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Robot Round-Up

I can't believe they're making such a human looking robot. Am I correct in thinking 120cm would be about 3 feet tall?

Here's the photo.
 
A great article on this in this week's New Scientist, including comments by teams Sandstorm and LADIBUG (the latter US Robot Wars competitors!)

Not on their website right now unfortunately.
 
BRF: Cool - keep an eye out for it - I was wondering if any Robot Wars Veterans might be in.

Anyway the races were run and the results were....... disappointing (but still interesting):

Rough ride for robots, but humans smiling

Rough ride for robots, but humans smiling

$1 million race ends without winners, but not without success


By Alan Boyle
Science editor
MSNBC
Updated: 08:22 PM PT March13, 2004

PRIMM, Nev. - Based on the numbers, the Pentagon’s first-ever robotic road race looks like a bust: No one won the $1 million offered as a prize. In fact, every one of the 15 autonomous vehicles broke down or withdrew within the first four hours of what was expected to be a 10-hour race. The hardiest robot made it through only 7.4 miles of the 142-mile course.

But most of the competitors, as well as the government agency that paid for the DARPA Grand Challenge, hailed Saturday’s event as a success.

“We came this far — we’ve won,” said 17-year-old Chris Seide, a member of the Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors, whose converted SUV crashed into the starting chute’s barriers twice during the morning.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already gotten a fourfold or fivefold return on its $13 million investment in the yearlong process, said Anthony Tether, DARPA’s director. He said the innovations demonstrated over the past week would help the U.S. military push toward its goal of having a third of its vehicles operate autonomously by 2015.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Tether told journalists in Primm, the intended endpoint of the race, “but that doesn't mean that we aren't going to keep coming back and keep doing this until somebody picks up that million-dollar check.”

Sandstorm, the converted Humvee military vehicle entered by Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team, was the favorite in the race — and it ended up going the farthest, racking up 7.4 miles. The vehicle, which had suffered a rollover during a practice session last week, hit a couple of posts early on Saturday’s course, and spun out several miles later as it was climbing a rugged switchback.

The failing might have been the result of a sensor glitch that went uncorrected after the earlier rollover, or damage done during the crash on the course, or merely a turn of bad luck. DARPA’s Tether told journalists that if Sandstorm had driven just 6 inches closer to the inboard side of the switchback, it might have kept on going.

Red Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor and the Red Team’s leader, took the apparent mechanical failure in stride.

“If you haven’t done everything, you haven’t done anything,” he told MSNBC.com. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a flipped bit, or a bad sensor, or a lug nut. They’re really all the same.”

He said Sandstorm’s performance showed that the machine had “as much heart as the team.”

“Sandstorm will ride again,” he declared.

The day promised to be a marathon: At 3:20 a.m. PT Saturday, competitors received 229,000 GPS coordinates defining the course between the makeshift starting-line arena in the Mojave Desert, outside Barstow, Calif., and the finish line at Primm, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas.

Whittaker said the team’s computers calculated the first “solution” for the trip within 10 minutes, and had a winning strategy by 4 a.m. Sandstorm also had the advantage of the earliest start, at 6:30 a.m., but by 7:10 a.m. it was all over for the vehicle.


How the robots finished

Red Team: Caught on berm, mile 7.4
SciAutonics II: Stuck on embankment, mile 6.7
Digital Auto Drive: Hung up on rock, mile 6.0
Golem Group: Stopped on hill, mile 5.2
Team Caltech: Went off course, mile 1.3
TerraMax: Could not proceed, mile 1.2
SciAutonics I: Lost route at mile 0.75
Team CIMAR: Caught in wire at mile 0.45
Team ENSCO: Flipped at mile 0.2
Team CajunBot: Brushed wall out of chute.
Palos Verdes hit wall in start area.
Axion circled wrong way in start area.
Virginia Tech's brakes locked up in start area.
TerraHawk, Blue Team withdrew before start.
Click to expand...

The ones that followed could do no better: Team SciAutonics II’s converted dune buggy got hung up on an embankment after 6.7 miles. Team D.A.D.’s robo-Toyota truck paused after 6 miles and couldn't get started again. The Golem Group's pickup was stymied by a steep hill after 5.2 miles. Team ENSCO’s buglike all-terrain vehicle zipped down the course’s first straightaway — then flipped over.

Some of the others could hardly get out of the starting chute. The only two-wheeled entrant, the Blue Team’s Ghostrider motorcycle, was withdrawn from the million-dollar competition — and fell over when it was set loose for a just-for-fun demonstration.

After all the contestants either withdrew or were disqualified, the teams and their vehicles trickled into Primm for post-race festivities. As night fell, Whittaker and his team showed up with a freshly repaired Sandstorm.

DARPA organizers said they wanted to evaluate some of the technologies demonstrated over the past week, and indicated that the Grand Challenge could well be repeated a year or two from now. Air Force Col. Jose Negron, the Grand Challenge’s project manager, marveled at the grass-roots robotics movement that the competition had spawned.

“You had teams collaborating -– ‘my technology for your technology,’” he said. “We can’t wait for this event to be over so we can talk.”
Click to expand...
million race ends without winners, but not without success


By Alan Boyle
Science editor
MSNBC
Updated: 08:22 PM PT March13, 2004

PRIMM, Nev. - Based on the numbers, the Pentagon’s first-ever robotic road race looks like a bust: No one won the
Rough ride for robots, but humans smiling

$1 million race ends without winners, but not without success


By Alan Boyle
Science editor
MSNBC
Updated: 08:22 PM PT March13, 2004

PRIMM, Nev. - Based on the numbers, the Pentagon’s first-ever robotic road race looks like a bust: No one won the $1 million offered as a prize. In fact, every one of the 15 autonomous vehicles broke down or withdrew within the first four hours of what was expected to be a 10-hour race. The hardiest robot made it through only 7.4 miles of the 142-mile course.

But most of the competitors, as well as the government agency that paid for the DARPA Grand Challenge, hailed Saturday’s event as a success.

“We came this far — we’ve won,” said 17-year-old Chris Seide, a member of the Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors, whose converted SUV crashed into the starting chute’s barriers twice during the morning.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already gotten a fourfold or fivefold return on its $13 million investment in the yearlong process, said Anthony Tether, DARPA’s director. He said the innovations demonstrated over the past week would help the U.S. military push toward its goal of having a third of its vehicles operate autonomously by 2015.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Tether told journalists in Primm, the intended endpoint of the race, “but that doesn't mean that we aren't going to keep coming back and keep doing this until somebody picks up that million-dollar check.”

Sandstorm, the converted Humvee military vehicle entered by Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team, was the favorite in the race — and it ended up going the farthest, racking up 7.4 miles. The vehicle, which had suffered a rollover during a practice session last week, hit a couple of posts early on Saturday’s course, and spun out several miles later as it was climbing a rugged switchback.

The failing might have been the result of a sensor glitch that went uncorrected after the earlier rollover, or damage done during the crash on the course, or merely a turn of bad luck. DARPA’s Tether told journalists that if Sandstorm had driven just 6 inches closer to the inboard side of the switchback, it might have kept on going.

Red Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor and the Red Team’s leader, took the apparent mechanical failure in stride.

“If you haven’t done everything, you haven’t done anything,” he told MSNBC.com. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a flipped bit, or a bad sensor, or a lug nut. They’re really all the same.”

He said Sandstorm’s performance showed that the machine had “as much heart as the team.”

“Sandstorm will ride again,” he declared.

The day promised to be a marathon: At 3:20 a.m. PT Saturday, competitors received 229,000 GPS coordinates defining the course between the makeshift starting-line arena in the Mojave Desert, outside Barstow, Calif., and the finish line at Primm, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas.

Whittaker said the team’s computers calculated the first “solution” for the trip within 10 minutes, and had a winning strategy by 4 a.m. Sandstorm also had the advantage of the earliest start, at 6:30 a.m., but by 7:10 a.m. it was all over for the vehicle.


How the robots finished

Red Team: Caught on berm, mile 7.4
SciAutonics II: Stuck on embankment, mile 6.7
Digital Auto Drive: Hung up on rock, mile 6.0
Golem Group: Stopped on hill, mile 5.2
Team Caltech: Went off course, mile 1.3
TerraMax: Could not proceed, mile 1.2
SciAutonics I: Lost route at mile 0.75
Team CIMAR: Caught in wire at mile 0.45
Team ENSCO: Flipped at mile 0.2
Team CajunBot: Brushed wall out of chute.
Palos Verdes hit wall in start area.
Axion circled wrong way in start area.
Virginia Tech's brakes locked up in start area.
TerraHawk, Blue Team withdrew before start.
Click to expand...

The ones that followed could do no better: Team SciAutonics II’s converted dune buggy got hung up on an embankment after 6.7 miles. Team D.A.D.’s robo-Toyota truck paused after 6 miles and couldn't get started again. The Golem Group's pickup was stymied by a steep hill after 5.2 miles. Team ENSCO’s buglike all-terrain vehicle zipped down the course’s first straightaway — then flipped over.

Some of the others could hardly get out of the starting chute. The only two-wheeled entrant, the Blue Team’s Ghostrider motorcycle, was withdrawn from the million-dollar competition — and fell over when it was set loose for a just-for-fun demonstration.

After all the contestants either withdrew or were disqualified, the teams and their vehicles trickled into Primm for post-race festivities. As night fell, Whittaker and his team showed up with a freshly repaired Sandstorm.

DARPA organizers said they wanted to evaluate some of the technologies demonstrated over the past week, and indicated that the Grand Challenge could well be repeated a year or two from now. Air Force Col. Jose Negron, the Grand Challenge’s project manager, marveled at the grass-roots robotics movement that the competition had spawned.

“You had teams collaborating -– ‘my technology for your technology,’” he said. “We can’t wait for this event to be over so we can talk.”
Click to expand...
million offered as a prize. In fact, every one of the 15 autonomous vehicles broke down or withdrew within the first four hours of what was expected to be a 10-hour race. The hardiest robot made it through only 7.4 miles of the 142-mile course.

But most of the competitors, as well as the government agency that paid for the DARPA Grand Challenge, hailed Saturday’s event as a success.

“We came this far — we’ve won,” said 17-year-old Chris Seide, a member of the Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors, whose converted SUV crashed into the starting chute’s barriers twice during the morning.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already gotten a fourfold or fivefold return on its million investment in the yearlong process, said Anthony Tether, DARPA’s director. He said the innovations demonstrated over the past week would help the U.S. military push toward its goal of having a third of its vehicles operate autonomously by 2015.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Tether told journalists in Primm, the intended endpoint of the race, “but that doesn't mean that we aren't going to keep coming back and keep doing this until somebody picks up that million-dollar check.”

Sandstorm, the converted Humvee military vehicle entered by Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team, was the favorite in the race — and it ended up going the farthest, racking up 7.4 miles. The vehicle, which had suffered a rollover during a practice session last week, hit a couple of posts early on Saturday’s course, and spun out several miles later as it was climbing a rugged switchback.

The failing might have been the result of a sensor glitch that went uncorrected after the earlier rollover, or damage done during the crash on the course, or merely a turn of bad luck. DARPA’s Tether told journalists that if Sandstorm had driven just 6 inches closer to the inboard side of the switchback, it might have kept on going.

Red Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor and the Red Team’s leader, took the apparent mechanical failure in stride.

“If you haven’t done everything, you haven’t done anything,” he told MSNBC.com. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a flipped bit, or a bad sensor, or a lug nut. They’re really all the same.”

He said Sandstorm’s performance showed that the machine had “as much heart as the team.”

“Sandstorm will ride again,” he declared.

The day promised to be a marathon: At 3:20 a.m. PT Saturday, competitors received 229,000 GPS coordinates defining the course between the makeshift starting-line arena in the Mojave Desert, outside Barstow, Calif., and the finish line at Primm, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas.

Whittaker said the team’s computers calculated the first “solution” for the trip within 10 minutes, and had a winning strategy by 4 a.m. Sandstorm also had the advantage of the earliest start, at 6:30 a.m., but by 7:10 a.m. it was all over for the vehicle.


How the robots finished

Red Team: Caught on berm, mile 7.4
SciAutonics II: Stuck on embankment, mile 6.7
Digital Auto Drive: Hung up on rock, mile 6.0
Golem Group: Stopped on hill, mile 5.2
Team Caltech: Went off course, mile 1.3
TerraMax: Could not proceed, mile 1.2
SciAutonics I: Lost route at mile 0.75
Team CIMAR: Caught in wire at mile 0.45
Team ENSCO: Flipped at mile 0.2
Team CajunBot: Brushed wall out of chute.
Palos Verdes hit wall in start area.
Axion circled wrong way in start area.
Virginia Tech's brakes locked up in start area.
TerraHawk, Blue Team withdrew before start.
Click to expand...

The ones that followed could do no better: Team SciAutonics II’s converted dune buggy got hung up on an embankment after 6.7 miles. Team D.A.D.’s robo-Toyota truck paused after 6 miles and couldn't get started again. The Golem Group's pickup was stymied by a steep hill after 5.2 miles. Team ENSCO’s buglike all-terrain vehicle zipped down the course’s first straightaway — then flipped over.

Some of the others could hardly get out of the starting chute. The only two-wheeled entrant, the Blue Team’s Ghostrider motorcycle, was withdrawn from the million-dollar competition — and fell over when it was set loose for a just-for-fun demonstration.

After all the contestants either withdrew or were disqualified, the teams and their vehicles trickled into Primm for post-race festivities. As night fell, Whittaker and his team showed up with a freshly repaired Sandstorm.

DARPA organizers said they wanted to evaluate some of the technologies demonstrated over the past week, and indicated that the Grand Challenge could well be repeated a year or two from now. Air Force Col. Jose Negron, the Grand Challenge’s project manager, marveled at the grass-roots robotics movement that the competition had spawned.

“You had teams collaborating -– ‘my technology for your technology,’” he said. “We can’t wait for this event to be over so we can talk.”
Click to expand...

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4517001/
 
Desert race too tough for robots

In the end the desert challenge was just too grand.
None of the robots taking part in a 241km race across the Mojave Desert made it to the finish line.

The robots had 10 hours to complete the course but only four of the entrants got more than 8km before crashing or suffering crippling technical problems.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency organised the race to drive research into autonomous vehicles for the military.

Travel tips

The Darpa Grand Challenge would have awarded a $1m prize to the makers of the first robot to complete the 241km course that wound its way from California to Nevada.

But the challenging terrain and the difficulty of building autonomous robots meant that the prize went unclaimed.

Darpa said that 15 robots were due to start the race but two were withdrawn before the event got under way.

The robots entered included custom-built vehicles as well as converted pick-up trucks, SUVs and a Humvee.

Of those that took part, a robot called Sandstorm, built by Red Team Robot Racing from Carnegie Mellon University, made it the furthest distance down the course.

Sandstorm travelled 11.91km (7.4 miles) before getting caught on an obstacle which caused its front wheels to catch fire.

SciAutonics II got almost as far. It travelled 10.78km (6.7 miles) before hitting an embankment and getting stranded.

The Digital Auto Drive robot made it to 9.6 km (6 miles) before sensor failure left it stranded and the Golem Group vehicle travelled 8.3km (5.2 miles) before a throttle problem ended its progress.

Many of the others managed to travel some distance down the course but some, such as the robot from Team CajunBot, did not make it out of the start area.

One robot, from Team Ensco, flipped over in the start area, suffered a fuel leak, and was removed from the course.

Some suffered broken brakes or axles or sensor problems that left them unable to use satellite guidance systems.

"It is tough terrain, it was a tough test," said Jan Walker, a spokewoman for Darpa, "We are very pleased some vehicles managed to travel five, six, even seven miles."

2006 re-run

In total 22 teams built robots for the race. Only seven of these completed a qualifying event arranged by Darpa two days before the official race.

However, Darpa changed the rules to allow some of those that did not complete the qualifying race to make it to the start line on race day.

It is planning to re-run the race in 2006.

Darpa positioned 10 tow trucks along the race course in anticipation of some robot vehicles needing help.

An audience of several hundred people turned out to watch the start of the race in Barstow, California.

link
 
I got the latest New Scientist as it also has that parapsychology Specila being discussed in another thread - what I find interesting is that the strict election process has inspired an Open Challenge to be held in September so it looks like interesting things ahead :)

Emps
 
The challege it seems was far greater than the vehicles. Perhaps it's been done already but couldn't they have had an easier race to start with. The Mojave desert is not the sort of place that you start working out the problems, perhaps as others have eluded, it was meant to be unbeatable so that no funds were in danger of being awarded, yet the govt still gets to see where this field of science stands.
 
Dammit, team LADIBUG must have failed to qualify - and they were the only ones with a self righting mechanism too.

The thing that strikes me about this is that all of the robots are using active senses like sonar and radar, surely in a combat situation against anyone with moderate technology that's as good as sticking a large beacon on top with a sign that says 'hit me'?

You could probably detect the sonar with something as simple as a handheld bat detector from a few hundred metres, and with more sophisticated equipment the radar for miles around - a nice stream of pulses for a homing missile to lock onto.
 
I think that the idea for the race is great. What concerns me a bit is that in a real war-fighting scenario these vehicles are likely to be easy pickings for the opfor. (Unless they also have some sort of autonomous defence mechanism. :eek!!!!: )
 
The initial requirement is for resupply vehicles, not combat - they want to be able to tell a truck to go and deliver supplies to a specified point.

Looks like the army will be relying on White Van Man (Khaki Van Man? Cammo Van Man?) for some time to come.
 
It was the re-supply scenario that I was thinking about. I believe that it was the long logistics train in Iraq that was one of the things that was targetted by the Iraqi forces.
 
They would probably still need to send them under escort in a "hot" area. But with no drivers to worry about, defending them is probably easier.
 
They would probably still need to send them under escort in a "hot" area. But with no drivers to worry about, defending them is probably easier.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure, a truck with a human driver can engage in evasive manouvers and can communicate with the rest of the convoy about what they're doing and what they should be doing, trying to babysit a semi-intelligent vehicle sounds like more of a liability to me.
 
Uber-nerd warning:

Candidate advocates marriage with robots


Canadian Press
Mar. 11, 2004 10:34 AM

HALIFAX - A computer technician who advocates marriage with robots and polygamy wants to run for the new Conservative Party of Canada.

David Boyd will seek the party's nod for the riding of Dartmouth-Cole Harbour in Nova Scotia at an April 3 nomination meeting.

In a letter last August to the Halifax Daily News, Boyd said revisions to marriage laws are long overdue.

"We must allow for same-sex marriages, multiple-people marriages and android-human marriages," he said.

Boyd, who has run unsuccessfully in past provincial and municipal elections, said this week he's hoping his viewpoint might work in his favor.

"I think it could win me more votes," he said.

"Most conservatives say that we should stay with the traditional form of marriage, but I'm a modern conservative, and I feel that times have changed."

Anything's possible in the future, Boyd said, during a telephone interview from a local tavern.

"Maybe down the road they will have androids, and I think that we should give them just as much rights as humans."

Boyd, 31, admits he's a big fan of Star Trek's blonde Borg bombshell Seven of Nine.

"Data was my second favorite," said Boyd.

For the record, Boyd is married, but not to a robot.

"My wife and I have separated," he said.

Boyd said he has no plans "in the near future" to marry an android.

"Maybe in 10 to 15 years, who knows?" he said.

Boyd's candidacy was approved by the Conservative Party of Canada's interim council, said Jim Cormier, chairman of the local Tory candidate selection committee.

"They've given the OK to Mr. Boyd," Cormier said.

No other Tories have declared yet in Dartmouth-Cole Harbour, but Cormier said Boyd will not be the only candidate vying for the party's nomination.

Last month, Conservative party bosses blocked the candidacy of a former Nova Scotia legislature member who was attempting to make a comeback after an expense scandal ended his political career 20 years ago.

Malcolm MacKay, 60, said the federal party's interim council rejected his candidacy after a news report made reference to his improperly claiming ,000 in expenses for out-of-town travel between 1981 and 1984.
Click to expand...

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0311robot-marriage11-ON.html

You just know he has one of those Living Dolls at home ;)

Emps
 
I have to draw the line at robosexual marriage.
Although, it's the internet, what did you expect.
 
A computer technician who advocates marriage with robots and polygamy
Click to expand...

He'll clearly ***** anything.
(Insert verb of choice here.)
 
"Share and Enjoy, share and enjoy
Journey through life with a plastic boy
Or girl by your side
Let your pal be your guide
And when it breaks down
Or starts to annoy
Or grinds when it moves
And gives you no joy
'Cos its eaten your hat
Or had sex with your cat
Poured oil on your walls
And ripped off your door
And you get to the point
You can't stand any more
Bring it to us, we won't give a fig
We'll tell you:
'Go stick your head in a pig'"
 
Min Bannister said:
"Share and Enjoy, share and enjoy
Journey through life with a plastic boy
Or girl by your side
Let your pal be your guide
And when it breaks down
Or starts to annoy
Or grinds when it moves
And gives you no joy
'Cos its eaten your hat
Or had sex with your cat
Poured oil on your walls
And ripped off your door
And you get to the point
You can't stand any more
Bring it to us, we won't give a fig
We'll tell you:
'Go stick your head in a pig'"
Click to expand...




marriage? dont talk to me about marriage! :D
 
International rescue robot

It has been rather a staple of near future sci fi and it is now here and at 3.5 meteres high it is a frightening beast (just no one mention Call me Kenneth and we'll be able to sleep easy in our beds ;) ).

Japanese firm unveils large robot for disaster rescue work

Thu Mar 25, 9:37 AM ET


TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese company unveiled a 3.5-metre (11.55-foot) tall robot that can forage its way through a heap of debris as a trailblazer for rescue workers following a disaster such as an earthquake.

The five-tonne T-52 Enryu (literally "rescue dragon") is hydraulically operated and equipped with two arms ending in pincer "hands" that can grasp and remove obstacles to help rescuers reach people trapped under rubble.

Each arm is capable of lifting 500 kilogrammes (1,100 pounds) and when they are fully extended the two pincers are 10 metres (33 feet) apart.

The prototype robot was developed by Tmsuk, a company based in the southwestern Japan city of Kita-Kyushu, in cooperation with fire-department officials and university researchers.

The company aims to develop a commercial model by the end of the year.
Click to expand...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/japan_technology_robot

Emps
 
Muscle powered robots

First robot moved by muscle power

18:17 27 February 04



A silicon microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine.

This distinctly futuristic development could lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that would allow paralysed people to breathe without the help of a ventilator. And NASA which is funding the research hopes swarms of crawling "musclebots" could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites.

Whatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles.



Muscle-powered micromachine

He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when he and his team looked into their microscopes, they were amazed to see the latest version of their musclebot crawling around.

The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. Attached to the underside of the arch, the team has grown a cord of heart muscle fibres (see graphic). It is the contraction and relaxation of this cardiac tissue that makes the arch bend and stretch to produce the bot's crawling motion. And the muscle is fuelled by a simple glucose nutrient in a Petri dish.


Arch-shaped skeleton


The prospect of using living muscle to power microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is an attractive alternative to micromotors. While motors need electricity, muscles can draw their energy from glucose - perhaps deposited on the surface where the robot will be working.

The UCLA team's breakthrough is to have developed an automated way of anchoring muscle tissue to a substance like silicon. The team carved an arch-shaped skeleton from a wafer of silicon using automated microchip manufacturing equipment, and coated it with an etchable polymer.

They then etched away the coating on the underside of the arch and deposited a gold film there. This acts as an adherent for the muscle cells. To grow the muscle, the skeleton was placed in a Petri dish containing rat cardiac muscle cells in a glucose culture medium. Over three days, the muscle cells grew into muscle fibres that attached themselves to the gold underside, forming a cable of cardiac muscle running the length of the arch.

During this process, the arch was held in place by a restraining beam. When this was removed the musclebot immediately started crawling at speeds up to 40 micrometres per second. The geometry of the musclebot ensures that its flexing pushes it in one direction, rather than simply contracting and relaxing on the spot.


Phrenic nerve

Montemagno now wants to use the technology to help people who have damaged phrenic nerves. These stimulate the diaphragm to make us breathe and damage means patients often need ventilators instead.

Rather than moving the legs of a musclebot, the muscle fibres would flex a piece of piezoelectric material and generate a few millivolts to stimulate the phrenic nerve. Using cells from the patient's own heart would prevent rejection of the implant, and the muscle could be powered by blood glucose.

Montemagno's initial brief from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts was to design a muscle-powered micromachine that could seek and repair micrometeorite punctures on spacecraft.

However, he stresses that such applications are several decades away. "The issue of all of the microbots talking to one another hasn't even been addressed," he stresses. Or, indeed, how they would be fuelled. Watch out for the sugar-coated space station.
Click to expand...

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994714
 
Teaching Robots to Herd Cats

By Michelle Delio

02:00 AM Apr. 21, 2004 PT

Robots designed for emergency rescue work can survive a six-story drop onto collapsed, jagged concrete. They can be thrown 100 feet into a disaster site. They can even cope with poisonous chemicals, fires, freezing temperatures and floods. But, like most rugged individualists, they don't play well with others.

When robots are set loose at a rescue site, the situation can become chaotic quickly, which lessens the advantage of having a swarm of robots to help human rescuers. There's no way for the robots to coordinate their activities autonomously. A human operator must control them individually, making robotic searches less efficient. Right now, even with state-of-the-art technology, rescue robots essentially lose interest in their tasks when left on their own. They simply wander off or shut down.


To translate the human concept of teamwork into electronics, three teams of university researchers are working together to develop technology that would turn a pack of robots into a single machine.

Led by Nikos Papanikolopoulos, researchers at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania and Caltech are working on software that will allow small robots to coordinate their actions, carry out commands from a single human operator or take directions from a larger, smarter robot.

Papanikolopoulos says that a single robot, or even a half-dozen of them, can't do everything that emergency personnel might need -- such as collecting air samples, testing for toxic fumes or monitoring a large area to find the wounded. Robots have to do much of this work on their own. Humans usually can't control more than three or four robots at one time.

"We've tried it -- anything over four robots and the rescuers are overwhelmed with too much information," says Papanikolopoulos.

"The rescue robots that were used at the World Trade Center site shortly after the towers collapsed had a lot of promise, because they could get into places that people and dogs couldn't access," said Frank Pulliaficaco, a rescue worker.

"But there weren't enough of them to really cover the area, and they just kind of wandered around underground. If we'd had a lot of them, and if they were smarter, they could have been really useful."

Papanikolopoulos' team is working on tiny robots called Scouts, built with off-the-shelf electronics. The Scouts are 3.9 inches long and 1.4 inches in diameter -- roughly the size and shape of the cardboard tube in a roll of toilet paper. The small package incorporates a video camera, three infrared range finders, two light sensors and a pyroelectric sensor (for sensing body heat) -- plus a two-way remote-control system that supports frequency hopping and signal encryption.

The Scouts' sensors make it possible for the research team to program them to perform activities on their own, such as finding a dark location in which to hide, something the robots will happily do.

But the robots aren't really good at wending their way through rescue sites on their own. Papanikolopoulos said the robots "cannot localize themselves effectively. And due to their size and their operation in an urban setting, we cannot use GPS to reliably find the robots' locations. This has a profound negative effect on the ability of these robots to compute maps of the environment around them."

So the teams are also building bigger, smarter robots. An emergency-response robot "dream team" might include a dozen or more Scouts with a combination of sensing devices. The team would be led by a MegaScout, a 15-inch-long sibling of the Scout that can carry larger sensors, a manipulator arm (for opening doors, lifting smaller Scouts and similar tasks) and the processing power to control the Scout team in the field. The robotic team leader could coordinate the smaller robots, perform more complex tasks and report back to a human operator.

Papanikolopoulos said the biggest challenge is developing ways for the robots to communicate with each other and with humans.

"We really underestimated this challenge," Papanikolopoulos said. "We often command the robot to move in a certain direction, but the robot never receives the command. This is usually due to ground effects (the robots are too far underground), antenna design and other interference problems."

The University of Pennsylvania team, led by Kostas Daniilidis, will be working to develop better robotic vision and perception skills, as well as collaborating on ways to develop team coordination among the Scouts. The Caltech researchers, led by Joel Burdick, are experts in sensor-based exploration and real-time mapping technology. Papanikolopoulos and the Minnesota team specialize in digital communication.

The work is supported by a .6 million Information Technology Research award from the National Science Foundation.
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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63099,00.html?tw=wn_techhead_4
 
Dorkbots Are Cool!

June 3, 2004 | home

DEPT. OF INVENTION
INCOMPREHENSIBLE
Issue of 2004-06-07
Posted 2004-05-31

The motto of dorkbot, a group that holds meetings once a month in Manhattan, except in the summer, and in fourteen other cities, including Sofia, Bulgaria, and Mumbai, India, is “People doing strange things with electricity.” At a dorkbot meeting in San Francisco, a speaker presented a design for two twelve-story towers. By means of a generator called a Tesla coil, the towers would produce lightning bolts as long as three hundred feet, which, a colleague said, was desirable, because “real lightning, which is very rarely seen up close, has the ability to focus and clear the mind.” At another meeting, a talk titled “Fire-Spewing Vacuum Cleaners” described a project involving vacuum cleaners fuelled with propane. The speaker called his next endeavor “Things That Might Fly If You Put Enough Rockets on Them.”

Dorkbot was founded by a young man named Douglas Repetto, who teaches computer music at Columbia. “The idea of dorkbot was to reach people who had nowhere to talk about these projects,” Repetto says. “Some might appear in a gallery, perhaps, but many are too odd, or they’re unfinished, or it’s not even clear what they are.” Dorkbot presentations typically feature novel ways of using electrical devices, especially uses that don’t require much money. “Dorkbot is about what you can do on the cheap in a back room somewhere,” he says. The name encourages humility.

Dorkbot meetings are usually held near Columbia, but the May meeting was in SoHo. The room was large, with high ceilings and white walls and columns. About eighty people in folding chairs faced a table on which there were three laptop computers. On the wall was a projection of a grid of colors, which were flashing. A man tried to make the grid disappear. Repetto, who shaves his head and has an athletic build, said, “We’ll get started in a minute. We’re just trying to solve some technical problems.” Then he took photographs of the audience.

The first presenter was a tall man named Spot Draves, whose presentation concerned his Web site, Electric Sheep, on which abstract images constantly change form, in response to information coming from other people’s computers via the Internet. Draves is tall and bald and diffident. “I’m not a big public speaker,” he said. “So I did the program at home, alone, in the dark, which is how I’m most comfortable, and I’m going to play that.” Swirling colors appeared on the wall, and Draves was heard saying mildly, “The project started in ’99. It was based on an algorithm developed in 1992. The title is based on the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,’ by Philip K. Dick.” Draves also said that it represented “the collective dream of sleeping computers all over the Internet.” Now and then he would place his hands at his sides and gather his pant legs, which made his cuffs rise, as if he were preparing to cross a stream. At the end of his talk, he held up a disk and said, “Please buy my DVD. I quit my day job to do this.”

The second presenter was Rich LeGrand, a young engineer who had built a small robot from Legos. The robot had four wheels and was operated by means of a Game Boy. It was about the size of a big crab—it looked like a device a space probe would place on the surface of a planet—and it was capable of a complicated maneuver whereby it rotated at the same time that it moved forward. LeGrand called the maneuver “frisbeeing.” “It’s questionable whether there’s a huge market for this,” he said, “but it’s fun.”

The final presenter, Rob Seward, discussed analyzing Bach chorales according to “the generative theory of tonal music,” which, he said, “takes developments in linguistics in the twentieth century and applies them to music.” Seward was the only presenter who brought his parents. He is tall and thin, with glasses and a beard. When he stood in front of the screen to point at something, the lines of the music staff lay on his cheeks like war paint.

Dorkbot talks are frequently abstruse. The problem, Repetto says, is that the more deeply a speaker explains “the geekiness of what he’s doing, the harder it is to find an audience with a sufficiently broad grasp of the subject to understand.” A listener equipped in one discipline is rarely prepared to handle three. “I try to make a meeting fair by having it be incomprehensible in several different fields, instead of just one,” Repetto said. “Tonight was incomprehensible art, incomprehensible robots, and incomprehensible music, so everybody was a little bit lost.”
— Alec Wilkinson

Copyright © CondéNet 2004. All rights reserved.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040607ta_talk_wilkinson

see also: http://dorkbot.org/

(if you click on dorkbot-london, it would seem that they're due for another meeting soon) :D
 
pity none of them have studies how to design a web page tho...
 
DARPA's debacle in the desert

Behind the scenes at the DARPA Grand Challenge, the 142-mile robot race that died at mile 7


by Joseph Hooper
June 2004


When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying they would pass the qualifying round and be allowed on to what was anticipated to be a 210-mile course from outside Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to somewhere just west of Vegas. The race's organizers, for their part, couldn't quite muster a consensus on how to handicap the event. Race manager and resident sunny optimist Col. Jose Negron unblinkingly predicted that a team would cross the finish line in under 10 hours to claim DARPA's million-dollar prize in the race's inaugural run?yet course designer Sal Fish couldn't bring himself to share this official vision. "It's still hard to get it in my brain," Fish said, "that this is all going to happen with robots."

Chalk one up for Mr. Fish.

Here, to spare you the suspense, is how things looked once the dust had cleared on race day, March 13: Carnegie Mellon University's "Red Team," the presumptive race favorite?in the minds of many race insiders, the only team with a realistic shot at the million-dollar prize?had ended the race at mile 7.4, its Humvee's belly straddling the outer edge of a drop-off, front wheels spinning freely, on fire. SciAutonics II dropped out of the running at mile 6.7, its Israeli dune buggy stuck in an embankment. Digital Auto Drive quit at mile 6.0, its Toyota Tundra stymied by a football-size rock. The Golem Group stopped at mile 5.2, its pickup stuck on a hill with insufficient throttle to move forward. Team Caltech, another race favorite, dropped out at mile 1.3, its Chevy Tahoe SUV having careened off course and through a fence. Team TerraMax, a heavyweight collaboration between Ohio State University and the Oshkosh Trucking Corporation, was out at mile 1.2, stopped of its own accord, a 32,000-pound six-wheel military truck flummoxed by some bushes. These, it should be noted, were the Grand Challenge success stories. The rest of the field went haywire at or just beyond the starting chute in full view of the press who packed the grandstands erected for the event.

The two teams that had become media darlings and unofficial DARPA pets had suffered particularly inglorious flameouts. At the last minute, Anthony Levandowski, the UC Berkeley grad student-cum-visionary behind the Blue Team's autonomous motorcycle, scratched from the race proper, his navigation systems nowhere near race-ready. But, as he proved on an earlier qualifying attempt, Levandowski had successfully realized an ingenious software system that could keep the bike moving forward (or in circles) through constant steering and countersteering corrections. At the Grand Challenge, DARPA agreed to let him stage a remote-control demonstration for the by now autonomous-bike-crazed media.

->
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5 more pages:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/auto/article/0,12543,645759,00.html
 
http://interestalert.com/brand/siteia.shtml?Story=st/sn/06190000aaa0155f.upi&Sys=siteia&Fid=LATEBRKN&Type=News&Filter=Late%20Breaking
Robots named to hall of fame

PITTSBURGH, June 19 (UPI) -- Five robots from both science fiction and technical reality will enter Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh this fall.

The tin-filled hall of fame will add Honda's Asimo bot, Shakey the Robot, Astroboy, C3PO and Robby the Robot.

The panel of robot lovers who selected them included sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke, the BBC reported Sunday.

The android superstars will officially take their place in the Robot Hall of Fame at a ceremony in October.

They will join last year's inductees, the Mars explorer Sojourner, the assembly line Unimate, Hal 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey," and R2-D2 from Star Wars.

"The jury discussed this year's candidates at length and has made some excellent choices," James Morris, founder of the Robot Hall of Fame, told the BBC.

"I'm happy to see some older, historically important robots like Shakey and Robby joining the newer ones like Asimo and C3PO."

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
Click to expand...
 
What, no Terminator or Gunslinger from Westworld? Looks like they are going for the cute, cuddly end of the robot spectrum
 
I sent a vote in for K-9, Kryten off Red Dwarf and R. Daneel Olivaw- none of them got in.
 
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