Drones offer top-down view of invention

Sunday

Feb 2, 2014 at 2:00 AM

Part I, Inception: This is the last section of "Inception," the top-down view of inventions. A successful invention starts out with a problem. It produces a workable solution, and then it is a successful invention.

Sam Asano

Part I, Inception: This is the last section of "Inception," the top-down view of inventions. A successful invention starts out with a problem. It produces a workable solution, and then it is a successful invention.

Most amateur inventors get excited about finding a solution to a problem and attention becomes very narrowly focused. They often become obsessed in their pursuit of a solution and in the process get stuck in a milliard of details, spending large amounts of time, while forgetting the top-down view of invention.

The top-down view does not necessarily help you develop right solution. But it places you in the right frame of mind while working to develop a solution. Human civilization is synonymous with invention. Starting from the development of an ax out of stone 3.4 million years ago to today's massive industrial society, inventions have been the foundation of civilization.

So perhaps we should look at all inventions at once to see the common thread.

Humans and all animals and plants on this earth live under one rule — space/time continuum. Space/time continuum is a scary expression coming out of the science of physics, and was popularized by the great physicists such as Newton and Einstein. Simply put, it is about where we are located and the idea that we are riding the flow of time, ceaselessly progressing toward infinity. We live in the four-dimensional spaces. X, Y, Z and time. X, Y, Z are the three axis coordinates of our location, and time is inexhaustibly advancing.

If you analyze all inventions, the vast majority are either for saving time or gaining time. Inventors, since 3.4 million years ago, have been dealing with the space/time continuum. The stone ax made cutting faster, which gained us time in abstractions, either to do more, or to rest and enjoy.

Medicine is probably the largest contributor of earning time. One's life doesn't last forever. Medicine is a solid science that puts more time between you and the final end point. Therefore, all inventions in medicine, probably starting some 100,000 years ago, worked to place time distance between your current position and the end. Without health care, your life span would probably be shorter. Some predictions suggest humans could live to 150 years old. Medicine is an effective time machine that creates time on the space/time continuum.

When one looks at inventions from the top down, inventions become more fun, purposeful and scientific. Tabitha Babbitt of Shaker faith in Harvard, Mass., invented a circular saw that gained significant efficiency in cutting logs. She gave us a large swath of time with which to do more, to rest, to do something else or simply enjoy life.

What I tried to do in Chapter I, Inception, is to raise the morale of us 99 percent inventors. I have noticed the social status of American inventors and the respect people pay to them have declined significantly as our manufacturing activity shifted wholesale to overseas sites. There are a few major reasons. Inventions have become less important when we don't manufacture anything. Also, there is no established academic branch of science for inventors. An inventor cannot attend college and receive a bachelor of science, master of science and Ph.D. degrees in inventions. This fact automatically deems any inventor who hasn't accomplished a world-stunning invention to be less important socially compared with some Ph.D. who has taken lengthy courses and passed an exam. This nation needs to treat inventors far better by developing an infrastructure in terms of academia.

Part II: Drone helicopter revisited.

Last week I discussed rapidly developing drone helicopters, which are popular among hobbyists. I consulted with brothers Alan and David Marshall of Framingham, Mass., authorities on hobbyist helicopters.

This is a substantial opportunity for amateur inventors to observe and try to think of developing new accessories. All these "toy" helicopters are manufactured in China and are quite sophisticated. The sizes and capabilities are currently fairly limited, and flight range and air time are less than 3,000 feet and 10 minutes. However, these numbers will rise quickly as new and better models are coming out practically every day. One spectacular feature of these drones is that they are inexpensive. An expensive quadcopter (four propellers) would run about $2,000 with a camera, but you could buy smaller ones for less than $200 and these will send back video in flight to your controller.

2) Structural inspections of homes, large buildings, bridges, towers and hard-to-access structures without dispatching people who will be exposed to some safety issues.

3) Energy loss inspection and measurement from houses and buildings using infrared sensors.

4) Agricultural inspection of cultivated lands as well as vermin control.

5) Wildlife protection and management.

6) Educational uses in schools.

7) Law enforcement purposes such as drug interdiction.

In all the above uses, there are plenty of needs to develop accessories that can be attached to the helicopters for a specific purpose. This is a new field, and there will be plenty of new problems to solve.

Shintaro "Sam" Asano was named by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 as one of the 10 most influential inventors of the 20th century who improved our lives. He is a businessman and inven­tor in the field of electronics and mechanical systems who is credited as the in­ventor of the portable fax machine. He also developed a data tablet used in retail point-of-sale to capture customer signatures when credit cards are used. E-mail him at sasano@gmail.com. Asano photo courtesy of Pernold Photo.

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