All right, the cheetah-bot might not be as
fast as the real life animal, nor does it look as gracious. But, it is the
fastest legged robot in the world, surpassing an impressive 29 mph (46 km/h).
Can you run at that speed? I didn't think so. Although it will take us much
longer to imitate animal species like the cheetah, they are
the inspiration for a lot of research and developmental robots.
Just as the cheetah has a flexible
back when running, the cheetah bot does as well. Because the whole body moves fluidly when
running, it is able to reach incredible speeds. The only limitation is that it is still
attached to a hydraulic arm to keep balance. It cannot yet run independently
and, as you can see in the movie, the robot really struggles with its
balance. Unfortunately it is hard to get any more technical information on the
cheetah bot, but actually that comes as no surprise is that the U.S. government is
very interested in these types of innovations. Why? To obtain world dominance, prepare
for an alien invasion, military advantage, who knows?
As the cheetah is so much faster than any
human being, it presents a lot of possible applications in the field of war. It can outrun
enemies and tackle them without any difficulty, just like an attack dog.
But, dogs can be easily defended when they eventually catch up to you.
With these robots you stand no chance. Running more than 29 mph? Snapping a
robots neck? Enemy forces will have to find a whole new way to fight the U.S.
army when similar robots come into play. That’s why these new robots are so
valuable. And, as we know, many innovations in business originate from
inventions used in the army, so maybe in the future we will be seeing more from
the cheetah bot.
They are everywhere if you consider your privacy, they can see it all? What are they? Why are they up in the skies like UFO's? Who controls them?
These are some of the few questions that pop up in our mind every time we hear about drone strikes somewhere in the world. They are actually unmanned flying machines controlled remotely at a military base, mostly thousand of miles away. They are equipped for tactile missions and have equipments such as hi-resolution cameras and even missiles at times. They are a new breed of warriors employed in the battlefields today, actually almost all of the news agencies are mapped with news about some or the other drone strikes somewhere in the world.
But are these mean machine so really mean? Can they just be used as weapons of mass destruction?
The answer to the above questions is NO.Drones are capable of much much more. They can be used in various circumstances where human intervention on board an aircraft is actually dangerous or tedious. Such situations can be weather observation, surveillance for pattern recognition in agricultural fields, or perhaps even traffic monitoring to understand several factors for different studies.
They are much much more than Killers they were designed to be much more. It's their use that makes them deadly yet the power behind the technology is immense. They are the frontrunners of unmanned aircrafts which perhaps in the future could also be extended to totally autonomous machines to do things even out of the earths atmosphere...
The next generation bots are coming... You can't see them, touch them or feel them around you but they would do things that would entirely change the course of perception of the human race. Imagine a chronic tumour in the human body in a place inaccessible even to the best of the medical terms. What is the cure?
Pop a pill containing these miracle workers which would be electronically programmed to target the tumour in a manner as quick as one can think without any risky procedures or long waits in the hospital. This is the future with bots being made at the nanoscale i.e. a nanometer scale which is equal to 19^-9 metres. So small as to be not even seen by the human eye yet so powerful to accomplish tasks through coordinated swarms.
Thought the creation of these minuscule is not very easy because of the fact of creation of motors, sensors and the matrix board for the controller, the size of lesser than even a nanometer and this is possible but not so very in the current period. These wonders have the power to work in a coordinated manner as a swarm to accomplish tasks not only in the medical field as mentioned above but they could be also used in emergency situations such as a war or on aircrafts to control in many real time features of the rudders for example.
These bots would enable us in the future to perform functions which today owing to the inability to create objects on such a scale factor are impossible.
The various approaches of formulation of these organisms are as follows:
1. Biochip
2. Nubots
3. Positional Nanoassembly
4. Bacteria Based
5. Open Technology
6. Nanorobot Race
These bots if implemented on this scale have tremendous potentials. They can even help us to decode the human genome on a much better scale as the DNA molecules are also at the same factor level. Though evidently they are of primary importance and are needed as soon as possible yet there is a lot to be learnt on the way before putting them into actual usage or over the production facility.
Robots are able to traverse where humans dare not, into disaster areas, both
natural and man-made. Governments, universities, and corporations across
the globe have been investing significant resources in developing robots to
deal with the repercussions of floods, mining collapses, oil spills, nuclear outbrakes, and other industrial and natural disasters since the 90's.
Robots, in essence, have no need of environmental comfort. Their chassis unite forged metallic alloys with synthesized polcarbonates that empower them to resist tremendous physical exposure to heat or steam (no air circulation), direct force or high frequency radiation, while being flexible enough to move around conveniently.
The limit of TID (total ionizing dose - deterioration of electric/electronic equipments because of temporally accumulated amount of radioactive exposure - absorbed dose [Gy]) for
human workers is legally defined as 100 - 250 Milli-Sievert [mSv]. If the safety factor is set
to 0.1 Gy, 50 [Gy] and 20 [Gy] (the admissible limit of a robot) are 20-50
times and 8-20 times larger the admissible limit of human workers
respectively.
Robotic devices have been employed in response to multiple Radioactive disasters: Three Mile
Island, Chernobyl and recently in Fukushima, Japan. In Fukushima, Packbots were used to measure radiation levels and take pictures safely (see video below). As for chemical and oil refinement disasters, robots have been vital in managing environmental damages. Clean-up robots, with huge, deployable arms, are able to analyze and collect chemical leakages within disaster areas.
Robots entering Fukushima Reactor Building for the very first time:
In the medical field, robots have been developed to identify, analyze, and combat terminal diseases, such as cancer. Nano-robots, robots scaled to 10-9 meters, are being developed to access and cure malignant cells through magnetic field targeting. A big advantage of this robotic technology is that it targets only the infected cells, without damaging healthy tissue (like chemotherapy).
Robots are morevover used to explore active volcanos, which is just
another example of how robots have extended humanity's learning
horizons.
Below (left), a Hurt Locker-like bomb-disabling robot is pictured. Another example of how robotics has extended humanity's practical reach without endangering human lives. All of these robots have broken down environmental barriers, allowing humans to access realms previously inaccessible. Now just imagine what barriers robots will be able to overcome in the future.
This tactical hazardous operations robot, also know as THOR, is considered to be the robotic disaster response challenge (DRC) robot, par excellence. It not only facilitates the accomplishment of certain milestones in the prevention of disasters, but also pushes the entire field of robotic technology to its utter limits. At the end of the challenge, THOR should be able to perform the following tasks:
Get into and drive a utility vehicle
Walk across a rubble field
Clear rubble blocking an entry
Open doors and enter a building
Climb a ship’s ladder
Manipulate a power tool to break through a wall
Locate and close a valve
Carry and connect a fire hose
The business value of this technology manifests in the increasingly growing market and research & development found in this area. It seem that this technology not only provides a pruduct with respect to social responsibility or business ethics, but also from a pure return on investment point of view it seems to be beneficial.
There is a constant deliberation amidst the Robotics community: can humanoid bots be really developed? If they can be, would they be capable of emulating human behavior or even perhaps match the competencies displayed by the human brain to some extent?
The answer to these questions can be further explored through the development of the first Android based humanoid bot by Professor Oh Jun-Ho, on behalf of Korea Advanced institute of science and technology, with the lower body of a bipedal frame, that of a robot, while keeping the head of a human(Albert Einstein in this case). The capabilities of this humanoid bot, though limited, include features such as independent eye movements on both the eyes, facial gestures, voice recognition and synthesis apart from movement freedom on more than 3 independent axes. There has also been a development of the HUBO 2 by the same organisation on similar scales as the upgraded version to HUBO also known as Albert HUBO.
The robot is specially known for its facial gestures which are closely matched to the more than 1000 facial gestures that the human face is capable of. Also another remarkable feature of this bot is the capability to produce a synthesized voice on the patterns of the voice of the famous physicist Albert Einstein. The bi-pedal frame is capable also of matching the human type walking movement though it is still at very slow speeds, which in turn are a remarkable feature for such a frame.
The technicalities of this bot are also a benchmark in this industry with various motors and special sensors put in place to monitor and to react to situations on real time basis. It uses two on-board PC104 processors and solid state drives for faster instruction processing power and retrieval. The left one can control the entire robot, taking care of functions such as walking and overall stabilization; the right one on the other hand is normally empty and one can load speech, vision, and navigation algorithms.
Such humanoid bots are a great leap in terms of human based interactions because such bots can be very readily deployed in the future in places of public interest to interact with live humans and perhaps provide more options and benchmarks in terms of the human-bot interaction in a more informal manner.
The advancements in technology have amazed everyone world wide, and the most astonishing developments over the past few years were in Atlas. Atlas are humanoid robots which are developed mainly to assist or carry out search and rescue tasks. Boston Dynamics, an American company, are developing the Atlas to assist The United States army.
The Atlas was developed from Boston Dynamics first version which was called Petman. The design are somehow identical in terms of the limbs (4 hydraulic limbs), material (Aluminium and Titanium), height (1.8 m) and weight (330 pounds). The vision system that is implemented in the Atlas is a laser rangefinder and stereo cameras.
Huge progress was made in the past 2 years, and with billions of dollars being funded to Boston Dynamics by the Unites States Defense Advanced Research Projects Team (DARPA), we are to expect these Robots to carry emergency services in search operations or even rescue. The Atlas is mainly being developed to carry out operations where humans can not survive due to the environment. Atlas is still in the beginning of the development stages as a lot of advancements and improvements are still needed to be made. One of the issues that they still face till now is that Atlas still falls down a lot, but by time more and more developments are improving its balance.
Asimo, which stands for Advanced Step in
Innovative Mobility, is not the first humanoid robot, but as his name predicts he
has been the leader in a wide range of innovations. He made his first
appearance in October 2000 and over the years it has been presented with several
new features. Honda, its developer, wanted to provide the world with a robot
that would add value to our society. So they invented a new type of
robot, one not related to the business environment, that could help people in their
daily life. That it is why Asimo is only 1.2 meters tall, so he can move around
easily in spaces that are occupied by humans, but he can still reach for certain
objects, like switches or doorknobs. His size also contributes to the fact that
he has a very attractive appearance, almost human-like.
One of the technologies that also contribute
to its human appearances is the Predicted Movement Control. Combined with
the already existing technologies it makes him move with great flexibility and
smoothness as you can see in the video. It results in an intelligent real-time flexible way of walking, easily
making changes of direction, and responding to sudden movements. It is ably to
steer clear from a person or, contrary, to approach someone to great him or her. Over the
years his movements have become more and more stable, enabling him now to even run up to
3.7 mph, kicking a football, or running up and down stairs.
Recognizing moving objects, postures,
gestures, sounds and faces are other features that make him resemble a human
being. As it can interact with us, he really starts to grow on us, like a pet,
or maybe like a real friend. Even though his two eyes are just cameras, they
give him a actual face, and most importantly they make sure that he captures
everything that happens around him, detecting movements of multiple objects or
determining distance and direction. It can even follow us around, like a little dog.
But you never have to clean up after him. Nor feed him, because he will know when his
51.8V lithium ion battery needs to be charged, and by himself he will return to his charger
point. Also, thanks to its voice interpretation, it will listen to your voice
commands as well as to gestures. The voice
recognition will even allow him to distinguish several people, so it will know
when you’re with friends and invite them to a cup of tea. Works better than a boyfriend.
In 1971, the first attempt was made to land a rover on Mars. At the time, NASA
experienced more failure than success. Of course by now we are finding more and more answers to the questions that continue to surround Mars. Rover development has made such technological strides since then. Each robot has specific capabilities, based on what NASA determines best suits the rover's mission. The long term goals that NASA has set for these rovers are to discover characteristics of Mars' climate, geology, and resources to determine if life has been, or could ever be, supported by the planet. Additionally they are preparing for human exploration of the planet.
The first
two Mars rovers were launched in 1971 and were developed by Russia, but
both attempts failed, as neither of them had a successful landing. On July 4, 1997, the American Mars Pathfinder landed and succeeded in doing some exploration until losing contact three months later. In 2003, the Beagle 2, Spirit and Opportunity were also launched. Up to this point, the Curiosity has been the most successful attempt to explore Mars. It was launched on November 26,
2011 and arrived to Mars on August 6, 2012. Today the rover is still operable and keeps on giving us new insights on the peculiarities of Mars.
Curiosity
is doing different kinds of biological, geological and geochemical research, in addition to studying the planetary processes and surface radiation. Curiosity's goals are as follows: to determine whether Mars could have ever supported life,
the role of water, the study of the climate and the geology of Mars and
the prospects of human exploration. In order to achieve these goals the Mars
rover has an impressive collection of tools. It not only has it got a wide range of
different cameras installed, but it can also drill in the Martian soil to extract samples, which can be analyzed by the robot itself. As it has its own space laboratory installed, it is able to study the samples it took and send the information to earth.
But it is not only the
amazing technology that the Mars rover contains that makes it so special. The process it took to land it is also extraordinary. The rover travels in a spacecraft at enormous speed from earth to Mars and the challenge is to slow it down before touching the surface, without any human intervention. It takes 14 minutes for communication to
travel to Earth, but the landing process only takes 7 minutes - from the moment the spacecraft reaches the Martian atmosphere to landing safely and soundly on the surface. Every step throughout this extremely sophisticated
and every step of the very tense Entry Descent Landing process has to be pre-programmed. This
takes 500.000 lines of COD3 programming with a zero margin for error.
The
spacecraft is first slowed down by the atmosphere, but because the Martian
atmosphere is much thinner that the one we have at earth, it is not enough. Therefor, NASA invented the biggest and strongest supersonic parachute ever
made. This parachute is slowing the shuttle down to 200 mph, but it is still not enough. So during its decent, it gets rid of the heat shield needed for passing
through the atmosphere, getting the rocket motors are ready to rock. The shuttle has to make a quick diversion to clear from the parachute that is being detached and in this maneuver it kills the remaining velocity. The
radar will start looking for its predetermined spot to land and the moment of truth is drawing near. But the rocket motors can’t breach the surface. The rover will thus be lowered down by cables and land
on its own ‘feet’. Than the cables are cut off and the shuttle is able to speed away to
make sure it doesn't damage the precious rover. All of this happens without
human intervention; everything is programmed. These are called the ‘7 minutes of terror’, in which we on earth are hoping no errors have been made during the years and years of preparation.
An ant alone has enough strength to lift a weight that is 10 times its own, it does so to carry food from the place where it finds it to the nest. Imagine now a swarm of ants looking for food, together they have the power to coordinate and lift food that is proportionally big, and also the swarm enables the ant to hunt a prey that is too big for a single ant to hunt upon. This methodology of the swarm works not only at this micro level but also at a macro level where animals such as lions or hyenas hunt in groups to be more effective. Even the human species during the initial stages of development used to hunt in groups.
The swarm gives you the multitude of effects such as strength, intelligence and many others.
What if you could have a swarm of robots that could do the same work in a manner unapprehensive to a single robot. This is what Wiki says about swarm robotics:
"Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physicalrobots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs."
The recent trends in robotics today is too get multiple robots to work together, but at the moment these parallel working robots don't work as desired because of collisions and noise effects. Some tasks are too tough for a robot to solve on its own and that is when the idea of the swarm kicks in. Basically the idea is to have multiple robots synchronized to add up in effectiveness, like the ants they work together side by side, distributing different tasks to reduce time and the amount of work. Not a moment they will block each others way, and everything looks like a well-oiled machine.
The algorithmic format in which a swarm is built, is too tedious to understand at this macro level. Yet to give you an idea how it works we will explain a bit of the basic terminology. The type of programs written for the swarm generally are designed in a manner to sequentially carry out a command and avoid the possibility of a deadlock. This is done by sensors used in the robot that can detect the robots in the proximity and then carry out the task by forming a group. The advantages of swarms are huge but the morphology in how to work coordinated as a swarm is still new, and the various sensors have their own range and the algorithms sometimes cannot capture the action that is to be carried out due to the numerous conditional branching.
Here is a video to give you a glimpse of what a swarm is capable of. Enjoy!!
