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FIRST Team 97, a partnership between MIT and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, is halfway through the FIRST build season and has completed their robot's drive train and chassis. They're using mecanum wheels this year, and I thought this video was pretty awesome.

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IEEE Spectrum's Sarah Adee reports:

Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green light—and some greenbacks—the state-of-the-art bionic arm will go into clinical trials. If all goes well, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives its approval, returning veterans could be wearing the new artificial limb by next year.

The Luke arm grew out of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was created in 2005 to fund the development of two arms. The first initiative, the four-year, US $30.4 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to be completed in 2009, led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., seeks a fully functioning, neurally controlled prosthetic arm using technology that is still experimental. The latter, awarded to Deka Research and Development Corp., Kamen’s New Hampshire–based medical products company (perhaps best known for the Segway), is a two-year $18.1 million 2007 effort to give amputees an advanced prosthesis that could be available immediately “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Kamen’s team designed the Deka arm to be controlled with noninvasive measures, using an interface a bit like a joystick.

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Photo: Dirk van der Merwe

Robotics Trends, a web portal of many things robotic, has just re-launched its site. The new site does a really nice job of putting together a ton of information about industry, academia, conferences, jobs, and other resources and presenting it in an easy to read way. Check it out!

Robotics Trends also runs the RoboBusiness conference, this year 8-10 April in Pittsburgh, and registration is going on as we speak.

Wired has a neat gallery that looks into the robotics labs at SPAWAR in San Diego. There's a wide array of ground-based humanoids, vehicles, and other machines, which all appear to be armed. On one of the bots:

This prototype robotic weapon platform is designed to be buried underground for camouflaged deployment. When called to action, the robotic gun pops up and starts shooting. If you're the unlucky soul on the business end of this gun, it's likely curtains for you -- this robot is an extremely accurate shooter. A high-tech night-vision scope (bottom right) permits dead-on targeting even during moonless nights.

Via BoingBoing

From Spectrum's February issue:

The small motorboat meanders through the Amazonian swamp. The water is a turbid brown, the jungle a thicket of twisted trees. A cricrió bird chirps from the treetops. The Brazilian researchers stop the boat to have a look around. Suddenly a noise breaks the calm. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Within seconds, an angry swarm of cabas, Amazon wasps with a powerful sting, envelops the boat and its unlucky occupants. To hear Ney Robinson Salvi dos Reis tell the story, you almost feel you're right there in the rain forest with him, fighting off the bellicose bugs.

“Jumping into the water is not a good idea,” Reis says. “There are crocodiles, snakes, piranhas, and a bloodsucking little fish called candiru that can enter your body orifices. So I covered my head and told the mateiro”—the Amazon native piloting the boat—“to get us out of there fast!”

For Reis, a robotics engineer at Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, fleeing from wild wasps through treacherous waterways in excruciating heat and humidity is just part of the fun. He heads the robotics laboratory at Petrobras's underwater technology division in Rio de Janeiro. The company's main oil fields reside in deep waters off the Brazilian coast, so Reis's lab specializes in developing all sorts of Jules Vernian contraptions—a caterpillar-like robot to unclog underwater pipelines, a supersized hydraulic wrench that can work down to 2000 meters.

We've all had those days when we suddenly say to ourselves, "Gosh, I wish I had my very own Predator drone. The things I could keep under surveillance! The neighbors I could buzz! Yes, my life is empty without it." Fortunately, for people like us, there is DIY Drones, a site dedicated to telling you how to build your own unmanned aerial vehicle for under $1000 using things like LEGO Mindstorms kits or BASIC Stamp kits to add navigation and other behaviors to RC airplanes.

Via MeFi. Photo from diydrones.com

My friend Chris Murphy is a graduate student in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute joint program. Late last summer his group went on a research cruise to the Arctic Circle, so I asked him to tell me a little bit about the two underwater vehicles they used for their work. Read on for the interview and some of his pictures from the cruise!

This lovely robot valentine, along with others, can be found at blissfullybitter.com.

Ney Robinson Salvi dos Reis, a Brazilian roboticist who leads a group developing an environmental robot for the Amazon jungle, writes to report important developments.

No, not a major advance in the robot's active suspension system. Not a breakthrough in its machine vision scheme either. The big news, Reis reports, is that the robot, called Hybrid Environmental Robot, was the inspiration for a vehicle used in this year's famed Rio de Janeiro carnival.

The vehicle was part of the presentation by the carnival group Grande Rio. The photo shows the vehicle parading through Sapucaí Avenue in Rio de Janeiro, and although you can't see them, Reis and his team of researchers were right there, dancing samba along with their "robot."

Sarah Adee's article on Dean Kamen's Luke Skywalker-like bionic arm created quite a buzz, but her video report is even better:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=221

Everyone lately is covering the thermally powered glider developed by Webb Research. Last week I attended the AUVSI/ONR Joint Review in Orlando, Florida, and I got to listen to someone from Webb talk a bit about their glider and how it works.

Gliders in general are a version of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), but with one important distinction: they are buoyancy-driven, rather than using a propeller to generate thrust underwater. Gliders maintain the torpedo-like shape of traditional AUVs but typically have wings that provide an extra control surface. They use a variable buoyancy system to change how much they weigh in the water, allowing them to ascend or descend, and also modify weight distribution inside their bodies to change their pitch angle in the water.

For example, the Spray Glider we build at Bluefin (developed at the SIO) has a constant-volume pressure vessel filled with mineral oil that can be pumped into or out of a bladder that sits in a flooded section of the vehicle. When oil is pumped in, the bladder expands, and displaces water in that flooded section, increasing the vehicle's volume in the water and allowing it to ascend. Similarly, when it pumps the oil out of the bladder and back into the constant volume vessel, it permits water to fill the flooded section again, decreasing the vehicle's volume and causing it to sink. Internal battery packs mounted on tracks can move side to side (controlling the vehicle's roll) and forward and backward (letting it dive or climb), so combining the angle control with the varied buoyancy allows the vehicle to dive and climb in a sawtooth pattern through the water. With this sort of system, a glider can stay out for durations on the order of six months.

This technology is ideal for long-term missions. Because so little power is used compared to a propeller that is always spinning, a glider can stay out for months at a time on one battery charge rather than the tens of hours that a propelled vehicle can achieve on a single charge. Webb, however, has made a few modifications to their buoyancy system that may allow their new gliders to stay out for years.

Rather than relying on a battery-powered hydraulic system to pump mineral oil in and out of the bladder, the oil is normally contained in a plastic tube surrounded by a kind of wax chosen for its phase change properties. The wax is sensitive to the ocean temperature: at cold temperatures it contracts, but at warmer ocean temperatures it expands. The expansion increases the volume of the wax and squeezes the tube, which in turn squeezes mineral oil out into the rest of the vehicle's variable buoyancy system. This causes the vehicle to sink. When it reaches depth (and therefore a low water temperature), the wax contracts, which allows the oil to flow back into the tube out of the buoyancy system and the vehicle ascends.

So what Webb has done is eliminate the need for batteries to drive a hydraulic pump system. However, they still need batteries to run the onboard computer, sensors, communication system, and roll/pitch control system, meaning that these gliders aren't totally "green" yet. But they're on their way, and other glider researchers are following suit. Webb's recent demonstration -- the activity that generated all the press -- shows that this technology is ready to be out of the lab and into the ocean, so we can probably expect this system to become widespread pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see what other ocean-powered systems can be applied to these gliders to make them truly "green'.

Thermal glider image from webbresearch.com

Spiegel Online reports on an EU DEXMART-funded research project at the University of Naples to design and build a robot that makes coffee and picks up clothes. The robot, named Justin [the Spiegel article incorrectly calls it "Justine"], is supposed to be one step in developing a multitasking household robot. From the article:

The €6.3-million ($9.3 million) project aims to develop robots that can use two arms simultaneously and in harmony, as opposed to current robots, which only have the technological complexity to handle "one-armed" tasks.

This goal is interesting to compare with the predictions of iRobot cofounder Colin Angle, who predicts that we will instead see more specialized robots like the Roomba -- an armless, not at all humanoid robot. Will Justine control Roomba some day? Or is one more likely to take off as a new paradigm than the other?

Of course, we should really be focusing on the important question, which is: is this coffee-making robot programmed in Java?

Update: Some folks have had problems watching the QuickTime videos -- man, I did test this on Firefox running on both Mac OS X and Windows XP and it worked for me, but apologies anyway. And here's the solution: you can now watch the full video of the Crusher field trials without QuickTime.

Last week, our correspondent Sally Adee went to Fort Bliss, Texas, to attend the field trials of DARPA's 6.5-ton unmanned, autonomous off-road vehicle, Crusher, developed by Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center.

On the obstacle course, Crusher proved true to its name by obliterating old cars like a monster truck. But it's also smart enough to avoid certain obstacles in its path. Obstacles like our intrepid reporter herself!

Watch the video to see how Crusher approaches Adee, inspects her with its creepy batting LIDAR "eyes," recognizes her as something it shouldn't destroy, and then backs off.

How does the monster vehicle do that?

Sally Adee explains:

The batting "eyes" you see are LIDAR (which was explained to me as being "invisible laser beams"). Crusher uses it in combination with radar and optical cameras to sketch out the topography around it and in its path, and compare it to its database of known objects, to then draw its own conclusions about where to go and where not to go.

For example, when it comes across a big boulder, it analyzes the material, its reflectivity, and its shape. Then, having been loaded with pre-fab specifications of what constitutes a boulder, it decides on whether to back off, go around, or roll over the obstacle.

This is all on the fly-- all processing takes place on board in real time inside Crusher's brain. So what exactly is inside that brain?

To process the incoming "sensory" data stream, there are eight blade servers with a total of 32 cores of computing just to process all the images from the laser scanner and the stereo cameras.

Right behind the eyes, Crusher's autonomy system consists of 38 CPUs: commercial off-the-shelf chips like Xilinx FPGAs and Intel and AMD processors. This is how it figures out where to go and how to get there.

Just keep in mind that this monstrosity was constructed almost entirely at Carnegie Mellon by undergrads, grad students, professors, staff engineers and industry people (they did pretty much everything but load up the chassis). Now that's an engineering curriculum.

PS: Adee is preparing a complete video report on the trials -- it will be on Spectrum's site this Wednesday, check back. But if you want more Crusher now, continue reading this post for a video of the vehicle smashing two cars like sardine cans.

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google, Inc. have just announced the first ten teams in the robotic race for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. With a total prize money of US$30 million it is the richest international competition in history. Six months after launch, ten teams have registered to compete for the first place worth US$20 million. They include the European team ARCA, a former contender in the Ansari X PRIZE and and well known for their innovative suborbital manned system Stabilo as well as the newly assembled team Astrobotic uniting Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Missile Systems Company and the University of Arizona.

To win the challenge teams will have to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth. If this challenge will be anything like the Ansari X PRIZE we can look forward to some very innovative robotic concepts. And it's looking good: In addition to the ten fully registered teams the organizers have already received over 525 expressions of interest from more than 52 nations.

Image from http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

Professor Bruno Siciliano, of the Robotics and Automation Group
at the University of Naples, Italy, tells us that the autonomous two-armed robot his team is using to demonstrate such dexterous manipulation tasks as making coffee is a German creation.

The humanoid manipulator, he says, was developed by a team at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, which is part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Wessling, Germany.

Oh, and the robot is called Justin, not Justine -- "so it's a 'male' robot eventually," Siciliano adds.

Siciliano is the coordinator of the DEXMART project, an ambitious European Union-funded initiative to improve robotic dexterity and related fields. He says that DLR's Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, headed by Gerhard Hirzinger, is a partner in the project, which started this month.

Siciliano's team is using Justin "as one of the experimental platforms for dexterous and autonomous bimanual manipulation tasks." One of those tasks involves using the robot as a barista.

So, yes, the bot makes great coffee. But a more important question, raised by my blog colleague Mikell, remains unanswered: is it programmed in Java?