLS challenges
The challenge in GLS is X propaga-tion debug. X corruppropaga-tion may be caused by a number of reasons such as timing violations, uninitialised memory and non-resettable flops. There generally are uninitialised flops in design which due to the architec-ture are guaranteed not to cause any problems. There is a need to find out all such flops in the design and initialise these to some random value (either zero or one) so as to mimic silicon. It gives a clear picture of how the design will behave at the desired frequency with actual delays in place.
Although GLS has its own set of challenges like set-up issues and long run time, among others, it is still very much a part of the sign-off process.
Fig. 2: Gate-level simulation and static-timing analysis flow
ERRORS SIM PASS Original SDF Used Generates Violation Report GLS Netlist Generate SDF SDF Designers Work on Real Design Fix
Fix the design issue and validate it in STA again
Yes Yes Yes No No No Check for Errors in report SDF with no timing issue STA Tool Generates
Timing Report and SDF
Temporary fix of known timing issues to start GLS SIM early and focus on
new unknown GLS issues
Modify/Update SDF Temporarily STA Tool
GLS Timing SIM
STA Flow Simulator Flow
W
hen I started work on this story at the close of 2015, the USA’s Federal Aviation Administra-tion (FAA) was voicing serious concerns about the number of drones expected to be bought by people during the 2015 Christmas sales. Ranging from simple US$ 20 toys to high-end quadcopters, FAA was expecting a million unmanned aerial ve-hicles (UAVs, aka drones) to be sold. The concern is palpable, because these new aircraft, if not flown responsibly, could cause a lot of trouble for airlines. So much so that FAA has launched a beta applica-tion called B4UFly, which helps drone users to abide by flying regulations, espe-cially to stay away from prohibited zones where their little aircraft could cause harm to real big ones.We are not sure how many drones really got sold over Christmas holidays, but it is evident that drones represent a real, solid trend. At one time, drones fell into two categories: either these were used in classified, military operations or were toys. Now their applications are more real-world.
In July 2015, a little drone flew 55km
across Appalachian Mountains to deliver medical supplies to a healthcare centre in Wise County, Virginia, USA. The place is not easily accessible and doctors usually stock up for a month at a stretch, lead-ing to a lot of waste. This FAA-approved drone delivery has seeded hope in the minds of many of the area’s citizens, who look forward to more such humanitarian drone missions.
From delivering medicines and com-mercial parcels to transporting organs, following clouds, spraying crops, shooting candid sports videos and surveying real estate, drones are attempting to become part and parcel of our lives, like cars and mobile devices once did. And soon these really might dot our skies, every day.
This prospect has put scientists and activists on full throttle. There is a lot of concern about the safety and privacy prob-lems posed by these drones and the need for proper regulations to overcome these. Fortunately, there is a lot of research and development happening to make smaller, smarter, more useful drones. In this story, let us take a peek at some such won-drone-ful developments.
Drones turn into Mr Fix-Its
University of Leeds, UK, has undertaken to develop drones that can be used to au-tonomously fix city infrastructure such as mending potholes or changing streetlights. The idea is to have drones automatically survey the city’s infrastructure, so prob-lems can be spotted and fixed even before these are visible to the human eye. The project will take a three-pronged approach to solving this challenge.
One area of research, dubbed as Perch and Repair, will aim to develop drones that can perch atop high structures to fix stuff like streetlights.
Another dimension is Perceive and
A Sunrise
PePPered With drones
Janani Gopalakrishnan Vikram is a
technically-qualified freelance writer, editor and hands-on mom based in Chennai
Robo-Fly being developed by the US Army (Image courtesy: US Army)
32 FEBRUARY 2016 | ELECTRONICS FOR YOU WWW.EFYMAG.COM
Patch, that is, drones that can autonomously inspect, identify and repair potholes in roads.
The third is Fire and Forget ro-bots, which can operate perpetually within live utility pipes, handling tasks like inspection, repair, meter-ing and reportmeter-ing.
The multi-million-pound project is actually deeper than it appears to be. It will involve not just advanced research in drones and robotics, but also include development of advanced simulators like airflow simulators to study air pollution, tackle the problem of aging water pipelines and more. The project will also study the environmen-tal and social impact of having a robot workforce always on duty in the city, trying to achieve the task with minimal disturbance to the city’s dwellers.
A trick or two learnt from flies
and birds
Think small, flying, fast and agile, and insects are the first creatures that come to mind. How challenging it is to vanquish a fly that irritat-ingly hovers around you, buzzing into your ears! So close by, yet so tough to swat. Well, it is no surprise then that with similar goals, drone researchers are turning to nature for inspiration.
Insects are able to fly swiftly in and out of even the trickiest of spac-es without colliding into anything. This is a capability that UAVs must have, if these are to work autono-mously and coexist with humans. One way to achieve this would be to
equip the drones with digital cam-eras that capture a 360-degree image of what is around them. However, this goes against the form factor and weight requirements, which are
critical for drones.
So scientists at Swiss Federal In-stitute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, have now developed an insect-inspired motion sensor
More exciting applications...
ETH Zurich recently demonstrated drones building a rope bridge as part of their Aerial Construction Project. The researchers navigated quadcopters between two sets of scaffolding. Thereafter, the drones were able to survey the distance, figure out how to build the bridge and with the help of motorised spools, tied together ropes to make a 7.3-metre(24-feet)-long bridge, without any human intervention.
Robot scientists from across Europe have joined hands under the auspices of Aerial Robotics Cooperative Assembly System (ARCAS) project to develop drones that can fly in a coordinated way to share the weight of heavy building materials. This will help deliver heavy payloads to difficult areas not reachable by cranes, which often pose risks to human workers.
Drones are expected to be very helpful for farmers, too. Stevia, the sugar substitute maker, considered deploying drones with lights over their farms to promote crop growth at night, too. A contest held last year in Maryland, USA, challenged students to develop drones that could prevent infestation of corn crops. Some interesting designs involved drones that landed on infested crops and pulled out insects with mechanical arms. NASA has shown how UAVs can be used to hunt hurricanes, while Lockheed Martin
showed how these can help in detecting and predicting avalanches, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and other natural disasters.
Conservation Drones is an organisation focused on using drones for environmental-conservation activities such as protecting chimpanzees in Tanzania and tracking Sumatran orangutans.
IBM is developing a drone called IRIS+, which can play table tennis. IRIS+ can automatically track the trajectory of a ball coming to its side of the table and return the ball to the other player.
Flying machines spanning load-bearing links (Image courtesy: ETH, Zurich)
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for UAVs. The artificial eye meas-ures just two cubic millimetres and weighs just two milligrams. It features a lens on top of all three electronic photodetectors in a tri-angular pattern. The device com-bines the measurements of these photodetectors to determine the speed and direction of any motion in its field-of-view. This is simi-lar to how the segmented eyes of insects capture their environment to avoid obstacles.
The team has also developed algorithms to process signals from these devices, which will be programmed into onboard chips to compute relevant parameters like distance to objects, time until poten-tial collision and so on.
The artificial eye has been tested under varied conditions like poorly-lit rooms, bright and sunny outdoor spots, and it seems poised to outdo the original itself, as results show that it is able to detect
mo-tion three times faster than actual flying insects.
Autonomy is a matter of
perception
If drones are to be really useful, de-livering parcels, spying enemy terri-tories, entering danger zones ahead of fire-fighters and first-responders, and more, these need to be aware of their environment and capable of flying autonomously. Drone mak-ers across the world are investing
More bio-inspired drones...
The US Army is working on Robo-Fly, which will one day relieve humans from the life-threatening job of espionage. Using piezoelectric materials, they have developed a fruit-fly-size micro-robot that can flap its wings without a motor. The prototype wings that they have made are just 3mm long, and are made of lead-zirconium-titanate, a material that bends and flaps when voltage is applied to it. They have also used the same material to design a set of tiny robotic legs (like a millipede’s) that can crawl when voltage is applied to these. It might be 10 to 15 years before these wings and legs actually turn into spying insects.
Mirko Kovac, director of Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London, believes in turning to nature for answers to drone challenges. By studying the perching of birds, he has developed a pigeon-size drone that can fly to the side of a building and comfortably perch on it. Basically, mechanical forces resulting from the impact cause the drone’s two arms to fly forward and make a grabbing action that holds onto the brickwork without spending any
extra energy. He is now studying the multi-modal mobility of birds and other creatures, which comfortably move between water, land and sky, to develop drones with similar capabilities.
David Lentink and his team at Stanford University, USA, have designed bird-inspired wings for drones. Unlike the rigid wings of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, these special wings can flap like a bird’s and fold back on impact, enabling these to recover instantly after a collision and continue flying like birds do. The wings are made of carbon-fibre and Mylar film. Each wing consists of two parts, one arm wing and one hand wing, hinged together with a 3D-printed wrist joint that enables the hand wing to fold back over the arm wing. The arm wing is further attached to the body by a shoulder joint. When the wings flap, a centrifugal force is created, enabling smooth flight. On collision, the wings fold back without any damage, recover instantly and start flapping again. All this happens passively, without requiring any electronics. This would make drones lighter and more reliable, too.
Other efforts to make drones self-aware...
When drones suddenly run out of power or lose the global positioning system (GPS) signal, these crash land. In order to prevent such situations, University of Zurich has developed drones with improved safety features. The drones have a camera, acceleration sensors and an orientation system that emulates the human visual system and sense of balance. When a failure situation is detected, the drone tries to regain balance and, when that is not possible, it surveys its surroundings, builds a 3D model of the environment and tries to find a safe place to land. All image processing and control runs on a smartphone processor onboard the drone, which enables the drone to act independently without requiring instructions from an operator.
Last year, DJI launched a new multi-modal sensing system called Guidance, which empowers drones like the company’s Matrice 100 with autonomous obstacle-avoidance capabilities. Guidance consists of an array of five ultrasonic rangefinders, a set of integrated visual cameras running advanced algorithms and an onboard processor to make sense of all data. Guidance enables drones to hover in place, maintain their positions and avoid obstacles, without GPS support.
Andrew Barry, a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, recently developed an
obstacle-avoidance system for drones, which uses only two mobile phones worth of onboard computing hardware and real-time image processing, according to an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) report. The solution is based on stereo filtering from a pair of 376 x 240 pixel resolution, 120 frames-per-second cameras spaced 34 centimetres apart. The drone focuses its attention on pixels that are about ten metres away and nothing else. It saves these pixels in its memory and the next image adds more pixels to it, gradually helping the drone to build a 3D map of what lies ahead. This technique is called pushbroom stereo detection. With a little bit of ironing out, this method could help drones to fly autonomously, at lower costs. While remote-controlled drones are capable of flying at great
speeds, autonomous ones still move quite slowly in order to make the required obstacle-avoidance calculations. However, birds and insects are able to fly very fast, without crashing into anything. This fact has inspired Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the development of small, lightweight and autonomous drones that can fly at speeds greater than 70kmph, manoeuvring adeptly to avoid obstacles. Rising to the occasion, Draper Labs and a group at MIT have started work on software systems that will help avoid obstacles at such high speeds.
efforts in this direction. Ascending Technologies, for example, has been working with Intel to develop solutions for ob-stacle avoidance. Intel’s RealSense 360-degree-depth camera module, which is less than four millimetre thick, weighing around eight grams, has been effectively combined with powerful microprocessors and smart algorithms to improve the percep-tion capabilities of drones without affecting payload and flight times.
AscTec FireFly, for example, uses Intel cameras to auto-fly through forests without crashing into trees. AscTec Neo, a research UAV, which will be available in 2016, will have a more advanced sensor ring with six Intel RealSense cameras, which will give it a 360-degree view essential for autonomous navigation.
Five little drones
flying in the air...
One little drone hit me on my head. Mummy called the police and the police said, “No more drones bump-ing on the head.”
Soon, this scene might be more real than you think. One of the biggest worries on the minds of authorities and people is the risk of drones interfering with public rou-tine. Imagine drones disturbing the flying of real aircraft, bumping into people, crashing on windscreens of cars and so on.
While companies are trying to make drones more self-aware and safe, organisations like FAA are trying to control the flight of these little electronic birds to avoid any mishaps. FAA is taking several steps in this direction, declaring no-fly zones, putting a bar on the height within which drones can be flown, prohibiting the use of drones near airports, checking and control-ling commercial usage of drones and so on.
To aid FAA in this potentially-mammoth task, NASA is developing a drone-traffic-management system
that can track thousands of drones, evaluate their flight plans and con-trol where these can or cannot go. The project involves four phases, of which the first phase is almost ready for testing by FAA. The sys-tem will use geo-fencing to prevent drones from going where these do not belong.
In a recent media report, Pari-mal Kopardekar, NASA’s principal investigator for drone traffic man-agement, explained that there are two types of geo-fences; one is a no-fly-zone type, where you should not go inside the geo-fence. This will be used to keep drones away from airports, for example. The other kind of geo-fence would keep drones from getting out.
The system will enable users to file flight plans, which will be evalu-ated and accepted or rejected if these do not work out. Ideally, the system will also enable anybody to simply point a smartphone at a drone flying in the vicinity and find out what it is up to. This is very important to instil confidence in people and avert the risk of spying drones.
When you actually point your phone at a drone, the answer could be quite surprising, because drones are up to a lot of things today. Drones with follow-me capabilities can track players and shoot vid-eos that will help them improve their playing.
Drones can plant seeds on high mountains and dangerous forests to improve the green cover. These can monitor farms and improve water-ing cycles. And well, Amazon hopes these can deliver parcels, too.
However, it is evident from the kind of research happening across the world that this is still far away. It took a long time for robots to start working cooperatively with peo-ple. So you can imagine how long it might take before drones start flying safely in the midst of people, cars, buildings and all the chaos of our cities!
F
irst shown at CES 2016, Etos is a BMW i8 with an auto-pilot and a drone onboard. Frank M. Rinderknecht, boss of the Swiss crea-tive think-tank Rinspeed, intends to use the UFO-esque drone on board Etos for performing services such as picking up deliveries from stores as the car drives you home, while you relax with a book in the driver’s seat. Drone applications have definitely gone way beyond their initial use as aerial torpedoes, unmanned weapons platforms and surveillance.Financial benefits look very promis-ing for developers of well-engineered drones. In a recent Forbes article by Baldwin Cunningham, it was said that the drone economy could be as incred-ible as the app economy we had seen in the last decade. To engineer drones that can handle next-generation applications, let us take a look at the technologies available for you.
Propulsion
Before you try to put smarts into your drone, you need to get your drone off the
ground. When you select your mix of motor and propeller, you need to make sure that there is enough thrust to comfortably pick up the entire drone.
As an example, a motor and pro-peller combination that delivers 500 grams of thrust in a quadcopter con-figuration would be able to barely lift a two-kilogram drone. This is not an ideal
situation and so it is recommended that the weight of your drone be less than half the maximum thrust your configuration is capable of delivering.
Direct current (DC) brushless motors are the most commonly used ones here. The Kv rating you find in these motors signify revolutions per minute per volt. A motor rated at 1000Kv will spin 1000 times per volt when there is no load attached to it. This is just a theoretical value, so it is not recommended to test your brush-less motor without a load on it. To control speed, you can increase or decrease the voltage applied to the motor.
Electronic speed controllers (ESCs) are devices that let you control revolutions per minute (rpm) of the motor reliably. These devices are able to handle the maximum current the motor might consume at the exact voltage as required by the user. Most motor manufacturers offer their own ESCs. Some of the popular motors in the mar-ket are the ones by Lynxmotion, TMotor, DJI and Storm. You need not look at motor brands; you should be fine as long as the specifications match your rpm and thrust requirements. Some expensive motors we came across come with better ball bearings that promise longer life and more reli-ability. For example, MN3508 motor built for aerial-photography drones comes with ball bearings that are twice the standard size seen.
However, electric motors come with an inherent weakness in the form of range and flight duration due to battery-pack limitations. That is where people have got-ten creative to repurpose tried-and-tested technologies like internal combustion en-gines. Yeair is one such product that comes with a ten cubic centimetre combustion engine paired with running engine control. The result? A drone with a range of over 55 kilometres!
Teach Your Drones
To Do More Than Fly
Dilin Anand is a senior assistant editor at EFY. He is B.Tech from University of Calicut, currently pursuing MBA from Christ University, Bengaluru
