Tag Archives: Eindhoven University of Technology

RoboEarth’s Rapyuta, a cloud engine for the robot internet

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Described in a 2011 BBC news item as an internet/wikipedia for robots only, RobotEarth was last mentioned here in a Feb. 14, 2011 posting (scroll down about 1/3 of the way) where I featured both the aforementioned BBC news item and a first person account of the project on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) Spectrum’s Automaton Robotics blog.

Today, Mar. 12, 2013, there’s a news release on EurekAlert about a new RoboEarth development,

Researchers of five European universities have developed a cloud-computing platform for robots. The platform allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers – the giant server farms behind the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon – for robotics tasks and robot learning.

With the development of the RoboEarth Cloud Engine the team continues their work towards creating an Internet for robots. The new platform extends earlier work on allowing robots to share knowledge with other robots via a WWW-style database, greatly speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.

Here’s how the cloud engine is described,

The developed Platform as a Service (PaaS) for robots allows to perform complex functions like mapping, navigation, or processing of human voice commands in the cloud, at a fraction of the time required by robots’ on-board computers. By making enterprise-scale computing infrastructure available to any robot with a wireless connection, the researchers believe that the new computing platform will help pave the way towards lighter, cheaper, more intelligent robots.

“The RoboEarth Cloud Engine is particularly useful for mobile robots, such as drones or autonomous cars, which require lots of computation for navigation. It also offers significant benefits for robot co-workers, such as factory robots working alongside humans, which require large knowledge databases, and for the deployment of robot teams.” says Mohanarajah Gajamohan, researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and Technical Lead of the project.

“On-board computation reduces mobility and increases cost.”, says Dr. Heico Sandee, RoboEarth’s Program Manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, “With the rapid increase in wireless data rates caused by the booming demand of mobile communications devices, more and more of a robot’s computational tasks can be moved into the cloud.”

Oddly, there’s never any mention of the name for the cloud engine project in the news release. I found the name (Rapyuta) on the RoboEarth website, from the home page,

Update: Join (or remotely watch) the Cloud Robotics Workshop at the EU Robotics Forum on Wednesday 20. March, 4-6pm CET. Details: http://www.roboearth.org/eurobotics2013

It is our pleasure to announce the first public release of Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine. Rapyuta is an open source cloud robotics platform for robots. It implements a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework designed specifically for robotics applications.

Rapyuta helps robots to offload heavy computation by providing secured customizable computing environments in the cloud. Robots can start their own computational environment, launch any computational node uploaded by the developer, and communicate with the launched nodes using the WebSockets protocol.

Interestingly, the final paragraph of today’s (Mar. 12, 2011) news release includes a statement about jobs,

While high-tech companies that heavily rely on data centers have been criticized for creating fewer jobs than traditional companies (e.g., Google or Facebook employ less than half the number of workers of General Electric or Hewlett-Packard per dollar in revenue), the researchers don’t believe that this new robotics platform should be cause for alarm. According to a recent study by the International Federation of Robotics and Metra Martech entitled “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment”, robots don’t kill jobs but rather tend to lead to an overall growth in jobs.

I’d like to see some more data about this business of robots creating jobs. In the meantime, there’s  more information about RoboEarth and the Rapyuta cloud engine in the links the news release provides to materials such as this video,

Unexpectedly, the narrator sounds like she might have been educated in Canada or the US.

Connecting the dots in quantum computing—the secret is in the spins

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The Feb. 26, 2013 University of Pittsburgh news release puts it a lot better than I can,

Recent research offers a new spin on using nanoscale semiconductor structures to build faster computers and electronics. Literally.

University of Pittsburgh and Delft University of Technology researchers reveal in the Feb. 17 [2013]online issue of Nature Nanotechnology a new method that better preserves the units necessary to power lightning-fast electronics, known as qubits (pronounced CUE-bits). Hole spins, rather than electron spins, can keep quantum bits in the same physical state up to 10 times longer than before, the report finds.

“Previously, our group and others have used electron spins, but the problem was that they interacted with spins of nuclei, and therefore it was difficult to preserve the alignment and control of electron spins,” said Sergey Frolov, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, who did the work as a postdoctoral fellow at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Whereas normal computing bits hold mathematical values of zero or one, quantum bits live in a hazy superposition of both states. It is this quality, said Frolov, which allows them to perform multiple calculations at once, offering exponential speed over classical computers. However, maintaining the qubit’s state long enough to perform computation remains a long-standing challenge for physicists.

“To create a viable quantum computer, the demonstration of long-lived quantum bits, or qubits, is necessary,” said Frolov. “With our work, we have gotten one step closer.”

Thankfully, an explanation of the hole spins vs. electron spins issue follows,

The holes within hole spins, Frolov explained, are literally empty spaces left when electrons are taken out. Using extremely thin filaments called InSb (indium antimonide) nanowires, the researchers created a transistor-like device that could transform the electrons into holes. They then precisely placed one hole in a nanoscale box called “a quantum dot” and controlled the spin of that hole using electric fields. This approach- featuring nanoscale size and a higher density of devices on an electronic chip-is far more advantageous than magnetic control, which has been typically employed until now, said Frolov.

“Our research shows that holes, or empty spaces, can make better spin qubits than electrons for future quantum computers.”

“Spins are the smallest magnets in our universe. Our vision for a quantum computer is to connect thousands of spins, and now we know how to control a single spin,” said Frolov. “In the future, we’d like to scale up this concept to include multiple qubits.”

This graphic displays spin qubits within a nanowire. [downloaded from http://www.news.pitt.edu/connecting-quantum-dots]

This graphic displays spin qubits within a nanowire. [downloaded from http://www.news.pitt.edu/connecting-quantum-dots]

From the news release,

Coauthors of the paper include Leo Kouwenhoven, Stevan Nadj-Perge, Vlad Pribiag, Johan van den Berg, and Ilse van Weperen of Delft University of Technology; and Sebastien Plissard and Erik Bakkers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The paper, “Electrical control over single hole spins in nanowire quantum dots,” appeared online Feb. 17 in Nature Nanotechnology. The research was supported by the Dutch Organization for Fundamental Research on Matter, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and the European Research Council.

According to the scientists we’re going to be waiting a bit longer for a quantum computer but this work is promising. Their paper is behind a paywall.

Self-cleaning products in six to eight years?

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I am obsessed, as anyone who doesn’t vibrate with joy at the thought of housecleaning can appreciate, with self-cleaning products. Sadly, this is not an announcement about self-cleaning windows (my bête noire) but the July 19, 2012 news item on Science Daily does offer the possibility of future relief for anyone cleaning cars, aircraft, or smart phones,

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have developed a coating with a surface that repairs itself after damage. This new coating has numerous potential applications — for example mobile phones that will remain clean from fingerprints, cars that never need to be washed, and aircraft that need less frequent repainting.

…

Researcher Catarina Esteves of the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at TU/e and her colleagues have [developed] surfaces with special ‘stalks’ carrying the functional chemical groups at their ends, and mixing these through the coating. If the outer surface layer is removed by scratching, the ‘stalks’ in the underlying layer re-orient to the new surface, thereby restoring the function.

This development can be of great importance for many applications. For example it will be possible to make a self-cleaning car, with a highly water-resistant coating that keeps this self-cleaning property for long periods. The superficial scratches will be self-repaired and the water droplets simply roll off the car, taking dirt with them.

The researchers are hoping the first commercially available coatings will be available in the next six to eight years.

Majorana, matter, anti-matter, and nanowires

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This is one of my favourite types of science story and I’m going to start with the quantum physics part of this (from the April 13, 2012 news item on Nanowerk),

Scientists at TU Delft’s Kavli Institute and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM Foundation) have succeeded for the first time in detecting a Majorana particle. In the 1930s, the brilliant Italian physicist Ettore Majorana deduced from quantum theory the possibility of the existence of a very special particle, a particle that is its own anti-particle: the Majorana fermion. That ‘Majorana’ would be right on the border between matter and anti-matter.

The researchers have made a video about the Majorana fermion and nanowires (from the April 12, news release on the TU Delft website),

Here’s a little more about the Majorana fermion and why the researchers as so excited (from the TU Delft news release),

Majorana fermions are very interesting – not only because their discovery opens up a new and uncharted chapter of fundamental physics; they may also play a role in cosmology. A proposed theory assumes that the mysterious ‘dark matter, which forms the greatest part of the universe, is composed of Majorana fermions. Furthermore, scientists view the particles as fundamental building blocks for the quantum computer. Such a computer is far more powerful than the best supercomputer, but only exists in theory so far. Contrary to an ‘ordinary’ quantum computer, a quantum computer based on Majorana fermions is exceptionally stable and barely sensitive to external influences.

This breakthrough was achieved not with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory) but with nanowires (from the TU Delft news release),

For the first time, scientists in Leo Kouwenhoven’s research group managed to create a nanoscale electronic device in which a pair of Majorana fermions ‘appear’ at either end of a nanowire. They did this by combining an extremely small nanowire, made by colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology, with a superconducting material and a strong magnetic field. ‘The measurements of the particle at the ends of the nanowire cannot otherwise be explained than through the presence of a pair of Majorana fermions’, says Leo Kouwenhoven.

The device is made of an Indium Antemonide nanowire, covered with a Gold contact and partially covered with a Superconducting Niobium contact. The Majorana fermions are created at the end of the Nanowire. (from the TU Delft website)

At the end of the TU Delft news release, they mention more about Ettore Majorana and this is where the story gets quite intriguing,

The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana was a brilliant theorist who showed great insight into physics at a young age. He discovered a hitherto unknown solution to the equations from which quantum scientists deduce elementary particles: the Majorana fermion. Practically all theoretic particles that are predicted by quantum theory have been found in the last decades, with just a few exceptions, including the enigmatic Majorana particle and the well-known Higgs boson. But Ettore Majorana the person is every bit as mysterious as the particle. In 1938 he withdrew all his money and disappeared during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples. Whether he killed himself, was murdered or lived on under a different identity is still not known. No trace of Majorana was ever found.

Here’s the citation for the article describing the discovery of the Majorana fermion (from the TU Delft news release),

The article is published in Science Express on 12 April: Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices, V. Mourik, K. Zuo, S.M. Frolov, S.R. Plissard, E.P.A.M. Bakkers, L.P. Kouwenhoven

There’s more information and there are more images with the April 12, 2012 TU Deflt news release.