Unmanned "Surge": 3000 More Robots for War

U.S. military robots ran 30,000 missions in 2006 -- hunting for, and getting rid of, improvised explosives.

Now, the military has launched a crash project to radically increase its unmanned ground forces. Call it the robotic equivalent of the "surge."

Read More

Robo-Cars Picked for Pentagon Driving Test

36 teams are moving on to the semi-finals of the Urban Challenge, the Pentagon's contest to see if robotic cars can move their way through cities.

That includes all five teams that completed 2005's Grand Challenge driverless rally across the desert.

Read More

Robot vehicles take on tough jobs

Got a destination too dirty or dangerous for a person to want to go there? The day could soon come when a robot vehicle takes humans' place as a matter of course.

Scientists are focused on developing unmanned machines that can operate in the air, on the ground and under water, doing jobs where deploying people is just too dangerous.

Read More

Snot for 'Bots

Synthetic mucus might help the robot nose smell trouble.


The robotic schnozz can sniff for bombs and air pollution, along with other simple chemicals, but it still can't tell a smushed banana from a sprig of peppermint. Now researchers at the University of Warwick in England have hit upon a way to dramatically improve a robot's sense of smell: synthetic snot.

Read More

Autonomous Flying Ambulances Could Save Troops

When there’s no safe escape, call in the Mules: These unmanned aerial vehicles could save lives on the battlefield—and off.

U.S. troops are pinned down in a crowded city center. Several are wounded and need immediate evacuation. There are miles of labyrinthine roads and thousands of enemy gunmen between them and the nearest base. The threat from rocket-propelled grenades has grounded the big helicopters.

Read More

Army's Greatest Inventions for 2006

Researchers behind the Army's top 10 greatest inventions for 2006 were recognized recently at a ceremony in Arlington, Virginia. The Army's Greatest Inventions for 2006 are:

Blow Torch Counter Improvised Explosive Device System, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. This vehicle-mounted system detonates IEDs at safe stand-off distances, minimizing vehicle damage and Soldier injuries.

"It's fairly easy to operate, and it gives a sense of security to the Soldiers when they're on convoy duty," said Maj. Brian Hackenberg, who helped develop the system.

Integrated Robotic Explosive Detection System, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, Redstone Arsenal, Ala. Capable of crossing rugged terrain, this remotely operated system incorporates an explosive trace detector onto a robotic platform.

Plastic Shaped Charge Assembly for Remote Destruction of Buried IEDs, U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. Remotely emplaced, the PSCA destroys known or suspected unexploded ordnance with higher accuracy than similar devices currently in use. Its low-fragmentation plastic housing eliminates collateral damage.

Humvee Crew Extraction D-ring, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, Redstone Arsenal, Ala. Combat locks on the up-armored Humvee provide security for Soldiers but often get so damaged the doors can't be opened. The D-ring provides solid anchor points for the hooks of a tow strap, chain or cable to pull open damaged doors.

"There was an issue of Soldiers getting trapped inside Humvees that had been damaged for whatever reason ... enemy fire or being flipped. Soldiers had problems getting the doors off these up-armored Humvees so we took their advice and created the D-ring," said Wesley D. Patterson, who is part of a Fast Assistance in Sciences Team that deploys to help Soldiers solve problems that can be resolved within six months.

M1114 Humvee Interim Fragment Kit 5, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. This kit was fielded as a ballistic improvement for the M1114 Humvee in April 2006. A prototype door solution with fabrication and mounting instructions was provided within one week with automotive testing and safety certification.

Remote Urban Monitoring System, U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, Fort Belvoir, Va. RUMS hardware combines emerging technologies in Wireless Local Area Network technology, night-vision cameras and unattended ground sensors to eliminate false alarms. Tripped sensors transmit an alarm signal to the camera module and operator after video and audio from multiple camera modules confirm the unattended ground sensor's alarm signal.

Constant Hawk, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. Constant Hawk is a surveillance capability that uses an electro-optic payload to collect intelligence and identify areas that require increased surveillance by other assets.

OmniSense Unattended Ground Sensor System, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. OmniSense is an unattended ground sensor system used to detect and classify personnel and vehicles in perimeter defense.

EM113A2 Rapid Entry Vehicle, U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, Picatinny, N.J. The REV provides rapid entry, non-lethal crowd control and rescue-squad insertion capabilities into areas requiring non-lethal intervention. The vehicle increases Soldier survivability through improved situational awareness and the ability to move and fire from within an armored vehicle.

BuckEye System, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Miss. BuckEye uses a digital camera to produce geospatial information for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It also produces high-resolution 3D urban mapping.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Harper said the BuckEye System has been instrumental in allowing a maneuver commander to rapidly map battle space through high-resolution imagery and to collect elevation data to give a 3D view.

"What it gives to Soldiers is added situational awareness they need to fight in an urban terrain," he said. "BuckEye has essentially mapped almost every major city in Iraq thus far."

Source: defensetech.org

ONARCHITECTURE- Intelligent design: Will robots take over architecture?

What if a building could build, repair, dismantle, and recycle itself? What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence? Finally, what if you could talk to a building and it could talk back?

Those are the kinds of questions students in UVA architecture professor Jason Johnson's Robotic Ecologies seminar are encouraged to ask and explore.

Read More

French Research Agency Validates Flapping Wings for Micro Drone

Remanta - De l'usage d'un microdrone
Uploaded by syl20g

Flapping wings might be better than rotors for a small surveillance UAV, engineers with the French aerospace research agency ONERA said June 18 at the 47th Paris Air Show.

ONERA’s simulation studies on a third-generation micro air vehicle dubbed Remanta show that such wings used less energy than a mini-helicopter design while delivering speedy flight, hover, endurance and agility, engineers Agnès Luc Boulah and Bruiec Danet said.

The Remanta is a partial demonstrator with a 15-centimeter wing and endurance of around 10 minutes. The micro-drone would fly on a programmed route into confined spaces, perform urban reconnaissance and send imagery for target acquisition and designation. The range would be a few hundred meters and include day/night capability.

Actuators would drive the flapping carbon-fiber wings. The major challenge is finding the power source, which must be compact and deliver 10 to 20 watts. Advances in power cells for mobile phones show promise.

A working demonstrator could be fielded in 10 years, the engineers said.

Labs in Cranfield and Shrivenham in Britain, German researchers and DARPA are also working on flapping wings for micro aerial vehicles.

Top 10 Forecasts from Outlook 2007

Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War.

Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2007:

1. Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas.
2. Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy.
3. Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money.
4. Outlook for Asia: China for the short term, India for the long term.
5. Children's "nature deficit disorder" will grow as a health threat.
6. We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030.
7. The robotic workforce will change how bosses value employees.
8. The costs of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year.
9. Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations.
10. A rise of disabled Americans will strain public transportation systems.

Read More

Faster "slamming" robots

SLAM is an acronym for 'simultaneous localization and mapping,' and slamming robots are simply robots which at the same time build a map of their environment while keeping track of their own localization.

Now, according to New Scientist, Purdue University engineers have designed P-SLAM robots based on a prediction-based SLAM algorithm. This algorithm contains an environmental-structure predictor to predict the structure inside an unexplored region. As these robots make some guesses about their environments, they are able to react faster in unfamiliar buildings. But if this technique is working well in offices — which have some repetitive characteristics from room to room — it is not yet well-adapted to outdoor environments.

Read More

A Robot Is Built To Rescue Soldiers

U.S. researchers are developing a remote-controlled robot designed to rescue injured or abducted soldiers without putting their comrades at risk. The prototype of the nearly 6-foot-tall Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, called Bear, can lift nearly 300 pounds with one arm, and its developer, Vecna Technologies of College Park, Md., is focusing on improving its two-legged lower body.

Read More

Naval Robot Wars

A new report drafted by the well-connected Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments makes a strong case for an accelerated development of unmanned combat aircraft for carrier battle groups.

With a simple equation, Tom Ehrhard and Robert Work of CSBA lay out the benefits of UCASs for the CVW, saying the increase in range and stealth drones bring to the maritime strike fight are inarguable...

Read More

'Guessing' robots find their way

Robots that use "guesswork" to navigate through unfamiliar surroundings are being developed by US researchers.

The mobile machines create maps of areas they have already explored and then use this information to predict what unknown environments will be like.

Read More

Merging of Man and Robot

Seapower is the official magazine of the Navy League but under the direction of Richard Barnard, Peter Atkinson, and Rick Burgess in recent years it has also emerged as a great source of future tech news and information.

The May issue of Seapower is no exception. Among features on micro air vehicles and new uses for fighter targeting pods is a cover story about the merging of man and robot to fight the wars of the not-so-distant future.

Read More

Bots on The Ground

The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.

This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Read More

Wall-Climbing Robot

Researchers have created a robot that can run up a wall as smooth as glass and onto the ceiling at a rate of six centimeters a second. The robot currently uses a dry elastomer adhesive, but the research group is testing a new geckolike, ultrasticky fiber on its feet that should make it up to five times stickier.

It's not the first robot to use fiberlike dry adhesives to stick to surfaces, says Metin Sitti, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, who led the research at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh. But this robot should prove to have far greater sticking power, thanks to fibers that are twice as adhesive as those used by geckos.

Such robots could, among other applications, be used to inspect the hulls of spacecraft for damage, their stickiness ensuring that they would stay attached.

Read More

Controlled Robots Anyone Can Build

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet.

The robots can take many forms, from a three-wheeled model with a mounted camera to a flower loaded with infrared sensors. They can be easily customized and their ability to wirelessly link to the Internet allows users to control and monitor their robots' actions from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

Read More

New Recon Robot For Military And Civil Use

Boeing and iRobot have announced they have signed a teaming agreement to design and develop a next-generation, small unmanned ground vehicle (SUGV) called the SUGV Early. The vehicle will provide military, civil and commercial users with unprecedented reconnaissance and secure, real-time intelligence capabilities.

Read More

Robot future poses hard questions

Scientists have expressed concern about the use of autonomous decision-making robots, particularly for military use.

As they become more common, these machines could also have negative impacts on areas such as surveillance and elderly care, the roboticists warn.

Read More

French startup sees the future, and it includes robots

PARIS (AFP) - Imagine having someone to serve you a glass of water whenever you ask, or even dance if you put on your favourite music.

Now imagine that certain someone is a something -- a robot, in fact.
A French startup named Gostai is doing just that.

Read More

Link: Gostai