Solar FREAKING Roadways

Phase II Prototype Solar Parking Lot

Pet Friendly!

LEDs

Snow test - Heating elements (not the LEDs!) in the two center panels are activated.

Artist's rendition of interstate. Graphic design by Sam Cornett

Tractor test

Artist's rendition of downtown Sandpoint, Idaho - Home of Solar Roadways. Graphic design by Sam Cornett

Artist's rendition of downtown Sandpoint sidewalk. Graphic design by Sam Cornett

We are excited to announce that Indiegogo has asked us to join their InDemand program: It allows teams to continue raising funds for their projects.

We are very excited about this for many reasons:

We've had numerous requests since our original campaign ended: "Can I still donate?", "Can I still get a Solar Roadways perk?", "I'd love to be a part of this movement", etc. Many people hadn't even heard about Solar Roadways until after the campaign had ended. Now, everyone can join in and become a part of Solar Roadways history.

We're still in Research & Development, so we're not making a profit yet. Therefore, we can still use your help. One of the things on our wish list is to do some more civil engineering (road) testing. We would also love to make some of our own machinery. The more of the production we can do ourselves and the more we can streamline it, the more we can keep costs down. The more money we can raise, the faster we can proceed to make our product available to the world.

We received donations from 165 countries, which is a clear indication that the world is ready for the paradigm shift Solar Roadways will become. We can't tell you what that level of support and encouragement has meant to us.

Since our original campaign, countless supporters have expressed what it means to them to help us spread the word. We need an educational component to create momentum. People tell us that the bumper stickers they put on their cars, the tote bags in their shopping carts, and the pendants around their necks provide a fun and effortless way for them to start conversations with others and we so appreciate that!

U.S. Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) talks about Solar Roadways

Years ago, when the phrase "Global Warming" began gaining popularity, we started batting around the idea of replacing asphalt and concrete surfaces with solar panels that could be driven upon. We thought of the "black box" on airplanes: We didn't know what material that black box was made of, but it seemed to be able to protect sensitive electronics from the worst of airline crashes.

Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to "paint" the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.

Our latest video - Google's Solve for X Solar Roadways presentation

What if roads and parking lots were solar, fueling enough energy from the sun to power nearby communities as well as electric vehicles? Scott and Julie Brusaw, the inventors/creators have the answer.

Join the conversation and tweet #SOLARROADWAY to have your tweet featured on the GE FOCUS FORWARD website. Go to focusforwardfilms.com/films/30/solar-roadways to see the discussion.

Watch more GE FOCUS FORWARD films at vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms/films.

Diamond Lane Films

DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY - Michèle Ohayon

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY - Theo van de Sande A.S.C.

EDITOR - Jamal El Amin

MUSIC - Davy & Yoann Bernagoult

SOUND - Fernanda Starling

RE-RECORDING MIXER - Michael Bard C.A.S.

ADDITIONAL EDITING - Edgar Burcksen, A.C.E.

ANIMATION - Dan Walden, Martin Ehleben

LINE PRODUCER, LA - Joel Sadilek

GRAPHICS - Patrick Bielski

LA PA - Jonathan VU

IDAHO PA - Dave Hussey

Short documentary by Michele Ohayon

In 2009, we received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype. During the course of its construction, we learned many lessons and discovered new and better ways to approach this project. These methods and discoveries are discussed throughout this website. Please enjoy and send us any questions that you may have. For Phase I pictures, please visit our Phase I Prototype page.

  This YERT video is featured in their full-length documentary, now being screened across the U.S. For a screening or presentation near you, click on the following "YERT plate":

After successful completion of the Phase I SBIR contract, we were awarded a follow-up 2-year Phase II $750,000 SBIR contract by the Federal Highway Administration beginning in 2011. With this award, a 36-foot by 12-foot prototype parking lot (108 prototype Solar Road Panels) was built and then tested under all weather and sunlight conditions. For Phase II pictures, please visit our Phase II Prototype page.

Scott presented the Solar Roadways at a TEDx Talk in Sacramento on April 16th, 2010. He was given 18 minutes for "The talk of his life" and it went great!

Everyone has power. No more power shortages, no more roaming power outages, no more need to burn coal (50% of greenhouse gases). Less need for fossil fuels and less dependency upon foreign oil. Much less pollution. How about this for a long term advantage: an electric road allows all-electric vehicles to recharge anywhere: rest stops, parking lots, etc. They would then have the same range as a gasoline-powered vehicle. Internal combustion engines would become obsolete. Our dependency on oil would come to an abrupt end.

It's time to upgrade our infrastructure - roads and power grid - to the 21st century.

Short Documentary about Solar Roadways

The basic building block of what has been dubbed by its creators, electrical engineer Scott Brusaw and his wife Julie, a solar roadway. It could one day make for a highway built of 0.4 –square-meter hexagonal panels, a hodge podge of green circuit boards surrounding 36-watts worth of blue solar panels, all covered in thick, bumpy glass for safety and traction.

The idea is to put unused roadway to good use (generating electricity) while also providing an electronic means for lane shifts, driver messages and other utilities. Bonus: solar roadways obviate the need for an electric grid by including a “Cable Corridor” right in the side of the roadway that eliminates the need for power lines running alongside it. And if outfitted with sensors as well the solar highway could transmit real time traffic data or other information of interest. The novel idea has been around for a few years now, bursting back into prominence this summer thanks to a new crowdfunding campaign to support further research and development that garnered $2.2 million before closing on June 20.

Read more http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/07/10/hard-road-ahead-for-solar-freakin-roadways/

Official website of Scott Brusaw's Solar FREAKIN' Roadways http://www.solarroadways.com www.facebook.com/solarroadways

Scott presented the Solar Roadways at a TEDx Talk in Sacramento on April 16th, 2010. He was given 18 minutes for "The talk of his life" and it went great!

Everyone has power. No more power shortages, no more roaming power outages, no more need to burn coal (50% of greenhouse gases). Less need for fossil fuels and less dependency upon foreign oil. Much less pollution. How about this for a long term advantage: an electric road allows all-electric vehicles to recharge anywhere: rest stops, parking lots, etc. They would then have the same range as a gasoline-powered vehicle. Internal combustion engines would become obsolete. Our dependency on oil would come to an abrupt end. 

It's time to upgrade our infrastructure - roads and power grid - to the 21st century.

ORIGINAL: Solar Roadways

A Brain-Computer Interface That Lasts for Weeks

Photo: John Rogers/University of Illinois

Brain signals can be read using soft, flexible, wearable electrodes that stick onto and near the ear like a temporary tattoo and can stay on for more than two weeks even during highly demanding activities such as exercise and swimming, researchers say.

The invention could be used for a persistent brain-computer interface (BCI) to help people operate prosthetics, computers, and other machines using only their minds, scientists add.

For more than 80 years, scientists have analyzed human brain activity non-invasively by recording electroencephalograms (EEGs). Conventionally, this involves electrodes stuck onto the head with conductive gel. The electrodes typically cannot stay mounted to the skin for more than a few days, which limits widespread use of EEGs for applications such as BCIs.

Now materials scientist John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues have developed a wearable device that can help record EEGs uninterrupted for more than 14 days. Moreover, their invention survived despite showering, bathing, and sleeping. And it did so without irritating the skin. The two weeks might be "a rough upper limit, defined by the timescale for natural exfoliation of skin cells," Rogers says. 

The device consists of a soft, foldable collection of gold electrodes only 300 nanometers thick and 30 micrometers wide mounted on a soft plastic film. This assemblage stays stuck to the body using electric forces known as van der Waals interactions—the same forces that help geckoes cling cling to walls.

The electrodes are flexible enough to mold onto the ear and the mastoid process behind the ear. The researchers mounted the device onto three volunteers using tweezers. Spray-on bandage was used once twice a day to help the electrodes survive normal daily activities.

The electrodes on the mastoid process recorded brain activity while those on the ear were used as a ground wire. The electrodes were connected to a stretchable wire that could plug into monitoring devices. "Most of the experiments used devices mounted on just one side, but dual sides is certainly possible," Rogers says.

The device helped record brain signals well enough for the volunteers to operate a text-speller by thought, albeit at a slow rate of 2.3 to 2.5 letters per minute.

According to Rogers, this research: 

...could enable a persistent BCI that one could imagine might help disabled people, for whom mind control is an attractive option for operating prosthetics… It could also be useful for monitoring cognitive states—for instance, 

• to see if people are paying attention while they're driving a truck, 
• flying an airplane, or 
• operating complex machinery. 

It could also help monitor patterns of sleep to better understand sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, or for monitoring brain function during learning.

The scientists hope to improve the speed at which people can use this device to communicate mentally, which could expand its use into commercial wearable electronics. They also plan to explore devices that can operate wirelessly, Rogers says. The researchers detailed their findings online March 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum
By Charles Q. Choi
16 Mar 2015 

A Brain-Computer Interface That Works Wirelessly

A wireless transmitter could give paralyzed people a practical way to control TVs, computers, or wheelchairs with their thoughts.

Why It Matters

Electronic brain interfaces may give paralyzed people control over their environments. 

A wireless brain interface uses the head-worn transmitter, shown.

A few paralyzed patients could soon be using a wireless brain-computer interface able to stream their thought commands as quickly as a home Internet connection.

After more than a decade of engineering work, researchers at Brown University and a Utah company, Blackrock Microsystems, have commercialized a wireless device that can be attached to a person’s skull and transmit via radio thought commands collected from a brain implant. Blackrock says it will seek clearance for the system from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, so that the mental remote control can be tested in volunteers, possibly as soon as this year.

The device was developed by a consortium, called BrainGate, which is based at Brown and was among the first to place implants in the brains of paralyzed people and show that electrical signals emitted by neurons inside the cortex could be recorded, then used to steer a wheelchair or direct a robotic arm (see “Implanting Hope”).

A major limit to these provocative experiments has been that patients can only use the prosthetic with the help of a crew of laboratory assistants. The brain signals are collected through a cable screwed into a port on their skull, then fed along wires to a bulky rack of signal processors. “Using this in the home setting is inconceivable or impractical when you are tethered to a bunch of electronics,” says Arto Nurmikko, the Brown professor of engineering who led the design and fabrication of the wireless system.

The new interface does away with much of that wiring by processing brain data inside a device about the size of an automobile gas cap. It is attached to the skull and wired to electrodes inside the brain. Inside the device is 

• a processor to amplify the faint electrical spikes emitted by neurons, 
• circuits to digitize the information, and 
• a radio to beam it a distance of a few meters to a receiver. 

There, the information is available as a control signal; say to move a cursor across a computer screen.
The device transmits data out of the brain at rate of 48 megabits per second, about as fast as a residential Internet connection, says Nurmikko. It uses about 30 milliwatts of power—a fraction of what a smartphone uses—and is powered by a battery.

Scientists have prototyped wireless brain-computer interfaces before, and some simpler transmitters have been sold for animal research. “But there’s just no such thing as a device that has this many inputs and spits out megabits and megabits of data. It’s fundamentally a new kind of device,” says Cindy Shestek, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Although the implant can transmit the equivalent of about 200 DVDs’ worth of data a day, that’s not much information compared to what the brain generates in executing even the simplest movement. Of the billions of neurons in the human cortex, scientists have never directly measured more than 200 or so simultaneously. “You and I are using our brains as petabyte machines,” says Nurmikko. “By that standard, 100 megabits per second is going to look very modest.”

Blackrock has begun selling the wireless processor, which it calls “Cereplex-W” and costs about $15,000, to research labs that study primates. Tests in humans could happen quickly, says Florian Solzbacher, a University of Utah professor who is the owner and president of Blackrock. The Brown scientists have plans to try it on paralyzed patients, but haven’t yet done so.

Currently, a half dozen or so paralyzed people, including some in the late stages of ALS, are taking part in BrainGate trials using the older technology. In those studies, underway in Boston and California, the implant that makes contact with the brain is a small array of needle-like electrodes carved from silicon. Also sold by Blackrock, it is commonly called the Utah array. To establish a brain-machine interface, that array is pushed into the tissue of the cerebral motor cortex, where its tips record the firing patterns from 100 neurons or more at once.

Those tiny blasts of electricity, scientists have found, can be decoded into a fairly precise readout of what movement an animal, or a person, is intending. Decoding those signals has permitted hundreds of monkeys, as well as a growing number of paralyzed volunteers, to control a computer mouse, or manipulate objects with a robotic arm, sometimes with surprising dexterity (see “The Thought Experiment”).


But the BrainGate technology will never turn into actual medicine until it’s greatly simplified and made more reliable. The head-mounted wireless module is a step toward that goal. Eventually, scientists say, all the electronics will have to be implanted completely inside the body, with no wires reaching through the skin, since that can lead to infections. Last year, the Brown researchers reported testing a prototype of a fully implanted interface, with the electronics housed inside a titanium can that can be sealed under the scalp. That device is not yet commercialized.

“If they could put it in under the skin, then everything you see in the videos could be done at home,” says Shestek, referring to films of patients using mental control to move robotic arms. “That wire going through the skin is the most dangerous part of the system.”

ORIGINAL: Tech Review

By Antonio Regalado 

January 14, 2015

A Bendable Implant Taps the Nervous System without Damaging It

Swiss researchers allow rats to walk again with a rubbery electronic implant.

Why It Matters
Neuroscientists need new materials to restore movement to paralyzed people.

An implant made of silicone and gold wires is as stretchy as human tissue.

Medicine these days entertains all kinds of ambitious plans for reading off brain signals to control wheelchairs, or using electronics to bypass spinal injuries. But most of these ideas for implants that can interface with the nervous system run up against a basic materials problem: wires are stiff and bodies are soft.

That motivated some researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to design a soft, flexible electronic implant, which they say has the same ability to bend and stretch as dura mater, the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

The scientists, including Gregoire Courtine, have previously showed that implants can allow mice with spinal injuries to walk again. They did this by sending patterns of electrical shocks to the spinal cord via electrodes placed inside the spine (see “Paralyzed Rats Take 1,000 Steps, Orchestrated by Computer”). But the rigid wires ended up damaging the mice’s nervous systems.

So Courtine joined electrical engineer Stéphanie Lacour (see “Innovators Under 35, 2006: Stéphanie Lacour”) to come up with a new implant they call “e-dura.” It’s made from 

• soft silicone, 
• stretchy gold wires, and 
• rubbery electrodes flecked with platinum, 
• as well as a microchannel through which the researchers were able to pump drugs.

The work builds on ongoing advances in flexible electronics. Other scientists have built patches that match the properties of the skin and include circuits, sensors, or even radios (see “Stick-On Electronic Tattoos”).

What’s new is how stretchable electronics are merging with a widening effort to invent new ways to send and receive signals from nerves (see “Neuroscience’s New Toolbox”). “People are pushing the limits because everyone wants to precisely interact with the brain and nervous system,” says Polina Anikeeva, a materials scientist at MIT who develops ultrathin fiber-optic threads as a different way of interfacing with neural tissue.

The reason metal or plastic electrodes eventually cause damage, or stop working, is that they cause compression and tissue damage. A stiff implant, even if it’s very thin, will still not stretch as the spinal cord does. “It slides against the tissue and causes a lot of inflammation,” says Lacour. “When you bend over to tie your shoelaces, the spinal cord stretches by several percent.”

The implant mimics a property of human tissue called viscoelasticity—somewhere between rubber and a very thick fluid. Pinch the skin on your hand with force and it will deform, but then flow back into place.

Using the flexible implant, the Swiss scientists reported today in the journal Science that they could overcome spinal injury in rats by wrapping it around the spinal cord and sending electrical signals to make the rodent’s hind legs move. They also pumped in chemicals to enhance the process. After two months, they saw few signs of tissue damage compared to conventional electrodes, which ended up causing an immune reaction and impairing the animal’s ability to move.

The ultimate aim of this kind of research is an implant that could restore a paralyzed person’s ability to walk. Lacour says that is still far off, but believes it will probably involve soft electronics. “If you want a therapy for patients, you want to ensure it can last in the body,” she says. “If we can match the properties of the neural tissue we should have a better interface.”

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
By Antonio Regalado 

January 8, 2015