Atsugi revisited - 27/2/'14
A day of snowboarding and skiing, followed by 5 hours of sitting in the train makes it quite a challenge to get up at 6 the next morning. Today we are going to visit NTT and Tokyo university.
NTT is like the KPN of Japan. They provide telecom services and besides that also have quite some impressive research laboratories. First we get the standard intro talk about the company, where they are located, their structure and the research they do. After these formalities it is time to visit some labs. First off we go to a cryogenic lab in which they experiment with equipment at 20 mKelvin which is pretty cold!
The second lab we see was working on single electron transistors. They tried building a full adder with it. Using single electrons means very power efficient and small devices.
At the third lab we finally figured out what all the aluminum foil is for that covers the large MBE machines. These are giant metal structures in which all kinds of chemical processes take place to deposit layers of atoms on wafers. When cleaning out the machine, which is made of stainless steel, it has to be evacuated. This means exposing it to normal air instead of the vacuum that is usually inside. When this happens water droplets tend to stick to the inside of the machine which is unwanted. To resolve this the machine is heated, but because steel is a poor conductor it is wrapped in aluminum foil to help the process.
After our tour at NTT we took the train again to go to Tokyo university. The planning was pretty tight which meant no time for lunch and running through the stations to get there in time. When we finally arrived we had to find our way through the maze building with double numbering on the doors. A bit late, but at the predefined location the intro presentation was skipped and we started with the lab tours immediately.
Tokyo university had a lot of robots to show off which was very cool. First they showed a humanoid robot which could open a door. As the law of Murphy and the demonstration effect predicted this of course failed the first time. When the robot grabbed the door handle and pulled it open it somehow tripped and made itself fall over, because it had no stability control other than keeping its center of gravity above its feet, which doesn't work when you're falling. On the second try the robot got it right though and opened the door successfully. In the same lab was also another robot that opened a refrigerator and handed Erik a drink. Pretty cool to see.
The second lab showed an even more human like robot which had tendons and everything to simulate muscle movements. The engineers working on it tried to make it ride a bike. Some more interesting research was shown including a hydraulic setup with force feedback which could also simulate muscular movement and was very powerful and fast.
Another one of the setups was to digitally simulate the human body and all the muscle movements. They showed us a computer model of the human skeleton with all the muscles drawn on and this model was linked to the movements of an actual person who had passive markers on his body and about 16 cameras watching his every movement from every angle. The model could move in real time and show the muscle movements.
There were a lot more robots and research being done into various applications, but because we had a limited time we couldn't see everything.
The predefined schedule for today ended and everyone had the rest of the evening to themselves. With a small group I started to head back for the hostel. We made a stop at one of the intermediate stations to find a nice place to eat and ended up in some kind of Indian restaurant where they served a pretty good curry with a large piece of naan bread. Feeling pretty stuffed we took the next train and went back to the hostel to get a nice and long night of sleep.
By: Mattanja Venema