Robotica Exotica

Very cool stair climbing robot

This is something that has to be seen to be appreciated. The videos on the following page do a good job of showing just how agile this little robot is. NGR builds the robot, and Acroname is currently putting some smarts on board. All in all, a very cool effort.

NRG Engineers have developed a Lightweight Reconnaissance Vehicle (LRV) which is able to climb and descend stairs, rocks and rubble up to 9” in height. This small agile robot has the ability to operate as a stand-alone robot (man packable), or as a mission module (marsupial robot, one that is deployed from a larger robot).

This vehicle uses a polymorphic locomotion system having the ability to act as a wheeled vehicle to traverse moderate terrain quickly and a rough terrain mode for efficient maneuverability up stairways and over rubble. The platform has a pivoting body capable of moving 30 degrees relative to the other side, allowing great mobility in the wheeled mode. The vehicle is able to traverse a wide range of environmental conditions such as: steps, rocks, building obstacles, building debris, level ground, compound slopes (successfully tested at 60°), sand, rocks, and ice surfaces. In addition this vehicle has been fully tested at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Robotics Test Bed.

Live Air Traffic Control on the Web

This is just one of those cool web things: you can get live streaming audio of air traffic control for a bunch of airports around the country. For anyone who wants to become a pilot. listening to this is incredibly useful.

The link is: http://www.liveatc.net/

UA Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) wins Competition

Aerospace Engineering students from the University of Arizona have won first place at a Micro Air Vehicle competition. These aircraft are little mavels, and represent a great deal of work in order to stabilize and operate. My hat is off to the students, and I do hope to be competing against them at some point in the not-to-distant future.

UA's Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) team took top honors earlier this month during the 4th International Micro Aerial Vehicle Meeting in Toulouse, France. The event included more than a dozen teams from France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, and the United States.

The UA plane, a flying wing with a 6-inch wingspan, was easily the smallest surveillance plane at the competition. The radio-controlled MAV flew a triangular course that was 100 meters on a side. It also used an onboard video camera to photograph and return an image of a target placed along the course. 100 meters is about the length of a football field, including the end zones.

"At 100 meters, the plane is just a dot," said Jeremy Tyler, an aerospace engineering senior. "So it had to fly itself. I can't see if the wings are level at that distance, and just giving it very gentle left and right steering commands is all I can do."

While the 6-inch plane almost flies itself, the UA team entered a plane in another part of the competition that actually does fly completely on its own. This MAV, which has a 12-inch wingspan, uses an autopilot and GPS navigation to fly hands-off. Once the team members turned it loose, the plane flew itself around a square course that was 300 meters on a side.

More Space Ship One Video

Here is the main page for the Scaled Composites video of the X-prize flight: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/video.htm. The details are pretty incredible. There have been lots of follow-up articles, and I think that this event has injected a lot of excitement into space flight again.

Rat Neurons fly (simulated) F-22

Researched at the University of Florida have made the presses with an exciting experiment that uses a bunch of disembodied rat neurons on a petri dish hooked up to a flight simulator. After some learning, the "brain" can now stabilize the F-22 in varying weather conditions.

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living "brain" that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its "body" -- the simulated aircraft.

"It's as if the neurons control the stick in the aircraft, they can move it back and forth and left and right," said Thomas DeMarse, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida who has been working on the project for more than a year. "The electrodes allow us to record the activity from the neurons and stimulate them so we can listen to the conversation among the neurons and also input information back into the neural network."

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn't figured out how to control its "body," but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight.

Micro UAV's on the Rise

GPS World's lead articles this month is about micro UAV efforts, an area of considerable research efforts. The minaturization of electronics has had a great effect on the overall scale, however this same effect makes them almost impossible for a human to fly. Advances in GPS-based autopilots allow a higher level of flight direction, allowing the control system to deal with stabilization and route planning.

Micro aerial vehicle (MAV) describes a category of aircraft with dimensions roughly comparable to small birds. As the smallest, powered aircraft, MAVs can carry various sensors as payload to support such civil and military missions as traffic monitoring, weather observation, and enemy surveillance during military conflicts. By next year, for instance, Germany's Federal Armed Forces could send the first operational MAVs to the field.

Much faster and cheaper than conventional reconnaissance aircraft, a MAV equipped with a miniaturized video camera could reconnoiter nearby enemy troop positions or, outfitted with highly sensitive sensors, could locate chemical weapons.

On the civil side, most requests for scientific MAV applications currently come from meteorologists seeking to measure temperature, humidity, and, most importantly, the speed and direction of wind. The weather researchers want a cost-effective, mobile, and reusable measurement platform that can replace non-returning radiosonde balloons whose onboard equipment is lost after a mission.

Other typical civil applications include traffic observation and control using mobile airborne camera platforms. Fixed traffic control systems installed along main highways, such as the German Autobahn, could be supplemented by MAVs to help facilitate optimal traffic flow not only on the main traffic routes, but also on side roads in case of closed highways.

Companies have already requested MAVs for observing their factory sites from the air. Search and rescue services are interested in MAVs to obtain a rapid overview of disaster areas — during forest fires (localization of the origin of fire), floods, and chemical or nuclear catastrophes — without endangering personnel in manned vehicles such as helicopters. Moreover, MAVs are ideal for providing information quickly in the wake of terrorist attacks.

Further applications include the reconnaissance of demonstrations, the creation of georeferenced maps, and determination of the maturity of farm crops in the field. Further in the future, MAV "swarms" will enable new applications such as providing mobile airborne communication networks or 3D scientific measurements and images. The number of new MAV applications is steadily increasing.

WTN X-Prize

Now that the X-prize has fallen [see this entry], the World Technology Network has taken up the X-prize banner and is looking for other interesting challenges. Keep an eye on this as it might become more interesting in the next few years.

The concept of the WTN X PRIZES is to utilize the concepts, procedures, technologies and publicity developed X PRIZE Foundation's Ansari X PRIZE competition for space and the global science and technology innovators identification process and community developed by the World Technology Network (WTN) to launch a series of technology prizes seeking to meet the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.

The X PRIZE competition focused on jumpstarting a private space industry has re-proven the principle – strongly proven in the early years of the 20th century for the aviation industry – that innovation can indeed be catalyzed. That principle can and should be extended to other global challenges and opportunities and together we at the World Technology Network (WTN) and the X PRIZE Foundation are committed to doing just that.

Robotics Insiitute turns 25

The Robotics Institute at Carnagie Mellon is sopnsoring a conference to celebrate its 25th year. They have a bunch of cool multimedia stuff, and it is definitely worth checking out.

Twenty-five years ago Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute opened its doors with the dream of ushering in a new age of thinking robots. During the ensuing two and one-half decades, we have experienced many research successes in intelligent manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, space-related robots, medical robotics, nano-machines and anthropomorphic robots. There is much to celebrate!

But what is a celebration of robotics, if it does not include a look into the future? This celebration will lay out the "grand challenges" that remain before us and refocus our attention on the hurdles we must overcome to achieve our dreams. For example, the questions of how to build truly intelligent machines, how to provide untethered power, and how to conquer the limits imposed by scale (eg., nano-machines to mega-machines) remain before us.

This celebration is unique because it will demand that every participant also consider how the dawning age of robotics will impact humanity. This is the most critical grand challenge: to create a positive, fruitful coexistence of robots with humans.

In 1963, a book titled Computers and Thought asked some of these same questions about the advent and impact of computers upon humanity. Looking back, one can only marvel at how much computers have changed our lives in a very short time! Their impact is comparable to the invention of the wheel, the printing press, the discovery of electricity and nuclear power. We can only imagine how autonomous machines that sense, think and act will continue to change our world.

In 1979, Carnegie Mellon Professors Raj Reddy and Angel Jordan and Westinghouse Electric Corp. President Tom Murrin agreed to open the Robotics Institute with the goal of making it the best place on the planet to do robotics research. By 2004, their efforts, powered by Carnegie Mellon's faculty, staff, and students, have arguably reached this lofty goal.

In this spirit, the Robotics Institute's 25th anniversary celebration will be a party as well as a deep reflection on the shape of our shared future with robots. Come and join us in this celebration.

Birth of a Cyborg

For a signals processing guy, the signals on our neurons are just another electrical signal to decode, something of interest. Researchers have taken this a step farther in order to help a quardrapalegic man in the UK. I have seen some preliminary work in this area done at Stanford with rats, but this is much more advanced than anything that I had heard of.

Rival teams are building devices to read brain activity without touching neurons. Neural Signals, based in Atlanta, has patented a conductive skull screw that sits outside the brain, just under the skull. Other researchers are developing non-invasive technologies, for example using an electroencephalogram to read a patient's thoughts.

But BrainGate's creators argue that such techniques only give a general picture of brain activity, and that the more direct approach allows more numerous and more specific signals to be translated. "This array has 100 electrodes, so one can theoretically tap into 100 neurons," says Jon Mukand, an investigator on the team based at the Sargent Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island.

This makes the technology faster and more flexible, he argues. "It's far more versatile when one can get a larger number of neurons."

But Stephen Roberts, an engineer at Oxford University, UK, who has worked on brain-computer interfaces, says the field is still waiting for a breakthrough. "We have to make something that works robustly and without a lot of patient training," he says. "Most of these devices work well on a small subset of patients, but there's a long way to go before getting them to work for the general population."

Micro Turbines to Power your PDA

Some very interesting work done by the MIT group on making MEMs turbines. They don't yet work, but all of the parts do. The article is full of interesting details, and is highly recommended.

Epstein started thinking about building a jet engine on a chip nearly a decade ago. At the time, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) were picking up speed. Techniques had emerged for carving new types of features into the surfaces of slabs of silicon, including sealed chambers and pipes and moving parts like spinning wheels—most of the parts needed for a gas turbine engine. Less clear at first was what one would do with a miniature fuel-burning engine. “We thought we’d be able to get the cost way down if we could figure out a reason for needing a lot of them,” says Epstein. “But the only thing we could see doing with tiny engines was flying tiny airplanes, and that seemed stupid. Of course, we hadn’t counted on the DoD.”

Sure enough, the U.S. military was suddenly gung ho over the idea of 15-centimeter-long planes that could carry small cameras for surveillance. The engineers at Epstein’s lab were somewhat less enthusiastic; they suspected that getting jet chips that were airworthy would take a couple of decades. Then Epstein latched onto a more immediate military need: freeing soldiers from the batteries that many of them have to lug around to power radios, GPS receivers, night-vision goggles, and other gadgets. And unlike a miniature aircraft engine, a battery-replacing jet chip would have enormous commercial potential.

Other materials scientists and engineers were already beginning to work on ways to shrink power-producing machines to supplement or replace batteries, creating a new field called “power MEMS.” The most popular approach involved shrinking fuel cells, which typically pass hydrogen through a membrane that pulls electrons out to create an electric current. But Epstein was convinced gas turbines were a better way to go, because of their unmatched ability to wring power out of hydrocarbon fuels. The technology becomes even more appealing where minimizing weight and volume is critical, as with portable devices. A jet chip would be at most half the size of a micro fuel cell of equal energy capacity. A gas turbine should also be relatively easy to fabricate, figured Epstein, because it could be built entirely out of silicon, using standard fabrication techniques.

Magneto-Plasma Propulsion

This is an interesting concept. It reminds me of a sci-fi book that I read which used orbiting lasers to propel solar-sailed spacecraft away. As I recall in that book, the issue was that since the earth didn't have a station, the aliens were going to super-nova the sun to get enough kick to get out of the solar system. Interesting how the concept is essentially the same.

Under the concept, a space-based outpost station would generate a high-energy plasma beam aimed at a spaceship equipped with a sail, resulting in it being thrust out into space. In the startup phase, the plasma station would direct bursts of plasma beams at the spaceship over a period of several days, refueling in the interim, to bring the spacecraft to the right speed required for its flight between the planets.

"Think of a system where large power units are placed permanently in orbit around critical regions of a planet," said Winglee. "With a beamed plasma system, spacecrafts can be pushed or pulled to perform orbital transfers around the planet or accelerated to other planets at essentially no cost."

Once shot off into space, onboard propulsion units would provide a spacecraft some power for minor flight corrections, but not enough to decelerate, which would be handled by a plasma station orbiting the destination.

The stations themselves would be fueled by nuclear power systems or solar-electric power systems augmented with fuel cells. By shifting the power source off the spacecraft and onto the station, Winglee hopes to gain an awesome level of speed.

Currently, rockets carry their propulsion systems on board, which means that the system not only has to move the spacecraft built around it, but it has to move itself, too. To ship a payload of 100 kilograms to Mars, scientists have to build a spacecraft many times that weight in order to support all the systems necessary to successfully deliver it. Since the propulsion system is using some of its energy to move itself, spaceships travel more slowly and can't carry as much as they could otherwise.

The Gladiator enters the Fray

The marine corps are experimenting with an robust UGV for exploration, scouting, and other tasks that fall under the rubrik of Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous. Called the Gladiator, it looks like a fairly conventional tracked vehicle. Not a lot of technical details in the article, but interesting none-the-less.

The Gladiator will be expeditionary in nature, inherently simple, durable, multi-functional, and easily transported and operated in the littoral battlespace. In the conduct of Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS), STOM, Sustained Operations Ashore (SOA), and Operations Other Than War (OOTW), the Gladiator will enhance the ability of Marines to accomplish assigned mission tasks. Operating just forward of the GCE units, the Gladiator will perform basic scouting/surveillance, obstacle breaching, and NBC reconnaissance tasks while permitting the operator to remain covered or concealed. The basic Marine Corps Gladiator will consist of a Mobile Base Unit (MBU), an OCU, and specific Mission Payload Modules (MPMs). Initial MPMs will include JCAD, APOBS, LVOSS, and direct fire (lethal and non-lethal). With development of future MPMs, the Gladiator operational capabilities may include Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition/designation (RSTA-D), engineer reconnaissance, communications relay, tactical deception, and counter sniper employment. Gladiator employment concepts include Offensive Operations, Defensive Operations, and OOTW.

The Gladiator TUGV is planned as a robust, compact, unmanned, tele-operated/semi-autonomous, multi-purpose ground RSTA vehicle system possessing a scouting and direct engagement capability. It will provide the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Ground Combat Element (GCE) with remote reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA), nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) reconnaissance, obstacle breaching, and direct fire capability to neutralize threats and reduce risk to the warfighter. The TUGV system will be fielded to infantry battalions and combat engineer companies and must be strategically, operationally, and tactically deployable worldwide in ground, aircraft and sea transport conveyances available to the MAGTF.

The configuration of the Gladiator system will consist of a highly mobile and survivable ground-based Mobile Base Unit (MBU), interchangeable Mission Payload Module (MPM) packages capable of supporting different mission requirements, and a man portable, hand held Operator Control Unit (OCU). The OCU will provide the Gladiator and its MPM's with tele-operational capability as well as data display, storage and dissemination. It is expected that the OCU will exchange video and data signals with the Gladiator via a non-tethered military link.

The X-Prize Falls

Congratulations to Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and the Pilots: The Ansari X-prize has been won by the Space Ship One.

X Prize officials said it set an altitude record exceeding the military X-15's top altitude of 354,200 feet (67 miles) set on August 22, 1963.

With a wish of "Good luck and Godspeed," mission control sent the privately funded craft toward space for the second time in a week, the requirements for winning the X Prize.

"Today we have made history. Today we go to the stars," said Peter Diamandis, co-founder of the X Prize Foundation.

The $10 million award is intended to spur civilian spaceflight.

"You have raised a tide that will bring billions of dollars into the industry and fund other teams to compete," Diamandis said. "We will begin a new era of spaceflight."

The craft left a near perfect dovetail of exhaust contrails with the White Knight turbo jet, which carried it aloft, as its rocket ignited for 84 seconds. The rocket burn sent SpaceShipOne on a trajectory that sent it climbing for almost a minute after the engine shut down.

"It looks great," said Brian Binnie, SpaceShipOne's pilot, on his way up to space at Mach 3.

Binnie, now only the second person in history to earn his commercial astronaut wings, reported a shaky flight with "a little roll" but did not experience the 29 rolls Mike Melvill experienced last week.

"The experience is quite literally a rush," he said. "You light off the vehicle and the world wakes up around you."

Video is available here, here, and here.