Spirit, you were a good rover. You were a great rover. You did your job, and more. There was never any doubt as to whether you’d be staying on Mars, but nearly two thousand days of operation instead of ninety? Incredible.

Spirit isn’t done yet, but unfortunately, she might be getting close… NASA has officially given up attempts to extricate the rover from deep sand and has declared her a stationary science platform. In the next few weeks, small movements will be made to try and orient Spirit’s solar panels more favorably toward the south, in the hopes that they will be able to generate enough power to keep Spirit alive through the Martian winter.

If Spirit makes it, she could continue to do valuable scientific work for months or even years:

“There’s a class of science we can do only with a stationary vehicle that we had put off during the years of driving,” said Steve Squyres, a researcher at Cornell University and principal investigator for Spirit and Opportunity. “Degraded mobility does not mean the mission ends abruptly. Instead, it lets us transition to stationary science.”

One stationary experiment Spirit has begun studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet’s core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches.

“If the final scientific feather in Spirit’s cap is determining whether the core of Mars is liquid or solid, that would be wonderful — it’s so different from the other knowledge we’ve gained from Spirit,” said Squyres.

Tools on Spirit’s robotic arm can study variations in the composition of nearby soil, which has been affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere.

We’re all pulling you ya back here on Earth, Spirit.

Meanwhile, Opportunity is doing just fine, heading towards a very young crater called Concepcion at a blistering pace of about 200 feet per day. Stuck or not, these little rovers never cease to amaze me.

[ Press Release ]
Comic VIA [ xkcd ]

The Sundance Film Festival that took place last week featured a couple interesting robot films… This first one, by director Spike Jonze, is called I’m Here:

The film is 30 minutes long, and Entertainment Weekly says that it “feels like a modern-day retelling of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, with two crudely constructed robots serving as the protagonists.” It may show up in its entirety on the Independent Film Channel later this year.

VIA [ io9 ]

Honda was also at Sundance to screen a wonderful 8 minute documentary called Living With Robots, which is totally worth watching simply because of how well it sums up so many of the issues relevant to robotics today and in the near future:

Honda’s got it exactly right: the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to the future of robotics is not technical, but rather an issue of public perception. At the end of the video, Mark Rowlands says “whatever robots turn out to be, will largely be a function of us, and the decisions we make.” This is an excellent point… If we have concerns about robots, it’s important to acknowledge that those concerns generally can’t, by definition, be about the robots themselves. Rather, we must understand that robots are a reflection, or perhaps more accurately a physical embodiment, of human desire, and it’s those desires and how we act on them that need to be examined.

So if there are issues surrounding things like, oh, I don’t know, military robots, we need to recognize that military robots only exist because of human conflict. They’re not terminators, they’re not out to get us, they’re there because we made them and decided that they were important and necessary. This doesn’t answer the question of whether they’re a good idea or a bad idea, but the point is that you can’t look at robots as something separate from the human experience.

You can see more footage of those ASIMOs wandering around an office environment in this post from 2007.

[ Honda Press Release ]

We got a terrifying peak at Castrol’s free kick robot in September of last year, but it looks like now it’s almost finished. Weighing in at around two tons (!), the actual kicking part of the machine is powered by an automobile engine (!!) that stores up energy in a flywheel, which releases it to the steel and carbon fiber leg all at once. The resulting kick tops 200 kph, and as you can see, it’s not something any goalie would want to sacrifice themselves for:

Blink? Here’s the slow-mo:

That tarp could have been your face. Yay robots!

VIA [ GetRobo ]

Willow Garage has been putting together a whole assemblage of PR2 robots, and they want to give you one to play with. For free. All you have to do is convince them that you (and your institution) will be using the PR2 to accelerate robotics research and drive open source robotics development. It’s that simple!

If you want to get your brand new PR2 to do much of anything, a good way to go about that might be ROS, or Robot Operating System. ROS 1.0, aka Box Turtle (cute!), is the very first non-beta release of Willow Garage’s open source Robot Operating System. ROS has the potential to be huge, if it becomes what it’s trying to become, which is a way for people to share code between different robot platforms. So, instead of having to write your own code to control (say) a gripper, you can just download a ROS package that will do it for you, which will integrate with other robotics software frameworks. On the other side of things, if you write some totally awesome code to control a gripper, other people can use your totally awesome code on their robots too. Basically, the idea behind ROS is to keep people from having to reinvent the wheel over and over again for each new robot, so that people can spend their time improving the wheel and inventing the hoverpad, as it were.

If it catches on, this could be great. I’m not saying MS-DOS great, but still great.

[ PR2 ]
[ ROS Introduction ]

Found this thing while looking for the robot attack video for this article… It’s a LEGO Mindstorms scorpion candy guard robot. This is why you build robots, to keep thieving thieves away from your candy that you’re hiding in the middle of a grocery store.

[ LEGO Mindstorms ]

As much as I’d like to, I can’t really let this one pass… 31 years ago today (January 25th), Robert Williams was killed by a robot arm as it was retrieving parts from a storage facility at a Ford Motor plant. It was the first recorded death of a human by a robot. Williams’ family was awarded $10 million in damages due to lack of safety measures surrounding the robot… This was largely the same situation as the accident that happened more recently in Sweden.

[Ronald Arkin] described Williams’ death as an “industrial accident,” one in which the lack of physical safeguards were at fault. The death was not caused by the robot’s will, he cautioned.

“It was not an ethical lapse, unless you’re a Luddite against the Industrial Revolution,” Arkin said in a recent telephone interview.

Remember this, because this sort of thing is going to happen in the future, and inevitably it’s going to be outside of an industrial setting. Whatever you may think, and however it may look, and whether or not any particular robot can be anthropomorphized, it’s not willful. It’s not about ethics. Robots are machines, people program robots, and accidents happen.

VIA [ Wired ]

I can’t fault people for writing articles that make use of the term “killer robots.” It’s sexy, and it attracts attention. I mean, I kinda just did it myself, didn’t I? An article by Johann Hari for the opinions section of The Independent takes this several steps too far, however, by making false assertions about the motives and capabilities of unmanned combat robots:

Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses”.

Why is “chooses” in quotes? It’s in quotes because that’s not the way it works, the author knows that’s not the way it works, and he’s covering his ass. Here’s the next paragraph:

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and “die”. So the military is building “autonomy” into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

See those quotes again? If you’ve been reading BotJunkie long enough, you should be able to figure out why they’re there. Obviously, the robots don’t “die.” And “autonomy” is in quotes because the previous paragraph talked firing a machine gun at autonomously chosen targets, which is not at all the way it works. In fact, the way it works is the exact opposite of what the author is insinuating with his quotation marks: when a combat robot loses signal, the only active actions it will take is to try to reacquire the signal again, or (in some cases) try to get home, even if it’s an impossibility. It won’t just start shooting at people.

This, really, is what bothers me most about these articles: They’re basically full of lies of a sort, designed to scare people who don’t know the facts. No, the author isn’t actually publishing false statements (I guess), but that stuff in quotes isn’t exactly true, and it’s only in there so that people who don’t take the time to find out what is true (most people) will use it to jump to the obvious, and wrong, and inevitably terrifying conclusion.

More, including a pretty funny video of a robot totally NOT killing the Japanese prime minister, after the jump. (Read more…)

I saw some of Sarah Dungan’s awesome robot prints at the Edwardian Ball over the weekend, and had to share.

The robot prints aren’t up on her Etsy store at the moment, but if you want one, you might try sending her an email through her website at the link below.

[ Industrial Fairytale ]

First, the good news (maybe): there’s a remote chance that the Phoenix lander, which has been frozen without power up at the north pole of Mars since November 2008, might thaw itself out, wake up again, and phone home now that spring (with warmer temperatures and additional sunlight) has come to the Martian arctic. Phoenix was not designed to deal with the winter on Mars, and missions scientists “do not expect Phoenix to have survived.” But the Mars Odyssey orbiter will be listening for signals from Phoenix from now through March just in case.

Updates can be found on the Phoenix mission website.

Now the not so good news… The Spirit Mars rover has been stuck in loose sand since May of last year. Despite methodical (but valiant) attempts to free the rover, not much progress has been made. Currently, the rover’s solar panels are tilted far enough away from the sun that if nothing is done, Spirit will run out of power by May. Both the right front wheel and right rear wheel of the six wheeled rover are non-functional, and recent attempts to get the rover out over the past few weeks have resulted in just over 2.5 inches of movement. Ideas like using the robot’s arm to push some rocks under the wheels to gain traction have been considered and rejected, since there’s a risk of compromising the science payload, and even if the rover is completely stuck, there’s still potential for stationary science. They’re running out of things to try, but nobody has given up hope entirely quite yet… And it’s important to keep in mind that the rovers were designed to operate for 90 days, and they’ve just made it to six years.

You can follow along at JPL’s Free Spirit website.

The nice thing about robots in space is that there’s no gravity, so you don’t have to worry about things like weight and balance. The annoying thing about robots is space is that there’s no gravity, so orientation and control is a problem. MIT has had a set of robots called SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites) on board the International Space Station since May of 2006 to test out algorithms for autonomous navigation and docking maneuvers. Each sphere is about 8″ in diameter and has 18 sides. They gets around with 12 thrusters powered by compressed CO2, while ultrasonic and infrared sensors and a wireless link tell them where they are. SPHERES are able to maneuver precisely enough to dance around in a circle on the ISS; watch as a third robot enters the pattern:

The idea behind SPHERES is that a bunch of small satellites working together is much cheaper, much more efficient, and much more robust than one single large satellite. It’s swarm robotics, up in space.

[ NASA ] and [ MIT Spheres ] VIA [ Danger Room ]