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Blog – Page 6827

Blue Robotics, a leading developer of marine robotics systems and components, has partnered with Unmanned Systems Technology (“UST”) to demonstrate their expertise in this field. The ‘Silver’ profile highlights how their underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), thrusters and accessories enable a wide range of missions for commercial, research and exploration applications.

The BlueROV2 is a high-performance, highly configurable ROV designed for underwater inspections, research and ocean exploring. With open-source hardware and software, the platform features an unprecedented level of flexibility and expandability, allowing users to easily make improvements and upgrades to take on a huge variety of missions down to depths of 100m (330 feet).

The ROV incorporates six Blue Robotics T200 thrusters in a vectored configuration, delivering excellent thrust-to-weight ratio and providing the ability to move precisely in any direction. The system can be expanded to eight thrusters via a Heavy Configuration Retrofit Kit, and features adjustable gain levels for precision control at extremely low speeds as well as high power to overcome currents and carry heavy loads. The BlueROV2 is provided with a Fathom ROV tether, with available length options from 25m (82 ft) up to 300 m (984 ft).

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How an MIT engineering course became an incubator for fusion design innovations.

“There is no lone genius who solves all the problems.”

Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is reflecting on a guiding belief behind his nuclear science and engineering class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering). He has recently watched his students, working in teams, make their final presentations on how to use fusion technology to create carbon-free fuel for shipping vessels. Since taking on the course over a decade ago, Whyte has moved away from standard lectures, prodding the class to work collectively on finding solutions to “real-world” issues. Over the past years the course, and its collaborative approach to design, has been instrumental in guiding the real future of fusion at the PSFC.

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John Martinis has done groundbreaking research on coherent superconducting devices since his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. These superconducting devices can be modeled as lumped-element electric circuits using Josephson junctions, capacitors and inductors as components. The fact that a superconducting phase across a Josephson junction can display coherent quantum behavior – even though it is a property of the wave function of an immense number of electrons – can be viewed as a fundamental discovery [1], kickstarting, in retrospect, the field of superconducting quantum computing.

John Martinis invented and developed the superconducting phase qubit, based on a current-biased Josephson junction, for the purpose of scalable multi-qubit quantum computing [2]. In 2002, he first demonstrated coherent Rabi oscillations and quantum measurement for such superconducting phase qubit [3]. He has had a longstanding interest in understanding the origin of noise in superconducting electric circuits as these sources of noise naturally limit qubit coherence. In particular, his understanding of noise sources such as dielectric loss, flux noise and the presence and dynamics of quasi-particles [4], by means of simple physical models, have been instrumental in the field. The effect and mitigation of quasi-particles and how they are affected by radiation and cosmic rays continues to be of high interest for the future of superconducting quantum devices [5, 6].

An important step showing his leadership and commitment to building a quantum computer came with his 2014 move, as a Professor at UCSB, to Google, where he gathered a large team of physicists and engineers to tackle the challenge of making a multi-qubit programmable processor. This team has excelled in its relentless focus on optimizing device performance by implementing successful engineering choices for qubit design, couplers and scalable I/O.

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Local media reports quoted Wang as saying that artificial intelligence, 6G, quantum technology, driverless vehicles, intelligent networks and other “frontier areas” would be the focus of Shenzhen’s investment plans, while the value of its digital economy would account for more than 31 per cent of GDP by 2025.

Money will be used to support innovation in core technologies, city’s Communist Party chief Wang Weizhong says.

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The aircraft can lift up to 2722 kg with unmatched performance in hot and high conditions.

Kaman Air Vehicles performed the maiden flight with the world’s first heavy-lift unmanned helicopter for the commercial market, the K-MAX TITAN, last month.

Kaman’s K-MAX helicopter has been flying unmanned cargo missions for US forces in Afghanistan for roughly a decade now. Now, the company is introducing a commercial version to the market.

With a focus on enabling safety and operational efficiency, the unmanned helicopter will redefine the helicopter external lift market by increasing future mission capabilities in any location and any type of weather. This is made possible thanks to the so-called autonomous Near Earth Autonomy’s sensor-based autonomy suite.

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A team of Chinese physicists are making some serious progress in the field of quantum mechanics. Recently, this team has measured the speed of quantum entanglement – more affectionately known as “spooky action at a distance”, as Einstein called it.

To summarize quantum entanglement, two or more particles are entangled, which means they share the same wave form. The more technical definition is: “Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons, electrons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and even small diamonds interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description (state), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc.”

When most people describe this interesting process, they’ll describe the information transfer as ‘instantaneous’ or ‘near-instantaneous’. Several research teams have attempted to measure the actual speed seen in the transfer of information in entangled systems, but have failed in one way or another, usually resulting from flawed methodology dealing in quantum nonlocality.

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For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used one of its two microphones to listen as the Ingenuity helicopter flew for the fourth time on April 30, 2021. A new video combines footage of the solar-powered helicopter taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z imager with audio from a microphone belonging to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument.

The laser zaps rocks from a distance, studying their vapor with a spectrometer to reveal their chemical composition. The instrument’s records the sounds of those laser strikes, which provide information on the physical properties of the targets, such as their relative hardness. The microphone can also record , like the Martian wind.

With Perseverance parked 262 feet (80 meters) from the helicopter’s takeoff and landing spot, the rover mission wasn’t sure if the microphone would pick up any sound of the flight. Even during flight, when the helicopter’s blades spin at 2537 rpm, the sound is greatly muffled by the thin Martian atmosphere. It is further obscured by Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. Listen closely, though, and the helicopter’s hum can be heard faintly above the sound of those winds.

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Quantum entanglement is the binding together of two particles or objects, even though they may be far apart – their respective properties are linked in a way that’s not possible under the rules of classical physics.

It’s a weird phenomenon that Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance”, but its weirdness is what makes it so fascinating to scientists. In new research, quantum entanglement has been directly observed and recorded at the macroscopic scale – a scale much bigger than the subatomic particles normally associated with entanglement.

The dimensions involved are still very small from our perspective – these experiments involved two tiny aluminum drums one-fifth the width of a human hair – but in the realm of quantum physics they’re absolutely huge.

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