A Land Rover That Drives Itself

In an airplane hanger on MIT’s campus in Cambridge last week, a team of engineering students and researchers put the finishing touches on Talos, a Land Rover that drives itself. Talos is MIT’s entry in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) robotic car race, which will take place on November 3, in Victorville, CA.

Known as the Urban Challenge, the race will test the ability of robotic cars from 35 different teams to obey traffic laws and drive safely in a city-like environment without human assistance. The vehicles will need to find their way to a preprogrammed destination while paying attention to lane markers, other cars, and unexpected obstacles, such as potholes in the road. (See video.)

The Urban Challenge is a follow-up to DARPA’s Grand Challenge race, held in 2004 and 2005, in which cars navigated an empty desert road. The new, more complex racing environment reflects the rapid progress being made in robotic cars: while none of the teams finished the first Grand Challenge race, 5 out of 23 cars finished the second one. Stanford University’s team, which won the latter race, will enter the Urban Challenge with Junior, an upgraded version of its winning car. (See “Stanford’s New Driverless Car.”)

In order to “see” its environment, MIT’s Talos is equipped with numerous laser range finders, radar units, Global Positioning Systems, and video cameras, explains Emilio Frazzoli, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and one of the team leaders. The researchers developed novel software–which runs on 10 quad-core computers in the Land Rover’s trunk–to make sense of the incoming data and to calculate the car’s next move. The 40 processors produce so much heat that the team added an air-conditioning unit to the roof of the car. (See slide show.)

Many of the robotic cars at the Urban Challenge will be outfitted with similar collections of off-the-shelf sensors, so it’s nuances in each car’s software that will likely distinguish winners from losers. MIT’s software consists of algorithms that work with the sensors to build a picture of the environment, and algorithms that determine what the car should do with that picture, explains Frazzoli. Every second, the algorithms use data from the sensors to generate more than a thousand possible paths that the car could take. Talos then drives along the path with the highest probability of producing the most direct and safest route for a given situation.

For the MIT team, which started developing Talos about a year ago, the challenge is to make sure that the car is reliable in as many different locations as possible. “We’re testing almost every day,” says Frazzoli. When the car arrives in Victorville, the team will continue to test for about a month before the preliminary trials begin. “It’s not too hard to build a robotic car,” Frazzoli says. “But it is hard to build one that’s robust and safe in many different environments.”

(taken from http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19471/?a=f)

Asimo

The Past

In 1986, Honda engineers set out to create a walking robot. Early models (E1, E2, E3) focused on developing legs that could simulate the walk of a human. The next series of models (E4, E5, E6) were focused on walk stabilization and stair climbing. Next, a head, body and arms were added to the robot to improve balance and add functionality. Honda’s first humanoid robot, P1 was rather rugged at 6’ 2” tall, and 386 lbs. P2 improved with a more friendly design, improved walking, stair climbing/descending, and wireless automatic movements. The P3 model was even more compact, standing 5’ 2” tall and weighing 287 lbs.

The present

ASIMO is the culmination of two decades of humanoid robotics research by Honda engineers. ASIMO can run, walk on uneven slopes and surfaces, turn smoothly, climb stairs, and reach for and grasp objects. ASIMO can also comprehend and respond to simple voice commands. ASIMO has the ability to recognize the face of a select group of individuals. Using its camera eyes, ASIMO can map its environment and register stationary objects. ASIMO can also avoid moving obstacles as it moves through its environment.

The future

As development continues on ASIMO, today Honda demonstrates ASIMO around the world to encourage and inspire young students to study the sciences. And in the future, ASIMO may serve as another set of eyes, ears, hands and legs for all kinds of people in need. Someday ASIMO might help with important tasks like assisting the elderly or a person confined to a bed or a wheelchair. ASIMO might also perform certain tasks that are dangerous to humans, such as fighting fires or cleaning up toxic spills.\

(taken from http://asimo.honda.com/AsimoHistory.aspx)

History of robot (Last part)

Medieval developments

Al-Jazari (1136-1206), an Arab Muslim inventor during the Artuqid dynasty, designed and constructed a number of automatic machines, including kitchen appliances, musical automata powered by water, and the first programmable humanoid robot in 1206. Al-Jazari’s robot was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns by moving the pegs to different locations.

One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) in around 1495. Da Vinci’s notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw.  The design is likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian Man. It is not known whether he attempted to build the robot

Early modern developments

An early automaton was created in 1738 by Jacques de Vaucanson, who created a mechanical duck that was able to eat and digest grain, flap its wings, and excrete.

The Japanese craftsman Hisashige Tanaka, known as “Japan’s Edison,” created an array of extremely complex mechanical toys, some of which were capable of serving tea, firing arrows drawn from a quiver, or even painting a Japanese kanji character. The landmark text Karakuri Zui (Illustrated Machinery) was published in 1796. (T. N. Hornyak, Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots [New York: Kodansha International, 2006])

Modern Developments

In the 1930s, Westinghouse Electric Corporation made a humanoid robot known as Elektro, exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World’s Fairs.

The first electronic autonomous robots were created by William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, England in 1948 and 1949. They were named Elmer and Elsie. These robots could sense light and contact with external objects, and use these stimuli to navigate.

It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century, when integrated circuits were invented, and computers began to double rapidly in power (roughly every two years according to Moore’s Law),[25] that it became possible to build robots as we imagine them. Until that time, automatons were the closest things to robots, and while they may have looked humanoid, and their movements were complex, they were not capable of the self-control and decision making that robots are today.

The first truly modern robot, digitally operated, programmable, and teachable, was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called the Unimate. It is worth noting that not a single patent was cited against his original robotics patent (U.S. Patent 2,988,237 ). The first Unimate was personally sold by Devol to General Motors in 1960 and installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.

(taken from en.wikipedia.org)

History of robot (part2)

Ancient developments

The idea of artificial people dates at least as far back as the ancient legends of Cadmus, who sowed dragon teeth that turned into soldiers, and the myth of Pygmalion, whose statue of Galatea came to life. In Greek mythology, the deformed god of metalwork (Vulcan or Hephaestus) created mechanical servants, ranging from intelligent, golden handmaidens to more utilitarian three-legged tables that could move about under their own power, and the robot Talos defended Crete. Medieval Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan included recipes for creating artificial snakes, scorpions, and humans in his coded Book of Stones. Jewish legend tells of the Golem, a clay creature animated by Kabbalistic magic. Similarly, in the Younger Edda, Norse mythology tells of a clay giant, Mökkurkálfi or Mistcalf, constructed to aid the troll Hrungnir in a duel with Thor, the God of Thunder.

In ancient China, a curious account on automata is found in the Lie Zi text, written in the 3rd century BC. Within it there is a description of a much earlier encounter between King Mu of Zhou (1023 BC-957 BC) and a mechanical engineer known as Yan Shi, an ‘artificer’. The latter proudly presented the king with a life-size, human-shaped figure of his mechanical handiwork.

The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time…As the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies in attendance, whereupon the king became incensed and would have had Yen Shih [Yan Shi] executed on the spot had not the latter, in mortal fear, instantly taken the robot to pieces to let him see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously coloured white, black, red and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete—liver, gall, heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines; and over these again, muscles, bones and limbs with their joints, skin, teeth and hair, all of them artificial…The king tried the effect of taking away the heart, and found that the mouth could no longer speak; he took away the liver and the eyes could no longer see; he took away the kidneys and the legs lost their power of locomotion. The king was delighted.[20]

Concepts akin to a robot can be found as long ago as the 4th century BC, when the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical bird he called “The Pigeon” which was propelled by steam. Yet another early automaton was the clepsydra, made in 250 BC by Ctesibius of Alexandria, a physicist and inventor from Ptolemaic Egypt.[21] Hero of Alexandria (10-70 AD) made numerous innovations in the field of automata, including one that allegedly could speak.

(taken from en.wikipedia.org)

History of robot (Part 1)

Etymology

The word robot was introduced to the public at large by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.[18] The play begins in a factory that makes ‘artificial people’ – they are called robots, but are closer to the modern idea of androids or even clones, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the “Robots” are being exploited and, if so, what follows? (see also Robots in literature for details of the play)[19]

However, Karel Čapek himself was not the originator of the word; he wrote a short letter in reference to an article in the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual inventor.[18] In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he also explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři (from Latin labor, work). However, he did not like the word, seeing it as too artificial, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested “roboti”.

The word robot comes from the word robota meaning literally serf labor, and figuratively “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech, Slovak and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota “servitude” (“work” in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root *orbh-. Robot is cognate with the German word Arbeiter (worker).

(taken from en.wikipedia.org)