Every time the Air Force sends a B-1B bomber on a mission over Afghanistan, it spends costs $720,000 in fuel, repair, and other costs. And when the plane comes back, it has to spend 48 hours being repaired for every hour it was in the air. All of which is double-crazy, because the bomber doesn’t really drop bombs over Afghanistan any more, thanks to the military’s airstrike restrictions. The B-1B just lingers over the country with a camera: a big Predator drone, at many, many times the price. “If the B-1 is not dropping its load of ordnance, we should withdraw it, and use unmanned systems instead,” Michael Wynne, former secretary of the Air Force, tells me. “They’re much cheaper.”

I tend to argue for unmanned systems on the basis of getting humans out of harm’s way, but the expense of an aircraft like the B-1 is just staggering. Maybe in the context of the military it’s not a big deal, but I am officially staggered. Admittedly, a B-1 is capable of many things that Predators and other UAV/UCAVs aren’t, but the point that Danger Room makes is that expensive assets are being used in situations where the majority of their capabilities are not being utilized, and it’s just a waste of resources.

Incidentally, if 48 repair hours for every 1 operational hour seems a bit, um, excessive (!), that number comes from USAF HQ, while a commenter on the Danger Room article who actually works with B-1s says that it’s nothing like that. If anybody here happens to know anything about B-1 maintenance (yeah?), please feel free to post in the comments.

[ Danger Room ]

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, aka Curiosity, is currently undergoing assembly and testing. Scheduled for a 2011 launch, Curiosity is way bigger, and capable of a lot more science, than either little Sojourner or not-so-little Opportunity (which is still going, by the way).

It must be pretty stressful to be an engineer working on MSL, knowing that at some point you just have to say, “okay, looks good” and then the robot takes off for Mars and there’s nothing more you can do, ever. And for better or worse, Spirit and Opportunity have set some pretty high (I’m not sure whether to say “unrealistic”) standards for durability and performance. I’m optimistic, though, and as long as the crazy landing scheme works out, MSL has tons of potential. Video of the robotic “skycrane” that’ll set Curiosity down on the surface of Mars, after the jump. (Read more…)

In 2008, we covered the Army’s unmanned Little Bird project, which took an off the shelf MH-6 helicopter and shoved a bunch of computers in the back to make it optionally manned, and even controllable from an Apache attack helicopter.

Until now, the Little Bird depended on a set of GPS waypoints for guidance. But last month, the UAV (developed by an Army-funded team from Carnegie Mellon and the Piasecki Aircraft Corporation) completed a course which involved taking off, avoiding obstacles during flight, locating a safe landing zone, and then landing, entirely autonomously. Separate tests challenged the UAV by setting flight paths through obstacles or designating a landing zone on top of a car, but the Little Bird was able to use its sensors to dynamically alter its flight plan to account for all the unexpected and potentially crashy stuff. According to Danger Room, this was the very first time a full-sized helicopter made a completely autonomous flight.

It turns out that a lot of the technology used for the autonomous capabilities of the Little Bird was derived from Carnegie Mellon’s DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle, Boss. For example, a LIDAR scanner was mounted on the helicopter to create 3D maps of its surroundings to detect and avoid obstacles, which is a feature common to most autonomous vehicles. The video below shows such a system mounted on a small autonomous helicopter successfully avoiding obstacles including a 6mm wire with a 2% reflectivity at 90 meters, at a 2007 DARPA demonstration:

Now that Fire Scout has been canceled, the Unmanned Little Bird has the potential to fill that niche. And as much as I hate to say it (because I really liked Fire Scout), a full sized autonomous helicopter does offer a number of distinct advantages: for example, it can not only carry more payload, but it can also transport several people, none of whom necessarily needs to be a pilot. Also, since this is a modification of an existing platform, it’s probably going to be cheaper to build and cheaper to fix. Not nearly as cool as Fire Scout, maybe, but perhaps a better idea overall.

[ Little Bird UAV ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

Kondo is releasing a new series of hobby robot kits based on animals, and the first one of the bunch is this cute little turtle. He’s got four legs with two servos each plus a movable head, with his batteries and circuit board packed up neatly inside his shell. It’s not a complicated kit, and Kondo seems to be hoping that people will use it as a base to build onto using additional bolt-on Kondo brackets and servos (sold separately, of course).

The kit goes on sale today in Japan for about $450 USD.

[ Kondo ] VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

NASA’s Centennial Challenges are technology development contests open to anyone, kinda like the DARPA challenges. This means that if you (you!) have a good idea as to how to go about solving one of the problems they present, you have just as good a chance as anyone else at snagging one of the prizes. Here are the three new challenges for 2010:

The Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge: to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week. The prize purse is $2 million. The goals of this challenge are to stimulate innovations in low-cost launch technology and encourage creation of commercial nano-satellite delivery services.

Night Rover Challenge: to demonstrate a solar-powered exploration vehicle that can operate in darkness using its own stored energy. The prize purse is $1.5 million. The objective is to stimulate innovations in energy storage technologies of value in extreme space environments, such as the surface of the moon, or for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems on Earth.

Sample Return Robot Challenge: to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from a wide and varied terrain without human control. The prize purse is $1.5 million. The objectives are to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies.

NASA’s budget for these challenges has been increased to $10 million per year through 2015, so hopefully we’ll see even more of them. As I’ve said before (relating to an earlier NASA challenge), this system seems like such a great way to spur creativity and innovation, especially considering what a huge return can be had on what (for a government agency) is more or less a trivial sum.

[ NASA ]

Last month, South Korea deployed an armed surveillance robot at a guard post within the demilitarized zone in Gangwon Province. The robot consists of an array of cameras and sensors plus a 40mm grenade launcher.

Now, let’s be clear: this robot is remote controlled. It appears to have autonomous sensing and targeting capability, but it doesn’t fire autonomously… Rather, it can be fired remotely by a human. In this respect, it’s much the same as a Predator drone or a Talon SWORDS, except that it’s stationary.

This approach is very efficient if you have a lot of static area to monitor, since many robots can be controlled by a small group of humans, with each robot only alerting its controllers if its sensors detect something relevant. Human soldiers would probably perform better at most aspects of the task, certainly, but humans are very expensive to train, equip and maintain, while each of these robots costs only $330,000.

I managed to dig up a video from 2006 of what I’m pretty sure is the same basic robot; it’s in Korean, so if anyone can translate some of the interesting stuff, please post in the comments.

If this trial proves successful, South Korea plans to deploy the robots at all guard posts along the DMZ, and possibly to some offshore islands.

VIA [ Chosun ]

I guess this kind of thing is only to be expected when you’ve got a robot that looks like a small bird or large bug flapping around outside, heh.

[ DelFly II ]

Yes. Such a shirt exists. And it’s a good thing, too, what with the assemblage of beer serving robots that we’ve been treated to over the last week. Yours from ThinkGeek for $20.

[ ThinkGeek ]

This is what happens when you mix robots and beer.

Thanks Alex!

For those of you with spectacular memories, the BAE Taranis will look familiar to you from our trip to the AUVSI Expo last year where we saw a little model of it in the BAE booth. Britain’s Ministry of Defense Defence has now officially unveiled a full scale prototype of the Taranis low observable unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), which is scheduled to begin flight trials next year. However, according to Peter Felstead, editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, “this isn’t an aircraft that will go into service, it’s a tech demo.” Well, that’s unfortunate, but seeing as both the US and Russia are currently developing UCAVs, my guess is that we’ll see the Taranis (or something very much like it) turn into more than a tech demo in the near future.

We actually emailed BAE after AUVSI (i.e. in 2009) for more details on Taranis, and they sent us a few specifications… Check them out, after the jump. (Read more…)