Aasemoon'z Cluster

In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped. An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine. A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant. Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. “You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece.”

Leading up to the San Francisco Game Developers Conference (GDC), BBC Worldwide today announced a major new partnership with game developer Three Rings to create BBC Worldwide's first ever free-to-play multiplayer online game centered around the blockbuster drama television show, Doctor Who. For the first time ever, players from around the world will be able to follow in the footsteps of the eccentric and brilliant Doctor by travelling through time and space, exploring new worlds and encountering many alien races, both friend and foe. Titled Doctor Who: Worlds in Time, the game allows players to enter the TARDIS and be set a challenge by the mysterious Time Lord to help him defend civilized culture against infamous Doctor Who enemies.

Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking. Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory.

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought. That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed a neural prosthesis for rats that is able to restore their ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked.In a dramatic demonstration, Berger blocked the ability to rats to form long-term memories by using pharmacological agents to disrupt the neural circuitry that communicates between two subregions of the hippocampus, CA1 and CA3, which interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown.

Realistic sound rendering can directly impact the perceived realism of users of interactive media applications. An accurate acoustic response for a virtual environment is attuned according to the geometric representation of the environment. This response can convey important details about the environment, such as the location and motion of objects. The most common approach to sound rendering is a two-stage process: Sound propagation: the computation of impulse responses (IRs) that represent an acoustic space. Audio rendering: the generation of spatialized audio signal from the impulse responses and dry (anechoically recorded or synthetically generated) source signals.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC, Raymond Oung. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight, modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more information on current work, future plans and real-world applications, read on or tune in!

The Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) Simulator is a key feature of the package that allows you to get started without buying expensive robots. It is a great tool for use in education. The add-ons outlined below help you to create your own simulation environments and get started on learning about robotics.

Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.

Honda and the Ars Electronica Futurelab are collaborating on a human-robot interaction study this week in Linz, Austria (September 2nd ~ 8th).  Although they say their goal is to determine how robots ought to interact with people in the future, I think this may be just an excuse to let the public have some one-on-one fun with ASIMO.  In any case, these sorts of studies should help steer Honda’s engineers in the right direction when designing the next version of the world’s most famous humanoid robot.

Over 100 years ago, when Henry Ford was conceiving a mass produced automobile, it was in an environment where cars were specified and built to order one by one. Each car was 'hand crafted' with the care and precision warranted by a fledgling auto market where society's elite were the only ones who could afford such a revolutionary contraption.

bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power. The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

Because telecommunication systems require by essence to conform to a common standard that covers static and dynamic interfaces, telecommunication standardization bodies as well as telecommunication equipment manufacturer have been using advanced modeling technologies such as MSC, ASN.1, SDL, and TTCN for years. In fact these technologies cover the whole development cycle from requirements, specification, design, and test. That is why it should definitely be considered when developing communicating systems.   

You can think of the Distributed Flight Array as a combination between vertical take-off and landing vehicles, and modular reconfigurable robots. It is a flying platform consisting of multiple, autonomous, single-propeller vehicles, and these single propeller vehicles - or modules - are able to generate enough thrust to lift themselves into the air, but are completely unstable in flight, kind of like a helicopter without a tail rotor.

The latest episode of the Robots Podcast looks at the following scenario: Imagine being able to throw a hand-full of smart matter in a tank full of liquid and then pulling out a ready-to-use wrench once the matter has assembled. This is the vision of this episode's guests Michael Tolley and Jonas Neubert from the Computational Synthesis Laboratory run by Hod Lipson at Cornell University, NY. Tolley and Neubert give an introduction into Programmable Matter and then present their research on stochastic assembly of matter in fluid, including both simulation (see video above) and real-world implementation. Read on or tune in!

Introduction: The proliferation of multicore processors and the desire to consolidate applications and functionality will push the embedded industry into embracing virtualization in much the same way it has been embraced in the server and compute-centric markets. However, there are many paths to virtualization for embedded systems. After a tour of those options and their pros and cons, Freescale Semiconductor’s Syed Shah shows why the bare metal hypervisor-based approach, coupled with hardware virtualization assists in the core, the memory subsystem and the I/O, offers the best performance.

The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.   The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

Can a team of soccer-playing robots beat the human World Cup champions by 2050? That's the ultimate goal of RoboCup, an international tournament where teams of soccer robots compete in various categories, from small wheeled boxes to adult-size humanoids. IEEE Spectrum's Harry Goldstein traveled to Singapore to attend RoboCup 2010 -- and check out how the man vs. machine future of soccer is playing out.

It is no secret that field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting bigger and more complex all the time. The fabrication process creates smaller transistors and makes more dense chips packing more digital processing per nanometer. Engineers love to see advancement because it means they can do more with modern silicon, and many times NI LabVIEW FPGA Module technology helps by abstracting the complexity to a higher level so that engineers can more smoothly take advantage of these improvements.  Unfortunately, there is one issue with FPGAs that continues to be a time sink and only gets worse with denser FPGAs: compilation time.