University of Birmingham
Assembly Line
Human hands are astonishing tools. Here's why robots are struggling to match them
Human sensory systems are so complex and our perceptive abilities so adept that reproducing dexterity at the same level as the human hand remains a formidable challenge. But the level of sophistication is rapidly increasing. Enter the DEX-EE robot. Developed by the Shadow Robot Company in collaboration with Google DeepMind, it’s a three-fingered robotic hand that uses tendon-style drivers to elicit 12 degrees of freedom. Designed for “dexterous manipulation research”, the team behind DEX-EE hope to demonstrate how physical interactions contribute to learning and the development of generalised intelligence.
Roboticists have long dreamed of automata with anthropomorphic dexterity good enough to perform undesirable, dangerous or repetitive tasks. Rustam Stolkin, a professor of robotics at the University of Birmingham, leads a project to develop highly dexterous AI-controlled robots capable of handling nuclear waste from the energy sector, for example. While this work typically uses remotely-controlled robots, Stolkin is developing autonomous vision-guided robots that can go where it is too dangerous for humans to venture.
During the course of a day, however, human hands undertake thousands of different tasks, adapting in order to handle a variety of different shapes, sizes and materials. And robotics has some way to go to compete with that. One recent test of a robotic hand using open-source components costing less than $5,000 (£4,000) found that it could be trained to reorientate objects in the air. However, when confronted with a challenging object – a rubber duck shaped toy – the robot still fumbled and dropped the rubber duck around 56% of the time.
The Birmingham Blade: the world's first geographically tailored urban wind turbine designed by AI
AI design specialists EvoPhase and precision metal fabricators KwikFab have unveiled the world’s first urban wind turbine designed by AI, and tailored to the unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area. The team has called it the Birmingham Blade. The collaboration between EvoPhase and KwikFab provides a solution to one of the most pressing issues in the green energy landscape – how to produce small-scale, affordable, generators of clean wind energy.
EvoPhase used its AI-driven design process to generate and test designs for their efficiency at wind speeds found in Birmingham, which, at 3.6 metres / second are substantially lower than the 10 metres per second rating for most turbines. EvoPhase found the optimal design for curved blades which spin around a central point, and confirmed that that it will be up to seven times more efficient than existing designs used in the Birmingham area.
Developed by a research group led by Dr Kit Windows-Yule at the University of Birmingham, EvoPhase’s AI-led evolutionary design process mimics natural selection, this approach allows for simultaneous optimisation of many different parameters, avoiding traditional trade-offs between performance factors. The EvoPhase – KwikFab collaboration provides a rapid design and prototyping service, and the team is now working on another design for the very different conditions in Edinburgh.
Salinity Solutions secures £1 million investment from SQM Lithium Ventures
Salinity Solutions, an engineering tech start-up based in Birmingham (UK) has secured a GBP £1 million initial investment from SQM Lithium Ventures to fund the next stage of its growth. SQM Lithium Ventures, in return, will take ownership of a minority stake in the company, with the option to acquire additional equity in the future.
SQM Lithium Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of the lithium business of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), one of the world’s leading producers of battery-grade lithium chemicals. Salinity Solutions joins the SQM Lithium Ventures portfolio alongside industry-leading companies like Altilium Clean Technology and Electric Era.
Salinity Solutions developed HyBatch™, its ground-breaking batch reverse osmosis water treatment technology – the first in the world to be manufactured commercially – to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of water treatment. The technology uses less energy, purifies a higher amount of wastewater, generates less waste, and is more compact and portable than traditional reverse osmosis systems. The first of Salinity Solutions’ five registered patents has been approved in the European Union, China and the United States.
♻️ The potential for a plastic recycling facility to release microplastic pollution and possible filtration remediation effectiveness
With current plastic production and the growing problem of global plastic pollution, an increase and improvement in plastic recycling is needed. There is limited knowledge or assessment of microplastic pollution from point sources such as plastic recycling facilities globally. This pilot study investigates microplastic pollution from a mixed plastics recycling facility in the UK to advance current quantitative understanding of microplastic (MP) pollution release from a plastic recycling facility to receiving waters. Raw recycling wash water were estimate to contain microplastic counts between 5.97 106 – 1.12 × 108 MP m−3 (following fluorescence microscopy analysis). The microplastic pollution mitigation (filtration installed) was found to remove the majority of microplastics >5µm, with high removal efficiencies for microplastics >40µm. Microplastics <5µm were generally not removed by the filtration and subsequently discharged, with 59-1184 tonnes potentially discharged annually. It is recommended that additional filtration to remove the smaller microplastics prior to wash discharge is incorporated in the wash water management. Evidence of microplastic wash water pollution suggest it may be important to integrate microplastics into water quality regulations. Further studies should be conducted to increase knowledge of microplastic pollution from plastic recycling processes.