Month: December 2016

Hyundai’s Exo-Skeleton Suits

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Hyundai is known for it’s reasonably priced good cars, but in addition to that, the Korean automaker working on electric and hybrid cars is also researching alongside on Exo-Skeletons which will give superhuman abilities to common people in a way.

Hyundai has made a line of robotic suits to help paraplegic patients walk and to reduce back injuries in manual laborers. Workers piloting the device can lift objects weighing “hundreds of kilograms,” according to the company. Soldiers can also use it to pack up to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) over long distances. The drawback is they can be prohibitively expensive, but Hyundai thinks it can lower the cost of these exosuits that not only give us the ability to lift more, but can also help disabled people walk once again.

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The drawback is they can be prohibitively expensive, but Hyundai thinks it can lower the cost of these exosuits that can help disabled people walk once again.

 

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The suit is a juiced up version of the H-LEX “wearable walking assistant” that Hyundai introduced last year. Unlike that lightweight version, which is worn like a suit, the fully mechanized exoskeleton “wears” you.

Hyundai says the project is part of its “Next Mobility” system “that will lead to the free movement of people and things.” In other words, the car manufacturer is angling the suits as transportation, where other companies, like Panasonic and Daewoo, see them strictly them strictly as worker aids. Like Hyundai, DARPA is building an exosuit for soldiers for its “Warrior Web” program. As companies like Ekso Bionics have shown, however, such robotic suits may have the highest potential as rehabilitation aids.

 

 

Sources: (Wired, Engadget)

Quantum computer memories of higher dimensions than a qubit

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A quantum computer memory of higher dimensions has been created by the scientists from the Institute of Physics and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT by letting two electrons loose in a system of quantum dots. In their study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers demonstrate for the first time how quantum walks of several electrons can help for implementation of quantum computation.

For more information: Quantum Computing

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Abstraction – Walking Electrons

“By studying the system with two electrons, we solved the problems faced in the general case of two identical interacting particles. This paves the way toward compact high-level quantum structures,” says Leonid Fedichkin, associate professor at MIPT’s Department of Theoretical Physics.

In a matter of hours, a quantum computer will be able to hack into the most popular cryptosystem used by web browsers. As far as more benevolent applications are concerned, a quantum computer would be capable of molecular modeling that accounts for all interactions between the particles involved. This, in turn, would enable the development of highly efficient solar cells and new drugs.

As it turns out, the unstable nature of the connection between qubits remains the major obstacle preventing the use of quantum walks of particles for quantum computation. Unlike their classical analogs, quantum structures are extremely sensitive to external noise. To prevent a system of several qubits from losing the information stored in it, liquid nitrogen (or helium) needs to be used for cooling. A research team led by Prof. Fedichkin demonstrated that a qubit could be physically implemented as a particle “taking a quantum walk” between two extremely small semiconductors known as quantum dots, which are connected by a “quantum tunnel.”

The Quantum dots are like potential wells to an electron, therefore, the position of an electron can be used to encode the basis of two states of the qubits 0 or 1.

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The blue and purple dots in the diagrams are the states of the two connected qudits (qutrits and ququarts are shown in (a) and (b) respectively). Each cell in the square diagrams on the right side of each figure (a-d) represents the position of one electron (i = 0, 1, 2, … along the horizontal axis) versus the position of the other electron (j = 0, 1, 2, … along the vertical axis). The cells color-code the probability of finding the two electrons in the corresponding dots with numbers i and j when a measurement of the system is made. Warmer colors denote higher probabilities. Credit: MIPT

If an entangled state is created between several qubits, their individual states can no longer be described separately from one another, and any valid description must refer to the state of the whole system. This means that a system of three qubits has a total of eight basis states and is in a superposition of them: A|000⟩+B|001⟩+C|010⟩+D|100⟩+E|011⟩+F|101⟩+G|110⟩+H|111⟩. By influencing the system, one inevitably affects all of the eight coefficients, whereas influencing a system of regular bits only affects their individual states. By implication, n bits can store n variables, while n qubits can store 2n variables. Qudits offer an even greater advantage since n four-level qudits (aka ququarts) can encode 4n, or 2n×2n variables. To put this into perspective, 10 ququarts store approximately 100,000 times more information than 10 bits. With greater values of n, the zeros in this number start to pile up very quickly.

In this study, Alexey Melnikov and Leonid Fedichkin obtain a system of two qudits implemented as two entangled electrons quantum-walking around the so-called cycle graph. The entanglement of the two electrons is caused by the mutual electrostatic repulsion experienced by like charges. Number of qudits can be created by connecting quantum dots in a pattern of winding paths and have more wandering electrons. The quantum walks approach to quantum computation is convenient because it is based on a natural process.

So far, scientists have been unable to connect a sufficient number of qubits for the development of a quantum computer. The work of the Russian researchers brings computer science one step closer to a future when quantum computations are commonplace.

(Source: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, 3Tags.)

Magic Leap – The Future?

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Magic Leap is a US startup company that is founded by Rony Abovitz in 2010 and is working on a head-mounted virtual retinal display which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye. It is attempting to construct a light-field chip using silicon photonics.

Before Magic Leap, a head-mounted display using light fields was already demonstrated by Nvidia in 2013, and the MIT Media Lab has also constructed a 3D display using “compressed light fields”; however Magic Leap asserts that it achieves better resolution with a new proprietary technique that projects an image directly onto the user’s retina. According to a researcher who has studied the company’s patents, Magic Leap is likely to use stacked silicon waveguides.

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Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semi-transparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating mixed-reality technology, but right now the quality of its virtual visions exceeds all others. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park. Google was one of the first to invest. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others followed. In the past year, executives from most major media and tech companies have made the pilgrimage to Magic Leap’s office park to experience for themselves its futuristic synthetic reality.

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The video below is shot directly through the Magic Leap technology without composing any special effects. It gives us an idea of how it looks through the Magic Leap.

On December 9, 2015, Forbes reported on documents filed in the state of Delaware, indicating a Series C funding round of $827m. This funding round could bring the company’s total funding to $1.4 billion, and its post-money valuation to $3.7 billion.

On February 2, 2016, Financial Times reported that Magic Leap further raised another funding round of close to $800m, valuing the startup at $4.5 billion.

On February 11, 2016, Silicon Angle reported that Magic Leap had joined the Entertainment Software Association.

In April 2016, Magic Leap acquired Israeli cyber security company NorthBit.

Magic Leap has raised $1.4 billion from a list of investors including Google and China’s Alibaba Group.

On June 16, 2016, Magic Leap announced a partnership with Disney’s Lucasfilm and its ILMxLAB R&D unit. The two companies will form a joint research lab at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco campus.