This one is for the iOS series of devices, including iPhones and iPads; the Free Graphing Calculator for iOS. This has a lot of built in functions, solvers for a variety of equation types, constants including those necessary to do orbital mechanics calculations, reference material including some very detailed but understandable explanations of how the various logic gates work, and a whole lot more. If you do anything with math beyond count your change at the checkout counter, this app will help you do it a lot faster and easier. Thanks to the folks at The Daily App for the heads up on this one. If you have a iOS or Android smart device you will want to visit the Daily App once a week or so to check out all the interesting goodies they find.
From the web site Space Facts, this little infographic gives a very clean representation of the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system. I think if they would have included Pluto its size compared to the others would have made the not-a-planet argument obvious.
The Mars Descent Imager camera, MARDI for short, took a bunch of 1600X1200 pixel resolution pictures during the decent and landing. As usual with things that happen so far away, the bandwidth of the uplink back to Earth was the choke point on our retrieving the sequence, but now we have it. The original capture rate was 5 images per second, but this playback is at 15 frames/second, so it takes noticeably less than the original 7 minutes of terror (watch second video for that one) to play the video back. Use the link to watch the video on YouTube if you want to see it in full 1080P resolution. Thanks to Peta Pixel for the heads up on this one.
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.