NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

'Goosinator' Robot Scares Away Pooping Geese

Canada geese are lingering in parks around the country, and anyone wanting to take a stroll there gets a nasty surprise. Meet the Goosinator, a bright orange robot being tested as a way to keep geese moving along.

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Geese here in Denver seem to find the location as appealing as I do. Instead of moving south, they're hanging around, gorging on grass in open areas, and pooping all over city parks. One goose drops at least a pound of poop daily, Bruce Finley wrote in the Denver Post. Multiply that by flock after flock and we've got a gross, expensive problem.

Usually, parks in the area have turned to dogs to discourage the geese, but they can cost $500 a day to employ and they're limited as to how fast they can move and where they can go. The Goosinator is a remote-controlled, battery-powered robot made from orange foam painted to resemble a devilish, grinning beast. It can move up to 25 miles per hour.

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A video made by its creators shows the robot continuously scaring geese away by moving along grass, snow, concrete and icy water. It also emits a loud motorized sound. Colorado-based Goosinator designer Randy Claussen told the Denver Post his challenge was to come up with a craft that could move along all kinds of different surfaces and be intimidating to geese.

"We humanely are returning wildlife back to the wild, at your fingertips," Claussen told the Post (video). Denver parks officials recently bought two Goosinators, costing about $3,000 each, and plan to have college interns operate them. It sounds expensive but just cleaning up after the geese can cost up to $1,000 a week.

So far the robots have been deployed in urban parks in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York. Residents in Westchester, N.Y., are trying it as an alternative to rounding up geese and killing them, which is what happened last summer, according to the Journal News.

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Goosinators do have their detractors. One lady in Denver told Finley she wonders where the geese will go if they all get driven from city parks. I doubt they'll come hang out in my neighborhood for a leisurely snack, though. Almost everyone here has a dog.

Photo: The Goosinator takes to the water. Credit: Randy Claussen via LoHud.com

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Crash-Proof Quadrotor Roves On Land and Air

When it comes to robot mobility, failure to navigate obstacles can often leave a robot looking like a turtle on its back.

Surely, this notion is not lost on researchers at the Robotics Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) who recently created the HyTAQ quadrotor. Designed by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko, the hybrid machine's ability to both fly and roll make it one of the most fluid moving robots I've ever seen. Best of all, its design makes it nearly impossible to crash.

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Here's how IIT's promo video describes it:

The robot is composed of a cylindrical cage connected to a quadrotor connected through two revolute joints. Thus, the cage can roll freely with respect to the quadrotor body. The flexible structure of the cage, fabricated out of polycarbonate and carbon fiber makes the robot crash resistant.

This simple, but arguably elegant design allows the robot to use the same actuators from both forms of locomotion. This keeps the system mass low since the robot does not need to carry the added mass of unused actuators and control electronics.

During terrestrial locomotion, the robot only needs to overcome rolling resistance, therefore it is much more energy efficient than an aerial-only quadrotor.

The researchers say this solves on of the most frustrating problems of quadrotors and rotorcraft -- their short operation time.

"Experimental results show that the HyTAQ can travel a distance four times greater and operate almost six times longer than an aerial only system," according to the team's website.

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The rearchers also tout the hybrid robot's ability to avoid obstacles.

"When an obstacle is encountered," they write, "the system simply flies over it."

via PhysOrg

credit: IIT

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Tiny Dragonfly UAV Flies and Hovers to Spy

You'd probably recognize a quadrocopter or a swarmbot swooping in for a closer view, but a tiny dragonfly might escape your notice. A Georgia Tech spinoff is betting their unmanned aerial dragonfly vehicle will leave other micro flying bots in the dust.

The Atlanta-based company TechJet started as a spinoff from developments in Georgia Tech's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Department. One of their projects, called Dragonfly, was initially developed with $1 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research. Since then, the Dragonfly prototypes have become smaller and there are now five technology patents on the design.

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TechJet, led by cofounders Jayant Ratti and Emanuel Jones, pictures different Dragonfly versions being used for gaming, dynamic photography, home security and military surveillance. Inspired by the way real dragonflies can fly and hover, they developed a four-winged robot weighing less than one ounce that can do the same.

Each Dragonfly has stereoscopic vision, flight control systems and a camera-ready operating system, according to the company. TechJet will be offering different options for robotics elements such as wings and actuators through its website, depending on what the user wants to do. For example, one version could be made more stable with better endurance for aerial photography.

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TechJet is currently raising money through the site Indiegogo with the goal of delivering the robots starting early next year. Dragonfly packages range from around $100 to $500 and include Wi-Fi and cameras at the high end.

So if you see a strange-looking insect flying your way, just be careful before you swat at it. That dragonfly could be a spy.

Image: A prototype for TechJet's robot dragonfly in action. Credit: TechJet.

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Swarm Bots and Drones Team Up

An army of self-assembling swarm bots can get together and do certain jobs. But because each of them has a unique and limited perspective of the world, they could always use a little help. Enter the overhead quadrotor drone. This guy has the advantage of a bird's eye view of the area and can coordinate the team to work together more efficiently to overcome obstacles or perform tasks.

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In the video below, the quadrotor uses stereo imagery to compute how steep a hill is, runs an onboard simulation to see how many ground robots will have to team up to make it over and then directs the robots to team up and go over the bridge. The idea was demonstrated in Portugal at the 2012 Intelligent Robots and Systems conference by a team of researchers from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa. via IEEE Spectrum

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Robo-Bee To Get Brain for Autonomous Flight

Autonomous robots can do reconnaissance for the military, fly in complex patterns and even explore other planets. But they aren't great at complex, open-ended problems. Military surveillance drones or NASA's Curiosity rover are both doing largely pre-programmed tasks.

Animals -- even insects -- are a lot smarter than robots, so scientists are constantly looking at ways of mimicking insect behaviors in robots. At the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex in the U.K., researchers are building a software model of a bee's brain.

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Called the "Green Brain," the software model will focus on how a bee sees and smells. With that, a robotic bee could be built that actually behaves like a real bee, rather than just flying on a pre-programmed path and carrying out instructions.

"The benefit of an autonomous model is clear when you have complex tasks you want to undertake," James Marshall, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield who is leading the three-year project, told Discovery News.

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If the programming works as the scientists hope, the robo-bee could do things like pinpoint the odor of a gas the way a bee looks for a certain flower. Ordinarily a robot could detect the gas and fly a pre-programmed pattern to find the source. But a bee doesn't have to be told to do that -- it learns from experience.

The brain simulations will use hardware from NVIDIA. Graphics processing unit accelerators, used in rendering complex three-dimensional images, will provide a lot of the computing power necessary to simulate a brain, even one as simple as a bee's. Marshall noted that once the program is complete, it will run on a large computer that transmits data to the flying robot, as it isn't yet possible to cram that much computing power into a small space.

Even a bee has a pretty sophisticated brain. So the problem of programming it will be broken up. The team will look at different functions of a bee's brain and simulate those and the interactions between them. Marshall said they hope that the bee behavior will emerge from that interaction.

The project is designed to shed light on how bees think and how artificial intelligence differs. Given that bees are vital to pollination of many crops, the recent stresses on bee populations are a big concern and any new knowledge about how bees navigate their environment would help. It might even be possible to make artificial pollinators. (It remains to be seen whether bees would complain about being replaced by robots).

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The actual flying machine -- the artificial bee -- is being designed by a group at Harvard working on an actual robotic bee. Prior to that, though, the bee brain program will be tested in a more conventional remote controlled flyer. "We'll be using a rather expensive executive toy," Marshall said.

Beyond that, the robo-bee type brain could even be used in a search and rescue drone, or a smarter reconnaissance vehicle. "A human rescuer isn't specifying step by step how to find people," Marshall said. "With an AI robot you don't have to specify how to solve a problem."

Credit: Henrik Trygg/Corbis

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Mind-Controlled Drone Takes Off

Mind-controlled applications and drones have been quite in vogue as of late, wouldn't you say? We've told you about scads of brain-computer interfaces and our list of drone-related projects stretches as far as the finger can click.

So, naturally, it came as no surprise when this landed in our lap: a brain-controlled quadcopter drone.

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Researchers at Zhejian University in Hangzhou, China, developed the quadcopter with the intent to give those with impaired motor skills a new way to interact.

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By wearing an emotiv electroencephalography (EEG) headset, the researchers showed how they can pilot the drone simply by thinking "left hard" to have quadcopter take off and land, "left lightly" to rotate, "right" to move it forward and "push" to have it fly up. If users clench their teeth, the drone descends. Blinking the eyes causes the on-board camera to snap a photo.

The EEG headset first relays commands from Bluetooth to a laptop, then via Wi-Fi to the drone. The quadcopter, named Flying Buddy 2, also live streams video footage of the flight back to the laptop to give users better control.

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Researchers will present their mind-controlled drone this week at the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012) in Pittsburgh, Pa. Check out the team's demo video below. Make sure to stick around until the end, where there's some pretty wicked drone-on-drone combat, a fight almost as fierce as the time Daniel LaRusso battled Johnny Lawrence for the All Valley Karate Tournament.

via Wired

Credit: Zhejiang University via YouTube

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Flying Robot Crashes, Keeps Flying

Lots of flying bugs, such as houseflies or bees, bump into walls and windows and keep going. Why can't a flying robot do that? That's the question Adam Klaptocz, a doctoral candidate in robots at the EPFL in Switzerland wanted to answer. Most flying robots are designed with navigational systems that prevent them from colliding into objects. But what if the robot was resilient enough -- at least as much as a bee or housefly -- to bump into things and keep going?

Klaptocz and his colleagues built a lightweight autonomous robot that's protected by a carbon fiber cage. The structure is light enough that it doesn't drag down the machine or and interfere with its center of gravity. But if it does bump into something, the cage offers protection. If knocked to the ground, the robot is which is capable of uprighting itself using spring-based legs. Once upright, it returns to the air.

“This type of robot could be useful in exploring hard-to-reach or dangerous areas, places with little light, caves, collapsed mines or nuclear power plants,” said Klaptocz.

The researchers have developed an algorithm that allows the robot to control its flying speed, and they're working on smart sensing within the robot's structure to detect the position and force of contact with the environment.

 

Credit: Youtube screen grab

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Joggobot Keeps the Pace

No joke, the other day I decided to go jogging for the first time in 10 years. I didn't get very far before I had to stop. The tar fumes coming off the freshly asphalted road I chose to jog on probably didn't help matters, nor did the fact that I was running in cheap basketball shoes and corduroy cut-off shorts.

But I won't put the entire blame on my lack of running attire. My failure to make it 400 meters before sucking wind and nearly collapsing into a ditch of poison ivy probably has something to do with being out of shape.

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However, I might have at least made it to the end of the road had Joggobot been flying in front of me, whirring out inspiration and dangling the carrot in front of this donkey's nose.

Who or what is Joggobot, you ask? No, it's not a new fraction of robotic Juggalos, though that sounds absolutely terrifying.

Joggobot is a quad-rotor helicopter drone, developed by Floyd Mueller and Eberhard Grather at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and it's here to help sandbaggers like me go the extra mile.

Grather and company took an AR Drone and used customized software to program Joggobot so that it flies a few yards ahead of a runner and keeps pace. Joggers wear a T-shirt with a specialized blue and orange pattern that Joggobot recognizes and follows.

When an onboard camera "sees" the pattern, Joggobot hovers about 4 feet off the ground and maintains a safe distance no matter how fast the jogger is running.

"People enjoy jogging together, but a lot of people, they just don't have anyone who jogs with them. Or they just start off jogging and need someone to run at their pace," Grather said. "So, maybe it's good for them to have this bot system of Joggobot that motivates them."

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With this research, Grather said his team tried to investigate the bigger picture of how people will exercise in the future and what role robots will play.

Check out the following video of Joggobot in action. However, Grather's jolly face and Austrian accent made me want to invite him over for a plate of Wiener schnitzel and a stein of beer. But that doesn't sound like the diet of any runner I know. No wonder I'm out of shape.

via Exertion Games Lab

Credit: Exertion Games Lab

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Flying 3D Eye Bots Get Aerial Visuals

 

Drones have been getting some major press lately, from devastating attacks in the Middle East to a “Texts From Drone” Tumblr. A new breed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), created by researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisberg Germany, might be what’s needed to show off the benefits of such a device. A fleet of them flies in synchronous flight to record 3D images.

They're mini-helicopters equipped with CMOS sensors that image their surrounding in real time. That allows them to fly in close formation without colliding. The sensors also measure three-dimensional distances very efficiently. The sensors take in the visual information as pixels, and assign each one a gray value as well as a distance value. That allows the drones to determine their position in relation to other objects around them.

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Accuracy in images is essential to any situation the drones are surveying. They're capable of identifying even the smallest of objects, 20 by 15 centimeters from seven meters away, even when flying in the direction of light, the aerial sensors have proven to measure distance more accurately than radar, which measures distance using echoes.

Researchers hope that these UAVs can be used not only to monitor situations like the riots described in the Institute’s study, but also to aid in city planning by creating detailed 3D maps of area, which can prove to be vital in planning and inspecting a region for growth and sustainability. It’s also being touted as a more efficient and cost-effective way to obtain aerials visuals of an area when compared to the use of satellite imaging.

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Flying Robot Swarm Performs James Bond Theme

The quadrotors at the University of Pennsylvania make the news with some frequency. They're a swarm of autonomous, mini-helicopters that researchers have programmed to perform a variety of tasks, demonstrating that swarms of robots in the future could potentially do the work of teams of humans. They flying swarms are able to fly in formation, get around obstacles, and find each other again in the air when the patterns are disrupted. And they've shown they can build structures. Now the team has the flying robots playing music. 

The instruments have infrared lights and cameras, which help the quadrotors navigate perfectly. That's because each robot has a reflector that the camera can see. A computer uses that information to plot the robot's exact position and direct it to the next location.

 

via i09 and the University of Pennsylvania

Credit: Screen grab from video

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