For those disappointed that the 21st century has unfolded so far without the promised personal flight packs—just strap a pack on your back and fly away—one Australian company's product may assuage your pain.

Arbortech Industries Ltd. of Perth, Australia, is touting a personal leisure craft that is a hybrid of a hovercraft and a Jet Ski.

The inception of the craft came in 1999, when the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games asked Arbortech to design a product that showcased Australia's technology and innovative ideas. The committee wanted something bold and totally new, and they wanted it to include that elusive wow factor. Oh, and it had to be ready for the 2000 Summer Olympics, in Sydney.

Arbortech Industries calls its floating disc a hybrid hovercraft-circular skateboard.

Kevin Inkster, managing director, came up with the idea for the Airboard, a small disc that would hover above and travel across the ground using proven hovercraft principles. The organizing committee endorsed that concept, leaving Arbortech one year to design, build, manufacture, and supply 20 Airboards, and to train riders in time for the opening ceremony.

Engineers used the three-dimensional design software Pro/Engineer from PTC of Needham, Mass., to design the board and to communicate each aspect of the design to other team members. The device is controlled by a combination of weight transfer and throttle control, Inkster said.

Long story short, 20 riders streamed about the opening ceremonies on their Airboards, which are now displayed in the London Science Museum, the Boston Museum of Science, and the Power House in Sydney. Arbortech spent another couple of years refining the design and is currently looking for distributors to market newly designed Airboards to sell to consumers and to theme parks. The company has a U.S. distributor, International Robotics Inc. in New York.

You can order one at the Hammacher Schlemmer Web site for $14,999.95. While you're there, you can check out the transparent hybrid canoe/kayak.

Snaking between the lines of orange cones in a new Corvette, the last thing you'd want to do is take your hands off the steering wheel.

Yet, Chris Gerdes, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University in California, recently showed off automated steering technology that essentially let him drive the car without touching the steering wheel.

During a demonstration—on the roof of a Stanford parking garage, no less—Gerdes sat in the driver's seat, pedal to the metal, but hands well clear of the steering wheel. The global positioning system and computer technologies that had learned the route after just one pass through the cones did the rest.

Three GPS antennas on the car's roof identified the car's direction and its exact location. Whenever the car started to drift, an onboard computer nudged it back toward the center of the line.

Most of the hardware installed in Gerdes' sporty prototype is of the standard off-the-shelf variety. The real innovation comes in the form of custom algorithms and models, he said.

When it comes to staying in the lane, the algorithm can be thought of as a spring with one end attached to the car and the other to the middle of the lane. If the car veers slightly, gentle tension in the spring pulls the car in the opposite direction, Gerdes said. If the veering is more pronounced, the spring responds with more force to pull the car back to the middle of its lane.

If a car that includes Gerdes' technology is manufactured, drivers would still use a steering wheel, but the wheel would be connected to a computer instead of the steering column. The computer, in turn, would communicate with the rest of the car.

Drivers could override the technology anytime, Gerdes said.

His efforts to fine-tune his lane-holding technology are not really about building the ultimate remote control car. He hopes to take aim at some of the more grisly traffic safety statistics.

In almost half of all fatal motor vehicle crashes, the accident starts when the vehicle leaves its lane and collides with a fixed object, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This might save tens of thousands of lives each year," Gerdes said.

It's not easy to cut production time in half, but one engine company has found a way.

An industrial small-engine maker, Engine Works Inc. of Batavia, Ill., found that recently installed three-dimensional modeling software has greatly sped its engineering processes.

Similar to many small companies, Engine Works needed computer-aided design software only occasionally, said Fred Story, the president. That's because the company's main business is assembly—putting together parts from other suppliers—not designing and building parts.

But when a sheet-metal part wasn't available or didn't fit client specifications, the company's engineers designed their own piece with a two-dimensional CAD system. They then passed the documents to a supplier for fabrication.

Story and his staff, however, recently decided to test 3-D CAD. They installed OneSpace Designer Modeling from CoCreate of Fort Collins, Colo.

The conversion paid off, according to Story, who said his staff now brings a product that includes in-house design to customers in half the time it previously took.

Engineering technology is lending a hand to physical therapists by helping doctors and engineers design foot braces that help some children walk better.

Cascade DAFO of Ferndale, Wash., makes its Dynamic Ankle Foot Orthoses, customized foot braces for children with neurological or neuromuscular problems. The braces correctly position the foot and ankle to increase stability and help the child walk on his or her own, said company founder Don Buethorn.

Brace design begins when a physician makes a cast of the child's foot and ankle. During the casting process, the patient's foot rests in a sole-shaped plate, which positions the foot and helps assure the accuracy of the cast.

The doctor sends the cast to Cascade DAFO, where it's filled with plaster to form an exact replica that can be used to size the brace components.

From about the time of its founding in 1982, Cascade DAFO made the foot plates from resin molds. Because each mold was hand carved, there was no simple way to scale the molds to a variety of sizes, Buethorn said. Loose-fitting plates could move around under the foot, so doctors had to take special care about placement for an accurate cast.

With that in mind, Buethorn recently designed a new plate that would grip the foot to provide more stability and consistency. He created it in the old manner, so he began with an object.

To create a mold for this design, engineers used reverse engineering software called CopyCAD from Delcam of Birmingham, England. They coupled that software with Delcam's PowerShape CAD program and its PowerMill computer-aided manufacturing program.

Engineers began by making a laser scan of Buethorn's mold. They brought the scanned data into the reverse engineering software, said Mike Walls, a manufacturing engineer.

"There we made modifications, tidied things up a bit, and added a little more definition," Walls said.

They transferred that file to the CAD system, created the digital mold shape, and scaled it. Those CAD files were transferred to the CAM system to establish machining programs.

"Finally, we milled the shapes of the molds into polyurethane tooling boards," Walls said.

The software guaranteed that the left and right foot plates were symmetrical, which was not always true of the previous molds, Walls said. By scaling the model up or down, the company can offer the foot plates in a variety of sizes, to fit the soles of even the smallest patients.

TekSoft Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., says its CAMWorks 2006 supports SolidWorks CAD software.

LMS of Leuven, Belgium, has released LMS Virtual.Lab Rev 5 for automotive structural analysis, vehicle ride and handling analysis, interior acoustics simulation, and road noise and durability analysis.

A maker of document and drawing management software, Open Archive Systems Inc. of Windham, N.H., has updated its Echive software to version 5.0

Actify Inc. of San Francisco says its SpinFire software for Microsoft Office is now available in Japanese. The software is used to distribute CAD information.

Inus Technology of Seoul, South Korea, is shipping its rapidformXO Verifier, a 3-D scan-based inspection system.

A maker of product lifecycle management software, UGS of Plano, Texas, has released Teamcenter 2005 software.

Coade of Houston has released CADWorx 2006, an updated edition of the company's software suite for plant design.

Abaqus Inc. of Providence, R.I., which makes FEA software, has released its Abaqus student edition version 6.5.

Incat International plc of London, which makes automotive and aerospace software, has acquired CAD Potential Inc., or Cadpo, of Denver, which makes the learning management system i.get.it.

DotSoft of Ewing, Ky., has released ToolPac 9.0, an AutoCAD productivity enhancement tool.

Matereality LLC of Ithaca, N.Y., has released an upgrade to its material data management system, Matereality version 2.1.

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© 2005 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers