When a human being walks around he constantly monitors the environment and takes his steps accordingly. When a robot has to walk around it has usually got pre-fed data on the path and can not always monitor changes in real time. Robotic engineers need to ensure that the robots that they design don’t go crashing into things in their way.

This design feature is one that has been constantly evolving with each new generation of robots. With the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) the scientists at MIT have given computers a better chance of not banging into things in their path. The system uses a camera to take images constantly as the robot moves and compare each picture with the last one. They started out using a laser, but since that was cost prohibitive, they switched to relatively cheaper digital cameras.

The new obstacles that enter the field of motion are navigated and the distance from the last point is noted. This constant ongoing evaluation of the unknown environment allows the robot to move comfortably in areas that is has never visited before. With an addition of a voice directions feature the system also has a possible use for blind people to navigate through new paths on their own as well. Now that would be a really useful science project.

Designing a robot that can fetch exactly what you want when you ask for it has been a problem that programmers have worked on long and hard. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new search algorithm that allows robots to find items with a tag more easily.

The radio-frequency identification tag can be stuck on to any object and the robot finds it easier to trace the object. These tags are self adhesive,  inexpensive and can be stuck on any surface of the object. The robot equipped with a radio frequency reader then simply scans the room for the tag and finds the object.

This method is a whole lot more reliable than the current visuals that a robot takes from cameras and lasers. By looking at a particular item the robot is not always able to identify it, but with the radio frequency identification tag, it will always know that it has got the right object.

The researchers have been working with a PR2 robot during the science project. The Robot has an articulated, directionally sensitive set of antennas and a new algorithm that allows the it to successfully find and navigate to the intended objects. The robot may be able to identify the object using this technique but it still needs to be able to pick it up and move.

Clean, pure drinking water is one of the most scarce commodities in the world today. With the growth of the global population the pressure on drinking water is only going to increase. So wouldn’t it be nice if we could convert salty water (the kind available in oceans) to drinking water?

While such science projects have been successful in the past, they have all required great amounts of energy to work. This expenditure on energy needs had made the water thus processed way too expensive to be economically viable on a large scale. The researchers at MIT have been considering this problem and have come up with the perfect solution for energy requirements – Solar Power.

A desalination process called electrodialysis which is powered by solar energy can be used to provide enough clean drinking water to supply the needs of an entire village. Natasha Wright and Amos Winters are researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a science project involving solar panels and saline underground water in Indian villages.

Electrodialysis may just be the creative answer to drinking problem shortage in underdeveloped countries where power grids do not extend to small isolated villages. What remains to be seen is how this project can be set up in under developed nations with minimum cost.

Most gamers know that the system adapts to their playing skills in order to set them stronger challenges. This means that some amount of programming is dedicated to finding out how a gamer thinks and what goals he is likely to set in a given situation. Now researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a software that can predicting what goal a player is trying to achieve in a video game with far greater accuracy than before.

The Artificial Intelligence based software holds great potential in helping game manufacturers design new ways of improving the gaming experience for players. Dr. James Lester, a professor of computer science said that they developed this software for use in educational gaming, but it has applications for all video game developers.This is a key step in developing player-adaptive games that can respond to player actions to improve the gaming experience, either for entertainment or — in our case — for education, said Dr Lester.

The researchers tested the software called AI on an educational game called “Crystal Island,” which they developed years earlier. the actions of 137 players were tracked and then the software was able to accurately pin point just what the player was trying to achieve in the game. Now that is an entertaining science project I would love to be a part of.

An absolutely ground breaking science experiment was conducted recently where two people who were 8000 km apart managed to speak from one brain to the other without using a telephone! A brain to brain transmission was facilitated between a person in France and another one in India.

Alvaronn Pascual-Leone, from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School said that they wanted to find out if communication was possible by reading brain activity. So they used internet linked electro encephalo gram of EEG to send the words “Hola” and “Ciao” from one person to the other using brain activity.

Four subjects were used wherein one was assigned to the brain computer interface or BCI where he sent the words out and the other three were assigned to computer brain interface CBI and had to receive and interpret the message. Both the words were first converted into binary code and emailed to the subjects. The message was transmitted to the subjects in noninvasive brain stimulation such as flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

The light was then decoded in the brain of the subjects. While they did not report feeling anything the subjects successfully received the correct greeting. The science project was a huge success and could lead to a number of applications. So move over smartphones, the brain is here to stay!