Aasemoon'z Cluster

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.

The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.

Tilikum the killer whale (Orcinus orca) made news recently in the tragic death of his Sea World trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum pulled Brancheau into the water when he grabbed her floating ponytail — much like a cat might grab yarn attached to a stick. Complex play behavior is a sign of intelligence, but unfortunately little is known of the circuitry of even a cat’s brain, much less the massive brain of an orca — roughly four times the size of a human brain. See Also The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain Ray Kurzweil Interview Brain on a Chip MIT neuroscientists are developing computerized techniques to map the millions of miles of neuronal circuits in the brain that may one day shed some light on the differences between Homo sapiens sapiens and other species, and will likely clarify how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality, and memory. Developing connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) may have just as much impact as sequencing the human genome. Here’s a video showing 3D rotating nodes and edges in a small connectome:

platform :   Linux   Windows   MacOSX Intel type :   diskmag release date : august 2010 release party : Evoke 2010

First, right off the top here: Scala has true blue Java-like null; any reference may be null. Its presence muddies the water quite a bit. But since Beust's article explicitly talks about Haskell he's clearly not talking about that aspect of Scala because Haskell doesn't have null. I'll get back to Scala's null at the end but for now pretend it doesn't exist.Second, just to set the record straight: "Option" has roots in programming languages as far back as ML. Both Haskell's "Maybe" and Scala's "Option" (and F#'s "Option" and others) trace their ancestry to it.

Last week Wim Jongman bloged about the Nebula Oscilloscope widget. It’s just an awesome widget for monitoring activity. See Wim’s post to form an opinion yourself. So, for me as a RAP developer, the first question I always ask myself when seeing such a cool thing is: “Will it run on RAP?”. I followed the steps Wim described to get the Oscilloscope running, changed the target to RAP, commented out one line of code and started the application. You can see the result in the screencast below.

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Perhaps the most difficult control problem for a drive servo is that of going down a ramp. Any back drivable drive servo will exhibit a freewheeling velocity on a given ramp. This is the speed at which the robot will roll down the ramp in an unpowered state. At this speed, the surface drag and internal drag of the servo are equal to the gravitational force multiplied by the sine of the slope. The freewheeling speed is thus load dependent.

Researchers from Leeds University are working on a camera and drill-weilding robot known as Djedi to solve the mystery of the blocked shafts inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. In 1992 and 2002, remote cameras were sent through the shaft under the watchful eye of antiquities master Dr. Zahi Hawass only to be stopped by limestone doors. Dr. Robert Richardson of the Mechanical Engineering department said their goal is to find out what is beyond the blocks and go as far as possible to discover the purpose of the shafts, all while doing minimal damage to the structure. Final preparations are being made now with hopes of sending the robot in before year's end. Place your bets now!

If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.

Clearly the most attractive super hero power for nanotechnology at the moment is invisibility. Last month we had a nano-enabled coating that managed to make aircraft invisible to radar. Now we have a metamaterial consisting of fishnet-like film containing holes about 100 nanometers in diameter that could serve as an invisibility cloak. While I personally might be persuaded to choose Spider-like climbing abilities for my nano-enabled super hero power, invisibility does pose an attractive option. However, invisibility is far from the point of this research conducted at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University and appears in the August 5th edition of the journal Nature.

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.

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.

As Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany, would have it, scientific research means riding the business end of a giant industrial robot arm while playing video games. But hey -- they produced some serious research on it, which was presented at ICRA 2010.  The CyberMotion Simulator is basically a full motion simulator adapted to a racing car game. Players (or subjects, the researchers prefer to call them) sit in a cabin on a robot arm some 2 meters off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track with force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. The aim is to make the experience as realistic as possible without having to buy a real F2007, and to test the simulator with an environment that requires sudden, massive acceleration.

Nothing is ever simple in IT, and nanotechnology is no different. For a start, the term nanotechnology can mean different things to different people. For purists, it refers to a microscopic structure equal to or less than one nanometre (nm) in size – about a billionth of a metre. But many vendors and regulators (see How EC rules affect nanotechnology, page 2) believe the term nanotechnology can be applied to any structure between 1nm and 100nm in size, which means various nanoscale silicon components and microchips already inhabit many of the computers and other electrical and electronic devices we use today.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Here is the agenda for today’s seminar. We will recall the principles of controlling a brushless DC motor. Secondly we will discuss the back EMF sensing method used in this sensorless technique. We will also cover the principles of digital filter and the so called majority function. Last section of this seminar discusses the motor start up sequence and the sensorless operation.

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

Last week, Nanowerk’s Spotlight piece covered recent research in which Swiss researchers demonstrated that they could remove metal ions, steroid drugs and proteins from blood by using nanomagnets. The nanomagnets are basically carbon-coated iron carbide at the nanoscale (an average diameter of 30 nanometers) and are functionalized with linker molecules that attract the target material in the blood.