Robotica Exotica

Biomimicry in the News

An interesting article appears in Business Week about the Office of Naval Research's program on Bio-Inspired Robotics and Research. This is an interesting area, as very clearly evolutionary pressures have made some very efficient structures and methods for locomotion.

It's a field known as biomimetics or biomimicry, though not everyone approves of those terms. Promode Bandyopadhyay of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., says his work is not an imitation of biology, but biologically inspired. "We are learning from nature's design," he says.

MORE THAN A COPY. A senior research scientist at the center, Bandyopadhyay has worked with the Office of Naval Research to develop a Bio-Inspired Autonomous Undersea Vehicle, or BUAV, which draws on the principles behind fly wings and fish fins in its propulsion and maneuvering.

The tried-and-true designs of many insects are the product of millions of years of evolution. Even so, they are not perfect models. Natural selection isn't just a matter of physiological perfection, but how an organism's traits suit it for a particular environment, scientists say. For this reason, Bandyopadhyay stresses it is important not to just copy nature's work, but to take the best parts of it and apply it elsewhere. "I am against mimicry," he says. "I am against making a mechanical zoo. There is no science in that. It is imperative to understand the science first."

It's in that vein that Bandyopadhyay has overseen study by the Office of Naval Research into biomimetic robots developed by Northeastern University's Joseph Ayers. The robots may be implemented by the military to disable mines in shallow waters.

Lego NXT has arrived

According to LEGO, the new mindstorms kits (the NXT) has begun to ship. Those of you who are looking for a low-cost entry into robotics, this is the think. It also makes a great valentine's day present for those engineers. :)

LEGO Group today announced it will showcase LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, its highly-anticipated robotics toolset, for the first time to a consumer audience at the premiere Maker Faire, a two-day family-friendly event celebrating science and technology projects and the DIY mindset. Conceived of and sponsored by MAKE Magazine, the Maker Faire is for creative, resourceful people who like to tinker and love to make things.

In addition, Bay Area LEGO enthusiasts will showcase their amazing LEGO train displays and models; children ages 2 and up can get “hands-on” making and creating with LEGO bricks; and, LEGO brand retail is sponsoring a pop-up store for attendees who are inspired to start making LEGO projects at home. The faire is open to the public Saturday, April 22 and Sunday, April 23 and attendees will find LEGO activities in the Cypress Hall at the San Mateo County Expo Center. For robotics enthusiasts who are unable to attend the event, blogger Jeff James will be onsite covering the faire in reports that will be posted at www.nxtbot.com

“The core DNA of the LEGO brand celebrates creativity, innovation and hands-on, minds-on fun,” said Michael McNally, spokesperson for LEGO Systems. “We are excited to be a sponsor of this inaugural Maker Faire. We believe it’s a perfect fit for us to be aligned with an event that celebrates the do-it-yourself mindset and a consumer’s right to tweak and hack technology at his or her will.”

Automatic Braking from Volvo

This is fairly interesting. Volvo has introduced a system that will take over and apply to brakes in order to prevent a collision (at least, one from running directly into an object). There are some legal ramifications, so don't expect to see this on your car just yet, but it remains a step in the right direction.

Volvo Car Corporation has focused its system development on detecting potential safety risks at an earlier stage. This means to help preventing accidents from occurring, or reducing their effects, simply by reducing speed and shortening the stopping distance. First out was the Collision Warning with Brake Support, recently launched in the new Volvo S80. It allows a 15° field of view, is equipped with a long range radar and registers moving and stopping vehicles.

- A radar sensor is designed to monitor the area in front of the car. If the driver does not react when the car approaches another vehicle from behind, a red light is reflected on the windscreen and a buzzer sounds, says Ingrid Skogsmo, Safety Director at Volvo Car Corporation.

To increase the margins even more, the brake pads are automatically placed against the discs. When the driver brakes, the system monitors the pedal pressure. If the pressure is assessed as being too light, the braking power is amplified by the system.

SLAMming with a SMART

This article was published a while back on a new take on SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), basing the recognition on a model used by the hippocampus. The idea is that the exact features are not important, but rather the spatial sequence of them, and that this can be used to figure out where you are.

A computer navigation system based on a part of the brain called the hippocampus has been tested on an autonomous robotic car. By enabling the robot to take what its creators call "cognitive fingerprints" of its surroundings, the software allows the vehicle to explore and remember places in much the same way mammals do.

Tests on the robotic vehicle -- an adapted Daimler-Chrysler Smart Car equipped with a laser range finder and omnidirectional camera as sensors -- have shown that it can successfully explore and navigate more than one and a half kilometers of urban terrain without getting lost.

Similarly, the system has been tested on an indoor robot by "blindfolding" it, taking it to an unknown location, and getting it to find its way home, says Adriana Tapus, a roboticist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who developed the system. This "kidnapping task" is much more difficult than it might seem, she says. Yet this problem, known as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), is becoming increasingly important for robots, autonomous vehicles, and military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

The challenge is to create a map from which a robot can navigate while it is still exploring that same environment, says Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of the West of England and Bristol University in the U.K. This is difficult because it involves mapping an unfamiliar environment while at the same time updating one's position within this map. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, says Tapus: "To localize the robot, a map is necessary, and to update a map, the position of the mobile robot is needed."

In addition, there's the uncertainty inherent in all sensor measurements, which adds to the uncertainty in the map that the robot builds, says Andrew Davison, a computer scientist at Imperial College London, who was one of the first researchers to develop a real-time SLAM system for robots.

To solve this problem, Tapus decided to copy the way people navigate. Working with Roland Siegwart, head of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, she developed a system that takes raw data detected by the robot's sensors, such as vertical edges, corners, and colors, and combines them into a single low-level description or "fingerprint" of that place.

This fingerprint consists of a circular, or looped, list of significant features around the robot. "It's not the features that are new, it is the combination of these features in a unique representation," says Tapus, who believes that human brains form the same kinds of combinations as they establish the relative positions of landmarks.

Update: a SMART car is being used as their platform, hence the title of this post.

Antarctic Icebox Roving Robot

Here is an article about some heavy duty off-road robots that are solar powered and made to traverse 500 Km of antarctic ice in two weeks. They are not particularly fast, but they are robust.

The next generation of Antarctic explorers could be robots capable of driving hundreds of kilometres and doing scientific experiments alone.

That was the vision unveiled by US scientists and engineers at a major science meeting in Vienna.

They have built a solar-powered prototype and tested it in Greenland, where it has "exceeded expectations".

Subject to funding, they envisage building and deploying a fleet of five robots by the end of next year.

These could perform scientific experiments where access is currently difficult or expensive.

"There are two basic types of mission scenarios," said James Lever, an engineer from the US Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire.

"One would be to stop the robot en route and take the data you need - things like sampling for bacteria in the snow, measuring the atmosphere, or doing a glaciological survey with ground-penetrating radar," he told the BBC News website at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.

"Then the other side is array-based sensor networks where you would deploy the instruments and then pick them up some time later."

The prototype, built with grant money from the US National Science Foundation, is about one cubic metre in size.

It weighs about 60kg but can carry a payload of at least 70kg and tow a much heavier load behind on a sledge.

The aim was to build a vehicle capable of travelling 500km in two weeks during the Antarctic summer; but on the evidence of the Greenland tests, the researchers believe they have exceeded their goal.

The box is covered in solar panels. The floor houses the control and drive systems, and four ordinary all-terrain tyres make contact with the snow.

Human Crossbow

I'm not quite sure how to categorize this, but this man wants to shoot himself from a crossbow into a high parabolic flight--it almost reminds me of the book "Gravity's Rainbow." I would love to see this guy succeed, but he might be heading towards a Darwin award.

There is no subtle way to say this: Brian Walker plans to shoot himself nearly 20 miles into the air aboard a homemade rocket launched from what could be the world’s largest crossbow. (Seriously.)

This isn’t Walker’s first outlandish invention. He’s responsible for the “light chaser” whirly toy, a 300-gallon water-balloon launcher (for putting out forest fires – still in prototype), and Taser gloves (featured in “Garage Geniuses Go Prime Time,” issue 14.03). But Project RUSH – for “rapid up superhigh” – is hands down his most preposterously dangerous effort. “I missed out on the opportunity to be the first private citizen to fly to the edge of space in a private rocket, so I decided to do something even more fun,” Walker says.

Walker’s idea of fun? Stretch a carbon-fiber bowstring 24 feet along a rail, fire up a jet turbine with 1,350 pounds of thrust, hit a trigger, and pull 10 gs as his craft, modeled on spaceships from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, shoots to the stratosphere. He’ll plummet back to Earth using hydrogen peroxide rockets (the propulsion system used in 1950s jet packs) to slow his descent. Don’t worry about Walker – he’ll be wearing a $15,000 surplus Russian space suit for protection. “I can see a scenario where giant crossbows would accelerate skydivers upward,” he says, “creating a new kind of skydiving.”

Robotic Instestinal Worm

Given that the field of robotics is taking a great deal of inspiration from the biological world, especially as we try to figure out why certain animals (typically insects) are so fast and so stable, this application was only a matter of time. Robotic intestinal worms that are used for inspection. Need implementation and application.

A robot designed to crawl through the human gut by mimicking the wriggling motion of an undersea worm has been developed by European scientists. It could one day help doctors diagnose disease by carrying tiny cameras through patients' bodies.

The team behind the robot includes scientists from Italy, Germany, Greece and the UK. They modelled it on polychaetes, or "paddle worms", which use tiny paddles on their body segments to push through sand, mud or water.

"We turned to biological inspiration because, in the peculiar environment of the gut, traditional forms of robotic locomotion don't work," says Arianna Menciassi, a roboticist from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

"Worms have locomotion systems suited to such unstructured, slippery environments."

Note that there are videos available.

Oh, I want one of these!

So, every now and again you come across something that is almost so over the top that is just makes you smile. These carbon fiber wings for giving Special Ops types extended range is a great example. I have seen cloth versions of the same in Banff Film Festival type movies, but nothing rigid like this. The idea is very simple, of course. Wings, even small ones, will greatly improve the Lift/Drag ratio of a falling body, so if you get dropped from a sufficiently high altitude, you can go quite a ways. And it would be a total thrill to jump with them!

Elite special forces troops being dropped behind enemy lines on covert missions are to ditch their traditional parachutes in favour of strap-on stealth wings.

The lightweight carbon fibre mono-wings will allow them to jump from high altitudes and then glide 120 miles or more before landing - making them almost impossible to spot, as their aircraft can avoid flying anywhere near the target.

The technology was demonstrated in spectacular fashion three years ago when Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner - a pioneer of freefall gliding - famously 'flew' across the English Channel, leaping out of an aircraft 30,000ft above Dover and landing safely near Calais 12 minutes later.

Wearing an aerodynamic suit, and with a 6ft wide wing strapped to his back, he soared across the sea at 220mph, moving six feet forward through the air for every one foot he fell vertically - and opened his parachute 1,000ft above the ground before landing safely.

Humanoid Robots

New Scientist has a nice summary of humanoid robot developments. These are like the Asimo and the Qrio, both featured here before. They are very limited at this point in time, and in my opinion will be for quite a bit more. No need to start worrying about being overrun just yet.

The goal is to build robots that can be let loose in our world, where they will learn to interact with humans in a messy and unpredictable environment, not just in the lab. These robots need to be able to get around in the same places we do, manipulate objects in their surroundings and communicate with others around them. In short, they need to be more like us.

Lifelike humanoid robots have eluded designers because the mechanisms required to perform such tasks as emulating a hand, or walking and talking in anything approaching a natural manner, are hugely complex and need fine control. Honda's humanoid robot Asimo can walk up and down stairs, fetch coffee and greet visitors. But its gait is deliberate and plodding, and the useful work it can do is severely limited. What's more, all the tasks Asimo can carry out have to be pre-programmed; it cannot act autonomously. Such dumb, choreographed behaviour has tended to cast robotics in a rather pitiful light, and robot toys have never quite got off the ground. Sony even cancelled its robot entertainment programme last week.

But as helpmates, huge leaps in computer power and advances in control software, sensors and actuators are allowing machines to shed their clunky image and gain impressively human-like abilities. The new breed of bots may not look as slick as Toyota's trumpeter, but by digging deep into the fundamentals of locomotion, speech and dexterity, their creators have come up with designs that will put today's robots in the shade.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the article is behind their subscription wall.

DARPA's replacement mule

DARPA has been planning on upgrading to a robotic mule to pack in supplies to difficult terrain. The mechanical engineering on this beast is quite incredible, and my hat is off to the team that came up with this. Like all such current devices, the difficulty will be in getting enough range and power on a mobile platform.

A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military.

BigDog is described by its developers Boston Dynamics as “the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth”. The company have released a new video of the robot negotiating steep slopes, crossing rocky ground and dealing with the sharp kick. View the impressive clip here (28MB Windows media file).

“Internal force sensors detect the ground variations and compensate for them,” says company president and project manager Marc Raibert. “And BigDog's active balance allows it to maintain stability when we disturb it."

This active balance is maintained by four legs, each with three joints powered by actuators and a fourth "springy" joint. All the joints are controlled by an onboard PC processor.

Machine Learning Success at the Grand Challenge

This story goes into detail about different machine learning algorithms, and their applications that are finally making headway in the software world. Most famous of the tasks is the DARPA Grand Challenge II that was won by the Stanford Stanley vehicle.

Thrun used several new machine-learning techniques in software that literally drove an autonomous car 132 miles across the desert to win a $2 million prize for Stanford in a recent contest put on by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The car learned road-surface characteristics as it went. And machine-learning techniques gave his team a productivity boost as well, Thrun says. "I could develop code in a day that would have taken me half a month to develop by hand," he says.

Computer scientist Tom Mitchell, director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University, says machine learning is useful for the kinds of tasks that humans do easily -- speech and image recognition, for example -- but that they have trouble explaining explicitly in software rules. In machine-learning applications, software is "trained" on test cases devised and labeled by humans, scored so it knows what it got right and wrong, and then sent out to solve real-world cases.

Mitchell is testing the concept of having two classes of learning algorithms in essence train each other, so that together they can do better than either would alone. For example, one search algorithm classifies a Web page by considering the words on it. A second one looks at the words on the hyperlinks that point to the page. The two share clues about a page and express their confidence in their assessments.

Mitchell's experiments have shown that such "co-training" can reduce errors by more than a factor of two. The breakthrough, he says, is software that learns from training cases labeled not by humans, but by other software.

Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is experimenting with languages in which programmers write code for the functions they understand well but leave gaps for murky areas. Into the gaps go machine-learning tools, such as artificial neural networks.

Russell has implemented his "partial programming" concepts in a language called Alisp, an extension of Lisp. "For example, I want to tell you how to get to the airport, but I don't have a map," he says. "So I say, 'Drive along surface streets, stopping at stop signs, until you get to a freeway on-ramp. Drive on the freeway till you get to an airport exit sign. Come off the exit and drive along surface streets till you get to the airport.' There are lots of gaps left in that program, but it's still extremely useful." Researchers specify the learning algorithms at each gap, but techniques might be developed that let the system choose the best method, Russell says.

The Real Story behind MINDSTORMS

Wired has a nice article on the development of the new version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS. It shows the odd mix of fanatacism, personality, and pure talent that makes a good engineering story.

He guessed it had something to do with Mindstorms, Lego's programmable robotics kit. After all, he's a master at assembling the plastic bricks into complex robots, like his wheeled, self-balancing machine dubbed the LegWay, and he's something of a celebrity in the Mindstorms world. But there hadn't been a Mindstorms update in nearly four years, and rumor had it Lego might abandon the product altogether.

Intrigued, Hassenplug signed the NDA, received a username and password, and was ushered to a secure online forum. Even there, he found no official information - just an email thread between a few peers: John Barnes, David Schilling, and Ralph Hempel. Hassenplug knew them well from Brickfest, the annual conference where Lego zealots show off their most elegant creations, from massive starships and richly detailed cathedrals to giant bipedal robots. The four Mindstorms experts speculated as to why they'd been tapped and sworn to secrecy. Lego probably needed beta testers for a Mindstorms update.

After lurking for a few days, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, dropped in on the conversation. He told the crew that a revamped kit was, in fact, in the works. But Lego didn't even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design. "I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too," recalls Barnes, an electronics engineer from Holland Patent, New York. "We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined."

Over the next 11 months, right up to the January launch of Mindstorms NXT at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the four men were de facto Lego employees. They exchanged countless emails with Lund and his team, reeling off ideas for new sensors, redesigned input ports, and stabilized firmware. The MUPers also met with Lund at Brickfest in the US and at Lego's Denmark headquarters to hash out specs for the computer that serves as the brain of every Mindstorms creation.

The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. "Pretty much the comment from all four of us was 'They're going to talk to us about Legos, and they're going to pay us with Legos?'" Hassenplug says. "'They actually want our opinion?' It doesn't get much better than that."