Robotics

Two stories on the slate:

Flying Microbots - BBC

British soldiers in Afghanistan will use tiny drones, the Black Hornet Nano drones, which weigh about 14g/half an ounce and measure around 4 x 1 inches (100mm x 25mm0. They carry a camera and can fly for about half an hour. Allows soldiers to see what is around without being in the line of fire. It's also part of what the Ministry of Defense calls a larger push for surveillance and intelligence-gathering tools.

Jumping Microbots - Physics.org

The three-legged jumping system begins life as a mold created by a 3-D printer. The robots are molded using soft silicone that allows them to stretch and flex. But where pneumatic robots are connected to tubing that pumps air, the jumping robots are connected to tubes that deliver a precisely controlled mix of methane and oxygen. Using high-voltage wires embedded in each leg of the robot, researchers deliver a spark to ignite the gases, causing a small explosion that sends the robot into the air.

Maybe HG Wells' Martian tripod fighting machines didn't so much walk as hopped

Trends to watch here: Small, soft bots in the air, meshed bots (the Internet of Flying Things) plus small controlled explosions. And print-your-own (war)bots.

Readers of this blog will know we are following the intersection of robotics and the internet, especially flying robots (aka the Internet Of Flying Things). News in is that Iran has built its first drone is interesting (see clip above). The Atlantic magazine notes:

But how concerned should we be about Tehran's latest toy? According to the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko -- not much. So far, he told me, Iran hasn't been able to mount precision-guided weapons on the Shahed-129 like the kind U.S. drones rely on to perform targeted killings. And even before it can attack a target, the machine has to get there -- a task made more complicated by Iran's elementary command-and-control infrastructure. Even if everything went to plan and the drone escaped detection -- an unlikely event in any case -- Iran's military would still need to keep in contact with it to operate the thing.

"And," Zenko added, "since it is a country with a military budget under $10 billion and surrounded by perceived threats, they are compulsive exaggerators about what their military could do."

I think that is hubris of the highest order, frankly. The whole point of drones is thay are 2+ orders of magnitude cheaper to develop than human piloted fighting aircraft. It also shows a scary lack of the remembrance of things past. In 1914, aircraft were used for scouting and attacking enemy on the ground. By 1915 they were used to fight each other. I'd predict by 2015 we will have our first reports of drone attacks against other drones. The only other question is whether a drone will shoot down an aircraft (probably a helicopter) or another drone first

By its design (long, thin, wings) this drone is a glider, ie built for scouting, not fighting - but that is just how it started in 1914 too, and by 1916 proper fighter aircraft had arrived, in large numbers. Perish the thought that history will repeat itself here.

The Internet of Flying things takes another step forward. Dan Shapiro's article here looks at the developments in copters:

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a thousand bucks. Amazon Prime is cool, and I can’t wait for self-driving delivery cars – but there’s a reason they call a beeline a beeline. Flying autonomous deliverybots are coming. Fast.

Lest you doubt the logistics, the Hong Kong based hobbyshop of wonderment, Hobbyking, recently sponsored a contest called “Beerlift 2012″. While the contestants mostly used water as a standin for the bubbly, the winner, Romanian pilot Muresan Alexandru Camil, lifted over a hundred pounds of liquid – meaning that deliveries of entire beer kegs are not out of the question [57kg to be exact - but see this video we published earlier of one lifting a man]. While his massive octocopter looks like quite an endeavor, American David Ditch lifted a respectable 50 lbs with a 2-foot-square quadcopter – enough for quite a few Taco Bell Doritos Locos to your door. 279 of them, if you’re counting.

Dan has an expanded discussion on the sorts of roles various other flying devices may have, but if you read this article in association with this one as well (allowing many bot-copters to interact via internet comms) you can see that teh Internet of Flying Things is going to be very interesting. (To summarise - in the last few years, battery power has gone up and processing and motor power/weight has gone down enough for affordable robot aircrafat to be near commodities. I'd be surprised of airforces use manned fighter aircraft in a generation)

Blend that in with the remorseless trend towards online ordering, and one wonders if we will move back to 100 years ago, where every local shop had a delivery lad on a bicycle - except now its going to be bots.

Update - this video of highly manouverable aeroplanes is a reminder that it may not go all the robocopter's way

Today, the 3rd and largest Mars exploration robot by far, Curiosity, landed on the Mars surface. It incorporates quite a lot of what was learned from the first 2, particulalrly:

- It used a heat generating plutonium source for thermo-electric power, rather than solar cells as it was found that the solar panels dust up and there is not a lot of light in winter
- To get it to places other rovers haven't reached, by using a retro-rocket firing drop-frame and a winch-down rather than airbags, this is a huge increase in complexity as well as a major advance in technology used - this starts to look like the Sci Fi dropships of the movies. (see video above)
- It is a lot bigger (the size of a small car), so can do more things for longer, and go farther.

A rather nice touch is the Curiosity (@MarsCuriosity - sadly, @curiosity is already someone's dog) team twittered the rover's descent, and it landed with the statement:

I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

I wonder if it will carry on twittering, telling us where it is day to day like Jodrell Bank does?

Apart from the excitement of getting another rover on mars, I am very interested by what it implies for robotic technology, as the overall system is at a far higher level level of complexity than what was deployed before, and is literally more complex than anything on earth. And of they can make this work on Mars, the potential is huge. This is another step forwatd for mankind, but it is truly a great leap forward for robotkind

Co-incidentally, last week I attended a talk by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who talked a bit about the manned missions that he believes should follow this work, and be able to stay on the surface awhile. Aldrin believes that we need to do this, because it is hard, and the benefits will be greater than the moon programme. When I was growing up I read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" as a science fiction book about Terraforming mars (albeit very well researched), but now - who knows?

(Aldrin also made some pertinent points about using a Mars Landing as a way of motivating the very best "next generation" scientists, technologsts, engineers and mathematicians to have an alternative career path to designing systems that make imaginary money move, or sell advertising to internet eyeballs)

Two videos, courtesy El Reg

1. Paper and drinking straw construction model plane dropped from edge of space



2. Model Electric motor toy expanded in size, lifts human



Juxtapose those with this....

Radical Innovation occurs by fitting new parts in new ways, seeing new patterns. I don't know what these things mean individually, but it points to a radical shift in the cost of flying devices, and that is bound to have an impact on our comms systems..

The future is all around, just unevenly distributed.....

Those of you who follow this blog (we few....) will know we track the developments i robotics, well this video from the latest TED talks (see above) illustrates something we have talked about before - the Internet of Mobile things - but as an ex Aeronautical engineer and robotics geek, a video that puts flying robots that use A-Life principles to self-organise is geekhasm with added cream (whiopped, of course).

Watch, and gawp.

There is a lot being written right now about "Gamification" - the translation of gaming techniques to put the "fun" into real life. I was quite interest to pick up a sort of reverse trend - here, agent based simulation modelling (used to model all sorts of real world problems from traffic flow to stock movement) is being added to game rendering to inform actual tactices - in this case, the movement of the mediaeval Byzantine army to the battle of Manzikert in 1071.

(For the history buffs, Manzikert in 1071 AD was the battle that cost the Byzantines their Empire and set up the future Ottoman Turks, as well as spawning the Crusades and all that spun out of that. Of course, in the West it is ignored for the smaller impact of Hastings, 5 years earlier).

MIT Review:

Historical accounts put the size of the army led by Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at the battle of Manzikert at up to 100,000 troops, but could an army that large really have been raised and supported in AD 1071? To find out, a group of computer scientists, archaeologists and historians teamed up to create what's known as an 'agent-based simulation' of the Byzantine Army as it marched from Constantinople into what is now modern Turkey. (Here's a paper on the research and a short video.)

Agent-based simulations model complex things like societies by simulating the simple ways that individuals in that population interact. At the head of those agents is an Emperor choosing, for example, the route the army will take, but the actual progress of its march consists of relatively straightforward things like setting up and breaking down camp, acquiring food, disseminating orders and the like. All of which this simulation includes.

This kind of simulation works because, as complicated as the behavior of individual humans might seem, in aggregate, crowds of humans aren't so different from termites or birds or any other animal. Group behaviors like flocking and nest building can be achieved with just a few basic rules describing the inclinations and interactions of the individuals in a group.

While models of this kind can never definitively answer questions about the historical accuracy of various claims, they can eliminate some possibilities, while also helping to address matters on which historians are mostly silent. These include things like how the economies of medieval societies were structured (think of taxes, transportation and food production) in order to support large standing armies.

The agent-based simulator used in this case doesn't simulate battles, because the decision-making that takes place in combat is too complicated to model at present. Just simulating how thousands of individual agents march from one location to another over a period of days requires significant parallel processing.

We consider this sort of algorithm maths to be part of the driving middleware for the Mobile Internet of Things which will blend Robotics and the IOT.

One of the areas we watch is the area of intersection between the 'Net, mobile Robotics and ICT - the "Internet of Moving Things". This video shows teams of 4-rotor (quadrotor) model helicopters assembling a frame. Make the choppers a bit bigger to add more onboard intelligence and more lifting power, and you have some impressive (and potentially scary) applications that suggest themselves.