In a review of "Wired for War"

"Another scientist talked about how the military came to him and said, "Oh, we'd like you to design the hunter-killer drone from the Terminator movies." Which, you know, is kind of incredibly scary, but it makes perfect sense from another perspective in that if it's effective for SkyNet, their thinking is: "Well, it could be really neat in our real-world battlefields.""

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/wired-war-or-how-we-learned-stop-worrying-and-let-dystopian-sf-movies-inspire-our-

DARPA Strategic Plan

Four "Future Icons" in DARPA's strategic plan will require particular involvement of MAS and MRS researchers:

Air Vehicles: unmanned air vehicles that quickly arrive at their mission station and can loiter there for very long periods

National Cyber Range: The National Cyber Range will provide an environment for realistic, qualitative and quantitative assessment of potentially revolutionary cyber research and development technologies

Persistent Surveillance Sensors: determine, track, and neutralize elusive threats, such as improvised explosive device factories

Networks: self-forming, robust, self-defending networks at the strategic and tactical level are the key to network-centric warfare; these networks will use spectrum far more efficiently and resist disruption if the GPS time signal is unavailable


DARPA currently emphasizes research in nine strategic thrusts:
Robust, Secure, Self-Forming Networks
Detection, Precision ID, Tracking, and Destruction of Elusive Targets
Urban Area Operations
Advanced Manned and Unmanned Systems
Detection, Characterization, and Assessment of Underground Structures
Space
Increasing the Tooth to Tail Ratio
Bio-Revolution
Core Technologies

http://www.darpa.mil/Docs/StratPlan09.pdf

Richard Feyman at Thinking Machines

Great article about Richard Feyman's time at Thinking Machines. This guy was a pure scientist.

"That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company."

".... we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems. 'That sounds like a bunch of baloney,' he said. 'Give me something real to do.'"

"When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. 'Hey, we got it right!' he said. 'Not bad for amateurs.'"

http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php

Someone has been watching Transformers

I can't believe this is anything more than a publicity stunt, but this very orange and very large robot is supposed to clear forests (for fire prevention) and perhaps even fight fires. Amusing, if nothing else.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/giant-robot-fights-forest-fires.php

Autonomous Robotics Journal - latest issue

Papers on robots with whiskers and underwater robots, sounds like we are halfway to an autonomous walrus ....

On the use of likelihood fields to perform sonar scan matching localization
Authors: Antoni Burguera, Yolanda González and Gabriel Oliver
DOI: 10.1007/s10514-009-9108-0
pp. 203-222

Contact type dependency of texture classification in a whiskered mobile robot
Authors: Charles W. Fox, Ben Mitchinson, Martin J. Pearson, Anthony
G. Pipe, and Tony J. Prescott
DOI: 10.1007/s10514-009-9109-z
pp. 223-239

Maneuvering and control of a biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle
Author: Jenhwa Guo
DOI: 10.1007/s10514-009-9117-z
pp. 241-249

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0929-5593

Imagine if scientists cooperated

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/what-if-scientists-didnt-compete/

"What if scientists, instead of rushing to publish or perish, chose to cooperate? Sean Cutler decided to do “a little experiment,” as he calls it, and you can see the results in the forthcoming issue of Science."

I think MRS and MAS researchers cooperate more than researchers in most fields do, because there is so much to be done to make even a single application work. There is also so much "low hanging fruit", that competing hard to be the first to some some particular problem rarely seems worth the effort - just find an interesting unsolved problem that there are not so many people working on.