When you release a balloon in the air, its flight is short and erratic
because of the sudden air loss inside the skin. If you could somehow continuously
pump air back into the balloon to maintain pressure and create a jet of continually
escaping air, the balloon could fly.
This is the same principle used on jet engines. Brenda Benedetti is a robotics
and design engineer who works on jet engines. She focuses on designing better
and more efficient ways for the engine to function.
"We use the computer and a lot of 3D design tools to work out our designs,"
she says. Benedetti is currently working on the complete installation of the
engine into the aircraft.
"I am also using my hands and doing a lot of testing on engine installation,"
she says. "I'm particularly interested in the mount structure for the engine.
"I've always been interested in planes," says Benedetti. "And once I could
combine this with engineering and technology, it was fascinating to know I
could be a part of the design of a jet engine."
When David Garau writes his memoirs, don't be surprised if he calls it
My Life as a Crash Test Dummy. It's not the job he dreamed about during his
two grueling years at college. "It's better," he says -- and he means it.
Garau reconstructs motor vehicle accidents for an insurance company. His
job is to help the insurance company decide who is liable for an accident.
Sometimes that also means figuring out whether injuries like whiplash could
have been caused by the accident.
"We go to junkyards and find similar vehicles [to the ones in the accident
we're investigating]. Then we add instrumentation inside and out to measure
impact, speed and other variables," says Garau. "We spend a lot of time setting
up the scene on our back lot, making sure we've got it right.
"Then we crash them."
That's right. Garau has the job that anybody who played with toy cars in
a sandbox dreamed about. He's allowed to crash big cars and trucks into each
other. And he gets paid for it. So is there a downside?
"Well, sort of," he admits. "Sometimes we have to wire ourselves up and
sit in the car during impact. But the vehicles aren't moving very fast when
we do that."
Sometimes Garau has to design and build the instrumentation devices he
installs in the cars. He's using electronic, mechanical and computer technology
to collect and analyze data that reveals what happened during an accident.
As much as Garau enjoys talking about the lighter side of his work, he's
quick to remind people that very often he deals with real human tragedy.
"We're very aware that death and serious injury are often a part of these
accidents," he says. "When your job is to establish liability -- determine
who is responsible for the accident -- you know the results of your tests
will affect someone for the rest of their lives."
During their research of the accident, robotics technologists sometimes
have to work with the actual cars involved or view the police photos of the
accident scene -- it can be pretty gruesome. Part of their investigation involves
looking at witness reports and consulting experts at car companies around
North America.
"At its most practical level, this is problem solving. You have to determine
the most probable chain of events. Sometimes the work is tedious; it takes
a lot of thinking time and planning," he says. "It can be difficult, but I
love it. It's great work."
When he was in school, he had no idea this kind of work existed. "One of
my professors told me about the job. I was interested because it was an opportunity
to use my skills and knowledge about automation and robotics in a really practical
way."
When Skip Carter went through school, he had no idea he would end up working
in robotics either. "I trained as a physical oceanographer and got into robots
by accident," he says.
Carter uses robots to study the ocean -- he puts environmental sensors
on the ocean floor to monitor and study water currents. "Our measurement instruments
tend to contain some onboard intelligence because they have to be left unattended
for months, or even left on the ocean bottom for years at a time," he says.
Almost as soon as he began his job, Carter started experimenting with the
sensors to make them function better. His newly designed environmental sensors
started looking more and more like robots. Out of curiosity, he started going
to robot conferences and read more and more robotics journals.
"Now some of my robots -- walking on legs or rolling on wheels -- are more
recognizable as traditional robots and aren't really environmental sensors
anymore," he says.
It takes time to craft a robot and then set it free on the ocean bottom.
Carter has to figure out if the robot will be useful in the depth of the ocean.
How much power is available? Are high and low temperatures a consideration?
Must the robot be able to move?
Once Carter has figured out the constraints, he begins to design. He has
to rely on his knowledge of the ocean, mechanics, electronics and robotics
to help him think of a way to put the robot together. How do you build a useful,
reliable tilt sensor for a walking robot? It takes time and many mistakes
before technologists come up with the answer.
"It can be very frustrating to implement something that works perfectly
fine in isolation, but not on the robot as a system."
But Carter chooses to look at the obstacles as challenges rather than frustrations.
"The synthesis of the different skills required to build and program a robot
is a challenge that always makes things interesting," he says. And out of
the frustration or challenge comes a working robot.
In many fields, workers have to be conservative with their thoughts and
plans. In robotics, this isn't the case. "The field is young enough that no
one believes that they have all the solutions," says Carter.
No matter if you are designing crash test dummies or ocean going robots,
you can try out radically new approaches to solving a problem. And
according to Carter, that can lead to the best result: "You often end up learning
something new yourself."