Northrop Grumman’s sexily badass X-47B unmanned combat air system made its first flight ever on Friday, circling a desert runway a couple times all by itself before successfully not crashing. Northrop seemed pretty happy about the way things went:

“The flight provided test data to verify and validate system software for guidance and navigation, and the aerodynamic control of the tailless design. The X-47B aircraft will remain at Edwards AFB for flight envelope expansion before transitioning to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. later this year. There, the system will undergo additional tests to validate its readiness to begin testing in the maritime and carrier environment.”

‘Flight envelope expansion’ means that they’re going to see how crazy the X-47B can get in the air. After that, they’re going to get it ready for its intended purpose, which is carrier operations. We know that drones are already pretty good at precision maneuvers, but I hear carrier landings are especially tricky. I’m optimistic (I always am about robots), but seeing this thing manage an autonomous carrier touchdown is going to go a long way towards convincing skeptics that drones really can function on a level similar to even the most skilled humans in many aspects of combat aircraft control.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

We didn’t quite have the budget to make it to AUSA this year, but Lockheed Martin has uploaded a bunch of videos on their displays to YouTube. Highlights include updates on HULC, a look at what used to be called MULE, and peeks at some new SAMARAI hardware,

SAMARAI:

Check out more, after the break. (Read more…)

Lockheed Martin’s original pack-hauling robot was named (appropriately enough) MULE, which stood Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment… Vehicle. MULE got canceled at the beginning of this year, though, and its effective replacement seems to be the SMSS, or Squad Mission Support System.

SMSS is completely autonomous, and will either follow behind a soldier or follow preset GPS waypoints, all while avoiding obstacles with its conspicuous and fragile looking LIDAR system. It can 1200 pounds of gear, has a range of over 200 miles, and also functions as a mobile gear charger.

The long-term vision of this system can accommodate armed variants, while improving its reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition capabilities within the concept of supervised autonomy. A squad-size manned or unmanned support vehicle is critical to today’s asymmetrical and urban battlefields.

It sounds like Lockheed Martin’s long-term vision is basically to turn SMSS into what MULE was supposed to be: a six wheeled platform that, in addition to hauling equipment, could (by simply adding some modular accessories) also be used for this sort of thing:

Of course, MULE was undoubtedly going to be super expensive and much harder to develop, but it had the potential to offer tons of flexibility, which personally I think is the key to the future of the military in general. Oh, and that thingy it used to get past the barbed wire? It looks an awful lot like one of these.

Anyway, I guess it’s good to see that Lockheed Martin’s original concept isn’t totally dead, it’s just kinda sad when an awesome robot gets made so much less awesome, even if it is substantially more practical.

[ SMSS ]

See this? This is an honest to goodness, real, working, commercially available jetpack. Or maybe a ducted fanpack, but whatever… The point is, YOU’RE TOO LATE, because the Martin Jetpack is now robotic and has no use for humans. Yep, that one piece of the future that would have been totally awesome has just passed us by.

Martin Aircraft Company has been working on a practical jetpack for years now, and we’ve been following it over on OhGizmo. The lowdown is that the jetpack uses two huge ducted fans that you wear kinda like a backpack, and will propel you 8,000 feet up at 60 miles an hour for 30 minutes. It runs on the same gas your car does, doesn’t require a pilot’s license, and includes a ballistic parachute (that works at low altitudes) just in case.

From the beginning, Martin had autonomy in mind for their jetpack, for one simple reason: nobody really wanted to be the guy who had to strap it on and see how fast it would go, or who had to check if the emergency parachute system worked. So, it was a natural step to turn the robotic testing system into a total robotic flying system, and now Martin is hoping that their ‘Skyhook’ will be able to fill a niche between man-portable reconnaissance UAVs and larger, infrastructure dependent drones like Predators. Skyhook can take off and land vertically while carrying up to 100 kilos of payload, which would be ideal for local resupplying of isolated units. Plus, like, it’s a jetpack. Think StarCraft 2.

Currently, Martin needs some funding to make this possible, so do yourself (and them) a favor and go buy a jetpack… It’ll be the best $100,000 you’ve ever spent.

[ Martin Jetpack ] VIA [ Fox News ]

When you have a 1,360 square mile military facility that needs patrolling, robots are the way to go, or at least that’s the position starting to be adopted by the US Army. Why? Simple: using mobile robots instead of permanent infrastructure (like fixed cameras and motion detectors) saves $6 million in up-front costs plus an additional $1 million a year in maintenance.

The robots being used at the Hawthorne Army Depot (which stores tens of millions of cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste) are somewhat unsexily called MDARS (Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems). They’re diesel powered, with a top speed of 20 mph, and they can stay on duty for 16 hours. Most of the time, MDARS do random fully autonomous patrols, using RFID tags to check the status of locks and gates. If they notice something out of the ordinary, a human can take over, using cameras, microphones, and speakers to interact with whatever needs interacting with. The bots are currently unarmed, so short of running someone over they can’t do much more than observe, although they are certainly capable of mounting remote controlled weapons.

[ NNSA Press Release ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

Those cute little Landroids (disposable robots that work together to form a mobile local area network for soldiers) that iRobot is developing for DARPA have been evolving, and now sport all kinds of new hardware, including:

-Cliff sensors
-Front obstacle sensors
-Yaw sensors
-Four video cameras
-Two way audio
-And an optional laser scanner

Check out the video here.

That seems like a heck of a lot of hardware to stand up to the hypothetical $100 per bot mass production price, and I really, really hope DARPA stands firm on that point. I mean, I have to wonder if all of this stuff is really necessary to fulfill the Landroid’s mission. I loved the original concept which was basically just a little disposable tracked robot that turned into an internet node. Yes, having four cameras and a laser sensor makes it better at finding its way around, but is that critical equipment when you could just use a little camera and vision software like this prototype from the previous generation? More capabilities and increased adaptability are certainly valuable, but at some point Landroid will turn into something bigger and more expensive and not a Landroid at all. Besides, the whole point of a cheap and disposable node in an adaptive network is that if one node gets lost/stuck/destroyed/stolen by me, another one can just take its place.

[ iRobot Landroids ] VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

With just a little bitty Army contract, you can take that robot paintball turret that we saw a week or so ago, mount it on a QinetiQ SWIFT (an intermediate prototype between this and this), and rig it up to be controlled by head movements. It’s not just for the cool factor (although there’s definitely a cool factor); head control is easy to train, easy to use, and requires no hands. They’ve got the basic system running on this sweet little indoor tank, too:

Every office absolutely needs one of those.

[ Stratbot ]

Thanks Kent!

In an incident that’s already been blown way out of proportion by headlines like “ROBOT KILL-CHOPPER GOES ROGUE above Washington DC!“, an MQ-8 FireScout temporarily lost its communication link and entered restricted airspace around Washington DC before operators shifted to another ground control station and brought it back to base.

Obviously, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go… When UAVs lose communications, they’re supposed to either head back home, or loiter in place until they receive further instructions. So what happened to FireScout? If you guessed human error, you’re at least partially correct:

The series of events that prompted the aircraft to wander into restricted airspace around Washington, DC., “had to line up just perfectly,” says Rear Adm. William Shannon, Navy program executive officer for weapons and unmanned systems. He attributes the problem to a “software logic flaw.” In this case “We found a software anomaly that allowed aircraft not to follow its preprogrammed flight procedures,” Dunigan says. “We have identified the issue and have aircraft operating restrictions that will prevent this from happening again.”

There could be an element of operator error in the incident. Shannon says that a command was given by the operator just as the air vehicle would have shifted to its preplanned return-to-base procedure. So, the introduction of the command apparently played a part in the mishap.

It’s also worth noting that as soon as FireScout realized something was wrong, it started squawking to local air traffic control, who could route other aircraft around the area if necessary.

Although this was undoubtedly an ‘incident,’ it illustrates why I’m so optimistic about autonomous robots, military or not. I mean consider what happened… An unforeseen and improbable series of events occurred that caused a communication loss and FireScout went somewhere it shouldn’t have. The robot realized something was wrong, notified air traffic control that it was in distress, and responded directly when communication was restored. The issue was then identified and resolved, end of story.

FireScout has been undergoing testing for a long time, and this is why it’s been undergoing testing for a long time. FireScout works, and it works well… Well enough that it takes a software bug plus human error in a very specific situation to get it to do anything it’s not supposed to, and even then, it doesn’t do anything crazy or excessively dangerous.

Of course, there is always the potential for other unforeseen issues to cause similar errant behaviors. But that’s kinda the way everything works, whether it’s a robot’s software or a human’s software. The advantage of robots, however, is that issues (when they arise) can be identified with certainty and resolved with an equal amount of certainty: FireScout won’t make this mistake again, and neither will any other FireScout running this software.

And, well, there’s always Plan B.

[ Aviation Week ] VIA [ The Register ]

We already knew that in some specific cases, robots are better pilots than humans, but this footage from Rockwell Collins really drives home the fact that under extreme circumstances, there’s just no out-flying a robot. This small autonomous demonstrator suffers all kinds of damage, but not only does it not crash, it keeps on flying its mission and then lands. For the record, humans are pretty adaptable too, but this next one takes the cake:

Let me just reiterate what’s going on here: the aircraft has no aileron control and is rolling randomly, but is still able to navigate in three dimensional space (it’s flying in a big circle) by using its other control surfaces in conjunction with whatever its roll angle happens to be. At roll speeds of up to 500 degrees per second, there is no way a human could do this, but to the robot, it’s just not that big of a deal.

This technology is great for UAVs, of course, but personally I wouldn’t mind in the least if every airplane I flew on had this capability sitting dormant in a subroutine somewhere until the wing falls off and everybody starts to PANIC and then realizes oh, it’s fine, apparently we don’t need that wing anyway. Next up: cut-rate airlines invest in adaptive intelligent flight control technology, auction off wings and tails.

[ Rockwell Collins ] VIA [ I Heart Robotics ] and [ DIY Drones ]

Vecna Technologies sent along this new video of BEAR, their Battlefield Extraction something Robot. I don’t immediately see any new capabilities, but BEAR does show a penchant for wanton (or premeditated) destruction, smashing through doors and car windows with no apparent sense of remorse. BEAR’s selling point (besides the cute ears) is its ability to lift ludicrous amounts of weight while simultaneously balancing on two extendable treads, which enables it to be (potentially) more useful than a human for performing certain heavy lifting and moving tasks. With all of that power comes a corresponding amount of infrastructure, though, and for BEAR to be really useful in the field it’s going to need to be both durable and easy to repair, and that huge betubed hydraulic backpack looks kinda fragile.

[ Vecna Robotics ]

Thanks Andy!