Hasta La Gadget!

When the robots come for you, at least they won’t scratch the walls. MIT research into autonomous flight has delivered a robotic plane that can thread its way, at speed, through enclosed and indoor conditions, without requiring preconfigured flight plans or GPS navigation. The plane has significantly longer flight time than autonomous helicopters, though introduced a fair few problems of its own.

Unlike helicopters, which can hover, rotate on the spot, easily travel in three-dimensions and go sideways, planes must keep moving and have reduced flexibility in where they can redirect themselves. MIT’s solution was a custom-designed aircraft with shorter, chunkier wings that combine tight turning, the possibility of relatively low speeds without stalling, and reasonable cargo capabilities for the AI smarts and camera equipment.

Inside, along with the cameras which allow for the bird’s-eye view in the video below, the plane has a laser rangefinder, accelerometers and gyroscopes to track whereabouts in the room it is, what speed it’s traveling, acceleration, and more. At any one moment in time, the plane is figuring out 15 different values, MIT says, and part of what makes the new system special is a duo of algorithms – one fast and rough, the other slow and accurate – to first filter out the most relevant data and then crunch only that.

It’s not all magic, at least not yet. The plane must be preloaded with a high-res digital map of the area, unlike helicopters which are capable of building their own maps. That’s next on the MIT team’s agenda, however, boosting the algorithms and building in more visual information to the other sensors.

Of course, an alternative approach might be pairing the best of helicopters and planes, using both in sequence. An autonomous helicopter could enter an unknown area and quickly gather reconnaissance data of the environment, taking advantage of the flexibility of movement to be more comprehensive, and then be followed by an autonomous plane using that fresh data but bringing greater flight time to the table.

[via Gizmodo]

MIT robot plane deletes the pilot is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

NASA’s Curiosity rover is having its “Windows Update” moment, with the Mars exploration vehicle undergoing a huge “brain transplant” this weekend to better equip it for the challenges ahead. The new version of the flight software will installation today, and NASA expects the process to be completed by Monday, tweaking how Curiosity drives as well as how its robotic arm operates.

Curiosity has not one but two computers, added protection through redundancy should one fail. They’re hardly Core i7 behemoths, either; rather than well-traveled mainframes, the rover’s twin brains prioritize stability and protection from radiation over raw compute power. At their heart is a 200MHz RAD750 processor, paired with 256KB of EEPROM, 256MB of DRM and 2GB of flash memory, specifications that make even a mid-range smartphone look expansive.

However, where your Android phone might have problems handling the radiation involved in traveling to and crossing Mars, Curiosity’s systems do not. Specially radiation-hardened memory is used so as to prevent data loss from the difficult conditions.

In fact, the only data loss involved is intentional. The limited storage space meant that Curiosity couldn’t carry both its flight and its operational software simultaneously; the former, now no longer of use since the tricky “Seven Minutes of Terror” landing has been completed, will be deleted to make room for the new on-Mars brain.

With its new skill-set, Curiosity will be able to fully use its arm and drill, along with better image processing so as to avoid obstacles during driving. NASA’s goal is to make the rover self-autonomous, able to create its own path rather than relying on pre-configured goals beamed over from Earth.

Unfortunately for those of us enjoying the photos sent back from Mars, there are unlikely to be more until the software update is completed. NASA opted to freeze scientific research until the computers had been fully brought up to speed, and will be using the downtime to identify the first areas of exploration from the 360-degree panoramas already recorded.

Curiosity Rover gets “brain transplant” to explore on its own is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’re flying a robot indoors, chances are it’s a quadrocopter. The ability hover and maneuver on a dime is essential to whipping around the confined spaces of a lab. Researchers have figured out a way to overcome such obstacles with a fixed-wing aircraft, using laser range finders, sensors and an Intel Atom processor to churn through all the data. To demonstrate just how accurate the on-board navigation systems are, the team of scientists took the autonomous plane to a parking garage with ceilings just 2.5 meters high. Why is that important? The vehicle has a wingspan of two meters — leaving little room for error. To see the plane in action, check out the video after the break.

Continue reading MIT researchers develop highly agile autonomous plane (video)

Filed under: Robots

MIT researchers develop highly agile autonomous plane (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink GigaOM  |  MIT  | Email this | Comments

It’s not often you get to interview a nuclear engineer and a physician who run a tiny vaporizer factory out of an oversized garage outside of San Francisco so today is your lucky day. Two weeks ago we spent some time with the guys from Thermovape, a homegrown, self-funded hardware company that just happens to produce some of the coolest and most effective vaporizers I’ve seen.

For the uninitiated, the product is called the Thermo Essence Thermovape, a smoking cessation tool and “botanical vaporizer.” It’s designed for vaporizing the essentials out of botanicals like pot and tobacco as well as and oils. It’s not smoking – the convection vaporizer pulls everything important out of the materials, leaving behind desiccated leaves.

Founded by best buds Noah Minskoff and Nathan Terry, the company has about ten employees, including a pro machinist. The pair turned to vaporizers when they saw that the market was wide open. More importantly, Noah’s mother died of lung cancer and he was looking for a simple way to help people stop smoking. The Thermovape offers the nicotine dosage of a cigarette without the carcinogenic byproducts.

Whatever your take on drug use, these guys are real hardware entrepreneurs on a mission. They are completely self-reliant and haven’t accepted any funding, partially because the VC world is wary of these sorts of businesses. But, as Minskoff pointed out, this isn’t a bong factory. It’s a precision machine shop that uses some amazingly complex and expensive tools to make a product that lasts.

You can see how the pair work on their vapes in this episode of Makers and look for more hardware startups coming up in the next few weeks. If you have something cool you want to show us, don’t forget to email me at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line MAKERS.

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC acknowledged some critics Saturday in announcing it changed plans and will stream Sunday’s Olympic closing ceremony live online.

Sunday’s ceremony from London will still air on a tape-delayed basis on NBC in prime time. For the opening ceremony, NBC took some heat for not making the event available to anyone in the United States for hours after the fact.

The opening ceremony was watched by 40.7 million people, a bigger audience than for the Grammys and Oscars this year. NBC has since found that streaming live all of the Olympic sports events online has not cut into its prime-time audience, which has been unexpectedly bigger than the 2008 Beijing Games.

Read More…
More on NBC