CF-SCI-TECH-RELATED

A robotic helping hand

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 23:20:35 +0000

A robotic helping hand Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/14/2018 - 16:20

Daniel Strain

Connor Brooks, a graduate student in computer science, demonstrates a robotic system that responds to spoken commands. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

“Robot, point to the screwdriver next to the clamp.”

Daniel Pendergast, a graduate student in CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute, issues the command, and a few feet away a four-foot-tall robot obeys. The machine whirs to life, bending and twisting its one arm to hover over a table crowded with assorted tools—where it points its claw at a screwdriver right next to a clamp.

Daniel Szafir

The action might seem simple—something that people do every day—but in the field of robotics, Pendergast’s pointing system is a big step forward. That’s because it’s not easy for robots to understand the messy and often vague nature of human language, said Daniel Szafir, Pendergast’s advisor and an assistant professor at ATLAS.

What, for example, does a person mean when they say “next to”?

In trying to answer those questions, Szafir and his colleagues belong to a rapidly-growing area of study called human-robot interaction. The field addresses the huge gulf that seems to exist between people and their robot helpers: Robots don’t always understand people, and people often don’t want to be around moving, learning machines.

There’s a lot to be gained from helping the two get along, Szafir said. In the case of the screwdriver-locating robot, which the team highlighted in a recent publication, Szafir’s goal is to design automated machines that could help people take on a range of tasks—from caring for elderly relatives to assembling toy castles for their kids on Christmas morning.

“There was always something that fascinated me about this idea of automated assistants,” said Szafir, also in the Department of Computer Science. “It seems like such a powerful way to improve the quality of life for people at all stages. It can help out in healthcare and rehabilitation. It can help us around the house and free us up for pursuits that we’d really like to be doing.”

[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYdX7Ozbhk]

Flying eyes

If the idea of a world filled with robotic assistants wigs you out, Szafir acknowledged that you’re not alone. Many people feel uncomfortable around robots, in part because humans are used to working with beings with expressive eyes and complex body language.

“The robot in our lab only has one arm,” he said. “You can do certain kinds of gestures with that, but people have two arms.”

Szafir, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2017, is trying to cross that valley. He has experimented, for example, with using augmented reality headsets to help people understand what robots are going to do next. In one case, he made it easier for humans to anticipate the movements of flying robots by making them look like giant eyeballs.

He imagines that similar technologies could help disaster responders fight wildfires—using augmented reality displays to track and manage fleets of drones flying around blazes. Szafir and his colleagues recently landed a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to experiment with how workers in dangerous fields could use those sorts of tools.

But he also focuses on designing robots that can better interpret human gestures and language. As Szafir put it, in the field of human-robotic interaction, “the human is just as important as the robot.”

That’s not easy. Take the task of building a toy castle on Christmas morning. If you’re working with a human assistant, you can signal that you want a screwdriver in many different ways: you might say “hand me that,” grunt and point or just direct your gaze.

“People are so good at interpreting highly-ambiguous statements and gestures,” Szafir said. “So while I can tell a person, ‘can you pass me that thing,’ for a robot, it would be really hard to know what that meant.”

[video: https://vimeo.com/280123074]

Helping hands

To get to that point, Szafir and his colleagues took an unusual approach: they asked people to teach their robotic system for them.

They solicited human volunteers to describe the locations of objects in a series of illustrations of messy workbenches, similar to the one in Szafir’s lab. The team then fed those sentences into a computer algorithm that analyzed and learned the speech patterns that people use when they want something but can’t reach it.

The claw isn’t perfect. So far, it points to the right objects about 70 percent of the time. And it can’t understand certain types of descriptions, such as those involving negatives: “Hand me the screwdriver that isn’t next to the clamp.” But, Szafir said, it’s a leap above existing systems of this kind.

The researchers reported their results in October at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Boulder.

And the team hasn’t stopped at spoken words. In related research, Szafir and his colleagues are working to develop robots that can understand the language of human shrugs, head scratching and pointing.

They have designed a system that scans people as they complete a basic assembly task—say, building a tower out of wooden blocks and screws. Based on how the builders move and where their eyes are pointing, the robot tries to guess at the tools those people might need next.

“It would recognize when they wanted to fasten things together and it would hand them a screwdriver,” Szafir said. He presented the results of that research recently at the International Conference of Intelligent Robots and Systems in Madrid.

There’s a lot of work to be done, but Szafir hopes that automated assistants will be coming to work places and homes near you in the decades ahead. Such feats of engineering may seem mundane in a world where drones can fly over the surface of Mars and run on treadmills.

But, Szafir said, the pursuit of everyday robot coworkers is about conserving something that all humans cherish: “The one limited resource that we all have is our time.”

[video: https://youtu.be/cKktizb-4ac]

Daniel Szafir's work may pave the way for fleets of automated assistants that will one day help people carry out a range of tasks—from fighting wildfires to building craft projects in the home.

Off

Traditional

White

Fire ant colonies could inspire molecular machines, swarming robots

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:24:07 +0000

Fire ant colonies could inspire molecular machines, swarming robots Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/05/2018 - 10:24

Daniel Strain

Fire ant (Solenopsis invicta). (Credit: CC photo by Insects Unlocked via Flickr)

Think of it as mathematics with a bite: Researchers at CU Boulder have uncovered the statistical rules that govern how gigantic colonies of fire ants form bridges, ladders and floating rafts.

The research, published last week in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, takes a unique look at one of the strangest, and potentially painful, networks in nature. Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) are resourceful builders, using their own bodies to create gigantic structures made up of hundreds to thousands of insects and more.

In the new study, a team led by CU Boulder’s Franck Vernerey set out to lay out the engineering principles that underlie these all-ant structures—specifically, how they become so flexible, changing their shapes and consistencies within seconds. The group used statistical mechanics to calculate the way that ant colonies respond to stresses from the outside, shifting how they hang onto their neighbors based on key thresholds.

The findings may also help researchers understand other “dynamic networks” in nature, including cells in the human body, said Vernerey, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Such networks “are why human bodies can self-heal,” Vernerey said. “They are why we can grow. All of this is because we are made from materials that are interacting and can change their shape over time.”

Ant armada

Fire ants form a raft during flooding. (Credit: CC photo by Turnbull FL via Wikimedia Commons)

They can also float: Fire ant colonies gained some fame in 2017 when videos from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Texas showed these insects riding out the flood waters by banding together into rafts.

Such structures may be an insectophobe’s nightmare, but they’re an engineer’s dream. That’s because while individual ants have simple brains, their colonies display surprisingly intelligent behavior. That’s a trait that scientists would like to mimic as they develop new types of polymers and swarms of robots that can work together seamlessly.

Fire ants are “a bio-inspiration,” said Shankar Lalitha Sridhar, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at CU Boulder and a coauthor of the new study. The goal is “to mimic what they do by figuring out the rules.”

To begin to understand those rules, the team turned to experimental results collected by scientists at Georgia Tech University. Those researchers found that fire ant colonies maintain their flexibility through a fast-paced dance. To glom onto each other, individual ants hang onto the insects next to them using the sticky pads on their feet. But they also don’t stay still: In a typical colony, those ants may shift the position of their feet, grabbing onto a different neighbor every 0.7 seconds.

The team from CU Boulder wanted to find out how the ants govern this internal cha-cha in response to outside pressures. To do that, Vernerey and his colleagues used a mathematical tool that allowed them to average out the behavior of the hundreds to thousands of ants in a colony.

“When look at an aggregation, you don’t really care what one ant does,” said Tong Shen, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and a coauthor of the study. “You just look at the population.”

Tap dance

The researchers, who also included graduate student Robert Wagner, discovered that as the forces on ant colonies increase, the insects pick up their speed. If the force on an individual ant’s leg hits more than eight times its body weight, the insect will compensate by switching between its neighbors twice as fast.

“If you start to increase your rate of shear, then you will start stretching their legs a little bit,” Vernerey said. “Their reaction will be, ‘oh, we are being stretched here, so let’s exchange our turnover rate.’”

That behavior explains why ant colonies are classified as “shear-thinning” fluids, or materials that get thinner the more force you put on them—think stirring a can of paint.

But if you keep increasing the forces on the ants, they can no longer keep up. When that happens, the ants will stop letting go of their neighbors and instead hold on for dear life.

“Now, they will be so stressed that they will behave like a solid,” Vernerey said. “Then at some point you just break them.”

The researchers explained that they’ve only just scratched the surface of the mathematics of fire ant colonies. But their calculations are general enough that researchers can already begin using them to explore designs for new dynamic networks, including molecular machines that deliver drugs directly to cells.

Researchers have uncovered the statistical rules that govern how gigantic colonies of fire ants form bridges, ladders and floating rafts.

Off

Traditional

White

Engineers scale up a low-cost, energy-saving cooling system

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Engineers scale up a low-cost, energy-saving cooling system Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/26/2018 - 09:00

Trent Knoss

CU Boulder and University of Wyoming engineers have successfully scaled up an innovative water-cooling system capable of providing continuous day-and-night radiative cooling for structures. The advance could increase the efficiency of power generation plants in summer and lead to more efficient, environmentally-friendly temperature control for homes, businesses, utilities and industries.

The new research demonstrates how the low-cost hybrid organic-inorganic radiative cooling metamaterial, which debuted in 2017, can be scaled into a roughly 140-square-foot array—small enough to fit on most rooftops—and act as a kind of natural air conditioner with almost no consumption of electricity.

“You could place these panels on the roof of a single-family home and satisfy its cooling requirements,” said Dongliang Zhao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in CU Boulder’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The technology, which takes advantage of natural radiative cooling principles, is described today in the journal Joule.

“As Earth’s temperature warms due to the absorbed heat from the sunlight during the day, it continuously emits infrared light to the cold universe all the time,” said Professor Ronggui Yang of Mechanical Engineering and lead author of the study. “During the night, Earth cools down due to the emission without the sunshine.”

The researchers’ film-like material reflects almost all incoming sunlight while still allowing an object’s stored heat to escape as much as possible, keeping it cooler than ambient air even in the midday sun.

“The material, which we can now produce at low cost using the current roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques, offers significant advantages.” said Associate Professor Xiaobo Yin of Mechanical Engineering and CU Boulder’s Materials Science and Engineering Program.

“We can now apply these materials on building roof tops, and even build large-scale water cooling systems like this one with significant advantages over the conventional air conditioning systems, which require high amounts of electricity to function,” said Associate Professor Gang Tan of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering.

The researchers tested their system outdoors in a variety of weather conditions, including wind, precipitation and humidity. In experiments conducted in August and September 2017, their proprietary RadiCold module kept a container of water covered by the metamaterial 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient air between 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m., the most intense summer sunlight of the day.

The researchers also introduced an element of dynamic scheduling to their technology, anticipating that structures such as offices may have limited or no cooling demand at night. In a building-integrated system, however, a cold storage unit could be added to capture the cold through heat transfer fluid such as water in this system and allow it to be retrieved during the subsequent day to reduce the cooling strain during peak demand periods.

“We have built a module that performs in real-world, practical situations,” said Yang. “We have moved quite far and fast from a materials level to a system level.”

The RadiCold module could become a viable solution for supplemental cooling for single-family homes, businesses, power plants, municipal utilities and data center facilities among other potential applications, Yang said.

Additional co-authors of the study include CU Boulder graduate students Ablimit Aili and Yao Zhai as well as senior undergraduate students Jiatao Lu and Dillon Kiddof Mechanical Engineering. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) provided funding for the research. Startup company Radi-Cool Inc holds an exclusive option to the technology through March 2019.

CU Boulder engineers have successfully scaled up an innovative water-cooling system capable of providing continuous day-and-night radiative cooling for structures.

Off

Traditional

White

3D bioprinting technique could create artificial blood vessels, organ tissue

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 14:00:00 +0000

3D bioprinting technique could create artificial blood vessels, organ tissue Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/22/2018 - 08:00

Trent Knoss

CU Boulder engineers have developed a 3D printing technique that allows for localized control of an object’s firmness, opening up new biomedical avenues that could one day include artificial arteries and organ tissue.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, outlines a layer-by-layer printing method that features fine-grain, programmable control over rigidity, allowing researchers to mimic the complex geometry of blood vessels that are highly structured and yet must remain pliable.

The findings could one day lead to better, more personalized treatments for those suffering from hypertension and other vascular diseases.

“The idea was to add independent mechanical properties to 3D structures that can mimic the body’s natural tissue,” said Xiaobo Yin, an associate professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the senior author of the study. “This technology allows us to create microstructures that can be customized for disease models.”

Hardened blood vessels are associated with cardiovascular disease, but engineering a solution for viable artery and tissue replacement has historically proven challenging. To overcome these hurdles, the researchers found a unique way to take advantage of oxygen’s role in setting the final form of a 3D-printed structure.

“Oxygen is usually a bad thing in that it causes incomplete curing,” said Yonghui Ding, a postdoctoral researcher in Mechanical Engineering and the lead author of the study. “Here, we utilize a layer that allows a fixed rate of oxygen permeation.”

By keeping tight control over oxygen migration and its subsequent light exposure, Ding said, the researchers have the freedom to control which areas of an object are solidified to be harder or softer—all while keeping the overall geometry the same.

“This is a profound development and an encouraging first step toward our goal of creating structures that function like a healthy cell should function,” Ding said.

As a demonstration, the researchers printed three versions of a simple structure: a top beam supported by two rods. The structures were identical in shape, size and materials, but had been printed with three variations in rod rigidity: soft/soft, hard/soft and hard/hard. The harder rods supported the top beam while the softer rods allowed it to fully or partially collapse.

The researchers repeated the feat with a small Chinese warrior figure, printing it so that the outer layers remained hard while the interior remained soft, leaving the warrior with a tough exterior and a tender heart, so to speak.

The tabletop-sized printer is currently capable of working with biomaterials down to a size of 10 microns, or about one-tenth the width of a human hair. The researchers are optimistic that future studies will help improve the capabilities even further.

“The challenge is to create an even finer scale for the chemical reactions,” said Yin. “But we see tremendous opportunity ahead for this technology and the potential for artificial tissue fabrication.”

Additional co-authors of the new study include Hang Yin, Yao Zhai and Associate Professor Wei Tan of Mechanical Engineering. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health provided funding for the research.

A new 3D printing technique allows for localized control of an object's firmness, opening up new biomedical avenues that could one day include artificial arteries and organ tissue.

Off

Traditional

White

Shape-shifting material can morph, reverse itself using heat, light

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 18:00:00 +0000

Shape-shifting material can morph, reverse itself using heat, light Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/24/2018 - 12:00

Trent Knoss

A new material developed by CU Boulder engineers can transform into complex, pre-programmed shapes via light and temperature stimuli, allowing a literal square peg to morph and fit into a round hole before fully reverting to its original form.

The controllable shape-shifting material, described today in the journal Science Advances, could have broad applications for manufacturing, robotics, biomedical devices and artificial muscles.

“The ability to form materials that can repeatedly oscillate back and forth between two independent shapes by exposing them to light will open up a wide range of new applications and approaches to areas such as additive manufacturing, robotics and biomaterials”, said Christopher Bowman, senior author of the new study and a Distinguished Professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (CHBE).

Previous efforts have used a variety of physical mechanisms to alter an object’s size, shape or texture with programmable stimuli. However, such materials have historically been limited in size or extent and the object state changes have proven difficult to fully reverse.

The new CU Boulder material achieves readily programmable two-way transformations on a macroscopic level by using liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), the same technology underlying modern television displays. The unique molecular arrangement of LCEs make them susceptible to dynamic change via heat and light.

To solve this, the researchers installed a light-activated trigger to LCE networks that can set a desired molecular alignment in advance by exposing the object to particular wavelengths of light. The trigger then remains inactive until exposed to the corresponding heat stimuli. For example, a hand-folded origami swan programmed in this fashion will remain folded at room temperature. When heated to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, however, the swan relaxes into a flat sheet. Later, as it cools back to room temperature, it will gradually regain its pre-programmed swan shape.

The ability to change and then change back gives this new material a wide range of possible applications, especially for future biomedical devices that could become more flexible and adaptable than ever before.

“We view this as an elegant foundational system for transforming an object’s properties,” said Matthew McBride, lead author of the new study and a post-doctoral researcher in CHBE. “We plan to continue optimizing and exploring the possibilities of this technology.”

Additional co-authors of the study include Alina Martinez, Marvin Alim, Kimberly Childress, Michael Beiswinger, Maciej Podgorski and Brady Worrell of CU Boulder and Lewis Cox and Jason Killgore of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The National Science Foundation provided funding for the research.

[video:https://vimeo.com/286537992]

A square peg in a round hole? No problem. New material developed by CU Boulder engineers can transform into complex, pre-programmed shapes via light and temperature stimuli, and back again.

Off

Traditional

White

Cheers to that: Beer waste transformed into energy-efficient window covering

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Cheers to that: Beer waste transformed into energy-efficient window covering Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/13/2018 - 10:00

Daniel Strain

Qingkun Liu, a posdoctoral researcher in physics, lifts up a petri dish holding samples of a new aerogel. (Credit: CU Boulder)

Can a new type of transparent gel, made from readily-available beer waste, help engineers build greenhouses on Mars?

CU Boulder physicists have developed an insulating gel that they say could coat the windows of habitats in space, allowing the settlers inside to trap and store energy from the sun—much like a greenhouse stays warm during the winter. And unlike similar products on the market, the material is mostly see-through.

“Transparency is an enabling feature because you can use this gel in windows, and you could use it in extraterrestrial habitats,” said Ivan Smalyukh, a professor in the Department of Physics. “You could harvest sunlight through that thermally insulating material and store the energy inside, protecting yourself from those big oscillations in temperature that you have on Mars or on the moon.”

The defining feature of aerogels, as their name suggests, is air, Smalyukh explained. By weight, these thin films are 90 percent gas. Engineers achieve this feather weight by generating crisscrossing patterns of solid material that trap air inside billions of tiny pores, similar to the bubbles in bubble wrap. It’s that trapping capacity that makes them such good insulators.

“You create a very tortuous network of these nanoparticles that link together in the aerogel, preventing the heat from going through,” Smalyukh said.

[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOtA7GdCKEQ&feature=youtu.be]

Beer to windows

That same network, however, tends to scatter light, making aerogels look cloudy and explaining why some engineers call them “frozen smoke.”

To make a more translucent gel, Smalyukh and his colleagues begin with the common plant sugar cellulose. By carefully controlling how cellulose molecules link up, the team is able to orient them into a lattice-like pattern.

That pattern is so uniform, he said, that it allows light to pass through unbothered, giving the gel its transparent appearance.

Problem solved. In order to find a ready supply of cellulose for their space-age material, the researchers turned to a substance with humble beginnings: a refreshing IPA.

Unused beer wort, or waste liquid produced during the brewing process, can make cellulose when scientists add in specialized bacteria. The researchers began driving to breweries across the Boulder area to collect tubs of unwanted liquid from beer-makers.

“So not only are we recycling and saving this valuable material from entering the landfill, but we’re also producing this raw material cheaply,” said Andrew Hess, a Ph.D. student in physics at CU Boulder.

Currently, it takes the team about two weeks to culture the cellulose, but the rest of the process of making the aerogel moves quickly. The final product of the team’s efforts is a thin, flexible film that is roughly 100 times lighter than glass. This gel is so resistant to heat that you could put a strip of it on your hand and light a fire on top—without feeling a thing.

Joshua De La Cruz, a Ph.D. student in the CU Boulder Materials Science and Engineering Program, pours beer wort into a tray before adding cellulose-producing bacteria. (Credit: CU Boulder)

Mars to Antarctica

Top: Qingkun Liu inspects a jar holding dissolved cellulose, which, in this state, naturally scatters light, producing a rainbow-like appearance. Bottom: Researchers pick up a pane of glass from a tub used to settle the final aerogel film. (Credit: CU Boulder)

While the researchers have their eye on putting this material on space habitats, more immediate applications are already available on Earth.

Most windows are poor insulators. According to the Department of Energy, roughly one-quarter of the energy that is expended to heat and cool buildings in the United States goes toward offsetting the loss of heat through windows, potentially costing building operators billions of dollars per year.

Covering glass in sheets of the aerogel, however, could dramatically slow down the loss of heat, said Hess, who also leads the project’s tech-to-market transfer work. And you wouldn’t have to replace the windows in the process.

“Windows are incredibly expensive to replace,” Hess said. “We’re envisioning a retrofitting product that would basically be a peel-and-stick film that a consumer would buy at Home Depot.”

On a larger scale, cities could use the gel to retrofit windows on skyscrapers, dramatically increasing energy efficiency.

To get to that point, the researchers say that they would need to learn how to produce more aerogel faster. But they’re already moving forward on that goal. Smalyukh’s team has been exploring partnerships with window manufacturing companies.

Earlier this summer, they won NASA’s 2018 iTech competition, a national contest that seeks out Earth-bound technologies that might one day help people travel to space. The team’s research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

“Our approach so far has been around windows,” Hess said. “However, we also see our technology being enabling for so many other applications, including smart clothes, for insulating cars and protecting firefighters.”

And there are more fanciful uses, too. Smalyukh said that one afternoon, his lab got a visit from the young daughter of one of his team members. For fun, the researchers coated her hand in the non-toxic aerogel, giving her a crystal-clear and flexible glove. That inspired Smalyukh to think about using aerogels to make clothing that would be both ultra-warm and transparent.

“This opens your imagination,” he said. “We were joking about going to the South Pole and doing a group outing with penguins. You could sun tan on top of the ice.”

Physicists have developed an insulating gel that they say could coat the windows of habitats in space, allowing the settlers inside to trap and store energy from the sun.

Off

Traditional

White

Wearable technology brings high-tech to mushroom hunting

Anonymous — Wed, 09 May 2018 15:39:51 +0000

Wearable technology brings high-tech to mushroom hunting Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/09/2018 - 09:39

Daniel Strain

CU Boulder graduate student Jen Liu is bringing a bit of high tech to what may be one of humanity’s oldest pursuits: hunting for mushrooms.

Liu, an amateur mushroom hunter herself, is developing tools that allow foragers to collect data on environmental conditions while they hunt for fungi. In recently published research, she describes her project to build wearable technology into this hobby. Her designs include a walking stick that stores samples of dirt and a glove that takes soil moisture readings when you dip your fingers into the earth.

The project differs from many common types of wearable technologies like fitness trackers, said Assistant Professor Laura Devendorf. She is a co-author of the new study and leads CU Boulder’s Unstable Design Lab in the ATLAS Institute.

From top to bottom: A vest for mushroom hunting; soil-collecting walking stick; eyelash pixie cup mushrooms (Scutellinia scutellata). (Credits: Jen Liu (vest and walking stick); CC photo by Hamilton/Mushroom Observer (eyelash pixie cup))

“This research frames wearables differently in that it extends your body into the environment,” Devendorf said. “We often think of technology as clean and dust free, so there’s an element of going to the dirt here that I thought was provocative.”

Mushroom hunting’s “going to the dirt” ethos attracts a small but passionate group of hobbyists, scientists and more. In Colorado, the foraging season extends from late spring to early fall, and sought-after mushrooms include edible morels and chanterelles.

Liu has been searching for mushrooms since 2015. For her, the fun has less to do with eating fungi—although she said she likes gnoshing on a type of mushroom called chicken of the woods—and more to do with experiencing nature.

“It is a very personal thing, wanting to get to know the environment through what grows there,” Liu said.

As a master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, she decided to explore how technology might, or might not, fit into such a personal endeavor. To that end, she built three mushroom foraging tools: a vest, a walking stick and glove.

The vest turns mushroom hunting into a communal activity by allowing wearers to automatically log where they find fungi in an online map. These reference points guide novice hunters to mushrooming spots by using vibrating motors in the collar to “nudge” people in the right direction. The walking stick, a tube of plastic with a handle that looks like a light saber, lets you pick up samples of dirt as you walk, storing that soil for future analysis.

The glove is the most tactile tool. Rather than using a traditional handheld device, Liu embedded soil moisture sensors into the pointer and middle fingers of this wearable. The goal, she explained, is to enable a mushroom hunter to collect hard numbers while still getting a feel for the soil. The wetness of the soil can determine where certain mushrooms grow.

“There’s so much information you can gather from multisensory experience,” Liu said of the value getting one’s hands dirty. “I wanted to see if there was a way to build that process into a wearable so that you can become the sensor.”

The researcher said that her designs follow a philosophy called “collaborative survival,” a concept coined by anthropologist Anna Tsing that emphasizes that humans are not separate from nature. Instead, they depend on a wide range of organisms like fungi for their health and well-being.

Liu and Devendorf described these technologies at a conference in Montreal in April along with study co-author Daragh Byrne of Carnegie Mellon University.

Devendorf explained that many sustainable technologies focus only on getting people to conserve energy or save on waste, not on those more personal relationships.

“We’re trying to think about environmental engineering more broadly,” she said. “Maybe it’s about becoming attuned to the environment and being affected by it.”

That was the case for Liu. She said that wearing the designs pushed her to be more attentive to what was going on below her feet, including the conditions that are good for growing fungi. And, she added, there’s a lot to see. She pointed to her own favorite fungus, the eyelash pixie cup, a peach-colored mushroom with hairs around its rim that look like eyelashes.

“If you ask someone to think about a mushroom, they probably think about a button mushroom or a toadstool,” Liu said. “But there’s so much weird stuff out there—or weird to us.”

Researchers at CU Boulder are exploring how wearable technologies can help people to experience nature as they hunt for fungi.

Off

Traditional

White