The Darpa Robotics Challenge is all about building robots that can operate in a human environment robust enough to do useful work during emergencies, to aid and supplement first responders. Whether the emergency is man made or natural, the robots need to operate human devices, such as doors, stairs, tools and vehicles, as well as recognize and asses their environments for emergency context. If you have been waiting for your chance to shine as a robotics engineer, this might be your kind of challenge. Tracks A and B have already been selected, Track C for software control systems, and Track D for combined hardware and software, are both still open. The initial work should be developed and submitted with the GFE Simulator package, which is the robot simulation software from the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Even if you don’t think your skill set is quite up to entering a competition of this caliber, if you have any interest in developing your own robots you should download this free software suite and try out your hand at design and development. If you do enter, and you are selected to continue past the entry level, at the next stage you may be eligible for some funding to develop your design. Our next Evil Robot Overlord could be one you made yourself! Thanks to the folks at Popular Mechanics for the heads up on this one, and check out their article for lots more detail. And yes, I did just install Ubuntu 12.04 specifically so I could get the best build of GazeboSim installed and running.
Astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy has managed to discover more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 in fact. He also is the director of the Center for Integrative Planetary Science, an entire organization dedicated to extrasolar planet research. So it shouldn’t be any surprise he has received a grant to study the Kepler data for evidence of Dyson Spheres, the mark of a Type II civilization. A Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale utilizes close to the total energy output of their star to power their culture, and one way to do that is to build a Dyson Sphere around the star for both living surface and to capture that energy. Thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission we now have a huge amount of reconnaissance of other star systems already being sifted for evidence of other planets, to reexamine that data looking for Dyson Spheres only costs some additional computing power and man hours, all the capital outlay has already been made. And we might just discover some new neighbors!
I love living in the world of the future. Dubbed Project Green Brain, the engineering teams at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are writing computer models of the brains of bees, specifically the systems in the brain that interpret a bee’s vision and sense of smell. They intend to link this to robotic sensors designed to perceive the same stimulus and install it into a flying robot. The purpose of the project is to advance understanding of simple non-human brain structures and artificial intelligence, but they already have a number of practical applications in mind, from search and rescue in dangerous environments such as mines or nuclear power plants, to finding the source of gas leaks, to actually pollinating crops in areas where hive collapse has eradicated real bees. As long as they don’t include stingers I think this will be a project worth following, particularly since this is the first Artificial Intelligence project I know of that is being designed to run on desktop PCs rather than supercomputers.
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…
Not the whole sun, just one little strand of plasma. But that one little strand was many times larger than Earth, and was traveling at 900 miles per second when it left the sun on August 31st this year. NASA had a number of observation platforms able to get a look at it, so they put together this rather amazing video. The music is quite tasty as well, wish I knew what it was. The music is not as good on the second video, but it is quite silly and celebrates the recent landing of Curiosity on the red planet, so I felt the need to include 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.