AeroVironment, makers of the Raven UAV and the Dragon Eye UAV (among other things), have been working for several years now on a DARPA funded program to develop micro nano air vehicles that use flapping wings as a lift and propulsion source. Now, we’ve seen a lot of robots that use flapping wings, but only one other robot that could use them to hover, like an insect or a hummingbird. The AeroVironment “Mercury” NAV isn’t as small as an insect, but it is about the size of a hummingbird, and surprise surprise, DARPA has asked AeroVironment to dress up the next prototype in a little costume:

Okay, so it’s a little hokey looking, but honestly, I bet it gets the job done: nobody who sees something that looks like that flying around on wings is very likely to think it’s a robot… Except for maybe you, right now, after reading this. Psst… They’re watching you.

From the look of things, this bot is just about ready to go: it has already demonstrated fully controllable untethered flight, so the next step is to get it carrying a payload and perhaps some autonomous capability. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of this thing in action, but probably the clearest indication of the success of this robot will be if the program suddenly ends, and we’re never told anything else about it ever again.

[ AeroVironment ]

The Navy has a few different programs in the works when it comes to detecting mines underwater, a tedious and inefficient process when done by humans in boats. For a while now, they’ve been using trained dolphins to sniff ping out mines, with a reasonable amount of success… The picture above shows a Navy dolphin about to place a marker on a training mine. The problem is that dolphins require constant attention and supervision and mackerel, and certain people are (somewhat understandably, I suppose) upset that dolphins are being tasked with this sort of thing. So obviously, it would be great if the Navy could just get some robots to take care of the whole business.

Yes, it would be great, but it’s turning out to be tougher than it might seem. You can blame the dolphins for that: they made the job look easy. Robots, on the other hand, have some issues when it comes to differentiating mines from other things, say for example, the rest of the ocean. The solution that several research groups are working on is not to make smarter robots per say, but rather to make dumb robots that are capable of teaching themselves. After all, you can spend a whole bunch of time and effort programming a robot to do one specific task, or you can spend a whole bunch of time and effort programming a robot to learn how to do many specific tasks all by itself. It’s a much more efficient way to go, and it means that the dolphins can go back to molesting UAVs and toying with Pleo.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

This is obviously just a concept, but the scary thing about this video is that we’re far closer to robots like this being a reality than you might necessarily realize. Tiny flying bots? We’ve seen them. Optic flow navigation? Seen it. Robots that can both fly and crawl around? Seen that, too. Not to mention the actual cyborg insects. And that’s all stuff that’s available to the public, who knows what they’ve got goin’ on out in some windowless lab buried under the Nevada desert. So yeah, we’ll just have to wait and see, but I do know one thing for sure: it’s gonna be a bad time to be a sniper without some industrial strength bug repellent.

[ Air Force Research Lab ] VIA [ FlightGlobal ]

Next time you hear some crickets chirping, listen a little bit closer: they could be sending email. The DARPA is already working on cyborg insects, but now the military wants them to be able to form their own ad-hoc wireless networks, using chirps:

Insects will be equipped with embedded MEMS transceivers that pick up modulated calling sounds from nearby insects. Once the information in a call is extracted by the transceiver, the information code is applied to an electromechanical device on board the insect that modulates the insect calls, thereby retransmitting the information to another insect, and so on.

I can’t imagine that a cricket chirp has a super high amount of bandwidth, and the transmission is not exactly going to propagate at the speed of light. But as a covert communication network, it seems like it could be a fairly cheap and robust system, especially if the transceivers are able to use electromagnetic harvesters to power themselves from the muscle movements of the insect. Just release a whole orchestra of crickets where you want a network, and you’ll have a your own little swarm of self sustaining, noisy routers.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

We’ve seen our share of robot snakes, but as far as I can remember, this is the first one that can blow itself up. Oh, it’s designed to do plenty of other things too… The Israelis have developed it primarily for surveillance. The two meter long, camo covered bot sends back audio and video, and can lift itself up to get a better look around. It looks quite mobile, if a little spazzy, but I bet you’d be spazzy too if you were packed with explosives in case you end up crawling underneath a target that’s more valuable than you are. Yeah, I’d rather take a bath with one of these than find an exploding robosnake under my bed.

[ Jerusalem Post ] VIA [ Engadget ]

The video shows a multitude of iRobot products in action, including lots of PackBots with various payloads (including LiDAR), a PackBot deploying out of an airplane (awesome!), footage of the SeaGlider and Ranger submarine bots, and some kind of robotic boat. It’s a nice reminder that whatever we might think of the Roomba (which is at risk of being developmentally stagnant), iRobot’s still burning the midnight oil when it comes to military robots. And it makes sense, too, since (and I know I belabor this a lot), that’s where the money is.

Oh, and there’s also some kind of weird shooting thing at about 38 seconds in… I’m not sure what it is, some kind of weapon perhaps?

VIA [ RSN ]

I’m generally of the opinion that PackBots are pretty cute, but this one manages to look downright menacing as it stands up and looks at its hapless victim. Seriously, where do they find volunteers for this kind of thing…

Aw, hell, I’d totally volunteer to get tasered by a robot. The line forms to the left…

VIA [ RSN ]

After all the hullabaloo a little while ago about military robots going out of control and killing everyone and their babies (which has since been replaced with swine flu hysteria, if you hadn’t noticed), a professor from Georgia Tech has actually started working on something relevant to what could be, but isn’t yet, an issue. Ronald Arkin is working on what he calls an “ethical governor” for combat robots, which will be a software package that defines what actions the robot is allowed to take, and when, based on the same set of standards that human troops are trained to use.

He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers. “Ultimately these systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make,” said Arkin. “Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives.”

“Robots don’t have an inherent right to self-defense and don’t get scared,” said Arkin. “The robots can take greater risk and respond more appropriately.” Fear might influence human decision-making, but math rules for robots. Simplified, various actions can be classified as ethical or unethical, and assigned a certain value. Starting with a lethal action and subtracting the various ethical responses to the situation equals an unethical response. Other similar equations governor the various possible actions. The difficult thing is to determine what types of actions go into those equations, and for that humans will be necessary, and ultimately responsible for.

If you remember, this is pretty much exactly what we were saying back in March. To some extent, I think this could be an oversimplified approach (although it may just be that the source article is oversimplifying)… Having an ethical rule structure is great and all, but part of the problem with the sort of combat that humans (and robots) are finding themselves in is that there are all kinds of things going on that don’t really lend themselves to ethical rule structures. This isn’t yet a problem for the robots, though, since they’ve all still got a human in the loop somewhere. We’ll have to wait and see what happens over the next couple years as humans begin to get phased out.

VIA [ Discovery News ]

Those little Ember robotic LAN nodes that we wrote about on Monday have shown up in an iRobot video. There isn’t really any new information here, but I was impressed by how effective the little flippers are at getting the bot up and over obstacles that look impossibly tall. It doesn’t look quite big enough to climb stairs, but as long as it can make it over railroad tracks and curbs, it should have no trouble getting around typical urban environments.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

iRobot, in its infinite wisdom, seems to have decided to start releasing information on development projects and prototypes on their PackBot Facebook page. Yes, PackBot has its own official Facebook page. So, this was breaking news as of about two months ago, but apparently nobody noticed until Robot Stock News (in a moment of boredom, I can only assume) Facebooked them. Anyway, you may be familiar with the LANdroid program from back in 2007, the goal of which is to develop a swarm of ‘disposable’ (i.e. $100ish) robots capable of creating a adaptive wireless network in urban environment. You might also remember that iRobot got a chunk of DARPA funding to try to make it happen, and here’s the result: ‘Ember.’

Ember weighs in at only a pound, and is about the size of a small paperback book. Like its cousin the PackBot, Ember uses flippers to help it climb obstacles and self-right. It accepts just about any kind of USB or SDIO radio payloads, including 802.11 WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth, Zigbee, etc.. Also like the PackBot, it’s robust enough to be thrown, and has some kind of onboard obstacle avoidance (eventually it should be semi-autonomous), mounts a small camera on top, and looks to be controlled by a little tiny touchscreen.

Ember is still a prototype (it’s at stage one of the DARPA program), but it looks like it more or less works. Also, it’s kinda interesting just how much Ember looks like the original DARPA concept. One more pic, after the jump. (Read more…)