June 22, 2004
Private Astronaut arcs in the Edge of Space
Unless you were under a rock somewhere, you know that Burt Rutan's White Knight and SpaceShipOne combination made history yesterday by privately sending a test pilot to 100 Kilometers above the surface of the planet. At this altitude, you can see the stars and the terminator of the Earth.
I was there with friends, and while I missed the all night party, it was certainly exciting. I took a few pictures and some video, and will write up a longer description of the flight later.
From the New York Times article:
A veteran civilian test pilot on Monday became the first human to reach space in a privately developed program, guiding a tiny rocket ship more than 60 miles above California in a flight with several white-knuckle moments.
In front of thousands of spectators and a teeming press corps, the squid-shaped craft, SpaceShipOne, was lifted into the atmosphere shortly after 6:30 a.m., attached to the belly of a sleek plane called the White Knight.
When the plane reached an altitude of 50,000 feet, it dropped the smaller craft, and its pilot, Michael W. Melvill, started the rocket that took him up nearly 300,000 feet more, to the beginnings of space. He then brought SpaceShipOne back to earth as a glider, touching down at 8:15.
June 7, 2004
Educational Robot comes packed with Features
OK, I'll be crass: I want one. This is a very cool robot that seems to have a lot of the right set of sensors on board. It would save someone in a typical lab quite a bit of time integrating a conventional robot. Also, the software seems quite interesting as a simulation environment.
Wany Robotics’ Pekee™ robot is an open robotic development toolkit for researchers, educators, and students in technology. Pekee helps you understand robotics and robotic software, from basic concepts to high-level development in the Wany Robotic Software Lab™. These tools give fast hands-on experience with all the latest in robotics, from algorithms for autonomous movement and obstacle avoidance, to embedded video, network, signal analysis, and artificial intelligence. Pekee is the ideal platform for complete experimentation in electronics, computer science, and robotics.
The Pekee robot is designed around a completely open architecture that provides total flexibility for your robotic application testing and development. Its built-in infrared, temperature, and light sensors, odometers, shock detector, and gyrometers ensure that you can monitor critical elements in the robot’s environment at all times. The Pekee platform lets you pursue your own projects at all levels, from trajectory planning to real-time programming in consumer prodcuts such as robotic vacuum cleaners and interactive toys.
Looks like about $10K per robot.
Cool Underwater ROV
Though we often think of autonomous vehicles as ground or sometimes flight vehicles, there are a whole bunch of them that operate in other environments. This one is a particularly nice underwater vehicle that is used for remote inspections in cold murky water. It follows from the rule of three D's: Dangerous, Dirty, or Dull is where machines are used in place of people. This one in particular is a spin-off from Homeland Security applications.
Sputtering along the Elizabeth River, the small yellow-and-black vehicle wove half-circles near the pleasure boats moored at Waterside, looking like a child's toy alongside the larger watercraft.
But no toy could go where this 8-pound gizmo was heading. With a flick of a switch, police harbor patrol Officer Norman Harris turned on its submerged head lamps, and twin cones of light appeared in the water in front of the tiny craft.
"Going down," Harris said.
The tiny, remote-operated submersible vehicle slipped under the surface and glided into the tea-colored water, trailing a yellow umbilical cable. The vehicle, called the VideoRay, sends underwater images back to a video monitor.
It's one of two new high-tech gadgets giving city police eyes under the waves. A side-scan sonar device towed behind a police boat located a car that was submerged last year.
Both devices were purchased with about $39,000 in federal funds dedicated to homeland security, Harris said. Police have long relied on divers to seek victims of drowning or suicide and evidence of crimes.
June 4, 2004
Private Astronauts and the Public is Invited
Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's venture for the X-prise, the White Knight and Space Ship One combination, are going to perform the first manned sub-orbital hop that is not backed by a government. Not only that, but the public is invited to see this even down in Mohave, CA.
Composites' SpaceShipOne will attempt to become the world's first commercial, manned space vehicle during a June 21 launch on at Mojave Airport in California. From its carrier aircraft White Knight, the privately developed spacecraft will launch at about 50,000 feet MSL above the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center and aim for suborbital space-defined as 100 kilometers (62 miles)-and thus go where no non-governmental manned aircraft has gone before. Conceived by EAA homebuilding pioneer Burt Rutan, built by his company Scaled Composites, and backed by investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, White Knight/SpaceShipOne will then try for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE later in the year. That will require three people to be taken to 100 km and back twice within two weeks.
On May 13, Mike Melvill was at the controls of SpaceShipOne when it reached 211,400 feet (approximately 40 miles), the highest altitude ever reached by a non-government aerospace program. The pilot for the June 21 flight, who has not yet been announced, will become the first person to earn astronaut wings in a non-government sponsored vehicle, and the first private civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere.
June 21, 2004. Save the date.
June 3, 2004
Robot Swarms in the News
Fortune magazine does a profile of the SwarmBots over at iRobot. Since I am doing some research in this area, I thought that I would link to the article. Basically, a number of cheap robots with fairly unsophisticated rules about how to behave can demonstrate some impressive behavior at the swarm level.
Insects make great conceptual models for cheap robots because they have simple local interactions with one another that nonetheless add up to very complicated group behaviors, such as building a hive or foraging for nectar. The whole, in other words, is greater than the sum of its parts. iRobot's SwarmBots are cubes measuring five inches on each side. They have rechargeable nicad batteries and a pair of electric motors inside, along with a microprocessor and some associated circuitry. A "bump skirt" helps the robots sense and avoid crashing into obstacles. Each has a small color camera for simple object recognition, as well as sensors that detect light. Communications between robots are handled by an array of infrared transmitters and receivers similar to the ones used in TV remote controls.
The iRobot researchers conduct a charming SwarmBot demo in foam-board corrals arranged on a carpeted office floor. It simulates exploring an unfamiliar interior environment, much as commandos would when storming a building. These little devils are efficient, in the computational sense; the software that's needed to run the robots through the exploration routine occupies just 60 kilobytes of memory, the equivalent of a medium-sized Microsoft Word file. Musical tones and flashing red, blue, and green LEDs that look like plump, luminous gumdrops atop the robots keep the humans clued in to what the members of the swarm are doing. A red light means a robot is seeking to maintain uniform spacing from its neighbors. Blue signals that a robot is moving into unexplored territory. Green indicates that a robot is heading back to the charging dock to top off its batteries. Robots showing all three colors at once have detected an object and are "guarding" it. Watching all that helps the observers identify bugs (pardon the expression) in the evolving software and devise fixes. The computer code is designed to work with as few as ten robots and as many as 10,000.
Very cool stuff.