Screengrab from the WildCat video from Boston Dynamics.
This is both wonderful and terrifying. A DARPA-funded four-legged robot named WildCat is being developed by a company called Boston Dynamics (tagline of “Changing Your Idea of What Robots Can Do”). They’ve previously developed a humanoid capable of walking across multiple terrains called Atlas, and the scarily-fast Cheetah which set a new land-speed record for legged robots. But the WildCat is a brand new robot created to run fast on all types of terrain, and so far its top speed has been about 16 mph on flat terrain using both bounding and galloping gaits.
The video, released yesterday, shows WildCat’s best performance so far. Don’t let the sound fool you — yes, it does sound like a weed-whacker. But as soon as it raises up off its haunches, you know you’re doomed.
I’ve been trying to figure out what sci-fi equivalent might describe it best: the Terminator’s pet? A lethal, non-fuzzy Daggit from Battlestar Galactica? An AT-AT Walker on speed?
Astrobotic's model rover explores a mine on Earth to train for lunar lava tunnels (Video screenshot)
Ever since (and most likely long before) the first tantalizing glimpses of a lunar lava tube and skylight were captured by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft in 2009, scientists have been dreaming of ways to explore inside these geological treasures. Not only would they provide valuable information on the movement of ancient lunar lava flows, but they could also be great places for future human explorers to set up camp and be well-protected from dangerous solar and cosmic radiation.
But before human eyes will ever peer into the darkness of a lava tube on the Moon, robotic rovers will roll along their silent floors — at least, they will if Google Lunar XPRIZE competitor Astrobotic has anything to say about it.
Last month, engineer and Astrobotic CEO Dr. Red Whitttaker talked to NASA about why they want to explore a Moon cave and the history and progress of their project. Check it out below:
“Something so unique about the lava tubes is that they are the one destination that combines the trifecta of science, exploration, and resources.”
– Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, CEO Astrobotic Technology, Inc.
The international Google Lunar XPRIZE aims to create a new “Apollo” moment for a new generation by driving continuous lunar exploration with $40 million in incentive-based prizes. In order to win, a private company must land safely on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters above, below, or on the lunar surface, and send back two “Mooncasts” to Earth… all by Dec. 31, 2015.
Astrobotic Technology Inc. is a Pittsburgh-based company that delivers affordable space robotics technology and planetary missions. Spun out of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2008, Astrobotic is pioneering affordable planetary access that promises to spark a new era of exploration, science, tourism, resource utilization and mining. (Source)
SpaceX SuperDraco inconel rocket chamber w regen cooling jacket emerges from EOS 3D metal printer. Via Elon Musk on Twitter.
We knew SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was powerful, but now he’s gone all Ironman on us. Last week on Twitter he posted a teaser, saying, “Will post video of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & immediately printing in titanium.”
And now, here it is.
“I believe we’re on the verge of a major breakthrough in design and manufacturing,” says Musk in the video, “in being able to take a concept of something from your mind and translate into a 3-D object intuitively on the computer, then make that virtual 3-D object real just by printing it. It’s going to revolutionize manufacturing and design in the 21st century.”
See a montage of images of a SuperDraco rocket part made of Inconel-X, an austenitic nickel-chromium-based superalloy, emerge from a 3-D printer:
Musk and his design team have been working on using natural gesture-based interaction with a computer-aided design program called Leap Motion, allowing designers to work quickly to create parts, and then equally as quick, use 3-D printing in a metal superalloy to create the part.
The Kirobo talking robot on the ISS. Credit: Toyota.
The talking robot launched to the International Space Station in August has sent its first audio/visual message to Earth. Kirobo, the mini Japanese robot — which appears to have the bravado of Buzz Lightyear and the cuteness of WALL-E — is just .34 meters (13.4-inches) long. Kirobo is designed to be able to have conversations with its astronaut crewmates and to study how robot-human interactions can help the astronauts in the space environment. In its first message, Kirobo wished Earth a “good morning” and mentioned (and motioned) its giant step in getting to space.
Kirobo is part of a research project sponsored by the University of Tokoyo and Toyota, and the robot will be working closely with Koichi Wakata, slated to be the first Japanese commander of the ISS for Expedition 39, who will launch this November as part of the Expedition 38/39 crew. An identical robot named Mirata remains on Earth for additional testing.
Kirobo is designed to navigate in zero-gravity, have facial recognition of its fellow crewmates, and will assist Wakata in various experiments. No word on whether it will have access to opening or closing the various hatches on the space station.
Building a flying vehicle for Mars would have significant advantages for exploration of the surface. However, to date, all of our surface exploring vehicles and robotic units on Mars have been terrestrial rovers. The problem with flying on Mars is that the Red Planet doesn’t have much atmosphere to speak of. It is only 1.6% of Earth air density at sea level, give or take. This means conventional aircraft would have to fly very quickly on Mars to stay aloft. Your average Cessna would be in trouble.
But nature may provide an alternative way of looking at this problem.
The fluid regime of any flying (or swimming) animal, machine, etc. can be summarized by something called the Reynolds Number (Re). The Re is equal to the characteristic length x velocity x fluid density, divided by the dynamic viscosity. It is a measure of the ratio of inertial forces to viscous ones. Your average airplane flies at a high Re: lots of inertia relative to air stickiness. Because the Mars air density is low, the only way to get that inertia is to go really fast. However, not all flyers operate at high Re: most flying animals fly at much lower Re. Insects, in particular, operate at quite small Reynolds numbers (relatively speaking). In fact, some insects are so small that they swim through the air, rather than fly. So, if we scale up a bug-like critter or small bird just a bit, we might get something that can move in the Martian atmosphere without having to go insanely fast.
A potential design of an ‘Entomopter’ from Georgia Tech Research InstituteWe need a system of equations to constrain our little bot. Turns out that’s not too tough. As a rough approximation, we can use Colin Pennycuick’s average flapping frequency equation. Based on the flapping frequency expectations from Pennycuick (2008), flapping frequency varies roughly as body mass to the 3/8 power, gravitational acceleration to the 1/2 power, span to the -23/24 power, wing area to the -1/3 power, and fluid density to the -3/8 power. That’s handy, because we can adjust to match Martian gravity and air density. But we need to know if we are shedding vortices from the wings in a reasonable way. Thankfully, there is a known relationship, there, as well: the Strouhal number. Str (in this case) is flapping amplitude x flapping frequency divided by velocity. In cruising flight, it turns out to be pretty constrained.
Our bot should, therefore, end up with a Str between 0.2 and 0.4, while matching the Pennycuick equation. And then, finally, we need to get a Reynolds number in the range for a large living flying insect (tiny insects fly in a strange regime where much of propulsion is drag-based, so we will ignore them for now). Hawkmoths are well studied, so we have their Re range for a variety of speeds. Depending on speed, it ranges from about 3,500 to about 15,000. So somewhere in that ballpark will do.
There are a few ways of solving the system. The elegant way is to generate the curves and look for the intersection points, but a fast and easy method is to punch it into a matrix program and solve iteratively. I won’t give all the possible options, but here’s one that worked out pretty well to give an idea:
Mass: 500 grams
Span: 1 meter
Wing Aspect Ratio: 8.0
This gives an Str of 0.31 (right on the money) and Re of 13,900 (decent) at a lift coefficient of 0.5 (which is reasonable for cruising). To give an idea, this bot would have roughly bird-like proportions (similar to a duck), albeit a bit on the light side (not tough with good synthetic materials). It would, however, flap through a greater arc at higher frequency than a bird here on Earth, so it would look a bit like a giant moth at distance to our Earth-trained eyes. As an added bonus, because this bot is flying in a moth-ish Reynolds Regime, it is plausible that it might be able to jump to the very high lift coefficients of insects for brief periods using unsteady dynamics. At a CL of 4.0 (which has been measured for small bats and flycatchers, as well as some large bees), the stall speed is only 19.24 m/s. Max CL is most useful for landing and launching. So: can we launch our bot at 19.24 m/s?
For fun, let’s assume our bird/bug bot also launches like an animal. Animals don’t take off like airplanes; they use a ballistic initiation by pushing from the substrate. Now, insects and birds use walking limbs for this, but bats (and probably pterosaurs) use the wings to double as pushing systems. If we made our bots wings push-worthy, then we can use the same motor to launch as to fly, and it turns out that not much push is required. Thanks to the low Mars gravity, even a little leap goes a long way, and the wings can already beat near 19.24 m/s as it is. So just a little hop will do it. If we’re feeling fancy, we can put a bit more punch on it, and that’ll get out of craters, etc. Either way, our bot only needs to be about 4% as efficient a leaper as good biological jumpers to make it up to speed.
These numbers, of course, are just a rough illustration. There are many reasons that space programs have not yet launched robots of this type. Problems with deployment, power supply, and maintenance would make these systems very challenging to use effectively, but it may not be altogether impossible. Perhaps someday our rovers will deploy duck-sized moth bots for better reconnaissance on other worlds.
Artist concept of a 5 kg CubeSat with CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT) firing in low Earth orbit. Via Kickstarter.
Cubesats are all the rage these days: they’re usually inexpensive and quick to build and they can tag along on launches already scheduled for other things. We think of cubesats as being almost “disposable” satellites – tiny spacecraft that go into Earth orbit for a short time, do their science and then burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere. But a team of scientists have a more long-term, long-distance plan for their cubesats. Benjamin Longmier and James Cutler from the University of Michigan want to build cubesats that have tiny plasma thruster engines that could propel them into deep space, maybe even interstellar space.
They have a vision of their plasma-thruster cubesat waving as it speeds past the Voyager spacecraft at the edge of our Solar System.
They are working on what they call the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), a new plasma propulsion system. This thruster technology doesn’t exist all in one piece yet, but Longmeir and Cutler said they could put it together in months, with just a little funding. The CAT plasma thruster will propel a 5kg satellite into deep space, far beyond Earth orbit, at 1/1000th the cost of previous missions.
They’ve begun a $200,000 Kickstarter campaign to help fund their project. Their ideas of what these thruster propelled cubesats could do are mind-bogglingly exciting: flying through the plumes of Enceladus to look for life, studying and tagging asteroids, formation flying through Earth’s magnetosphere to learn more about solar flares and the aurora or just an interplanetary message in a bottle lasting for hundreds of millions of years in orbit around the Sun.
They think they can get a satellite up and flying within 18 months.
“The traditional funding process starts with some seed data, a large government grant and a large number of milestones and gates to go through,” said Longmier in a press release from the University of Michigan. “We’d like to leverage Kickstarter funds to compress that timeline and go from initial seed data to flight in about 18 months, a much faster time scale than is possible with traditional grants.”
The cubesats would be about as big as a loaf of bread and the thrusters – the first of its kind — would use superheated plasma directed through a magnetic field to propel the CubeSat. The duo says that with this technology, exploring interplanetary space and eventually other planets would become faster and cheaper than ever before.
While plasma rockets have been used before, they’ve only been used on big spacecraft like Deep Space 1 and DAWN. Longmier and Cutler are miniaturizing the system. Most of the thruster components have been built and have been tested individually, but they need help through Kickstarter to assemble everything into one compact thruster unit for testing the integrated components in the lab, then in Earth orbit, and then interplanetary space.
They’ve got more info on how the thrusters work on their Kickstarter page.
A near-infrared view of NGC 4038 (one of the Antenna Galaxies) obtained with the Gemini Observatory's new adaptive optics system. Credit: Image data from Rodrigo Carrasco, GeMS System Verification Team, Gemini Observatory. Color composite image by Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage.
Rise above Earth with a telescope, and one huge obstacle to astronomy is removed: the atmosphere. We love breathing that oxygen-nitrogen mix, but it’s sure not fun to peer through it. Ground-based telescopes have to deal with air turbulence and other side effects of the air we need to breathe.
Enter adaptive optics — laser-based systems that can track the distortions in the air and tell computers in powerful telescopes how to flex their mirrors. That sparkling picture above came due to a new system at the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
It’s one of only a handful pictures released, but astronomers are already rolling out the superlatives.
“GeMS sets the new cool in adaptive optics,” stated Tim Davidge, an astronomer at Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.
The planetary nebula NGC 2346. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA (Image data from Letizia Stanghellini, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Arizona. Color composite image by Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage.)
“It opens up all sorts of exciting science possibilities for Gemini, while also demonstrating technology that is essential for the next generation of ground-based mega-telescopes. With GeMS we are entering a radically new, and awesome, era for ground-based optical astronomy.”
Other telescopes have adaptive optics, but the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GEMS) has some changes to what’s already used.
It uses a technique called “multi-conjugate adaptive optics”. This increases the possible size of sky swaths the telescope can image, while also giving a sharp view across the entire field. According to the observatory, the new system makes Gemini’s eight-meter mirror 10 to 20 times more efficient.
The Gemini South telescope during laser operations with GeMS/GSAOI. Credit: Manuel Paredes
The next step will be seeing what kind of science Gemini can produce from the ground with this laser system. Some possible directions include supernova research, star populations in galaxies outside of the Milky Way, and studying more detail in planetary nebulae — the remnants of low- and medium-mass star.
A long, magnetic filament burst out from the Sun after a C-cladd flare on(Aug. 31, 2012 (NASA/SDO/AIA)
We live on a planet dominated by weather. But not just the kind that comes in the form of wind, rain, and snow — we are also under the influence of space weather, generated by the incredible power of our home star a “mere” 93 million miles away. As we orbit the Sun our planet is, in effect, inside its outer atmosphere, and as such is subject to the constantly-flowing wind of charged particles and occasional outbursts of radiation and material that it releases. Although it may sound like something from science fiction, space weather is very real… and the more we rely on sensitive electronics and satellites in orbit, the more we’ll need to have accurate weather reports.
Fortunately, the reality of space weather has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. Federal Government.
An X1.6 flare eruption on Jan. 27, 2012 (NASA/SDO/AIA)
Today the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report, Space Weather Observing Systems: Current Capabilities and Requirements for the Next Decade, which is an assessment of the United States government’s capacity to monitor and forecast potentially harmful space weather and how to possibly mitigate the damage from any exceptionally powerful solar storms in the future.
The report was made by a Joint Action Group (JAG) formed by the National Space Weather Program Council (NSWPC).
The impacts of space weather can have serious economic consequences. For example, geomagnetic storms during the 1990’s knocked out several telecommunications satellites, which had to be replaced at a cost of about $200 million each. If another “once in a century” severe geomagnetic storm occurs (such as the 1859 “super storm”), the cost on the satellite industry alone could be approximately $50 – $100 billion. The potential consequences on the Nation’s power grid are even higher, with potential costs of $1 – 2 trillion that could take up to a decade to completely repair.
– Report on Space Weather Observing Systems: Current Capabilities and Requirements for the Next Decade (April 2013)
“In other words,” according to the report, “the Nation is at risk of losing critical capabilities that have significant economic and security impacts should these key space weather observing systems fail to be maintained and replaced.”
The National Space Weather Program is a Federal interagency initiative with the mission of advancing the improvement of space weather services and supporting research in order to prepare the country for the technological, economic, security, and health impacts that may arise from extreme space weather events.
The Solar Impulse airplane flies over the Golden Gate Bridge on April 23, 2013. Credit: Solar Impulse.
The world’s first solar-powered plane is stretching its wings over the US. Today it took off from Moffett Field in Mountain View, California — the home of NASA’s Ames Research Center – and flew to San Fransisco, soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Starting on May 1, Solar Impulse will fly across the US to New York, making several stops along the way as a kind of “get to know you” tour for the US while the founders of Solar Impulse, Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard and and pilot Andre Borschberg, want to spread their message of sustainability and technology. You can read about the cross-country tour here on UT and also on the Solar Impulse website. You can follow Solar Impulse’s Twitter feed for the latest news of where they are.
A production of the time machine from H.G. Wells' famous story. Via the Austin, Texas Library.
An interesting news item from Iran’s Entkhab news agency: Iranian scientist Ali Razeghi – who is also the managing director of Iran’s Center for Strategic Inventions — has registered a new invention of his own making: a time machine.
It’s doesn’t actually take anyone to the past or future, but produces printed reports with details about the future, and can “predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy” according to Razeghi, as quoted in The Telegraph.
“My invention easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users,” he says. It will not take you into the future, it will bring the future to you.”
Razeghi, 27, says he has been working the project for 10 years and this is the 179th invention he has registered.
The “time machine” would be a good resource for governments, he said, but he doesn’t want to launch a prototype at this point because “the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”
Razeghi said his latest project has been criticized by friends for “trying to play God” with ordinary lives and history. “This project is not against our religious values at all,” Razaghi was quoted. “The Americans are trying to make this invention by spending millions of dollars on it where I have already achieved it by a fraction of the cost.”
