Robotica Exotica

UAV on bombing runs

The Department of Defense has a long term vision that within 25 years, they would like something in the neighborhood of 25-40% of the vehicles that they use to be robotic. This increases something that they refer to as the tooth-to-tail ratio. Anyway, though it is a very long way off from being combat ready, it does represent a very interesting development. Here, the Boeing UAV drops a small bomb on a practice target.

Under human supervision but without human piloting, a prototype of the Boeing Co.'s X-45 took off from the desert base, opened its bomb bay doors, dropped a 250-pound Small Smart Bomb and then landed.

The inert bomb struck within inches of the truck it was supposed to hit, Boeing said, adding that had the bomb contained explosives, the target would have been destroyed.

Space Butterfly

This is just amazingly beautiful. The Hubble telescope has picked up an image of a butterfly-like nebula that is just tremendous.

Its latest reveals unprecedented detail in the Bug Nebula, a huge mass of gas and dust which hides a hot, dying star.

The Bug Nebula, or NGC 6302, is about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Scorpius.

Stars like our Sun shed their outer layers when they get old and in this case, the ejected material appears to have gone in two distinct directions.

Small Robots for Rescue Operations

Wired has an interesting article on some robotic applications for rescue in difficult environments (read: collapsed structures). The interesting point that the article makes is that control and location of the robots becomes very difficult as soon as the number exceeds approximately 3 per operator. Thus cooperation becomes an increasingly important area of research.

Robots designed for emergency rescue work can survive a six-story drop onto collapsed, jagged concrete. They can be thrown 100 feet into a disaster site. They can even cope with poisonous chemicals, fires, freezing temperatures and floods. But, like most rugged individualists, they don't play well with others.

When robots are set loose at a rescue site, the situation can become chaotic quickly, which lessens the advantage of having a swarm of robots to help human rescuers. There's no way for the robots to coordinate their activities autonomously. A human operator must control them individually, making robotic searches less efficient. Right now, even with state-of-the-art technology, rescue robots essentially lose interest in their tasks when left on their own. They simply wander off or shut down.

To translate the human concept of teamwork into electronics, three teams of university researchers are working together to develop technology that would turn a pack of robots into a single machine.

Robotic Agents for Extraterrestrial Exploration

NASA has been quietly working on some of the more unusual things to do with robotic agents in terms of reducing the amount of chatter between off-planet exploring astronauts and the teams back here on Earth. The interesting thing is that they are taking a very good incremental development and shakedown approach to all of this.

The goal of the mobile agent software is to blend the extravehicular research conducted by human astronauts with the data management abilities inherent in a computer system.

The first role of an astronaut's personal mobile agent is to simply cut down on the amount of time astronauts take relaying information back to Earth, such as computer readouts or the temperatures of space suits and batteries. Using the agents to control a robot assistant, a landing party could identify interesting locations from the comfort of a habitat module and proceed directly into a scientific investigation.

"People's time is very important on the surface and you don't want to waste it doing reconnaissance," Alena told SPACE.com. "You want astronauts to do targeted surveys, to follow the water and maybe even signs of life."

Gravity Probe B to Fly

Gravity Probe B, the physics experiment at Stanford that was indirectly the proximate cause for my Ph.D., is finally set to launch on Monday. Note that this experiment was conceived 40 years ago, and it simply took this long to have the technology to catch up to the idea. According to this article, over 100 Ph.D.'s have been spun out of this effort (of which I am one), though I think the actual number is much higher.

By all accounts the experiment now at Vandenberg is a technical tour de force. At its heart, isolated as much as possible from the universe, are the gyroscopes: four quartz spheres slightly larger than golf balls. They are said to be the most perfectly spherical objects ever made by humans — out of round by only 40 layers of atoms. If the Earth were this perfect, the tallest mountain would rise just six and a half feet.

In space, they will be suspended by electrical fields and spin at 10,000 revolutions per minute inside a quartz telescope trained assiduously at the star IM Pegasi.

To make sure that no outside influence imparts a stray wobble to the spinning balls, the telescope floats freely inside an external spacecraft equipped with jets to sense and counter any drag from stray wisps of atmosphere. It is also surrounded by a superconducting lead bag that shields it from magnetic fields. And the whole assembly is cooled by liquid helium to less than 2 degrees above absolute zero, or about minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that's only the beginning. After having isolated the gyroscopes from the rest of the universe and aligned them with IM Pegasi, the scientists have to monitor which way they are spinning.

To this end, the quartz balls are coated with niobium, which loses all resistance to electrical current at these temperatures. As a result, when the balls rotate, some of the electrons in the niobium slip behind their atoms. Their relative motion creates a small current that generates a tiny magnetic field, located by detectors known as squids — superconducting quantum interference devices — built into the gyroscope.

To all the people who worked on GP-B over the years, good luck on Monday! For everyone else, you can see a webcast of the launch here and here.

Cash Going Into Robotics

This is good news as far as my research is concerned. I really think that there is a great synergy coming in terms of automation into areas that we don't really consider as ripe or fruitful to do so.

Researchers in robotics have traditionally faced two debilitating obstacles: terribly expensive parts and difficulty attracting funding from anyone outside of a small corps of true believers. But robotics experts see a "perfect storm" heading their way, thanks in no small part to the human ravages of war.

Just as the constant march of technology is driving down the cost of key components, top universities in robotics are reporting major increases in federal funding, with the Defense Department the biggest spender.

The military desperately wants to reduce the number of soldiers killed by roadside bombs or surface-to-air missiles — cheap implements of war that have felled scores in Iraq (news - web sites). Many in the Pentagon (news - web sites) believe the answer lies in autonomous air, sea and land vehicles.

The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has seen federal funding jump 48 percent since 2000, and by 117 percent since 1994. Much of the $24.8 million in federal funding for 2003 came from the Pentagon, said institute director Chuck Thorpe.

The university's corporate funding for robotics is also up 40 percent since 2000, with $7.8 million arriving last year.

Of course, I haven't gotten any funding on this yet, but I am more confident about where I am looking.

Human Health Condition Monitoring

This is a pretty neat device. Developed by Greg Kovacs of Stanford University, it combines several different sensors, along with a good amount of memory and wireless access into a single wearable device. This is going to change the information that we have as to what kinds of physical stress we see everyday during our own routines. I know that I'd like to have one.

It's a compact, portable, wearable device -- a single piece of equipment that gathers a wide variety of vital signs. About the size of a computer mouse, a CPOD is worn around the waist. It's comfortable enough to be worn while sleeping. It's non-invasive. It takes only minutes to don. Importantly, it can track a person's physiologic functioning as they go about their normal routine -- they don't have to be tethered to some stationary device. It can store data for eight-hour periods for later downloading; alternatively, it can send it wirelessly, in real time, to some other device.

"This is a new tool," says Kovacs. "It allows monitoring of the body without invasion of the body --- without tethering the person down, letting them go about their normal business."