UAV Sniper

The Army is testing an autonomous helicopter capable of acting as a sniper. Not much information about the stability package for the weapon, but it must be impressive. Not sure how a helicopter is going to achieve the stealth required of a sniper? After the much publicized messes the Predators have made with their much less precise weapons, this is a good step forward.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/army-tests-new/

Insects for chemical and biological detection

Controlling small UAVs has turned out to be so difficult (even understanding the way insects fly was/is really hard) that DARPA is again looking to outfitting insects instead of building vehicles.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-06/insect-wifi-network-tracks-down-wmds

I think it was in the movie Get Smart that Max smashed an expensive prototype something like this into pieces.

Nuclear armed UAVs?

Two interesting UAV articles posted on the same day. One talks about the possibility of nuclear armed UAVs, the other notes that the USAF will train more UAV pilots than real pilots for the first time this year. This is partly in response to Gates insisting that the Air Force goes to more automation in their UAVs in response to higher crash rates than the Army had for their UAVs.

Together, these two articles show just how quickly the U.S. military is moving to UAVs. The F-22 and Stealth Bombers and Fighters might be the last major manned military aircraft. End of an era.

http://eideard.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/air-force-intends-to-rely-on-unmanned-aircraft-rather-than-pilots/

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/06/4040349

Solar powered robots?

The reigning North American Solar Challenge car made it from Texas to Canada in 50 hours. This is with a driver, adding weight and imposing constraints on the overall shape. Without those constraints, it would seem reasonable to think that a solar powered robot vehicle could move pretty effectively, reliably and quickly over long distances. I don't recall seeing any solar powered robotic vehicles (except on Mars), I wonder why.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/0-to-60-in-full-sunlight-revving-up-for-world-solar-challenge.ars

Spy Chips Guiding CIA Drone Strikes

Story in Wired about the possibility that the U.S. military is getting locals to plant RF chips on or near militants which are used to guide UAVs in onto their targets.

One of the interesting things to me was that apparently the militants had worked out a while ago that this was going on and were doing their best to stop it. That seems to indicate a pretty high level of technical sophistication.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/spy-chips-guiding-cia-drone-strikes-locals-say/

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.

IJRR accepting "Data papers"

I think this is a great idea, get peer-reviewed data on the web both for reducing start up costs for robotics research and for good comparison of techniques.

" From the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Robotics
Research,

The International Journal of Robotics Research announces a new genre
of paper – the data paper – for significant and peer reviewed archival
data sets. Data papers build on the success of archival multimedia
content for papers, another IJRR innovation that was introduced in
July 2001.

Our goal in creating data papers is to facilitate and encourage the
release of high quality, peer reviewed data sets to the robotics
community. We believe that the widespread availability of large data
sets (order of Gbytes) will overcome a significant entry barrier in
robotics which currently slows algorithmic development.

Benefits will come from eliminating the effort and expertise required
to collect these very large experimental data sets, and from
facilitating direct comparison to previously published work.

Further details are available in the editorial at http://ijr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/28/5/587"

Autopilot safer for Predators

It will be no surprise to researchers working in the field of robot teleoperation to hear that autopilots on UAVs are substantially better than human pilots at keeping their aircraft safe. Apparently the U.S. Air Force's highly trained "real" pilots, have crash landed $80 million worth of Predators, compared to none by the "Xbox trained" Army techs.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=62334

The upshot is that the Air Force is being forced to go to autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible.

Man injured by malfunctioning robot

"A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."

Apparently the man thought the robot was disconnected from power, but was not and managed to confuse him for a rock.

http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html

Nice application for Multi Robot System

MIT is working on a "Robot Gardener" that might do plant and harvest your vegetables for you. Sounds like a perfect basis for an interesting MRS.

http://www.technology.am/robot-gardener-plants-tends-and-harvests-114746.html

Highlight: "This robot pulls up to a docking station and “pees” on a tomato plant to water it. The robot moves to another tomato plant and uses the Web cam to recognize a tomato and grab it with the gripper."

Interesting TED talks

A couple of short videos on TED that may be of interest to MRS or MAS researchers:

Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the AlloSphere, an entirely new way to see and interpret scientific data, in full color and surround sound inside a massive metal sphere. Dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements ...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

Winner of IFAAMAS-08 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award announced

Ariel Procaccia receives the 2008 Victor Lesser Distinguished
Dissertation Award sponsored by IFAAMAS, the International Foundation
for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (http://www.ifaamas.org).

The selection committee for the IFAAMAS-08 Victor Lesser Distinguished
Dissertation Award is pleased to announce that Dr. Ariel Procaccia has
won the award. Dr. Procaccia received the Ph.D. in Computer Science
from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis contains fundamental
contributions to computational social choice theory, covering a wide
variety of topics including the complexity of election manipulation,
the robustness of voting rules, the learnability of voting rules, and
incentive-compatible machine learning. Among other contributions, it
introduces a new way of analyzing the manipulability of social choice
functions, which has become influential in AAMAS and related research
communities.

The committee is also pleased to announce two runners-up: Dr. Matthew
Taylor, who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, who received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of
Michigan. Dr. Taylor's thesis concerns transfer learning and Dr.
Vorobeychik's thesis studies empirical mechanism design. Both
dissertations also make innovative and influential contributions to
the field of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

Previous winners of this award were Radu Jurca (2007) and Vincent
Conitzer (2006).

The selection committee members were Vincent Conitzer, Les Gasser,
Radu Jurca, Sarit Kraus, Sandip Sen, and Makoto Yokoo (chair).

Military vision

Interesting (but somewhat unambitious) view of how autonomous systems and humans will work together in the future.

Check out the video.

Some of the technology already exists and has been demonstrated, but a lot of what is left to do for this particular vision is some messy engineering.

Scientists losing their jobs to automation?

Two articles have appeared in the popular science media in the last week talking about software that automatically made new scientific knowledge. In one case, the knowledge was completely new, while in the other case, the software autonomously learned something we already knew.

Here are the first and second articles.

It makes sense to me that this type of technology will do more over time. Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. That 99% often involves running large numbers of experiments, processing reams of data and designing slightly changed experiments based on the previous results. When the execution of the experiments can be automated, e.g., when a simulator is used, software is ideally suited to run the experiments.

Artificial intelligence is sometimes described as the science of search. Thus, the techniques developed in that field for 50 years, should be ideally suited to performing routine experiments. The design and processing of experiments and their results is essentially search over some complex, sometimes physical space.

But getting software to do that "1% inspiration" is likely a long way off. That leads to two possible outcomes: (a) Scientists starting actually working 1% of the time (about 20 minutes a week) or (b) Scientific discovery speeds up 100 fold. I know where my money is.

Robotic Fish for Pollution Monitoring

These 5ft (1.5m) long fish won't be a swarm in the intuitive sense, but there will be multiple of them. Nice application.

"EU Commissions Swarm of Robot Fish to Sniff Our Pollution in Ports

The systems the EU is buying for a pollution control project are one of the rare robotic systems shaped like animals for practical reasons, not just for looks.

Researchers in Southern England have won part of a European Union contract with a sophisticated, autonomous, marine-locomotive pollution detector that looks astonishingly like a fish.

The 2.5 million-pound ($3.6 million) contract was awarded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for SHOAL a project whose name looks like an acronym but isn’t, whose goal is to use robot fish to sniff out and report pollution in Europe’s harbors and rivers."

Read more.