To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots

To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots By Clay Dillow Posted 11.08.2011 at 3:49 pm 5 Comments
A Robot Made of Robots via Ares

Over at Fort Benning, soldiers at the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment aren’t waiting for military robot makers to come up with the right mix of robotic capabilities. Putting that military penchant for improvisation into practice, soldiers there are mashing up their military robots to give themselves the capabilities they want, piggybacking one robot on top of the other until they get the right mix of gear.

Specifically, soldiers there mounted a TiaLinx Cougar 10 (that’s the robot that can hear your terrified breathing through a concrete wall via radio frequency sensors) on top of a faster and stronger Lockheed Martin Squad Mission Support System (SMSS), a load-bearing unmanned ground vehicle that went to Afghanistan recently for operational testing.

Related ArticlesThis Robot Can Hear Your Frightened Breathing, Even Through WallsA Hexacopter That Sees Motion and Hears Breathing, Even Through WallsHow The First Crowdsourced Military Vehicle Can Remake the Future of Defense ManufacturingTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, fort benning, lockheed martin, military, military robots, robotics, robots, tialinxThe DIY rig was designed by soldiers at Fort Benning to mitigate some problems they were having with the Cougar 10. While they love the ability to detect a human presence through a wall or obstacle, the Cougar 10 was too slow for teams of soldiers who were trying to quickly sweep and secure multiple buildings. The makeshift solution: piggyback the Cougar 10 aboard the SMSS, which is designed to move at speed and carry up to 600 pounds of payload.

Combined, the two ‘bots performed the mission the soldiers needed it to. But that doesn’t mean a Cougar 10/SMSS blend is a perfect robot by any means. The SMSS is large and loud, unfit for stealthy missions (during another night ambush exercise a SMSS packed with thermal imaging gave away a unit’s position with its engine noise). On the other hand, the Cougar 10 is designed to help soldiers get the drop on their enemies.

But for the mission at hand--sweeping and clearing a series of buildings--it was the right robot for the job. The fact that soldiers were able to quickly build their own customized robot out of robots is cool, both in terms of crafty DIY ingenuity and in terms of the future of modular military robot design.

[Ares]

Previous Article: Bell Labs's Nethead Makes Telepresence Robots Affordable for AllNext Article: Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator 5 Comments Link to this comment beantown179 11/08/11 at 6:06 pm

Wait if we let soldiers do this then how will the defense contractors make all their money?

Link to this comment JediMindset 11/08/11 at 6:14 pm

sadly they wouldn't be giving the soldiers the credit and they pay check. think about it this way, soldiers just follow orders. that's their job. so another "superior" telling them to hand over their creations is just another mission.

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Link to this comment tcolguin 11/08/11 at 7:10 pm

If you are working for a company and build a new robot, you don't get it either, it is the companies not yours. Nothing different here.

Link to this comment WhittyMike 11/09/11 at 2:21 pm

These are

the droids we've been looking for...

Link to this comment Zreiser 11/09/11 at 11:21 pm

Yo dawg, I heard you liked robots, so we put a robot on your robot, built out of other robots to help make even more robots for your robots!

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November 2011: Data Is Power

This month, we examine all the ways information is driving our future, from dating to crime to how we see the world.

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Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator

Keio University researchers are taking telepresence to the next logical level with a new “telexistence” robot called TELESAR V, a robotic platform that doesn’t just transport the user's eyes to another location, but also his or her ears and hands as well. The idea is to break through the limitations of time and space to allow a user to actually feel like he or she is present elsewhere via a remotely operated robot that returns three sensory stimuli back to the user.

Using a head-mounted 3-D visual display, an audio system that streams sound to the user, and tactile gloves that allow the user to feel the shapes and temperatures of objects--currently the robots force vector and temp sensors can accurately relay textures as fine as the unevenness on the surface of a Lego block--the user can manipulate the robot remotely and feel what the robot feels. The designers are looking for a true avatar sensation, one that makes the user really feel that he or she is inhabiting the place of the robot.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen or heard of this kind of concept, but it is one of the first all around implementations of so much telepresence technology in a single package that--by all appearances--seems to work really well. And there’s no need to take our word for it; see TELESAR V in action below.

[DigInfo]

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'Robot biologist' solves complex problem from scratch

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2011) — First it was chess. Then it was Jeopardy. Now computers are at it again, but this time they are trying to automate the scientific process itself.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, Cornell University and CFD Research Corporation, Inc., has taken a major step toward this goal by demonstrating that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates. According to the researchers, it is one of the most complex scientific modeling problems that a computer has solved completely from scratch.

The paper that describes this accomplishment is published in the October issue of the journal Physical Biology and is currently available online.

The work was a collaboration between John P. Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor at Vanderbilt, Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson at the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University and Jerry Jenkins and Ravishankar Vallabhajosyula at CFDRC in Huntsville, Ala.

The "brains" of the system, which Wikswo has christened the Automated Biology Explorer (ABE), is a unique piece of software called Eureqa developed at Cornell and released in 2009. Schmidt and Lipson originally created Eureqa to design robots without going through the normal trial and error stage that is both slow and expensive. After it succeeded, they realized it could also be applied to solving science problems.

One of Eureqa's initial achievements was identifying the basic laws of motion by analyzing the motion of a double pendulum. What took Sir Isaac Newton years to discover, Eureqa did in a few hours when running on a personal computer.

In 2006, Wikswo heard Lipson lecture about his research. "I had a 'eureka moment' of my own when I realized the system Hod had developed could be used to solve biological problems and even control them," Wikswo said. So he started talking to Lipson immediately after the lecture and they began a collaboration to adapt Eureqa to analyze biological problems.

"Biology is the area where the gap between theory and data is growing the most rapidly," said Lipson. "So it is the area in greatest need of automation."

Software passes test

The biological system that the researchers used to test ABE is glycolysis, the primary process that produces energy in a living cell. Specifically, they focused on the manner in which yeast cells control fluctuations in the chemical compounds produced by the process.

The researchers chose this specific system, called glycolytic oscillations, to perform a virtual test of the software because it is one of the most extensively studied biological control systems. Jenkins and Vallabhajosyula used one of the process' detailed mathematical models to generate a data set corresponding to the measurements a scientist would make under various conditions. To increase the realism of the test, the researchers salted the data with a 10 percent random error. When they fed the data into Eureqa, it derived a series of equations that were nearly identical to the known equations.

"What's really amazing is that it produced these equations a priori," said Vallabhajosyula. "The only thing the software knew in advance was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division."

Beyond Adam

The ability to generate mathematical equations from scratch is what sets ABE apart from Adam, the robot scientist developed by Ross King and his colleagues at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Adam runs yeast genetics experiments and made international headlines two years ago by making a novel scientific discovery without direct human input. King fed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. He also linked the computer to a remote-controlled genetics laboratory. This allowed the computer to generate hypotheses, then design and conduct actual experiments to test them.

"It's a classic paper," Wikswo said.

In order to give ABE the ability to run experiments like Adam, Wikswo's group is currently developing "laboratory-on-a-chip" technology that can be controlled by Eureqa. This will allow ABE to design and perform a wide variety of basic biology experiments. Their initial effort is focused on developing a microfluidics device that can test cell metabolism.

"Generally, the way that scientists design experiments is to vary one factor at a time while keeping the other factors constant, but, in many cases, the most effective way to test a biological system may be to tweak a large number of different factors at the same time and see what happens. ABE will let us do that," Wikswo said.

The project was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.

Journal Reference:

Michael D Schmidt, Ravishankar R Vallabhajosyula, Jerry W Jenkins, Jonathan E Hood, Abhishek S Soni, John P Wikswo, Hod Lipson. Automated refinement and inference of analytical models for metabolic networks. Physical Biology, 2011; 8 (5): 055011 DOI: 10.1088/1478-3975/8/5/055011

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

'Robot biologist' solves complex problem from scratch

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2011) — First it was chess. Then it was Jeopardy. Now computers are at it again, but this time they are trying to automate the scientific process itself.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, Cornell University and CFD Research Corporation, Inc., has taken a major step toward this goal by demonstrating that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates. According to the researchers, it is one of the most complex scientific modeling problems that a computer has solved completely from scratch.

The paper that describes this accomplishment is published in the October issue of the journal Physical Biology and is currently available online.

The work was a collaboration between John P. Wikswo, the Gordon A. Cain University Professor at Vanderbilt, Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson at the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University and Jerry Jenkins and Ravishankar Vallabhajosyula at CFDRC in Huntsville, Ala.

The "brains" of the system, which Wikswo has christened the Automated Biology Explorer (ABE), is a unique piece of software called Eureqa developed at Cornell and released in 2009. Schmidt and Lipson originally created Eureqa to design robots without going through the normal trial and error stage that is both slow and expensive. After it succeeded, they realized it could also be applied to solving science problems.

One of Eureqa's initial achievements was identifying the basic laws of motion by analyzing the motion of a double pendulum. What took Sir Isaac Newton years to discover, Eureqa did in a few hours when running on a personal computer.

In 2006, Wikswo heard Lipson lecture about his research. "I had a 'eureka moment' of my own when I realized the system Hod had developed could be used to solve biological problems and even control them," Wikswo said. So he started talking to Lipson immediately after the lecture and they began a collaboration to adapt Eureqa to analyze biological problems.

"Biology is the area where the gap between theory and data is growing the most rapidly," said Lipson. "So it is the area in greatest need of automation."

Software passes test

The biological system that the researchers used to test ABE is glycolysis, the primary process that produces energy in a living cell. Specifically, they focused on the manner in which yeast cells control fluctuations in the chemical compounds produced by the process.

The researchers chose this specific system, called glycolytic oscillations, to perform a virtual test of the software because it is one of the most extensively studied biological control systems. Jenkins and Vallabhajosyula used one of the process' detailed mathematical models to generate a data set corresponding to the measurements a scientist would make under various conditions. To increase the realism of the test, the researchers salted the data with a 10 percent random error. When they fed the data into Eureqa, it derived a series of equations that were nearly identical to the known equations.

"What's really amazing is that it produced these equations a priori," said Vallabhajosyula. "The only thing the software knew in advance was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division."

Beyond Adam

The ability to generate mathematical equations from scratch is what sets ABE apart from Adam, the robot scientist developed by Ross King and his colleagues at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. Adam runs yeast genetics experiments and made international headlines two years ago by making a novel scientific discovery without direct human input. King fed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. He also linked the computer to a remote-controlled genetics laboratory. This allowed the computer to generate hypotheses, then design and conduct actual experiments to test them.

"It's a classic paper," Wikswo said.

In order to give ABE the ability to run experiments like Adam, Wikswo's group is currently developing "laboratory-on-a-chip" technology that can be controlled by Eureqa. This will allow ABE to design and perform a wide variety of basic biology experiments. Their initial effort is focused on developing a microfluidics device that can test cell metabolism.

"Generally, the way that scientists design experiments is to vary one factor at a time while keeping the other factors constant, but, in many cases, the most effective way to test a biological system may be to tweak a large number of different factors at the same time and see what happens. ABE will let us do that," Wikswo said.

The project was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.

Journal Reference:

Michael D Schmidt, Ravishankar R Vallabhajosyula, Jerry W Jenkins, Jonathan E Hood, Abhishek S Soni, John P Wikswo, Hod Lipson. Automated refinement and inference of analytical models for metabolic networks. Physical Biology, 2011; 8 (5): 055011 DOI: 10.1088/1478-3975/8/5/055011

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Foambot Creates Itself Out of Sprayable Foam, Becoming Whatever Robot You Need

Foambot Creates Itself Out of Sprayable Foam, Becoming Whatever Robot You Need | Popular Science@import "/files/css/1857af3413d9ad8bd2f9d3926af8ec39.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthPopSci Eco TourTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg Foambot Creates Itself Out of Sprayable Foam, Becoming Whatever Robot You Need By Clay Dillow Posted 10.19.2011 at 3:08 pm 5 Comments
Foambot

Like most machines, Robots are generally built toward a purpose or a set of narrowly defined applications, like automobile manufacturing or explosive ordnance disposal or making doner kebabs. So how do you make a robot that is truly multi-utility, adaptable to any job? You make a robot that can make itself.

Enter Foambot, a University of Pennsylvania creation that constructs itself on the spot depending on what kind of robot is needed at the time. Foambot consists of a mobile “mothership” platform and several joint modules that can create powered kinetic motion. Programmed for a task, the mothership can configure the joints on the ground and spray them with a mixture of chemical reagents that harden and expand into a solid urethane foam.

Related ArticlesThe Navy Wants a Swarm of Semi-Autonomous Breeding Robots With Built-In 3-D PrintersAt the International Robot Exhibition in Japan, Robots For Your Every NeedCould Robots Unite Under One Operating System?TagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, foam, foambot, robotics, robots, university of pennsylvaniaOnce connected by the hardened foam, the joints are coordinated by a piece of software that analyses the way the mothership has connected them and creates a motion scheme on the fly. And like that, you have a robot. Kind of like Voltron, but without the defender-of-the-universe mission profile.

The concept is pretty rudimentary for now, but it’s not hard to envision such a make-it-as-you-go platform being refined into a very useful concept, particularly for situations where humans know they might need a robot but don’t know what kind of robot they might need (say for humanitarian missions or for future space exploration, for instance). The Navy is already exploring this idea to some degree via 3-D printing. As you can see in the video below, this kind of concept is still taking form. Now we just have to wait for it to solidify.

[New Scientist]

Previous Article: European Alternative to GPS Lifts Off Tomorrow From South America, Via Russian RocketNext Article: Video: Google Finally Explains the Tech Behind Their Autonomous Cars 5 Comments Link to this comment Q 10/19/11 at 3:43 pm

Here! Here! For wishful thinking in robot self manufactoring. I like to see the results of this a few years in the future.

Link to this comment dorin 10/19/11 at 4:10 pm

its sertenly a good start but we have a long ways to go

Link to this comment beantown179 10/19/11 at 8:24 pm

Love the concept but doesn't really make sense to build something out of foam. If coupled though with the new material maker that uses DNA as its building blocks then we could literally have a machine build something that ordinarily would not exist in nature solve a problem remotely. Replace "foam" for another medium and instead focus on the AI - and now you have some serious advancements.

Link to this comment qksilver 10/20/11 at 3:28 pm

One obedient girlfriend coming up!

Link to this comment prime2011 10/20/11 at 6:52 pm

Nice idea and good start. Once they get to more exact precision with the limb creation etc then it should be quite versatile. Perhaps some sort of mobile 3d printer would be a good choice as well?

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October 2011: The Search for Alien Life

This month, we examine all the ways we're looking for extraterrestrial life, within our solar system and beyond.

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