1 • Thursday, July 16, 2020 - McHenry County News
www.McHenryCountyNewspaper.com
VOL. 10 • NO. 30
DISPLAY ADVERTISING & CLASSIFIEDS:
• 4 mos. - $145 • Under new Ownership!
SUMMITFITNESSOFPECATONICA.COM
PUBLISHED BY ROCK VALLEY PUBLISHING, LLC
815-877-4044 CIRCULATION:
815-877-4044
E-MAIL: McHenry 355219
McHenry County News
Free!
219 Main St. 24/7 Pecatonica, IL Access 815-239-2349
News@RV Publishing.com
THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2020
Genealogy program on Zoom July 18 By now we are acutely aware of all the negatives the coronavirus has brought to our shores. But one positive is time—time to reorganize the garage, time to plant a garden, time to research one’s past. Delving into one’s family history can be a tall order and, quite frankly, a bit overwhelming. But genealogist Craig Pfannkuche of Memory Trail Research in Wonder Lake is ready to guide you through it. “The first thing is to talk to your parents and grandparents, if they are still alive—and then don’t believe a word your parents say! Check it all out,” Pfannkuche said with a laugh. “Nobody wants to talk about divorces, criminals and illegitimate children but that is part of family history. The family stories play an important part in what to do with this stuff.” Property records provide an important opportunity to unravel these secrets. Often, when a person dies, the family property is passed on to the owner’s married daughter. Pfrannkuche said one can, by looking at the records, discover married family members who cannot be found in the “Index to Illinois Marriages.” In his own family’s history, Pfannkuche said an adult child was “blackballed” by her siblings because she, and not other family members, got the property. His parents never once mentioned that married daughter’s family name until he stumbled upon it in the property records. Pfannkuche will present a “Tracing Your Family Roots” online workshop at 2 p.m. Saturday, July 18. The interactive program is $5 for society members, $10 for nonmembers. Participants may also buy an optional Archival Genealogy Kit for $25, which may be picked up at the historical museum in Union. The storage repertoire includes one, letter-size document case; three, letter-size file folders; two lettersized archival envelopes; five sheets of bond paper for interweaving in archival applications; Micron red pen, ideal for scrapbooks and archival recording; a No. 2 pencil, for writing archival labels and tags 15 presentation pockets—five each of 8 ½ by 11 inches, 5 by 7 inches and 4 by 6 inches. This talk will take place virtually via Zoom. Register by visiting www. gothistory.org or typing mchenry-county-historical-society-and-museum. ticketleap.com/tracing-your-family-roots in your browser. All people registered will receive an email a few days before the event with log-in instructions and a link. This information is not to be shared. If you are unfamiliar with Zoom, visit www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9isp3qPeQ0E. The webinar will discuss the method which one must know in order to search property records as well as where this work can be done. While one can use a “Property Index Number (PIN)” to find information about a specific piece of property, Sidwell maps are useful in finding neighborhood properties—if a specific address and/or PIN number is not known. Pfannkuche said most family research records became available online about four years ago—from land ownership to cemetery plots. Add to that the digitization of newspapers, obituaries and family scrapbooks, at places such as the McHenry County Historical Museum’s Research Library, and uncovering ones’ roots has never been easier.
COURTESY PHOTO McHenry County News
Robot aiding in fighting COVID-19 Girish Chowdhary is pictured with TerraSentia.
BY MARIANNE STEIN
Where coronavirus puts human workers at risk, robots can step in to do the job. Girish Chowdhary and his research team at the University of Illinois already have developed the robot, and they are now adapting it to current needs. TerraSentia is a small, semi-autonomous robot that moves nimbly on the ground. A team of these robots work together, combining the speed and power of technology with the attention to detail of human labor. “We made a good robotic platform. It has wheels, but it didn’t have any arms; it was just moving around,” says Chowdhary, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and The Grainger College of Engineering at U of I. So Chowdhary strengthened his collaboration with Kris Hauser and Girish Krishnan, both professors in Grainger Engineering. “Essentially, with the COVID-19 crisis, two things happened. One is the urgent need to keep healthcare workers safe from sick patients,” Chowdhary says. “The second, medium-term need is enabling more diversity in our food systems to accommodate social distancing and disrupted food chains. In some places, fruit is rotting on farms because they’re not able to get people to do the work. And Illinois, while being a top agricultural state, still has very limited fruit and vegetable growing capacity” Chowdhary’s team accelerated the
work to make a robot that can perform tasks in the field or in the hospital, keeping people out of harm’s way and filling labor gaps. They partnered with Krishnan, assistant professor in industrial and enterprise systems engineering and a leading expert on soft robotic arms and manipulators, to design a hybrid soft arm for field robots. Together, the team plans to test a prototype on picking cherry tomatoes and blueberries this summer at the Center for Digital Agriculture’s autonomous farm, and they expect to have the robots ready for farm work next year. “That’s an aggressive plan,” Chowdhary says. “But we need to move fast.” Chowdhary and his collaborators also saw a clear need in the healthcare industry. “Healthcare professionals who work with COVID-19 patients have a higher risk of being exposed to infection. Those individuals are our first line of defense. If they start getting sick, it’s difficult,” he says. One way to limit exposure to the coronavirus is to disinfect rooms and surfaces. Robots already exist that can disinfect a room by filling it with UV light for 20 minutes. But the light is harmful to human skin, so people have to leave while the robot works. Chowdhary teamed up with Hauser, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at U of I, to develop technologies that use UV lights, wiping, or other mechanisms for
disinfection. Hauser is a renowned expert in health-care robotics and was already working on wiping and disinfection robots. The researchers partnered with EarthSense, a start-up company in U of I Research Park that Chowdhary co-founded, to manufacture the robots and scale up the technology for production. “The technology that works is the one that scales. It doesn’t have to be optimal or perfect,” Chowdhary says. “Sometimes we forget this as scientists; we focus on the perfect solution. Because of the urgent need, we now have to focus on scaling up.” Chowdhary’s group will work on localization and mapping technology for enabling the robots to work close to humans as they move around in a hospital environment. A cloud-based system will make the robots traceable, showing which areas have been disinfected. “At Carle Health we welcome advancements like this that help us stay firmly focused on caring for our patients while keeping healthcare providers and our environmental services staff safe,” says Lynne Barnes, Carle senior vice president of facilities. “Times like this, especially, require openness to new ideas, and this idea certainly would have helpful applications in a healthcare setting.” The robots are not limited to hospitals; they could work at schools, universities, offices, restaurants, airports, or any high-traffic places that need constant disinfection.
See ROBOT, Page 4
Prairie View offers: • Individual apartment homes • Private patios • Kitchenettes, walk-in showers • Full dining services • Housekeeping & laundry service COURTESY PHOTO McHenry County News
Craig Pfannkuche will present an online workshop July 18 on “Tracing Your Family Roots,” using Zoom for the presentation.
• Emergency call system • 24 hour a day in-house caregivers • Social and recreational programs • Access to rehabilitation services
Limited Availability - call 815-335-1800 500 East McNair Road • Winnebago, IL
377321