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KAIST unveils foldable micro electric car, Armadillo-T
The small and light electric car completely folds in half when parking, making it a perfect fit for public or private transportation in an urban environment.
Looking for a parking space for hours at a busy shopping mall or being stuck on roads jammed with cars releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide are all-too-familiar scenes for city dwellers.
A group of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently developed a possible solution to such problems: a foldable, compact electric vehicle that can be utilized either as a personal car or part of the public transit system to connect major transportation routes within a city.
In-Soo Suh, associate professor of the Graduate School for Green Transportation at KAIST, and his research team introduced a prototype micro electric car called "Armadillo-T," whose design is based on a native animal of South America, the armadillo, a placental mammal with a leathery armor shell.
The research team imitated the animal"s distinctive protection characteristic of rolling up into a ball when facing with threat from predators. Just as armadillos hide themselves inside the shell, Armadillo-T tucks its rear body away, shrinking its original size of 2.8 meters (110 inches) down to almost half, 1.65 meters (65 inches), when folding.
Armadillo-T is a four-wheel-drive, all-electric car with two seats and four in-wheel motors. Since the motors are installed inside the wheels, and the 13.6 kWh capacity of lithium-ion battery pack is housed on the front side, the battery and motors do not have to change their positions when the car folds. This not only optimizes the energy efficiency but also provides stability and ample room to drivers and passengers.
Once folded, the small and light (weighs 450 kg) electric vehicle takes up only one-third of a 5-meter parking space, the standard parking size in Korea, allowing three of its kind to be parked. With a smartphone-interfaced remote control on the wheels, the vehicle can turn 360 degrees, enhancing drivers" convenience to park the car, even in an odd space in a parking lot, the corner of a building, for example.
Professor In-Soo Suh said, "I expect that people living in cities will eventually shift their preferences from bulky, petro-engine cars to smaller and lighter electric cars. Armadillo-T can be one of the alternatives city drivers can opt for. Particularly, this car is ideal for urban travels, including car-sharing and transit transfer, to offer major transportation links in a city. In addition to the urban application, local near-distance travels such as tourist zones or large buildings can be another example of application."
The concept car has loads of smart features on board, too: the cameras installed inside the car eliminate the need for side mirrors and increase the driver"s ability to see the car"s right and left side, thereby reducing blind spots. With a smartphone, the driver can control Armadillo-T and enable remote folding control. The car has a maximum speed of 60 km/h, and with a ten-minute fast charge, it can run up to 100 km.
Professor Suh explained that the concept of Armadillo-T was originally initiated in 2011 as he focused his research interest on the sub-A segment of personal mobility vehicles (PMVs), which are smaller and lighter than the current compact cars, as a new personalized transport mode.
"In coming years, we will see more mega-size cities established and face more serious environmental problems. Throughout the world, the aging population is rapidly growing as well. To cope with climate, energy, and limited petroleum resources, we really need to think outside the box, once again, to find more convenient and eco-friendly transportation, just as the Ford Model T did in the early 1920s. A further level of R&D, technical standards, and regulatory reviews are required to have these types of micro vehicles or PMVs on the market through test-bed evaluations, but we believe that Armadillo-T is an icon toward the future transport system with technology innovation."
The research project has been supported by the Korean government, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement, since December 2012.Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DoZH7Y-sR0
2013.08.21 View 15625 -
2013 International Conference for the Integration of Science, Technology, and Society at KAIST (ICISTS-KAIST)
The International Conference for the Integration of Science, Technology, and Society at KAIST (ICISTS-KAIST) is a global forum organized by KAIST undergraduate students to promote the exchange of ideas and facilitate the discussion of issues that are important to science, technology, society, and higher education. The ICISTS-KAIST conference has been held annually every summer since 2005, inviting distinguished speakers and guests from all around the world to share their insights and expertise with students gathered from Korea and abroad. Last year alone, more than 300 students from 22 nations and 40 speakers participated in the event.
Originally, the ICISTS-KAIST was established by KAIST students who were inspired by the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR), which is one of the Harvard’s largest annual student conferences in Asia.
This year, 335 students from 103 universities in 22 countries joined the conference that was held on August 5th-9th in Daejeon, making the 2013 ICISTS-KAIST the biggest science and engineering gathering hosted by university students in Asia. About 36% of the participants were international students.
The theme of the conference was “Perfect Alliance: Coexistence for Human Society,” in which students and speakers addressed issues on how to harmonize the speed of scientific progress with the development of important values in society, as well as to explore solutions to overcome the chasm, if any, between the boundaries of science and society.
In his opening remarks, President Steve Kang said, “Creativity and innovation are born out of openness. Therefore, it is essential for young scientists and engineers to communicate with people from different cultural and political backgrounds. Through this kind of global interaction and exchange of ideas and views, students will have an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the world and to better examine the purpose of their intellectual exploration in science and technology.” At the 2013 ICISTS-KAIST, 25 distinguished speakers participated including Walter Bender, a former director of the Media Lab at MIT and David Christian, a professor of Macquarie University in Australia.
2013.08.08 View 11107 -
KAIST's wireless Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV) runs inner city roads
For the first time anywhere, electric buses provide public transportation services and are recharged right from the road.
The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is an electric vehicle that can be charged while stationary or driving, thus removing the need to stop at a charging station. Likewise, an OLEV tram does not require pantographs to feed power from electric wires strung above the tram route.
Following the development and operation of commercialized OLEV trams (at an amusement park in Seoul) and shuttle buses (at KAIST campus), respectively, the City of Gumi in South Korea, beginning on August 6th, is providing its citizens with OLEV public transportation services.
Two OLEV buses will run an inner city route between Gumi Train Station and In-dong district, for a total of 24 km roundtrip. The bus will receive 20 kHz and 100 kW (136 horsepower) electricity at an 85% maximum power transmission efficiency rate while maintaining a 17cm air gap between the underbody of the vehicle and the road surface.
OLEV is a groundbreaking technology that accelerates the development of purely electric vehicles as a viable option for future transportation systems, be they personal vehicles or public transit. This is accomplished by solving technological issues that limit the commercialization of electric vehicles such as price, weight, volume, driving distance, and lack of charging infrastructure.
OLEV receives power wirelessly through the application of the “Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance (SMFIR)” technology. SMFIR is a new technology introduced by KAIST that enables electric vehicles to transfer electricity wirelessly from the road surface while moving. Power comes from the electrical cables buried under the surface of the road, creating magnetic fields. There is a receiving device installed on the underbody of the OLEV that converts these fields into electricity. The length of power strips installed under the road is generally 5%-15% of the entire road, requiring only a few sections of the road to be rebuilt with the embedded cables.
OLEV has a small battery (one-third of the size of the battery equipped with a regular electric car). The vehicle complies with the international electromagnetic fields (EMF) standards of 62.5 mG, within the margin of safety level necessary for human health. The road has a smart function as well, to distinguish OLEV buses from regular cars—the segment technology is employed to control the power supply by switching on the power strip when OLEV buses pass along, but switching it off for other vehicles, thereby preventing EMF exposure and standby power consumption. As of today, the SMFIR technology supplies 60 kHz and 180 kW of power remotely to transport vehicles at a stable, constant rate.
Dong-Ho Cho, a professor of the electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Wireless Power Transfer Technology Business Development at KAIST, said:
“It’s quite remarkable that we succeeded with the OLEV project so that buses are offering public transportation services to passengers. This is certainly a turning point for OLEV to become more commercialized and widely accepted for mass transportation in our daily living.”
After the successful operation of the two OLEV buses by the end of this year, Gumi City plans to provide ten more such buses by 2015.
2013.08.07 View 25837 -
A magnetic pen for smartphones adds another level of conveniences
Utilizing existing features on smartphones, the MagPen provides users with a compatible and simple input tool regardless of the type of phones they are using.
A doctoral candidate at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) developed a magnetically driven pen interface that works both on and around mobile devices. This interface, called the MagPen, can be used for any type of smartphones and tablet computers so long as they have magnetometers embedded in.
Advised by Professor Kwang-yun Wohn of the Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT) at KAIST, Sungjae Hwang, a Ph.D. student, created the MagPen in collaboration with Myung-Wook Ahn, a master"s student at the GSCT of KAIST, and Andrea Bianchi, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University.
Almost all mobile devices today provide location-based services, and magnetometers are incorporated in the integrated circuits of smartphones or tablet PCs, functioning as compasses. Taking advantage of built-in magnetometers, Hwang"s team came up with a technology that enabled an input tool for mobile devices such as a capacitive stylus pen to interact more sensitively and effectively with the devices" touch screen. Text and command entered by a stylus pen are expressed better on the screen of mobile devices than those done by human fingers.
The MagPen utilizes magnetometers equipped with smartphones, thus there is no need to build an additional sensing panel for a touchscreen as well as circuits, communication modules, or batteries for the pen. With an application installed on smartphones, it senses and analyzes the magnetic field produced by a permanent magnet embedded in a standard capacitive stylus pen.
Sungjae Hwang said, "Our technology is eco-friendly and very affordable because we are able to improve the expressiveness of the stylus pen without requiring additional hardware beyond those already installed on the current mobile devices. The technology allows smartphone users to enjoy added convenience while no wastes generated."
The MagPen detects the direction at which a stylus pen is pointing; selects colors by dragging the pen across smartphone bezel; identifies pens with different magnetic properties; recognizes pen-spinning gestures; and estimates the finger pressure applied to the pen.
Notably, with its spinning motion, the MagPen expands the scope of input gestures recognized by a stylus pen beyond its existing vocabularies of gestures and techniques such as titling, hovering, and varying pressures. The tip of the pen switches from a pointer to an eraser and vice versa when spinning. Or, it can choose the thickness of the lines drawn on a screen by spinning.
"It"s quite remarkable to see that the MagPen can understand spinning motion. It"s like the pen changes its living environment from two dimensions to three dimensions. This is the most creative characteristic of our technology," added Sungjae Hwang.
Hwang"s initial research result was first presented at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces organized by the Association for Computing Machinery and held on March 19-22 in Santa Monica, the US.
In the next month of August, the research team will present a paper on the MagPen technology, entitled "MagPen: Magnetically Driven Pen Interaction On and Around Conventional Smartphones" and receive an Honorable Mention Award at the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013) to be held in Germany.
In addition to the MagPen, Hwang and his team are conducting other projects to develop different types of magnetic gadgets (collectively called "MagGetz") that include the Magnetic Marionette, a magnetic cover for a smartphone, which offers augmented interactions with the phone, as well as magnetic widgets such as buttons and toggle interface.
Hwang has filed ten patents for the MagGetz technology.
Youtube Links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkPo2las7wc, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9GtgyzoZmM
2013.07.25 View 11554 -
Technology Developed to Control Light Scattering Using Holography
Published on May 29th Nature Scientific Reports online
Recently, a popular article demonstrated that an opaque glass becomes transparent as transparent tape is applied to the glass. The scientific principle is that light is less scattered as the rough surface of the opaque glass is filled by transparent tape, thereby making things behind the opaque glass look clearer.
Professor Yong-Keun Park from KAIST’s Department of Physics, in a joint research with MIT Spectroscopy Lab, has developed a technology to easily control light scattering using holography. Their results are published on Nature’s Scientific Reports May 29th online edition.
This technology allows us to see things behind visual obstructions such as cloud and smoke, or even human skin that is highly scattering, optically thick materials. The research team applied the holography technology that records both the direction and intensity of light, and controlled light scattering of obstacles lied between an observer and a target image. The team was able to retrieve the original image by recording the information of scattered light and reflecting the light precisely to the other side.This phenomenon is known as “phase conjugation” in physics. Professor Park’s team applied phase conjugation and digital holography to observe two-dimensional image behind a highly scattering wall. “This technology will be utilized in many fields of physics, optics, nanotechnology, medical science, and even military science,” said Professor Park. “This is different from what is commonly known as penetrating camera or invisible clothes.” He nevertheless drew the line at over-interpreting the technology, “Currently, the significance is on the development of the technology itself that allows us to accurately control the scattering of light."
Figure I. Observed Images
Figure II. Light Scattering Control
2013.07.19 View 9105 -
Joint Research Center on EEWS with Hyundai Heavy Industries Plans to Open
The research center will conduct collaborative R&D projects on energy, environment, water, and sustainability for the next five years.Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), the world’s largest shipbuilding company, signed an MOU with KAIST for future business development and joint research collaboration.
KAIST and HHI signed an MOU as an agreement to establish the “HHI-KAIST EEWS Research Center (HK Research Center) on June 21st.”
The major mission of the HK Research Center is to build a strong base for creating future businesses through developing fundamental, core technology in the field of EEWS and designing business models based on the new technology.
Toward this goal, HHI will sponsor the R&D budget and operation expenses of the research center for the next five years.
Prior to the signing of the MOU, a delegation from HHI, led by the Vice President, Mr. Si-Young Hwang, visited the Office of EEWS Initiative at KAIST and held a workshop. During the workshop, HHI and KAIST agreed to collaborate in fields such as LNG-propelled ships, solar power generation, energy storage, fuel cells, and CO2 capture.
KAIST has run a EEWS graduate program that receives government grants over the last five years, with a research emphasis on energy, environment, water, and sustainability, which are crucial issues to humankind in the 21st century. The EEWS program achieved 24 core technological developments and educates more than 200 masters- and PhD-degree students annually.
The EEWS program also emphasizes commercializing its research outcomes. Through the annual Business Planning Competition and Investment Drive, there have been eight new companies founded by alumni and professors over the last five years of the program. The HK Research Center will be an excellent foundation for future education and research in EEWS.
Professor Jae-Kyu Lee, the head of the HK Research Center and the director of the EEWS Initiative, said, “This event is a benchmarking example of Industry-KAIST collaboration. We hope that the HK Research Center will be a place for disruptive innovations to translate into creative business opportunities.”
MOU signed for Hyundai Heavy Industries-KAIST EEWS Research Center
2013.07.15 View 9209 -
Chin-Wan Chung, a professor of computer science, received the best paper award from ACM
The Korea Times reported on July 12, 2013 that Chin-Wan Chung, a professor of computer science at KAIST, won the best paper award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). For the article, please click the link:
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/people/2013/07/178_139132.html
2013.07.15 View 7530 -
Prof. Song Chong received the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award
The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Communications Society (ComSoc), a renowned global network of professionals with a common interest in advancing communications technologies, has announced the winner of the 2013 William R. Bennett Prize in the field of communications networking. The prize was given to a Korean research team led by Song Chong, Professor of Electrical Engineering at KAIST and Injong Rhee, Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. In addition, Dr. Minsu Shin, Dr. Seongik Hong, and Dr. Seong Joon Kim of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. as well as Professor Kyunghan Lee from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology were recognized for their contribution.
The William R. Bennett Prize for communications networking has been awarded each year since 1994 in recognition of the best paper published in any journal financially sponsored or co-sponsored by ComSoc in the previous three calendar years. Only one paper per year is selected based on its quality, originality, scientific citation index, and peer reviews. Among the previous award winners are Robert Gallager of MIT, and Steven Low of the California Institute of Technology, and Kang G. Shin of the University of Michigan.
The Korean research team’s paper, On the Levy-Walk Nature of Human Mobility, was published in the June 2011 issue of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, a bimonthly journal co-sponsored by the IEEE ComSoc, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with its Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM).
In the paper, the research team proposed a new statistical model to effectively analyze the pattern of individual human mobility in daily life. The team handed out GPS (global positioning system) devices to 100 participants residing in five different university campuses in Korea and the US and collected data on their movements for 226 days. The mobility pattern obtained from the experiment predicted accurately how the participants actually moved around during their routines. Since publication, the paper has been cited by other papers approximately 350 times.
The team’s research results will apply to many fields such as the prevention and control of epidemics, the design of efficient communications networks, and the development of urban and transportation system.
The research team received the award on June 10th at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) held in Budapest, Hungary, from June 9-13, 2013.
Professor Song Chong
2013.07.06 View 14179 -
Thinking Out of the Box: KAIST Silicon Valley Innovation Platform
KAIST established a liaison office in San Jose, California, to support the entrepreneurship of KAIST graduates, students, and faculty who aspire to transform their innovative ideas into business.
The office, KAIST Silicon Valley Innovation Platform (SVIP), is located within the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) IT Center on North First Street in San Jose.
SVIP collects information and analyzes trends on emerging technologies; provides various educational programs on entrepreneurship and technology translation; offers opportunities to prospective entrepreneurs to engage with industry and research and government organizations; and assists Korean startups in accessing the US and North American market.
President Steve Kang attended the opening ceremony of the office on June 14th and encouraged KAIST alumni living in the US to share their ideas and technology innovations and transform them into business opportunities.
For more information, please contact Professor Soung-Hie Kim (seekim@business.kaist.ac.kr) from the Graduate School of Information and Media Management, KAIST.
2013.07.04 View 9087 -
Professor Jay H. Lee to receive the 2013 AIChE CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award
Professor Jay H. Lee of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at KAIST has won the 2013 Computing in Chemical Engineering Award of AIChE"s CAST Division (AIChE, American Institute of Chemical Engineers and CAST, Computing & Systems Technology Division).
The CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, sponsored by The Dow Chemical Company, is annually given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions in the application of computing and systems technology to chemical engineering.Professor Lee has been recognized for his pioneering research contributions for “novel paradigms for much improved and robust model predictive control in industrial processes.” He is currently the Head of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department and Director of Brain Korea (BK) 21 Program at the department. BK21 is the Korean government’s initiative to support the growth of research universities in the nation and foster highly trained master’s and doctoral students as well as researchers.
The CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award will be presented to Professor Jay H. Lee at the CAST Division dinner to be held at the AIChE Annual Meeting this November in San Francisco, where he will also deliver the after dinner lecture associated with this award.
2013.06.12 View 10784 -
Technology for Non-Breaking Smartphone Display Developed
High-strength plastic display has been developed by applying a glass-fiber fabric.
“Will bring about innovation to the field by replacing glass substrates”
It is now possible to manufacture non-breaking smartphone display. Heavy glass substrates of large-screen televisions will be replaced with light plastic films.
Professor Choon Sup Yoon from KAIST’s Department of Physics and KAIST Institute for Information Technology Convergence has developed the technology for high-strength plastic substrates to replace glass displays.
The plastic substrate created by Professor Yoon and his research team have greatly enhanced needed properties of heat resistance, transparency, flexibility, inner chemical capability, and tensile strength. Although the material retains flexibility as a native advantage of plastic film, its tensile strength is three times greater than that of normal glass, which is a degree similar to tempered glass. In addition, Professor Yoon’s substrate is as colorless and transparent as glass and resists heat up to 450℃, while its thermal expansivity is only 10% to 20% of existing plastics.
Glass substrates are currently used in practically every display such as mobile phone screens, televisions, and computer monitors for having smooth surface and satisfying basic conditions for display substrates. However, as glass substrates are heavy and easily broken, researchers studied colorless and transparent plastic polyimide films to replace glass substrates for their excellent thermal and chemical stability.
Nonetheless, colorless and transparent polyimide films do not have sufficient heat resistance and mechanical solidity. To resolve this problem, polyimide films are impregnated with glass-fiber fabrics, but it was far from commercialization as the impregnation exacerbates the roughness of surface and light transmittance. The roughness of the surface increases as the solvent evaporates in the impregnation process, resulting in surface roughness of around 0.4μm. The downturn in light transmittance is due to light scattering effect by the discording refractive index of polyimide film and glass-fiber fabric.
Professor Yoon’s research team resolved these issues by tuning the refractive indices of transparent polyimide film and glass-fiber fabric up to four decimal places, and by developing the technology of flattening the film’s surface roughness to a few nanometers. As a result, the research team achieved heat expansivity of 11ppm/℃, surface roughness of 0.9nm, tensile strength of 250MPa, bending curvature radius of 2mm, and light transmittance at 90% with a 110μm-thick glass-fiber fabric impregnated transparent polyimide film substrate.
“The developed substrate can not only replace the traditional glass substrate but also be applied as flexible display substrate,” said Professor Yoon in prospect, “it will bring about technological innovation in display industry as it can fundamentally resolve the issue of shattering mobile phone displays, reduce the weight and thickness of large-area televisions, and apply Roll to Roll process in display manufacture.”
Supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy for five years, the technology has applied for 3 patents and is in discussion for technology transfer with related business.
Figure 1. The according (left) and discording (right) refractive indices of glass-fiber fabric and polyimide film. The characters on the left are sharp and clear, but the characters on the right appear foggy.
Figure 2. Picture of the developed glass-fiber fabric
2013.06.09 View 9472 -
A KAIST research team developed in vivo flexible large scale integrated circuits
Daejeon, Republic of Korea, May 6th, 2013–-A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.
Silicon-based semiconductors have played significant roles in signal processing, nerve stimulation, memory storage, and wireless communication in implantable electronics. However, the rigid and bulky LSI chips have limited uses in in vivo devices due to incongruent contact with the curvilinear surfaces of human organs. Especially, artificial retinas recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (refer to the press release of FDA"s artificial retina approval) require extremely flexible and slim LSI to incorporate it within the cramped area of the human eye.
Although several research teams have fabricated flexible integrated circuits (ICs, tens of interconnected transistors) on plastics, their inaccurate nano-scale alignment on plastics has restricted the demonstration of flexible nano-transistors and their large scale interconnection for in vivo LSI applications such as main process unit (MPU), high density memory and wireless communication. Professor Lee"s team previously demonstrated fully functional flexible memory using ultrathin silicon membranes (Nano Letters, Flexible Memristive Memory Array on Plastic Substrates), however, its integration level and transistor size (over micron scale) have limited functional applications for flexible consumer electronics.
Professor Keon Jae Lee"s team fabricated radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) interconnected with thousand nano-transistors on silicon wafer by state-of-the-art CMOS process, and then they removed the entire bottom substrate except top 100 nm active circuit layer by wet chemical etching. The flexible RF switches for wireless communication were monolithically encapsulated with biocompatible liquid crystal polymers (LCPs) for in vivo bio-medical applications. Finally, they implanted the LCP encapsulated RFICs into live rats to demonstrate the stable operation of flexible devices under in vivo circumstances.
Professor Lee said, "This work could provide an approach to flexible LSI for an ideal artificial retina system and other bio-medical devices. Moreover, the result represents an exciting technology with the strong potential to realize fully flexible consumer electronics such as application processor (AP) for mobile operating system, high-capacity memory, and wireless communication in the near future."
This result was published in the May online issue of the American Chemical Society"s journal, ACS Nano (In vivo Flexible RFICs Monolithically Encapsulated with LCP). They are currently engaged in commercializing efforts of roll-to-roll printing of flexible LSI on large area plastic substrates.
Movie at Youtube Link: Fabrication process for flexible LSI for flexible display, wearable computer and artificial retina for in vivo biomedical application
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PpbM7m2PPs&feature=youtu.be
Applications of in Vivo Flexible Large Scale Integrated Circuits
Top: In vivo flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI); Bottom: Schematic of roll-to-roll printing of flexible LSI on large area plastics.
2013.06.09 View 14202