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Robonaut 2, the ISS, and You

Robonaut 2 had some nice glowing reports of earning its keep in orbit on the ISS back in March… This project was an unusual collaboration, 15 years in the making, between NASA and General Motors, each of whom had their own reasons for wanting to develop a much more advanced robot than anything then available. There was another requirement in the development criteria; it had to be a robot that could do things like a human would do them, using a similar visual feedback and manipulatory structure. In plain English, two eyes looking forward from its head, and hands with opposable thumbs on person length arms, so it could use the same tools, vehicles, and other components of a human environment to do jobs that assisted people or freed them up for other tasks.

They did such a good job on it that the team and project are now up for the Sammies Award this year, and you can read a great interview here with one of the original developers about their approach to the entire endeavor.

What has happened since? Well, not as many news stories it seems, but some very exciting stuff if you were thinking about cobbling together your own variant. They have now released the Robonaut 2 Simulator as a free download over at ROS.org (Robot Operating System). The tested versions are only certified to run on Ubuntu 12.04 since that was the box they tested them on (what a surprise, the very version I upgraded my own Ubuntu box to just a few days ago), but the dependencies are pretty generic, so it should run on most scientifically oriented recent Linux builds. If you need to compile something for a more specific system, you can grab the source code here, tweak it for your own hardware, and make any other changes your system might require.

All of which means you can write your own instruction sets for the robot and see exactly what happens when it carries them out! There is a very good chance this is going to become one of the core R.O.S.’s going forward, not least because it is open source, so if you are considering a future in robotics I strongly recommend downloading this as a way to explore and learn the possibilities.

Curiosity Lands Tomorrow!

Curiosity, more formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, will be attempting to land on Mars on Sunday, August 5th, at 10:31 PM PDT. They are using that time zone because the JPL Labs running the rover are based in California. I think the landing is going to be pretty exciting (referred to as the Seven Minutes of Terror by the NASA scientists behind the mission), and if you like you will be able to watch live coverage as it happens. To give you an idea of the landing process, watch either of these videos.

Cities from Space

A few good photos and videos of cities as seen from space, photographed from the ISS. I particularly like the commentary from NASA Astronaut Don Pettit on the second video, which gives you some pointers on how to recognize specific places from orbit. He also took an awful lot of these images, and even starts off by explaining a bit about how they solved the blurring problem created by trying to take time lapse images while hurtling through the sky. This is also the man who invented the zero G coffee cup; thanks to Openculture for the heads up on this one.

Let’s Go To Mars!

It turns out that NASA’s Mars Explorer Program still has a shot at getting a manned mission to the Red Planet! Which means I was wrong when was afraid we had gone totally third world, abandoning our future in space for a few bucks in local pork barrel projects used to line some politicians pockets. But I wasn’t completely wrong; if you want the future of humanity to include some Americans colonizing our new homes in space (and not just the Chinese and their other western pacific rim culture allies) you need to make your voices heard. From now until July first, go to the Mars Forum, register as a forum member (it’s free), read through the entries, and make your voice heard. There are some great ideas there, some flames, and some irrelevant commentary, like every forum you have ever been to. But this time the stakes may just be the future of the human race for the next half million years; wouldn’t you want your children and grandchildren to have a shot at being part of it?

Annular Eclipse

The Annular Eclipse that happened earlier this week was amazing, but those of us who saw it from North America only got a little tease of the event. If you got to see if from Japan, like Danny Choo, then perhaps you got to see it in its full glory. Here is a picture or two to put it in perspective for you. The first image is Danny in his Filter Facemask, which will hopefully protect him from having his retinas burned out by staring into the sun. To me, the scary bit is he reminds me of Friend from the movie trilogy 20th Century Boys, a wonderful Sci-Fi sequence based on the Manga. The second image is what he was staring at. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can either travel to the next event half way around the world in 50 years, or stay where you are and wait for it to happen there again, in 300 years.