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When the space shuttle Discovery launches on Thursday (weather and technology permitting), it will be ferrying an unusual passenger to the International Space Station: Robonaut 2. This humanoid robot was designed by NASA and General Motors to work alongside astronauts on the space station, and could eventually take over some tedious or dangerous tasks.

Human beings who dream of becoming astronauts acquire things like advanced science degrees or the ability to fly jet planes in hopes of catching NASA’s eye and being chosen as astronaut candidates. If they do become candidates, there’s still scads of training before they can take a flight up to the ISS. But how does a robot qualify for and prepare for that trip to orbit? DISCOVER spoke with Marty Linn, General Motor’s principal engineer of robotics, to find out.

Qualifications

Physical Fitness: Human astronauts have to pass the NASA long-duration space flight physical to prove that they’re healthy, fit, and strong enough for astronaut duties. Robonaut 2 has to be pretty strong, too: Here on Earth, he proved that he can do arm curls with 20-pound free weights. “The limitation is grasp strength,” says Linn. “The weak link is how strong the fingers are.” The robot didn’t have to spend any time on the treadmill, though, because this model doesn’t have lower limbs—it’s simply a torso with arms and a head.

Intelligence: To be honest, R2 (as its buddies call it) isn’t that bright—it can’t make independent decisions. NASA’s top priority for the experimental bot is guaranteeing that it won’t pose a threat to the astronauts or the space station, so for now R2 will be under the strict control of astronauts and ground crew. R2 “isn’t going to go berserk,” Linn stresses, but it’s still nice to have an off switch. He also explains that the robot’s actions can be programmed joint by joint, or it can be controlled by a tele-ops system, in which an astronaut dons the tele-ops gear and puts the robot through its paces by moving her own arms or head.

Vision: NASA has always paid careful attention to the eyesight of its astronaut candidates, and only recently decided that people who have gotten laser surgery to correct their vision can still be considered for the job. R2′s vision is top-notch. It’s equipped with high-resolution digital cameras, can detect motion and distinct objects, and has a 3D mapping tool to allow it to determine where objects are in space. It also has lower resolution cameras for tele-operation, Linn explains, which “allow the operator to see through the eyes of the robot.”

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The simple act of picking something up requires a plethora of decisions: Is the thing light or heavy? How much force do I need to grip it? If I grip too hard, will I crush it with the might of my mighty hands?

As we grow up we become fairly practiced at the art of picking up (objects, that is), so our brains will do most of this for us without a lot of conscious thought. But all those variables—plus adapting to a surprise on the fly—mean that picking things up with the proper force is one of the most difficult skills to teach a robot. That’s why the design by Eric Brown’s team is so clever.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Brown and colleagues demonstrate (paper in press) their “universal gripper,” a successful prototype of a robot hand. It’s based on an idea that’s been around for a while, and it looks like a beanbag on a robot arm, because, well, that’s kind of what it is.

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Hugging someone standing up. Going on a hike. Making eye contact with someone at their level, instead of always being looked down upon. These are simple things that people stuck in wheelchairs don’t have a chance to experience in daily life.

Berkeley Bionics is giving those experiences back to paraplegics with the introduction of an exoskeleton suit called eLEGS–a battery powered, artificially intelligent, wearable outer skeleton that gives these people back their freedom. People wearing these devices won’t be a common sight just yet–a suit is currently priced at about $100,000 a pop, and they’ll only be available for use in clinics at first–but it’s an exciting step forward.

The person straps into an exoskeleton made of carbon fiber and steel, which weighs 45 pounds. Sensors in the legs convey their position to a control unit contained in a backpack, and the controller tells which joints to bend to create a natural gait. The user gives the suit commands using two high-tech crutches: pressure on both tells the motorized legs to stand up, pressure on one means to step with the opposite leg. The suit’s battery pack can power up to six hours of walking, and it can reach speeds above two miles per hour.

Amanda Boxtel, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a skiing accident 18 years ago, tried out the device and says she took to it quickly.

“Walking with eLEGs took some rewiring and relearning,” says Boxtel, “but my body has the muscle memory. And I learned to walk really fast.” [New Scientist]

The suit will be used in a clinical trials at select rehabilitation centers starting in early 2011, and its makers hope a commercial model won’t be too far behind. Berkeley Bionics wants to make a lighter, thinner, and cheaper model (hopefully closer to $50,000, Berkeley Bionics CEO Eythor Bender says) available for home use by 2013.

Hit the jump for more info, and a poignant video of several paralyzed people giving eLEGS a tryout.

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It fakes to the left; it goes to the right. But the deceiver isn’t a running back, and this isn’t football. Meet the newest lying robot.

Georgia Tech scientists Alan Wagner and Ronald Arkin created two bots on wheels that play hide and seek with each other. The hider, however, had something the seeker lacked: an algorithm in its programming that allowed it, under certain circumstances, to fib. The prevaricating machine was pretty good at it, too, fooling the naive seeker three-quarters of the time in a simple test.

Here’s the setup: There are three spaces in which the hider could hide—left, middle, and right. There are also three markers standing in a row, the idea being that the hiding bot would run over the left marker if it decided to hide at left, or the right marker if it decided to hide at right. The seeker bot knows this, and so it would look for the clue of a fallen marker to predict where its target is hiding.

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From “When the Robots Sing ‘Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch-Me,’ the E-Skin Is Working,” on the DISCOVER blog Science Not Fiction:

That’s right, e-skin. A group of scientists at UC-Berkeley devised a flexible mesh using nanowires to create a substance that reacts to pressure, and, as their paper in Nature Materials said, “effectively functions as an artificial electronic skin.” In the same issue, a team from Stanford University announced it had devised a kind of skin so sensitive, it can detect the weight of a bluebottle fly.  All of which means for one shining issue, a scientific journal was a skin mag.

Read the rest of this post (with video).

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Image: UC Berkeley

Earlier this week, DISCOVER brought you oil-cleaning bacteria. Today, we bring you oil-cleaning bots.

This weekend in watery Venice, Italy, MIT scientists will demonstrate a creation called Seaswarm, a fleet of autonomous swimming bots intended to skim the water’s surface; each bot would drag a sort of mesh net to collect the crude sitting there. According to their creators, the machines will be able to find oil on their own and talk to one another to compute the most efficient way to tidy it up.

The Seaswarm robots, which were developed by a team from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water [CNN].

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Researchers have found the secret to improving a robot’s sense of smell: Shove frog eggs up its nose. A team at the University of Tokyo has developed a sensor made from a genetically modified frog egg that can help a robot pick out insect smells and pheromones.

As useful as a moth-smelling robot may seem, researchers believe the study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is just one step towards an inexpensive but sensitive chemical detector. Study coauthor Shoji Takeuchi explains that such a device could pick out gases like carbon dioxide:

“When you think about the mosquito, it is able to find people because of carbon dioxide from the human. So the mosquito has CO2 receptors. When we can (extract) DNA (from the mosquito) we can put this DNA into the frog eggs to detect CO2.” [Reuters]

Here’s how they did it.

Step 1 — Get Some Frog Eggs

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It’s hard to say goodbye to old friends. We’ve known since the springtime that NASA’s Spirit rover, which roamed the surface of Mars for more than six years, was probably doomed to a frozen death. But in the last week, NASA has repeatedly called the rover, hoping that the endurance explorer somehow managed to conserve enough power during the martian winter to respond.

So far, no luck. Spirit has not phoned home.

Spirit’s been on Mars since January 2004 and already survived previous winters, which run from May through November. With sunlight reaching Spirit at a weak angle, the rover hibernates and uses the scant solar power to recharge batteries and heat itself to –40 degrees [Scientific American].

But this winter it could not. With a wheel caught in the loose martian terrain, Spirit could not drive to an opportune position to capture some sunlight. As a result, the rover probably dropped to -67 degrees during the brutal winter on the red planet, too cold for its heaters or machinery to function.

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Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land.  MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.

Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]

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Perhaps it’s a fitting tribute. The Japanese–designers of some of the world’s most ingenious robots–can now watch a traditional art form get a robotic makeover. As described in a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT and Harvard researchers have made self-folding origami that can mold itself into a boat or an airplane.

Why? Origami is just a first step; researchers picture the “shape-shifting” robots used for everything from “smart” cups that could change from grande to venti based on how much coffee you need to a “Swiss army knife” that will bend to its user’s will, forming a variety of tools.

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In January 2004, the Mars rover Opportunity, along with its brother Spirit, landed on the Red Planet. Eight months later we were wowed by their longevity, as both the machines had crawled long past their expected 90-day lifetimes. This year Spirit got intractably stuck in the sand and NASA announced that its days of wandering were finally at an end. But not Opportunity: The less mechanically troubled of the twins, Opportunity continues to rove the surface of Mars, and this week it passed the duration record for time on Mars set by NASA’s Viking 1 lander when it died in 1982. As of today, Opportunity has been operating on Mars for six years and 118 days.

By this March, Opportunity had driven more than 12 miles on the surface of Mars (on the far side of the planet from Spirit). But even a plucky rover needs breaks, especially now when the light level doesn’t allow constant driving. This image shows Opportunity’s tracks on a journey from one well-lit spot to the next, where it could recharge. However, the light level is increasing where the rover is located, so soon it should be able to take longer drives.

Click through for some more of Opportunity’s best images.

Robot steps are what you take, walking on the moon.

A group of Japanese satellite makers called the Space Oriented Higashiosaka Leading Association (SOHLA) says that it will spend more than $10 million to put a humanoid, bipedal robot on the moon by 2015. Maido-kun would hitchhike on board a moon mission by the Japanese space agency JAXA that year and plant the country’s flag on our planet’s natural satellite. And maybe it will walk around—if it can keep from falling over:

Designing a robot that can balance and move on two legs will be a major challenge, says Roger La-Brooy of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. “Human beings are relatively unstable, and when designing robots for unpredictable terrain, three legs are better than two.” If the robot were to fall over, it could have trouble getting up again, says Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at MIT [New Scientist].

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With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill spreading and the operations to contain it taking too much time, Rear Adm. Mary Landry says the Coast Guard is considering another option to keep the spill from reaching nearby American shorelines: setting the oil on fire.

Yes, you read that right. The idea of a controlled burn surfaced as a possible way to remove thick pockets of crude rife with baseball-sized tar balls from within the massive slick. That tarry crude poses the biggest threat to sensitive coastal areas. Landry said burning could begin as early as today [Houston Chronicle]. BP, the company that leased the now-sunken oil rig, is trying to slow the leak via the work of submersible robots, but so far they’ve had no success. And so 42,000 gallons of oil continue to leak into the gulf every day. To keep the spill from becoming one of the worst in American history, the Coast Guard is considering all its options.

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It was a big week for experimental military aircraft, with the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane and the Navy’s biofuel-powered “Green Hornet” both achieving successful test flights. But the most ambitious—the HTV-2 hypersonic glider under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—lost contact with its operators during its run.

Launched from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. on April 22, the unmanned HTV-2 was planned to cross the Pacific and impact the ocean north of Kwajalein Atoll in the first of two flights to demonstrate technology for a prompt global strike weapon [Aviation Week]. It successfully achieved separation from its booster rocket high in the atmosphere; however, nine minutes into the test the glider lost communication. Now the military is studying the test flight telemetry to figure out where the HTV-2 would have crashed down.

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When we last reported on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig had sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, but at least the Coast Guard saw no new oil leakage happening. Over the weekend, though, things went from bad to worse as response teams began to see crude oil leaking into the Gulf. Now, the Coast Guard says, 42,000 gallons per day are leaking into the sea, and it may be 45 to 90 days before the leak can be stopped.

Deepwater Horizon, under lease by BP, had been drilling into an oil reserve 5,000 feet below the surface of the water. When the burning rig sank, its 5,000-foot pipeline crumbled like a giant broken straw. The biggest leak has been found at the first crook. The well valve is holding for now but there’s at least one more leak [ABC News]. The Coast Guard couldn’t see the oil so deep under sea right away, which is why the initial assessment wasn’t this bad.

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