Neil Armstrong was one of my heroes, and I finally found a video I wanted to post here about his contributions to the space program. This Week @ NASA (actually, last week at this point) had this brief comment about him, along with a number of other interesting entries on a variety of topics. If you are not familiar with the weekly vlog, here is an entry to give you an idea of what they cover. You can subscribe to the podcast at the link above if you want to follow it…
It seems if you fill a classroom with robots that make mistakes, the kids get smarter. According to this New Scientist Report, a Nao Robot was operated by humans in the next room during an English class in a Japanese school. Yes, that is Telepresence rather than true robotics, but the kids didn’t know that. They played a learning game where the English name for a shape was given, and the robot and kids would draw that shape. It appears the kids learned faster when the robot made mistakes, and the children would have to teach it to draw the correct shape to go with that word. Which is just scientific backing for the old adage The best way to learn is to teach. Not only that, but the kids then wanted to continue learning with the Robot, and would carry on studying longer and learning better as they did so. The results will be presented at Ro-Man this year, the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, which will run from tomorrow, September 9th through the 13th in Paris, France. The event is all about real world results of humans and robots working and communicating together, and every year contributes tremendously to the further development of robotics on both the software and hardware fronts. Take a look at their scheduled presentations to get an idea of the scope of this event. If you were thinking of building your own robot, this is a great place to absorb some real understanding of what is possible today and coming for tomorrow.
Here is a slightly different project created with the Robot Operating System at the core of its programming. While I think he might have wanted to spend a bit more time training his Voice Recognition interface before making this video, he did do a wonderful job with this project. If you are curious about how exactly this works, he has lots more videos on his You Tube Channel, plus he has uploaded his source code and hardware interfacing instructions to Sourceforge. I am sure it will be no surprise to anyone that this is a project involving AstroMech, the R2 Builders Club.
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.
This one isn’t science fiction any more, and a trend I have commented on previously. A number of groups have been developing humanoid robots for various reasons, and now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has done a blog entry of its own about the new robot FACE, more human than ever with the emotions it can express. And then some singing android faces, just because I can.
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.