The ‘human problem’ with traveling to another star 

The largest obstacle in manned interstellar travel may not actually technological, but human.

Fifty years after the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and the first orbital spaceflight, US astronaut John Glenn, many are asking: “What’s next for mankind in space?” In five decades of incredible discovery, we’ve sent man to the Moon and now have a handful of spacemen living on the International Space Station, orbiting 200 miles over our heads. Our technological prowess seems to know no bounds and we have the ability to mount a deep-space manned mission right now.

But for many, the advances aren’t happening fast enough - shouldn’t we have a base on the moon by now? That was, after all, the logical step after the Kennedy administration set the task to race the Soviets to the lunar surface in the 1960’s. Why haven’t we sent a man to Mars yet? It seems puzzling that the majority of robotic missions we send to the Red Planet have a component intended to reconnoiter for a “future” manned mission that never seems to come.

It may seem a shame, then, that we know we can live in space, we know that we send robotic probes to any corner of our Solar System, and yet since the trailblazing Apollo Era of the late 60s and early 70s, no human has ventured beyond low-Earth orbit. Perhaps our evolution into a true space faring species will take longer than a few decades; or even centuries? Let’s just hope we don’t destroy ourselves through war or ecological decimation before our stellar dreams become a reality.

(via Aljazeera)

It’s alive! Space station’s humanoid robot awake

NASA’s humanoid robot has finally awakened in space.

Ground controllers turned Robonaut on Monday for the first time since it was delivered to the International Space Station in February. The test involved sending power to all of Robonaut’s systems. The robot was not commanded to move; that will happen next week.

“Those electrons feel GOOD! One small step for man, one giant leap for tinman kind,” Robonaut posted in a Twitter update. (All right, so a Robonaut team member actually posted Monday’s tweets under AstroRobonaut.)

The four visible light cameras that serve as Robonaut’s eyes turned on in the gold-colored head, as did the infrared camera, located in the robot’s mouth and needed for depth perception. One of Robonaut’s tweets showed the view inside the American lab, Destiny.

“Sure wish I could move my head and look around,” Robonaut said in the tweet. Robonaut - the first humanoid robot in space - is being tested as a possible astronaut’s helper.

(via PhysOrg.com)

Mars Rover Reaches Giant Crater After 3-Year Trek 

After nearly three years of dragging through the Martian dust, NASA’s Opportunity rover has reached the rim of an expansive and ancient crater.

Since leaving Victoria crater in August 2008, Opportunity has rolled 13 miles to reach the rim of 24-mile-wide Endeavour crater — the biggest of 11 craters the robot has visited. It’s the site of an ancient impact that shot out dark rocks onto the crater’s rim.

“We’re soon going to get the opportunity to sample a rock type the rovers haven’t seen yet,” said planetary scientist and Mars rover team member Matthew Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. “Clay minerals form in wet conditions so we may learn about a potentially habitable environment that appears to have been very different from those responsible for the rocks [found on] the plains.”

(via Wired.com)

scienceisbeauty:

On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam’s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

Source: A Moment Frozen in Time, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

laughingsquid:

Light Painting With A Roomba

(via eirizu)

laughingsquid:

Robot Armpit Introduces Sense of Smell to Human Robot Interaction

Patrick Tresset’s robots draw faces and doodle when bored

Pop along to the Tenderpixel art space in Soho this month, and you could grab a drawing of your mug, sketched by one of Patrick Tresset’s robotic arms.

The sketching bot is called Paul. It starts off the exhibition by scanning the room and looking for people with its motorised eye. When it spots a human face, it uses an edge detection technique called Gabor filter (which is modeled after cells in a human’s visual cortex) to pick out the salient lines.

A robotic arm, gripping a standard biro, then goes to work. It draws out those lines on paper, and then does a spot of shading. If he’s hooked up to the internet, he’ll even post your photo to Facebook or tweet about his sketching.

The technology is based, in part, on “a project hosted in the computing department at Goldsmiths college where we investigate the sketching activity through computational modelling,” Tresset told Wired.co.uk.

The rest is built from scratch, using “current research from computer vision, cognitive computing and robotics”, and a hodge-podge collection of different programming languages, including Urbiscript, python and frameworks such as ROS.

(via Wired UK)

Meet Japan’s spherical reconnaissance drone

Check out this spherical reconnaissance drone, built by the Japanese Ministry of Self-Defense. The sci-fi robot is 42cm in diameter, its featherweight body weighs only 350 grams, and the drone can zip along at speeds of 40 miles per hour.

Unfortunately, it can only stay in the air for about eight minutes, before crashing into the ground. However its spherical body allows it to roll upon landing to absorb much of the impact. That bouncy durability also comes in handy when navigating walls, stairs and window frames.

Inside the roll-cage you’ll find a propeller which is used for thrust, and eight separate wings for control. It can also hold a camera and sensors.

(via Wired UK)

evilmadlinks:

Everything that’s good about Maker Faire in one picture (by kapshure)

Those plucky quadrotors at UPenn’s GRASP laboratory never cease to amaze. In this latest video, watch them autonomously build a structure. In the future, construction workers will be a buzzing, mildly disturbing haze of mechanical diligence.

(via io9.com)

(Source: grasp.upenn.edu)

HUMANOID ROBOT GEORGE REVIVED AFTER 45 YEARS

Robot George wasn’t made by some sci-fi obsessed kid, but by a former spy catcher and RAF officer Tony Sale, who built this baby for around $25, using scrap metal form a crashed Wellington Bomber plane, back in 1950. 

Sale was a fresh-faced 19-year-old at the time and his incredible, radio-controlled, man-sized robot, which looks like something from Flash Gordon, or even Flesh Gordon, could walk, apparently talk and carry out simplistic chores, as the Daily Telegraph reports:

“I made him in my spare time. He was 6ft tall and I put light sensitive cells in his eyes which enabled him to home in on an illuminated beer bottle,” he said.

“He was brought out and demonstrated at all the open days at RAF Debden and featured on Pathe News.”

The robot, which is powered by two motorcycle batteries can be made to walk, turn his head, move an arm and sit down. He can operate up to 30 feet from his controls.

He caught the imagination of the press and was featured in numerous papers as one of the earliest humanoid robots built in the UK.

George was pictured carrying the shopping, hoovering and even mowing the lawn.

“I think he really impressed people because he looked so lifelike,” said Mr Sale.

pcoolsongs:

takudeath:

macro55:

eclecticbanana:

samuraifrog:

(via cocksandcowboys, lj7stkok)

Mr. R. Robot esq.

Okay, Viva La Robolution.

La Robolution? Really? Jesus Suffering Fuck, that’s just asinine. Well, it’s reblogged now, so…there’s that.

I feel dirty.

These gentlemen? Not worried about a machine uprising. Maybe a machine machine uprising, though…

(via lucyphermann, surrogateself)

Forgotten Soviet Moon Rover Beams Light Back to Earth

Rediscovering the 40-year-old robot could help astronomers put general relativity to the test

Sitting at his home computer on the evening of 22 April, Tom Murphy, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, logged into an observation session 1200 kilometers away, at Apache Point Observatory. From a pine-dotted ridge above the White Sands Missile Range, Russet McMillan, the on-site specialist, aimed the New Mexico observatory’s telescope at a small patch of dust near the edge of the moon’s face. Then, at Murphy’s go-ahead, she fired a stream of laser pulses into the night sky.

The pulses—20 per second—shot toward the moon and, after little more than a second, bathed the lunar dust patch in a pool of green light. Another second passed. Then Murphy saw a blip in the data on his screen. It suggested that an unusually large number of photons had returned from the moon and were being recorded by the telescope’s photodiode.

At first, Murphy thought the blip might just be an artifact of the instrumentation, a common disturbance caused by turning the detector on and off. But no matter how McMillan tweaked the instruments, the signal kept showing up. By the next morning after analyzing the data, he was sure the blip represented something much more significant: contact with the first robot to roam a surface beyond Earth. Until NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped photographs of the robot’s tracks earlier that month, no one had been able to locate the Soviet rover Lunokhod 1 for nearly four decades.

But the discovery has turned out to be more than a just a fun bit of space archaeology. Now that Murphy has confirmed the location of Lunokhod 1, he plans on using the aging rover to help measure the moon’s movements and test theories of gravity with the greatest precision to date.

[Source: IEEE]