When Concierge Parking Is No Longer A Luxury


Concierge parking is a luxury that few of us indulge in. It can be expensive, and there's always the thought that the young guys driving your car will have a lead foot when you're out of sight. However, if your car could go and find a parking space on its own, we would all be over the moon.

It seems that the luxury of concierge parking for free is on its way. In this year's Combined Exhibition for Advanced Technologies in Japan, Nissan have shown a vehicle, the NSC-2015, which will do precisely that (1,2). The robotic system installed in the car enables it to rush off to find a parking spot after you have got out and told it to go park itself.

The cameras and sensors in the car enable it to find a vacant parking slot and it will reverse itself into the spot. With 4G technology it has keeps track of where you are every minute that you’re away from it, so when you are ready, a button on your smart phone will bring it rushing to your side like a whistle to an obedient dog.

Your faithful robotic car doesn't sleep. It keeps a watchful eye open for bad guys getting too close. If they try and interfere with it, it will tell your smartphone which will warn you of impending doom. You could call the police, rush to its aid, or best, tell it to come and find you. Unfortunately, at present this is only a demo version and we will have to wait for a while before our parking problems have vanished.

The engineers seem to think that robotic control of our cars is a long way off. The auto-drive Google car has quite a few miles under his drive train and the laws are being changed to make it legal for general use. The BBC report suggests suggest that auto-drive vehicles may be popular in urban settings but less so on the interstate. It seems to me that long journeys on the interstate would be a good place to set the auto-drive function, just as we use cruise control today.

I hope we get our auto-drive and concierge parking electric cars very, very soon. I'm feeding my piggy bank so I'm ready.

  1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/10/03/nissans-robot-car-finds-its-own-parking-spots/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906

Biodegradable Electronics


Biodegradable electronics are not a usual feature of our high tech society in which our devices are obsolete in two to three years. Also biodegradable electronics implies disposable units and this limits the materials that can be used.

Currently the ‘clever bit’ of our electronics is silicon based and silicon is biofriendly. It oxidizes and dissolves in water, so this is a starting point from which a large team led by Rodgers and Omenetto took up the challenge for developing biodegradable electronics, which they call transient electronics (1,2).

At normal body and most environmental situations, the solubility of silicon is very low and their solution is to use it in very thin nanomembranes, thus there is very little of it to go into solution. So nanomembranes of silicon, with some metal oxides to make semiconductors, form the basis of electronic devices that could be implanted into a person, an animal or perhaps a sensitive environmental situation which would make it difficult to retrieve.

The proof of principle gadget was a circuit embedded in a wound which could be heated to act as a bacteriocide. It worked like a charm, the wound healed and the device was absorbed into a now happy rat. No antibiotics were required.

The next problem is that we might want some circuits to last longer than others and making them thicker isn’t a very good option for a uniform production process. The answer the team used was to sign up some silk worms into the work force. The fibroin in silk forms sheets which then stick together via weak hydrogen bonds. The nanomembranes can be coated with dissolved silk, which is then allowed to re-crystalize. This controls the subsequent dissolution of the coating and then the device.

A number of devices are under lab test and one can imagine that in addition to the bacteriocide concept mentioned above, the biodegradable electronics could be used for sensors (chemicals released by sepsis or temperature changes for example after surgery) or for a controlled release of a drug. With modern wireless technology, perhaps the release and data acquisition could be controlled and read by our smartphones.

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1640
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19737125