DARPA

Six teams finish the DARPA Urban Challenge

By Mike Hanlon

18:50 November 3, 2007 PDT

November 3, 2007 The DARPA Urban Challenge finished here this afternoon with an astounding six teams completing an array of missions over a demanding 60 mile urban course. The logical placegetters in the event were the first three to clear the course, quite some time ahead of the others - Junior (Stanford University's VW Passat), Boss (Carnegie Mellon's Chevrolet Tahoe) and Odin (Virginia Tech's Ford Escape hybrid). No winner has been named on the day, with DARPA due to announce the final placings tomorrow morning at 10am, though Tartan Racing’s Red Whittaker seemed very confident after the event after a completely clean run with no infringements or hiccups and a total time more than 20 minutes faster than the nearest competitor. The calm and confidence after the event did not reflect some of the issues the team experienced on the starting line Read More

Saturday's DARPA Urban Challenge finalists trimmed to 11 teams

By Mike Hanlon

13:00 November 1, 2007 PDT

The finalists for Saturday’s landmark DARPA Urban Challenge were announced here today and the biggest surprise was that the final field was trimmed to just 11 starters, a decision taken by Grand Marshall and DARPA director Dr Tony Tether in the interests of securing a winner. “It’d be a great shame if one of the robots took out another robot,” said Tether as the final 11 contestants were announced. Most pointedly, Tether also introduced Team Tartan as the team that would be the Number One seed “if we were to give a ranking to the number one", before presenting the plate to Dr William “Red” Whittaker of Team Tartan (pictured). Read More

M-ELROB robot challenge seeks European entrants for 2008

By Loz Blain

06:58 September 4, 2007 PDT

September 4, 2007 Europe’s answer to America’s DARPA challenge is currently seeking entries for 2008. The Military European Land Robot Trial (M-ELROB) is calling for European civilian entrants keen to test their robot minions against several military scenarios in front of a panel of judges. The aim is to find robotic solutions that can be deployed in the near future to help save soldiers’ lives. Read More

Location and semi-finalists announced for DARPA Urban Challenge

By Noel McKeegan

17:35 August 9, 2007 PDT

August 10, 2007 It might not have the publicity, crowds or glamour of a Formula 1, NASCAR or MotoGP event, but the DARPA Urban Challenge is unquestionably the most important motoring event that will take place on Planet Earth this year viewed from an historical perspective. That's because the competing cars will be driven entirely by computers and the ground-work is being done to finally remove the most unreliable part of the automobile - the human being that drives it. The rules of engagement have been known for some time, but now the venue has been named - the Urban Challenge will take place in Victorville, California at the site of the former George Air Force Base on November 3, 2007. Thirty-six semi-finalist teams have also been named to compete at the National Qualification Event (NQE) will take place at the same location, October 26-31, 2007. Read More

The ion-propelled, remotely-powered jetpack

By Loz Blain

This has to be one of the most 'futuristic' developments we've seen in some time; a new U.S. patent has been awarded to a company that has plans for a safe, silent personal flight device using electromagnetic ion propulsion as its primary thrust generator and drawing its power wirelessly from earthbound inductive green power broadcast stations. California's Personal Flight Systems are taking a serious look at the future of personal flight, and the technology involved will leave you shaking your head. Read More

Successful autonomous landing of a damaged UAV

By Mike Hanlon

May 31, 2007 One of the advantages of having a human at the controls of an aircraft when things go wrong is that we have the ability to adjust and intelligently work around a problem – the tales of valiant airmen bringing home planes that have no right to still be flying are myriad. Now it seems that the humble, computer-controlled UAV is set to learn such skills too. Flight control and navigation systems provider Athena Technologies recently demonstrated the damage tolerant flight control and autonomous landing capabilities on a subscale F/A-18 UAV. See the videos … Read More

Cyborg machine-insects prepare for the battlefields of the future

By Noel McKeegan

May 31, 2007 Cyborgs and bionic humans have long been the domain of science fiction with the concept popularised by the seventies TV series, Six Million Dollar Man, about a cyborg working for the OSI. As technological development funded by military spending has accelerated in recent times, we’ve seen the development of the bionic eye, the bionic hand and the bionic arm, with lots of work also being done in the area of exoskeletal robotics to help soldiers run faster and longer and carry heavy loads. Now it appears that we’re about to see the concept of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Cyborgs morph. Whilst UAVs have been among the most successful and high-profile innovations in military technology over the past decade, the arena of unmanned aerial technology is about to become a whole lot stranger as hybrid insect-machine "cyborgs" become a reality. The prospect of a remote controlled dragon-fly capable of transmitting video and other environmental data from the front-line still seems like the stuff of science-fiction, but research into hybrid insect-machines is accelerating under the auspices of DARPA. Read More

Orbital Express completes first autonomous free flight and capture

By Mike Hanlon

May 11, 2007 The Boeing Orbital Express system has completed another first by successfully performing a fully autonomous free-flight rendezvous and capture operation. The demonstration of the two-spacecraft system is part of an ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) mission to validate on-orbit servicing capabilities. Using its onboard cameras and advanced video guidance system, the Boeing Autonomous Space Transport Robotic Operations (ASTRO) servicing spacecraft separated from the NextSat client spacecraft, backed away to a distance of 10 meters (33 feet), maintained proximity flight with NextSat for a full orbit, and then approached and captured NextSat with its docking mechanism. The demonstration occurred at full spacecraft autonomy to mark the first on-orbit rendezvous and capture operation performed with no active exchange of relative navigation information or any intervention or control from the ground. Read More

DARPA's Surface Navigation Concept - without GPS

By Mike Hanlon

April 19, 2007 Imagine the United States attempting to fight a war if the Global Positioning System (GPS) were suddenly unavailable. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has obviously thought about it has just awarded a concept development contract to a team of corporations led by Boeing. The objective of the Robust Surface Navigation (RSN) program is to develop technologies that can exploit various "signals of opportunity" -- electronic waves emanating from satellites, cell phone towers and even television transmission towers -- to provide precise location and navigation information to ground troops when GPS signals are being electronically jammed or blocked by natural or man-made obstacles, such as foliage or buildings. The team includes ROSUM, the only company that has used broadcast television signals to locate mobile assets. It's also the first company to combine television and GPS signals for truly robust situational awareness in all environments. Read More

New drugs promise two days without sleep and improved alertness and cognitive powers

By Mike Hanlon

March 5, 2007 Two years ago, we wrote about the “time-shifting” drug, Modafinil that enables you to stay awake for 40+ hours with close to full mental capacity and with few side effects. The drug is a eugeroic and offers improved memory, mood enhancement, improved alertness and cognitive powers, and has a much smoother feel than amphetamines because they work differently. Popular Science is now reporting that we’re just about to see new forms of super eugeroic called armodafinil (Modafinil’s creator Cephalon is awaiting FDA approval for the drug), and a drug code-named CX717 from Cortex. Both drugs promise even longer periods of wakefulness, and in experiments with Ampakine CX717, sleep-deprived rhesus monkeys on the drug often outperformed their own well-rested but undrugged best efforts on mental-performance tests. While these drugs will be marketed to assist people with sleep disorders like narcolepsy, it’s their potential as recreational and workplace performance-enhancing drugs that make them worth watching. The times they are a changing … Read More

Junior – Son of Stanley set for DARPA Urban Challenge

By Mike Hanlon

February 19, 2007 The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge marked a milestone in artificial intelligence when five autonomous vehicles finished the course and Stanford Racing Team’s Stanley went down in history as the winner of the first race for autonomous vehicles. Centuries from now, the win will be equally significant as winning the first auto race from Paris to Rouen in 1894. Indeed, a century from now, there’s every chance that cars will all be autonomous, as computers make less mistakes than human beings. The robots in the 2007 Urban Challenge, however, will need all of Stanley’s capabilities plus a whole lot more as this time they need to handle real traffic. “In the last Grand Challenge, it didn’t really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush because either way you’d just drive around it,” says Stanford Team Leader Sebastian Thrun. “The current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment.” Thrun is the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. When the bookmakers frame the odds for the Urban Challenge, Thrun’s charge will be favourite. On Saturday, Thrun introduced Stanford Racing Team’s new challenger to the world. Junior is a new generation of autonomous vehicle built to accomplish missions in a simulated city environment, which includes the traffic of the other robots and traffic laws. This means that on race day, November 3, Junior not only will have to avoid collisions, but he will have to master concepts that befuddle many humans, such as right of way. Junior began life as a 2006 Volkswagen Passat wagon. Read More

The use of special prizes to fuel global innovation

By Mike Hanlon

February 13, 2007 Two heads are better than one. Six billion are even better. In solving big problems, you need a lot of brain power and the opportunity now exists via this wonderous global network to pour cubic brainpower on problems we need to solve. Tens of millions of scientifically trained minds all thinking about the same problem ensures that if there’s a way, we’ll find it. In terms of setting the global scientific agenda and stimulating innovation, nothing seems to work quite as well as a clearly defined challenge and a big fat prize. It immediately gives that limitless source of human intelligence out there a focal point – throughout history, such prizes have consistently proven to be the most effective method of fast forwarding development of enabling technologies, opening new vistas of human endeavour and solving key society-enabling problems. In announcing the Virgin Earth Challenge, Branson showed he had been an attentive student of innovation history when he said, “History has shown that Technology Prizes have been invaluable in encouraging technological advancements and innovation in many, many areas of science and industry.” History has indeed given us many big thinkers who have left massive legacies – people whose macro perspective on the world is such that they can identify a seemingly insurmountable societal problem and set in motion the process of solving it with an audacious stroke and a lot of money. In recent times we have seen DARPA’s Grand Challenge which gave us the world’s first truly autonomous vehicle inside a few years and for just a few million dollars. The Ansari X Prize fast-forwarded space development by decades. The British government offered the first prize of this type for a device capable of accurately measuring longitude in 1714. The prize was claimed 59 years later when clock maker, John Harrison (pictured) was awarded UKP 20,000 for devising an accurate and durable chronometer and it transformed our ability to sail the seas. The French have often used prizes as an incentive to fuel innovation, with a 100,000 franc prize in 1775 resulting in an artificial form of alkali being produced and hence began the French chemical industry. Napolean is best known for his battlefield genius but a 12,000 francs he offered in 1810 resulted in the first vacuum sealed food. A newspaper prize catalyzed the first flight across the English channel in 1909 and reset human boundaries as to what was possible with powered flight. Read More

The One-Shot Sniping System

By Mike Hanlon

January 7, 2007 The snipe is a wading bird renowned for being the hardest of all birds to hunt due to being difficult to locate, impossible to approach without flushing, or to hit once in the air due to its erratic flight. In the days of market hunting, those who brought snipes to market were regarded as the best of the best and earned the term snipers. The verb snipe originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India applying similar skills in wartime with a human quarry. A sniper occasionally takes the one, well-aimed shot that, if done properly, will save lives and turn the course of battle. One of the many skills of a modern days sniper is mathematics – to measure or estimate the range, cross winds, and calculate the allowances needed for one shot to hit its target after travelling up to 2000 yards (the longest confirmed sniper kill of the Gulf War was made by a Barrett Model 82A1 sniper rifle at a range of 1,800 meters). Read More

Top Three Urban Challenge Finishers to receive US$2 Million, US$1 Million and US$500,000

By Mike Hanlon

December 11, 2006 One of the most intriguing contests ever conceived , the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge for autonomous robotic ground vehicles will take place on November 3, 2007, at an undisclosed location in the western United States. First prize will be US$2 million, second gets US$1,000,000 and third takes home US$500,000, awards that will go to the top three finishers to complete the 60-mile course through traffic within the six hour time limit. The fully autonomous ground vehicles will be tested to the full, conducting simulated military supply missions safely and effectively in a mock urban area. To succeed, vehicles must obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles. Human understanding of the technology required to make vehicles smarter and safer will grow rapidly in the preparation for the contest and expedite the time when we’ll be switching to autopilot for long journeys on intelligent roads in our intelligent cars. Read More

RCV awarded engine contract for Micro Air Vehicle

By Mike Hanlon

December 8, 2006 There’s a delicious irony about the success of UK-based RCV Engines. The company achieved international recognition for its range of model aircraft engines then moved into a new market earlier this year with the development of its proprietary Rotating Cylinder Valve (RCV) engine for sub-250cc applications such as motorcycles, scooters and power tools where it offers 100PS/litre performance and manufacturing costs akin to those of a two-stroke, with the emission levels and fuel consumption of a four-stroke. The engine is so promising that it has been selected by Honeywell to produce a demonstrator engine based on RCV technology for use in Honeywell’s backpack-sized Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) – the irony is of course that the company is effectively back in the same domain it started from, though model aircraft enthusiasts who own one of RCV’s traditional SP or CD Series engines can rejoice in knowing that company is also powering some of the most innovative flying machines ever built. Another plus for the Rotating Cylinder Valve (RCV) engine is its exceptional power to weight ratio and it’s ability to run on a variety of fuels. The MAV autonomous surveillance aircraft has been developed as part of the US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) MAV Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration programme and is small enough for a foot soldier to carry. It is designed to provide soldiers with improved situational awareness without exposing them to enemy fire through forward- and downward-looking video cameras that relay information to a remote ground station video terminal. Read More

GoldenEye 80 ducted fan UAV makes successful first flight

By Mike Hanlon

December 7, 2006 Flying saucer sightings are certain to be on the increase from this point forth as a new type of aerial vehicle comes into existence. The Aurora Flight Sciences GoldenEye 80 unmanned air vehicle made a successful first flight last month, becoming the first ducted fan UAV to fly under the power of a heavy fuel engine. The fully autonomous GoldenEye 80 UAV is being developed under contract to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Organic Air Vehicle (OAV-II) program. The GoldenEye 80 is designed to give company commanders the ability to spot, identify, designate, and destroy targets. With its powerful sensors and quiet operation, the aircraft can dash to a target area, hover motionless in the sky, and observe and designate a target – all without being heard by people on the ground. The unique design and embedded capabilities of the GoldenEye 80 enable the UAV to be used for a variety of military missions, from conducting surveillance beyond hills in rural areas to gathering intelligence while flying between buildings in urban warfare operations. Read More

The RATTLRS Penetrator missile - Mach 3 and deadly accurate

By Mike Hanlon

October 19, 2006 Here's a riddle for would-be enemies of the state - what’s 20 feet long, weighs 2000 pounds, cruises at 70,000 feet and comes down the chimney at Mach 3? Give up? You should! It's the Revolutionary Approach To Time-critical Long Range Strike (RATTLRS) Penatrator missile and will deliver itself with pinpoint accuracy anywhere within 500 miles within a few minutes of being launched. Combatants of the United States will no doubt feel particularly uncomfortable after reading this story, because the inside 10 minute time-to-target references them as the target and it shows the U.S. military machine is well on the way to achieving its RATTLRS goals. With its speed, accuracy, range and responsiveness, RATTLRS will be able to address a wide variety of target types including mobile, time-critical, hard or buried targets. The tests completed this week by Lockheed Martin were penetrator warhead sled tests against hardened bunkers. During the tests, the RATTLRS airframe was accelerated to speeds greater than Mach 2 and slammed into the bunker (pictured). The warhead penetrated cleanly and completely through the concrete barriers. Read More

Onyx Swarming Precision Parachutes

By Mike Hanlon

October 6, 2006 The shape of military technology continues to evolve in all directions and one of the most interesting we’ve seen in recent times comes from Atair Aerospace in the form of its inventive Onyx precision guided parachute systems. Onyx systems are autonomously guided parafoil systems designed to allow military cargo to be parachuted from high altitudes of up to 35,000 ft, autonomously glide for 30 miles, and land within 50 metres of a preprogrammed target. Atair is the first company to successfully develop autonomous agent swarming UAVs so the Onyx system includes Adaptive Control, Flocking/Swarming and Active Collision Avoidance capabilities which means in laymans terms that 50+ parachutes can be deployed in the same airspace, guiding to one or multiple targets without the possibility of midair collisions. Read More

Track A Participants announced for 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge

By Mike Hanlon

October 5, 2006 Please excuse us for being so excited, but the third Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle competition is scheduled for November 3, 2007 and this time instead of tackling the desert, the vehicles will be required to negotiate an urban environment. DARPA has established a two-track (track A and track B) system for teams to qualify and compete in the Urban Challenge in order to help accelerate autonomous development and this week it announced the track A teams which will each receive US $1 million in technology development funds. Read More

US$10 million skin for DARPA's remarkable ISIS stratospheric airship

By Mike Hanlon

September 29, 2006 Lockheed Martin has received a US$10 million contract to further develop advanced material technology and next-generation hull material for DARPA's Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) program. The ISIS program will develop the core technologies necessary to integrate an extremely capable sensor package directly into the structure of stratospheric airships, which operate at approximately 70,000 feet. The planned capabilities of the ISIS project are straight out of a sci fi film – ISIS will provide a dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy – a big picture map showing everything moving for hundreds of kilometers. Read More

World’s first hands-off autonomous air refueling engagement

By Mike Hanlon

September 13, 2006 With two aircraft flying about 50 feet apart at hundreds of miles per hour, aerial refueling, even under the most ideal conditions, is an exacting manoeuvre. In the last few weeks, both Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Boeing have demonstrated new technologies that will improve safety for tanker aircrews and the airplanes receiving critical fuel. DARPA), in a joint effort with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, performed the first-ever autonomous probe-and-drogue airborne refueling operation on August 30, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Boeing meanwhile, used its new KC-767 Tanker to demonstrate a new technology using a series of cameras mounted on the tanker's fuselage. The KC-767 Remote Vision System (RVS) provides high-definition stereoscopic imagery to the aircraft's boom operator stationed behind the KC-767 cockpit. Read More

Lockheed Martin showcases air, water and underwater unmanned vehicles

By Mike Hanlon

August 21, 2006 Lockheed Martin telegraphed its intention to become a significant supplier of unmanned systems technology during a press briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. this week. In showcasing its latest developments in unmanned systems technology and its progress into the future net-enabled environment, it discussed a broad range of unmanned and autonomous technologies, from the recently introduced Polecat and other unmanned aerial systems, to surface vessels such as the Protector (covered earlier this week here) and subsurface prowlers, such as the Sea Talon. During the conference Lockheed VP Frank Murno acknowledged that the company was considering a hybrid version of its F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter – where it could be operated with or without a human pilot as required. Read More

Motorsport without the driver

By Mike Hanlon

July 12, 2006 DARPA might have started something huge when it held the first Grand Challenge as a fledgling new sport has taken root - motorsport without the driver. That first race where the best vehicle only managed a few miles has now spawned the first race for robots, appropriately to be held at one of the birthplaces of American motorsport and the mountain that inspired Katharine Lee Bates famous poem, “America the Beautiful” – Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak has a 14,700 ft high summit with a 12.4 mile long access road rising 4710 feet through 156 corners, and annual races have been held there since 1916. Now the first Annual Autonomous Robot Race to the top of Pikes Peak will be held September 23, 2006. So far ten competitors have entered, most of whom will be recognised from their previous outings at DARPA GC I & II, though all comers are welcome. Team Axion made the trip to the 2006 Pikes Peak International Hillclimb (with drivers) last week and on the day after the race Spirit, Axion Racing’s autonomous Jeep Grand Cherokee, became the first unmanned vehicle to drive itself to the summit of Pikes Peak without human interaction or remote control. Spirit’s time of 47 minutes and 10.3 seconds was almost five times that of Kiwi Rod Millen’s record but as Axion Racing’s Team Leader Bill Kehaly explained, “we would have reached the top quicker, but Spirit kept having to apply brakes to stay back from slower human controlled vehicles.” “Our top speed is presently 25 miles per hour and we think we can break 30 minutes at this September’s inaugural Pikes Peak Robot Hill Climb.” Read More

Grand Challenge winner talks autonomous robotic vehicles of the future

By Mike Hanlon

June 19, 2006 Those who had a passing interest in the DARPA Grand Challenge and the field of autonomous robotics will no doubt be interested to learn of AutoBlog’s recent article reporting on Dr. Sebastian Thrun's keynote presentation at the 2006 Sensors Expo. Thrun you may recall, was the project leader of Stanford University’s Volkswagen-based autonomous vehicle (aka Stanley) which won DARPA’s Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles, hence ensuring himself a place in history. Apart from being director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, we believe that robotics will become so ubiquitous one day, Thrun's work will be regarded as landmark in the same way that the Wright Brothers first flight is revered. Thrun openly discussed Stanley’s technology and even gets into the future of autonomous navigation on the roads. Read More

High performance web search

By Mike Hanlon

June 13, 2006 Search is the name of the game on the web these days because it’s where decisions get made about where to spend money – if you can control the space where the best informed (and hence most lucrative) decisions get made, then you win the game. Not surprisingly, as the amount of available relevant information (reports, research, emails, blogs, news stories, documents ad infinitum) continues to increase at a bewildering rate, our ability to make informed decisions is in danger of being overwhelmed (hands up all those who feel like that – see!!!!). Faced with this exponential expansion of information and information sources, how can anyone know with certainty that they have reviewed all available relevant information? Or uncovered the facts and relationships critical to sound decision-making? Insightful Corporation was this week issued a U.S. patent for the "Inverse Inference Engine for High Performance Web Search." The invention is designed to provide a faster and more scalable alternative for intelligent keyword search techniques. With this invention, Insightful claims users will realize a richer and more relevant search experience than traditional statistical keyword techniques. The invention is designed to enhance the end user's search experience by providing related and recommended options based on the user's query found within unstructured text such as web sites. Read More