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More on the fly eating robot:

Technology

Fly-eating robot powers itself

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 Posted: 1750 GMT (0150 HKT)


(CNN) -- Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself.

Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.

Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.

Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision.

"That means they need energy. It is one thing to have a robot getting its energy from a household socket, or maybe from the factory floor, but it is another thing when the robot goes outside buildings," he said.

"Of course, there is solar energy outside. Little robots can use solar energy to move about. But mostly, if there is not a lot of solar energy about, you have to give robots batteries -- which eventually run out."

The EcoBot II powers itself in much the same way as animals feed themselves to get their energy, he said.

At this stage, EcoBot II is a "proof-of-concept" robot and travels only at roughly 10 centimeters per hour.

But the self-sustaining robot had the potential to be used in conditions that were not suitable for humans, said Melhuish.

"In the future, I think we are going to want robots to go to places that we don't want to go. In order to do that, it's unlikely that these robots are going to have sufficient energy to carry out their tasks," he said.

The EcoBot II uses human sewage as bait to catch the insects. It then digests the flies, before their exoskeletons are turned into electricity, which enables the robot to function.

Bacteria in the sewage eats the flies' soft tissues, which releases enzymes that break down the hardened shell.

Sugar molecules released from the broken-down shell are then absorbed and used as energy by the bacteria.

"The robot then has the energy to carry out some example tasks which in this case include moving towards light, measuring temperature. It has a temperature sensor. It could be anything, but we have chosen temperature," Melhuish said.

"Then it transmits that temperature information over a radio link to a base station a couple of meters away and it does that all using the energy from insect or plant material."

source
 
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Roboshark to hunt tourists

By Julianna Kettlewell
BBC News science reporter

The world's only robotic shark is going to make some electronic friends.
The star of last year's BBC documentary, Smart Sharks, will retire to a watery heaven - complete with robotic tuna to feast on.

Roboshark's inventor, Andrew Sneath, has designed a giant aquarium, which will house an impressive panoply of robotic fish in a seven metre deep tank.

Visitors will be invited to explore the aquatic world of robots from the safety of little submarine pods.

Indeed, tourists will be very glad of their bite-proof pods, because Roboshark is programmed to enjoy a spot of human hunting.

The purpose-built complex, which will be situated near Birmingham, is expected to open in 2006.

"The tank is really a stage," Andrew Sneath told the BBC News website. "There will be all sorts of special effects with lights and bubbles. It should look amazing."

Shark intelligence

In its original role, Roboshark swam with wild sharks while carrying a movie camera on its head, so it could film them behaving in a natural way.

Its handiwork was screened in a BBC documentary about shark intelligence, narrated by David Attenborough.

During filming, Roboshark swam with whale sharks, the largest fish on the planet, and navigated its way through murky mangrove swamps to rub fins with fearsome bull sharks.

After the programme had been completed, Andrew Sneath loaned Roboshark to the National Aquarium in Plymouth, where it attracted 4,000 visitors a day.

Now the electronic beast's ability to draw the crowds will be put to good use in the 3,600 square metre "Hydrodome".

The innovative leisure centre will contain a 40m diameter aquarium, which the designers hope will encourage interest in robotics, artificial intelligence and marine technologies.

"There is an education side to this," explained Mr Sneath. "In the Hydrodome we are going to have robot labs for kids and adults to learn about building and programming a robot."

Roboshark's companions will include a shoal of robotic tuna - dubbed Tintuna - and a collection of robotic sting rays.

Andrew Sneath will programme all the fish to behave in as natural a way as possible.

"The Tintuna school like real fish," Mr Sneath said. "They have cameras in their eyes, and will group together when they see the shark as a protective measure."

Roboshark will also be programmed to chase the tuna, but only if it catches one on its own.

"If a tuna leaves the group, the shark will chase it," said Mr Sneath. "And if it catches one it will stun it. The fish will go all catatonic and float to the surface for a while.

"And our stingrays won't like light - if a diver shines a touch on them they will shoot for cover."

Diver training

As well as tourists, who will buzz about under the water in their mini submarines, the Hydrodome will also welcome trainee scuba divers.

Bob Tattrie, President of the Bromsgrove Diving Club, has already had a sneak preview of Tintuna and Roboshark in action.

"We swam with the tuna and it was really good," he said. "It swims like a real fish even if it didn't quite look like one."

Mr Tattrie also believes the facility will be useful for training novice divers.

He said: "I think the Hydrodome project is very exciting and we would like to use the facilities.

"Having robotic fish swimming about will give new divers familiarity because trainees are not used to having fish around them."


Source
 
Combine those two previous reports and this one and we have Judgement Day drawing a little closer:

Thursday January 6, 7:21 PM

South Korea claims world's smartest robot


SEOUL (AFP) - South Korean scientists said they had developed the world's smartest robot able to think and learn like a human.

Unveiling their creation, they said the robot that looks like a small teenager wearing a blue and grey space suit was the first wireless network-based human-like robot.

It can become wiser through learning because unlike other robots, the device is linked with an outside computer through a high-speed wireless telecom network, and is able to exchange information with the server and respond quickly to real-life environments.

"This is the first network-based humanoid in the world," said You Bum-Jae of the state-financed Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), introducing the 150-centimeter (60 inches)-high robot weighing 67 kilogrammes (147 pounds).

"We developed this humanoid focusing on intelligence capability by taking advantage of networking technology in which South Korea is strong," he said.

Unlike already-developed humanoids whose intelligence capabilities are largely fixed with built-in circuits, the network-based humanoid relies on its outside server whose capacity can be expanded easily.

Equipped with visual and force sensors, the new robot detects movements and speech, then sends the data to the server for processing and receives directions allowing it to interact with people and the environment.

At the unveiling here, the robot replied to New Year greetings from a TV commentator and shook hands with him.

It can recognize its master, detect and analyze visual and audio signals, and people's movements.

When showed a 10,000 won (10 dollars) bank note, it said: "That's a 10,000 bank note that people would like to have."

When asked about its name, it said: "I am sorry. I don't have a name yet. Please give me one."

Then it waved its hands, saying: "I will see you again next time when I will have become wiser."

Its creators say the new robot's ability to move and walk lags behind that of the ASIMO developed by Honda of Japan. It can walk to and fro and diagonally at a maximum speed of 0.9 kilometers (0.56 miles) per hour while ASIMO is capable of running at a speed of three kilometers per hour.

The new robot is an amalgam of various technologies including those for real-time data transmission, visual, audio and force sensors as well as high-speed processing.

"Aside from enhancing its intelligence, we will make efforts to develop its capability of recognizing objects and handling them," said You of KIST.

"This robot could be used in the future as an assistant at home and offices who is highly intelligent and always ready to serve you."

Source
 
Emperor said:
Combine those two previous reports and this one and we have Judgement Day drawing a little closer:

Thursday January 6, 7:21 PM

South Korea claims world's smartest robot

"This robot could be used in the future as an assistant at home and offices who is highly intelligent and always ready to serve you."

Source


like working in burger bars. until theyve taken so much crap from customers, they go "postal"?
 
Ethics for the Robot Age

Should bots carry weapons? Should they win patents? Questions we must answer as automation advances.

By Jordan Pollack

Most people's expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity.

Both visions are wrong. The artificial intelligence to animate robots remains several orders of magnitude less than what's needed. We have to master either software engineering or self-organization before our most intelligent designers can dare play in the same league as Mother Nature.

My definition of a robot is any device controlled by software that can work 24/7 and put people out of work. The machines are not intelligent. They cannot comprehend Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to protect and obey humans before preserving themselves. Yet they are all around us. In case you missed them, today's most popular robots are ATMs and computer printers.

While our hopes for and fears of robots may be overblown, there is plenty to worry about as automation progresses. The future will have many more robots, and they'll most certainly be much more advanced. This raises important ethical questions that we must begin to confront.

1. Should robots be humanoid? Humanlike robots today are showbots, created for marketing purposes. They allow corporations to display technological machismo, wooing consumers to trust their cars and stereos. The risk is not humanoids running amok, but that as these electronic puppets become more lifelike, they become door-to-door spambots who trick people into buying snake oil and junk bonds.

2. Should humans become robots? We are nearing an age in which humans and computers may be connected via direct neural interfaces, technology indistinguishable from telepathy and telekinesis. In the input direction, computers might use electrodes to format information for our brains to understand. In the output direction, humans might be trained to think in distinct ways so that sensors and software could classify thoughts into signals to control equipment. While potentially beneficial for paraplegics, there's the frightening opportunity for using animals as cheap, disposable robot bodies.

3. Should robots excrete byproducts? When cars were invented, no one imagined that hundreds of millions of them would spew carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. But they do, and yet we still feel entitled to drive them. Imagine the pollution levels if we add hundreds of millions of robots powered by internal combustion engines.

4. Should robots eat? There are proposals to allow robots to gain energy by combusting biological matter, either food or waste items. If this mode of fuel becomes popular, will we really want to compete for resources against our own technological progeny?

5. Should telerobotic labor be regulated? A telerobot is an electronic puppet controlled across a wire by a human using a PC and devices like joysticks and gloves. Consider replacing the on-site operator with a $10-per-day handler in an overseas call center. Instead of outsourcing jobs, we could import brains over broadband to manage machinery in factories, to teach in schools, or to clean houses. Should local labor laws apply to overseas workers who telecommute?

6. Should robots carry weapons? We must distinguish autonomous robot weapons from remote control armaments - unmanned telerobots supervised by humans. The ethical difference between the two: Who's responsible for pulling the trigger?

7. Should machines be awarded patents? Evolutionary software has already designed simple circuits, as well as physical mechanisms like the ratchet and cantilever. As these automatic design systems improve and progress from simple geometric forms to novel integrated systems, intellectual property laws must change. If a robot invents, does the patent go to its owner or the patent holder of its artificial intelligence?

These questions are the beginning of a dialog that should precede, rather than react to, the enormous social, economic, and legal changes wrought by continued automation. Managed correctly, the increased labor and intelligence provided by machines can lead to greater human prosperity and improved conditions on Earth. We need reasonable policies informed by the robots of reality, not of fantasy.

Jordan Pollack (www.jordanpollack.com) is a professor of computer science and complex systems at Brandeis University.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.0 ... _tophead_5
 
'Living' robots powered by muscle

By Roland Pease
BBC radio science unit

Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The devices were formed by "growing" rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials.

Less than a millimetre long, the miniscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power.

The work is a dramatic example of the marriage of biotechnology with the tiny world of nanotechnology.

In nanotechnology, researchers often turn to the natural world for inspiration.

But Professor Carlo Montemagno, of the University of California, Los Angeles, turns to nature not for ideas, but for actual starting materials.

In the past he has made rotary nano-motors out of genetically engineered proteins. Now he has grown muscle tissue onto tiny robotic skeletons.

Living device

Montemano's team used rat heart cells to create a tiny device that moves on its own when the cells contract. A second device looks like a minute pair of frog legs.

"The bones that we're using are either a plastic or they're silicon based," he said. "So we make these really fine structures that mechanically have hinges that allow them to move and bend.

"And then by nano-scale manipulation of the surface chemistry, the muscle cells get the cues to say, 'Oh! I want to attach at this point and not to attach at another point'. And so the cells assemble, then they undergo a change, so that they actually form a muscle.

"Now you have a device that has a skeleton and muscles on it to allow it to move."

Under a microscope, you can see the tiny, two-footed "bio-bots" crawl around.

Professor Montemagno says muscles like these could be used in a host of microscopic devices - even to drive miniature electrical generators to power computer chips.

But when biological cells become attached to silicon - are they alive?

"They're absolutely alive," Professor Montemagno told BBC News. "I mean the cells actually grow, multiply and assemble - they form the structure themselves. So the device is alive."

The notion is likely to disturb many who already have concerns about nanotechnology.

But for Carlo Montemagno, a professor of engineering, it makes sense to match the solutions that nature has already found through billions of years of evolution to the newest challenges in technology.

------------------------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/s ... 181197.stm

Published: 2005/01/17 13:25:10 GMT

© BBC MMV
 
Have they learned nothing from the fillums????

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Army Prepares 'Robo-Soldier' for Iraq


By MICHAEL P. REGAN
AP Business Writer

January 22, 2005, 8:51 PM EST

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. -- The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside. But the weather couldn't matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun pointing the way like Pinocchio's nose. The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning in March or April.

Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp.

It's easy to humanize the SWORDS (a tendency robotics researchers say is only human) as it moves out of the flashy lobby of an office building and into the cold with nary a shiver.

Military officials like to compare the roughly three-foot-high robots favorably to human soldiers: They don't need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They never complain. And there are no letters to write home if they meet their demise in battle.

But officials are quick to point out that these are not the autonomous killer robots of science fiction. A SWORDS robot shoots only when its human operator presses a button after identifying a target on video shot by the robot's cameras.

"The only difference is that his weapon is not at his shoulder, it's up to half a mile a way," said Bob Quinn, general manager of Talon robots for Foster-Miller Inc., the Waltham, Mass., company that makes the SWORDS. As one Marine fresh out of boot camp told Quinn upon seeing the robot: "This is my invisibility cloak."

Quinn said it was a "bootstrap development process" to convert a Talon robot, which has been in military service since 2000, from its main mission -- defusing roadside bombs in Iraq_ into the gunslinging SWORDS.

It was a joint development process between the Army and Foster-Miller, a robotics firm bought in November by QinetiQ Group PLC, which is a partnership between the British Ministry of Defence and the Washington holding company The Carlyle Group.

Army officials and employees of the robotics firm heard from soldiers "who said 'My brothers are being killed out here. We love the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal), but let's put some weapons on it,'" said Quinn.

Working with soldiers and engineers at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, it took just six months and only about $2 million in development money to outfit a Talon with weapons, according to Quinn and Anthony Sebasto, a technology manager at Picatinny.

The Talon had already proven itself to be pretty rugged. One was blown off the roof of a Humvee and into a nearby river by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Soldiers simply opened its shrapnel-pocked control unit and drove the robot out of the river, according to Quinn.

The $200,000, armed version will carry standard-issue Squad Automatic Weapons, either the M249, which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at a rate of 750 per minute, or the M240, which can fire about 700 to 1,000 7.62-millimeter rounds per minute. The SWORDS can fire about 300 rounds using the M240 and about 350 rounds using the M249 before needing to reload.

All its optics equipment -- the four cameras, night vision and zoom lenses -- were already in the Army's inventory.

"It's important to stress that not everything has to be super high tech," said Sebasto. "You can integrate existing componentry and create a revolutionary capability."

The SWORDS in the parking lot at the headquarters of the cable news station CNBC had just finished showing off for the cameras, climbing stairs, scooting between cubicles, even broadcasting some of its video on the air.

Its developers say its tracks, like those on a tank, can overcome rock piles and barbed wire, though it needs a ride to travel faster than 4 mph.

Running on lithium ion batteries, it can operate for 1 to 4 hours at a time, depending on the mission. Operators work the robot using a 30-pound control unit which has two joysticks, a handful of buttons and a video screen. Quinn says that may eventually be replaced by a "Gameboy" type of controller hooked up to virtual reality goggles.

The Army has been testing it over the past year at Picatinny and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland to ensure it won't malfunction and can stand up to radio jammers and other countermeasures. (Sebasto wouldn't comment on what happens if the robot and its controller fall into enemy hands.)

Its developers say the SWORDS not only allows its operators to fire at enemies without exposing themselves to return fire, but also can make them more accurate.

A typical soldier who could hit a target the size of a basketball from 300 meters away could hit a target the size of a nickel with the SWORDS, according Quinn.

The better accuracy stems largely from the fact that its gun is mounted on a stable platform and fired electronically, rather than by a soldier's hands, according to Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos of the EOD Technology Directorate at Picatinny. Gone are such issues as trigger recoil, anticipation problems, and pausing the breathing cycle while aiming a weapon.

"It eliminates the majority of shooting errors you would have," said Tordillos.

Chances are good the SWORDS will get even more deadly in the future. It has been tested with the larger .50 caliber machine guns as well as rocket and grenade launchers -- even an experimental weapon made by the Australian company Metal Storm LLC that packs multiple rocket rounds into a single barrel, allowing for much more rapid firing.

"We've fired 70 shots at Picatinny and we were 70 for 70 hitting the bull's-eye," said Sebasto, boasting of the arsenal's success with a Vietnam-era rocket launcher mounted on a SWORDS.

There are bound to be many eyes watching SWORDS as it heads to battle. Its tracks will one day be followed by the larger vehicles of the Future Combat System, such as six-wheel-drive MULE under development by Lockheed Martin, a 2.5-ton vehicle with motors in each wheel hub to make it more likely to survive.

The Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also recently awarded contracts to aid research of robots that one day could be dropped into combat from airplanes and others meant to scale walls using electrostatic energy -- also known as "static cling."

Many of the vehicles being developed for the FCS will have some autonomy, meaning they'll navigate rough terrain, avoid obstacles and make decisions about certain tasks on their own.

They may be able to offer cues to their operators when potential foes are near, but it's doubtful any of them will ever be allowed to make the decision to pull the trigger, according to Jim Lowrie, president of Perceptek Inc., a Littleton, Colo., firm that is developing robotics systems for the military.

"For the foreseeable future, there always will be a person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That's a hard problem to determine autonomously," said Lowrie.

------------------------
Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press

Source

A slightly shorter version but with pictures.
 
Machine learns games 'like a human'


A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers.

CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own "hypotheses" about the game's rules.

Full story:


http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6914
 
Spherical Robot

A spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders has been developed by a Swedish start-up company.

The design was first developed with planetary exploration in mind, at the Ångström Space Technology Center, part of Uppsala University, Sweden. But Rotundus, formed in December 2004 plan to market the ball-shaped bot as an automated security guard.

"We knew it would have applications on Earth," says company CEO Nils Hulth. "It is very robust when compared to robots that use wheels or tracks and can travel through mud or even snow."

A short video (14.5MB mpeg) on the company's website demonstrates the robot's ability to navigate through snow.

It is propelled by a pendulum suspended from an axis inside the casing, controlled by a motor. Moving the pendulum forwards causes the robot roll along, but the pendulum can also swing from side to side, giving the robot the ability to steer left and right. An animation also available on the Rotundus website illustrates the locomotion mechanism in action.
Patrol route

The finished version of the robot will follow a patrol route using an internal GPS sensor, Hulth says. Wide angle cameras fitted to the sides of the robot should allow it to record and transmit video footage back to a controller. And the next version will also have enough power to propel itself up slopes, he says.

Ultimately, the company hopes to make the robot virtually autonomous. It is currently developing a radar sensor to allow it to navigate around obstacles and motion-sensing software to automatically detect an intruder. "It will sound the alarm, allowing a remote controller to take over and get even better pictures," Hulth says.

Tony Hirst, a roboticist with the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, told New Scientist the robot's spherical design could make it more nimble than other robots in certain situations. It would be less prone to getting stuck in corner, for example. Hirst also notes that some US companies already offer indoor security robots that can autonomously patrol a factory floor.

Hulth concedes that the robot is not well suited to navigating inside a building, where it would face steps, stairs and other obstacles.
Scrambling legs

Other robots being developed could be much better suited to indoor tasks, however. For example, researchers at Case Western University in Cleveland, US, are working on insect-inspired bots that can overcome irregular surfaces and steps.

These robots use a combination of wheels and legs to scramble over terrain and are therefore dubbed "whegs". A video (35MB mpeg) of various whegs in action reveals a form of locomotion akin to that of a large insect.

"Three spoked appendages, called wheel-legs, combine the speed and simplicity of wheels with the high mobility of legs," the researchers write on the project's website. "The robot can surmount obstacles significantly greater than the radius of the wheel-legs - a difficult feat for wheeled vehicles."

The latest Mini Whegs have also been given a mechanism that allows them to leap up a small step, as another video (0.7MB mov) made by the team shows.
 
Blimey - I see the future adn it doesn't look healthy for us humans:

Sex and the single robot

Jonathan Watts, East Asia correspondent
Wednesday February 2, 2005
The Guardian

Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning.

Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire.

Kim, a leading authority on technology and ethics of robotics, said: "Christians may not like it, but we must consider this the origin of an artificial species. Until now, most researchers in this field have focused only on the functionality of the machines, but we think in terms of the essence of the creatures." That "essence" is a computer code, which determines a robot's propensity to "feel" happy, sad, angry, sleepy, hungry or afraid. Kim says this software is modelled on human DNA, though equivalent to a single strand of genetic code rather than the complex double helix of a real chromosome.

Kim said: "Robots will have their own personalities and emotion and - as films like I Robot warn - that could be very dangerous for humanity. If we can provide a robot with good - soft - chromosomes, they may not be such a threat."

Although he admits his ideas sound fantastic, Kim is no crank. In the mid-1990s, the professor launched the robot football world cup, which has since become one of the most popular means for robotics researchers to measure their progress against competitors from around the world.

Source
 
Robot wars

Technology guru Ray Kurzweil offers a vision of future fighting machines.

At the 24th Army Science Conference, held in Orlando, Florida last December, Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote address entitled "Warfighting in the 21st Century". News@nature quizzed this renowned commentator on robotics about his views on future warfare.

How will warfare change in the next 50 years?

Within 25 years, non-biological intelligence will match human intelligence in areas in which humans now excel, principally in pattern recognition. It will combine these abilities with the inherent advantages of machine intelligence, such as speed, easy sharing of knowledge and skills. One implication will be that we will enhance our own biological intelligence through direct connection with non-biological intelligence.

Already, our abilities benefit from close collaboration with machines. Within 50 years, the non-biological portion of the intelligence of our civilization will predominate. Applying non-biological intelligence to areas such as strategy, decision-making and intelligent weapons will characterize military power.

You imply that one of the primary aims will, or should, be to remove humans from direct combat. How would that happen?

The US army's Armed Predator, a small, unmanned plane equipped with a laser, is a harbinger of an important trend. There is no reason why a human has to be inside a weapon. He or she can be in an appropriate virtual-reality environment and control the weapon from there.

Cyberspace will be a key battlefield

Ray Kurzweil




This allows the weapon to be smaller, to take much greater risks and to dispense with life-support systems. It also puts the onus on secure communications. These weapons will develop increasingly sophisticated abilities to make their own tactical decisions.

Where will the future battlefields be? Will they include cyberspace?

One major development will be swarms of nano-engineered devices. Already, the US Department of Defense's Smart Dust project has prototypes that can reconnoitre. For example, millions of sensors can detect detailed movement of humans and machines in a large area. Ultimately they will be able to explore substantial terrains stealthily, perhaps looking for specific individuals. In a decade, they will be capable of performing offensive missions.

Cyberspace will be a key battlefield. With software running in and around our bodies and brains, software integrity and security will a key strategic issue.

How does your vision of robotic, virtual-reality warfare square with the notion that many modern wars involve terrorism or suicide attacks in civilian settings?

Centralized structures such as buildings, aeroplanes and cities are targets for terrorism, but decentralized, self-organizing systems are far more secure: meetings conducted through the Internet will not be subject to physical attack, and these will move towards full immersion virtual reality environments. And if we devise decentralized sources of energy, for example, nanotech solar panels and nanoengineered fuel cells, these will be less easy to disrupt. Decentralization of our infrastructure will result in suicide bombers becoming less of an issue. On the other hand, the ability of a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered virus will introduce new dangers. There are emerging strategies for dealing with this - for example applying RNA interference to combat newly introduced viral pathogens - but we need to increase the priority of developing these defences. Similar issues will arise when we have full molecular nanotechnology.

You suggest that one key concept is decentralization. Is there any reason to believe that military leaders will grant their 'agents' the necessary autonomy?

We are already seeing increased deployment of special forces that include intelligence agents who are empowered to make significant, on-the-ground decisions. Military tactics have largely moved beyond large massed armies.

The same applies to information and secrecy. Self-organization typically relies on local rather than global information, but will that require shifts in military thinking?

One key issue is giving tactical authority to machine intelligence. There is a hesitancy to do this, but as machine intelligence gains in sophistication, the line between strategic and tactical decision-making gradually changes. In 20 years, a human commander is likely to give her swarm of weapons a command to "Take that hill," leaving the tactical details to the swarm.

Do you have the impression that the military is genuinely ready to change the way it operates? There must be a lot of inertia in such a system.

The unexpected success of Armed Predator, and similar projects, has had a major impact. Technology typically moves in an incremental fashion rather than a single leap, but with each generation of technology taking less time than the last, this evolutionary process is moving more quickly.

Wars of conquest or permanent occupation seem increasingly unlikely. Granting that technology will change, what will wars themselves be about?

There was a major trend towards democracy in the 1990s, fuelled by decentralized electronic communication. We're not fully there but I believe this trend will continue. So a key struggle will be against fundamentalism, against groups animated by a desire to keep things the way they are, or were. These struggles will tend not to be classical struggles between nation states.

Where should a nation's priorities lie: in avoiding war, or in strengthening defences?

One can argue that these are not incompatible. Many of the elements of avoiding war are not military issues, but ones of promoting political stability, education, and other elements of societies in which all members have a stake. From a military angle, we will need to strengthen international cooperation, as modern dangers are global issues. Missiles, biological viruses, and information pathogens all travel around the world without regard for national boundaries.

What would you say to sceptics who argue that vast technological superiority has not prevented the US from suffering significant casualties in its current conflict?

The order of magnitude of US casualties in Desert Storm, the Balkans and the recent Iraq war are around a thousand deaths; Vietnam produced on the order of 100,000 US deaths, and casualties in earlier wars were much higher.

Perceptions of casualties are skewed because each event is brought to our living rooms in high resolution In the Second World War, there were single battles with tens of thousands of casualties that generated only grainy newsreels seen weeks later in movie theatres.

Does new technology, and in particular the 'singularity' that you have identified in its rate of change, make war more or less likely?

I think classical wars will occur less often. Decentralized communication such as the Internet is inherently a democratizing force, and has been behind the move towards greater democracy in the world. Although not a perfect system, democracies tend not to fight wars against each other. Future conflicts will tend to be with smaller groups who will try to amplify their impact by finding vulnerabilities in our technological infrastructure.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050207/ ... 207-7.html
 
Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News

February 9, 2005
Octopuses, those boneless, brainy, denizens of the deep, use their arms for some tasks in much the same way humans do, according to a new study.

Theoretically, there are any number of ways an octopus could use its long flexible arms to move an object. But the method they actually use is surprisingly close to how animals with rigid skeletons—including humans—do it, scientists say.


When hunting and grabbing dinner, the octopus uses all the flexibility the arm is capable of. But to bring captured prey to its mouth, the octopus turns the arm into a semi-rigid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length.

Understanding how the octopus controls eight flexible arms all at once could be the basis for developing the next generation of flexible robotic arms—long a goal among robotics engineers.

"Our specific aim in this project is to learn from nature how to build and control a flexible-arm robot," said Binyamin Hochner, a biologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the co-authors of the study. "And indeed our studies show how the octopus simplifies the complex problems associated with controlling flexible arms that have an infinitely large number of degrees of freedom. This in turn inspires the development of new strategies for the control of flexible robotic arms."

Quasi-Jointed Cephalopod

With more than a 250 species, octopuses are members of an ancient group of animals called cephalopods. The giant Pacific octopus (Octopus dofleini) can grow to over 20 feet (6 meters) and weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms). The tiny Californian octopus (Octopus micropyrsus), by contrast, is no more than half an inch to an inch (1.3 to 2.5 centimeters) long.

There have been numerous accounts of (and searches for) an as yet unknown species of deep-sea octopus that is believed to grow to over 100 feet (30 meters) across and weigh several tons.

Octopuses have intrigued scientists for years, because they have both long- and short-term memory, they remember solutions to problems, and they can go on to solve the same or similar problems. They have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open holds in search of crabs. They can figure out mazes, open jars, and break out of their aquariums in search of food.

The arms are composed almost entirely of muscle, with no bone or external skeleton—a structure known as a muscular hydrostat. Elephant trunks and tongues are other examples of a muscular hydrostat.

Earlier research funded by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) suggests that, to keep the arms from constantly tangling themselves up, each arm has an independent peripheral nervous system and neural circuitry (see related-story link below). This allows the brain to essentially give a command—"Arm Four, fetch that tasty crab crawling by"—and have the arm carry out the order without the brain thinking about it again.

This ability is combined with excellent eyesight. Once an octopus spots its prey, it has a remarkable ability to reach out with one of its arms and grab it with one of the suckers that form a double line up each of the octopus's arms.

Some scientists studying octopus arms conclude that they may represent the optimal design for robotic arms.

"If you had something—a person, say—floating in a water column or in space, a straight mechanical arm is likely to push it away," said Thomas McKenna, a project officer at the ONR. "But an arm you could use to gently wrap around an object and retrieve it, that would be useful."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... topus.html
 
Scorpion robot could conquer worlds
Jessica Ebert
Walking machine may go where wheeled explorers cannot.





The Scorpion robot mimics the walking style of its living counterpart.

© NASA

Planetary rovers may soon have an eight-legged mechanized side-kick to help them explore distant planets. The Scorpion robot is able to descend steep cliffs, climb rough terrain, and squeeze into crannies that are inaccessible to larger, wheeled vehicles.

The dog-sized prototype is the brainchild of Frank Kirchner, a robotics specialist at the University of Bremen in Germany. It is currently being evaluated at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Some of the most interesting places on Mars are on the faces of cliffs or in areas that are too small or rocky for a car-sized rover to reach, says Silvano Colombano, a NASA scientist and collaborator on the project at Ames. A Scorpion, however, could "go into these areas, look at the geology and pick up samples", he suggests.




Click Here for a video of the Scorpion in action.

© NASA Media box

Walking robotics is a relatively new field, and engineers are taking cues from biology to give these machines versatile locomotive capabilities. The Scorpion, for example, moves by following an internally generated pattern based on the movement of its real-life counterparts. "The program has the flexibility to allow [the robot] to adapt to the environment," says Colombano. Essentially, he says, it has "reflexes that take over at the point when the motion is somehow obstructed".

The manoeuvring abilities of the Scorpion come at a price, however. The robot is too small to carry lots of power. "It needs to be connected to a larger robot that can provide it with power, or recharge it," says Colombano. Once this technical kink is ironed out, the Scorpion should aid complex roving missions.

Researchers could also use the robot on Earth, to investigate mines or search for earthquake survivors trapped in rubble.


http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050207/ ... 07-14.html
 
Published online: 8 February 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050207-7

Robot wars

Philip Ball

Technology guru Ray Kurzweil offers a vision of future fighting machines.
At the 24th Army Science Conference, held in Orlando, Florida last December, Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote address entitled "Warfighting in the 21st Century". News@nature quizzed this renowned commentator on robotics about his views on future warfare.

How will warfare change in the next 50 years?

Within 25 years, non-biological intelligence will match human intelligence in areas in which humans now excel, principally in pattern recognition. It will combine these abilities with the inherent advantages of machine intelligence, such as speed, easy sharing of knowledge and skills. One implication will be that we will enhance our own biological intelligence through direct connection with non-biological intelligence.

Already, our abilities benefit from close collaboration with machines. Within 50 years, the non-biological portion of the intelligence of our civilization will predominate. Applying non-biological intelligence to areas such as strategy, decision-making and intelligent weapons will characterize military power.

You imply that one of the primary aims will, or should, be to remove humans from direct combat. How would that happen?

The US army's Armed Predator, a small, unmanned plane equipped with a laser, is a harbinger of an important trend. There is no reason why a human has to be inside a weapon. He or she can be in an appropriate virtual-reality environment and control the weapon from there.

Cyberspace will be a key battlefield

Ray Kurzweil

This allows the weapon to be smaller, to take much greater risks and to dispense with life-support systems. It also puts the onus on secure communications. These weapons will develop increasingly sophisticated abilities to make their own tactical decisions.


Where will the future battlefields be? Will they include cyberspace?

One major development will be swarms of nano-engineered devices. Already, the US Department of Defense's Smart Dust project has prototypes that can reconnoitre. For example, millions of sensors can detect detailed movement of humans and machines in a large area. Ultimately they will be able to explore substantial terrains stealthily, perhaps looking for specific individuals. In a decade, they will be capable of performing offensive missions.

Cyberspace will be a key battlefield. With software running in and around our bodies and brains, software integrity and security will a key strategic issue.


How does your vision of robotic, virtual-reality warfare square with the notion that many modern wars involve terrorism or suicide attacks in civilian settings?

Centralized structures such as buildings, aeroplanes and cities are targets for terrorism, but decentralized, self-organizing systems are far more secure: meetings conducted through the Internet will not be subject to physical attack, and these will move towards full immersion virtual reality environments. And if we devise decentralized sources of energy, for example, nanotech solar panels and nanoengineered fuel cells, these will be less easy to disrupt. Decentralization of our infrastructure will result in suicide bombers becoming less of an issue. On the other hand, the ability of a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered virus will introduce new dangers. There are emerging strategies for dealing with this - for example applying RNA interference to combat newly introduced viral pathogens - but we need to increase the priority of developing these defences. Similar issues will arise when we have full molecular nanotechnology.


You suggest that one key concept is decentralization. Is there any reason to believe that military leaders will grant their 'agents' the necessary autonomy?

We are already seeing increased deployment of special forces that include intelligence agents who are empowered to make significant, on-the-ground decisions. Military tactics have largely moved beyond large massed armies.


The same applies to information and secrecy. Self-organization typically relies on local rather than global information, but will that require shifts in military thinking?

One key issue is giving tactical authority to machine intelligence. There is a hesitancy to do this, but as machine intelligence gains in sophistication, the line between strategic and tactical decision-making gradually changes. In 20 years, a human commander is likely to give her swarm of weapons a command to "Take that hill," leaving the tactical details to the swarm.


Do you have the impression that the military is genuinely ready to change the way it operates? There must be a lot of inertia in such a system.

The unexpected success of Armed Predator, and similar projects, has had a major impact. Technology typically moves in an incremental fashion rather than a single leap, but with each generation of technology taking less time than the last, this evolutionary process is moving more quickly.


Wars of conquest or permanent occupation seem increasingly unlikely. Granting that technology will change, what will wars themselves be about?

There was a major trend towards democracy in the 1990s, fuelled by decentralized electronic communication. We're not fully there but I believe this trend will continue. So a key struggle will be against fundamentalism, against groups animated by a desire to keep things the way they are, or were. These struggles will tend not to be classical struggles between nation states.


Where should a nation's priorities lie: in avoiding war, or in strengthening defences?

One can argue that these are not incompatible. Many of the elements of avoiding war are not military issues, but ones of promoting political stability, education, and other elements of societies in which all members have a stake. From a military angle, we will need to strengthen international cooperation, as modern dangers are global issues. Missiles, biological viruses, and information pathogens all travel around the world without regard for national boundaries.


What would you say to sceptics who argue that vast technological superiority has not prevented the US from suffering significant casualties in its current conflict?

The order of magnitude of US casualties in Desert Storm, the Balkans and the recent Iraq war are around a thousand deaths; Vietnam produced on the order of 100,000 US deaths, and casualties in earlier wars were much higher.

Perceptions of casualties are skewed because each event is brought to our living rooms in high resolution In the Second World War, there were single battles with tens of thousands of casualties that generated only grainy newsreels seen weeks later in movie theatres.


Does new technology, and in particular the 'singularity' that you have identified in its rate of change, make war more or less likely?

I think classical wars will occur less often. Decentralized communication such as the Internet is inherently a democratizing force, and has been behind the move towards greater democracy in the world. Although not a perfect system, democracies tend not to fight wars against each other. Future conflicts will tend to be with smaller groups who will try to amplify their impact by finding vulnerabilities in our technological infrastructure.

Source
 
Robotic ball to chase burglars

Greets

Robotic ball to chase burglars

A robotic black ball, originally designed for use on Mars, could be used to catch burglars.

The device acts as a high-tech security guard capable of detecting an intruder thanks to radar and infra-red sensors.

Once alerted, the 2ft black ball can summon help, sound an alarm or pursue the intruders, taking pictures, at speeds of up to 20mph.

It can go faster than a human being on foot and can still give chase over mud, snow and water, reports the Telegraph.

It was originally designed by scientists at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to survey the surface of Mars.

Nils Hulth, co-founder of Rotundus, the company which is marketing the ball, said it was especially well-suited to patrolling perimeter fences.

"It is extremely light, which is why it moves so fast," Mr Hulth said.

While the current version can only raise the alarm, it could be adapted to corner an intruder if the customer wanted, Mr Hulth added.

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1283249.html

mal
 
Greets

(in case anyone missed this)

Robotic relief - an apology

On September 11, we published a story suggesting that Indian scientists had invented a robot with the ability to improve couple's sex lives.

This was based on a report in an Indian newspaper. However, we have since learnt that the story was not true and it has been removed from our site.

We would like to apologise to Honda, the company responsible for the ASIMO robot

http://www.ananova.com/about/story/sm_820548.html

mal
 
<headline>Robot Soldiers A Reality</headline>


ROBOT SOLDIERS A REALITY The US military is gradually edging closer to unleashing a new model army of robot soldiers on the battlefield.Robots are expected to become a major fighting force within US Army ranks in less than a decade. Technological advances allow them to hunt and kill enemies while their human controllers remain a safe distance away, carefully monitoring proceedings through a laptop. The 67.3 billion Future Combat Systems contract is the biggest in US military history and officials are making rapid progress.

While not yet ready to be used as a fighting force, hundreds of robots have been deployed to dig up roadside bombs in Iraq, scour caves in Afghanistan and guard weapons depots.

By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute, will be at work in Baghdad. The one metre-tall 'soldiers' will be equipped with tank tracks, night vision and mounted automatic weapons. 'They don't get hungry, they're not afraid, they don't forget their orders,' Gordon Johnson, from the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon, told the New York Times. 'They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.' Experts say the new generation of soldiers will be increasingly capable of thinking, seeing and reacting like humans.

The first models will only shoot when a human operator presses a button after identifying a target on video shot by the robot's cameras.

Automated forces could save lives but the cost is expected to drive the US defence budget up by almost 20%.

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,3 ... 15,00.html
 
Mini Helicopter Thinks For Itself

Mini Helicopter Thinks For Itself — On The Fly — To React To Dangerous Situations

ATLANTA (February 8, 2005) — Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one step closer to someday matching — and possibly surpassing — their human-piloted counterparts, thanks to the completion of a project successfully tested by Georgia Tech and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The project was supported by DARPA’s Information Exploitation Office with Dr. John Bay serving as the program manager.

Researchers from several partner institutions and organizations have helped to successfully build, test and fly the first rotary wing UAV, a helicopter called GTMax, with capabilities of flight control fault identification and reconfiguration, adaptive control and agile maneuvering — all operating on a single vehicle and under a single software architecture.

Collaborators on the project include Draper Laboratories, Vanderbilt University, Scientific Systems Company Inc., Oregon Graduate Institute, Honeywell Laboratories and Boeing.

The flight represents the completion of a DARPA/Air Force project to develop an innovative new software-enabled control (SEC) system with applications to UAVs.

Based on this UAV success, Georgia Tech has now been awarded funding for two follow-on programs for multiple UAVs in an urban warfare environment and for transitioning the technologies developed under the DARPA/Air Force program to military vehicles.

Advances in rotary wing UAVs are particularly important because of their requirement to take off and land in difficult terrain and restricted-size areas, such as ship decks, and their ability to hover while they identify and inspect specific locations. With traditional aircraft, a pilot with years of training and flight experience is on board to react to problems, threats and weather conditions, and current UAVs must be flown much more conservatively and have limited reaction capabilities.

Georgia Tech’s primary contribution to the overall project was continuing work started by Boeing on the new SEC system, an Open Control Platform (OCP), which gives the UAV the ability to reconfigure its software systems autonomously in flight.

The OCP is an object-oriented, real-time operating software architecture that can handle very large sets of data and computations in real time, similar to a pilot’s brain reacting to enemy fire or changing weather conditions.

The system also gives the UAV more agility to help avoid danger without exceeding critical flight parameters.

During the final test at Fort Benning, Ga., the GTMax used eight different low-level flight control systems and three guidance systems in a single flight, including adapting to primary flight control system hardware failures, environmental factors and changes in aircraft configuration.

The final tests on Georgia Tech’s UAV demonstrated several key advancements:

• The UAV is able to learn as it flies.

• The UAV is able to reconfigure after failures in primary flight control systems, including losing the ability to change the pitch of the main rotor.

• The UAV is able to automatically plan a route through obstacles.

• The UAV is able to maneuver aggressively.

• The UAV is able to fly using what it sees in its onboard camera, rather than using traditional navigation systems such as GPS.

• The UAV can be reconfigured in flight to select among several control and guidance systems.

The final experiment, recently conducted at the Military Operations Urban Terrain site in Fort Benning represents five years of collaboration between Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

Georgia Tech’s principal investigators on the project are Dr. Daniel Schrage and Dr. Eric Johnson, professors in Aerospace Engineering; and Dr. George Vachtsevanos, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Georgia Tech team was selected by DARPA to be the systems integrator for the entire rotary wing UAV project, integrating engineering advances from a distinguished group of other corporate and university researchers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 131550.htm

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.
http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=515
 
Robots toddle along with human efficiency

Robots toddle along with human efficiency

Passive dynamics is key to the prowess of mechanical triplets.

Three robots that walk with a human gait have been unveiled. They use a unique system that makes them far more efficient than previous walking machines, requiring only as much energy as a person does for a stroll.

Robots such as Honda's Asimo use about ten times as much energy as a walking human, because all the movement in the leg joints are powered by motors. But the new robots use a system called passive dynamics, which allows the robots' lower legs to swing back into place after each step using gravity alone.

"These robots are the first powered robots that use passive dynamics," says Steven Collins, a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who co-authored a research paper describing all three machines in this week's Science1. The droids were also shown off at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington on 17 February.

Made for walking

The robots were created by teams at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Less motorized movement is the secret to energy efficiency, says Andy Ruina, a mechanical engineer at Cornell. "If not designed well, motors absorb energy," he says. "To decrease the energy absorbed you must decrease the work the motors do."

To that end, Ruina and colleagues expanded the work of Tad McGeer, an aeronautical engineer who founded the Insitu Group, a company based in Bingen, Washington, that develops miniature robotic aircraft.

McGeer pioneered the study of passive-dynamic walkers that could travel down slanted runways powered only by gravity.

In a manner similar to the Wright brothers, who achieved powered flight by meticulously studying gliders and simply adding a motor, Ruina and the other researchers studied these downhill robots and substituted small motors for gravity's power, allowing them to walk along level surfaces.

Do the locomotion

The Cornell robot weighs in at about 13 kilograms with legs about a metre long, but the MIT machine, coined the 'Toddler', is just 2.74 kilograms and a mere 43 centimetres tall. Delft's robot comes between the two, weighing 8 kilograms and measuring 1.5 metres in height.

The MIT robot is the first walking machine to use a learning programme that allows it to adapt to changing terrain. "In the very near future we're going to see these robots walking over terrain they've never walked over before," says Russ Tedrake, lead designer of the Toddler.


The stable, humanlike movements of the walkers suggest that passive-dynamic effects are important in the natural mechanics of human walking. Ruina expects that these robots will provide insights into the locomotion of animals, into the biomechanics of foot placement and balance, for example. In addition, the machines could help in designing walking prosthetics that take less effort to use.

Ruina points out that the Cornell and Delft robots can only go forwards, so this is just the first step in developing useful walking machines. "We have a long way to got to keep these robots efficient while improving their versatility," he says. "But it's an exciting time in robotics," adds Tedrake.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050214/ ... 14-13.html

References
Collins S., Ruina A., Tedrake R. & Wisse M. Science 307, 1082 - 1085 (2005).
 
Has anyone seen our submarine?

Greets

Has anyone seen our submarine?

David Adam, science correspondent
Monday February 21, 2005
The Guardian

Lost: much loved robot submarine, last seen under 200 metres of Antarctic ice last Wednesday, answers to the name Autosub - reward.

The £1.5m British unmanned research sub was investigating the waters below the Fimbul ice shelf when it became trapped. Scientists don't know what went wrong, but say the submarine is stuck and unlikely to be recovered.

Gwyn Griffiths, an ocean engineer at the Southampton Oceanography Centre who helped to design Autosub, said: "It isn't going to come back. We've lived with this vehicle for eight years and it's done 382 missions. But every time we put it out there's a chance it isn't going to return. It was sort of inevitable."

Scientists sent the submarine under the ice shelf, one of the most inaccessible and poorly understood known environments on earth, to collect information about the role of the ocean in climate change. It was also to investigate whether global warming was accelerating, how the ice melts and what sort of creatures live in the Antarctic waters.

The conditions and terrain on the ice shelf are so treacherous that collecting data at the surface, even using tethered robotic vehicles, is too dangerous.

The seven-metre Autosub, also known as an autonomous underwater vehicle, was due to return to the British Antarctic Survey's research ship James Clark Ross on Wednes day. Instead it began to broadcast a distress signal from a position about 10 miles from the edge of the 200 metre-thick ice sheet.

The sub is not remote controlled - its route is programmed before departure and it uses an onboard sonar system to navigate.

Powered by 5,160 D-size batteries, it can run for about 300 miles over several days.

The vehicle was not insured - scientists knew if it got into trouble under the ice it would be impossible to rescue.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1419086,00.html

mal
 
Japanese Robot Mannequins To Strike A Pose For Their Custome

Japanese Robot Mannequins To Strike A Pose For Their Customers

A mannequin robot named 'Palette' moves its arms and head to strike a pose like a supermodel through motion-capture technology before the press at a Tokyo hotel, 28 February 2005. The robot is expected to go on sale this year for fashion and service industries. AFP Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno
Tokyo (AFP) Feb 28, 2005
The mannequin moving in the store window is no longer a fantasy. A Japanese firm has developed a mannequin robot that can strike a pose for customers -- and spy on who they are and what they're buying.
"Mannequins have been static but this will pose for the nearest person by sensing his or her position," robot designer Tatsuya Matsui told a news conference Monday.

"It makes the product the mannequin wears look more attractive, increasing consumers' appetite to buy," said Matsui, who heads Flower Robotics Inc.

The female robot, code-named "Palette", can draw inspiration from the world's most beautiful women, using motion-capture technology to replay the movements of supermodels.

But Palette will double-up as an industrial spy, with the maker planning to program it to judge the age and sex of shoppers and even identify the bags they are carrying and pass along the information to stores for marketing purposes.

Matsui developed Palette with software company SGI Japan Ltd. and aim to start selling it this year for the fashion and service industries.

The price has not been set yet but SGI wants to make it "as close as possible to that of conventional mannequins," said Hiroshi Otsuka, who is in charge of new business promotion at SGI Japan.

There is a business chance as "the concept of showcases being static has not changed for more than a century," Otsuka said.

Palette for the time being will be off the catwalk, as its torso is on a metal bar. Otsuka said it was "safer that the robot stays in a showcase."

The robot may remind some people of a 1987 US movie "Mannequin," starring Andrew McCarthy as a department store window-dresser who falls in love with a mannequin who was actually an ancient Egyptian woman.

Palette, however, has no face to fall in love with.

"Consumer attention would be diverted to the face if there were one," said Matsui, the designer, noting he wanted customers to focus on the clothes or jewelry the mannequin wears.

Palette is available in two versions -- the whole-body without legs or upper torso models for jewelry displays. Matsui said he wanted in the future to design a Palette with legs along with male and child models.

http://www.spacemart.com/news/robot-05k.html
 
Worms, Slugs Inspire Robotic Devices

Worms, Slugs Inspire Robotic Devices
Drawing on an understanding of how slugs, leeches and earthworms traverse their environments and grasp objects, a team of Case Western Reserve University biologists and engineers has developed two flexible robotic devices that could make invasive medical procedures such as colonoscopies safer for patients and easier for doctors to administer.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related sections: Plants & Animals
Matter & Energy





The researchers from Case's departments of biology, mechanical and aerospace engineering and electrical engineering and computer science have obtained a patent for a new endoscopic device and a provisional patent for a gripping device that may have industrial as well as medical uses.

"We have taken our understanding of biology to use it as an inspiration for novel robotic devices," said Hillel Chiel, Case professor of biology and principal investigator on the project. "By taking nature seriously, we have created novel, flexible and adaptive devices that will be useful for a variety of applications."

The endoscopic device, constructed of three muscle-like actuators made of latex bladders and surrounded by nylon mesh, looks like a nine-inch long hollow worm. The actuator segments, inflating and contracting in sequence, propel the device forward, mimicking the undulating movement of slugs and worms. "This device can literally worm its way into complicated places or into curving tubing such as the colon," Chiel explained.

The current prototype can be added to existing medical endoscopes. Eventually, the device may be miniaturized and equipped with sensors that enable it to work autonomously and self propelling. According to Chiel, the research team will also be working to make the device more flexible, imitating the reflex responses of slugs and worms to changes in their environment. As a result of these refinements, the new device could reduce discomfort and the risk of injury among patients undergoing invasive medical tests, and thereby increase compliance with doctors' orders to have such tests performed.

The second device, a biologically inspired "gripper," mimics the way hungry California sea slugs in Chiel's lab grasp seaweed in its many highly slippery forms. The prototype consists of a four-inch, ball-like device, surrounded by muscle-like actuators in the form of tubes or rings. One of these tubes contains a mouth that opens and closes. The ball pushes forward, opens its mouth and grasps at the object before it.

This device could meet an industrial need for grippers that can pick up soft objects without destroying them. Building grippers to pick up soft materials has been very hard," Chiel explained. "Most gripper devices are fairly rigid and designed to work effectively with things that have a fixed orientation or a certain texture or toughness."

Chiel also noted that if the gripping device were miniaturized and equipped with sensors, it could have medical applications as well. Such a device, for example, might eat its way through occluded blood vessels.

Animal behavior and robots

For nearly two decades and with support from the National Science Foundation, Chiel has studied the detailed movements of soft-tissue animals like the California sea slug, chronicling their behavior on film and with MRI imaging..

"My focus has been basic science," Chiel explained. "If we can understand how nature controls adaptive behavior through its neural and biomechanical mechanisms, it will have spinoffs in novel devices. But it will also help us understand behavior in more complicated systems like human beings."

Taking Chiel's findings about animal motion, Roger Quinn, director of the Biorobotics Laboratory in the engineering school, and Randy Beer, Case professor of electrical engineering and computer science, designed the robotic devices. Elizabeth Mangan, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, built them. A second graduate student in mechanical engineering, Gregory Sutton, also contributed to the "Gripper" project.

The two new devices join other inventions--including several generations of insect-like robots that imitate cockroach behavior--created by researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Case School of Engineering.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 142703.htm

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.
http://www.case.edu/news/2004/11-04/sluginvention.htm
 
Space Snakes and Scorpions

Space Snakes and Scorpions By Amit Asaravala
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66804,00.html

02:00 AM Mar. 07, 2005 PT

In a nondescript office building on an old Naval Air Station, a team of NASA researchers is building a fleet of weird and wonderful robots that may one day go where no human -- or other robot -- has ever gone before.

At the Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, NASA's Autonomy and Robotics group is working to make robots smarter and more efficient.

Working from a crowded lab, about 90 engineers and programmers spend their days coming up with the cutting-edge technologies NASA needs to carry out its robotic missions. The result is a bevy of strange robots that look and act unlike any other.

Take, for instance, researcher Silvano Colombano's Snakebot, a 2-foot long robotic snake that can wiggle into holes and slide through sandy areas that would bog down a wheeled rover. Made of 12 metal links, each slightly smaller than a Rubik's Cube, the robot moves by bending its body in a wave that is perhaps more like a worm or a caterpillar than a snake.

Colombano's philosophy is that nature has already solved many of the problems that technologists face today.

"The idea is to borrow as much as possible from nature," said Colombano. "We know these things have evolved to be good at moving around, so we can use that to our advantage."

Another natured-based design is Colombano's Scorpion bot. It looks a bit like a boombox that sprouted eight metal legs, and the Scorpion has no trouble crawling over rocks and scurrying under ledges where rovers just can't go.

It can also carry things. Put a small package on top of the Scorpion and it will hold it with four of its legs, and use the other four to walk. Lift some of the Scorpion's back legs and the rest will stretch out automatically to keep itself balanced. Break a leg, and it hobbles along.

The Ames group works on traditional rover-styled robots, too, like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that landed on Mars.

The team has K9, one of the early Mars rover prototypes, in its lab. Team members use K9 to experiment with new software algorithms that allow the rover to automate tasks mission controllers must currently manipulate from the ground.

For instance, one of the current experiments gives K9 the ability to roll up to a rock, photograph it from all sides and then place an instrument like a contact microscope or drill on its smoothest surface, all without human supervision. Though it may seem like a mundane task, the speed at which these tasks are done can have a huge impact on a mission.

Currently, to operate the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, scientists on Earth must carefully analyze images of a selected rock and path to it before deciding on the safest set of moves. The entire process takes about three days. By shifting a lot of the analysis to the rover itself, the Ames team believes it can cut the time to just several hours.

"The most basic task you have if you're exploring something is to go up to it, look at it and poke it," said roboticist Liam Pedersen. "But these abilities, which we take for granted, are very hard to automate."

The teams' first chance to see some of this technology in action on another planet could come as early as 2009 or 2011. That's when NASA plans to send one or two more rovers to Mars as part of its Mars Science Laboratory mission.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the rover missions for NASA, and has already asked to look at some of K9's tool placement algorithms, according to project manager Maria Bualat.

James Crawford, technical area lead for the Autonomy and Robotics group, says the team may one day get to experiment with blimp-like robots. Such robots would be needed if NASA decides to send another probe to Saturn's moon Titan as a follow-up to the European Space Agency's Huygens mission. A blimp could float through Titan's thick atmosphere, taking measurements for years without ever getting caught in the oily muck thought to exist on the surface of the moon.

And at some point, the team hopes to do what all robotics teams dream of -- work with intelligent robots.

"Long-term, we want to have robots actually understand what humans are doing. We want them to anticipate the human's next moves," said Crawford. "Of course, that's a lot harder to do."
 
Arm wrestling robots beaten by a teenaged girl

Here

Arm wrestling robots beaten by a teenaged girl

* 13:03 08 March 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Duncan Graham-Rowe



Flesh and bone triumphed in the first ever man-versus-machine battle of brawn - an arm wrestling contest between robots and humans in California on Monday.

The champion, beating all three robotic arms each in matter of seconds, was a 17-year-old girl called Panna Felsen, a high school student from San Diego, US.

The contest was set up by Yoseph Bar-Cohen at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, US, in an attempt to encourage the development of polymer-based artificial muscles. The aim, he says, is to improve on existing actuators - or muscles - currently used in prosthetics and robots.

The actuators in the three competing robotic arms belong to a class of materials known as electroactive polymers (EAP). These are plastics that can change shape when activated either electrically or with chemicals.

The ultimate aim is to have an artificial arm beat the world's strongest person, says Bar-Cohen. But for now he wanted to make the challenge slightly more attainable which is why Panna, a self-confessed wimp, was chosen to represent humanity.
Second to none

Despite her lack of strength, training and technique, she was able to conquer the first arm, developed by Environmental Robots Inc. from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in just 24 seconds. Following this, and a pep talk from an arm wrestling expert, it took her just four seconds to beat the second arm and three seconds for her to win the last match.

Two champion arm wrestlers oversaw the matches to ensure that standard arm wrestling rules were observed. The three robot teams are now trying to work out what went wrong.

Bar-Cohen first came up with the idea for an arm wrestling contest in 1999. But at the time he thought it would take decades before the technology was ready to match humans. This first contest suggests he may have been right.
Quiet and capable

Nevertheless, the drive to develop EAP artificial muscles is unlikely to be deterred by this setback because of the need to overcome the current limitations with existing actuators and motors.

Electric motors tend to be too weak, while hydraulics and pneumatics are too heavy for use in robotics or prosthetics. EAPs, in comparison are lightweight, quiet and capable of energy densities similar to biological muscles.

The three robot teams, two from the US and one from Switzerland, each used different types of EAPs for their arms. The Virginia Tech group had three sets of chemically activated muscles acting on the shoulder joint, triggered by hydrochloric acid which caused the EAP strands to contract. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it only started to work a few minutes after its match had ended.

The other two teams, one from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in Dübendorf, and the other made by Environmental Robotics Inc. used electrically activated polymers.

The contest was held at the Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conference in San Diego, California.

The Opponent
 
Biscuit-eating dummy tests crumbs

Experts have invented a mannequin with a motorised mouth to test the amount of crumbs biscuits produce.

Staff at the Mcvitie's laboratory in High Wycombe, Bucks, designed the Crumb Test Dummy to test which baking techniques produce the most crumbs.

The motorised mannequin has plastic teeth and is designed to replicate human eating.

A Mcvities spokeswoman said the crumbs produced by a biscuit show if it has been cooked to perfection.

"Eating lots of biscuits is obviously an enjoyable prospect for most people but we haven't yet found a human who can test on this scale," Mcvitie's brand manager Liz Ashdown added.

"The Crumb Test Dummy has a never-ending appetite and doesn't need to stop for breath."

----------------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/e ... 328509.stm

Published: 2005/03/08 10:15:55 GMT

© BBC MMV
 
More Robots

I cant access Robot Round Up at the moment. Not sure if the problem lies with my PC or if the thread is being worked on?

So I'm putting these in a new thread. Apologies to Mods Team (and Rockers Team) if this causes any inconvenience.

Duke University Engineers Join 'Red Team' Robotic Vehicle Team
DURHAM, N.C. –-

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 181724.htm

Students from Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering are partnering with Carnegie Mellon University's "Red Team" in an effort to win a $2 million prize from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). All they have to do is complete the toughest ground course ever devised for a self-guided robotic vehicle.



The Red Team is developing two Hummer vehicles for the competition -- Sandstorm and H1ghlander. Duke’s contribution will be a "Duke Radar Object Identification Device" (DROID) unit for each vehicle. The DROID uses radar to identify objects on the ground that must be avoided to prevent damage to the vehicle. DROIDs will provide the locations and classifications of obstacles to the Red Team vehicles’ navigation systems. (Photo courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)


The contest, called the DARPA Grand Challenge http://www.darpa.gov/grandchallenge/, is a race between fully self-guided ground vehicles to be conducted in the Southwestern United States on Oct. 8, 2005. DARPA said it hopes the contest will stimulate significant improvements in technology that may be adapted for future military use.

The race route could be as long as 175 miles over desert terrain featuring natural and man-made obstacles. The exact route will not be revealed until two hours before the event begins, and the course must be completed within 10 hours. Winner takes all -- there is no second place.

The Red Team (http://www.redteamracing.org/) is developing two Hummer vehicles for the competition -- Sandstorm and H1ghlander. Duke's contribution will be a "Duke Radar Object Identification Device" (DROID) unit for each vehicle. The DROID uses radar to identify objects on the ground that must be avoided to prevent damage to the vehicle. DROIDs will provide the locations and classifications of obstacles to the Red Team vehicles' navigation systems.

Radar bounces radio waves off a target to get a reflection. That reflection is received by the radar's antenna and is then analyzed by a computer. Radar systems are essentially range devices that measure distances to each radar reflection.

Radar is routinely used to track aircraft and ships, but those applications are fairly simple because the sky and ocean are essentially featureless. Identifying and distinguishing among objects on cluttered landscapes is far more challenging, and radar has never been successfully adapted for off-road ground vehicle use.

The Red Team investigated radar last year but ultimately dropped it from the project because of the immense challenges, particularly ground clutter issues, involved in adapting the technology for ground vehicle use, said Josh Johnston, lead student engineer for the Duke team. Johnston, from Boise, Idaho, is a senior double majoring in electrical and mechanical engineering, and president of Duke's Robotics Club.

Duke is taking a novel approach in its quest to make radar a contributing part of the Red Team's vehicles, he said. Instead of directing radar pulses from the top of the vehicle down, the team is positioning the radar for a horizontal field of vision similar to what a human driver would see. DROID will be placed on the front of the car.

"Other onboard systems can figure out topography, so we're focusing on the location of above-ground objects," Johnston said. "Our job is to identify obstacles that could damage the vehicle." But he notes that's not so easy.

William "Red" Whittaker, robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and leader of the Red Team project, explained that "radar can sense fast and far through desert dust, but cannot yet distinguish fine detail, or reliably distinguish between content and clutter. Radar interpretation is a grand challenge in its own right, and the software challenge is profound.

"Bright ideas and computer simulations are not enough to win a race, so Duke must push radar interpretation beyond the laboratory, onto robots, and out to the world."

The Duke team is analyzing different obstacles -- fence posts, barbed wire barricades and natural hazards such as rocks, ravines and trees -- and identifying distinguishing features to create "obstacle profiles." Those profiles become part of a catalog that the computer program consults when trying to identify and classify an object detected with radar.

One man-made obstacle called a tank trap still stumps the team, however, said Robert Kielb, one of two faculty advisers for the Duke students and a senior research scientist in the mechanical engineering department. (Adjunct electrical and computer engineering professor Jason Janet is the other adviser.) A tank trap looks like a man-sized "jack" from a child's jacks-and-ball pickup game. Tank traps can slow down, block or impede the movement of armored fighting vehicles.

"Tank traps are difficult for radar systems to locate because they are unintentionally stealthy designs, because they don't provide strong reflections to the radar system," Kielb said.

Kielb and Johnston plan to create a full-size tank trap on campus so they can hammer away at the reflection problem.

It's been slow going, but the team is making progress, Johnston said. "We're essentially trying to program a computer to tell the difference between a tumbleweed and a tangle of barbed wire -- it's incredibly difficult," he said. Johnston reported Duke's accomplishments to date to the entire Red Team in mid-February in Pittsburgh.

Aaron Mosher, a Boeing Co. engineer who is working with the Red Team and with the Duke University team on the DROID project, said the team was developing advanced filtering and reasoning logic for the radar system.

"A person can look at the radar output and manually pick out important features while ignoring most of the clutter," Mosher said. "But we have to build all of that intelligence into a computer system that will perform that operation automatically. The clutter that comes from the ground makes it hard to separate out legitimate targets. Our DROID system's logic must walk a fine line between sending out too many false alarms versus missing important obstacles.

"So far, we've had some promising results," Mosher said. "This radar system's intelligence has grown significantly over what we used in last year's race."

Duke students have been working on the DROID project since September. Faculty in Duke's Pratt School of Engineering support the effort by providing expertise, laboratory space and by incorporating aspects of the project into senior design classes for electrical engineering and mechanical engineering majors. Robotics Club members have been working on the project constantly.

Five Duke students went to the Nevada Automotive Test Center in Carson City over the holiday break in December to work with Red Team members and get experience in the field.

"We've also driven the system around the Duke campus, which got us some weird looks from campus security," Johnston said. Kielb built a platform that was bolted onto the front of his pickup truck as a mount for the radar antenna. Johnston and all the electronics were crammed into the jumpseat area of the king-cab truck to take data as they drove around campus.

"This is a golden opportunity and a difficult challenge for Duke engineering students," Kielb said. "In a few months they have taken an ineffective system and developed it into one that shows great promise of aiding in a Red Team victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge."

This is the second attempt at meeting the Grand Challenge for the Red Team, an alliance of individuals, non-profits and for-profits. On March 13, 2004, Red Team was one of 15 robotic vehicles that attempted to navigate a challenging 142-mile route through the Southwest desert. None was able to complete the mission. Red Team beat all competitors, but managed to travel less than 10 miles.

"The DARPA Challenge presents a remarkably tough problem," said Clinton Kelly, senior vice president at Science Applications International Corp (SAIC). "Vehicles must go for as long as 10 hours with no help from humans. This will require an improvement in the state of the art in autonomous technology by a factor of 100 times for competitors to complete the race," he said. Kelly served on the National Academy of Sciences committee that evaluated state of the art in unmanned vehicle technology.

Kelly approached Duke engineering students about taking part in the DARPA Challenge after meeting the team who won the innovation prize for designing an underwater autonomous vehicle in the International 2004 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, sponsored by the Association for Underwater Vehicles Systems International and the Office of Naval Research. (http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/releases ... ?story=164) The Duke Robotics team also won in 2004 for a book-sized, self-guided robot at the seventh annual International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots in Madrid. (http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/releases ... ?story=171)

Through Kelly, a 1959 Duke engineering graduate, SAIC sponsors the Red Team and provides direct support to Duke's engineering students. Duke also received technical expertise and guidance from Boeing, also a Red Team sponsor.

"Our involvement with the Red Team helps us build valuable knowledge for future work in robotics, sensing and autonomy," Boeing's Mosher said.

Red Team Members include students, volunteers and professionals from corporate sponsors, including Boeing, Science Applications International Corp., Caterpillar, Intel, AM General, TTTech, Applanix, HD Systems, KVH, Snap On, Chip Ganassi Racing, Google, CM Labs, HMR Magazine and Wired Magazine.

Duke students involved in the project include: biomedical/electrical engineering double majors Alex Kloth (junior), Avery Capone (senior) and Jason Ziglar (senior); mechanical engineering/computer science junior Brian Hilgeford and electrical engineering/mechanical engineering senior Josh Johnston; electrical and computer engineering/computer science majors Chris Abbott (senior), John Cornwell (junior), John Felkins (senior), Larissa West (senior), Owen Donovan (senior), Thomas Rawley (senior) and Vinh Nguyen (junior); freshman engineering students Arjun Madan-Mohan, Cristian Liu, Gareth Guvanasen, Lee M. Pearson and Matt Johnson; and Trinity Arts and Sciences sophomore Yanjia Yao.

Robots Serve Humans On Land, In Sea And Air

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 134723.htm

MIT's version of the "robotoddler" is just the latest MIT entry in the world of robots that can move themselves in a variety of settings. There's still a long way to go before today's robots evolve into practical, everyday technologies, but even now, autonomous robotic vehicles developed at MIT are exploring uncharted or hazardous places, assisting troops in combat and performing household tasks.



Postdoctoral associate Russ Tedrake and alumna Teresa Weirui Zang watch their robotic toddler navigate the medical building foyer. Photo / Donna Coveney

On land

In addition to his well-known work on humanoid robots such as Kismet, Professor Rodney Brooks led the development of several robotic vehicles and co-founded a company, iRobot, that develops these machines commercially. iRobot produces Roomba, a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner for home use, and PackBot, a small, tank-like battlefield robot that can climb stairs and right itself when it flips over. Troops in Afghanistan use PackBots to explore enemy caves, and soldiers in Iraq use them to detect improvised explosive devices and inspect weapons caches. iRobot has also partnered with John Deere to develop r-Gator, an unmanned jeep that can shuttle supplies to and from combat zones.

"In 20 years, we've gone from robots that can hardly maneuver around objects to ones that can navigate in unstructured environments," said Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He also pointed to the many applications for labor-saving robots, from autonomous lawnmowers to mobile "assistants" for the elderly. Brooks and his CSAIL colleagues are currently working on an experimental robotic assistant built onto a Segway transporter. However, smarter, multifunctional robots that operate usefully are still a ways off. They will require advances such as object recognition (for example, the ability to differentiate between a pile of salt and a crumpled ball of white paper), manual dexterity and interfaces that could make a robot as easy to use as a refrigerator.

Then there's the final frontier: space. With funding from NASA, CSAIL is developing prototypes of autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots for exploration on the Moon and Mars. In the sea

Professor Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, director of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory (AUV Lab), envisions "robots filling the vast void of oceans, roaming around, observing, communicating, and reporting back." His lab has spent the past 15 years developing AUVs that have carried out missions ranging from surveying shipwrecks to testing underwater navigation and communication software.

The lab developed the Odyssey class of submarine-like vessels, which evolved into AUVs produced commercially by BlueFin Robotics, a company that spun out of the AUV Lab and still works closely with it. BlueFin vehicles aid research, survey offshore oil fields, and assist the U.S. Navy in mine warfare and battlespace preparation.

The next generation of AUVs, said Chryssostomidis, will include smaller, more robust vehicles that could be tossed out of an aircraft; hovering AUVs that inspect ship hulls for mines; biomimetic AUVs that mimic marine animals (based on past MIT projects such as Robotuna); and surface crafts for applications such as hydrographic surveying and communicating with and shadowing AUVs.

The biggest challenge for AUV engineers is power generation. Most AUVs run on batteries, and current fuel-cell technology limits missions to hours rather than weeks or months of continuous underwater activity. Chryssostomidis and his colleagues are also working on underwater acoustic communication via modem and on software that enables high-level control of both communication and navigation. In the air

Eric Feron and his research group in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems are working on several projects that may lead to more airborne robots. Those projects include intelligent aircraft, communication among multiple air vehicles, and automated takeoff and landing.

The group has already made progress in two of these areas. The "robochopper," a model helicopter outfitted with a sophisticated instrumentation box, can perform autonomous aerobatic maneuvers at the flip of a remote-control switch. Feron, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, also led the development of an intelligent aircraft guidance system that allows a pilot in one airplane to guide another unmanned airplane by speaking commands in English.

An agile aerial vehicle such as the robochopper is better suited than a surface robot to some scenarios, said Feron, noting that it's easier to fly a miniature robotic helicopter through a chaotic urban environment than to deploy a land robot down in the streets.

Feron is taking on the challenge of autonomous landing. Unmanned aircraft presently use GPS (Global Positioning System) for navigation, but that technology is not reliable enough to manage the fine transition between air and ground. "We wouldn't want to put it in any of the critical tasks involved in landing," he said.

The solution, says Feron, is to mimic a human pilot's vision. He is developing what he calls a "collaborative vision scheme," in which the "eye" of a helicopter (a camera), looks at a specially designed target sitting on the landing area. The target allows the helicopter to obtain the position parameters in real time necessary for landing.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2, 2005 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 49, Number 19).

 
Hitachi unveils 'fastest robot'

Greets

Wednesday, 16 March, 2005, 09:01 GMT

Hitachi unveils 'fastest robot'
Hitachi's Emiew, the fastest humanoid robot
Pal and Chum impressed with their chat and fast moves
Japanese electronics firm Hitachi has unveiled its first humanoid robot, called Emiew, to challenge Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrio robots.

Hitachi said the 1.3m (4.2ft) Emiew was the world's quickest-moving robot yet at 6km/h (3.7 miles per hour).

Two wheel-based Emiews, Pal and Chum, introduced themselves to reporters at a press conference in Japan.

They will be guests at this month's World Expo. Sony and Honda have both built robots to showcase engineering.

Explaining why Hitachi's Emiew used wheels instead of feet, Toshihiko Horiuchi, from Hitachi's Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory, said: "We aimed to create a robot that could live and co-exist with people."

"We want to make the robots useful for people ... If the robots moved slower than people, users would be frustrated."

Emiew - Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate - can move at 6km/h (3.7 miles per hour) on its "wheel feet", which resemble the bottom half of a Segway scooter.

With sensors on the head, waist, and near the wheels, Pal and Chum demonstrated how they could react to commands.

"I want to be able to walk about in places like Shinjuku and Shibuya [shopping districts] in the future without bumping into people and cars," Pal told reporters.

Hitachi said Pal and Chum, which have a vocabulary of about 100 words, could be "trained" for practical office and factory use in as little as five to six years.

Big bot battle

Robotics researchers have long been challenged by developing robots that walk in the gait of a human.

At the recent AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) annual meeting in Washington DC, researchers showed off bipedal designs.

The three designs, each built by a different research group, use the same principle to achieve a human-like gait.

Hitachi's Emiew, the fastest humanoid robot
Toyota, Honda, and Sony, all try to out-do each other with robots
Sony and Honda have both used humanoid robots, which are not commercially available, as a way of showing off computing power and engineering expertise.

Honda's Asimo was "born" five years ago. Since then, Honda and Sony's Qrio have tried to trump each other with what the robots can do at various technology events.

Asimo has visited the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic, France and Ireland as part of a world tour.

Sony's Qrio has been singing, jogging and dancing in formation around the world too and was, until last year, the fastest robot on two legs.

But its record was beaten by Asimo. It is capable of 3km/h, which its makers claim is almost four times as fast as Qrio.

Last year, car maker Toyota also stepped into the ring and unveiled its trumpet-playing humanoid robot.

By 2007, it is predicted that there will be almost 2.5 million "entertainment and leisure" robots in homes, compared to about 137,000 currently, according to the United Nations (UN).

By the end of that year, 4.1 million robots will be doing jobs in homes, said a report by the UN Economic Commission for Europe and the International Federation of Robotics.

Hitachi is one of the companies already with home cleaning robot machines on the market.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4351639.stm

mal
 
Emperor said:
Have they learned nothing from the fillums????

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Army Prepares 'Robo-Soldier' for Iraq


By MICHAEL P. REGAN
AP Business Writer

January 22, 2005, 8:51 PM EST

Chances are good the SWORDS will get even more deadly in the future. It has been tested with the larger .50 caliber machine guns as well as rocket and grenade launchers -- even an experimental weapon made by the Australian company Metal Storm LLC that packs multiple rocket rounds into a single barrel, allowing for much more rapid firing.

------------------------
Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press

Source

A slightly shorter version but with pictures.

I had a quick look at the Metal Stomr site and they have

Metal Storm ‘On Target’ with Live Fire Demonstrations in US

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA – 22 March 2005: Metal Storm Limited (ASX trading code: MST and NASDAQ Small Cap ticker symbol MTSX).

Metal Storm has successfully completed a series of live fire demonstrations held at the US Army’s range facility at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey.

The demonstrations consisted of multiple live firings of a purpose-built version of the Metal Storm 40mm weapon system mounted on a Talon unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). During the demonstrations approximately 100 guests saw the Metal Storm equipped Talon engage a variety of targets, including simulated personnel, an infantry carrier and a bunker, with pyrotechnic rounds.

The purpose of the demonstration was to showcase the technical and operational capabilities of the Metal Storm 40mm weapon system combined with a robotic platform currently in use by the US military. The demonstrations were attended by senior scientific and technical personnel from the US Department of Defense as well as selected defense industry representatives.

The Metal Storm 40mm weapons system employed in the demonstrations was a specially designed 4 barrel array loaded with 4 rounds per barrel and utilizing significant design and engineering improvements, including improved cartridge reload and recoil management systems. It also incorporated an optical targeting system integrated with a purpose-designed mount which provided 2-axis control, stability and accuracy in aiming and operating the weapon.

Metal Storm’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. David Smith, said the demonstrations had achieved their objective in generating a positive response from key defense industry personnel. “Our system performed extremely well and we are delighted with the positive feedback and interest expressed by those attending. We already have a number of new potential opportunities under discussion as a result of the demonstrations and our technical staff has gathered very valuable data on the performance of the system. This is the outcome we were aiming for.” he said.

The demonstrations were held as part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) that the US Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) has with Metal Storm. Under the terms of this agreement, Metal Storm develops rapid fire weapons technology while ARDEC demonstrates and evaluates such technology for potential US Army use.

Personnel from the Medium Caliber Ammo Branch of ARDEC attended the live fire demonstrations to observe the functionality of the system. Under the CRADA they will be working with Metal Storm on the development of a range of munitions for use in the Metal Storm 40mm weapon system.

The live fire demonstrations at Picatinny Arsenal did not include firings from the Dragonfly DP4X unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as previously planned because of operational restrictions on the range which prevented in-flight live fire trials being possible. Arrangements are currently being made for in-flight test-firings and demonstrations to be held in the next few months at another location.

Video and still images from the live firings at Picatinny will be available for viewing on the Metal Storm website as soon as they are approved for release by the other parties involved in the program.

Source

and there is more video footage on their site:
www.metalstorm.com

Previous Metal Storm discussion:
www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12001
 
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