We’ve seen plenty of tiny UAVs (or NAVs — Nano Aerial Vehicles — as they’re also known), but none quite like the robo-hummingbird that’s been in development at DARPA-contractor AeroVironment for the past couple of years. While we haven’t heard much about it during that time, the company recently completed its most advanced prototype to date, dubbed Mercury, and it’s taken advantage of the opportunity to show off all the progress it has made. As you can see in the video after the break, the bot is able to fly about and hover in place by mimicking the wing movement of a real hummingbird and, of course, be controlled completely untethered. What’s more, the firm says that the final version will actually look like a real hummingbird as well, and be able to be controlled from up to a kilometer away — even inside buildings, where a hummingbird won’t look at all out of place.

[Via Danger Room]

Continue reading DARPA contractor shows off tiny robo-hummingbird UAV

Filed under: Robots

DARPA contractor shows off tiny robo-hummingbird UAV originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AeroVironment, maker of several important military UAVs like the Wasp, Raven, and Dragon Eye , has received a Phase II SBIR grant from DARPA to continue work on it’s hummingbird-like nano UAV (NAV), which propels itself with flapping wings. In the video shown above, the vehicles stability control is shown, including take-offs from a standstill.

“The goals of the NAV program — namely to develop an approximately 10 gram aircraft that can hover for extended periods, can fly at forward speeds up to 10 meters per second, can withstand 2.5 meter per second wind gusts, can operate inside buildings, and have up to a kilometer command and control range — will stretch our understanding of flight at these small sizes and require novel technology development.”

The Phase II contract is worth $2.1 million USD and will continue through the summer of 2010.

[Via Slashdot]

AeroVironment, maker of several important military UAVs like the Wasp, Raven, and Dragon Eye , has received a Phase II SBIR grant from DARPA to continue work on it’s hummingbird-like nano UAV (NAV), which propels itself with flapping wings. In the video shown above, the vehicles stability control is shown, including take-offs from a standstill.

“The goals of the NAV program — namely to develop an approximately 10 gram aircraft that can hover for extended periods, can fly at forward speeds up to 10 meters per second, can withstand 2.5 meter per second wind gusts, can operate inside buildings, and have up to a kilometer command and control range — will stretch our understanding of flight at these small sizes and require novel technology development.”

The Phase II contract is worth $2.1 million USD and will continue through the summer of 2010.

[Via Slashdot]

Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems and Operations, the third volume of the series (still in preparation).

The paper is part of an edited book collection, available for purchase from Amazon, on bio-inspired nanoscale computing that was published about a week ago by Wiley.

Freitas’ contribution to the book is the following chapter:

Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Chapter 15. Computational Tasks in Medical Nanorobotics,” in M.M. Eshaghian-Wilner, ed., Bio-inspired and Nano-scale Integrated Computing, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2009, pp. 391-428.

The chapter is about 5.2 MB in size and a draft preprint version may be downloaded from Freitas’ nanomedicine website. From the abstract:

Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to medicine: the preservation
and improvement of human health, using molecular tools and molecular knowl-
edge of the human body. Medical nanorobotics is the most powerful form of
future nanomedicine technology. Nanorobots may be constructed of diamondoid
nanometer-scale parts and mechanical subsystems including onboard sensors,
motors, manipulators, power plants, and molecular computers. The presence of
onboard nanocomputers would allow in vivo medical nanorobots to perform
numerous complex behaviors which must be conditionally executed on at least a
semiautonomous basis, guided by receipt of local sensor data and constrained by
preprogrammed settings, activity scripts, and event clocking, and further limited
by a variety of simultaneously executing real-time control protocols. …
[W]e introduce the concept of nanorobot control
protocols which are required to ensure that each nanorobot fully completes its
intended mission accurately, safely, and in a timely manner according to plan. Six
major classes of nanorobot control protocols have been identified and include
operational, biocompatibility, theater, safety, security, and group protocols. Six
important subclasses of theater protocols include locational, functional, situa-
tional, phenotypic, temporal, and identity control protocols.

The nanomedicine books remain freely available online here, with links to MNT-based medical nanorobot designs here.

Hi, my name in Elijah, I am in the 4th grade at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn New York.

But it would be amazing to go as a LEGO ambassador and work at the booth again.Hi, my name in Elijah, I am in the 4th grade at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn New York.

But it would be amazing to go as a LEGO ambassador and work at the booth again.

Designed for search and rescue missions – which, let’s face it, are only ever one loose word away from “search and destroy” – the SCRATCHbot uses its whiskers to detect disaster survivors in inhospitable or dangerous areas. The Bristol Robotics Laboratory developed the rat-inspired people searcher over the past 6 years and now hopes to find interest for it in underground and underwater projects where vision may be impaired. Far less heroic uses are also being contemplated, such as textile inspection and implementation inside intelligent vacuum cleaners that would be able to adjust their cleaning to the particular surface they sense. Video of the new bot coming to life is after the break.

Continue reading Video: SCRATCHbot hunts like a rat for those trapped like one

Filed under: Robots

Video: SCRATCHbot hunts like a rat for those trapped like one originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a paper on roboethics by Yueh-Hsuan Weng of Taiwan’s Conscription Agency in the International Journal of Social Robotics that has gotten a write-up on Physorg (h/t to Accelerating Future).

Here’s the abstract:

Technocrats from many developed countries, especially Japan and South Korea, are preparing for the human-robot co-existence society that they believe will emerge by 2030. Regulators are assuming that within the next two decades, robots will be capable of adapting to complex, unstructured environments and interacting with humans to assist with the performance of daily life tasks. Unlike heavily regulated industrial robots that toil in isolated settings, Next Generation Robots will have relative autonomy, which raises a number of safety issues that are the focus of this article. Our purpose is to describe a framework for a legal system focused on Next Generation Robots safety issues, including a Safety Intelligence concept that addresses robot Open-Texture Risk. We express doubt that a model based on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics can ever be a suitable foundation for creating an artificial moral agency ensuring robot safety. Finally, we make predictions about the most significant Next Generation Robots safety issues that will arise as the human-robot co-existence society emerges.

Now frankly, as I mentioned last week, the major thing we have to worry about with future technology for quite a while yet will simply be whether it works as intended. One very important part of making this happen is to make the systems, whatever they are, as simple as possible (but not simpler, as Einstein said).

However, Weng does address one point that I haven’t seen anywhere else besides my own book Beyond AI — the “open texture” of the law. Well before AI and robotics folks realized that it was impossible to specify actions in the real world precisely, lawyers did, and the legal notion of the open texture is the result. It’s a kind of deontic uncertainty principle — what in Beyond AI I called “formalist float”. Here’s the example I give in the book:

Two men sit down at a lunch counter and order cups of coffee. The first man finishes, gets up, and leaves a dime on the counter where he was sitting. He pays at the register and leaves.

The second man gets up. He places his fingertip on the dime and slides it over to his spot on the counter. Then he, too, pays and leaves.

What, if anything, has been stolen? The dime, intended by the first man for the waitress, still goes to the waitress. The second man never picked it up or possessed it. He was not legally obligated to leave a tip. Yet we are morally certain that he stole something.

What this means for robotics, AI, and indeed any formal system, is that there has to be some common-sense way to fill in the fabric of flesh in the gaps between the bones of the rigid, formal specifications.

But that’s the hard problem of AI itself, not just roboethics. If we can solve it for housecleaning robots, it may give us a leg up on solving it for the law itself, and all the other mechanisms of our rapidly-formalizing world.

Retro Robo Sculpture by Mike Rivamonte

Here’s a great gallery of retro robot art creations. There quite an array of intricate robot sculptures from a variety of artists. The robot pictured above was created by artist Mike Rivamonte. There’s a few more of my favorites after the jump.

What’s your favorite?

Retro Robot by Rich Muller

Robo-woman by Greg Brotherton

There’s a post on Technology Review’s blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories.

Current-day magnetic memory is already “nanotechnology” under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt dimer sitting on top of a benzene ring would have a high enough magnetic anisotropy to store a bit magnetically.

(surprisingly enough, the cobalts prefer to stack up rather than so lie down flat on the carbon ring.)

Don’t expect this in your computer any time soon; the authors write:

Technological use would require to solve at least three additional
problems: fabrication of large regular arrays; protection against oxidation without reducing
the anisotropy; new read/write technologies. Let us finally discuss a possible method to
solve the latter problem. Conventional write technology makes use of magnetic fields B in
the order of 1 T, Ref. 2. It would fail in the present situation, where a field B = MAE/µs of
several hundred tesla would be needed.

But they then go on to show that the bit could be written (reading is relatively easy) by a scanning-probe like tip which briefly ionized the upper cobalt. The mechanisms to do that would of course still have to be designed and built; but this is exploratory engineering in atomically-precise mechanisms, and we’d like to see more of it.

Robots and other devices linked to social networking sites aren’t exactly anything new, but few have been in the form of tiny robot penguins, and even fewer have been tiny robot penguins with hats. That bit of mold-breaking comes courtesy of upstart Arimaz of Switzerland, which is now busy showing off its MyDeskFriend “Facebook companion” that’s set for release this September. As you can see in the video after the break, the bot is able to mosey about your desk without falling off and react to your voice like any good robot, but its real secret is that it can connect to Facebook and read your messages, or even be controlled (some may say tormented) by your real Facebook friends. Look for it to run $99 when it’s released.

[Via Technabob]

Continue reading MyDeskFriend robot penguin will link to Facebook, be a true friend

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MyDeskFriend robot penguin will link to Facebook, be a true friend originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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