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• It should be able to hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand without the need for human control.  The software system must enable the robot to perform the Challenge Tasks following a high-level script with no operator intervention. For example, the operator would issue a command such as “Throw Ball.” That command would in turn decompose into a sequence of lower-level tasks, such as “find ball,” “grasp ball,” “re-grasp ball, cock arm, and throw.”

• 
• Honda and the Ars Electronica Futurelab are collaborating on a human-robot interaction study this week in Linz, Austria (September 2nd ~ 8th).  Although they say their goal is to determine how robots ought to interact with people in the future, I think this may be just an excuse to let the public have some one-on-one fun with ASIMO.  In any case, these sorts of studies should help steer Honda’s engineers in the right direction when designing the next version of the world’s most famous humanoid robot.

• 
• Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.

• The Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) Simulator is a key feature of the package that allows you to get started without buying expensive robots. It is a great tool for use in education. The add-ons outlined below help you to create your own simulation environments and get started on learning about robotics.
• 

• 
• In its latest episode, the Robots
  Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight
  Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC,
  Raymond Oung.
  The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each
  individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels
  to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight,
  modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video
  of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a
  few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to
  the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA
  is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines
  multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in
  distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world
  issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it
  provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like
  distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more
  information on current work, future plans and real-world applications,
  read
  on or tune
  in!

• Introduction: The proliferation of multicore processors and the desire to consolidate applications and functionality will push the embedded industry into embracing virtualization in much the same way it has been embraced in the server and compute-centric markets. However, there are many paths to virtualization for embedded systems. After a tour of those options and their pros and cons, Freescale Semiconductor’s Syed Shah shows why the bare metal hypervisor-based approach, coupled with hardware virtualization assists in the core, the memory subsystem and the I/O, offers the best performance.
• 

• The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.

  
  

   

  
  

  The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

• Can a team of soccer-playing robots beat the human World Cup champions by 2050?

  
  

  That's the ultimate goal of RoboCup, an international tournament where teams of soccer robots compete in various categories, from small wheeled boxes to adult-size humanoids.

  
  

  IEEE Spectrum's Harry Goldstein traveled to Singapore to attend RoboCup 2010 -- and check out how the man vs. machine future of soccer is playing out.

• The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.
• 

• 

• Tilikum the killer whale (Orcinus orca) made news recently in the tragic death of his Sea World trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum pulled Brancheau into the water when he grabbed her floating ponytail — much like a cat might grab yarn attached to a stick. Complex play behavior is a sign of intelligence, but unfortunately little is known of the circuitry of even a cat’s brain, much less the massive brain of an orca — roughly four times the size of a human brain.

  
  
  
  
  See Also
  
  
  • The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain
  • Ray Kurzweil Interview
  • Brain on a Chip
  
  
  
  

  MIT neuroscientists are developing computerized techniques to map the millions of miles of neuronal circuits in the brain that may one day shed some light on the differences between Homo sapiens sapiens and other species, and will likely clarify how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality, and memory. Developing connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) may have just as much impact as sequencing the human genome. Here’s a video showing 3D rotating nodes and edges in a small connectome:

• 

• First, right off the top here: Scala has true blue Java-like null; any reference may be null. Its presence muddies the water quite a bit. But since Beust's article explicitly talks about Haskell he's clearly not talking about that aspect of Scala because Haskell doesn't have null. I'll get back to Scala's null at the end but for now pretend it doesn't exist.

  Second, just to set the record straight: "Option" has roots in programming languages as far back as ML. Both Haskell's "Maybe" and Scala's "Option" (and F#'s "Option" and others) trace their ancestry to it.

• Simple mathematical analysis shows that the best answer to address this problem is to  select a CR ratio QGD/QGS1 that is less than 1. Other factors to consider for preventing C dv/dt induced turn-on include low driver-sinking impedance (<1 Ώ), a FET design with intrinsically low RG, an externally-applied G-S capacitor and Q2 packages that minimize parasitics and voltage ringing.
• 

• In high-end audio equipment, careful selection of resistors is one of the best ways to avoid or minimize noise and distortion in the signal path. This paper describes the noise generation in resistors manufactured using the various available resistor technologies and quantifies the noise insertion typical for each type.

• Last week Wim Jongman bloged about the Nebula Oscilloscope widget. It’s just an awesome widget for monitoring activity. See Wim’s post to form an opinion yourself.

  
  

  So, for me as a RAP developer, the first question I always ask myself when seeing such a cool thing is: “Will it run on RAP?”. I followed the steps Wim described to get the Oscilloscope running, changed the target to RAP, commented out one line of code and started the application. You can see the result in the screencast below.

• Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:
• 

Great series of articles. Make sure to check out parts 1 and 2.

• Perhaps the most difficult control problem for a drive servo is that of going down a ramp. Any back drivable drive servo will exhibit a freewheeling velocity on a given ramp.
  

  
  This is the speed at which the robot will roll down the ramp in an unpowered state. At this speed, the surface drag and internal drag of the servo are equal to the gravitational force multiplied by the sine of the slope. The freewheeling speed is thus load dependent.
  

• While the topic of timing has already been raised in previous parts in this series, the discussion here will be expanded to include the execution and response time of the software functions.
  

  
  When discussing timing in embedded software, there are typically two types of timing requirements, rate of execution and response time. Rate of execution deals with the event-to-event timing within a software function. It can be the timing between changes in an output, time between samples of an input, or some combination of both.
  

• 
• Researchers from Leeds University are working on a camera and
  drill-weilding robot known as Djedi to solve the mystery of the blocked
  shafts inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. In 1992 and 2002, remote
  cameras were sent through the shaft under the watchful eye of
  antiquities master Dr. Zahi Hawass only to be stopped by limestone
  doors. Dr. Robert Richardson of the Mechanical Engineering department
  said their goal is to find out what is beyond the blocks and go as far
  as possible to discover the purpose of the shafts, all while doing
  minimal damage to the structure. Final preparations are being made now
  with hopes
  of sending the robot in before year's end. Place your bets now!

• Just finishing off the chapter on bit syntax and pattern matching over bit strings for our Erlang book. We wanted to put in a realistic example, and chose a TCP segment as described  here.

  
  

  It's amazing how expressive the notation can be, and we get a definition which pretty much mirrors the diagram and explanation in the link above: nothing like doing it for yourself to convince you that it works.

• If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.
•