Counter to their legendary durability, one of the major problems with diesel engines is vibration. This has been magnified recently with the advent of common rail fuel injection, which produces even higher torsional energy on the crankshaft. Many manufacturers are using dual-mass flywheels to control the problem, but a combination crankshaft damper-isolator developed by the Hillsdale Division of Eagle-Picher Automotive, Hillsdale, MI, will offer additional improvement in noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance. First developed for export for 2.5L turbo-charged Land Rover engines, the unit, installed between the crankshaft and crankshaft pulley, is essentially two assemblies in one. The first part consists of an elastomeric crankshaft damper, designed to attenuate traditional crankshaft torsional vibration caused by the firing forces from the engine. The isolator portion, which effectively decouples the crankshaft pulley from the crankshaft itself, is designed and tuned to control the front-end accessory drive vibration created from the ancillary system on the engine. With the combined damper-isolator assembly, it is anticipated that there will be longer life expectancies in the engine's belts, belt tensioner and camshaft chain. The 2.5L Land Rover engine will be installed in the Discovery line of sport-utility vehicles. Circle 400.

The Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT has been playing host to the tread of tiny feet these days. Or, more correctly, the feat of tiny treads. Researchers have integrated cubic-inch-size microrobots with 17 sensors each. IR emitters were then added to allow the 'bots to communicate with each other. The resulting "ant colony" has resulted in a structured robotic community made up of the interactions of individual units. The sensor array includes four light sensors, four IR receivers, bump sensors, "food" sensors (food consists of crumpled balls of brass foil that trigger a response between a ground reference and a conductive surface) and a tilt sensor. The IR emitters for communication are mounted on the top and front of the robot. The brain of each robot is an 8-bit MC68HC11E9 running at 2MHz, the same power that ran early Atari/Commodore computers. The idea was not to have huge codes in each 'bot, but to increase system complexity by adding more robots. Current skills include games such as Follow the Leader, Tag and Manhunt, the latter similar to tag but played with two teams, and it is from these team games that the researchers are developing further community-behavior protocols. Each robot is even topped with single red, yellow and green LEDs to tell researchers at a glance what the unit's "mood" is like, based on how the software is running. Circle 401.