Robotica Exotica

MIT's Stackable Cars

For whatever reason, I always find myself drawn to the small, the simple, the sublime. MIT has been embarking on a project of designing the future city, and how things will integrate in. In this article, they discuss a stackable car that will work in this new city environment.

The Smart Cities group focused on how cars could be better adapted to get round familiar problems of city life, namely congestion, pollution and parking. Motor companies are well aware of the issue. But the group felt the companies had missed the point, even with city cars such as the Smart, the iconic two-passenger cars introduced by Swatch and Mercedes in 1998.

"We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems," says Mr Chin. While Smart changed the way people think about parking and size, the MIT engineers felt that, as it had not been widely adopted and congestion and pollution problems had got no better, its success had been limited.

So the MIT team started from scratch to come up with their own concept: a stackable, shareable, electric, two-passenger car. "Imagine a shopping cart - a vehicle that can stack - you can take the first vehicle out of a stack and off you go," says Mr Chin. "These stacks would be placed throughout the city. A good place would be outside a subway station or a bus line or an airport, places where there's a convergence of transportation lines and people."

The precedent for this type of shared personal transport is demonstrated with bicycle-sharing schemes in European towns and the ZipCar and FlexCar projects on the east and west coasts of the US respectively.

The MIT concept car is a complete re-think of vehicle technology. For a start, there is no engine, at least in the traditional sense. The power comes from devices called wheel robots. "These are self-contained wheel units that have electric motors inside," says Mr Chin. "The interesting thing is that the wheel can turn a full 360 degrees so you can have omni-directional wheel movements. You can rotate the car while you're moving, any direction can be front or back and you can do things like crabbing or translate sideways. It's almost like you imagine yourself driving a computer chair."

The wheel robots, complete with their own suspension, remove the need for a drive shaft and even the engine block, freeing up designers to make new use of the space in the car.

"Essentially the car will comprise four wheel-robots plus a customisable chassis," says Chin. "The frame can be built specifically for each customer."

To say the least, this looks interesting.

Blue Origins is Getting Serious

Blue Origins, Jeff Bezos' rocket company, is getting serious. In this article, and this other one, it seems that he is busy buying up land for development and testing. I have spoken to him briefly about this venture while talking to him at a speach he gave a few years ago: he is serious, and has always been interested in space exploration.

The new space race has touched down in Kent, where Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos is building a rocket-ship complex set to open early next year.

Blue Origin, Bezos' aerospace company, will use the facility to design and build spacecraft and engines. The company's near-term goal is to develop a vehicle that can take passengers on a thrill ride to the edge of space.

But eventually, Bezos has said, he wants to build spaceships powerful enough to orbit the Earth. He even hopes to establish permanent colonies in space someday.

Bezos paid $13 million for just less than 25 acres of industrial land next to the railroad tracks in the Kent Valley. City records show he is spending up to $8 million to remodel an existing office building and warehouse and build an experimental stand where rocket engines will be tested in three-minute-long trial runs. Among the upgrades spelled out in the plans: installation of aircraft hangar doors.

Test launches will be conducted in West Texas, where Bezos recently bought a 165,000-acre ranch near the small town of Van Horn, about 110 miles southeast of El Paso. Long-term plans for that site include a spaceport where three-person space-tourism flights could blast off once a week.

Best Tech Moments of 2005

It is the end of the year, and all of the media are prone to "year in review" type articles. Wired is no exception, with a countdown of the best Tech moments of 2005. While I don't particularly agree with the list, it makes interesting reading.

In the tech world, 2005 was a period of bold ideas and exciting breakthroughs -- shadowed, at times, by devastating reversals.

New software apps changed the way we looked at the world, while hardware got smaller, faster and more fun. On the net, blogs provided many of the most dramatic moments, sometimes courting lawsuits, other times taking us places we could not otherwise go: New Orleans, Iraq, even inside the twisted mind of an accused killer.

As we begin what's certain to be an exciting new year of Yahoo acquisitions and rising Google stock, it's perhaps a good time to stop and reflect on the highs and lows of the year that was. Here are our picks for the 10 best tech moments of 2005.

Michael Robertson hires DVD Jon: What do you get when you cross a maverick tech entrepreneur with a young genius who specializes in cracking content-protection schemes? When Robertson imported 22-year-old Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen in October, he was cagey about what the twice-acquitted author of DeCSS would be working on in sunny San Diego.

Now we know it's a new music-storage service called MP3tunes Locker, eerily reminiscent of Robertson's late, great my.mp3.com, which was lamentably sued out of existence by the recording industry five years ago. Admittedly, the Locker hasn't yet raised a big ruckus in the post-iPod world; but with this A-list cast, who cares about the plot?

The $100 laptop: From the moment MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the (mostly) working prototype of his $100 laptop at a U.N. summit in Tunisia, he was trailed by a plume of reporters and admirers eager for a glimpse of the lime-green tote. The appeal is obvious: Negroponte's noble, world-shaping ambition to put millions of the tiny hand-cranked learning machines in the hands of impoverished children around the globe, and the fetishistic draw of the rugged computer's nostalgic, toylike design.

Still, skeptics abound. Slate added up the retail price of the components and predicted the laptop would actually cost more like $300, and Intel chair Craig Barrett argued that discriminating children in developing countries would reject the Linux machines as underpowered gadgets. Less sillily, questions remain about the environmental impact of dumping the computers in developing countries, and whether the money wouldn't be better spent on food and medicine. We'll know soon enough: In December, Taiwan's Quanta won a bidding war to manufacture between 5 million and 15 million of the laptops, expected to roll off the assembly line in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Katrina, blogged: Ten floors above some of the worst devastation ever visited on the United States, the New Orleans hosting company DirectNic managed not only to keep its servers purring, but to pump out crisis updates and images to the net. A company webcam trained on the street captured pictures of survivors scrounging for food and looters pillaging neighboring buildings.

Company "crisis manager" Michael Barnett shared his firsthand observations on his LiveJournal blog, which reached 3,000 hits an hour as word of its existence spread. "I mean, it's Lord of the Flies out there right now," Barnett blogged Aug. 31. "There's no order at all. No respect for private property, no respect for life." When the worst finally passed, the blog morphed into NOLA.us, a community site still serving the Big Easy as it struggles to rebuild.

50 Top Robots

Wired has a top 50 countdown of the best robots of all time (these include both real and fictional robots). It makes for an interesting reading list. I recommend the article if only for a place with images of all of them.

50. ROBONAUT Not all NASA robots drive around poking at rocks. This android will one day work alongside people on space stations. Robonaut is the same size and shape as a person in a space suit, so it can handle tasks typically performed by humans - its hands are even better articulated than an astronaut's gloved digits. The fact that it looks like Boba Fett? Lucky coincidence.

49. LEONARDO
Awww, isn't it cuddly? Or maybe just creepy. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal is famous for building robots that humans have an emotional reaction to. Her newest creation, Leonardo, was bolted together in 2002 with the help of the movie monster gurus at Stan Winston Studio (their animatronics include the Terminator, the aliens in Aliens, and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park). Leonardo can grab objects, make facial expressions and complex gestures, and even learn simple tasks (like turning lights on and off) through trial and error.

48. KITT
The smooth-talking, self-driving muscle car from the early '80s TV drama Knight Rider was so cool, it even upstaged David Hasselhoff. The success of this Trans-Am helped to usher in a new genre of show with supervehicles as heroes, from Airwolf to Stealth.

47. HAL 9000
Some tasks are too important to be left to humans. Just ask Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The 1968 film gave the world the ultimate all seeing, all knowing - and apparently all ego - AI villain. It set the standard for machines that can think (and kill) like us but are too powerful to control.

46. ROOMBA DISCOVERY
This wasn't the first robosucker, just the first that didn't blow. In 2005, iRobot's second-generation robotic vacuum showed that domestic bots can actually work. To clean the floors, simply turn the thing on - just try not to stand around watching slack-jawed.

[...]

05. SHAKEY
Developed by Stanford Research Institute International, Shakey had jerky, often nonsensical movements. But that didn't stop the 1972 robot from entering the history books as the first machine to autonomously locate objects, steer around them - and then explain its logic for doing so.

04. ROBBY THE ROBOT
Few robots can trace their origins to Shakespeare. Robby, from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, was inspired by Ariel in The Tempest. But that didn't keep Robby from leaving a legacy all his own. For decades, the very idea of a robot was synonymous with Robby's bulbous figure.

03. SPIRIT AND OPPORTUNITY
Some robots sit in labs for researchers to tinker with. These two bots are on frickin' Mars. Expected to last only three months when they touched down on the Red Planet in January 2004, the rovers are still going strong two years later - each sends back 100 megabits of data a day.

02. ASTROBOY
While American kids were daydreaming of Superman, Japanese tykes were worshipping at the altar of Tetsuwan Atom, aka Astroboy. First drawn in 1951, Astroboy has rocket boots, lasers that shoot from his fingertips, and, uh, an ass cannon. The lovable crime-fighting robot was an inspiration to a generation of kids -some of whom went on to become robotics researchers. He's a big reason why Japan is at the forefront of android development today. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.

And the #1 Robot of All Time Is...

01. STANLEY
The Stanford Racing Team's autonomous vehicle is a modified Volkswagen Touareg that can scan any terrain and pick out a drivable course to a preset destination. Cup holders optional.

Robotic Boats to Battle Pirates

I found this article on the BBC News website, where they are talking about the need for patrols against pirates on the high seas.

Passengers aboard the Seabourn Spirit, a luxury liner sailing off the coast of Somalia, came face to face last month with the growing problem of piracy, especially planned assaults and ocean hijackings using fast boats and sophisticated weapons.

As the pirates go hi-tech, so ships must use more advanced technology in their defence, according to the latest report from the International Maritime Bureau.

Anti-piracy technologies endorsed by the bureau include an unmanned spy plane, the Inventus UAV, for aerial surveillance of risky waters.

Others include Secure-Ship, a 9,000 volt electric fence that when rigged around ship's deck stops the pirates from boarding, and ShipLoc, a hidden tagging device for ships that allows satellites to track ships on behalf of their owners even after a hijacking.

In their defence against pirates off the coast of Somalia, the Seabourn Spirit's crew used an acoustic weapon that focused a deafening alarm sound on the attackers, hastening their retreat.

In the future, robotics could play a role in anti-piracy defences, though the technology has yet endorsed by the International Maritime Bureau.

Pirates are coming up with more ways of seizing ships
Speaking to BBC World Service's Discovery for its programme on the future of shipping safety, Keith Henderson of Marine Robotics International explained how unmanned robotic vessels could help.

Marine Robotics have created vessels called Ghost Guard which can patrol the seas along pre-programmed routes, overseen by a single, human controller on shore.

The boats can also escort other ships through dangerous waters. Video and other equipment on board these robotic ships allow their on-shore controllers to see and interact with the crew of any vessels they encounter:

"They could go alongside, there's a loudspeaker and a microphone so they could have a conversation with the vessel," said Mr Henderson.

"And if they feel that there's something suspicious then they could call up a naval patrol vessel."

Hopping Mini-Bots

Here is a very interesting article on tiny little hopping robots. These are the brainchild of a cooperation between Dr. Penelope Boston and Dr. Steven Dubowsky, a cave biologist and a roboticist.

If you want to travel to distant stars, or find life on another world, it takes a bit of planning. That's why NASA has established NIAC, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. For the past several years, NASA has been encouraging scientists and engineers to think outside the box, to come up with ideas just this side of science fiction. Their hope is that some of these ideas will pan out, and provide the agency with technologies it can use 20, 30, or 40 years down the road.

NIAC provides funding on a competitive basis. Only a handful of the dozens of proposals submitted are funded. Phase I funding is minimal, just enough for researchers to flesh out their idea on paper. If the idea shows merit, it then may get Phase II funding, allowing the research to continue from the pure-concept to the crude-prototype stage.

One of the projects that received Phase II funding earlier this year was a collaboration between Dr. Penelope Boston and Dr. Steven Dubowsky to develop "hopping microbots" capable of exploring hazardous terrain, including underground caves. If the project pans out, hopping microbots may some day be sent to search for life below the surface of Mars.

Boston spends a lot of time in caves, studying the microorganisms that live there. She is the director of the Cave and Karst Studies Program and an associate professor at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico. Dubowsky is the director of the MIT Field and Space Robotics Laboratory at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is known in part for his research into artificial muscles.

[...]

AM: How do all these little spheres co-ordinate with each other?

PB: They behave as a swarm. They relate to each other using very simple rules, but that produces a great deal of flexibility in their collective behavior that enables them to meet the demands of unpredictable and hazardous terrain. The ultimate product that we're envisioning is a fleet of these little guys being sent to some promising landing site, exiting from the lander and then making their way over to some subsurface or other hazardous terrain, where they deploy themselves as a network. They create a cellular communication network, on a node-to-node basis.

AM: Are they able to control the direction in which they hop?

PB: We have aspirations for them ultimately to be very capable. As we move into Phase II, we're working with Fritz Printz at Stanford on ultra-miniature fuel cells to power these little guys, which would enable them to be able to do a fairly complex array of things. One of those capabilities is to have some control over the direction in which they go. There are certain ways that they can be built that can allow them to preferentially go in one direction or another. It's not quite as precise as it would be if they were wheeled rovers just going on a straight path. But they can preferentially cant themselves more or less in the direction that they wish to go. So we're envisioning that they will have at least crude control over direction. But a lot of their value has to do with their swarm motion as an expanding cloud.

As wonderful as the MER rovers are, for the kind of science I do, I need something more akin to the insect robot idea pioneered by Rodney Brooks at MIT. Being able to tap into the model of insect intelligence and adaptation for exploration had long appealed to me. Adding that to the unique mobility provided by Dr. Dubowsky's hopping idea, I think, can enable a reasonable percentage of these little units to survive the hazards of subsurface terrain - that just seemed like a magical combination to me.

Robot Uprising Coming to a Theater Near You

A recent Carnegie Mellon graduate from the Robotics Institute has published a tongue-in-cheek look at robots that take over the earth. While I haven't read it, I understand that Paramout has bought the movie rights already.

Many a book idea has been hatched at the bar of the Squirrel Hill Cafe (aka the Squirrel Cage), but Wilson's is one of the few that actually survived the next day's hangover. He and some friends were griping about robot stereotypes in movies (the emotionless evil of Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey"; the self-repairing modular robot in "Terminator 3"), and thought it would be funny to write a book taking the stereotypes seriously.

He pitched the idea to a book agent in April 2004 and started writing late that summer while working for Intel in Seattle. He finished it by January and then started focusing on his graduate thesis, which he defended in September before being awarded his robotics doctorate.

Wilson's agent sold the movie rights to Paramount before the book was even finished, and the screenplay is being written by two writer-actors from Comedy Central's "Reno 911!," Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. Wilson said he's "really excited" about the movie, since it is supposed to be a spoof of robot movies, like his book.

Wilson, an Oklahoma native who moved to Pittsburgh to start his graduate work in 2000, is still primarily a scientist, not a book or movie writer. His specialty within robotics is designing smart houses to aid the elderly and infirm, which informed several parts of the "Uprising" book.