The many uses of Detecting oil spills The man behind eye tracking in the Arctic the Predator TechnologyQuarterly December 1st 2012 The dream of the medical tricorder How “Star Trek” is inspiring diagnostic add-ons for smartphones TQCOV-DECEMBER.2012.indd 1 19/11/2012 15:22 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 1st 2012 Monitor 1 Contents On the cover Along with teleportation and speech-controlled computers, the medical tricorder, a portable diagnostic tool, was one of many imaginary future technologies featured in Star Trek. It is now inspiring a host of real-life medical add-ons for An internet of airborne things smartphones, page 8 Monitor 1 An internet of airborne things, auxetic materials, agricultural robots, motion-capture systems in sport, cardboard bicycles, mobile-phone Networking: Enthusiasts dream of building a drone-powered internet to recycling, an unusual new type of lens, and who won our carry objects rather than data. Are they mad? Innovation awards HE spread of mobile phones in devel- charged one before proceeding to the next Dierence engine Toping countries in the past decade has station. The routing of drones and the delivered enormous social and economic allocation of specic packages to specic 7 The PC all over again? benets. By providing a substitute for drones would all be handled automatical- Fans of 3D printing should watch travel, phones can make up for bad roads ly, and deliveries would thus be possible out for a regulatory clampdown and poor transport infrastructure, helping over a wide area using a series of hops. It traders nd better prices and boosting is, in short, a physical implementation of Medical technology entrepreneurship. But although infor- the packet switching model that directs 8 A doctor in your pocket mation can be delivered by phoneand, data across the internet, which is why its Smartphones go to medical in a growing number of countries, money creators call their scheme the matternet. school, thanks to Star Trek transferred as wellthere are some things Over the matternet, so the vision goes, that must be delivered physically. For hospitals could send urgent medicines to small items that are needed urgently, such remote clinics more quickly than they Detecting oil spills as medicines, why not use drone heli- could via roads, and blood samples could 11 Trouble under the ice copters to deliver them, bypassing the be sent and returned within hours. A As oil companies move into the need for roads altogether? farmer could place an order for a new Arctic, new tools are needed That, at least, was the idea cooked up tractor part by text message and pay for it last year at Singularity University, a Silicon via mobile money-transfer. A supplier Valley summer school where eager en- many miles away would then take the Navigation technology trepreneurs gather in the hope of solving part to the local matternet station for 13 Finding the way inside humanity’s grandest challenges with new airborne dispatch via drone. Satellite navigation is great, but technologies. The plan is to build a net- doesn’t work indoors. What will? work of autonomously controlled, multi- Mind over matter rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Andreas Raptopoulos, the entrepreneur Computer interfaces carry small packages of a standardised who led the academic team, reckons that size. Rather than having a drone carry the scheme would be competitive with 15 The eyes have it each package directly from sender to building all-weather roads. A case study Eye-tracking technology is being recipient, which could involve a long of the Maseru district of Lesotho put the put to a wide range of uses journey beyond the drone’s ying range, cost of a network of 50 base-stations and the idea is to build a network of base 150 drones at $900,000, compared with Brain scan stations, each no more than 10km (6 miles) $1m for a 2km, one-lane road. The ad- 17 The dronefather from the next, with drones carrying pack- vantage of roads, however, is that they can A prole of Abe Karem, creator ages between them. carry heavy goods and people, whereas of the modern military drone After arrival at a station, a drone would matternet drones would be limited to swap its depleted battery pack for a fully payloads of 2kg in a standard 10-litre con- 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 1st 2012 2 tainer. But the scheme is potentially life- gee cords, obviously. But they are con- saving in remote areas, and might also structed in a similar way, using a tech- have commercial potential to deliver nique called weft insertion to wrap a thin small packages in the rich world. Hook’s law line of high-strength material such as Since the original proposal, however, Kevlar around a core made of specially an ideological disagreement has emerged processed elastic polyester. These threads over how best to implement this drone- are then woven into auxetic cloth that can powered internet for objects. Two separate be cut into particular shapes for use in groups are now taking rather dierent Materials: Auxetic substances, various applications. approaches. The rst, led by Mr Raptopou- which get fatter rather than thinner Auxetic materials have two useful los, has formed a company, called Mat- properties. One is the shape change per se. ternet, to develop the drone and base- when stretched, could be useful in a The other is that the shape change absorbs station hardware, and the software that wide range of applications and stores energy, and does so rapidly. If a will co-ordinate them. The company then OBERT HOOKE was a contemporary sheet of the material is hit in one place, the hopes to sell the technology to govern- Rof Isaac Newton and even more of a energy of the impact is thus spread over ment health departments and non-prot polymath. Sic transit gloria mundi. These the whole sheet. Then, when the material groups. Just as mobile phones have days Hooke is well known only for his law relaxes back into its original shape, that spurred development in poor countries, of elasticity: that the amount a material energy is dissipated from the entire sur- Mr Raptopoulos hopes drone delivery stretches is proportional to the force ap- face, rather than just the point of impact. will do something similar. plied. Such stretching, inter alia, causes the Auxetix has already tested a bomb- The second group is called Aria (au- material to get thinner, of course. Unless, resistant curtain made of such material. It tonomous roadless intelligent array). It that is, the substance in question is an can stop fragments of glass and similar believes the matternet should be free, auxetic material, in which case it gets shrapnel, but is thin enough to be translu- open and based on standardised proto- fatter. Robert Hooke’s near namesake, cent and thus let a useful amount of day- cols, just like the internet. It is developing Patrick Hook, the boss of Auxetix, a small light through a window. If hit by a blast, these protocols and building prototypes rm based in south-west England, hopes the curtain expands. That creates pores that adhere to them, and inviting others to to exploit this weirdness to make every- which allow the air of the blast to pass follow suit. Aria is not promoting any thing from body armour to dental oss. through, so that the cloth is not damaged particular use of the technology, and will To understand how an auxetic material but the pores are also small enough to stop not necessarily build or run networks works, imagine a rubber bungee cord with the passage of solid debris. The kinetic itself. We understand there will be hun- a piece of shing line wrapped around its energy of the debris is then absorbed by dreds of applications, but we are not length in an open spiral. If you pull the the material. interested in running such applications, line tight, it straightens, and the cord is The rm also hopes to use its unusual says Arturo Pelayo, Aria’s co-founder. We distorted into a spiral around it. And that material to make body armour. The Amer- won’t aim for understanding every single spiral is wider than the undistorted cord. If ican army’s current kit, known as In- geographical and cultural context where several such line-wrapped bungee cords terceptor Body Armour, weighs as much the system might be used. are laid alongside each other and the as 15kg including ceramic-plate inserts. Both groups have recently started shing lines pulled tight simultaneously, Soldiers are obviously keen to reduce this testing their rst prototypes. Matternet ran then they push each other aside, increas- weight. Dr Hook has tested prototype a series of successful eld tests of its proto- ing the area that they cover and the vol- auxetic armour that is 10% lighter than type UAVs in the Dominican Republic ume they occupy. In other words, they get Interceptor while, he hopes, being just as and Haiti in September, and met local bigger when stretched. eective at absorbing impacts. groups to sell the idea. Meanwhile, Aria The threads from which Auxetix’s If the new material works in these also spent the summer testing, and show- materials are made are thinner than bun- military applications, then Dr Hook hopes 1 cased its ideas, such as the use of retro- tted shipping containers for base sta- tions, at the Burning Man festival held in the Nevada desert in August. Flying drones in high winds without crashing into anyone presented quite a challenge.