News Blog

XX25 powers a MiTAC V100 rugged laptop.

(Credit: UltraCell)

A California company has introduced a 25-watt mobile fuel cell system designed to power a ruggedized laptop computer for up to 14 hours at a time using a single 250cc cartridge.

The XX25, as it is called, internally generates fuel cell-ready hydrogen from a highly concentrated methanol solution, providing power to a field computer and communications equipment at weight savings of up to 65 percent, according to Livermore, Calif.-based UltraCell.

(Credit: UltraCell)

Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, and continue to produce it as long as the fuel lasts. This is not only ecologically correct, but it also weighs less. The company calculates that on a typical 72-hour mission, each soldier requires 27 pounds of rechargeable military batteries.

The Army's Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) and DARPA (PDF) have extended UltraCell's development contract so that tests can continue. A year ago, CERDEC deemed the 25-watt model safe enough to be worn by soldiers in the field and used to power portable devices, a first for this type of fuel cell.

(Credit: darpa)

DARPA has released some tidbits of information in a briefing on how one might build a propulsion system that combines a Constant Volume Combustion (CVC) engine and a full-scale turbine engine to accelerate a hypersonic jet to multiple Mach.

It's called the Vulcan, and it's a demonstration program designed to power a full-scale reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle like the Falcon HTV-3X, and to do it by 2012. The key, according to the DARPA briefing, is to integrate a currently produced turbine engine like the F110-129 or the F119, with minimal modifications and a CVC (PDF).

The CVC, or "scramjet," will operate only at supersonic speeds. It's basically a constricted tube with few or no moving parts through which air is compressed at high speeds, with fuel combusted along the way. The exhaust comes out the nozzle faster than the air came in.

The turbojet engine is needed for runway takeoff and to push the plane from zero to Mach 4, where the CVC would accelerate it to Mach 6 and beyond. Ideally, both would share a common inlet and nozzle.

Bottom line for the military is a hypersonic jet capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload up to 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours. It would also be used for reconnaissance, strike, and other critical national missions, like ferrying Tom Clancy characters to emergency meetings at the Kremlin.

Three groups including Georgetown University teamed up Wednesday to develop a new way to measure the glucose levels of diabetes patients without a finger prick to draw their blood.

The technique involves the use of disposable skin patches (embedded with a wireless sensor chip) that can monitor glucose levels, and then transmit that information to a cell phone. With the data, the mobile phone could conceivably control an insulin pump remotely, according to the researchers.

The organizations involved in the project are Georgetown, Gentag, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a technology development company. Also a tech research firm, Gentag has developed an RFID-sensor reader platform for cell phones. And with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, researchers from Georgetown and SAIC created the skin patch technology, initially to monitor soldiers on the battlefield.

As part of their agreement, the groups will combine their respective intellectual property to develop the new application for diabetes patients. The patches will be able to monitor patients' blood every hour for a 24-hour period, and transmit that data to a device that's already familiar to many diabetes patients. The phones also include geolocation technology in the case of an emergency.

"We expect that this new, painless, disposable, wireless glucose sensor technology will significantly improve diabetes monitoring worldwide," Gentag President John Peeters said in a statement.

The organizations did not set a specific launch time for the technology.

iRobot has secured a multimillion-dollar R&D contract for a new type of soft, flexible robot for the military, the company announced Tuesday.

The "ChemBot" project was awarded to iRobot from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army Research Office.

iRobot did not release any preliminary diagrams or details on what the ChemBot might look like. But some ideas on what a ChemBot might be like can be gleaned from a request for proposals DARPA put out in March 2007. The robot DARPA wants to see must be a soft, flexible, mobile robot that can squeeze into hard-to-reach places. The goal is to make a robot that would be "soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload," according to DARPA's request. The robot will also need to change in size and shape to fit a given situation's needs.

The ChemBot project led by iRobot will include team members from iRobot, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with expertise in chemistry and material science, as well as those versed in the expected actuator, electronics, sensor, and computer technologies.

The ChemBot will be used for reconnaissance and search-and-rescue type missions, according to iRobot.

Small and nimble seems to be the latest robo-interest.

SRI International released footage of its sticky wall-climbing robots in April. BAE Systems announced in early May it secured a $38 million contract with the U.S. military for its spider-like intelligence-gathering robots. Finally, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle announced earlier this month that they are developing "robofish" for gathering information at sea and that the military is interested in a school of its own.

Virginia Tech's team, VictorTango, won third prize and $500,000 in the Urban Grand Challenge in 2007. Torc Technologies, which collaborated on the car, will now sell a version of it to interested academics and researchers.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)

Self-driving cars are veering closer to the roads.

Torc Technologies, which collaborated with Virginia Tech on an autonomous Ford Escape Hybrid that placed third in DARPA's Urban Grand Challenge, started selling a version of its self-driving creation Tuesday.

Called the ByWire XGV, Torc's drive-by-wire converted Ford Escape Hybrid will be available as a research platform for academics and car industry types who are interested in developing new applications in the field of autonomous autos.

While the world may not be ready yet for self-driving cars on the road, someone could have a lot of fun on a closed-course race track. Torc's car will sell for about $60,000, excluding the cost of the Ford Escape Hybrid with four-wheel drive. The starting sticker price on the SUV with 4WD is about $29,000. (As a platform, the car is ideal for U.S. research because it's American-made, has a powerful battery onboard, and is sturdy over rough terrain.)

"It's an experimental ground vehicle that provides researchers and developers with a car that's already converted," said Anu Saha, robotics product engineer with National Instruments, whose technology is used in the car. "There is a base level of technology, and researchers can come up with the next level, like what's stopping us from having autonomous cars on the road? We need more intelligence."

Torc is among the few contestants in DARPA's autonomous road races from 2004 to 2007 that are turning their hard work into a product. Team Dad commercialized an advanced laser sensor that it developed for the 2004 race, and then sold it to as many as 12 semifinalists in the 2007 event. The so-called lidar, which costs about $80,000, helps create a highly detailed map of the surrounding terrain so an autonomous car can more easily detect and avoid obstacles. Other teams have tried to sell their cars for research purposes, too, but on a more informal basis.

The auto industry is moving closer all the time to adopting these technologies. Infiniti has a new car that features "lane departure control," which is capable of keeping itself between lane lines. It will use the brakes to kick itself back on course if it veers from a lane, according to Car and Driver.

Torc announced other new autonomous vehicle technologies that it will sell to the military.

The PackBot from iRobot can climb stairs and carry a camera on its arm. The robot is already being used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Credit: Courtesy of U.S. Army/Spc. Jonathan Montgomery)

The Blacksburg, Va.-based company has developed components that would convert a vehicle into one that could act autonomously. It developed hardware that contains the software algorithms for obstacle detection and avoidance, and route planning. The box is Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) interoperable, meaning that it's compliant with a U.S. Department of Defense standard for syncing manned and unmanned systems. Also, Torc built the SafeStop, an emergency stop system for unmanned vehicles to get out of trouble. That's also in a hardware box that can be plugged into a vehicle.

So far, Torc has demonstrated how the technology works with the iRobot PackBot, an unmanned ground system used in Iraq for defusing explosive devices. Soldiers typically control the PackBot with a remote. But with Torc's system, called Autononav, they can use a monocular to mark a target for the robot to reach 100 meters away, for example; and the robot will drive itself there.

"The soldier doesn't have to worry about driving around ditches. It figures it out. We call that site and click autonomy," said Torc CEO Michael Fleming.

Fleming said that by mid-2009, a small number of the systems will be evaluated in Iraq. Although the system is newly available for purchase, he would not say how much it costs. It's sold only under military contract, he said.

But the technology can easily be ported to a variety of markets such as mining, industrial automation, and farming, Fleming said. Carnegie Mellon University's autonomous vehicle team has worked with Caterpillar on mining applications, for example.

"As an industry, we need to focus on taking these to commercial markets, such as mining automation, automated highways, farming," Saha said. "There's a cultural gap that needs to be filled, where users understand that in order to fill that void we need to continue to conduct experimentation."

AeroVironment is set to design and build a 3-inch nano air vehicle for DARPA.

(Credit: AeroVironment)

Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming a big deal for the armed forces, even when they're really small.

AeroVironment said Tuesday that it has gotten the go-ahead, in the form of a Phase II contract, to design and build a teeny-tiny prototype for the Nano Air Vehicle program at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. How teeny? The defense R&D agency stipulates that a NAV must be smaller than 7.5 centimeters (2.9 inches) and, at no more than 10 grams (one-third of an ounce), "ultralightweight."

A key eventual mission for NAVs would be military operations in urban environments, with the insect-sized aircraft capable of performing surveillance and reconnaissance both inside buildings and in the open air. In addition, DARPA says, "the program will advance technologies that enable collision avoidance and navigation systems for use in GPS-denied indoor and outdoor environments and develop efficient methods for hovering flight and deployment or emplacement of sensors."

While DARPA and Monrovia, Calif.-based AeroVironment cite biomimickry--that is, drawing on designs found in nature--as a central concept for NAVs, the NAV sketch on the AeroVironment site looks predominantly like a classic airplane-dropped bomb--with gossamer wings tacked on. (Sort of like the wings that Wile E. Coyote strapped on in one of his cartoon pursuits of Road Runner.)

The Wasp III is now serving with the Air Force.

(Credit: U.S. Air Force)

The Phase II contract involves a six-month, $636,000 development program that AeroVironment, which also makes wind turbines for civilian use, says will result in "a rudimentary, three-inch flapping-wing air vehicle system." (Phase I was a $1.7 million program.) If a demo of the NAV is successful, DARPA would have the option to extend the program for 18 months.

AeroVironment has already created small--but not "nano"--UAVs for the Pentagon, including the Raven and the Wasp. A "micro" air vehicle, or MAV, the Wasp can be remotely controlled or programmed for GPS-based autonomous navigation, and it carries a pair of on-board cameras. The Air Force took delivery of its first "BATMAV" (for the Battlefield Air Targeting Micro Air Vehicle program), the Wasp III--with a strapping 29-inch wingspan and weighing in at 1 pound--from the company in 2007.

Swarm Systems will enter autonomous quadrotor micro air vehicles weighing less than 2 pounds.

(Credit: Swarm Systems)

A village in England will host a robot hide-and-seek exercise next month, when 11 teams drawn from private companies and universities compete to sniff out snipers, roadside bombs, and other hidden dangers while relaying real-time images to a command post.

The MOD Grand Challenge, as it's called, is billed as the U.K. Ministry of Defense's counterpart to the U.S. DARPA Challenges, except it's military robots that compete against one another instead of robotic cars.

The purpose is to boost development of small robot teams capable of scouting out and alerting troops to potentially dangerous surprises on the urban battlefield. The robots must autonomously negotiate complex, unfamiliar terrain and urban clutter to locate the threats. Points are earned based on the number of threats uncovered in one hour. Points are lost if a team resorts to remote control to maneuver its bots at any stage.

In the world of robotic cars, human relations can be tricky.

Stanford's robot, Junior, was the first to cross the finish line in the Urban Grand Challenge last November.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)

The organizer of an upcoming "Robotic Grand Prix" in Long Beach, Calif., has retracted the title of its event after representatives from the Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University robotic racing teams took issue with how the event was being marketed. On Monday, the Toyota Grand Prix issued a press release that said autonomous cars from Stanford, CMU, and Lehigh University--finishers of last year's DARPA Urban Grand Challenge--would race against each other again later this month.

Jim Michaelian, CEO of the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach, said in an interview Tuesday that the group will now likely call the event a "robotic challenge" to reflect the fact that the three cars will not race. Rather they will demonstrate their technology by driving a lap on the Long Beach track on April 20. The lap will not be judged, he said.

"We're racing guys here. But 'race' was an overstatement. It really is a 'challenge'--and an opportunity to showcase this technology to a broad audience of 170,000 people," Michaelian said.

Still, the misrepresentation highlights the possibility of a future robotic race among these players. When asked whether the group would eventually host a Robotic Grand Prix (a race), Michaelian said: "This is the first step and we'll see where it goes from here."

A rematch would likely be a huge event, considering the rivalry between the top two contenders--CMU and Stanford--and the high stakes of past robotic competitions. Last year, CMU's "Boss," an autonomous Chevy Tahoe, won the $2 million Urban Grand Challenge, overtaking 2005's DARPA Grand Challenge winner, Stanford. Stanford's "Junior," a robotic Volkswagen Passat, took the $1 million second place in last year's contest, which tested how well autonomous vehicles could drive among other cars while still obeying traffic laws.

During the Urban Challenge, the cars maintained controlled speeds, but they were judged by how fast they finished the course and stuck to traffic laws. The implication of a race at the Toyota Grand Prix is that the robotic vehicles would be measured by how fast they could finish a lap around the track.

Sebastian Thrun, head of Stanford's racing team, said that any real race would be premature because the technology just isn't there yet. "We had no intention of turning this into a race. The intent is to go no faster than 30 mph and race cars go as fast as 150 mph. The technology is clearly not ready for those speeds."

During the demonstration on April 20, the robotic cars--Boss, Junior, and "Ben,"--will keep speeds of about 30 mph. Ben is a self-driving Toyota Prius from the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University.

Chris Urmson, director of technology for CMU's Tartan Racing, said his understanding of the event was that it would be a parade lap to show off the technology. And while it will not be a race, he said he hopes that there will be more opportunities for competition in the future.

"A race has a lot of implications of someone winning and losing," Urmson said. "We'd like to show off the technology, but we're not looking to compete with these people at this point."

Further details about this event have emerged. Please refer to this story for more information.

The robotic stars of last year's DARPA Urban Grand Challenge, an autonomous car race, will have a rematch at the Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach, Calif., later this month.

This time, their competition will be solely about speed.

"Boss," an autonomous Chevy Tahoe from Carnegie Mellon University and winner of the $2 million Urban Grand Challenge, will compete once again against "Junior," a robotic Volkswagen Passat from Stanford University, which took second place in the contest. The two teams, which have a long rivalry, will also face off against "Ben," a self-driving Toyota Prius from the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University. Ben finished sixth in the urban challenge.

Unlike the Urban Challenge, which measured each contestant's performance not just by speed but also by their driving skills, the three teams will be judged by how fast they can drive one lap of the 1.97-mile track. Of course, they'll have to stay on the track.

The race, called the Robotic Grand Prix, will take place on April 20 and will be part of the "Green Power Prix-View," which features futuristic alternative-energy vehicles.