(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Supposedly an acoustic trigger could have remotely sealed the under sea oil well that is currently spilling 210,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Many news outlets are reporting that if British Petroleum had invested in this particular remote control technology, workers escaping from the burning BP rig on April 20 would have been able to send a signal more than a mile under water, causing 450-ton hydraulic rams to close off the well, almost immediately stopping the flow of oil.

Since they didn’t install an acoustic trigger, the people at BP are now shamefully watching their precious oil contaminate the once-beautiful Gulf, killing thousands of innocent sea creatures (as well as the price of  their stock).

So why didn’t BP have a remote valve shut-off system in place? Most of the reports I’ve seen and heard blame it on the $500,000 price tag for an acoustic trigger . I know what you’re thinking: “That’s one expensive remote!”

Do I hear crickets chirping?

Okay, so maybe you’re actually thinking about the environmental and economic devastation starting to take hold in the Gulf; but please take one more moment to further consider the remote control technology that “could have” saved the day.

Was  BP just trying to save a buck (er… 500,000 bucks) when they opted not to  install an acoustic trigger in their undersea drilling operation that’s now hemorrhaging oil into the Gulf? Maybe. But we should also consider the possibility that acoustic switches aren’t quite as foolproof as certain outraged lawmakers and media outlets would like us to believe.

These pricey switches are used voluntarily in many offshore drilling operations, and are required by law for drilling off the coast of Brazil and Norway. So why isn’t this technology required for offshore drilling in the US?

Consider one of the earliest everyday remote controls, Zenith’s Space Command, which first appeared in 1956. This remote used sound waves to control the television it was paired with. History tells us that sound control didn’t last long on land; but why?

Zenith’s Space Command fell out of favor because noise in the home environment—say the plunk of a child’s xylophone or a squealing little brother—often matched the frequencies for controlling the TV. Accidentally changing the channel or powering off was all too common.

Could competing sounds be the same reason acoustic triggers aren’t the most popular item in the offshore drilling safety toolbox?

In 2003, the U.S. Minerals Management Service commissioned a report on whether oil companies drilling offshore should be required to install an acoustic trigger for remote valve shut off.

The report concluded that,  “Acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly, and there is insufficient data available on system reliability in the presence of a mud or gas plume.”

Hmmm… so it doesn’t really work?

I checked out the MMS report, and here’s what I discovered: the reason sound waves are not the preferred way to achieve remote control under water is same reason sound waves are not the preferred way to achieve remote control on land—acoustic signals leave too much room for error.

Under water, acoustic interference caused by the noise of a flowing oil well or a plume of mud can make the operation of an acoustic trigger unreliable.

It seems both land and sea are just too noisy for acoustic control to be especially effective. Other sounds can get in the way–skewing, blocking or mimicking actual commands.

In living rooms around the world, infrared light has been king of the remote control universe since the 1970s. Unfortunately for the little fishies of the Gulf (and every living thing on Earth),  IR isn’t a viable solution for triggering emergency shut-off valves deep in the ocean.

• iPhone controlled R/C Car
• An actual Oldsmobile
• Dance lights
• A minivan (2007)
• R2D2
• Dog feeders
• Military Drones
• A helicopter

What next? How about a bi-pedal walking robot named Walky.  The robot and controller were developed by a group of grad students from Keio University in Japan. Video after the break.

Walky understands a set of touch gestures that allow him to walk, jump, and kick.  Apparently they had attempted other methods of control like a PS3 Controller unsuccessfully and had settled on the iPhone. The touchscreen is more intuitive than a joystick since you can simulate walking using two fingers — remember the old Yellow Pages ads? Walky is pretty simple, but still seems well made and I like how they have broken the mold here with iPhone gestures.

No offense to Motorola, Verizon, or their Droid commercials, but this doesn’t seem like a very closed development system to me. Yeah, it’s true that the App store requires some approval, but that doesn’t seem to be discouraging too many people. The iPhone SDK is well thought-out and by far the easiest mobile development platform out there. Period. Plenty of people are using it to develop for reasons other then making money in the App store, including academic and scientific pursuits such as this one. I’m not going to be looking for the Walky Robot app on iTunes, but it’s nice to know that I could develop something like this if I wanted to.

There have been a variety of uses for multitouch tables, but, to be honest, most of them aren’t really that interesting.  We have all seen the promos of people having the time of their life pinch-zooming pictures and flicking them around, but it doesn’t look like much fun to me.  That is until I saw someone cutting through a 3D skull and spinning it around for a better look on the Virtual Autopsy Table.

Beyond the gimmicky picture stuff, these multitouch tables (or screens)  have near-unlimited potential in the educational field.  I felt like a kid again, watching the video  from the Norrköping Visualization Centre and the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization in Sweden.  Hours could easily become days if I had a chance explore and learn the human body on a system like that.  Multitouch gives the user great control over the 3D model and allows for easy and intuitive exploration — essential to the experience.

The Virtual Autopsy Table was obviously designed for educational purposes, now if only every school could afford to buy one, we might be headed in the right direction. In my experience children and adults alike love to play and touch with these kind of displays, so why not try to teach them something at the same time? Hopefully the Virtual Autopsy Table will start showing up in museums, at least.   It would be really cool if they could start compiling a large set of these models so that way users could dissect some animals or bugs without getting their hands dirty.

Have you ever wished you could have been a fly on the wall for a particular moment — for an entertaining squabble, an important moment in history, or simply just to spy on people for the fun of it? Well the Military does, and a group of researchers at University of California Berkeley are hard at work making that wish come true.

Researchers attached electrodes to various parts of a beetle and its brain in order to gain the ability to control it in flight.  These beetles are apparently zombie-like after the procedure (sorry, PETA), but the results are startling.  It’s pretty well known that the Military and researchers have been hard at work for a while on controlling insects, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in action — and from the video it’s pretty impressive.

I’m not sure of the actual device they use to control the beetle but it seems that they just activate an electrode to control left or right direction in flight.  There is obviously quite a way to go before they are controlling humans and spying with real flies, but it seems to be getting scarily close to reality.

We’ve long been inspired by our belief that remote control has the potential to make our lives more enjoyable and less difficult. If you are unable to operate a lawn mower due to physical limitations or health issues, Southern RobotX offers remote controlled lawn mowers that allow you to mow the lawn without breaking a sweat. Along with making lawn maintenance easier, the company claims that their hybrid electric-gas power system results in 40 percent lower fuel consumption that conventional mowers. Not bad!

Prices range from $2,599 for a residential model to $10,999 for the top-of-the-line commercial model. The latter is a hybrid, so you can feel all green about spending all that green.

Photo: Plantraco Microflight

Do you suspect your neighbors might be hatching a plot to overthrow the government? Concerned that Al-Qaeda may have just set up a headquarters down the street? Before you call the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist activity hotline, confirm your suspicions with one of these: the Micro Butterfly from Plantraco Microflight. Yes, for $149.99 you can have your very own, radio controlled plane with a tiny wingspan of just 3.5″. Add on a miniature voice transmitter for $35-80, and help keep our nation safe from terrorists.

Seriously, when we read about the Micro Butterfly in Charlie White’s DViCE post, we thought it was pretty cool. And we dug the video on YouTube, too (see below). But commenter @jay trini really opened our eyes to the possibilities here. After all, this seems far easier and cheaper than those spy pigeons we’ve been sending to Iran lately.

Photo: US Air Force

If we slide into one of those rare moments of military honesty, we realize that the technical demands of modern warfare are so complex a considerable percentage of our material is bound to malfunction even before it is deployed against a foe. We no longer waste manpower by carrying the flag into battle. Instead we need battalions of electronic engineers to keep the terrible machinery grinding.

– Ernest K Gann, The Black Watch

CNN’s Nic Robertson recently did some in-depth reporting on how the Air Force is conducting significant operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by remote control. In a half-hour special called “Warfare by Remote” he looks into the technology and the implications of fighting a battle in which our troops are halfway around the world from the combat.

In some ways it is ironic that CNN — the news outlet that rose to prominence in no small measure because of its coverage of the first Gulf War — would be covering this story. After all, stationing pilots in the Nevada desert is only the latest step in a progression that has been going on for decades, allowing the US to fight battles with increasingly less personal risk to our soldiers even while we increase the amount of damage that we can inflict on our adversaries.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that there are unintended psychological consequences when a soldier is able to obliterate dozens of people with absolutely no risk to his own person. While we support our troops and wish nothing more than their safe return, introducing the “convenience” of remote control to warfare seems like a morally dangerous proposition.

Warfare by Remote, part I

Warfare by Remote, part II

Warfare by Remote, part III