Pocobor.

A research project, called Skal, allows users to control a media center by placing different physical objects embedded with RFID tags in a bowl embedded with an RFID reader.

Timo Arnall, from the Oslo School of Architecture & Design, spoke last month at the “IxDA Interaction 10″ about how technology and networked objects are providing an entirely new interaction category. Designers and engineers, including Pocobor, are embedded technology into products that are providing an entirely new user experience. He stresses the difficulty and importance of communicating and/or visualizing the captured data for immediate feedback and for reflection in the future.

I’ve embedded the video of his presentation below for you to take a look. He focuses primarily on his research using RFID, but sprinkled throughout are some interesting comments about designing for this new product category. Enjoy.

A prototype version of the soft morphing blob robot.

I recently heard about a robot being developed jointly by iRobot and researchers at the University of Chicago that sounds like science fiction come to life. The concept is a soft, shape-shifting robot that moves by something called “jamming skin enabled locomotion.” Check out the video that the researchers have released that does a much better job than I can of explaining the ideas behind the technology and showing their prototype in action (to skip the details and get to the action, scroll to 1:50):

I am excited about this project for several reasons. First of all, there are some very interesting potential applications enabled by the robot’s ability to morph its shape and traverse complex terrain. Such a device could squeeze through small holes or cracks and be an extremely valuable tool for rescue operations (think collapsed buildings, for instance) as well as national security purposes (I would guess that this is why DARPA is funding the project).

Second of all, I think the project is a great example of a concept that is captivating enough to generate excitement in people who wouldn’t normally care about advances in robotics. The idea is so fanciful and yet at the same time easy to understand that it has a way of capturing the imagination (for me, at least). And anything that gets more people interested in science, technology and engineering is good news in my book.

I came across a blog post about the Arduino yesterday on an industrial design blog, Core77. I was definitely surprised to see an entire post dedicated to the Arduino, an open-source electronics and embedded software platform which targets DIY’ers and non-engineers who want to build/hack smart products, on a blog that focuses primarily on product and industrial design. The Arduino is getting great exposure and keeps popping up in places I wouldn’t expect. I’m excited the conversation about and accessibility of smart product design is spreading.

Why I’m Excited

The Arduino provides scaffolding for outsiders and non-embedded system designers, to understand and explore smart product design. It doesn’t matter what your experience or skill level is, Arduino provides an extremely accessible interface for people to get started, from both a hardware perspective and a software perspective. The electronics come packaged and ready to go, with easy to use connectors and easy to understand labels. Several vendors even provide drop-in electronics, called shields (click for a list of shields), which provide specific functionality (ie motor control) to the user with little effort. The free software interface provides a level of separation and simplification from the Microcontroller (MCU). Users have access to easy-to-understand functions and don’t have to familiarize themselves with specific registers and modules of the MCU.

People you wouldn’t expect are getting their hands dirty and cool things are happening. The internet is ripe with cool projects people have put together on their own and there are a ton of project examples and project guides to get people involved. Everyday people are building their own smart products!

Why This Matters To Me

Most importantly, the discussion is finally spreading to people in different walks of life! The exposure allows people who aren’t necessarily engineers to see the possibilities available in smart product design. Different perspectives can easily join the brainstorm. I’m convinced more wild and crazy ideas will be born, not only in garages but also in the office. Ultimately, better products will be designed.

And hopefully the realization of what is possible with a simple open source tool will lead people to imagine what is possible from a professional service firm (ahem Pocobor) and the value we offer. If nothing else, it helps me describe what I do and how technology is being incorporated into new products we use in our everyday lives.

Get Involved

We’ve even put the board in an open source project, called PedalOn, we’re completing for a client to allow customers to modify or rewrite the system software. We’ll talk more about this project in the coming weeks.

An Arduino is even inside PedalOn, a Pocobor project.

I encourage anyone not directly involved with smart product design to get their hands on one of these and start playing. The barrier to entry is low; you can get one for less than $30 from Sparkfun. Or try another distributor - for a full list of distributors look here.

A smart soccer ball that allows exact position tracking during play.

There is a field here in San Francisco where I play soccer from time to time. Being in the city, the field is bordered by streets on all sides and worse, is on top of a hill such that if the ball goes over the fence in any direction, it is headed downhill and will roll for a long, long time. Combined with heavy traffic on some of the streets and a few other random factors, it all adds up to a lot of lost soccer balls.

As I was looking for yet another ball the other day (which I never did find), I started talking with a friend about how great it would be if our soccer balls had locator chips in them. Picture a time when you forgot where you parked your car. You’re wandering around the parking garage, pressing the car alarm button on your key fob and waiting until you hear you car alarm so you can find your vehicle. Imagine doing a similar thing trying to find a soccer ball. You could even have an indicator on the key fob that told you which direction to go. Turn left! Getting warmer… And actually a similar system has been around for a few years for finding lost golf balls.

Lost soccer balls may not be a very common problem, but when I got to work the next morning I kept thinking about smart products in sports. There are a number of examples besides the golf ball finder already – for instance, Adidas has been working to develop a smart soccer ball for a number of years that will take the human guesswork out of knowing whether the ball has crossed the line for a goal. The system may even be used in the 2010 World Cup.

Another area where smart products are making inroads into sports is as training aids. There are smart golf clubs on the market that have built-in hardware designed to measure the user’s swing and help improve their form. Training aids is a really exciting avenue of development because of the potential to provide objective feedback to the user without requiring them to hire an expert (and expensive) coach.

The ongoing shift towards ever more affordable sensor and other IC technology over the past few years has also really opened some new possibilities. For instance, in the past year we’ve worked on projects in and around the sporting goods space involving everything from accelerometers and gyroscopes to RFID, Bluetooth, and motion tracking. All in all, it’s pretty clear that the sporting goods market is going to be an interesting area for smart products as time goes by – it will be exciting to see what comes out next!

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine (a non-engineer) about Pocobor and mechatronics (smart products). It was a meandering conversation about what mechatronics is, how you make something mechatronic, where mechatronics is going and such. (I wrote this post a few months ago which describes what mechatronics is in detail.) At one point she asked me what my favorite mechatronic product is. Without the slightest hesitation I answered “the automobile”. She was a bit surprised, thinking I would say something like a robot, or some other crazy gizmo. The truth is, cars have always been a driving (pun intended) force behind my desire to be an engineer. And a big reason I became a mechatronics engineer is because almost every car on the road today is a mechatronic product.

Cars weren’t always mechatronic. In fact for most of their history they were very much a mechanical system, with a bit of electronics (radio, lighting, etc.) here and there. However, what made a car a car (i.e. the engine, the carburetor, the suspension, and the transmission) were intricate pieces of mechanical hardware (with the exception, I guess, of the spark ignition system). It wasn’t until the end of the 70s and the beginning of 80s that cars started to become mechatronic in nature with the introduction of electronic fuel injection, and flow rate sensors such as the Bosch L-H Jetronic systems  to replace carburetors (read more about fuel injection here).

With the advent of cheaper and more powerful microcontrollers, as well as cheaper and more accurate sensors, came such breakthroughs as anti-lock braking systems, supplemental restraint systems (airbags), and electronic stability control. Today automobiles are the definition of mechatronics. They combine advanced software, with high-tech electronics, and elegant design to create amazing pieces of machinery. Everything from the transmission to the fuel injection to the valve timing to adaptive cruise control is controlled in some way by an embedded microcontroller, relying on accurate yet inexpensive sensors ranging from accelerometers to flow meters to position sensors.

It is also no coincidence that automotive technology has advanced step for step with advances in mechatronics. The automobile, with its economy of scale and demand for precision sensors and microcontrollers to control the ever more advanced systems found inside, is a major, if not the biggest, driver of technological advances in mechatronics and the steep decrease in component prices.

But that is only a part of why I love the automobile, and why I consider it my favorite mechatronic example. The other part is because it has the ability to inspire, to make you stop whatever you are doing, and stare. True, not every car designed elicits such emotion, but when a car that is truly exceptional drives by, everyone looks in awe and desire, and you don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate it. That is the rare thing about automobiles compared to most other products out there. When done right it makes everyone, from the youngest school boy, to the oldest grandma appreciate excellence in design, the same way a Picasso or Monet might.

Personal Metrics and Analytics are Sexy!

Companies have always been data driven. In order to make educated business decisions, you analyze figures and utilize typical business metrics. These metrics help to assess the health and direct the future of your business. Technology, specifically related to smart products, is allowing the same methodology to be applied to our personal lives (although the metrics may be quite different).

I realized yesterday how data driven my personal life is, whether it is my physical health and fitness, energy usage at home, or my personal finances, and how it is similar to the way we manage Pocobor. I now have affordable (if not free) access to tools that gather and analyze information on every aspect of my life, which help advise appropriate and effective decisions. There are tons of these products available; below is a listing of a few of the products I use or am excited to try to help me manage my personal life:

Fitness/Health

Money/Finances

Energy Expenditure

It’s exciting for Pocobor to be part of this revolution by developing smart products related to those listed above. Data and data analytics in our personal and professional lives is becoming more and more accessible. Consumers can now assess their personal lives and identify poignant changes to better their lives with simple and effective products available to them.

The MICROFACTORY MOW

I came across a cool post about the MICROFACTORY MOW by DaeKyung Ahn on Core77 yesterday that really got me excited. DK’s MOW is an in-home manufacturing machine to produce products from scrap flat stock you may have lying around your house, like the brown cardboard/corrugate that lies around after the purchase of any new product. The concept relies on a community open source web-portal where users freely share/upload their custom product ideas so others can search and download the plans to their personal machine for home machining. Although it wasn’t clear to me how the machine instructions would be translated from the ideas, I can easily imagine a simple sketch pad interface on the website to translate a pattern to control code that users with basic geometry skills could master.

MOW In Action

I am really excited about empowering everyday people to explore design in their own homes with simple manufacturing tools and by utilizing waste material. (Brian discussed this in his Democratization of Design post back in January related specifically to the RepRap machine.) So many people have amazing ideas that remain dormant because they don’t have access to the tools or don’t realize how easy it can be to prototype those ideas - maybe MOW can help bridge that gap. And the open source web-portal provides an extremely low barrier to entry; you can try out existing proven designs before experimenting on your own. Or maybe you just want to turn your garbage, bound for a landfill, into something valuable.

The video captures the iterative design process and a demo of the finished prototype. Check it out:

He doesn’t know, either.

Last week Akbar tackled the idea of whether the word “mechatronics” is effective in describing our field to people. However, that discussion is based on a more fundamental question – what do we actually do (i.e. what is the thing that “mechatronics” or any other word is actually trying to describe)?

Field vs. Application

To answer this question, I think it is important to first distinguish between the tools we use and the purposes we apply them towards. A good analogy might be to consider an engineer at an automotive company. Their field (the collection of tools, techniques and concepts they use to do their job) may be mechanical engineering, but their application (the project that they are working on) is a car. Similarly, I would say that mechatronics describes our field but that our applications may be much more varied.

What Is Our Field?

The literal definition of mechatronics is actually pretty straightforward – our niche lies around the intersection of mechanical engineering, electronics, and software. The semi-coherent pinwheel of death / Venn diagram shown below is a nightmare to parse but actually does a decent job of summing up the different areas that fall within our purview (with the qualification that we work on all of the intersection areas, not just the “Mechatronics” one). However, neither the diagram nor the above definition resonates in any meaningful way with the vast majority of people. Because of this, I think it is probably more effective to evangelize our field in terms of what mechatronics allows us to do as opposed to how we do it.

Perfectly comprehensible, right?

So, What Do We Actually Work On?

Because we are a consulting firm, we work on a wide variety of applications, from cleantech projects to medical devices to consumer products to automotive systems. However, if I had to pick one common thread that links virtually all of the work we do, I would say that we generally work on making devices and systems smarter. This can involve changing the way a user interacts with something or making the device able to function more effectively independently from the user.

Because saying “make things smarter” is pretty vague, let’s consider some examples. Imagine a house that turns off the lights when people aren’t in the room to save electricity, or a coffee maker that starts brewing your coffee in the morning before you get up so it is ready when you come downstairs. Picture a system that keeps track of your workouts at the gym and helps you track your progress and improve your technique, or even a Segway (by the way, all of these products currently exist). Making products smarter could mean equipping them with better communication technology so that you can control them remotely via a computer or phone. Or it could mean adding sensors to allow them to be aware of the situation around them so that they can respond in the most useful possible way. Finally, it often means integrating motors or other actuators so that the system is able to actually affect the physical world.

At the end of the day, we believe that mechatronics and its applications to smart products can enable a staggeringly broad set of improvements to our quality of life. Our goal is to get other people as excited about it as we are.

Over the last year and a half I have talked to many people about Pocobor and mechatronics. These conversations have proved to be more difficult than I expected. Some people (mostly engineers) understand exactly what we do, some people kind of understand, but a vast majority of people only take away that Pocobor is some sort of engineering consultancy and our work is probably complicated and boring.

When we started Pocobor, we knew mechatronics was not a terribly common term outside of our field and we understood we would spend a good portion of our marketing effort on actively educating people about mechatronics. We were, and still are, excited about being on the forefront of evangelizing mechatronics to the world and getting people excited about how mechatronics will shape the future by improving the products and services of tomorrow.  However, we weren’t aware how uncommon the term was, especially since mechatronics is a fairly mature field.

A Little Background…

The term mechatronics was coined over 40 years ago by Tetsuro Mori, a Japanese engineer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechatronics). Today, small microcontrollers are readily available from a variety of manufacturers and cost less than a couple of dollars each. People in the U.S. use mechatronic products every single day, from their cars to their microwaves to their smart phones.  Specific mechatronic engineering programs are even available from many universities, such as Professor Ed Carryer’s program at Stanford University (ME218).

So, What’s The Problem?

Given its ubiquity in our lives, one might think that people would already have a pretty good idea about what mechatronics is. And yet, for the most part, it is still unknown outside of engineering circles. Personally, I think the problem comes down to the word mechatronics itself.

Mechatronics is a portmanteau (portman – wha?) of the words “mechanical” and “electronic”. It makes perfect sense; after all, mechatronics is the blending of mechanical systems with electrical systems and software. The problem is that when most people hear mechatronics they might as well be hearing gobbledygook. It is just a jumble of letters to them. They can’t visualize how the word is spelled or decipher its roots. Even if they do happen to break the word down into mechanical systems, electronics, and software, the conversation still requires a long winded explanation of how these three fields fit together and the services we provide. This makes it difficult for people to internalize and talk about later. But even worse, it makes some people tune us out as soon as we start talking because they think what we are about to say is going to be technical and boring.

So, What’s The Solution?

This is the question we are asking ourselves at Pocobor. We like the word mechatronics. It’s not a word we just made up. It’s a real field and aptly describes what we do. However, we also need to be sensitive to the very real idea that it may be in our best interest to find a word that the general public can understand or can immediately identify with. One such example is Smart Product Design. It’s simple and understandable. However, is Smart Product Design as a term any more informative to the general public about we do than mechatronics? Because mechatronics is still unknown outside of certain circles, regardless of what word or phrase we choose to describe it will still require some explanation. I believe the solution may lie in not the word itself but in perfecting a succinct, understandable explanation..No term can be a silver bullet; there has to be a discussion.

In general, we try to tailor our message depending on our audience (engineer vs. non-technical individual, medical device field vs. clean tech, etc.) and we are  always trying out different ways to best describe Pocobor. Mechatronics is a growing field that is becoming more and more prevalent in our lives. The challenge for us is understanding how to best convey this message.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so a 60 second video must be worth 1,500,000 words (assuming 25 frames per second).