images courtesy of SENSEable City Lab
It’s the sort of room you’d expect to see in an Ikea catalog, or maybe an industrial design museum – cleanly furnished, with several sleek iMacs perched atop glass tables. Nothing seems out of place as I glance over my prepared questions about unmanned aerial vehicles. At least not until I’m distracted by several small flying objects.
More than several, actually. Seven thousand live crickets are buzzing around in a box on the floor.
What are those for? Oh, they’re just part of an architectural project the lab is doing to address the lack of protein in third world diets, I’m told. And they’re related to the UAV project too, in a roundabout way.
I put aside my prepared questions. Welcome to MIT’s Senseable City Lab.
Makr Shakr, a robotic bartender
In the past few years the SCL has become known for various wacky-yet-thought-provoking projects. To name a few: Makr Shakr, a robotic bartender controlled via smartphone; the New York Talk Exchange, a real time visualization of the global exchange of information through phone lines and the Internet; and most recently a cheeky four-rotored UAV tour guide dubbed SkyCall, designed for guiding lost Harvard students around MIT’s campus.
It’s this last project that brought me here. But I soon realize that it’s impossible to just discuss one project. Much like the threads in the New York Talk Exchange, everything here is linked.
UAVs have already revolutionized modern warfare, allowing the military to order airstrikes without risk of injury to pilot or soldier. But could drones find a place in your everyday life?
Chris Green, the SkyCall project leader showing me around the lab, thinks so. Under SCL director Carlo Ratti, Green sees SkyCall as just the first in a series of projects designed to “repurpose UAV technology for positive means and novel applications in urban environments that people haven’t thought about.”
Mike Xia, the technical lead for SkyCall, describes plans for a fleet of UAVs equipped with air quality sensors, generating 3D pollution maps in real time to create a highly visual model of an urban phenomenon that is not always easy to see. Creating this kind of model is currently extremely difficult because air quality instruments are static - they sit atop buildings, or next to highways.
“Pollution doesn’t stay still. It gets pushed along by cars, blown away by the wind. UAVs are agile and can follow this pollution,” says Xia.
The World Health Organization estimates that outdoor air pollution causes 3.3 million premature deaths every year. That’s more than AIDS and malaria combined. The kind of 3D pollution maps that the SCL envisions could be critical to understanding how pollution affects cities.
Researchers at the lab have also been discussing a possible cyanobacteria-mapping project with the Cambridge Public Health Department. Every summer, cyanobacteria bloom in the Charles River, producing toxins potentially harmful to humans and other mammals. But current understanding of how to combat the problem is limited.
“Currently it’s just a guy going out on a boat, looking for different colored bloom areas…But you can imagine having this fleet of UAVs, scouring the Charles, mapping these bacteria in real time,” says Green. “And if you have them consistently going about this process, then you can start to understand migration patterns, and get a better idea of what’s happening at the microbial level.”
That’s where Green sees the real power of UAVs. “They can let us measure different kinds of environmental factors that we can cross-reference to develop a deeper insight into our cities and our environments. The infrastructure of the city starts to speak back to us – it becomes this feedback loop, this interface, between us, the city, and digital technology.”
Interface. Green likes that word. “It’s not just an interface between robotics and people; it’s an interface between people and their environment. How can we deploy technology for the value of the city and its inhabitants?”
To answer that question on a larger scale, the Senseable City Lab is working on two central pavilions for the 2015 World Expo in Milan, Italy. That’s where the box of crickets comes in: the team is working on building a large 50 meter canopy designed to double both as public architecture and as a cricket farm (insects like crickets are on par with beef in the amount of protein they contain – but can be farmed at a much lower environmental cost). As the sun heats up the canopy, the crickets are instinctively drawn towards the warmth. This also means that they can shade the people inside the canopy from the sun, acting as a huge, dynamic, umbrella.
How do the UAVs come in? Well, a project the size of the World Expo has a huge footprint, cutting off large swaths of the natural environment. But, Green says, “If we can imagine UAVs as almost part of the natural ecology itself, then that opens up so many possibilities. We could deploy UAVs across the expo site, using sensors to scour for fertile soils, and reintroduce plants and repollinate areas that have been cut off.”
It’s the sort of symbiotic interface between machines, people and their environment that Green was so enthusiastic about earlier. And judging from the Senseable City Lab’s progress, it might not be so far-fetched after all.
Makr Shakr: Project concept and design by MIT Senseable City Lab; Implementation by carlorattiassociati | walter nicolino & carlo ratti; Main partners - Coca-Cola and Barcardi. Technical partners - Kuka, Pentagram, SuperUber; Media partners - Domus, Wired; Videos by MyBossWas; Event in collaboration with Meet the Media Guru, and endorsed by: Comune di Milano, World Expo Milano 2015 – Energy for Life. Feeding the Planet. Full credits available at www.makrshakr.com