2023’s Top Stories About Energy

Energy storage and nuclear fusion—two reliable crowd pleasers when the crowd you’re talking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum—are well represented among our most widely read energy stories of 2023. But atop the list are a couple of surprises. Number one? Heat pumps. Number two? A real corker, and the answer to the question, what generates electricity but isn’t a dynamo or a fuel cell?

Here are the 10 most popular AI articles that Spectrum published in 2023, ranked by the amount of time people spent reading them.

1. Heat Pumps—The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs

A window-mounted air-conditioning system includes an electric heat pump for heating.Gradient Comfort

A world growing warmer will inevitably need more air conditioning, to keep people not just comfortable but alive in the hottest regions. And yet more air conditioning exacerbates the very problem—climate change—that is driving the need for more air conditioning. What to do? Two words: heat pumps.

2. This New Breed of Generator Can Run on Almost Any Fuel

Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Energy’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Creative Shot

One of the most interesting energy startups that you’ve never heard of (unless you are a diligent reader of Spectrum) is Mainspring Energy. The Menlo Park, Calif., company, which was founded in 2010 by three Stanford grads, is producing a machine that generates 230 to 430 kilowatts using almost any kind of fuel, including ammonia, hydrogen, biogas, or natural gas. Mainspring calls its machine a linear generator, because it converts linear motion into electricity. Fuel and air compressed in the center of a linear assembly react and push outward, towards the opposite ends of the assembly, driving magnets on either side of the chamber through conducting copper coils, generating electricity. The machines are already generating electricity at scores of installations, and the company’s backers include some of the biggest names in tech investing, including Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla.

3. Welcome to Fusion City, USA

At Helion Energy, workers build a section of the company’s Polaris fusion reactor.Helion Energy

Fusion startups Zap Energy and Helion Energy have big ambitions and relatively modest facilities in Everett, Washington, better known as the site where Boeing employs 30,000 people in one of the world’s largest manufacturing facilities. Zap and Helion are part of a renaissance in fusion-energy R&D aimed at achieving practical fusion power using much more modest facilities than the vast International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in southern France, at a cost estimated to be north of US $22 billion by the time it’s completed.

4. NASA Battery Tech to Deliver for the Grid

EnerVenue’s nickel-hydrogen battery cells are 1.8 meters long, weigh 62 kilograms, and store 3 kilowatt-hours.EnerVenue

If you don’t discharge and then recharge them all the way, lithium-ion batteries can last for thousands of charge-discharge cycles. Now imagine a battery that can last through tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles. Such a battery already exists—it’s called nickel-hydrogen, and it’s been used in space since 1977. This past September, startup EnerVenue launched a new generation of its nickel-hydrogen battery and finished constructing a 93,000-square-meter factory around the same time. The company is one of a growing group targeting grid-scale applications, particularly for solar installations.

5. Lithium Battery Ripe for Disruption, Inventor Says

A car battery pack is opened, revealing the modules, at a Volkswagen pilot recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany. John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

M. Stanley Wittingham, along with the late John Goodenough, are credited as key figures in the invention of the lithium-ion battery in the early 1970s (the two of them shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019 with Akira Yoshino). Wittingham had a few peeves to get off his chest and did so at a symposium this past April at Stanford. Here’s one of the gripes: It takes 60 to 80 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce a 1-kWh lithium-ion battery. For Wittingham’s other complaints, you’ll have to read the article.

6. U.S. Re-Enters the Nuclear Fuel Game

Uranium is enriched in centrifuge cascades, such as this one at a Centrus Energy plant in Piketon, Ohio. Centrus Energy

To generate power, old-school light-water nuclear reactors use oxide fuel, which consists of ceramic pellets of uranium oxide, arranged end-to-end to form rods that are clad in zirconium alloy. The fuel is enriched to about 4.8 percent U-235. But the advanced reactors now coming on line use an entirely different kind of fuel, called high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). (Enriched to 20 percent U-235, it is still far below the 90-plus percent required for making nuclear weapons.) This past November, Centrus Energy of Bethesda, Maryland, became only the second organization capable of producing HALEU fuel, and the first outside of Russia. Fun fact: “The energy in just 3 tablespoons of HALEU can supply a lifetime’s worth of power for the average U.S. consumer,” reported Prachi Patel.

7. To Free The Baltic Grid, Old Technology Is New Again

A synchronous condenser, such as the one at right here, can be coupled to a flywheel, at left. Siemens Energy

Spectrum’s veteran, globe-trotting energy contributor, Peter Fairley, has been covering the electric-grid and -power ramifications of the war in Ukraine. This past November, he focused on the efforts of three Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—to separate their electrical grids from the Russian-controlled synchronous AC power zone. The three countries are deploying synchronous condensers to increase the resilience of their grids and enable them to withstand, in the absence of connections to the much larger Russian grid, the unexpected and sudden loss of transmission lines or generators. Such a condenser is essentially a large synchronous machine that spins freely; however, a flywheel connected to its shaft can store kinetic energy. Its main purpose, in this case, is to provide additional inertia, also called spinning reserve, that would help stabilize a grid in the event of a crisis.

8. Fusion Is Having a Moment

Fusion has been the power source of the future for more than 70 years.Harry Campbell

Fusion is the power source of the future—and it always will be. So goes the quip that you’re likely to hear from any grizzled technology watcher old enough to have lived through multiple hype cycles about the promise of fusion energy. The grim reality of fusion is that the world’s largest project, the ITER, will not be tested with deuterium and tritium fuel until 2035, and couldn’t produce any useful power for quite a few years after that. Nevertheless, 2023 saw several interesting developments in fusion, mostly in connection with startup companies pursuing alternative approaches to the money-pit gigantism of ITER and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These startups include Zap Energy and Helion Energy (see above, “Welcome to Fusion City, USA”) and also Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in Devens, Mass. To produce the stupendous magnetic fields necessary to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is using high-temperature superconducting tape, which will greatly reduce the size of the magnets needed to produce the fields (see below).

9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is using superconducting tape based on yttrium barium copper oxide.Gretchen Ertl/CFS/MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Magnetic-confinement fusion relies on staggeringly strong magnetic fields to confine a superhot plasma, typically within a torus-shaped vessel called a tokamak. At the ITER project, researchers are building superconducting electromagnets using alloys of niobium-tin or niobium-titanium, which must be cooled to about ‑269 °C (about 4 degrees Kelvin). The 18 ITER magnets will require 600 tonnes of the superconductor. Commonwealth Fusion Systems thinks there’s a better way, and it involves using a more advanced superconductor, yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO. It superconducts at temperatures between ‑200 to ‑250 °C (73 to 23 Kelvin). That seemingly small temperature difference, along with other features of the YBCO, will permit much smaller magnets that could be manufactured more quickly and inexpensively, according to Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion might very well depend on the effectiveness of these higher-temperature superconductors.

10. The Age of Silicon Is Here…for Batteries

Nanostructured silicon materials could deliver longer-range, faster-charging batteries. Group14

The typical anode material for lithium-ion batteries is graphite, coated on copper foil. But researchers have long been tantalized by the possibility of using silicon, which, gram for gram, can hold 10 times as many lithium ions. And in 2023, after several startups managed to solve problems with silicon anodes—mainly, a tendency to expand and fracture—several automakers announced plans to use silicon-anode lithium-ion cells in upcoming electric-vehicle batteries. The startups included OneD Battery Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., Sila Nanotechnologies in Alameda, Calif., and Group14 Technologies in Woodinville, Washington.

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Humanoid Robots Are Getting to Work

Ten years ago, at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trial event near Miami, I watched the most advanced humanoid robots ever built struggle their way through a scenario inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A team of experienced engineers controlled each robot, and overhead safety tethers kept them from falling over. The robots had to demonstrate mobility, sensing, and manipulation—which, with painful slowness, they did.

These robots were clearly research projects, but DARPA has a history of catalyzing technology with a long-term view. The DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges for autonomous vehicles, in 2005 and 2007, formed the foundation for today’s autonomous taxis. So, after DRC ended in 2015 with several of the robots successfully completing the entire final scenario, the obvious question was: When would humanoid robots make the transition from research project to a commercial product?

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2024.

The answer seems to be 2024, when a handful of well-funded companies will be deploying their robots in commercial pilot projects to figure out whether humanoids are really ready to get to work.

One of the robots that made an appearance at the DRC Finals in 2015 was called ATRIAS, developed by Jonathan Hurst at the Oregon State University Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. In 2015, Hurst cofounded Agility Robotics to turn ATRIAS into a human-centric, multipurpose, and practical robot called Digit. Approximately the same size as a human, Digit stands 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet, 8 inches), weighs 65 kilograms (about 140 pounds), and can lift 16 kg (about 35 pounds). Agility is now preparing to produce a commercial version of Digit at massive scale, and the company sees its first opportunity in the logistics industry, where it will start doing some of the jobs where humans are essentially acting like robots already.

Are humanoid robots useful?

“We spent a long time working with potential customers to find a use case where our technology can provide real value, while also being scalable and profitable,” Hurst says. “For us, right now, that use case is moving e-commerce totes.” Totes are standardized containers that warehouses use to store and transport items. As items enter or leave the warehouse, empty totes need to be continuously moved from place to place. It’s a vital job, and even in highly automated warehouses, much of that job is done by humans.

Agility says that in the United States, there are currently several million people working at tote-handling tasks, and logistics companies are having trouble keeping positions filled, because in some markets there are simply not enough workers available. Furthermore, the work tends to be dull, repetitive, and stressful on the body. “The people doing these jobs are basically doing robotic jobs,” says Hurst, and Agility argues that these people would be much better off doing work that’s more suited to their strengths. “What we’re going to have is a shifting of the human workforce into a more supervisory role,” explains Damion Shelton, Agility Robotics’ CEO. “We’re trying to build something that works with people,” Hurst adds. “We want humans for their judgment, creativity, and decision-making, using our robots as tools to do their jobs faster and more efficiently.”

For Digit to be an effective warehouse tool, it has to be capable, reliable, safe, and financially sustainable for both Agility and its customers. Agility is confident that all of this is possible, citing Digit’s potential relative to the cost and performance of human workers. “What we’re encouraging people to think about,” says Shelton, “is how much they could be saving per hour by being able to allocate their human capital elsewhere in the building.” Shelton estimates that a typical large logistics company spends at least US $30 per employee-hour for labor, including benefits and overhead. The employee, of course, receives much less than that.

Agility is not yet ready to provide pricing information for Digit, but we’re told that it will cost less than $250,000 per unit. Even at that price, if Digit is able to achieve Agility’s goal of minimum 20,000 working hours (five years of two shifts of work per day), that brings the hourly rate of the robot to $12.50. A service contract would likely add a few dollars per hour to that. “You compare that against human labor doing the same task,” Shelton says, “and as long as it’s apples to apples in terms of the rate that the robot is working versus the rate that the human is working, you can decide whether it makes more sense to have the person or the robot.”

Agility’s robot won’t be able to match the general capability of a human, but that’s not the company’s goal. “Digit won’t be doing everything that a person can do,” says Hurst. “It’ll just be doing that one process-automated task,” like moving empty totes. In these tasks, Digit is able to keep up with (and in fact slightly exceed) the speed of the average human worker, when you consider that the robot doesn’t have to accommodate the needs of a frail human body.

Amazon’s experiments with warehouse robots

The first company to put Digit to the test is Amazon. In 2022, Amazon invested in Agility as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund, and late last year Amazon started testing Digit at its robotics research and development site near Seattle, Wash. Digit will not be lonely at Amazon—the company currently has more than 750,000 robots deployed across its warehouses, including legacy systems that operate in closed-off areas as well as more modern robots that have the necessary autonomy to work more collaboratively with people. These newer robots include autonomous mobile robotic bases like Proteus, which can move carts around warehouses, as well as stationary robot arms like Sparrow and Cardinal, which can handle inventory or customer orders in structured environments. But a robot with legs will be something new.

“What’s interesting about Digit is because of its bipedal nature, it can fit in spaces a little bit differently,” says Emily Vetterick, director of engineering at Amazon Global Robotics, who is overseeing Digit’s testing. “We’re excited to be at this point with Digit where we can start testing it, because we’re going to learn where the technology makes sense.”

Where two legs make sense has been an ongoing question in robotics for decades. Obviously, in a world designed primarily for humans, a robot with a humanoid form factor would be ideal. But balancing dynamically on two legs is still difficult for robots, especially when those robots are carrying heavy objects and are expected to work at a human pace for tens of thousands of hours. When is it worthwhile to use a bipedal robot instead of something simpler?

“The people doing these jobs are basically doing robotic jobs.”—Jonathan Hurst, Agility Robotics

“The use case for Digit that I’m really excited about is empty tote recycling,” Vetterick says. “We already automate this task in a lot of our warehouses with a conveyor, a very traditional automation solution, and we wouldn’t want a robot in a place where a conveyor works. But a conveyor has a specific footprint, and it’s conducive to certain types of spaces. When we start to get away from those spaces, that’s where robots start to have a functional need to exist.”

The need for a robot doesn’t always translate into the need for a robot with legs, however, and a company like Amazon has the resources to build its warehouses to support whatever form of robotics or automation it needs. Its newer warehouses are indeed built that way, with flat floors, wide aisles, and other environmental considerations that are particularly friendly to robots with wheels.

“The building types that we’re thinking about [for Digit] aren’t our new-generation buildings. They’re older-generation buildings, where we can’t put in traditional automation solutions because there just isn’t the space for them,” says Vetterick. She describes the organized chaos of some of these older buildings as including narrower aisles with roof supports in the middle of them, and areas where pallets, cardboard, electrical cord covers, and ergonomics mats create uneven floors. “Our buildings are easy for people to navigate,” Vetterick continues. “But even small obstructions become barriers that a wheeled robot might struggle with, and where a walking robot might not.” Fundamentally, that’s the advantage bipedal robots offer relative to other form factors: They can quickly and easily fit into spaces and workflows designed for humans. Or at least, that’s the goal.

Vetterick emphasizes that the Seattle R&D site deployment is only a very small initial test of Digit’s capabilities. Having the robot move totes from a shelf to a conveyor across a flat, empty floor is not reflective of the use case that Amazon ultimately would like to explore. Amazon is not even sure that Digit will turn out to be the best tool for this particular job, and for a company so focused on efficiency, only the best solution to a specific problem will find a permanent home as part of its workflow. “Amazon isn’t interested in a general-purpose robot,” Vetterick explains. “We are always focused on what problem we’re trying to solve. I wouldn’t want to suggest that Digit is the only way to solve this type of problem. It’s one potential way that we’re interested in experimenting with.”

The idea of a general-purpose humanoid robot that can assist people with whatever tasks they may need is certainly appealing, but as Amazon makes clear, the first step for companies like Agility is to find enough value performing a single task (or perhaps a few different tasks) to achieve sustainable growth. Agility believes that Digit will be able to scale its business by solving Amazon’s empty tote-recycling problem, and the company is confident enough that it’s preparing to open a factory in Salem, Ore. At peak production the plant will eventually be capable of manufacturing 10,000 Digit robots per year.

A menagerie of humanoids

Agility is not alone in its goal to commercially deploy bipedal robots in 2024. At least seven other companies are also working toward this goal, with hundreds of millions of dollars of funding backing them. 1X, Apptronik, Figure, Sanctuary, Tesla, and Unitree all have commercial humanoid robot prototypes.

Despite an influx of money and talent into commercial humanoid robot development over the past two years, there have been no recent fundamental technological breakthroughs that will substantially aid these robots’ development. Sensors and computers are capable enough, but actuators remain complex and expensive, and batteries struggle to power bipedal robots for the length of a work shift.

There are other challenges as well, including creating a robot that’s manufacturable with a resilient supply chain and developing the service infrastructure to support a commercial deployment at scale. The biggest challenge by far is software. It’s not enough to simply build a robot that can do a job—that robot has to do the job with the kind of safety, reliability, and efficiency that will make it desirable as more than an experiment.

There’s no question that Agility Robotics and the other companies developing commercial humanoids have impressive technology, a compelling narrative, and an enormous amount of potential. Whether that potential will translate into humanoid robots in the workplace now rests with companies like Amazon, who seem cautiously optimistic. It would be a fundamental shift in how repetitive labor is done. And now, all the robots have to do is deliver.

This article appears in the January 2024 print issue as “Year of the Humanoid.”

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IEEE Receives Grant to Develop Lesson Plans On Semiconductors

The ON Semiconductor Foundation, an onsemi Giving Now program, recently awarded the IEEE Foundation a two-year grant totaling US $137,125 for IEEE TryEngineering to develop content about semiconductor technology for middle school students and their teachers. The preuniversity outreach program is overseen by IEEE Educational Activities. Onsemi, headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., funds STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) educational activities for underprivileged youth in underserved communities where they operate globally. The company is a leading semiconductor manufacturer serving tens of thousands of customers across several markets with intelligent power and sensing technologies.

“Through our Giving Now program, onsemi is driving positivity forward by creating meaningful change for our planet and every community that we live and work in around the globe,” says Tyler Lacey, board president for the ON Semiconductor Foundation. “On behalf of the Foundation, we’re proud to support the work of the IEEE Foundation and IEEE TryEngineering as we work toward making the world better together.”

Thanks to the grant from the ON Semiconductor Foundation, students will learn how semiconductors are made through hands-on activities.IEEE TryEngineering

Increasing the semiconductor workforce pipeline

The 2022 U.S. CHIPS and Science Act highlighted a gap in the workforce pipeline. There is a projected shortage of nearly 67,000 workers in the semiconductor industry by 2030, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That’s why onsemi and IEEE recognize the importance of introducing students to the industry.

The Giving Now grant will fund the creation of video-based professional development courses to help educators teach middle-school students about semiconductors and the industry, officials say. The project also includes on-site professional development for teachers in the Phoenix area, plus lesson-plan materials, including video-supported classroom activities.

IEEE Educational Activities staff and the organization’s semiconductor experts are developing content for use in classrooms, as well as support for teachers.

“A skilled and diverse pipeline of workers is crucial to support plans for building semiconductor industry capacity globally.” —Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director.

“IEEE has experts in all the fields involved in the manufacturing of semiconductors, and we also have many excellent educators in these fields,” says Tom Coughlin, 2024 IEEE president. “We are proud to be a resource as well as helping to train the next generation of semiconductor process technicians and engineers.”

“A skilled and diverse pipeline of workers is crucial to support plans for building semiconductor industry capacity globally,” says Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director. “IEEE Educational Activities is excited to be able to partner with onsemi to provide educational resources for pre-university students to help them learn about the opportunities available in this growing industry.”

IEEE TryEngineering educational resources

Since 2006, IEEE TryEngineering has empowered educators to foster the next generation of technology innovators. The program is focused on contributing to the global STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workforce pipeline by providing resources to overcome barriers in educational systems.

That includes free, Web-based access to culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate, and educationally sound instructional resources for teachers and community volunteers. IEEE TryEngineering also provides unbiased information about STEM careers as well as access to mentors and communities of learners.

“Partnering with onsemi will allow IEEE to develop exciting content that students and their teachers are looking for,” says Debra Gulick, director of IEEE student and academic educational programs. “IEEE TryEngineering is uniquely positioned for this project due to the organization’s vast network of volunteers, who will assist by providing the most current information and resources on semiconductors necessary to inspire the next generation of engineers.”

The funds are to be administered by the IEEE Foundation in partnership with IEEE TryEngineering.

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Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry’s New Priority: Stability

Wi-Fi is one of the most aggravating success stories. Despite how ubiquitous the technology has become in our lives, it still gives reasons to grumble: The service is spotty or slow, for example, or the network keeps cutting out. Wi-Fi’s reliability has an image problem.

When Wi-Fi 7 arrives this year, it will bring with it a new focus on improving its image. Every Wi-Fi generation brings new features and areas of focus, usually related to throughput—getting more bits from point A to point B. The new features in Wi-Fi 7 will result in a generation of wireless technology that is more focused on reliability and reduced latency, while still finding new ways to continue increasing data rates.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2024.

“The question that we posed ourselves was, ‘What do we do now?’” says Carlos Cordeiro, an Intel fellow and the company’s chief technology officer of wireless connectivity. “What Wi-Fi really needed to do at that point was become more reliable…. I think it’s the time that we should be looking more at latency and becoming more deterministic.”

The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision. “It’s not so much about throughput, but you really want to make sure that your [data] packet gets across the first time that you send it,” says Cordeiro. Beyond industrial automation and robotics, augmented and virtual reality technologies as well as gaming stand to benefit from faster, more reliable wireless signals.

Multi-link operations will make Wi-Fi more reliable

The key to a future Wi-Fi you can depend on is something called multi-link operations (MLO). “It is the marquee feature of Wi-Fi 7,” says Kevin Robinson, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance. MLO comes in two flavors. The first—and simpler—of the two is a version that allows Wi-Fi devices to spread a stream of data across multiple channels in a single frequency band. The technique makes the collective Wi-Fi signal more resilient to interference at a specific frequency.

Where MLO really makes Wi-Fi 7 stand apart from previous generations, however, is a version that allows devices to spread a data stream across multiple frequency bands. For context, Wi-Fi utilizes three bands—2.5 gigahertz, 5 GHz, and as of 2020, 6 GHz.

Whether MLO spreads signals across multiple channels in the same frequency band or channels across two or three bands, the goals are the same: dependability and reduced latency. Devices will be able to split up a stream of data and send portions across different channels at the same time—which cuts down on the overall transmission time—or beam copies of the data across diverse channels, in case one channel is noisy or otherwise impaired.

“[Multi-link operations are] the marquee feature of Wi-Fi 7.” —Kevin Robinson, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance

MLO is hardly the only feature new to Wi-Fi 7, even if industry experts agree it’s the most notable. Wi-Fi 7 will also see channel size increase from 160 megahertz to a new maximum of 320 MHz. Bigger channels means more throughput capacity, which means more data in the same amount of time. That said, 320-MHz channels won’t be universally available. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum—and in some regions, contiguous 320-MHz chunks of unlicensed spectrum don’t exist because of other spectrum allocations.

In cases where full channels aren’t possible, Wi-Fi 7 includes another feature, called puncturing. “In the past, let’s say you’re looking for 320 MHz somewhere, but right within, there’s a 20-MHz interferer. You would need to look at going to either side of that,” says Andy Davidson, senior director of technology planning at Qualcomm. Before Wi-Fi 7, you’d functionally be stuck with about a 160-MHz channel either above or below that interference. “With Wi-Fi 7, you can just notch out the interference…. You’ve still got an effective 300-MHz channel,” says Davidson.

When do I get my Wi-Fi 7?

The closest thing that a Wi-Fi generation has to a “release date” is when the Wi-Fi Alliance releases its certification, which is a process for ensuring that wireless products meet the industry’s agreed-upon standards for security, interoperability, and device protocols. Wi-Fi Certified 7—slated for the first quarter of 2024—is the culmination of years of collaborative work by the wireless industry to determine what features should be included in the new generation. After agreement on features, there is months of validation work on early implementations of those features to ensure they all work, separately and together, according to Robinson. Early Wi-Fi 7 implementations are tested at the organization’s R&D lab in Santa Clara, Calif. Finally, the new features are locked in and the Wi-Fi Alliance releases its certification program.

Separate from the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification process, the IEEE will ratify a new version of the 802.11 standard. The two are not entirely equivalent—not everything specified in the standard makes it into the Wi-Fi Alliance certification. Regardless, the new version—802.11be—should be ratified later this year as well, after the Wi-Fi 7 certification release.

When Wi-Fi Certified 7 is released, manufacturers will bring their devices to one of 20 authorized test labs around the world to confirm that their devices conform to the specs laid out by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Most importantly, certified devices are guaranteed to work together properly.

Wi-Fi 7 routers, chips, and other devices are already available, ahead of Wi-Fi Certified 7’s release. This is standard practice: Companies release their Wi-Fi 7–compatible products and undergo the official certification when it becomes available. Qualcomm’s Davidson explains that it’s common for companies to work from earlier IEEE draft standards once it becomes clear what features and requirements the next wireless generation will include.

Meanwhile, work is already underway on what will become Wi-Fi 8. “Think of it as a pipeline,” says Robinson. “While the Wi-Fi Alliance is putting the finishing touches on commercializing a new generation of Wi-Fi, standards organizations like the IEEE are already looking forward to what is going to go into the next generation.”

This article appears in the January 2024 print issue as “Wi-Fi’s Big Bet on Reliability.”

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IEEE Spectrum’s Top Telecom Stories of 2023

Faster and better—or broken and worse? IEEE Spectrum‘s readers gravitated to the extremes in the kinds of telecom stories they read this year. On the one hand, stories about Russia’s satellite jamming operations in Ukraine and stumbling 5G performance around the world attracted a lot of attention from our visitors in 2023. But readers also seemed particularly eager to know more about some of the newest and the best in the field—data rate records shattered and new ways to keep identities and authentications safe, to name just a couple.

Keep scrolling to see the top 10 stories that IEEE Spectrum readers spent the most time with over the course of 2023.

1. Satellite Jamming Reaches New Lows

ASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has, over its nearly two-year course, has revealed a lot about the current state of electronic warfare. In early 2023, it became clear that one new branch of electronic warfare was the jamming of low Earth orbit (LEO) communications satellites. These satellites—typically CubeSats, and orbiting 2,000 kilometers or lower—have brought new challenges to satellite jamming compared to their bus-sized geostationary brethren.

One of the key features for LEO satellite constellations is their need to frequently hand off signals to the next satellite coming over the horizon. These hand-offs need to happen approximately every 7 to 10 minutes, and each time, they introduce a new opportunity for a jammer to interrupt the signal. LEO satellites also generally have less space, compute, and power for security measures compared to larger satellites—and many rely on off-the-shelf components that often come with additional vulnerabilities.

The upside is that a lot of work is being put into making these new satellite constellations more secure, even though it will likely take a lot of rethinking about how to design and build the thousands upon thousands of satellites that make up these growing networks.

2. 5G Networks are Performing Worse. What’s Going On?

iStock

2023 is probably the year in which 5G really hit its stride. The only problem is—that stride is a bit less impressive than the telecom industry may have hoped for. Specifically, upload and download speeds for 5G networks around the world were generally worse, compared to performance metrics from a year earlier.

There are some caveats to this seeming flop—for one thing, every cellular generation tends to go through some growing pains as new capacity is first built out (and performs well) and then used by more people (generally dragging speeds back down due to network congestion). But there are some unique aspects of 5G that haven’t done it any favors: Piggybacking off of 4G networks, failure to capitalize on millimeter wave spectrum, and increasingly complex technologies going into the networks.

One thing to keep an eye on for the years ahead? How 5G’s sluggish start impacts the research directions that the industry prioritizes for 6G and beyond.

3. Vint Cerf on 3 Mistakes He Made in TCP/IP

Peter Adams

Vint Cerf (AKA “Mr. Internet“) was the recipient of the IEEE’s 2023 Medal of Honor. Cerf was instrumental in the early days of the Internet, including co-creating much of the infrastructure that the global network relies on to this day. He didn’t get everything right, however.

Cerf recounted to IEEE Spectrum three of the mistakes he made while developing the Internet Protocol Suite (more commonly referred to as TCP/IP). They may seem obvious in hindsight—just how many bits would be needed for Internet addresses (32 wouldn’t be enough!) or just how important security would be. But Cerf did get a lot right. Even if he admits that, like everyone else, he never really appreciated what the Internet would become in the following decades.

4. This Mirror Reverses How Light Travels in Time

Nature Physics

In an esoteric bit of research this year, a group of researchers based at universities in New York City discovered how to pass a signal through something called a “time interface”—the result being that the entire signal acted like it was moving back in time. Of course, the signal wasn’t actually traveling into the past. One way to think of the phenomenon is that it’s similar to how you can record yourself saying a word, and then playing that recording in reverse: You’ve changed the direction in time in which the word is being spoken.

If you’re still hanging in there after time interfaces and reversed signals, it’s fair to now ask, why? Beyond just being a physical proof of something that has been theorized for six decades, there are practical applications in telecom (as well as radar and optical computing). Time reversal is commonplace in signal processing. Currently, that’s often done digitally, which places demands on a network’s time, energy, and memory capacity. A time interface that can naturally reverse signals would be much faster and less complex.

5. Google Develops Quantum-Safe Security Keys

GK Images/Alamy

The looming advent of quantum computing has had cybersecurity researchers hunting for ways to make cryptographic systems that can withstand the new capabilities of such computers. Google researchers developed a solution for quantum-safe security keys, the physical external devices that function as an alternative to passwords. Their technique is a quantum-resilient implementation of the FIDO2 standard for security keys.

Security keys admittedly don’t have a broad uptake to date—passwords remain far more common. But their use is growing, and they are harder to compromise because they require actually plugging in the physical key to the computer to access an application or service. The Google researchers in question have helped to ensure that growing popularity won’t be cut short when quantum computing becomes more mainstream and traditional cryptography cracks. Unfortunately, even a post-quantum security key remains just as vulnerable to side-channel attacks, which is when a hacker gains direct physical access to the key. So even in the future, try not to misplace a security key.

6. Can We Identify a Person From Their Voice?

Chad Hagen

In December 2020, a fishy distress call from a boat off the coast of Maine opened up an investigation into its authenticity—an investigation that played into the resurgence of something called “voiceprinting.” In the same way that a person’s unique fingerprints can be used to identify them, the idea with voiceprinting is that, given a recording, the same can be done with a person’s voice.

The technique has had a controversial past—the concept first emerged around 1911, but only came into prominence in the 1960s. By 1979, however, it was discredited, at least until the last few years. The technology’s effectiveness remains unproven, however. The U.S. Secret Service claims to be able to identify an individual from a voice-only line-up, and Chinese courts have taken voiceprints into account in hundreds of judgments already. But a lack of standards and an increasing reliance on deep learning models to make vocal matches—models that cannot explain the connections they’ve made—suggest there’s a long way to go before voiceprinting ever gets its day in court.

7. How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records

Gabriel Zimmer

The U.S. Capitol riot on 6 January, 2021 resulted in the largest collective investigation in U.S. history, as the Federal Bureau of Investigations sought to track down and identify as many of the participants as possible. But the FBI didn’t turn to state-of-the-art technologies and techniques to ID rioters—they used the same surveillance techniques used every day, in even the most minor criminal cases.

What really set the FBI investigations apart from anything that came before, as contributor Mark Harris wrote for IEEE Spectrum on the two-year anniversary of the incident, is the sheer scale of the surveillance tools that the FBI tapped into, and the huge implications that has for the future of digital surveillance. Questions like whether or not technologies like geofencing are constitutional probably won’t be settled any time soon—but they have implications for everyone, in the U.S. and beyond, as we all create more and more detailed digital records of our daily lives.

8. NASA’s Laser Link Boasts Record-Breaking 200-Gb/s Speed

MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Everyone loves a good speed record. This year, NASA broke the data rate record for laser communications by beaming 200 gigabits of data per second from its TBIRD system (short for TeraByte InfraRed Delivery). TBIRD is onboard the agency’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 satellite, orbiting roughly 530 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The achievement doubled the laser comms record set just last year, also by TBIRD.

The rate is equivalent to TBIRD transmitting the equivalent of 1,000 high-definition movies (2 terabytes of data) in a single 5-minute overhead pass. It’s orders of magnitude faster than the radio links traditionally used for satellite communications. High-speed laser comms would be a boon for space exploration, although there are still some general hurdles to overcome: Beams tend to dissipate over interstellar distances, and the Earth’s atmosphere can wreak havoc on signal quality. (Although to that end, NASA can boast another recent laser comms record shattered, this one achieved mere weeks ago—the first video streamed from deep space by laser, achieving 267 megabits per second download speed.)

In addition to the above challenges that TBIRD faced down, the team also had to make sure the components—intended for terrestrial use—would survive the rigors of launch and the hostile space environment. In one early vacuum test before launch, for example, the system’s optical fibers melted because heat couldn’t be wicked away fast enough. Still, the researchers hope to be able to push laser communications as far out as the moon, and in the meantime, it will have plenty of applicability planetside as well.

9. Cory Doctorow: Interoperability Can Save the Open Web

Tim Robberts/Getty Images

In September, IEEE Spectrum contributor sat down with journalist and author Cory Doctorow to get his thoughts on Internet interoperability. In short, Doctorow’s argument is that the bigger that tech companies get, the more users risk losing—in other words, when a company becomes a monopoly (or close to one), the easier it is for that company to make the shift from “what is good for our users and good for business” to simply “what is good for our business.”

For Doctorow, interoperability is the key to a good Internet future. Quite simply, things should simply work together. That would require reversing the trend by tech companies to turn their platforms, services, and apps into walled gardens. Instead, Doctorow wants to see a “virtuous circle,” in which users are free to switch between services without friction, forcing companies to actually do right by consumers. And he’s got some ideas for how to make that happen.

10. Fiber-Optic Cables Are Natural Earthquake Detectors

MirageC/Getty Images

Fiber-optic cables: Great for moving lots of data around quickly. As it turns out, they’re also great at detecting earthquakes. Because of the medium of transmission—light beams through a glass tube—they’re naturally sensitive to any kind of vibration, including those from an earthquake.

Seismometers are expensive to maintain—the state of California alone has over 700 of them, and they each cost up to US $50,000. Of course, installing fiber optic cables isn’t cheap, but they can pull double duty as communications channels and earthquake detectors. And they’re already (almost) everywhere.

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Try This Brand New Analog Computer

Once upon a time, if you cracked open the pages of IEEE Spectrum you could spot full-page advertisements for analog computers, boasting of their ease of use and even—in the case of one model built into a cart with wheels—their portability. Engineers connected potentiometers and op-amps to set up representations of knotty differential equations and read the solutions as varying output voltages. But then digital computers conquered all, making analog computing as obsolete as radio coherers, mechanical televisions, and punched cards. Almost.

Like other written-off technologies that have seen comebacks such as vinyl records, Nixie tubes, and airships, analog computers have their adherents striving for a revival. In 2017, Yannis Tsividis wrote a feature article for Spectrum describing his research at Columbia University into the possibilities of digital-analog hybrid computer chips. The digital element offers ease of use, while the analog element provides energy-efficient solutions to many real-world types of problems.

When the article was published, I thought it made some compelling points, but as a casual experimenter I didn’t really have a good on-ramp to analog computing. That changed last year when I saw that startup Anabrid was offering a brand-new analog machine, the US $513 THAT.

Anabrid’s main gig is developing hybrid analog-digital chips of the sort pioneered by Tsividis.

It’s THAT is intended to raise awareness of the possibilities of modern analog computing. THAT is an acronym for The Analog Thing, and it’s a small open-source machine composed largely of discrete op-amp integrated circuits.

The THAT is smaller than the industrial-grade machines of yore, with just eight potentiometers for setting parameters and five integrators, along with a collection of supporting summers, inverters, comparators and so on. But the THAT is not just a cut-down toy. Multiple THATs can be chained together if more processing power is required, and a hybrid connection port is provided to make it easier to interface a THAT with a digital computer.

The THAT analog computer [left] has sockets for connecting various components, such as integrators, that correspond to mathematical operations. I displayed its outputs using an LCD screen [top right], protoboard interface [middle right] and Arduino Uno [bottom right].James Provost

Like the analog computers that once graced the advertisements in Spectrum, the THAT is programmed by wiring up elements that perform mathematical functions with short patch cables. You need to provide your own way to display the THAT’s output voltages—for me it felt only appropriate to hook up an old analog oscilloscope that I’d cadged from my older brother some time ago on general principles.

It was time to try some computing. As it’s been a minute since I last took down Erwin Kreyszig’s Advanced Engineering Mathematics to ponder differential equations, I was glad to see that the THAT’s accompanying manual is chock-full of examples and patch diagrams. Soon I was watching Euler spirals and simulations of neural spiking bloom into phosphorescent life, observing their evolution as I twisted potentiometers to adjust parameters.

It felt only appropriate to hook up an old analog oscilloscope I’d cadged from my older brother.

But I wanted to test out the hybrid approach. The natural choice was to build on Anabrid’s demo patch for a lunar-lander game: starting above the surface with a limited amount of fuel, a spacecraft is in grip of the moon’s gravity. The player must control the spacecraft’s engine throttle by turning a potentiometer so that the spacecraft lands before the fuel runs out.

With an oscilloscope, the game lacks a certain visual élan, with the fuel and altitude readings displayed as two horizontal lines. And a critical element of any lunar-lander game is also missing—determining whether or not the spacecraft’s speed at the moment of landing results in a graceful touchdown or a fresh crater. But these deficiencies could be addressed digitally.

On the left are the differential equations that model the flight of the lunar lander in their textbook form. On the right is how they are encoded into the elements provided by the THAT, such as integrators and comparators. The numbers inside circles refer to the potentiometers used to set the values of parameters.James Provost

For my digital computer and graphics display, I dug out an Arduino Uno and a small LCD touchscreen shield. The LCD display uses nearly all the pins on a regular Arduino Uno, but two analog inputs remained available to read the voltages representing altitude and fuel.

This did entail sacrificing some precision. Internally, the THAT represents quantities using a range between -10 and +10 volts. That full range would curdle the analog-to-digital convertors built into most microcontroller boards, so the THAT compresses and shifts that range for the hybrid port. There, voltages vary between 0 V and 3.3 V. The Arduino Uno operates at 5 V, and reads with 10-bit precision, so the altitude and fuel level end up approximated as numbers between 0 and 675. But that’s tolerable, given that my LCD has only 320 vertical pixels at most to display the spacecraft’s location above the surface.

I made up an Arduino protoboard with connectors for the LCD shield and a ribbon cable running to the THAT’s hybrid port. It is possible to exert some active control of the THAT via the hybrid port, for example, commanding it to reset to its initial conditions and solving an equation. However, with only two analog inputs available after accommodating the LCD shield, I was using the Arduino as a purely passive display.

I wrote a program to display the lunar surface and the player’s spacecraft in classic vector-like style. Fuel is displayed as a dwindling horizontal bar. Speed is computed and displayed by sampling the spacecraft’s altitude about 10 times per second and dividing the change in altitude by the time interval between measurements. When the altitude reaches zero, the speed is checked and the player is told if they landed safely, damaged their spacecraft, or were destroyed on impact. The program then waits until the THAT is reset for another attempt.

Somewhat to my surprise, my hybrid contraption worked smoothly. Spacecraft rose and fell on the display in accordance with the laws of physics encoded in the THAT’s nest of wiring, and lived or died depending on my skill with the throttle. As an intro to a form of computing now alien to nearly all engineers, the THAT is about as well designed an on-ramp as you could wish for. Now it’s time to take down Kreyszig and start exploring my own physics models!

This article appears in the January 2024 print issue as “A Brand New Analog Computer.”

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HVDC Networks Come to Europe

The days are numbered for the Lerwick Power Station, whose diesel generators have supplied electricity to the Shetland Islands for over 70 years. Starting around the middle of 2024, the Shetlands—and also part of mainland Scotland—will be powered by the 443-megawatt Viking wind farm, consisting of 103 wind turbines on the main island of Shetland.

But what’s most interesting about the mammoth, £580 million project isn’t so much the turbines as the subsea transmission link that will connect the wind farm to the Scottish mainland. Peak demand in the Shetlands is only about 44 MW, so at any given time as much as 90 percent of the Viking output could flow south via the link. The 260-kilometer, 320-kilovolt high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) transmission system, based on technology from Hitachi Energy, in Zurich, marks a milestone in an ongoing transformation of the European power grid: It will plug into the first truly dynamic multiterminal HVDC network in Europe.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2024.

This newer HVDC technology is opening up new opportunities. “European grid operators are adopting HVDC as the technology of choice for their bulk-transmission needs in the future,” says Cornelis Plet, vice president for DNV, a consultancy that advises on power systems and risk management.

According to Plet, wind energy is driving an acceleration of HVDC installations in Europe. By 2030, the European Union seeks to roughly double, to 42.5 percent, the share of energy met by renewables. Officials are prioritizing projects that tap the relatively consistent and strong winds that blow farther offshore, more than 75 km, say—a distance for which the high capacitance of insulated power cables renders AC transmission impractical. Grid operators are also installing subsea DC interconnections in other regions to share wind-energy surpluses and connect to backup supplies, such as Scandinavia’s giant hydropower reservoirs. Furthermore, subsea and underground HVDC cables increasingly look like the most viable way to push added wind power across congested national grids and densely populated landscapes.

New Technology Drives an HVDC Renaissance

Driving this expansion in HVDC are major technical advances. Historically, HVDC lines conveyed power from one single point to another. The level of power transfer needed to be set, and its direction could not be instantaneously reversed—as would be necessary if the lines were part of a network. However, starting around 25 years ago, the path to multiterminal HVDC systems was established by big improvements in the converters that change high-voltage alternating current to DC, and vice versa.

Power generated by the443-megawatt Viking wind farm, in the Shetland Islands, will feed a three terminal HVDC network, with the possibility of two more terminals in the future. The southern most terminal is at Blackhillock, Scotland, the site of Europe’s second-largest substation.Elias Stein

The key advance was the implementation of voltage-source converters (VSCs). Among other features, they allow operators of a transmission line to independently control not only the real power flowing on a line, but also the reactive power, which is the product of the voltage and the current that are out of phase with each other. Another feature of the new systems is modularity: Most modern VSCs are implemented as an integrated set of modules, in a system called a modular multilevel converter (MMC).

The converters are made up of submodules, and the higher the voltage being converted, the greater the number of submodules. These submodules, in turn, are typically based on capacitors and high-speed insulated-gate bipolar transistors. Energy from the AC source is stored in DC capacitors in the submodules. The capacitors are then charged and discharged in sequence to exchange energy with the AC network.

The Shetland link will create a three-terminal system by adding on to an existing HVDC cable further south. From the Shetland HVDC converter station, near the wind farm, DC is transmitted via the subsea cable to an existing converter station, near the cable’s landfall on Scotland’s northern tip. An inverter there can feed into the mainland AC grid. Or the DC power coming from the island can bypass that first mainland converter, continuing south to a third converter station that’s 160 km closer to Scotland’s big-city consumers. Or the system’s controller can flip the entire game plan, sending electricity north to Shetlands consumers just as quickly as its winds can shift.

What makes that dynamic power juggling possible is the flexible control over current and voltage that is the hallmark of VSC technology. Over the past three decades, China pushed traditional HVDC technology, based on current source converters and thyristors, to massive scale to send hydro, coal, and wind power thousands of kilometers to its coastal industries and megacities. To do so, engineers had to build the world’s most robust AC networks, including huge amounts of reactive-power compensation and a lot of filtering to prevent harmonic feedback.

VSC is a fundamentally different technology, pioneered in the late 1990s at Swiss-Swedish engineering giant ABB, whose power-grid business was recently acquired by Hitachi Energy. Unlike the traditional current-source converters, VSCs can regulate their own voltage. That means they can help stabilize the AC networks they trade power with. That feature gave ABB’s VSC-based systems an instant niche where there was literally no AC grid to lean on: sending electricity ashore from distant wind farms.

The technology caught a tailwind in 2010 when ABB’s leading HVDC rival, Siemens, commercialized the modular design that has since swept the market. Siemens’s MMC submodules switch only once per AC cycle, cutting losses from about 1.7 percent to 1 percent per converter. MMCs are now the standard configuration and are used in the United Kingdom’s newest offshore wind farm, off the coast of Yorkshire, which has 1,080 submodules and began delivering power in October.

European grid operators have deployed about 50 gigawatts of VSC-based HVDC technology to date. Another 130 GW is planned for the continent over the next 10 years, according to a September 2023 report that Plet cowrote for a U.S. grid research and advocacy consortium.

Europe and China Race for “Meshed” Grids

So far, Germany has the most ambitious program. A trio of HVDC systems will take wind power coming from offshore into northern Germany and move it inland to southern Germany. But far more HVDC transmission capacity will be needed to accommodate an anticipated surge in offshore wind. For example, Dutch-German grid operator TenneT recently signed €30 billion (US $33 billion) in contracts for 14 sets of converters and subsea cables to be operating by 2031—some in Germany and the rest in the Netherlands. That scale is cutting costs and speeding delivery by helping its vendors—GE Renewable Energy, Hitachi, and Siemens—finance capacity expansions.

Germany has also led standardization, with an eye to expanded DC grids down the line. TenneT asked all of its suppliers to offer compatible 525-kV HVDC systems with room for extra switchgear, creating the option to interconnect today’s segments in larger networks.

Other European states have joined the emerging 525-kV standard. The United Kingdom’s audacious network plan specifies a dozen 525-kV offshore wind links that its electricity system operator deems necessary by 2030. Among them is a possible five-terminal system linked end-to-end astride the North Sea coast—to minimize both the converter stations purchased and the cable crossings and landfalls dug across sensitive coastal ecosystems. In addition, the U.K. plans to push its growing wind harvest south toward London via six more offshore HVDC cables, running shore-to-shore like patch cords in an old-time telephone switchboard.

In 2020, Chinese utility giant State Grid started up the world’s first meshed DC grid—a four-node, 500-kV ring near Beijing

Ultimately, European grid planners foresee a day when today’s HVDC projects interconnect to form a meshed DC network stretching across the North Sea and beyond. That will require something extra: an HVDC circuit breaker capable of nearly instantaneous operation at 525 kV.

Cutting off AC power is more straightforward because its voltage zeroes out every time the current reverses direction. HVDC systems currently exploit that zero-crossing to handle faults, using AC breakers to power down the converters and thus squelch the continuous current flowing between them. But converter stops and restarts will be too disruptive to large HVDC networks. “When you go to four or five terminals, the system becomes too big to shut down,” says Andreas Berthou, Hitachi Energy’s group senior vice president and global head of HVDC.

In 2020, Chinese utility giant State Grid started up the world’s first meshed DC grid—a four-node, 500-kV ring near Beijing complete with 16 proprietary HVDC breakers. But Western sources say there’s been no independent assessment of its operation.

All of the big HVDC suppliers are working on circuit breakers. Hitachi Energy’s proprietary unit has been verified at 350 kV, and Berthou says it is being considered for “a couple” of offshore projects. “We are ready to tender at 525 kV,” he claims.

An HVDC converter hall at an undisclosed location is outfitted with Hitachi Energy’s Voltage Source Converter technology, based on modular, multilevel converters. Hitachi Energy

One of Germany’s cross-country HVDC projects will demonstrate an alternate approach: an MMC converter design with “full-bridge” modules capable of opposing and stopping gigawatts of DC power. The cost: twice as many pricey, power-consuming insulated-gate bipolar transistors per module.

Meshed HVDC grids seem like science fiction in a U.S. grid context—home to just 3 percent of modern HVDC installations, according to Plet’s report. But several states have plans to follow Europe’s HVDC lead. New Jersey selected a system of HVDC links to connect its first offshore wind farms, for example, and California is considering an offshore HVDC “patch cord” to boost its north-south power flows.

But securing the equipment won’t be easy, according to experts. Emmanuel Martin-Lauzer, a U.S. business-development director for Paris-based cable manufacturer Nexans, recently likened Europe’s project pipeline to a “black hole” devouring the world’s supply of HVDC cable.

Plet says some U.S. transmission developers have put down “tens of millions of dollars” to secure a place in production queues—a “big risk” since poorly coordinated state and federal grid-approval processes kill off many projects. Developers will also pay dearly to staff up, he says, given the dearth of U.S. electrical engineers with HVDC expertise. Adding it up, Plet figures that U.S. HVDC development may lag Europe’s by a decade.

This article appears in the January 2024 print issue as “High-Voltage DC Power Roars Ashore in Europe.”

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Top Robotics Stories of 2023

2023 was the best year ever for robotics. I say this every year, but every year it’s true, because the robotics field seems to be always poised on the edge of changing absolutely everything. Is 2024 going to be even better? Will it be the year where humanoids, or AI, or something else makes our lives amazing? Maybe! Who knows! But either way, it’ll be exciting, and we’ll be here as it happens.

As we look forward to 2024, here’s a look back at some of our most popular stories of 2023. I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them!

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Roombas at the End of the World

My favorite story to report and write in 2023 was this tale of the bizarre existence of the Roombas that live and work at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. A single picture that I spotted while casually browsing through the blog of a South Pole infrastructure engineer took me down a crazy rabbit hole of Antarctic hijinks, where a small number of humans relied on some robot vacuums to help keep themselves sane in the most isolated place on Earth.

This Robot Could Be the Key to Empowering People With Disabilities

This story about Henry and Jane Evans, Willow Garage, and Hello Robot beautifully tied together something like a decade and a half of my history as a robotics journalist. I got to know the folks at Willow early on in my career, and saw the PR2 doing some amazing work, including with Henry and Jane. But the PR2 was never going to be a practical robot for anyone, and it took the talent and passion of Hello Robot to design the hardware and software to make PR2’s promises into something real-world useful.

What Flight 50 Means for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is currently looking forward to its 70th flight, which is astonishing for a technology demo that was only really expected to fly five times. Arguably, this little helicopter is one of the most extreme autonomous systems that humans have ever built. I’ve written a bunch about Ginny over the last few years and talked to several different members of her team. But Flight 50 was a special milestone, and in this interview, Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos talks about why.

It’s Totally Fine for Humanoid Robots to Fall Down

We’re going to be seeing a lot more robots walking around over the next year, and that also means we’re going to be seeing a lot more robots failing to walk around in one way or another. Videos of robots falling tend to go crazy on social media, but most of the people who see them won’t have any idea about the underlying context. In this article, two of the companies with the most experience building humanoids (Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics) explain why robots falling down is actually not a big deal at all.

Watch This Giant Chopstick Robot Handle Boxes With Ease

It’s not often that a robot is able to combine a truly novel design with an immediately practical commercial application, but Dextrous Robotics was able to do it with their giant chopstick box manipulator, and our readers certainly appreciated it. Boxes are a compelling near-term application for robots, but the go-to manipulation technique that we see over and over again is suction. Dextrous’ approach is totally unique, and it seems like a gimmick—until you see it in action.

Superhuman Speed: How Autonomous Drones Beat the Best Human Racers

Humans can do some pretty incredible things, and watching a human demonstrating some skill that they are the actual best in the world at is fascinating—especially if they’re at risk of losing that top spot to a robot. This race between world champion drone racers and autonomous drones from ETH Zurich took place in 2022, but I had to wait for the underlying research to be published before I was allowed to tell the whole story.

How Disney Packed Big Emotion Into a Little Robot

It’s refreshing to write about Disney’s robots, because somewhat uniquely, they’re designed for the primary purpose of bringing humans joy. Disney goes about this methodically, though, and we’re always excited to be able to share the research underlying everything that they do. These are some of my favorite stories to tell, where there’s a super cool robot that just gets cooler when the people behind it explain how it does what it does.

Stowing Is a “Beautiful Problem” That Amazon Is Solving With Robots

Robotics is full of problems that are hard, and one of those problems is stowing—the process of packing items into bins in a warehouse. Stowing is the opposite of picking, which is something that warehouse robots are getting pretty good at, but stowing is also much more difficult. “For me, it’s hard, but it’s not too hard,” Amazon senior manager of applied sciences Aaron Parness told us for this article. “It’s on the cutting edge of what’s feasible for robots, and it’s crazy fun to work on.”

Your Robotic Avatar Is Almost Ready

As much as we love robots, humans are still much, much better at a lot of stuff. One thing that humans are particularly bad at, though, is being physically present in far away places. The Avatar XPrize competition combined human brains with robot embodiments, and the results were honestly much better than expected. With the right hardware and the right interface, the competition showed that humans and robots can make a fantastic team.

All of the Humanoid Robots

And finally, our top robotics coverage area for 2023 was humanoid robots. Or, more specifically, humanoid robots that are (supposedly) poised to enter the labor force. The last time we had this much humanoid robot coverage was probably in 2015 surrounding the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, and it’s not like there’s been a gradual increase or anything—humanoids just went absolutely bonkers in 2023, with something like a dozen companies developing human-scale bipedal robots with near-term commercial aspirations.

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