Cutting Edge

The history of flight is notoriously fickle. Orville Wright managed to stay aloft for just 12 seconds in his plane in 1903. Last week, Judy Wexler hovered a few inches above the ground for about 4 seconds in a human-powered helicopter, but it was enough to put a mark in the history books.

The University of Maryland has played host to the creation of the Gamera helicopter, named for a giant flying turtle superhero that can give Godzilla a run for his money.

Gamera is usually seen flying by spinning around rapidly like a big, scaly Frisbee. The helicopter version features four 42-foot-long rotors in an X pattern with the pilot at the center. Counting the 110-pound Wexler, a University of Maryland biology student, the whole contraption weighs in at a slim 210 pounds worth of balsa, mylar, carbon fiber, and foam. Hand and foot pedals provide the power.

Gamera is chasing a lofty goal. The American Helicopter Society's Sikorsky Prize offers $250,000 for a human-powered helicopter that hovers for 60 seconds, stays within a 10-meter square space, and reaches a 3-meter altitude. That's a tall order. … Read more

Remember that little robot that scoots along the corridors of the Death Star? These Georgia Tech machines remind me of that little guy. But they're designed to help people on Earth by mapping out building interiors.

The rolling droids are being developed by Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Equipped with two cameras and laser scanners, they can autonomously explore hallways in an unfamiliar building, detecting doors and windows, and create a map for users such as soldiers or firefighters.

The project is part of the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program and is being sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory. The program is aimed at developing palm-size machines that can hover in place, enter buildings, and perform other insect-like stunts while gathering data and relaying it to human controllers.

The Georgia Tech robots in the vid below roll on treads and measure about a foot square, but researchers plan to shrink them. "Fully autonomous and collaborative, these tiny robots could swarm by the scores into hazardous situations," Georgia Tech said in a release.

Creepy? Definitely. The only thing worse than swarming robots are baby robots. But I digress. … Read more

She was charged for the airline ticket, but the mid-flight viewing of a space shuttle launch was free.

Stefanie Gordon of Hoboken, N.J., woke up on Delta Air Lines flight 2285 Monday traveling from New York's LaGuardia Airport to West Palm Beach, Fla., in time to watch the space shuttle Endeavour break through some cloud cover on its way to the International Space Station.

"The captain made an announcement that we would probably see it," Gordon told CBSNews. "I really couldn't hear what he was saying, and then all of a sudden people started getting up and going over to the windows."

Gordon recorded a video (below) and took some pictures, which she then posted to her Twitter account. She wrote in a later post that she was "half asleep" the whole time.

Her pictures show Endeavour's smoke trail, with the massive shuttle appearing as small as a dot.

"It was amazing," Gordon told CBS News. … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Running two weeks late because of an electrical glitch, the repaired shuttle Endeavour finally blasted off and rocketed into orbit for the last time Monday, putting on a spectacular, if brief, show for the several hundred thousand spectators who were estimated to have come to watch NASA's next-to-last shuttle launch.

Carrying a $2 billion particle physics experiment, critical supplies, and spare parts bound for the International Space Station, Endeavour's three main engines flashed to life and throttled up to full power while computers monitored their performance 50 times per second.

Six-and-a-half seconds later, at … Read more

European research group Fraunhofer has developed an inertial sensor system which, together with a handheld remote control, lets people program the movement of a robotic arm simply by moving their own arms, in a sort of "follow the leader" fashion.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing, Engineering, and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, devised algorithms governing the interactions of inertial sensors in the input device, which can be used to control the six-jointed robot arm.

The algorithms "fuse the data of individual sensors and identify a pattern of movement. That means we can detect movements in free space," the institute's Bernhard Kleiner said in a release.

Potential applications include easier programming of industrial robots: instead of teaching an assembly robot what to do by guiding it with a baton that it follows with laser tracking, workers could instruct the robot by simply moving their own arms.

A potential medical application is regulating the movements of active prostheses. The inertial sensor system could be attached to a patient's upper thigh and control the motors in a prosthetic foot to achieve a smoother gait.

The technology will be shown off at the Sensor +Test 2011 trade fair, June 7-9 in Nuremberg, where visitors will be able to control the robot using their arms, and make it catch a ball. … Read more

Willow Garage's $400,000 open-source PR2 personal robot is a jack of all trades, dabbling in household chores, bartending, and even playing pool.

Now, according to the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog, a group of researchers from Stanford's AI Lab is looking at putting it to work as a cashier in the retail store of the future.

The primary goal of the research is finding a way for a robot to sort, grasp, and identify objects with minimal programming. To make this work, a 3D sensor on PR2 takes a picture, and from that single frame, the robot is able to use the raw depth data to pick up an item.

The team coined the phrase "autonomous checkout clerk," which is exactly what follows, as the robot locates the bar code by spinning the object in its hands, reading the numeric code, and then putting the item in a bag. No training or model programming is required, and the research revealed a grasping success rate of 91.6 percent when picking up 100 various items.

Just don't let it handle the eggs. As you can see in the video below, the integrity of the item is in question once it leaves the robot's mechanical hand. … Read more

After soaring into the skies early this morning, the solar-powered Solar Impulse plane has completed its first international flight, traveling from its home of Switzerland to Brussels in about 13 hours--without the need for fuel and without producing any pollution.

Flown by pilot Andre Borschberg, the plane took off from its home base at Payerne Airfield at 8:40 a.m., a bit later than planned due to foggy weather conditions. Climbing to an altitude of more than 3,800 meters (approximately 12,467 feet, or 2.36 miles), the plane headed toward France and Luxembourg, and landed in Brussels airport at 9:38 p.m. The plane was originally due to land at 9 p.m., but the early-morning delay extended the arrival time.

The first international flight was expected to be especially challenging. Not only does the Solar Impulse rely on the power of the sun to keep it aloft during the day, but the plane was also set to navigate through standard commercial air traffic and possible turbulence as it soared over the different countries.… Read more

As Advanced Driver Assistance Systems become more prevalent in the vehicle industry, their market value will grow at an exponential rate, a new study from ABI Research has found.

This year alone, the market value of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which are built by vendors, is expected to hit $10 billion, the research firm reported today. ABI Research forecasts the ADAS market to reach a value of $130 billion in 2016.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems offer several important functions for drivers, including adaptive cruise control that speeds up or slows down the car based on road conditions; warnings when the vehicle starts to drift into another lane; and low-speed collision mitigation. ADAS has been available in some luxury vehicles for well over a decade. However, this year, ADAS will start making its way to "higher-volume" cars, ABI Research says, including the Ford Focus and Mercedes Benz C-Class.

The shift to more popular cars is the result of the improvement ADAS has undergone over the years. Aside from delivering better functionality, the systems are becoming easier to produce. That combination of better performance and lower production cost is helping to bring more car makers into the ADAS game.

New features in ADAS systems are also helping to attract new-car buyers. As ABI Research pointed out, simple warnings when a car drifts into another lane are no longer the norm for ADAS. Now, automakers are installing systems that can turn the car back into the lane. The systems are also capable of maintaining speed limit information to keep drivers informed.… Read more

Imagine logging in to Facebook or eBay with just a blink of an eye. A new gadget for consumers may soon make that possible.

Designed by the Hoyos Group, a device called EyeLock uses iris-recognition as an alternative to passwords to log you in to password-protected Web sites and applications. Although similar eye-scanning devices are already used in the business and industrial markets, Hoyos calls EyeLock "the first and only portable iris-scanning device for consumers."

The scanning device, which resembles a wand, plugs into a base that connects to your PC via a USB port. After you install the software and choose the sites and applications that you want to iris-protect, you pass the scanner in front of your eye. A snapshot is taken of your iris to confirm your identity. Assuming you're the real you, you're then granted immediate access to the secure Web site or application.

With security always a primary concern, the company boasts that the device is unhackable.

"Every time you log in, it reads your iris and creates a unique key, which is a series of numbers, and this key changes every time you log in, so no one can hack it," Tracy Hoyos, assistant marketing director, said in an interview with CNN.… Read more