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This article is part of an IEEE Spectrum special report: Top 10 Tech Cars of 2010.

The top of this year’s Ford Taurus range is the powerful and jazzy Taurus SHO (for “super high output”), a sport sedan. Chief among the technical bragging points is an optional safety feature known as electronically scanning radar. This guardian angel scans the highway far enough ahead to save you from rear-ending a fog-shrouded forerunner while going wide enough to catch any would-be lane changer that may be lurking in your blind spot. Because its microwaves penetrate fog, it beats the older, laser-based systems.

TOP 10 TECH CARS Special Report

Ford crows that the device, supplied by Delphi, is derived from a radar used in the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Of course this sort of thing can also be done by mechanical scanning—like a dish antenna sweeping the sky—but by steering the beam electronically you get not only better performance but also a far more compact package that’s a mere 5 by 8 by 18 centimeters long. That makes it easy to fit the radar’s forward-looking part into the car’s sleek front end. Other car companies offer such radars, but Ford gets our plaudit because it charges just US $1195, far less than any competitor.

In practice, the radar functions as part of a larger system of adaptive cruise control—a-baby step along the road to automated driving. When the radar senses the hint of a threat of an impending collision, it alerts the driver and precharges the brakes, so they’ll react that much faster to the driver’s foot.

This article originally appeared in print as “Ford Taurus SHO: Ford gets its radar from a fighter plane.”

Check out the rest of the Top 10 Tech Cars of 2010.

Made in bulk for the first time, this new carbon allotrope is the semiconductor graphene isn't

Prachi Patel is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. She writes about energy, biotechnology, materials science, nanotechnology, and computing.

Researchers have found a way to make graphyne, a long-theoreized carbon material, in bulk quantities. Like its cousin graphene, graphyne is a single layer of carbon atoms but arranged differently.

Since graphene’s discovery 18 years ago—leading a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010—the versatile material has been investigated for hundreds of applications. These include strong composite materials, high-capacity battery electrodes, transparent conductive coatings for displays and solar cells, super-small and ultra-fast transistors, and printable electronics.

While graphene is finding its way into sports equipment and car tires for its mechanical strength, though, its highly touted electronic applications have been slower to materialize. One reason is that bulk graphene is not a semiconductor. To make it semiconductive, which is crucial for transistors, it has to be produced in the form of nanoribbons with the right dimensional ratios.

There’s another one-dimensional form of carbon related to graphene that scientists first predicted back in 1987, that is a semiconductor without needing to be cut into certain shapes and sizes. But this material, graphyne, has proven nearly impossible to make in more than microscopic quantities.

Now, researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder have reported a method to produce graphyne in bulk. “By using our method we can make bulk powder samples,” says Wei Zhang, a professor of chemistry at UC Boulder. “We find multi-layer sheets of graphyne made of twenty to thirty layers. We are pretty confident we can use different exfoliation methods to gather a few layers or even a single layer.”

Graphite, diamond, fullerenes, and graphene are all carbon allotropes, and their diverse properties arise from the combination and arrangement of multiple types of bonds between their carbon atoms. So while the 3D cubic lattice of carbon atoms in diamond make it exceptionally hard, graphene’s single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice make it extremely conductive.

Graphyne is similar to graphene in that it’s an atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms. But instead of a hexagonal lattice, it can take on different structures of spaced-apart rings connected via triple bonds between carbon atoms.

The material’s unique conducting, semiconducting, and optical properties could make it even more exciting for electronic applications than graphene. Graphyne's intrinsic electron mobility could, in theory, be 50% higher than graphene. In some graphynes, electrons can be conducted only in one direction. And the material has other exciting properties such as ion mobility, which is important for battery electrodes.

Zhang, Yingjie Zhao of Qingdao University of Science and Technology in China, and their colleagues made graphyne using a method called alkyne metathesis. This is a catalyst-triggered organic reaction in which chemical bonds between carbon atoms in hydrocarbon molecules can crack open and reform to reach a more stable structure.

The process is complicated and slow. But it produces enough graphyne for scientists to be able to study the material’s properties in depth and evaluate its uses for potential applications. “It will take at least a couple years to have some fundamental understanding of the material,” says Zhang. “Then it will be in good shape for people to take it to a higher level which is targeting specific semiconducting or battery applications.”

He and his colleagues plan to investigate ways to produce the material in much larger quantities. Being able to use solution-based chemical reactions would be critical to make graphyne at industrially relevant scales, he says.

It’s just the beginning for graphyne though, and for now, just being able to make this long-hypothesized material in sufficient quantities is an exciting first step. “Fullerenes were discovered in the 1980s, then nanotubes in the early 90s, then graphene in 2004,” Zhang says. “From discovery of a new carbon allotrope to its intensive study to first application, the timeline is becoming shorter. I’m already receiving calls from venture capitalists around the world. But I tell them it’s a little bit early.”

It's a lot of progress over a just one year

One year ago, we wrote about some “high-tech” warehouse robots from Amazon that appeared to be anything but. It was confusing, honestly, to see not just hardware that looked dated, but concepts about how robots should work in warehouses that seemed dated as well. Obviously we’d expected a company like Amazon to be at the forefront of developing robotic technology to make their fulfillment centers safer and more efficient. So it’s a bit of a relief that Amazon has just announced several new robotics projects that rely on sophisticated autonomy to do useful, valuable warehouse tasks.

The highlight of the announcement is Proteus, which is like one of Amazon’s Kiva shelf-transporting robots that’s smart enough (and safe enough) to transition from a highly structured environment to a moderately structured environment, an enormous challenge for any mobile robot.

I assume that moving these GoCarts around is a significant task within Amazon’s warehouse, because last year, one of the robots that Amazon introduced (and that we were most skeptical of) was designed to do exactly that. It was called Scooter, and it was this massive mobile system that required manual loading and could only move a few carts to the same place at the same time, which seemed like a super weird approach for Amazon, as I explained at the time:

From what I can make out from the limited information available, Proteus shows that Amazon is not, in fact,behind the curve with autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and has actually been doing what makes sense all along, while for some reason occasionally showing us videos of other robots like Scooter and Bert in order to (I guess?) keep their actually useful platforms secret.

Anyway, Proteus looks to be a combination of one of Amazon’s newer Kiva mobile bases, along with the sensing and intelligence that allow AMRs to operate in semi-structured warehouse environments alongside moderately trained humans. Its autonomy seems to be enabled by a combination of stereo vision sensors and several planar lidars at the front and sides, a good combination for both safety and effective indoor localization in environments with a bunch of reliably static features.

I’m particularly impressed with the emphasis on human-robot interaction with Proteus, which often seems to be a secondary concern for robots designed for work in industry. The “eyes” are expressive in a minimalist sort of way, and while the front of the robot is very functional in appearance, the arrangement of the sensors and light bar also manages to give it a sort of endearingly serious face. That green light that the robot projects in front of itself also seems to be designed for human interaction—I haven’t seen any sensors that use light like that, but it seems like an effective way of letting a human know that the robot is active and moving. Overall, I think it’s cute, although very much not in a “let’s try to make this robot look cute” way, which is good.

What we’re not seeing with Proteus is all of the software infrastructure required to make it work effectively. Don’t get me wrong—making this hardware cost effective and reliable enough that Amazon can scale to however many robots it wants to scale to (likely a frighteningly large number) is a huge achievement. But there’s also all that fleet management stuff that gets much more complicated once you have robots autonomously moving things around an active warehouse full of fragile humans who need to be both collaborated with and avoided.

Proteus is certainly the star of the show here, but Amazon did also introduce a couple of new robotic systems. One is Cardinal:

There’s also a new system for transferring pods from containers to adorable little container-hauling robots, designed to minimize the amount that humans have to reach up or down or sideways:

It’s amazing to look at this kind of thing and realize the amount of effort that Amazon is putting in to maximize the efficiency of absolutely everything surrounding the (so far) very hard-to-replace humans in their fulfillment centers. There’s still nothing that can do a better job than our combination of eyes, brains, and hands when it comes to rapidly and reliably picking random things out of things and putting them into other things, but the sooner Amazon can solve that problem, the sooner the humans that those eyes and brains and hands belong to will be able to direct their attention to more creative and fulfilling tasks. Or, that’s the idea, anyway.

Amazon says that it expects Proteus to start off moving carts around in specific areas, with the hope that it’ll eventually automate cart movements in its warehouses as much as possible. And Cardinal is still in prototype form, but Amazon hopes that it’ll be deployed in fulfillment centers by next year.

Learn how an electromagnetic simulator can be applied to various scenarios in the automotive industry

This whitepaper shows several examples of how WIPL-D electromagnetic simulator can be applied to various scenarios in the automotive industry: a radar antenna mounted on a car bumper operating at 24 GHz, 40 GHz, and 77 GHz, an EM obstacle detection at 77 GHz, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication at 5.9 GHz. Download this free whitepaper now!