Robotica Exotica

Human Heart Cell moved MicroRobot

A team at UCLA has developed a microrobot powered by a human heart cell. Though this is a long way off from commercialization, it still represents an interesting application. The truth is that muscle cells are very robust compared to the usual things that we use in building small robots.

Whatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when he and his team looked into their microscopes, they were amazed to see the latest version of their musclebot crawling around.

The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. Attached to the underside of the arch, the team has grown a cord of heart muscle fibres (see graphic). It is the contraction and relaxation of this cardiac tissue that makes the arch bend and stretch to produce the bot's crawling motion. And the muscle is fuelled by a simple glucose nutrient in a Petri dish.

Closing in on Saturn

The Cassini-Huygens probe is getting close to Saturn, and starting to return some simply stunning imagery. This one is particularly impressive.

The narrow angle camera onboard the Cassini spacecraft took a series of exposures of Saturn and its rings and moons on February 9, 2004, which were composited to create this stunning, color image. At the time, Cassini was 69.4 million kilometers (43.1 million miles) from Saturn, less than half the distance from Earth to the Sun. The image contrast and colors have been slightly enhanced to aid visibility. The smallest features visible in this image are approximately 540 kilometers across (336 miles). Fine details in the rings and atmosphere are beginning to emerge, and will grow in sharpness and clarity over the coming months. The optical thickness of Saturn's B (middle) ring and the comparative translucence of the A (outer) ring, when seen against the planet, are now apparent. Subtle color differences in the finely banded Saturnian atmosphere, as well as structure within the diaphanous, inner C ring can be easily seen. Noticeably absent are the ghostly spoke-like dark markings in Saturn's B ring, first discovered by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft on approach to the planet 23 years ago.

Odds on CMU for Grand Challange

Here is a nice article about the DARPA Grand Challange (Autonomous Vehicle race through the desert from Barstow to Las Vegas) that puts CMU in the lead as the team to beat. Since the race course is only released two hours before the start, the vehicle teams must either rely on their vehicle to do the navigation based on on-boards sensors, or pre-plan their route in under two hours. CMU has taken the latter approach.

In the space of an hour, this group will attempt to plan every twist and turn Sandstorm might take in a 210-mile scramble across the back roads and open spaces of the Mojave Desert -- which side of the road to favor in a turn, which obstacles to go around and which to barge over.

Today's exercise, like yesterday's and those of last weekend, is a dry run for the March 13 race. And if the concentration displayed by the students and other volunteers seems particularly intense, it's because what they are doing is crucial for Sandstorm's success.

"If you had the perfect map and the perfect [route] plan, you'd win this race," said William "Red" Whittaker, the renowned roboticist who organized the team last spring and has since pushed its members to the edge of their endurance. "There's no sense that any of these things are perfect."

The term for this in engineering is: brute force approach.

Five Robots

In a nice article in Forbes Magazine, they talk about five robots that will change your life. These range from the cutting edge (see the entry about the monkey controlled arm below), all the way to the truly bizarre. Very interesting stuff, and note that two of them are medicine related and one rescue related.

For decades, science fiction has been promising a future filled with robots that will make the various annoyances and dangers of life easier or more bearable. You might be forgiven for thinking it was all the product of overactive imaginations, but then you're simply not looking in the right places.

Sure, robotics changed manufacturing in the '70s and '80s. But now a new generation of robots--either available now or in development--will take on a whole new range of tasks, and could conceivably change your life.

Mind Control

This is a very neat story. Researchers at Duke University have a robotic arm that is controlled not by software, but rather by directly decoding the brain signals from a monkey. This has implications for the paralyzed, as well as telepresence research.

For decades scientists have pondered, speculated on, and pooh-poohed the possibility of a direct interface between a brain and a machine -- only in the late 1990s did scientists start learning enough about the brain and signal-processing to offer glimmers of hope that this science-fiction vision could become reality. Since then, insights into the workings of the brain -- how it encodes commands for the body, and how it learns to improve those commands over time -- have piled up at an astonishing pace, and the researchers at Duke studying the macaque and the robotic arm are at the leading edge of the technology. "This goes way beyond what's been done before," says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering. Indeed, the performance of the center's monkeys suggests that a mind-machine merger could become a reality in humans very soon.

Nicolelis and his team are confident that in five years they will be able to build a robot arm that can be controlled by a person with electrodes implanted in his or her brain. Their chief focus is medical -- they aim to give people with paralyzed limbs a new tool to make everyday life easier. But the success they and other groups of scientists are achieving has triggered broader excitement in both the public and private sectors.

[...]

The notion of decoding the brain's commands can seem, on the face of it, to be pure hubris. How could any computer eavesdrop on all the goings-on that take place in there every moment of ordinary life? Yet after a century of neurological breakthroughs, scientists aren't so intimidated by the brain; they treat it as just another information processor, albeit the most complex one in the world. "We don't see the brain as being a mysterious organ," says Craig Henriquez, Nicolelis's fellow co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering. "We see 1s and 0s popping out of the brain, and we're decoding it."

Robot Rally

Here is a nice article on some of the competitors of the DARPA Grand Challenge. I think that it is a great project by DARPA, but I'm not sure that any of the competitors will win this year.

In an empty parking lot a few miles from Gregory's garage, that goal seems far away. Bob Addison and Wayne Gothmiller, two Sciautonics team members, are slowly guiding an old golf cart around the pavement. A LIDAR sensor—a sort of laser-mapping device—is mounted on the front of the cart, hooked up to a laptop computer in the passenger seat, connected in turn to a small generator. They drive a few feet forward, crawling along, then stop and check the computer screen to figure out what the sensor saw. On race day the technology on this puttering, halting golf cart will need to guide the Prowler as it bounces through riverbeds at 60 mph. Nobody said building a robot car would be easy.

Or cheap. Sciautonics expects that it will cost about $250,000 for the team to put together its vehicle. And unlike the teams from Caltech, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon, members can't rely on large amounts of university funding.

Review of Bluetooth GPS recievers

This is a nice review of Bluetooth GPS recievers. In case anyone is looking for one.

The offer in terms of Bluetooth GPS receivers is beginning to grow steadily after long being limited to the Emtac/Socket Bluetooth GPS released at the end of 2002.

The GpsPasSion team will share its opinion on the subject here, based both on subjective and objective observations of the 16 models currently available. With more models being added as they become available.

The Military and the Terminator

So, here is an interesting article on the use of autonomous robots in order to remove soldiers from the battlefield. All in all, a good use, but it only works if just one side of the conflict has this capability. If both sides have it, then it becomes an increasingly abstract game of tit-for-tat while each side destroys the others' machines.

The eight-wheeled Stryker has already seen service in Iraq as an armored troop carrier with human drivers. The idea is to teach Stryker to accomplish a mission on its own, as a robot. By 2010, robotic Strykers and similar cont ivances are slated to be in use as all-purpose battlefield vehicles, surveying battlegrounds, sniffing for land mines, or transporting supplies and troops to the front line.

An unmanned Stryker is part of the military's effort to move more machines into battle to save both money and lives. "Well before the end of the century, there will be no people on the battlefield," said Robert Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Management and Technology.