Robotica Exotica

Space Ship One glide test

Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne performed another drop-test/glide-test on 19-Nov-2003. Scaled Composites are gunning for the X-prize, and currently seem to be in the lead.

The progression of SpaceShipOne test flights are meant to ultimately snag the X Prize -- a $10 million purse for the first private vehicle to propel passengers to the edge of space and meet a set of guidelines established by the X Prize Foundation of St. Louis, Missouri. Teams around the world are vying for the X Prize money, with numbers of suborbital concepts being pursued.

All in all, a very neat project.

An Article on the SegBot

Here is an interesting article on some of the research being done with the SegBots. These are segway machines that have been converted to automatic control.

University of Southern California researchers are working on ways to get the Segway to act as a "mule" that follows humans around, carrying their gear. The robotic Segway hauls as much as 45 kilograms.

Another USC project involves controlling the way the Segway pitches and bounces over rough terrain so it can carry sensitive cargo, perhaps an injured human, according to lead researcher Gaurav Sukhatme.

A University of Pennsylvania lab is getting a robot-controlled Segway to communicate with an autonomous robotic blimp and small, truck-like vehicles so they can work as a team to find a designated object in a certain geographic area. The robots would navigate and communicate with each other autonomously, but a human would oversee the whole network.

I still hope to get one of these for my lab.

A new robotic vacuum

Samsung has a new robotic vacuum cleaner, that looks similiar in size and shape to the roomba, though it has some different specs.

The Samsung cleaner draws a 3-D map of the environment to identify its relative location, enabling faster and more efficient cleaning of a defined area. A less advanced automated vacuum cleaner navigates randomly until it faces an obstacle, blindingly crawling the area. The smarter Samsung cleaner knows which area needs to be cleaned, with a much more accurate result. A user can also program in the working time and cleaning options in advance, so that the robot cleans the area automatically when the user is away.

No details on the sensor suite or processor they are using.

CalState Long Beach Aerspike

The team at Cal State Long Beach who flew an aerospike engine last November have diagnosed the failure, and are going to fly again in early December.

The CALVEIN team has completed inspection of the Prospector 2 aerospike engine and has identified the root cause for its suboptimal performance relative to that obtained on the preceding static fire test. Specifically, it appears that the clearance gap between the graphite exit ring and the chamber aft flange was too large, resulting in the ring "settling" slightly upon the application of heat and pressure at start-up. This then opened up an alternative flow path for some of the combustion gases around the outer surface of the ring. That in turn lead to the erosion of part of the aft flange, as evidenced by the asymmetric thrust in flight and the ring itself.

We wish them much luck and success.

Liberator Unveiled

Another one of the X-prize contenders, the HARC Liberator, was unveiled on Monday, 24-Nov-2003 in Alabama. They are using a LOX Kerosene propulsion system, and other than that, it looks like a fairly conventional rocket.

The HARC team also used the event to provide more technical details about the Liberator and its planned flight profile than what was first announced last month. As currently planned, Liberator will lift off from either a platform in the Gulf of Mexico or a peninsula in the US Virgin Islands. The spacecraft, carrying a pilot and two passengers stacked vertically, will be propelled by a booster using two 53,400-newton engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. HARC acquired the engine design from a defunct launch vehicle startup, Space America. With a total mass at liftoff of about 4,500 kilograms, the Liberator’s occupants will experience an acceleration of 2.5g. That acceleration will grow to 5g before engine burnout, although Pickens said his team is looking at ways to reduce the g-loads during flight.

Not quite a gentle ride, but certainly survivable.

UAV Navigates Airspace

An article on UAV's obviating the need for pilots. While I love UAV's, I don't think that we will be removing the pilots from the cockpits of commercial aircraft anytime soon. What I would love to see is a normalization of the FAA's directives such that the language was changed from "See and avoid" to "Detect and avoid." That way both UAV's and regular aircraft can operate in the same airspace.

Most fears center on their safety for civilian use, such as monitoring traffic over urban areas.

"They don't have a pilot to get them out of trouble," notes Steve Zaloga, an analyst with Teal Group, an aerospace and defense research firm. "The local TV station isn't going to be happy to have a million-dollar plane crash into traffic or someone's house. It's going to be a hazard and it's going to be a cost issue."

The truth is that many UAV's have crashed, but most of them due to weather or landing issues. It's still unlikely that they will just fall out of the sky.

Methanol Powered Laptops

The promise of fuel cells always seems just around the corner. Another article on Methanol fuel cells to replace batteries on portable electronics. I seem to see these every year or so.

But now, small fuel cells could become available to the masses. A German company, SFC Smart Fuel Cell of Munich, already sells a briefcase-size $6,000 portable fuel cell system to affluent campers who use it to recharge their battery-powered devices.

In my opinion, the smart thing to do is to go after small portable devices first, then when the economies of scale kick in, see if you can develop a large high-power fuel cell.

Robot Greetings

The newest addition to King's College in London is the Inkha, a robotic receptionist to greet and direct you.

The gregarious robot was built by master's students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is only a head and shoulders on a pyramidal plinth, but her eyes, mouth, head and neck move in response to interactions. Hidden cameras and infrared sensors detect movement and colour around her.

I'm not sure if this is the wave of the future, but it certainly boasts an impressive amount of hardware.

Wax Rocket Fuel

Just to give a plug to my old stomping grounds, Arif Karabeyoglu and Brian Cantwell over at Stanford have developed a Paraffin based hybrid rocket motor that functions quite well. Arif has been working on this for several years, and they have finally made the leap to a commercial venture.

The Stanford team first tested paraffin in a laboratory-scale rocket motor in November 1998 and found that like solid pentane, it burned three to four times faster than conventional solid fuels. To date, they have conducted more than 250 laboratory and field tests in collaboration with engineers at NASA Ames Research Center. They have tested rocket motors with 2,500 pounds of thrust, the amount that might be needed for a third stage rocket in a launch system. "Further scale-up tests are needed before paraffin-fueled rockets can be utilized in lower stage rockets requiring thrust levels of 200,000 pounds or more," Cantwell said.

Best of luck to them.

The Japanese DC-X

The Japanese have been quietly working on their version of the DC-X, a VTOL rocket called the RTV-9. This video shows it doing its thing. Very, very cool. I would love to see more of this type of thing. It is a very neat little rocket, though most of the press on it is in Japanese.

Explaination of RLV vs. ELV costs

Over at the RocketMan blog, there is a nice article on the different costs of Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLV) vs. Expendible Launch Vehicles (ELV). For those of you interested in why these things cost so much (and it isn't obvious), take a look:

It seems like such a waste to build an entire launch vehicle that will be used only once before it is dumped in the ocean. However, every successful launch vehicle in the history of spaceflight with the exception of the Shuttle has been expendable (and calling the Shuttle successful is a stretch). In recent years there have been many attempts at building a fully reusable vehicles (RLVs) but, for a wide variety of reasons, all of them have failed.

Very nice insight. Check out the rest of his site for some nice information on the X-prize and others.

Walking Chair

Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan has just demonstrated a prototype bipedal robot that carries a person on top. They call it a walking chair:

WL-16 uses 12 actuators to move forwards, backwards and sideways while carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds). The robot can adjust its posture and walk smoothly even if the person it is carrying shifts in the chair. At present it can only step up or down a few millimeters, but the team plans to make it capable of dealing with a normal flight of stairs.

Very complex, I'd like to see the sensor suite on board.

Weird Science

And just when you thought all this genetic engineering was the stuff of serious research, here comes the new, spiffy, made-just-for-your-tank, glo-fish.

The GloFish, as it is called, is a zebra fish containing a gene from a sea coral that makes the fish bright red under normal light and fluorescent under ultraviolet light. Zebra fish, about an inch and a half long, are normally silver and black.

Wild.

Working Whilst I Sleep [Old]

Here is something that I stumbled upon by Ray Kurzweil in the NY Times,

"When I go to sleep I assign myself a problem, without trying to solve the problem," he said. Then during his waking moments, between consciousness and slumber, he revisits the problem. "It is a great time for creative thinking," he said. "You can think of new connections, new approaches that you wouldn't otherwise think of."

Gives a whole new dimension to the process of dreaming.

[Note: this is an old entry from my typepad site, which will be going down soon]