Robotica Exotica

Robotic Spray Painter

This is just too cool. Someone has built a robotic grafitti artist that uses a spray can mounted on two cables. This is very, very cool.

Of course we did not call it Hektor from the beginning, it did not even have a shape, it was just an idea. There were dozens of decisions to take and problems to solve, but the basic idea was clear: Four step motors, mounted onto the wall in the four edges of a rectangle would move the can, which would be connected to the motors by something like robes, the motors functioning like winches. The can in the middle and the four robes connected to the motors would form an X, and when the can is moved by pulling or releasing each of the winches, this X is distorted.

There would be so many advantages: The machine would be scalable, it would not spray within a predefined size only. One could mount the motors wherever possible and required, the only limitations would be the length of the robes, the accessibility of the locations for the motors and some other mechanical constraints. All the parts would fit into something portable, for
example a suitcase.

Be sure to check out the movie on their page.

Robotic Surgeon for Children

This is a neat article on the effects of using a robotic surgeon, in which the doctor is directing the surgury through an interface to the robot and the robot is doing the actual surgery usually through orthoscopic type devices. The advantage here is that the wound is much smaller, and typically damage to the body is less.

Their finding suggests that the minimally invasive surgical techniques made possible by the surgeon-controlled, camera-guided robot system can give the same surgical result as open-chest techniques, with less impact on the young patient’s body.

And although the study group was small, the finding demonstrates that robot-assisted surgery may be a good option for certain defects.

Neat stuff.

Great Interview with the Head Scientist for the RVT

This is a great interview with Dr. Inatani of the Japanese RVT project. Those of you who don't remember, this the Japanese version of the DC-X, and is currently the only vehicle on the planet exploring design issues for a vertical takeoff and landing rocket. It really is a neat project, and the way they are pushing incremental development is just fantastic.

Suborbital vehicle projects, such as those competing for the X PRIZE, have been criticized by many in the aerospace community as contributing very little to the development of orbital RLVs. They say the factor of 25 or so greater energy needed to reach orbit (and to dispose of on reentry) is too great and there is little overlap in hardware between the two regimes. In what ways do you think that suborbital RLV development can contribute to the development of robust, lower cost orbital RLVs?

Inatani: I do not care about X-prize flying machines. Some of them do not have space flight potential and [are] just an extension of aircraft. As stated, our study is not for building specific vehicle, but to study how to design and build the future vehicle. General or universal things such as aircraft type operation of space vehicle is the most important thing to my understanding. Again, even a ballistic vehicle can convince the people [to] recognize the benefit of reusable vehicles. I admit the direct technical succession from ballistic to orbital, but what is important is to receive the understanding of public for the future goals such as tourism and SSPS. How long do you think it takes? Technically viable things must be realized when people need it.

Self Parking Toyota

This is a very nice application for a control system: Parallel Parking. Basically, Toyota has an autopilot option that you can have installed (only in Japan), that will parallel park your car into a vacant spot.

Parking Assist relies on a built-in computer, steering sensor and a tiny camera in the car's rear and works like this:

A dashboard display shows the image taken by the camera. When you near a parking space and shift into reverse, computerized lines pop up on the display, along with arrows pointing up, down, left and right.

Using the arrows, you move the lines around until they define exactly where you want the car to be parked. Then you push the "set" button on the display.

Keep your foot lightly on the brake pedal, and the car will start backing up, the steering wheel responding to an invisible hand. Voila, the car will park itself in the spot you've chosen with the arrows.

Have no illusions, however.

Hands-free driving doesn't mean you can read a book or doze off. The system has no artificial intelligence that actually recognizes objects — so it won't stop for a person or a cat or anything else you shouldn't be running over.

You still have to hit the brakes yourself. And the system is designed so that it will shut itself off if you lift your foot from the brake pedal, making the car go too fast.

What would be more interesting would be if it could identify the spot for your car already, jusdging the size of your vehicle versus the image that it took of the spot. Still, its a pretty neat innovation.

Elvis has left the Building

The Mars rover "Spirit" has rolled off of its lander platform onto the Martian surface. Or, as the JPL guys are ecstatically proclaiming, "We have six wheels in the dirt."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully drove off its lander platform and onto the soil of Mars early today.

The robot's first picture looking back at the now-empty lander and showing wheel tracks in the soil set off cheers from the robot's flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"Spirit is now ready to start its mission of exploration and discovery. We have six wheels in the dirt," said JPL Director Dr. Charles Elachi

A hydrogen powered plane

This is pretty neat. They have built a hydrogen-powered fuel-cell electric airplane. This should be an interesting project. They have not yet flown, as can be seen from the quote below.

The E-Plane team hopes to start taxi testing in January. As it stands the Prop Adapter and Wiring are the only things left to complete. Our team is on holiday though we were at the Centennial of Flight Celebration at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina the week of the 17th of December. We are hoping to demonstrate the E-Plane at Sun 'n Fun (Lakeland, Florida) along with a replica Wright B Flyer in 2004!

I think that this is a really cool project, but I have to ask the same question as I ask every environmentalist who waxes poetic about a hydrogen-based economy: Where does the hydrogen come from? Either you are cracking hydrocarbons (read: Oil) or you are electrolizing it using electricity that comes from ... where? Most likely nuclear power. That usually isn't the answer they have, but without a cheap way to separate hydrogen from water, it is unlikely to ever get out of the lab.

A Vision of Future Robots

Here is an interesting article from a researcher in Thailand talking about the next revolution in Robotics. I have to say that I am not quite as optimistic as they are, though this is my chosen field and I do love it. It is just that replicating human senses and actuation is very very hard to do. Basically, the most advanced robots today have a hard time doing what a 2-3 year old does quite naturally.

The mainstay job that robots have been doing over the past decade or two hasn’t really changed that much, basically helping out us humans by doing the repetitive jobs, mostly in big industry. But this is set to change over the next 20 to 30 years.

“Robots in the future will no longer be just a basic machine but a living agent that can interact naturally with people. They will transfer knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation, making invaluable knowledge immortal,” said Djitt Laowattana, the director of the Institute of Field Robotics (Fibo) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thonburi.

Playing Robot Soccer

Over at Carnegie-Mellon, they have a project with humans on segways and segbot playing soccer in mixed human-robot teams. In order to home in on the right kind of interactions that are required for humans and robots to interact, these kinds of experiments are invaluable.

The researchers have made a human-size version of their soccer-playing robots by basing the robots on Segway scooters, and they are working on a set of rules for Segway soccer, a game designed to be played by mixed teams of the robots and humans riding Segways.

The project is designed to allow researchers to look at human-robot interactions in which humans and robots are on nearly equal footing, said Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. The two types of players will have nearly the same acceleration, the same top speed, the same turning abilities, and will use the same ball manipulation device, she said.

The setup makes it possible to explore questions like how and when humans and robot should communicate, and how they should divide a common task, said Veloso. "There are many really interesting challenges here that we now have the opportunity of investigating," she said.

Army funding robotics dogs/pack mules

The army is funding several projects to create a robotic mule that can follow the soldiers while carrying food, ammunition, equipment, etc. Obviously, looking for instance at the week that the Mars Rover Spirit is taking just to roll off of its platform, this is going to be a while before it is ready for realistic conditions, but it is good innovative work anyway.

"We're coming full circle," said Paul Meunch, a TACOM research scientist. "In the days of George Washington, the Army used mules and horses. Then it moved on to trucks. And then armored vehicles and tanks. Now we could be swinging back to four legs."

But reaching that galloping dream won't be easy. Building mechanical legs that work right has been a brutal task. Spinning a wheel is simple. Swinging a set of legs that can bend, step high and keep a robot balanced is hard.

"We're at the bottom of the pyramid right now," said Ben Krupp, president of Yobotics, which won a $750,000, two-year TACOM grant to build a Great Dane-sized drone. "It's tough just to get a four-legged robot to run across the parking lot without falling down."

After decades of research, tiny, commercial robo-dogs can now scamper across a flat surface. Child-sized humanoid bots can waddle -- carefully. A canine drone in the armed forces would have to do much better, though, keeping up with soldiers marching over uneven terrain.

Probably wind up looking more like a giant insect than a dog, as they are much more stable and a lot faster over unever terrain.

Toyota goes after Humanoid Robot Market

Toyota announced that it was going after the humanoid robot market, and that it would try to have one for sale by 2005. Very ambitious, indeed.

Unlike Honda's ASIMO, the world's first two-legged walking robot unveiled in 2000, and Sony's QRIO, the world's first jogging robot revealed this month, Toyota's robot will be used for "practical" purposes, the daily said.

While Honda and Sony have said they are not considering selling their models in the foreseeable future, the daily said Tokyo plans to market its workman robot.

Toyota aims to develop motion and sound sensor technology for the robot and then apply it to automobiles as a device to avoid collisions, the report said.

Toyota hopes the new robot can help factory workers conduct physically demanding work and provide assistance in nursing care and rescue operations, the daily said but gave no financial figures involved in the project.

We wish them luck in this endeavour.

Some Robotics Resources

A graduate student doing some exploratory work for me has done some interesting digging on robotic mobile platforms for us to work with. With special thanks to Shamin Ding, here are some useful links:

Robot Platforms

NPR Story on SpaceShipOne Flight

This is a cool story on NPR about the SpaceShipOne supersonic flight on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers Flight.

This week, while President Bush and John Travolta were honoring the Wright Brothers under the rainy skies of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, George Whitesides was in Mojave, California, watching a new chapter in history open. Whitesides is the director a space education project called "Permission to Dream." I was there on a rumor – the rumor that aviation pioneer Burt Rutan might test his brand new rocket vehicle, SpaceShipOne, on the 100th anniversary of powered flight. Rutan is best known for designing the Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world without refueling. But now he has set his sights higher, on the X PRIZE, a $10 million dollar contest for the first private craft to take humans into space. SpaceShipOne is his entry. So at 6:30 am, I found myself on the flightline of the Mojave airport, the home base of Rutan’s company, shivering with a small band of fellow space buffs. Within an hour, our shivering was rewarded, and SpaceShipOne rolled regally out onto the tarmac. It is hard to describe the feeling of seeing this amazing craft. It’s actually two crafts, mated together: the carrier vehicle, dubbed the White Knight, looks like a Star Wars fighter, while SpaceShipOne – a pointed pod with stars painted on its nose -- hangs underneath, to be carried aloft to its designated release altitude. This beautiful, elegant system, its twin engines whistling with caged power, wheeled right past our observation station, and the small crowd let out a whoop. I think I even saw someone in the cockpit wave a thumbs up sign out the window. We heard the magic words, “White Knight, you are cleared for takeoff”, and the whine of the engines grew to a roar. And there, before my very eyes, a private spaceship took off into the morning sky. It felt like the moment that all the kids since Apollo had been waiting for – a personal spaceship made for you and me.

Very, very cool.

GPS on Race Horses

So, they have gone and started measuring the performance of race horses using GPS. This is an interesting article on the process, though it leaves a lot of details out. Now that you can buy a GPS reciever for $40 that is less than an inch on a side, it seems silly not to use it to measure all kinds of things.

Massey University scientists are using global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals to measure how far and fast horses gallop each day and how quickly they accelerate.

They are combining this information with heart rate monitors to judge the fitness of each horse.

Senior lecturer Janene Kingston said the GPS system, originally designed to guide United States missiles on to enemy targets, was now so accurate that it could follow horses round a racetrack.

Just so everybody knows, a velocity measurement from GPS should be good to cm/sec levels.

Tale of Two Mars Spacecraft

Prof. Hall over at the SpaceCraft blog has a nice article on the two Mars spacecraft that reached Mars during the past week: The Beagle II and the Spirit Rover. The Spirit appears to be functioning well, however the Beagle appears to be lost.

Beagle 2 is a 75-kg British-built lander, named after the famous ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, whose naturalist, Charles Darwin, was even more famous. The modern Beagle is the brainchild of Open University's Professor Colin Pillinger, and hitched a ride to Mars onboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express. A few days before arriving at Mars, the Beagle separated from Mars Express, using a spring-loaded separation mechanism that simultaneously gave the spacecraft a spin-stabilized angular velocity of about 14 RPM. The Beagle then followed its own path to a Mars landing, while Mars Express prepared to place itself into orbit about the Red Planet.

Beagle was supposed to have descended and landed about 6 days after the release, using a combination of heat shield, parachute, tether and inflatable gas-bags. Sometime around midnight Christmas Eve, Beagle should have landed in the Isidis Planitia Basin, a site that "showed evidence of fluvial processing by large volumes of water." A couple of hours after landing, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter was to fly over the Beagle landing site and act as a communications relay between the lander and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. That was more than a week ago, and Beagle has not been detected (though you may find this satirical story to the contrary amusing). The ESA has begun to lower the Mars Express spacecraft's orbit to make it easier for it to communicate with the Beagle. I should note that by all accounts the Mars Express mission has performed flawlessly.

Meanwhile, NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were also on their way to Mars. These two lander/rovers were natural follow-on missions to 1997's Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover, a highly successful mission by any measure. The new rovers have been journeying to Mars for several months, and two virtual astrobots who journeyed with them were also blogging about their epic voyage.

On the first Saturday of the New Year, Spirit landed in the Gusev Crater and began transmitting images back to Earth. The rover has not yet begun to rove, but is expected to move out in a few days, traveling at a speed of several meters per day. Opportunity will make its landing on Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, hopefully as successfully as its earlier sibling.

Interesting stuff. Mars is still very hard to get to.