Future Photonics
Stanford’s Junior 2 uses an array of sophisticated sensors to facilitate its fully autonomous driving. Courtesy of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Advances in organic photovoltaic technology allow for flexible solar panels, which suggest a range of novel
applications. Examples include a solar bus shelter (above) and the solar curtain that attaches to the outer
wall of a building. In the future, we could see much more of such solar panels incorporated into the design
of buildings and other structures. Image courtesy of Konarka Technologies. Photo by Ryan Hughes.
Bus Stops Powered by the Sun
enneth McCauley, vice president of
sales, marketing and business development at Konarka Technologies Inc. in
Lowell, Mass., rebuked me ever so slightly
when I asked him to describe what the
solar power landscape will look like 20
or 50 years from now.
K
The industry is difficult to predict year
to year, he said, so looking that far
ahead can be like a rocket scientist who
is a small fraction of a degree off in a
calculation: This small error replicated bil-
lions of miles downrange in the flight
path can leave you somewhere entirely
different from where you anticipated
ending up.
“That said,” he continued, “I personally
believe that 20 to 50 years into the fu-
ture, and perhaps much earlier, distrib-
uted electrical (and other) power gener-
ation, much of it at point of use, will be-
come so ubiquitous that we will cease
to think of renewable energy as something
novel or unusual.”
And just as we’ll likely see flexible
OLED lighting integrated into architec-
tural and interior designs, he hopes
that we’ll see flexible solar panels – such
as Konarka Power Plastic technology,
based on a photoreactive polymer ma-
terial that can be printed or coated
onto flexible substrates using roll-to-roll
manufacturing – integrated into auto-
mobile surfaces and building envelope
design elements, for instance. Such tech-
nology could serve in any application
where transparency, a color palette, light
weight, flexibility and off-angle energy
harvesting are useful design/perfor-
mance elements.
So-called “smart cars” simply will drive
more efficiently than humans do now,
using different and more sensible patterns
of accelerating and braking. At the same
time, vehicle-to-vehicle communication
through optical interconnects will enable
“highway trains,” with cars traveling very
close to one another at high speeds. This
could lead to fewer accidents – with vehicles slowing automatically if a car brakes
suddenly somewhere up ahead – as well
as to increased fuel efficiency. Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure
communication also could help reduce
congestion, facilitating a smooth flow of
traffic with an intricate ballet of cars,
trucks and pedestrians.
Even as optics-based and other technologies take over control, however,
driving in the future will involve a sort
of partnership between vehicle and
driver, with an ongoing dialogue between
the two about where they’re going and
how they’re getting there. “Think of
the human as the backseat driver to the
car,” Baer said.
For this reason, any technological
developments in autonomous driving
must be accompanied by research in
nontechnical areas such as driver-vehicle
interaction. How much information must
be exchanged between the people in the
car and the vehicle? If the car suddenly
starts to slow down, for instance, it will
have to explain itself to its passengers. At
