Robotica Exotica

Boat on the Water

I have just finished putting together a short video of our most recent autonomous wing-sailed catamaran test off of Pearl Harbor. We had done a previous test in the harbor, and it worked fine, so we went out to sea and tested several miles off the Oahu coast.

The wind started out very nicely at 17 knots, but this was more swell than we had previously worked with. Based on the experience of the chase boat captain, we aborted the test after 8 nautical miles with the wind at 25 knots, and motored back to our berth. While the data revealed we still had good stability in terms of capsizing, we also discovered that the welds on the rear support beam had broken and were slowly tearing the metal apart.

Click on the image to see the video.

Right call (abort), wrong reason. As always, it is better to be lucky than good.

Sebastian in the News Again

Sebastian Thrun, who led Stanford to the winning run in the DARPA Grand Challenge is in the news again, this time preparing for the DARPA Urban Challenge. They have developed a new car, Junior, which is based on a Volkswagen Passat, and has quite a few more sensors than Stanley had.

A robotic automotive vehicle — which, Thrun says, would "combine the convenience of a train with the convenience of a car" — is a long way from commercial viability. But the Stanford Racing Team will put a driverless Volkswagen Passat wagon named Junior to the test in November in the 2007 Urban Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's research arm.

Junior's predecessor, a modified VW Touareg sport utility vehicle called Stanley, won the 2005 Grand Challenge race in the Nevada desert. This year, Junior and 52 competitors must master far more than pure speed.

The Urban Challenge will be a 60-mile test of city driving, replete with intersections, rights-of-way, stop signs, lane changes and that most annoying variable: traffic.

Keep your eyes on this, as the competition should be exciting.

When Politics and Technology Collide

I've now heard about this story twice, from different sources. Wired has a nice write-up. Basically, a company in San Diego, Vision Robotics, is working on an automated fruit picker for the agricultural industry. The interesting thing is that they are funded entirely by agricultural associations, who are trying to hedge their bets against future immigration reform. The team has had some insights into the problem, and why it has been technically difficult in the past.

It's a surprising new market for Vision Robotics, which had been focused on developing consumer devices, including a robotic vacuum cleaner to compete with iRobot's Roomba.

When a member of the California Citrus Research Board approached the company in 2004, Morikawa was doubtful that an effective robotic picker was even feasible. A citrus grower brought the skeptical engineers to an orange farm in California's fertile Central Valley, where they walked down the neat rows of trees and stared at the oranges hanging in the branches.

Previous attempts at making a mechanical harvester were thwarted by inefficiency, explains Morikawa. In the past, experimental machines approached a tree as a human would, picking one piece of fruit and then looking for the next. In this slow process, the machine circled the tree repeatedly until it was sure it had picked all the fruit.

Morikawa says his engineers had their breakthrough idea right there in the orange grove. They realized that the task could be divided between two robots: One would locate all the oranges, and the second would pick them. "Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all," says Morikawa.

The funny thing about this is that is corroborates a different viewpoint I saw on another block about "energy slaves." This one is over here, at the Power and Control Blog, where he talks about the concept of energy slaves, and uses the thermostat as an example.

Early energy slaves replaced draft animals - the early age of steam. Then they replaced humans for simple repetitive tasks - like sealing cans of peaches at a peach canning factory. Now our energy slaves are smarter and can think for themselves to a certain extent and will follow orders without complaint. Like the thermostat that will make sure in the winter that during the day the house is warm but at night it is cooler except on Saturday night when it is kept warmer for the traditional Saturday night party. 24/7/365 for decades. Change the timing when you like. Down to the minute.

These energy slaves are getting smarter every day. They are precision machinists that can work at a speed and keep tolerances no manual machine could dream of. Some of them have hands. As many hands as needed.

One of the reasons slavery not to mention work is going out of style. Machines (energy slaves) can do it better, faster, and cheaper. John Henry couldn't defeat steam. He has no chance what so ever against electricity.

Interesting synergy.