Planetary Gear

Here is a mock-up of the EyeStop bus shelter.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

High-tech bus stops so cool they might actually entice you to take a ride will be installed next year in Florence, Italy.

The urban fixtures have been designed by a group of researchers led by Carlo Ratti, head of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.

The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.

Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.

Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.

About 1,000 EyeStop bus poles will be installed in Florence, Italy, in 2010.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

A bus pole version of the EyeStop with similar mapping, info, and communication tools will also be introduced. It glows brighter as the next bus nears the stop to signal pedestrians from afar.

The design for the EyeStop was unveiled this week at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence, and a prototype will soon follow.

Florence residents will start testing the high-tech bus stop's usefulness, durability, and limitations in October. Following that, about 200 bus shelters and 1,000 bus poles are expected to be installed next year. The EyeStop was developed by Ratti's project team, in collaborartion with the Province of Florence and Florence's local transportation authority.

The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won't be one-size-fits-all.

Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop's immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.

But is it graffiti proof?

"We have looked into special glass surfaces that are self-cleaning and graffiti proof," Ratti said in an e-mail. "However, we will perform some real tests before building the prototype in October."

This is EyeStop bus shelter with an imaginary user.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

Battery material made by Gerbrand Ceder and Byoungwoo Kang could lead to quicker charging portable devices.

(Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT)

Engineers at MIT have made a breakthrough that could translate into smaller, lighter, and faster-charging lithium ion batteries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Wednesday.

Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT; aided by Byoungwoo Kang, a graduate student in materials science and engineering, have made a small battery that can be fully charged or discharged in 10 to 20 seconds.

A detailed explanation on how they did this has been published in the March 12 issue of Nature, but here is a brief recap of what they essentially accomplished.

While lithium ion batteries have high energy densities, they are also known for their inability to gain and discharge energy quickly. That is why it commonly takes hours to recharge the battery on a plug-in electric vehicle.

Electric vehicle proponents have been struggling with this battery issue, some coming up with clever ways around it. Better Place, for example, came up with the idea of drivers saving time by swapping-out discharged car batteries for fully charged ones at electric vehicle stations.

Ceder and Kang experimented with the way lithium ions move in and around lithium iron phosphate, a material commonly used in lithium ion batteries. They worked with it to develop a new surface structure that gets ions to move more quickly from one place to another. They compare their project to building a beltway that goes around a city to avoid traffic, but has tunnels that let you drop in to exactly where you need to be.

"The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds rather than hours may open up new technological applications and induce lifestyle changes," according to Ceder and Kang's paper in Nature.

In addition to being significantly faster, batteries made with their material degraded much less than usual lithium ion batteries after repeated discharges and recharges during testing. Because of that, they believe their batteries could be made with less material making them lighter and smaller.

Because their invention is not a completely new material, but rather a change to the way it's structured, the researchers said in a statement that their material could be implemented into commercial batteries within 2 to 3 years.

A new autonomous underwater vehicle created by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is able to hover over a specific position in the ocean even in the face of currents.

How'd they do it? In a word: thrusters.

The Odyssey IV, which was developed at the MIT Sea Grant Program's Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory, uses a combination of fins and thrusters on both ends of the robot. It allows it to act more like a helicopter than a propelled glider. The thrusters can also propel the Odyssey IV as fast as two meters per second.

The small robust AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) can navigate to a given point and then maintain that position, self-correcting for things like obstacles, sea life, and ocean currents. The Odyssey IV can withstand the rough jostles and pulls of the aquatic environment up to 6,000 meters below the ocean's surface. It

It's not just something being tested in a lab pool. The Odyssey IV was used this summer by researchers investigating sea squirt activity in the George's Bank area of the Gulf of Maine.

(Credit: MIT AUV Lab)

"The sea is very unforgiving. If there's anything that can go wrong, the sea will find it," Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, director of the MIT Sea Grant Program, said in a statement last week.

But hovering for the purpose of observing a specific ocean target is only one part of what the robot can do. The Odyssey IV is capable of picking up and carrying cargo. Its current mechanical arm is also able to complete simple functions such as turning a valve.

While the scientists seem proud of their robot's ability to stay in one place, they clearly have no interest in treading water themselves.

Chryssostomidis and company are already working on how they can give the AUV a longer battery life, better communication capabilities from underwater, and a larger capacity for holding and transferring data.

The group also hopes to develop more flexible arms capable of sophisticated movements that could enable it to be used as a repairman for underwater machinery.