The future of robotics is here. It’s **drum roll** cockroaches? Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (say that 10 times fast!) is developing technology that allows cockroaches to be controlled via a tiny chip on a cockroach’s back that sends electrical signals to make the roach move. “It’s like a cattle prod for cockroaches,” says William Charlton, an associate professor at Texas A&M.

But why cockroaches? Well, the same chip that communicates remotely with a computer to prod the roach has several types of radiation sensor, meaning that it can detect whether conditions in a given area are safe for humans.

“Cockroaches really are the perfect medium for this,” says William Charlton, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the university and a principal investigator on the project. “They can go for extraordinarily long periods of time without food. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. They’re very radiation resistant, and they can carry extremely large amounts of weight compared to their body mass.”

If Charlton gets his way, we’ll have mini-armies of 20 or so roaches surveying areas as large as one square kilometer, all controlled by remote operators, all reporting data about chemical conditions in the area.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

It may look almost cartoonish in proportion, but the picture above is the real deal. How long till we see “Control Your Own Cockroach” kits for the kids?

[ NDIA ] VIA [ Wired ]

Update 2- It’s all back, yay!

Update- Apparently Flyfire is a secret still, since it looks like MIT has pulled the video, plus the website, just an hour or so after we posted this. Weird…

The problem with true three dimensional displays (displays that you can walk around) is that they require pixels to be floating in space. This has been done with lasers and plasma, but such technologies are super expensive and limited in many ways. MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) has hit upon the idea of creating huge free form three dimensional displays out of individual “smart pixels” made up of micro helicopters carrying LEDs:

Gigantic 3D displays made up of swarms of micro helicopters that can be released into any open space… How awesome is that?

We’ve talked about the benefits of swarm robotics before: it’s relatively cheap because the individual robots are simple, if any one robot breaks it’s easy to replace, and it’s easily scalable since you can just toss more bots into the mix. You can even use swarms to compensate for things like batteries: if you initially launch your robots in waves, you can have a whole other group of standby robots that dynamically replace the performing robots as their batteries run out, flying up with their LEDs off to switch places without anybody noticing.

The tricky part, of course, is getting everything to work together. MIT has big plans for the system, though…

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience. Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.

You could even play an HD movie on system… Let me see, to play a movie in 1080p (trying to get it to do 1080i with half the number of bots would be pretty interesting but probably impossible, unless you could get them to do barrel rolls at 60 Hz or something to form the interlacing) you’d need over 2 million micro copters to form the base screen, plus however many more are required to swap out for recharging. Fun to think about, but maybe it would be better to just stick with standard def, since you’d only need about 350,000 bots.

While the video is a rendering, the robots are real enough, and hopefully we can expect to see some live demos of the entire system sometime soon.

[ Flyfire ]

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 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 ]

I don’t know enough about molecular biology for how this works to make any sense to me, but apparently, researchers at NYU have created an autonomous bipedal walking robot out of a single strand of DNA with a linkage in the middle. I’m going to just let them explain how it works:

The walking device consists of a strand of DNA that contains a 5′,5′ linkage in the middle. One leg is called L-E and the other is called L-O. It walks on a track consisting of a series of stem-loops (T1-T4) that are part of a stiff DX motif. It is fueled by a pair of successive stem-loops (F1 and F2) that are in solution. The driving force for its motion is the formation of more base pairs than exist at any given time. The system is shown below.

Alright, so I don’t get how this works at all, but it’s still pretty amazing that they’ve put together a bipedal robot with DNA legs. If you’re wondering why something like this might be useful, besides the first step towards forming a DNA soccer league, the same group has developed a “molecule capture system” that uses “DNA origami” to create little robots able to capture and move single molecules. And they’re seriously little… Each is a million times smaller than a red blood cell.

With technology like this, it becomes possible to start constructing nanoscale machines molecule by molecule. Machines of this size have the potential to travel around inside our bodies in huge numbers, continuously fixing everything that goes wrong with us. It may sound crazy, but it may also be the future.

[ Prof. Nadrian C. Seeman @ NYU ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

These four climbing robots are from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, Israel, from the same people who came up with that web slinging spider robot. There’s a couple new techniques here which are pretty cool… We’ve seen clawed climbers before, and the little magnet guy is pretty cool (albeit of limited usefulness). There’s also a bot that uses regular 3M sticky tape on its wheels to climb smooth surfaces. The really neat one, though, is the treaded robot that you can see at about 40 seconds into the video. If you can’t tell from the vid, there is a dispenser above each tread which squirts hot glue onto the top of the track, and it travels up and around to stick the robot to the surface. It’s got limited ammo, and it leaves a bit of a mess behind, but if you need a robot that’s capable of climbing just about any type of surface (and you don’t have a geckobot), gluetank here (I made that up) could be for you.

[ BGU Robots ] VIA [ IEEE ]

I know the following about these images: they come from the November 2009 edition of Kokoro News (which is in Japanese). The guy in the picture is Dr. Javier Movellan, and the robot next to him is “Diego-San.” They’re from the Machine Perception Laboratory at UCSD. Since I can’t read Japanese, I don’t know what this robot is for or why on Earth it has a gigantic baby head. I also don’t know why these pictures were included in the article:

Look, we’ve been over this before… You don’t. Make. Robot. Babies. Humans are hardwired to respond in a particular way to other humans in general, but more specifically when it comes to babies, and we can instantly tell when something’s wrong and it’s like a punch to the gut. Like, it’s not just mildly creepy, it’s seriously #@$*%^ up.

I’m quite sure that Diego-San is an incredible robot doing incredible research, and hopefully we’ll get more details on that, but seriously now, whoever put that head on there needs to get out of the lab a little more.

If anyone cares to translate the article and let us all know what’s going on with this thing, there’s a PDF at the read link below.

[ Kokoro News (PDF) ]
[ UCSD Machine Perception Laboratory ]

Okay, so this is not exactly your first introduction to the squiggly world of snakebots, but I liked the introduction to this particular robot, which is called OmniTread. It’s called OmniTread because, as you may have guessed, it is utterly betreadified, with treads on pretty much every available surface. OmniTread is made up of a series of independent square-ish segments (I think a three dimensional rectangle is technically called a “prism”) connected by three pressurized tubes, the rigidity of which can be independently adjusted to control the angle between OmniTread’s segments to a useful degree.

There are two version of OmniTread: one that can fit through an 8 inch hole that weighs 26 pounds, and a smaller bot that can fit through a 4 inch hole and only weighs 5.5 pounds, including on board power systems. The small robot also has the capability to “latch on and travel along small diameter objects such as water pipes, electric overhead wires, or on-wall electric conduits.” Developed by the University of Michigan, OmniTread is designed for rescue and inspection duties where humans either can’t go or really don’t want to go.

This is not a new robot, with the 8 inch diameter version from 2005 and the 4 inch diameter version from 2007 or 2008. Now it’s 2010, which means that even if these snakebots only followed a linear development path (and exponential is much more likely), we’d be looking at a half pound snakebot that can fit through two inch holes and probably feeds on kittens or something for power. Or maybe the project was concluded. I’m not sure. But if you see one, run very far away, and then let me know.

[ OmniTread ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

With all due respect to Professor Hiroshi Ryu of Chiba University in Japan, if you’re going to come out with a little flying robot and call it a ‘hummingbird’ robot, it’s much less impressive if you do so six months after the AeroEnvironment flapping wing NAV that actually looks, and operates, exactly like a hummingbird. But still, this robot (which looks a bit more like an airplane) does flap its wings, although it can’t yet fly backwards. It weighs only 2.6 grams and is controlled via infrared. By 2011, it should be able to carry a little camera, at which point it will probably look a lot like this:

That’s the DelFly Micro, a flapping wing ornithopter that we wrote about in July of 2008, when it was flying around capturing footage with a built-in wireless color camera. Oh, and it looks like a slightly larger version has figured out how to flap around autonomously, avoiding walls and obstacles:

Awfully clever, I’d say, and this video is nearly a year old. What’s been going on with the DelFly since then? I’m not entirely sure, but I hope we find out sometime soon… If we don’t, what that means is that you won’t find yourself looking at one of these unless you’re in a lot of trouble with the secret police. The Dutch secret police.

VIA [ Physorg ]

You’re probably familiar with the Trolley Problem ethical thought experiment, but if you’re not, here’s the question:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

There are a whole bunch of different variations on this scenario, involving fat people and organ donors, but according to morality and ethics researchers, “factors such as gender, age, education level, and cultural background have little influence on the judgments people make, in part because those judgments are generated by an unconscious “moral grammar” that is analogous in some respects to the unconscious linguistic grammars that support ordinary language use.” So basically, there are ‘built in’ rules of ethics that humans have.

Lu├¡s Moniz Pereira of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal and Ari Saptawijaya of the Universitas Indonesia have published a paper entitled “Modeling Morality with Prospective Logic” in which they discuss using the answers to ethical questions like the Trolley Problem to create a piece of software that answers such questions the same way a human would. This is not yet a broad spectrum ethical governor like Ronald Arkin is working on, and it’s not designed for military situations, but it does suggest that it’s possible to endow robots with software that gives them the capability to make ethical decisions that are at least consistent with the decisions that a human would make. Whether those decisions are best, of course, is an entirely different matter… But that’s the great thing about robots: when you find something that works better, you just reprogram them.

VIA [ Technovelgy ]