DARPA says the balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.
(Credit: DARPA)You may have heard about that DARPA balloon challenge, where the first team to identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 moored weather balloons across the continental U.S. wins $40,000? Well, as of Saturday, the balloons are up in the air. If you don't have a team yet, here are some places to report a sighting.
What's cool is how most of the balloon-hunting communities I've found are working toward selfless goals. Both DARPABalloon.com and this MIT group are proposing to gather a huge number of participants, and rather than give each contributor a measly cut, the 40 grand will be donated to charity.
DARPA is holding its Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition is meant to explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.
So, good luck to everyone involved. If you happen to stumble across one this weekend, consider reporting it to a group that's playing for charity. Just make sure it's not a red balloon some kid let go of first.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
(Credit:
Volkswagen Group of America)
If you're a person who would gladly relinquish the task of parking your car to a computer, there may be a Volkswagen in your future.
Last weekend, Volkswagen Group of America and Stanford University's School of Engineering hosted a dedication ceremony on the Stanford campus for the new Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) that included the "first ever" autonomous parking demonstration by a driverless car.
(Credit:
Volkswagen Group of America)
The car, a VW Passat called Junior, was developed jointly by VW and Stanford and is the same one that finished second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Driverless cars have come a long way since the first DARPA race in 2004, when not one contestant made it over the finish line, much less parallel-parked itself.
VW donated $5.75 million for the new laboratory, which it called "the next step in the evolution of the two organizations' commitment to drive innovation in automotive development."
"When the new building opens early next year, VAIL will provide a home on campus for faculty and students from around the university to work on advanced automotive research," said Jim Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering.
The company also unveiled the Pike's Peak Audi TT-S, the latest iteration of driverless vehicles developed through the VW-Stanford partnership.
(Credit:
Sandia National Laboratories)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demoed its Precision Urban Hopper robot, a wheeled ground unit that can leap over 25-foot-tall obstacles and keep on truckin'.
Seen in the video below, released last week by the Sandia National Laboratory, the shoebox-size Hopper easily takes on a chain-link fence, bounces a bit after landing, and then keeps rolling. It seems that a piston-fired leg makes it fly.
The Precision Urban Hopper is being developed by Sandia and Boston Dynamics, creator of the famously creepy BigDog robot, for surveillance operations in urban terrain. Guided by GPS, it is designed to "bolster the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban combat," navigating autonomously, according to Jon Salton, a program manager at Sandia.
Sandia said hopping has "shown to be five times more fuel-efficient than hovering," when it comes to getting around obstacles less than 30 feet tall. It added that other potential applications of the Hopper include law enforcement, homeland security, search and rescue, and exploring other planets.
Testing and delivery of the Hopper is scheduled for late 2010.
(Credit:
ZMP)
For those who want a shot at the DARPA Grand Challenge but can't afford the gear, a Japanese company is offering a 1/10-scale robot-powered model car with all the bells and whistles so they can at least get their autonomous feet wet.
It's still not cheap, but at $7,000 the ZMP Car Robotics Platform, or RoboCar, provides all the tools needed to test your applied robotic technology, autonomous movement, and inter-vehicular and car/human communications expertise (PDF).
The RoboCar includes a built-in stereo camera, image recognition module, laser range finder, gyro and acceleration sensors, independent rotary encoders for the four wheels and infrared distance sensors. User applications include a built-in OS, communication with PC applications, and wireless communication with Wi-Fi for other plug-ins.
Full-scale robotic car platforms are costly and require a lot of space, so the company came up with the RoboCar, which provides a perfect solution for students, seat-of-the-pants researchers, and over-the-top hobbyists.
It's a perfect teaching tool for universities or companies to train students or staff on control theory, automated control systems, or development process, according to ZMP. With the automotive industry rapidly evolving toward next-generation intelligent cars, it's important students be given the opportunity to work on sophisticated systems and gain the skills they can use after graduating, the company said.
Well, it's perfect for the dads and grads that have everything, that's for sure.
Robots that can self-replicate aren't new. But a new DARPA initiative is a little more frightening as it looks to create robots that can take part in their own construction, according to The Register. That means they're "alive" before they're finished and can help their forebearers put them together.
I built myself!
(Credit: IMDB)As if I'm not scared to death enough of robots, it means the robot armies of the future might be able to build themselves faster.
Now, I'm all for science, but DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is a military entity. That means these robots will probably have military uses. That means they'll probably be born to kill. And they'll come for me after Sarah Conner.
The initiative is known as the Self-Explanation Learning Framework, or SELF for short. It's currently in request-for-proposals mode, so don't go stocking up on the canned food yet. But if someone somehow figures out a realistic way for future AIs to function like this, then it might be time.
The science isn't quite there yet, so DARPA is holding an orientation day (PDF) for would-be mad scientists on June 10 at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington, Va. When future freedom fighters get asked where the end of the world started, now they've got an answer.
(Credit:
Boston Dynamics)
Here's another offering from Boston Dynamics' zoomorphic line: the RiSE V3, a multi-legged, beaver-tailed robot that can skitter along the ground, shimmy up a pole, and then quietly cling there and stare at you.
The legs are powered by a pair of electric motors and equipped with small surgical needle micro-claws, which allow the unit to dig into and climb up textured, convex, cylindrical structures at a rate of 21 centimeters per second, or just under a half a mile an hour (PDF).
"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," said University of Pennsylvania Professor Daniel Koditschek, who worked on the project.
The RiSE was the result of a collaboration between Boston Dynamics, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University, with funding by DARPA.
As with the company's now famous BigDog, what distinguishes this robotic creation is its freakishly familiar gait. RiSE uses a distinctive, koala-like climbing pace, or behavioral gait, propelling the body forward while passively maintaining yaw, pitch, and roll stability. Locomotion--leg motion, strain, and joint position and foot contact sensors--is controlled by an onboard computer, naturally. The front legs are just long enough to hug a telephone pole.
The development team's aim was to reproduce movements they had observed in climbing insects. This is something else that sets this wall climber apart. Most other climbing robots have generally relied on "surface-specific attachment mechanisms," i.e. magnets and suction devices.
Watch a video of RiSE V3 below.
As much as you may miss it, you'll have to face the fact that donating blood may become obsolete someday soon.
The U.S. military is seeking an automated culture and packaging system that could produce a steady supply of universal donor red blood cells right on the battlefield, without resorting to needles and the human filling-stations (PDF).
DARPA has awarded a $1.95 million contract to Arteriocyte, a Cleveland company that's experimenting with a technology developed at Johns Hopkins that enables the rapid expansion of umbilical cord blood. The company wants to adapt it to a manufacturing technology that will feed the military's thirst for universal donor red blood units. The technology, called Nanex, uses a nanofiber-based structure that mimics bone marrow in which blood cells multiply, according to the company.
The military envisions a "fieldable" in-theater, culture-manufacturing system that would take hematopoietic progenitor cells and automatically covert those into hundreds of prepackaged, ready-to-be-infused RBC units. This process, called "blood pharming," would eliminate much of storage, transport and the donor blood type and health limitations that make RBC resupply such a challenge.
Red blood cells, which make up 40 percent of the average human's blood volume, are the most transfused blood product for trauma care, with 40,000 RBC units used in the United States every day, according to the Red Cross. A unit is 220 ml. or about a cup.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office is looking for a submersible aircraft design and invites you to come up with a concept.
Performance requirements call for an aircraft that can cover 1,850km by air or 185km by sea, or 22km underwater in eight hours or less. And this is not some miniature pool hopper; DARPA wants it to be able to carry a crew of eight and a 2,000lb payload.
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Terra Tigershark)
Speculation on design suggests an old-school snorkel to provide air supply for the power plant while your flying fish is in submerged mode, but don't rule out nuclear power or dilithium crystal for that matter.
Be advised, difficulties with developing such a platform will arise from the diametrically opposed requirements that exist for an airplane and a submarine, DARPA helpfully points out. Your concept should not only identify the technological limitations that need to be overcome to produce a swimming plane, you also need to provide proof that it's doable.
"In addition to the conceptual design studies, performers need to outline experiments or computational models that will be used to demonstrate that the major technological limitations can be overcome," DARPA warns, while admitting that "prior attempts to demonstrate a vehicle with the maneuverability of both a submersible and an aircraft" have, unfortunately, been unsuccessful.
One plan is to use the submersible aircraft to infil small SF teams off the coastline and then hang around for pick-up, a service already provided fairly effectively by surplus submarines.
A prototype high-tech cuff that detects and treats bleeding from combat injuries got a step closer to the battlefield Monday when Siemens Healthcare announced an exclusive contract with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency to develop the device.
Infantrymen from the 82nd Airborne Division being trained in first aid--here, dressing a leg wound.
(Credit: Mike Pryor, 82nd Airborne/Courtesy of U.S. Army)The Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff, or DBAC, is designed to limit blood loss from penetrating wounds to limbs--as in the case of a gunshot injury--thus reducing the risk of limb loss or death.
Once the cuff is applied, ultrasound technology within the device automatically would identify the location and severity of the bleeding. This in turn would trigger therapeutic ultrasound elements to emit and focus high-power energy toward the bleeding sites, speeding coagulation and halting bleeding.
Siemens says the compact and lightweight device can accommodate a variety of limb sizes, from a wide male thigh to a narrow female arm. The cuff is intended to shut off automatically and to be operated with minimal training.
When word of the DBAC first surfaced in 2006, both Siemens and a competing team from Philips were awarded contracts by DARPA to develop the technology.
Now that Siemens has landed the deal, it will be working with partners at the University of Washington's Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound; Texas A&M University's Institute for Preclinical Studies; and Siemens Corporate Research to meet DARPA's goal of producing a prototype in 18 months.
Related story:
(Credit:
DARPA)
A new type of binoculars developed by DARPA not only penetrates heat haze, it uses the shimmering distortion to magnify distant objects behind it, significantly extending target recognition and identification.
The Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS) exploits an "atmospheric turbulence-generated micro-lensing phenomena", which acts as a lens, sporadically generating a better view of what is going on behind the haze.
The one disadvantage is that since the technique relies on a combination of images, you can't see what's going on in real time. Best case viewing from the approximately 4 lbs., 14 inch prototype will be one image per second.
These fleeting images are digitally strung together into a continuous strip; the result is three times more detail than many current telescopes manage to produce even without the heat haze. The military's goal is "90% accurate facial recognition of a moving individual from 1 km away, using a 6-centimetre lens", according to New Scientist. One hope is that this greater "target identification confidence" will reduce fratricide and collateral damage on the battlefield.
Testing is scheduled for 2009, with delivery to special ops in the field by 2011. The same turbulence-induced, super resolution principle could be applied to other optical systems like telescopes used in astronomy.
(Credit:
DARPA)
