Nissan is looking to schools of fish to learn about how to help people reduce car crashes and traffic jams. The car company developed tiny robots that move in fish-like groups of up to 7 without bumping into each other. Each uses a laser range-finder to measure the distance between obstacles. The data is constantly shared between peers via radio, allowing the group to travel as a “shoal” without bumping into each other. The technique allows the cars to travel side-by-side or quickly switch direction as a group[BBC News]. The robot is dubbed Eporo, which stands for Episode O (Zero) Robot, meaning zero episodes, or accidents, and zero emissions.
This is Nissan’s second attempt at designing a crash avoidance system based on animal behavior. Their last attempt was the BR23C robot, modeled after the anti-collision behavior of bumblebees (check out a video of the bee based bot here). The Eporo, however, imitates three rules of fish movement: avoiding crashes, traveling side by side, and keeping close to other members of the school [CNET]. Nissan plans to unveil the Eporo at the Ceatec conference in Tokyo on October 6.
Long gone are the days when a “robotic movement” meant something jerky, awkward, and stiff: The new robo-fish that have just been unveiled by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology swim through the water with sinuous grace. The flexible fish move naturally, as the motor in the middle initiates a wave that moves along the body and propels it forward. Real fish move in a similar fashion by contracting muscles on either side of their bodies [CNET]. The robo-fish are the descendants of Charlie the Robotuna, a large robot created at MIT in the 1990s that consisted of almost 3,000 parts. The new fish measure less than a foot long and use only 10 parts; researchers say the simple, durable fish are cheap to produce and hard to damage. To manufacture each robot, a single motor is placed in a fish-shaped mold before a liquid polymer is poured in and allowed to solidify. The continuous polymer casing prevents water from seeping in and damaging the motor, says Pablo Alvarado, an engineer who helped design the fish. “These materials are very resilient,” he said. “Water can’t do much to them and they can survive very high temperatures. Unless another fish eats them, they could go on and on” [Wired.com].
Survival of the fittest is a brutal game, as a group of robots in a Swiss lab have just demonstrated. When the robots competed for points and only the most successful passed on their computer code (which is analogous to our genetic code), they soon evolved into greedy deception-bots that tried to horde all the points for themselves.
The robots — soccer ball-sized assemblages of wheels, sensors and flashing light signals, coordinated by a digital neural network — were placed by their designers in an arena, with paper discs signifying “food” and “poison” at opposite ends. Finding and staying beside the food earned the robots points…. After each iteration of the trial, researchers picked the most successful robots, copied their digital brains and used them to program a new robot generation, with a dash of random change thrown in for mutation [Wired.com].
The Mars rover Opportunity, an interloper on the Martian soil, has discovered another piece of metal that isn’t native to the planet: a boulder-sized iron meteorite that spun out of the sky and crashed into the planet sometime in the distant past. While the rock isn’t the first iron meteorite spotted on Mars (the two Mars rovers’ previous discoveries make this the fourth), it is the largest, measuring about 2 feet wide and 1 foot high. Researchers hope that studying the mega-meteorite will provide clues to the atmosphere and landscape that it encountered when it arrived on Mars.
Opportunity spotted the out-of-place object on July 18 and snapped a picture of it, but the rover was on its way towards a distant crater and didn’t stop. When NASA scientists saw the photographs, however, they ordered the rover to reverse course and head for the rock. “When you’re driving around on relatively smooth, flat, boring plains for a long time, anything that looks like a decent-sized rock says, ‘Come get me!’” says team member Albert Yen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory [New Scientist].
How do you extract a vehicle from a sand trap when the operation has to happen remotely from a distance of 174 million miles? That’s the question that NASA scientists are attempting to answer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where engineers are working on a plan for how to get the Mars rover Spirit moving again. The rover has been stuck, up to its hubcaps in sand, since April 23rd when it drove backwards into an area now called “Troy.”
To test strategies for how to get the rover unstuck, scientists built a sandbox that resembles that patch of Martian terrain, and then drove a rover replica into it. Spirit project manager John Callas explains that the scientists carefully mixed sand, pottery clay, and a light material called diatomaceous earth to imitate the dirt on Mars. While the ingredients do not match the Martian soil’s chemistry, the mixture has a similar strength. “It is representative of the trouble Spirit is in … in very, very fluffy soil with very little load bearing strength,” Dr Callas said. “It’s like talcum powder, but not as fine grained. It clings to the wheels and they lose traction.” Adding to their problems, the rover is tilted on a 12-degree slope [The Age].
Robotic explorers on Mars get a lot of veneration for their daring feats, as well they should–but let’s not neglect the robots that are busy exploring the most inaccessible regions of our own planet. On Sunday, a robot submarine known as Nereus dove to a depth of 6.8 miles to investigate the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. Nereus descended all the way to the deepest cranny of the trench, a spot known as the Challenger Deep, and spent more than 10 hours making observations in a spot that is deeper than Mount Everest is high.
For the expedition, the team had to build a new breed of remotely-operated submarine … which is capable of going deeper than any other while still filming and collecting samples. Sunday’s dive makes it the world’s deepest-diving vehicle [currently in operation], and the first vehicle to explore the Mariana Trench since 1998 [New Scientist]. So far, researchers have released only a single image (pictured), showing Nereus’s robotic arm scooping up sediment.
For two years, the Mars rover Opportunity explored the Victoria crater and dutifully sent back reports on the sedimentary rock layers on display in the crater walls and the scattering of pebbles on the sunken floor. Now, the results of that comprehensive survey have been compiled and compared to data gleaned from Opportunity’s exploration of two smaller craters several miles away. The study shows that shifting sand dunes on ancient Mars once concealed a network of underground water spread across an area the size of Oklahoma…. “Given that we’ve seen the same stuff at places that are miles apart, it is a reasonable conjecture that those processes operated over most of this region” [National Geographic News], says lead researcher Steve Squyres.
The rover had previously explored the Eagle and Endurance craters, about 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) away from Victoria. Mission scientists chose Victoria as the next crater to explore because “it was the biggest crater we could possibly find,” said Steve Squyres…. The science team hoped that Victoria’s depth — of about 400 feet (125 meters) — might shed more light on the geology of the Meridiani Planum region [LiveScience]. Like a child in a fairy tale following a trail of pebbles, Opportunity also studied the small, round rocks made of the mineral hematite as it trundled towards the Victoria crater in 2006.
The Mars rover Spirit has driven almost 5 miles across the Martian surface, has climbed a hill as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and has generally kept on trucking for the five years since it landed on the planet, even though its mission was originally scheduled to last only 90 days. But its roving days could be over, unless its controllers at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory can extricate it from a sticky situation: Spirit is stuck in the Martian sand.
The rover was navigating around a low plateau en route to two volcanic features, Von Braun and Goddard, when it started rolling across the soft sand, and began to sink in. NASA controllers have tried a variety of maneuvers over the past few days in an attempt to extricate Spirit, but the rovers’ wheels have only sunk deeper, and are now partially buried in the sand. “This is quite serious,” said JPL’s John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. “Spirit is in a very difficult situation. We are proceeding methodically and cautiously. It may be weeks before we try moving Spirit again” [Los Angeles Times].
At the ripe old age of five the Mars rover Spirit is starting to show signs of its age, and NASA scientists are beginning to wonder how much longer it can continue to roll across the Red Planet. Over the past few weeks the rover once ignored its morning wake-up call and has unexpectedly rebooted its computer several times. Spirit has also occasionally failed to record its activities in its memory drive, the robotic equivalent of “senior moments.”
John Callas, project manager for the Mars rovers, says scientists don’t yet have an explanation for these glitches, but adds that the incidents suggest that Spirit is getting erratic. Or maybe just old…. “I don’t think anyone can tell you how these rovers will eventually end on Mars,” Callas said. “Will they gradually degrade until their mechanical functionality goes or will they have a catastrophic end, where something inside the rover breaks?” [Washington Post]
Researchers have learned the universal secret behind the graceful, aerial turns executed by everything from insects to cockatoos. And it’s a surprisingly simple process: To turn left, all a bird has to do is flap its right wing a little bit harder than the left wing. To end the turn, the bird simply returns to flapping its wings in unison [Discovery News]. Researchers hope to duplicate the simple set of motions to create more nimble and acrobatic flying robots.
Though the dynamics probably can’t work at large scales — building-sized robotic birds won’t ever be as agile as a swallow — they could be harnessed in small drones used by explorers or the military. Compared to the average hummingbird or fruit fly, such craft are now clumsy and unstable. “The results will inform all future research into maneuvering flight in animals and biomimetic flying robots” [Wired], wrote biomechanicist Bret Tobalske in a commentary.
Researchers have built a robot that doesn’t just perform pre-programmed tasks like a factory worker, but instead is capable of generating its own hypotheses and then running experiments to test them–like a scientist. The robot, named Adam, was set to work investigating the genetics of brewer’s yeast, and made 12 small discoveries. Lead researcher Ross King says that Adam’s results were modest, but real. “It’s certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable,” he says [New Scientist].
Adam isn’t a humanoid robot; instead it’s comprised of a sophisticated software program run on four computers, and a room full of lab equipment to carry out commands. The researchers gave Adam a freezer full of yeast strains and a database containing information about the yeast’s genes and enzymes, and asked Adam to determine which genes code for specific enzymes. The robot came up with hypotheses, devised experiments to test them, ran the experiments, and interpreted the results. In all, Adam formulated and tested 20 hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam’s work with their own experiments [New Scientist].
Yesterday, Honda Research Institute revealed the latest trick from its Asimo robot: It can now respond to commands issued only as thoughts. The Japanese carmaker ran a video of a man imagining four simple movements – raising his right hand, raising his left hand, running and eating – that were then duplicated by Asimo, the company’s humanoid robot. Honda said the technology was not ready for a live demonstration because the test subject might get distracted. A previous demonstration in 2006 required the test subjects to lie motionless in an MRI scanner in order to pick up the signals [Financial Times].
The mind-reading system is non-invasive, meaning that the controller doesn’t have electrodes implanted in his head. Researchers used a specialized helmet instead, which is the first “brain-machine interface” to combine two different techniques for picking up activity in the brain. Sensors in the helmet detect electrical signals through the scalp in the same way as a standard EEG (electroencephalogram). The scientists combined this with another technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, which can be used to monitor changes in blood flow in the brain [The Guardian]. A software program then integrates the two signals and transmits a command to the robot.
The Mars Phoenix Lander conked out in November, ending the active mission of the robotic scientist, but the results of its five months of research on Martian geology are still coming in. In a late-breaking update, some Phoenix scientists now declare that they spotted several drops of liquid salt water on the lander’s legs; this would be the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed beyond Earth.
The researcher who proposed the hypothesis, Nilton Renno, was careful to say, “This is not a proof.” But he added: “I think the evidence is overwhelming. It’s not circumstantial evidence” [The New York Times]. Liquid water would boost the possibility that microbial life could survive beneath the Martian surface.
Renno bases his claim on images that show several blobs on the lander’s legs that changed between snapshots, seeming to merge and grow in size. The dramatic assertion has divided the Phoenix’s science team, with some researchers arguing that the low-resolution pictures actually show nothing more than clumps of frost. “It’s highly unlikely that [liquid water is] the explanation,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory…. “It’s just water vapor moving around. It’s an ordinary, unexciting explanation” [AP].
Defying its predecessors, SandBot is the first robot able to traverse sand. Robots normally face the same difficulties as humans when trying to walk across sand, often getting stuck or digging themselves into a rut, and even SandBot had trouble in its first trials. Like a car spinning its tires only to sink deeper, SandBot’s legs moved so quickly that the entire robot simply sank [Discovery News]. However, a few tweaks to its speed and the motion of limbs soon had it cruising like a veritable dune buggy.
The SandBot model is inspired by the movements of desert animals such as lizards and cockroaches. Instead of moving through sand at a steady rate, the new robot is designed with six limbs, three of which move slowly while in contact with the sand, while the others rotate quickly through the air to position themselves for the next step (see the video). In a year of trials, SandBot eventually traversed a track of “sand” made out of poppy seeds at a speed of about 30 centimeters per second, or at least 15 times faster than the Mars rovers [ScienceNOW Daily News].
The next-generation Mars rover may be a rough-and-tumble robot that can roll down steep slopes, clamber over rocks, and can even be lowered down cliff faces into deep craters. The prototype, called Axel, takes its name from its simple design–a single axle with two wide, toothed wheels. A video shows that the rover is undeterred by sandy soil, uneven terrain, and other impediments that it can expect to encounter on Mars.
Axel is considerably more nimble than the rovers that are currently trekking across the Martian landscape, Spirit and Opportunity. When faced with the unknown slipperiness of a crater’s sloped sides, these part-autonomous robots require huge input and planning on behalf of their Earth-bound controllers–the scene has to be imaged, and the driving route planned with minute precision lest the ‘bots six small wheels become irrevocably jammed in the rocks [Fast Company].
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Nissan is looking to schools of fish to learn about how to help people reduce car crashes and traffic jams. The car company developed tiny robots that move in fish-like groups of up to 7 without bumping into each other. Each uses a laser range-finder to measure the distance between obstacles. The data is constantly shared between peers via radio, allowing the group to travel as a “shoal” without bumping into each other. The technique allows the cars to travel side-by-side or quickly switch direction as a group [BBC News]. The robot is dubbed Eporo, which stands for Episode O (Zero) Robot, meaning zero episodes, or accidents, and zero emissions.
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