Skip to main content

Home/ Advanced Concepts Team/ Group items tagged the

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Juxi Leitner

Japan Plans a Moon Base by 2020, Built by Robots for Robots | Popular Science - 1 views

  • Those initial surveyor bots will pave the way for the construction of the unmanned moon base near the lunar south pole, which the robots will construct for themselves.
  • Even if Japan falls short of its 2020 deadline, the advances in robotics technology that could fall out of this little project could be as exciting as the moon base itself.
  •  
    More on these Japanese moon base plans... Those initial surveyor bots will pave the way for the construction of the unmanned moon base near the lunar south pole, which the robots will construct for themselves.
Luís F. Simões

Encouraging Behavioral Diversity in Evolutionary Robotics: An Empirical Study - MIT Pre... - 2 views

  • several papers recently proposed to explicitly encourage the diversity of the robot behaviors, rather than the diversity of the genotypes as in classic evolutionary optimization. Such an approach avoids the need to compute distances between structures and the pitfalls of the noninjectivity of the phenotype/behavior relation; however, it also introduces new questions: how to compare behavior?
  • In this paper, we review the main published approaches to behavioral diversity and benchmark them in a common framework.
  • The results show that fostering behavioral diversity substantially improves the evolutionary process in the investigated experiments, regardless of genotype or task.
  •  
    paywall skipping: http://www.isir.upmc.fr/files/2011ACLI2061.pdf The most complete study I've seen so far on a new approach (Novelty Search) that has been gaining a lot of attention lately. And they even use parallel coordinates to visualize the results!! ;)
Luís F. Simões

Evolution of AI Interplanetary Trajectories Reaches Human-Competitive Levels - Slashdot - 4 views

  • "It's not the Turing test just yet, but in one more domain, AI is becoming increasingly competitive with humans. This time around, it's in interplanetary trajectory optimization. From the European Space Agency comes the news that researchers from its Advanced Concepts Team have recently won the Gold 'Humies' award for their use of Evolutionary Algorithms to design a spacecraft's trajectory for exploring the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). The problem addressed in the awarded article (PDF) was put forward by NASA/JPL in the latest edition of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition. The team from ESA was able to automatically evolve a solution that outperforms all the entries submitted to the competition by human experts from across the world. Interestingly, as noted in the presentation to the award's jury (PDF), the team conducted their work on top of open-source tools (PaGMO / PyGMO and PyKEP)."
  •  
    We made it to Slashdot's frontpage !!! :)
  •  
    Congratulations, gentlemen!
Isabelle Dicaire

Measuring height by connecting clocks - 2 views

  •  
    They were able to compare the ticking rates of two optical clocks separated by 2000 km, with the objective of computing sea level based on the effect gravity has on the clock ticking rate. They did the experiment using glass optical fibers, but I wonder if we could one day do the same from orbit, to measure the gravitational field around Earth.
  •  
    isn't this is effectively what pacome has been doing with his time for the last few years? e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.6766v1.pdf also mentioning the ACES experiment
Luís F. Simões

William Shatner Wakes Up Crew for Final Discovery Mission - Slashdot - 1 views

  • The Space Shuttle Discovery left the International Space Station this morning for the last time. To commemorate the ship's accomplishments over 27 years of service, the crew was greeted to a morning wake-up message from Capt. Kirk. "Space, the final frontier," Shatner said in a prerecorded message. "These have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery. Her 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together on the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before."
  •  
    here's a recording of the transmission: http://ia600406.us.archive.org/13/items/STS-133/03-07-11_STS-133_FD12_Crew_Wakeup.mp3 to quote from the thread at reddit: "When the space shuttle first flew, 55 americans were being held hostage in the embassy in Iran, and Ronald Reagan had just become president. That same year Prince Charles would marry Lady Diana, the HIV virus would be first identified, Post-It notes were invented, and a small company called Microsoft released it's new operating system MS-DOS."
  •  
    Speaking of William Shatner, the legendary "Rocket Man": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hARDXYz2io
Ma Ru

Ambition - 0 views

shared by Ma Ru on 15 Mar 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  •  
    Today we released the Astro Drone app. People that have the Parrot AR drone can freely download the game. While they fly their drone in the real world, they are trying to dock to the ISS in the virtual world. But the app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state and uploaded. The data is then used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.
  •  
    Visit the main ESA website and you'll be greeted with a 6-minute Rosetta promo movie by a kickass Polish artist... P.S. You can also find the video here. P.P.S It seems I've just discovered a way to hijack old diigo entries ;-)
Nina Nadine Ridder

To save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars - 1 views

  •  
    More arguments for a lunar base? "They found the most mass-efficient path involves launching a crew from Earth with just enough fuel to get into orbit around the Earth. A fuel-producing plant on the surface of the moon would then launch tankers of fuel into space, where they would enter gravitational orbit. The tankers would eventually be picked up by the Mars-bound crew, which would then head to a nearby fueling station to gas up before ultimately heading to Mars."
  •  
    There was a paper with a very similar concept (reaching Mars via DRO) at the AAS meeting in January by Conte et al. First, the total Delta V required for a trip Earth -> LLO -> MLO is higher than Earth -> MLO. The trick is that Earth -> LLO requires less Delta V than Earth -> MLO and hence less mass has to be carried along *from Earth*. Essentially what both approaches have in common is that they say "if there's a free gas station orbiting the moon, it's cheaper to fly empty and fill up there on the way". The AAS paper actually does a decent job at estimating the "real" cost by also including estimates of the cost of a lunar base. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/portal/files/44275737/Conte_etal_AAS2015_Earth_Mars_transfers_through_Moon_distant_retrograde_orbit.pdf
jaihobah

The Nanodevice Aiming to Replace the Field Effect Transistor - 2 views

  •  
    very nice! "For a start, the wires operate well as switches that by some measures compare well to field effect transistors. For example they allow a million times more current to flow when they are on compared with off when operating at a voltage of about 1.5 V. "[A light effect transistor] can replicate the basic switching function of the modern field effect transistor with competitive (and potentially improved) characteristics," say Marmon and co. But they wires also have entirely new capabilities. The device works as an optical amplifier and can also perform basic logic operations by using two or more laser beams rather than one. That's something a single field effect transistor cannot do."
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    The good thing about using CdSe NW (used here) is that they show a photon-to-current efficiency window around the visible wavelengths, therefore any visible light can in principle be used in this application to switch the transistor on/off. I don't agree with the moto "Nanowires are also simpler than field effect transistors and so they're potentially cheaper and easier to make." Yes, they are simple, yet for applications, fabricating devices with them consistently is very challenging (being the research effort not cheap at all..) and asks for improvements and breakthroughs in the fabrication process.
  •  
    any idea how the shine the light selectively to such small surfaces?
  •  
    "Illumination sources consisted of halogen light, 532.016, 441.6, and 325 nm lasers ported through a Horiba LabRAM HR800 confocal Raman system with an internal 632.8 nm laser. Due to limited probe spacing for electrical measurements, all illumination sources were focused through a 50x long working distance (LWD) objective lens (N.A. = 0.50), except 325 nm, which went through a 10x MPLAN objective lens (N.A. = 0.25)." Laser spot size calculated from optical diffraction formula 1.22*lambda/NA
Luís F. Simões

Zeitgeist 2012 - Google - 2 views

  • 1.2 trillion searches. 146 languages. What did the world search for in 2012?
  •  
    this is a gold mine :D Portugal, a bankrupt country in crisis where the Most Searched How to... is "Como emagrecer" (how to lose weight?). Netherlands, where the Most Searched How to... is "Hoe overleef ik" (how do I survive?) UK where the most Trending What is... is "What is love?" and Italians... please explain how come the top Trending How to... are 1. Come fare Sesso 2. Come fare un Clistere !?!? Respect for Austria though, where the top trending What is... are: 1. Was ist ACTA 2. Was ist SOPA any other interesting finds?
  •  
    From Ghana "What is...?": What is a Constitution What is Government [edit] Some top Science searches in the US: Hemorrhoid, Pregnancy Syndroms. Any potential for Ariadna? [edit] ... and finally, for the sake of my shield, top search from Poland in the Music category
Luís F. Simões

NASA will send robot drill to Mars in 2016 - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • A German-built drill nicknamed “The Mole” will pound 16 feet into the Martian crust to take the temperature of the planet, while a sensitive French-built seismometer will detect any Marsquakes.
  •  
    slashdot describes the drill as "a self-driving mole developed by the German space agency (DLR)". This seems to be the drill: GEMS - a mole to explore the interior of Mars, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OCEANSE.2009.5278132. Interesting news for all the roots people :)
LeopoldS

The Pacific free trade deal that's anything but free | Dean Baker | Comment is free | g... - 0 views

  •  
    Frightening! In reality, the deal has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new "free trade" pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Luís F. Simões

Stochastic Pattern Recognition Dramatically Outperforms Conventional Techniques - Techn... - 2 views

  • A stochastic computer, designed to help an autonomous vehicle navigate, outperforms a conventional computer by three orders of magnitude, say computer scientists
  • These guys have applied stochastic computing to the process of pattern recognition. The problem here is to compare an input signal with a reference signal to determine whether they match.   In the real world, of course, input signals are always noisy so a system that can cope with noise has an obvious advantage.  Canals and co use their technique to help an autonomous vehicle navigate its way through a simple environment for which it has an internal map. For this task, it has to measure the distance to the walls around it and work out where it is on the map. It then computes a trajectory taking it to its destination.
  • Although the idea of stochastic computing has been around for half a century, attempts to exploit have only just begun. Clearly there's much work to be done. And since one line of thought is that the brain might be a stochastic computer, at least in part, there could be exciting times ahead.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.4495: Stochastic-Based Pattern Recognition Analysis
  •  
    hey! This is essentially the Probabilistic Computing Ariadna
  •  
    The link is there but my understanding of our purpose is different than what I understood from the abstract. In any case,the authors are from Palma de Mallorca, Balears, Spain "somebody" should somehow make them aware of the Ariadna study ... E.g somebody no longer in the team :-)
johannessimon81

Wind-powered cart that travels 2 times faster than the wind - AGAINST the wind! Also tr... - 1 views

  •  
    Apparently this cart settled some longstanding physics dispute... Would there be a way to think of something similar using solar wind? *no clue*
  •  
    the counterintuitive aspect in my view is not the travelling against he wind but the faster than wind travelling with the wind, where the simple trick of having the wheels power the propeller flips the mind to understand it easily ... (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/downwind-faster-than-the-wind/)
  •  
    But from that point of view it should also be counter-intuitive that it travels against the wind at twice the speed of the wind...
Alexander Wittig

Picture This: NVIDIA GPUs Sort Through Tens of Millions of Flickr Photos - 2 views

  •  
    Strange and exotic cityscapes. Desolate wilderness areas. Dogs that look like wookies. Flickr, one of the world's largest photo sharing services, sees it all. And, now, Flickr's image recognition technology can categorize more than 11 billion photos like these. And it does it automatically. It's called "Magic View." Magical deep learning! Buzzword attack!
  • ...4 more comments...
  •  
    and here comes my standard question: how can we use this for space? fast detection of natural disasters onboard?
  •  
    Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).
  •  
    In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).
  •  
    In HiPEAC (High Performance, embedded architecture and computation) conference I attended in the beginning of this year there was a big trend of CUDA GPU vs FPGA for hardware accelerated image processing. Most of it orbitting around discussing who was faster and cheaper with people from NVIDIA in one side and people from Xilinx and Intel in the other. I remember of talking with an IBM scientist working on hardware accelerated data processing working together with the Radio telescope institute in Netherlands about the solution where they working on (GPU CUDA). I gathered that NVIDIA GPU suits best in applications that somehow do not rely in hardware, having the advantage of being programmed in a 'easy' way accessible to a scientist. FPGA's are highly reliable components with the advantage of being available in radhard versions, but requiring specific knowledge of physical circuit design and tailored 'harsh' programming languages. I don't know what is the level of rad hardness in NVIDIA's GPUs... Therefore FPGAs are indeed the standard choice for image processing in space missions (a talk with the microelectronics department guys could expand on this), whereas GPUs are currently used in some ground based (radio astronomy or other types of telescopes). I think that on for a specific purpose as the one you mentioned, this FPGA vs GPU should be assessed first before going further.
  •  
    You're forgetting power usage. GPUs need 1000 hamster wheels worth of power while FPGAs can run on a potato. Since space applications are highly power limited, putting any kind of GPU monster in orbit or on a rover is failed idea from the start. Also in FPGAs if a gate burns out from radiation you can just reprogram around it. Looking for seals offline in high res images is indeed definitely a GPU task.... for now.
  •  
    The discussion of how to make FPGA hardware acceleration solutions easier to use for the 'layman' is starting btw http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/.
pacome delva

Royal Society Fellows Question Body's Climate Change Statements - 1 views

  • The Royal Society has released a statement acknowledging that its climate guide is being updated and noting: "The new guide has been planned for some time but was given added impetus by concerns raised by a small group of Fellows of the Society that older documents designed to challenge some of the common misrepresentations of the science were too narrow in their focus."
  •  
    The "climatosceptics" are more and more powerful, in France it's crazy how much they are in newspaper and television... Before it was fancy to fear the global warming, now it's fancy to fight the "dictat" of the Science, as if Science was a religion with its dogma !
Dario Izzo

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!!! - 3 views

  • Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.
  •  
    haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.
  • ...1 more comment...
  •  
    well sure competitiveness is good but to verify (and that should be the case for scientific experiments) the code should be public, it would be nice to have something like bibtex for code libraries or versions used.... :) btw I fully agree that the code should go public, I had lots of trouble reproducing (reprogramming) some papers in the past ... grr
  •  
    My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).
  •  
    Same battle we are fighting since a few years....
nikolas smyrlakis

Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movies, 2000 and Beyond | Underwire | Wired.com - 0 views

  •  
    some ideas for movie Fridays A "must" see on my opinion (never heard about it in the past!) : Primer Sounds ideal: "Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1] Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following."
  •  
    I watched it a while ago during my studies in Belgium... The plot is quite well summarized on this diagram: http://xkcd.com/657/large/ According to the text above I'm either savant or a liar (you choose). But I watched the movie under significant exposure to Belgian beer, so this may have helped...
Luzi Bergamin

Physics in a Crisis - 3 views

  •  
    Luckily I'm far away from Geneva, but this has to be said today, when the LHC starts! No, not tiny black holes will eat us (what a nonsense!), but the supernovae energy will let LHC explode!!! Pacome, I expect you to debunk this with gratest care!
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    wtf is this! As I read this morning in the newspaper (not even a scientific one), 1 TeV is the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito... so be careful ! It seems they already sloved every thing on this website: "At the Institute for Space Quantum Physics ISQP, it was already proved in 1991-1992 that dark matter is in magnetic fields as magnetic space quantum flux." This website is the biggest source of crackpots i have seen in a long time...! (http://www.supernovae-energy.com/)
  •  
    Come on guys, this website is hilarious! "The HAITI EARTHQUAKE (...) were impossible for the Institute for Space Quantum Physics (ISQP) to compute because on one single planet was on a common line or axis with the Sun: Venus."
  •  
    Unfortunately, most information I have about the guy (Hans Lehner, a Swiss) is in German, his official homepage is http://www.rqm.ch/ According to EsoWatch he is the Swiss analogue to Dr. Mills and his Blacklight power. Lehner apparently founded a company, which should have produced a "Raum-Quanten-Motor" that -- of course -- produces energy out of nothing. The theory is based on spookey forces mediated by Lehneronen. 11 Million Swiss Franks (about 8 Million Euro) were lost when the company bankrupt. And the guy is selling new stocks on his homepage again... Lehner calls another crackpot named Oliver Crane Zweistein (from Einstein being "Onestone") and himself "Dreistein". Now he is looking for Mister or Misses Vierstein. Perhaps you should apply, good luck!!
  •  
    i like the first line of their supernovae energy technology document "Dear potential investor:"...
LeopoldS

Tilera Corporation - 2 views

  •  
    who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    Well nVidia provides 10.000 "cores" in a single rack on thei Teslas...
  •  
    remember that you were recommending its purchase already some time ago ... still strong reasons to do so?
  •  
    The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).
  •  
    Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.
ESA ACT

Micronanostructures of the scales on a mosquito's legs and their role in weight support - 0 views

  •  
    We show here that the mosquito cannot only give rise to a higher water-supporting force than the water strider if the ratio of the water-supporting force to the body weight of the insect itself is compared, but also can safely take off or land on the wate
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 3335 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page