A device like this is both a mechanical poster-child showing what’s possible for the future of automation as well as an attempt to work out kinks on our way to personal robots that will help reduce drudgery and improve our lives. And yet, despite my love of cocktails and robots, this particular partnership rubs me the wrong way.

It’s called the Makr Shakr and the robot and smartphone app will be unveiled Wednesday at Google’s I/O conference. The apparatus has three robot arms, whose movements were modeled after those of an Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle, and access up to 100 different types of flavors (alcohols, fruit juice, syrups, etc.) You download the app and then use the app to create the mix of your choice.

MIT is making a big deal of being able to see what recipes people make and how the robot allows others to crowdsource winning combinations. For example, the release includes the following quote, which is presented without irony:

“The number of drink combinations is almost limitless,” says Yaniv Turgeman, project leader from MIT Senseable City Lab. “The magic moment will be watching the formation of a bottom-up bar culture, as we close the loop between ‘co-curating’ and ‘co-producing,’ in real time.”

To which I say, Bah humbug. Yes, a robot-dispensing bartender whose “arms” are modeled after a ballet dancer and are assigned movements by a professional choreographer (it’s Italian director and choreographer Marco Pelle if you must know) is clearly theater. But this is art used to package commerce in a form designed to appeal to the frenetic, internet-hardened consumers of today. While plenty of hackers and hipsters might feel immune to a TV spot or a billboard, they will flock to tell their friends about this robot, post videos of it online and in general look without skepticism at what the creation of this robot means.

And of course, people like me, will write articles about it. Because it is cool, and these sorts of endeavors are the future, of both the service industry and commerce. And while MIT is careful to note that this won’t replace your neighborhood bartender, that’s just idiotic.

In Austin, Briggo Coffee, is a robotic coffee-dispensing robot (it’s shaped like a giant cube) that allows you to order your cup of Joe on your smartphone on the way into work and pick it up form the cube at a set time. Let’s also not forget that in the heart of SoMa at Lemnos Labs, Momentum Machines is building a robot that makes hamburgers. And in Amazon’s warehouses robot pickers abound.

The Briggo coffee-making robot lives inside that cube.

Robots are cheaper at scale, and more efficient than people. For example, MIT boasts that Makr Shakr can not only mix drinks, but can also monitor alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels. So while it may not wipe down glasses while listening to your troubles, the Makr Shakr has a lot going for it should anyone decide to turn it into a production robot.

So while this is whiz-bang cool it’s worth asking the tough questions such a partnership and device bring up. Is this really what we want our MIT graduates working on? And if it is, then what kinds of adjustments do we need to be making in society to prepare for the infusions of robots into the service sector. Perhaps folks can start discussing those things after they get their Makr Shakr-made drinks.

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3D printer at MIT Media Lab could construct a building.

New Gartner research shows that the price for “enterprise-class” 3-D printers is falling enough that more businesses can (and should) start experimenting with them. It estimates that by 2016, these big-boy 3-D printers will cost as little as $2,000. Industrial-grade printers now typically cost five times that much but there’s no reason to wait. Companies should start experimenting with the technology now, even if it’s with lower-cost desktop models, since there is minimal risk of capital or time.

In a statement, Gartner Research Director Pete Basiliere said:

“Businesses must continuously monitor advances to identify where improvements can be leveraged … We see 3D printing as a tool for empowerment, already enabling life-changing parts and products to be built in struggling countries, helping rebuild crisis-hit areas and leading to the democratization of manufacturing.”

Companies that jump in early can get a more realistic grasp of material costs and the time it takes to build parts and components, Gartner said.

To be sure, some affordable technology is already available, at least, to churn out small items. The Makerbot Replicator 2 desktop 3-D printer, which made a splash at SXSW, lists for $2,199. Makerbot is also working on a 3-D scanner to ease the measurement and digitization of what needs to be manufactured. Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis told GigaOM that the Makerbot Digitizer, due this fall, will give creators another way to move designs between the physical and digital worlds. If you want to replicate a physical item, you scan it into the system which digitizes it and builds a 3-D blueprint which can be fed into the printer.

MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito is a huge fan of 3-D printing. At a recent event broadcast by the BBC, Ito reiterated his enthusiasm for the technology which he says can make high-quality manufacturing a key part of the U.S. economy again and boost the “maker movement” overall. As 3-D printing gains traction, more manufacturing may come back to the U.S. Ito is also investing in the sector. He, along with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, has invested in 3-D printing startup FormLabs.

In theory, the availability of inexpensive 3-D printers means that manufacturers can afford to make small lots of goods and then quickly change up their production lines to meet new demands. This technology has spawned a new class of hardware-oriented startups and efforts. With the time-and-cost savings 3-D printing can provide, “hardware really could be the new software.”

This story was updated at 7:30 a.m. PDT with additional information on the current price of industrial 3-D printers.

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Whiteboard set up at MIT Media Lab for Aaron Swartz memorial.

Late last week, lawyers for Swartz, the 26-year old programmer and civic activist who killed himself in January, requested that these documents be released to the public.

Swartz’s father Robert Swartz, his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman and his lawyers maintain that Swartz was railroaded by both MIT and the U.S. Attorney’s office, which prosecuted him on criminal charges for downloading too many articles from JSTOR, a database of academic articles.

In the letter, Reif said MIT remains committed to openness but needs to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in the documents and the security of the school’s networks. He acknowledged that Swartz’s lawyers expressly requested that no names be excluded or redacted. But, he wrote:

“In the time since Aaron Swartz’s suicide, we have seen a pattern of harassment and personal threats. In this volatile atmosphere, I have the responsibility to protect the privacy and safety of those members of our community who have become involved in this matter in the course of doing their jobs for MIT, and to ensure a safe environment for all of us who call MIT home.”

(The full text of the letter is also available on pastebin.)

The controversy has rippled throughout the MIT community and beyond. Last month, an anonymous caller reported an armed man on campus, prompting a lockdown. MIT later said the caller  said the alleged shooter was out to avenge Swartz’s death. MIT also later called the whole incident a hoax. The school has also said its computer systems have been hacked three times since Swartz died.

A few weeks after Swartz’s death, MIT named Hal Abelson, a professor emeritus of computer science, to head up an inquiry into the school’s role in this matter, but at a memorial service for Swartz last week at MIT’s Media Lab, Stinbrickner-Kauffman expressed skepticism about the process, saying she feared a PR whitewash.

This story was updated at 8:00 a.m. PDT with additional information about the MIT shooter hoax and other fallout from the Swartz case.

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Swartz’s partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman and his father Robert Swartz both called on MIT to open up its investigation into its own actions and to do it soon. Much of the coverage after Swartz’s death focused on the role of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who was slammed by critics for pursuing an overzealous prosecution for a minor offense. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and others have defended the prosecution.  But there was little mention of Ortiz or the U.S. prosecutors today. At MIT, it was MIT being scrutinized.

After Swartz’s death, the school announced an internal investigation into its actions. “I was hopeful that it could learn from mistakes made and make sure this injustice and tragedy is not repeated,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman told a couple hundred people at the event. “I have since become less hopeful,” she said.

“I fear a PR exercise, a whitewash. The [MIT] general counsel is running this. Aaron’s lawyers and father have not been interviewed and there is no sign that the report will be released,” she said.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

She said that while MIT’s stated mission of generating and disseminating knowledge is perfectly aligned with Swartz’s ethic, the school has diverged from that mission, as evidenced by the fact that it could have stopped the prosecution several times.

“MIT called in the Secret Service when it could have handled the issue internally. When people called on them to drop the case, MIT refused. MIT helped the prosecution while it refused to provide access to the defense,” she said.

It’s been two months since Swartz’s death and there is no report she said.

Other speakers, including some employed at the school, also worried about MIT’s standing here and how this issue affects its reputation.

White board at Swartz Memorial.

MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, who hosted the event, acknowledged his conflicted role as a member of the institution and a friend and colleague of Swartz. Introducing the proceedings, Ito noted: “I have an official voice and a personal voice. If it wasn’t for the official voice, I would have spoken out more on this,” he noted.

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And now he’s backing a new project that would let corporate Media Lab sponsors fund students’ startups after they graduate, according to this Scott Kirsner story in The Boston Globe.  That means big name companies including Samsung, Panasonic, AOL etc. could pony up to fund a stipend for MIT graduates to build the company or technology of their dreams.

This is still early stage. Asked to comment on the report, an MIT spokeswoman said “the program has not yet been approved or funded, so the Boston.com story was a bit premature.”

Industry-funded academic research projects are problematic. Critics say that private companies use universities, which often are publicly funded,  as petri dishes for their own R&D purposes. Company-funded college research can also lead to squabbles over  who owns intellectual property rights of work done at the school but partially or wholly underwritten by private industry.

Here’s the crux of the issue from Kirsner:

“One key purpose of the new fund, Ito explained to me recently, will be to encourage students to finish their degrees before they start companies. “We want students to stay focused while they’re here,” he said. But once they’re done, the fund will provide a six-month stipend to lay the groundwork for their company, and help make sure that the new venture has clear rights to the intellectual property they developed while at the Lab. (In the past, there has been a somewhat vague non-exclusive right granted to students to commercialize technologies that they worked on while at the Lab, Ito said.)”

The idea of encouraging college researchers to stick around for their diplomas is actually of note. Obviously MIT has a vested interest in its students completing their coursework, but some in tech say this is a waste of time and resources. These skeptics include early Facebook investor Peter Thiel who has funded two classes of Thiel Fellows. These young technologists get money to leave school and pursue their work. His argument is that it’s better for promising talent  just to get to it rather than put in their time at college, running up huge student loan debt.

That’s a premise that Upstart, founded by Google veteran David Girouard, for example, finds troubling. Upstart invests in promising graduates of specified schools in return for a percentage of their future earnings. Again, you have to graduate to get that Upstart money.

Whatever happens with Ito’s new project, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Flow batteries are large liquid-filled tanks that are mostly used to store energy for the power grid. A flow battery’s electrolyte is stored in two tanks that are separate from the cell itself, and the flow battery generates electricity when the liquid electrolytes, which are mixed with energy-storing materials, flow through the two sides and react with the electrodes in each side of the cell.

The idea, which has been around for decades, is to create a lower-cost battery option than, say, lithium-ion batteries. Power companies like them because the batteries are rechargeable, and can be scaled up and down by adding more tanks. Companies working on this technology include EnerVault, ZBB Energy, Prudent Energy, RedFlow, Primus Power and Deeya Energy.

ZBB’s flow battery

Sun Catalytix tells MIT Tech Review that it hopes to have a prototype of its flow battery later this year, which it can test out with customers, and then raise more funds for additional product development at that point. The end product is supposed to be a 1 MW flow battery that can last four to six hours and fit inside a 40-foot shipping container.

It’s not uncommon for cleantech startups — or any startup — to pivot and shift their plan as they progress. The artificial leaf was in the research phase and the company realized that commercializing it would take many years and lots of money. Though, as this New Yorker article points out Nocera has a bit of a reputation for hyping his discoveries.

The problem, though, is that funds for commercializing next-gen energy technologies are very tight these days. And Sun Catalytix already received a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, as well as a $9.5 million Series B round led by India’s Tata and including existing investor Polaris Venture Partners.

Venture capitalists have started to move away from investing in energy tech, and government funds could be tight in 2013, too. Funding could be particularly difficult for an early stage technology, where there are clear competitors that are farther ahead.

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In heavy industrial applications  like automotive manufacturing, robots perform tasks that are too big or too dangerous for human workers. In such jobs they are isolated from people for safety reasons. But what if human and robotic workers need to work together efficiently and safely in close proximity? That’s a problem Julie Shah, head of the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) is attacking with new research. According to a statement Shaw made to MIT News:

“People aren’t robots, they don’t do things the same way every single time … so there is a mismatch between the way we program robots to perform tasks in exactly the same way each time and what we need them to do if they are going to work in concert with people.”

Traditionally, human trainers reward robots when they do the task correctly and provide negative feedback when they fail to do so. But military research has shown that a similar approach with people alone is inefficient and does not encourage teamwork. That led Shaw to look into other ways to train people to work together well and to see if those methods could also apply to mixed teams of robots and people.

Cross-training — in which team members switch roles on different days — gives members a better idea of how their individual work affects their co-workers. To bring robots into the fold, Shaw and Ph.D. candidate Stefanos Nikolaidis built a algorithm to teach devices how to learn from their role-swapping experiences.

They ended up tweaking existing reinforcement-learning algorithms to allow the robots to take in not only positive and negative rewards, but also other information pertinent to the job at hand. Their findings? Mixed teams that cross-trained were much more efficient than mixed teams that used the older interactive reward method.

The researchers discovered that the amount of time that robots and people that cross-trained were able to work concurrently rose 71 percent while  concurrent work time by the other teams fell 41 percent. This is an important measure: If human team members have to wait for a robot to complete a task (or vice versa) before resuming work, that’s a lot of down time. Cross-trained robotic/human co-workers can work in tandem and get more done much more of the time than teams trained the old way.

Shah and Nikolaidis will present their research at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Tokyo next month. Check out the videos on their work . If this research pans out, look for more mixed workgroups on the factory floor and some pretty impressive productivity gains.

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The research, just published in the journal, Nature Photonics, used computer modeling to look at how to stretch the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide to change its physical properties to make use of a broader spectrum of sunlight than what silicon, the most common solar cell material, can manage today. Whether the design will work as well in real life will require further research.

Improving cell efficiency is important for lowering the cost of producing solar electricity. One way to do that is to extract more energy from the same amount of materials. That also will reduce the amount of land needed to generate the same amount of electricity. As it stands, photovoltaic power plants are more land-intensive compared with fossil fuel power plants with a similar energy output. Building solar farms on large swath of land has prompted fierce debates over their environmental impact on wildlife and prompted developers to agree to set aside wildlife corridors in exchange for permits or to avoid lawsuits.

What some scientists have been working on is to manipulate the band gap in a material. A band gap describes the amount of energy that electrons need to move around and generate electricity. If you can manipulate band gaps, then you can control the amount of electricity produced. Band gap engineering is not a new concept and is already used by solar cell developers and academic researchers in their search for more efficient solar cell designs.

What the MIT researchers proposed is more novel: strain a material to create specific and varying band gaps within a single material to capture different portions of the light spectrum. They imagined creating that strain by using a microscopic needle to poke at the material down the center and create that funnel. The pressure on the needle would cause different degrees of strain and band gaps.

Knowing how to stretch a material is only part of the solution. Finding materials that can withstand the pressure is another hurdle. Conventional solar materials would break or warp undesirably under the straining process proposed by the research. But there is a more recently minted class of ultra-strength materials” that could be suitable. MIT researchers settled on molybdenum disulfide.

The research, which received support from U.S. and Chinese institutions, is only a start in exploring the idea of using ultra-strength materials to engineer more efficient solar cells. The MIT research team, which includes Ju Li, Xiaofeng Qian and Cheng-Wei Huang, hopes to conduct lab work to verify the results of their computer modeling. Ji Feng of Peking University in China rounds up the research team.

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Willow Garage’s Personal Robot 2 with two friends.

The good news is that, relatively soon,  it looks like there will be tech options — including in-home robots — that can help them stay put.

The technology is getting more adaptable and more affordable. Rethink Robotics sells Baxter, an industrial robot, for $22,000 now and, with the advent of a new software development kit, Baxter could be adapted for new markets. Rethink’s CTO and founder Rodney Brooks hopes that geriatric care will be one of them.  Speaking at the Techonomy Conference last week, Brooks said:

“I think absolutely elder care is going to be an incredible pull on automation technology, because people want to stay in their homes longer, and the demographics is much more older people. This, by the way, is true in China now too. You know, a young Chinese person now has two parents and four grandparents who don’t have anyone else but that person.”

So there’s … going to be a real pull for how technology lets people be independent longer. And I’m hoping that someone will come up with some provocative things with Baxter for that.”

 Research: Older Americans are receptive to robotic help

Technology is one thing. The willingness to use it is another. And new research out of Georgia Tech  shows that acceptance of in-home robot help among older people may be growing. Researcher Cory-Ann Smarr, a PhD candidate in Engineering Psychology at the school, said a survey of 21 people between the ages of 65 and 93, showed them open to using robots for some tasks — but also very picky about which tasks those would be.

“They were fine with a robot reminding them to take their medications but not so fine about a robot telling them what medications to take,” Smarr told me in a recent interview.

Most of the respondents — who were shown a video of the Willow Garage PR-2 robot performing jobs — seemed pretty tech savvy already.  Most were proficient users of cell phones, recordable and programmable devices like thermostats and coffee makers. Most (71.4 percent) said they used a computer so these respondents were not tech neophytes and may not be typical of older seniors in the broader population. Recent Pew Research on smartphone ownership found that just 11 percent of adults over the age of 65 have smartphones, compared to 34 percent of those aged 50 to 64 year. Still, it’s interesting that they did not shoot down the notion of a robot helper.

While there’s been talk of robots in the home for decades — Roomba helped blaze the trail — there’s really nothing out there that looks like a robotic butler or maid. But given the economics of aging, the option of staying in a home that’s paid for versus selling that home to pay for facility living is undoubtedly attractive. Since assisted care facilities can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000 per month, the notion of buying a $22,000 robot — assisted at times by human helpers — might not be beyond the pale.

And more people will face that choice than ever. The most recent U.S. census data shows that the percentage of Americans over the age of 62 grew 21.1 percent between 2000 and 2010 — the second fastest growing demographic after the 45 to 64 year age group which grew 31.5 percent in that period. And, the AARP estimates that the number of US adults over the age of 65 will nearly double in the next 20 years.

Companies that can build adaptable and afforable robots to fill this growing need could be big, big winners going forward.

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The goal here was to create bio-compatible designs that mimic and take advantage of nature to build machines and solve problems. While the bio-bot is only 7 mm long — about a quarter-inch — it could be used in drug testing or other chemical detection jobs. Integrated sensors that react to certain chemicals could be installed on the bio-bot and cause it to veer away from specific chemical compounds, indicating their presence. It could be a 7mm-self-propelled canary in the coal mine.

From a release on the topic:

“The idea is that, by being able to design with biological structures, we can harness the power of cells and nature to address challenges facing society,” said Bashir, an Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering. “As engineers, we’ve always built things with hard materials, materials that are very predictable. Yet there are a lot of applications where nature solves a problem in such an elegant way. Can we replicate some of that if we can understand how to put things together with cells?”

The bio-bot moves because it’s asymmetrical, with one long, thin leg resting on a shorter, wider support leg. The thin leg is covered in the rat heart cells and when those heart cells beat, the long, thin leg pulses and moves the bio-bot forward. Yes, this sounds utterly creepy, but it’s undeniably cool to watch this thing spasm its way across the surface in the video:

As an aside, this is the second awesome research project I’ve read about being built by academics using a 3D printer. On Wednesday MIT detailed how students used a 3D printer to make a new type of radio antenna out of new meta-materials, which it compared to the planet-destroying Death Star from the Star Wars movie. The new antenna might be useful for deep-space imaging or perhaps microscopy at the nano level, but all I could think of was MIT students are using their 3D printers to recreate stuff from Star Wars movies.

Now I can add the folks at the University of Illinois to the list of institutions where researchers are taking 3D printers and building stuff out of science fiction novels.

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