Stephen Hawking at the Centre of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in 2013. Source: Tom Pilston/Panos

Welcome to this week’s Engineering360 news.

Stephen Hawking

Physicist Stephen Hawking, considered to be one of the world's greatest scientists, has passed away at the age of 76. He had at least 12 honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He was the author of numerous books including "A Brief History of Time," which has sold more than 10 million copies. Hawking theorized that black holes emitted a form of thermal radiation and contributed to work trying to unify Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics. He was a firm believer that the future of the human race must be in space and was quoted as saying, "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

Pipe Robots

Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute engineers have designed a pair of autonomous robots that will be used to help decommission a department of energy nuclear facility in Piketon, Ohio. The “Radpiper” robot will drive through miles of pipes to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls. RadPiper has a “disc-collimated” radiation sensor that CMU invented. Unlike external measuring techniques, the autonomous robot is able to go inside the pipes to more accurately measure radiation levels. Those segments with potentially hazardous amounts of uranium-235 will be removed and decontaminated. DOE officials estimate the robots could save tens of millions of dollars in completing the characterization of uranium deposits.

Autonomous Vehicles and Fog

An inability to handle misty driving conditions has been one of the main issues in the development of autonomous vehicular navigation systems that use visible light. MIT researchers have developed a system that can produce images of objects covered in fog so thick that human vision would be useless. It can also gauge the distance. Researchers tested the system using a vibrating motor from a humidifier immersed in a small tank of water. The results were better than human vision, whereas most imaging systems perform far worse. A navigation system that can outperform a human when driving in fog would be a huge breakthrough for self-driving cars.

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