"Robot Scientist" Said to Equal Humans at Some Tasks January 14, 2004 John Roach National Geographic News It looks nothing like C-3PO of Star Wars fame, but a team of British scientists have created a "robot" that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results on par with the best of their human counterparts. Called the "robot scientist," the technological marvel proved its intellectual prowess by correctly determining the function of specific genes within yeast. "Th ...

"Take That, Human Intruder!" February, 2005 Popular Mechanics.com Intruders at Japanese seaports and factories may soon discover that the long arm of the law has wheels and spews smoke. The diminutive cybersheriff, named Robot X, comes from Secom, Japan's leading security company. When Robot X hits production it is expected to cost around 300,000 yen (about $2900) per month--less than the cost of an old-fashioned human guard. Most of the time, Robot X works on the same principle as the Roo ...

"Turn Off the Television!": Real-World Robotic Exploration Experiments with a Virtual 3-D Display January 2005 By David J. Bruemmer, Douglas A. Few, Miles C. Walton, Ronald L. Boring, Julie L. Marble, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory; Curtis W. Nielsen, Brigham Young University; Jim Garner, Washington University at St. Louis Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 9 You can view the abstract online. A subs ...

$1000 Off-Road Robot To Hunt Land Mines Jun 12, 2004 SciScoop From a JHU press release with cool photos: Four Johns Hopkins undergraduate engineering students have designed and built a remote-controlled robotic vehicle to find deadly land mines in rugged terrain and mark their location with a spray of paint. The prototype has been given to professional explosive detection researchers as a model for a low-cost robot that humanitarian groups and military troops could use to prevent mine-relate ...

$6.6M for UAV-Mountable LADAR 23-Jun-2005 Defense Industry Daily Harris Corporation received a $6.6 million research and development contract from the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) to develop and demonstrate the Jigsaw Laser Radar (LADAR) 3D-imaging test-bed system for use on a DP-5X Helicopter UAV. Laser Radar (LADAR) is similar to millimeter wave radar, but uses lasers to scan and processes the signal echoed from targets, in order to create a 3-D virtual picture of t ...

$8.8M for R&D Into Robots That Can Steer Themselves June 24, 2005 Defense Industry Daily DID covered the future of land robots recently, and noted the challenges inherent in autonomously-steered robots as envisoned in the Future Combat System. Well, Defense Technologies Inc. in Ranlo, NC received an $8.8 million ceiling-priced indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for basic and applied research leading to the development of a prototype Intelligent Autonomous Unmanned Controls Stat ...

'Bots with bullets Globe and Mail January 24, 2005 By MICHAEL P. REGAN Englewood Cliffs, N.J. — The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside. But the weather couldn't matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun pointing the way like Pinocchio's nose. The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic wa ...

'Dr. Robot' to the rescue at the hospital November 16, 200 South Bend Tribune Doctors test 'remote-presence vehicle' to make their rounds more frequently DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) -- Doctors at Oakwood Hospital and Medical Center can make the rounds without leaving their chair or even leaving their house, thanks to a roaming robot called Rosie. Known technically as a remote-presence vehicle, Rosie's "head" is a 17-inch computer screen that transmits a color image of a human face. The face in m ...

Pasadenastarnews.com July 31, 2004 By Kimm Groshong EMAIL ARTICLE LINK TO ARTICLE PRINT ARTICLE Article Published: Saturday, July 31, 2004 - 8:53:03 PM PST Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a senior research scientist & group leader at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Thursday July 29, 2004 at his lab at JPL. Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen grips a robotic hand in his lab, while an android capable of changing facial expressions looks on. Yoseph Bar-Cohen issued a challenge to researchers ...

'Legos up' on the competition December 5, 2004 By Dennis B. Roddy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Disabilities don't stop local whizzes from taking top prizes in robot contest A group of kids accustomed to challenges -- one uses crutches, three have little or no hearing, another travels by motorized wheelchair -- began remaking the world in Lego yesterday, one Starbucks at a time. Two squads from Team Tech-Link, a collection of Pittsburgh youngsters, joined 73 teams vying for trophies in the sixth ...

'Robo-doc' puts patient's heart back on the beat November 2, 2004 By Rebecca Smith, Health Reporter, Evening Standard This Is London A robot surgeon has operated on a patient to correct the man's irregular heartbeat. The £1 million Da Vinci machine carried out the operation, the first in the UK, at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. The patient, Derek Rutter, 48, suffered from atrial fibrillation, which affects 500,000 people in the UK each year. During the procedure, robotic-enhanced atrial fibrillation ablation, surgeon Roberto Casula operated the robot by remote control to insert 5mm probes into Mr Rutter's chest. The probes sent microwaves into the heart tissue, stopping any abnormal heart rhythm. The operation was a success, meaning there was no need for invasive surgery.

'Robo-doc' works hospital rounds May 19, 2005 By Julie Clothier CNN.com LONDON, England (CNN) -- A London hospital has two new members of staff -- two robotic "doctors" that can carry out ward rounds in place of human physicians. The robots will be trialed in a general surgery ward and the accident and emergency department at St Mary's Hospital. They will also be used for surgical training for junior doctors at London's Imperial College. Called "Remote Presence," or RP6 for short, the robo ...

'Robot soldiers' bound for Iraq China Daily January 26, 2005 The US military is planning to deploy robots armed with machine-guns to wage war against insurgents in Iraq. Eighteen of the 1m-high robots, equipped with cameras and operated by remote control, are going to Iraq this spring. The machine is based on a robot already used by the military to disable bombs. Officials say the robot warrior is fast, accurate and will track and attack the enemy with relatively little risk to the live ...

BBC News 29 December, 2003, By Jo Twist BBC News Online technology reporter The Treebot is the first of its kind A fearless mobile robot is helping scientists monitor environmental changes in forests. The hi-tech Tarzan of the robot world, nicknamed Treebot, is the first of its kind to combine networked sensors, a webcam, and a wireless net link. It is solar-powered and moves up and down special cables to take samples and measurements for vital analysis. Treebot has been devel ...

Trusted handshake "For hardness, we have a dual-membrane sensor that measures the differential displacement based on the same contact. It's basically two strain gauges with different strain constants so that you don't even need to calibrate the contact force; you only need the differential output from the two sensors to derive the harness of an object," said Liu. For the future, the EEs plan to distribute large numbers of these arrays in a polymer fabric that can form the skin of future robot ...

'Swarm-bots' offer sniff of the future The Guardian November 25, 2004 Emma Young Andy Russell does not object to sniffer dogs. "They find leaks in oil pipelines, they find people, they detect drugs and explosives. Obviously they're very important," he says. But they do have weaknesses. They get hungry. They get bored. And if sent into a room filled with poisonous gas, they die. Clearly, there is room for improvement. On Russell's desk in the engineering department at Monash university, Me ...

'Swarm-bots' offer sniff of the future Mini-robots with a sense of smell are on the march. Emma Young investigates November 25, 2004 The Guardian Andy Russell does not object to sniffer dogs. "They find leaks in oil pipelines, they find people, they detect drugs and explosives. Obviously they're very important," he says. But they do have weaknesses. They get hungry. They get bored. And if sent into a room filled with poisonous gas, they die. Clearly, there is room for improvement. On Ru ...

Softcom June 25 2004 PITTSBURGH, June 25 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have developed small, throwable, remote-controlled robots designed for surveillance in urban warfare settings. Several of the robots are being sent to Iraq for testing, the scientists said. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with the U.S. Marine Corps' Warfighting Laboratory, developed the robots, known as Dragon Runners. The devices have the ability to see around corners and deliver information to Marine ...

'Trauma Pod' Robot to Save Soldiers' Lives on the Battlefield March 30, 2005 PhysOrg.com Imagine an automated medical treatment system that does not require onsite medical personnel on the front lines of battle, and is ready to receive, assess, and stabilize wounded soldiers during the critical hours following injury. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) has taken a significant step toward that goal by awarding an SRI International-led multi-orga ...

Currently, researchers with the Reverb project are attempting to blueprint the manner in which the human eye-brain system translates what it sees into control signals that provoke an immediate, effective response by actuators. This model will be used to wire the Scamp "eyes" to the robot's "brain." "Reverb enables researchers from a number of disciplines and institutions across the U.K. to work together to understand how the human nervous system integrates sensory information to guide behavior, ...

'Walking' octopus inspires soft robots June 7, 2005 BBC News The surprise discovery that octopi can "walk" along the sea bed on two tentacles has inspired scientists seeking to create of a new generation of soft, flexible robots. Two species of octopus have been observed moving in an upright bipedal stride since the discovery was announced in March this year. And scientists at the University of California at Berkeley believe they can develop artificial muscles for use in a new field of soft ...

125 teams build robots to compete in DARPA Grand Challenge Military & Aerospace Electronics January 24, 2005 WASHINGTON, 24 January 2005. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) reports a surge in applications from teams wanting to participate in DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 as the February 11, 2005, filing deadline approaches. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a field test of autonomous ground vehicles over rugged desert-type terrain for the purpose of advancing robotics technology ...

3D global and mobile sensor data fusion for mobile platform navigation May 2004 Steinhaus, P. Walther, M. Giesler, B. Dillmann, R., Inst. for Comput. Design & Fault Tolerance, Karlsruhe, Germany ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Efficient navigation of mobile platforms in dynamic, human centered environments is still an open ...

3D localization and tracking in unknown environments September 2003 By Saeedi, P. Lowe, D.G. Lawrence, P.D.; Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., British Columbia Univ., Canada Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper describes a vision-based system for 3D localization and tracking of a mobile robot in an unmod ...

Acme, MI A forum for the exchange of information on current work related to the advancement of intelligent vehicle system technologies and applications to Military and Commercial Vehicles.

6D SLAM with an Application in Autonomous Mine Mapping 2004 Kai Lingemann, Joachim Hertzberg Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS) Stanford University Abstract: To create with an autonomous mobile robot a 3D volumetric map of a scene it is necessary to gage several 3D scans and to merge them into one consistent 3D model. This paper provides a new solution to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem with six degrees of freedom. Robot motion on natural ...

WashingtonPost.com October 9, 2004 By RICHARD C. LEWIS PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Four years ago, scientists thought they had found the perfect place to settle the Noah flood debate: A farmer's house on a bluff overlooking the Black Sea built about 7,500 years ago - just before tidal waves inundated the homestead, submerged miles of coastline and turned the freshwater lake into a salty sea. Some believed the rectangular site of stones and wood could help solve the age-old question of whether the Bl ...

A 'perfect storm' brewing in robotics April 2004 By Charles Sheehan, The Associated Press MSNBC Cheaper parts, military money could spur industry Researchers in robotics have traditionally faced two debilitating obstacles: terribly expensive parts and difficulty attracting funding from anyone outside of a small corps of true believers. But the field could be in line for a major jolt. Robotics experts see a “perfect storm” heading their way, thanks in no small part to the human ravages of ...

A Battlefield Bot That Won't Die August 2002 By Elliot Borin Wired News It's called, appropriately enough, the Spinner, a six-wheeled turtle of an unmanned ground combat vehicle that can -- unlike any other of its species -- be turned on its back and still keep on truckin' over virtually any terrain navigable by tanks 10 times heavier and considerably slower and less mobile. "We expect it to become the resupply and reconnaissance workhorse of the UGCV fleet," says John Bares, director o ...

A breed apart February 24, 2005 The Guardian BigDog trots purposefully across the landscape, splashing through puddles and pushing through the long grass. It might be slow by the standards of most dogs, but for a walking robot, BigDog is quite an athlete. According to Marc Raibert, president of Boston Dynamics, BigDog is the first of a new breed of walking robots that could revolutionise transport. Walking robots have been around for decades, but Robosapiens and friends are still just t ...

A Campaign in Autonomous Mine Mapping By C. Baker, A. Morris, D. Ferguson, S. Thayer, C. Whittaker, Z. Omohundro, C. Reverte, W. Whittaker, D H¨ahnel and S. Thrun, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), April, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Unknown, unexplored and abandoned subterranean voids threaten mining operations, surface developments and the ...

A comparison of Gaussian and mean curvatures estimation methods on triangular meshes Sept. 2003 By Surazhsky, T. Magid, E. Soldea, O. Elber, G. Rivlin, E., Dept. of Appl. Math., Israel Inst. of Technol., Haifa, Israel Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Estimating intrinsic geometric properties of a surf ...

A comparison of pose estimation techniques: Hardware vs. video March 2005 Brad Grinstead*, Andreas Koschan, Mongi A. Abidi, Imaging, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, 334 Ferris Hall Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 Proceedings SPIE Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII, Vol. 5804, Orlando, FL, pp. 166-173, March 2005. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT Robotic navigation req ...

A Comparison of Two Camera Configurations For Optic-Flow Based Navigation of a UAV Through Urban Canyons By Stefan Hrabar and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 2673 - 2680, Sep 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract—We present a comparison of two camera co ...

A Constrained Optimization Approach to Globally Consistent Mapping By Ranjith Unnikrishnan and Alonzo Kelly, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA 2002 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '02), Vol. 1, October, 2002, pp. 564-569. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Mobile robot localization from large-scale appearance mosaics has been showing increasing promise as a lowcost, high-performance and infr ...

A Dangerous Path For Oregon Guard Soldiers katu.com January 12, 2005 By Elaine Murphy and KATU Web Staff Portland, Ore. - In this 2 Exclusive, Oregon National Guard soldiers who are in Iraq destroy an improvised explosive device (IED) before it destroys them. The soldiers, members of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, were in Tirmia, a town where terrorists prepared for the fight in Fallujah. Earlier in the day, they had traveled the same road, but on their way back, something stood in ...

A decentralized approach to formation maneuvers December 2003 Lawton, J.R.T. Beard, R.W. Young, B.J., Raytheon Missile Syst., Tucson, AZ, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a behavior-based approach to formation maneuvers for groups of mobile robots. Complex formation maneuvers are decomposed into a sequenc ...

A Developmental Organization for Robot Behavior February 2004 Roderic A. Grupen, Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper focuses on exploring how learning and development can be structured in synthetic (robot) systems. We present a developmental assembler for constructing reusable and temporally extended actions in a sequence. The discussion ad ...

A distributed architecture for Internet robot May 2004 Xueqiao Hou Jianbo Su, Dept. of Autom., Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ., China ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper describes a novel distributed networked architecture for an intelligent robot. It is proposed to address two challenges for an Internet/LAN based ro ...

A fascinating visit to a high-tech operating room February 3, 2005 By Kristen Gerencher Investor's Business Day SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- When a 31-year-old woman suffering from severe endometriosis needed treatment and a hysterectomy, Stanford University Hospital laparoscopic surgeon Dr. Camran Nezhat bypassed the traditional tool tray for more sophisticated aid: A robot. About a dozen surgeons and fellows in advanced training with Nezhat were still "prepping" the patient and steril ...

A FOLLOW-THE-LEADER APPROACH TO SERPENTINE ROBOT MOTION PLANNING By Howie Choset and Wade Henning, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 ASCE Journal of Aerospace Engineering Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT. Serpentine robots oer advantages over traditional mobile robots and robot arms because they have enhanced exibility and reachability, especially in convoluted environments. These robots are well suited to inspect large space-fairing t ...

A Formal Analysis and Taxonomy of Task Allocation in Multi-Robot Systems Brian P. Gerkey and Maja J. Mataric; USC Robotics Research Labs International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9):939-954, Sep 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Despite more than a decade of experimental work in multi-robot systems, important theoretical aspects of multi-robot coordination mechanisms have, to date, been largely untreated. To address this issue,we focus on the ...

A Formal Analysis of Potential Energy in a Multiagent System 2004 William M. Spears, Diana F. Spears, Rodney Heil Computer Science Department, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. I. INTRODUCTION The focus of our research is to build sensor network systems, specically, to design rapidly deployable, scalable, adaptive, cost-effective, and robust networks (i.e., swarms, or large arrays) of autonomous distributed mobile sensi ...

A formal framework for the study of task allocation in multi-robot systems By Brian P. Gerkey and Maja J. Mataric´; Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles July 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: Despite more than a decade of experimental work in multi-robot systems, important theoretical aspects of multi-robot coordina ...

A Framework for Comparing Agent Architectures By Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham England and Matthias Scheutz, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN In Proceedings of UKCI 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Research on algorithms and representations once dominated AI. Recently the importance of architectures has been acknowledged, but researchers have d ...

A framework for implementing cooperative motion on industrial controllers June 2004 Braun, B.M. Starr, G.P. Wood, J.E. Lumia, R. Aerosp. Corp., Albuquerque, NM, USA; IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 583- 589 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract The use of two or more robots jointly manipulating a common object, termed cooperative control, has many a ...

A Framework for Steering Dynamic Robotic Locomotion Systems 1 February 2003 Kenneth A. McIsaac Department of Elec. and Comp. Eng., University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canaga N6G 1H1 and James P. Ostrowski General Robotics Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut Street, Philedelphia, PA 19104-6228 International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 2 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to v ...

A Framework for Studying Multi-Robot Task Allocation By Brian P. Gerkey and Maja J. Mataric, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Presented at the International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems, Washinton, DC, May 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Although many multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) architectures can be found in the literature, relatively little has been said regarding the fundamental theoreti ...

Emediawire September 19 2004 For the first time in history, a robot has built its own synthetic central nervous system and then learned not only to walk, but how to autonomously enter and navigate the corridors of complex buildings. (PRWEB) September 19, 2004 -- This dramatic experiment was recently conducted at Imagination Engines, Inc. (IEI) in St. Louis, Missouri. Company President & CEO, Dr. Stephen Thaler points out that heretofore, scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have ...

AutoWeek June 25, 2004 By MARK VAUGHN THE STEPFORD WIVES ARE already here, they’re just still in pieces. The Jetsons car is here, too, but it needs work. Communication by thought is here as well, we think. The WIRED NextFest in San Francisco was a three-day-long peek into the future. There were automotive items there, but we’ve seen them all already: GM brought its AUTOnomy, Hy-Wire and fuel-cell-powered HydroGen3 minivan; there was a Smart Roadster present to highlight NextFest-presenting- ...

A Fuzzy Behavior-Based Control for Mobile Robots Using Adaptive Fusion Units January 2005 Authors: Watanabe, Keigo 1; Izumi, Kiyotaka 2; Maki, Junnosuke 3; Fujimoto, Katsuharu Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: It is known that a behavior-based control approach is effective for acquiring an intelligent control system of robots. However, further improvements are required for making any behavior-based control system robust against changes in the environments. A module learning m ...

A Fuzzy Perceptual Model for Ultrasound Sensors Applied to Intelligent Navigation of Mobile Robots Year of Publication: 2003 Authors Eugenio Aguirre Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, E.T.S. de Ingeniería Informática, University of Granada, 18071-Granada, Spain. eaguirre@decsai.ugr.es Antonio González Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, E.T.S. de Ingeniería Informática, University of Granada, 18071-Granada, Spain. gonzalez@decsai.ugr.es ...

A Gain-Switching Control Scheme for Position-Error-Based Bilateral Teleoperation: Contact Stability Analysis and Controller Design March 2004 Liy Nia Handshake Interactive Technologies Inc., 40 Weber Street East, Lobby Suite 50, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2H 6R3 and David W. L. Wang Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 3 - Publication Date: 1 ...

A General, Local Algorithm for Robot Formations By Jakob Fredslund 1 and Maja J. Mataric' 2 1 Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark 2 USC Robotics Lab, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Special Issue on Multi-Robot Systems October 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: We study the problem of achieving global ...

A Generalized Region-based Approach for Multi-target Tracking in Outdoor Environments By Boyoon Jung and Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), New Orleans, LA April 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We propose a generalized region-based approach to multi target tracking wh ...

A Generic Framework for Robotic Navigation March, 2003 By Chris Urmson 1, Reid Simmons 1, and Issa Nesnas 2 1 Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 2 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109 IEEE Aerospace Conference 2003, Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper describes progress in the development of a navigation framework for the Coupled-Layer Architecture for Ro ...

A global output-feedback controller for simultaneous tracking and stabilization of unicycle-type mobile robots June 2004 Khac Duc Do Zhong-Ping Jiang Jie Pan Sch. of Mech. Eng., Univ. of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 589- 594 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract We present a time-varying global output-feedback controller that solves both tracking and stabilization for unicycle-type mobile robots simultaneously at the torque level. The controller synthesis is based on a coordinate transformation, Lyapunov's direct method, and backstepping technique. Simulations demonstrate the result.

Podsedkowski, L.; Nowakowski, J.; Idzikowski, M.; and Vizvary, I. 2001. A new solution for path planning in partially known or unknown environments for nonholonomic mobile robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 34:145– 152. Rabin, S. 2000. A* speed optimizations. In DeLoura, M., ed., Game Programming Gems, 272–287. Rockland, MA: Charles River Media. Ramalingam, G., and Reps, T. 1996. An incremental algorithm for a generalization of the shortest-path problem. Journal of Algorithms 21:267–305 ...

A Hierarchical Architecture for Behavior-Based Robots By Monica N. Nicolescu and Maja J. Matari´c, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, 941 West 37th Place, Mailcode 0781, Los Angeles, CA 900890781 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Agents), Bologna, Italy, Jul 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT Behavior-based systems (BBS) have been effective in a variety of applications, but due t ...

A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach to the Revisiting Problem in Mobile Robot Map Building. 2003 D. Fox, J. Ko, K. Konolige, and B. Stewart. Proc. of the International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR-03) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present an application of hierarchical Bayesian estimation to robot map building. The revisiting problem occurs when a robot has to decide whether it is seeing a previously-built portion of a map, or is exploring ...

A Hierarchical Object Based Representation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping By Chieh-Chih Wang, ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia and Charles Thorpe, Qatar Campus, Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Accomplishing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in ver ...

A Hierarchical, Multi-Resolutional Moving Object Prediction Approach for Autonomous On-Road Driving By Schlenoff, C., Madhavan, R., Barbera, T., Intelligent Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD Proceedings of the 2004 ICRA Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 26 - May 1, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper, we present a hierarchical multi-resolutional approach for moving object prediction v ...

A high-speed VLSI design and ASIC implementation for constructing Euclidean distance-based discrete Voronoi diagram April 2004 Sudha, N. Sridharan, K., Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Indian Inst. of Technol. Madras, Chennai, India IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 2 On page(s): 352- 358 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we present a new algorithm to c ...

A Human Motion-Based Environmental Complexity Measure for Robotics By Dylan A. Shell and Maja J. Mataric´ Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper describes how environmental complexity measures can be employed in the process of ...

A hybrid scheduling and control system architecture for warehouse management December 2003 Byung-In Kim Heragu, S.S. Graves, R.J. St Onge, A., Dept. of Ind. & Syst. Eng., Univ. of Memphis, TN, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In recent years, the hybrid control framework has received attention from the research community. ...

A Hybrid-Control Approach to the Parking Problem of a Wheeled Vehicle Using Limited View-Angle Visual Feedback April-May 2004 P. Murrieri, D. Fontanelli and A. Bicchi Interdepartmental Research Center “Enrico Piaggio”, University of Pisa, via Diotisalvi, 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 4/5- Publication Date: 1 April-May 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In this paper we consider the mobil ...

A lake before Tahoe? July 1, 2005 Merry Thomas BONANZA STAFF WRITER North Lake Tahoe Bonanza Unbeknownst to many, including scientists, a lake existed in the Tahoe Basin before Lake Tahoe. Discovered this May, geologists from two universities found evidence of an ancestral Lake Tahoe, according to Dr. Richard Schweikert of the University of Nevada, Reno, geology department. "We found an overlay of glacial deposits," he said. "Our best estimate is that Lake Tahoe is at least two million y ...

A leg configuration sensory system for dynamical body state estimates in a hexapod robot September 2003 By Pei-Chun Lin Komsuoglu, H. Kodistchek, D.E.; Dept. of Mech. Eng., Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor, MI, USA Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract We report on a novel leg strain sensory system for the autonomous robo ...

Technician July 21 2004 Ben McNeely A class of robots, in the future, evolve from their current programming, instilled with three basic laws to guide their actions and logically deduce that humanity is killing itself. They in turn "protect" humanity from itself by overthrowing the government. This view of robots is not quite what Isaac Asimov was going for when he published his short story collection, "I, Robot" in 1951. But that is the basic plot of the new movie that bears his works' name ...

A Machine With a Mind of Its Own August 2004 By Oliver Morton WIRED Magazine For a machine that's changing the world, the device on the lab bench in front of me doesn't look very impressive - it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A contraption about the size of a human hand moves from side to side along a track. At the far right end of its trajectory, a proboscis-like pipette pecks into a foil-covered plastic container and sucks up some liquid; the hand moves a foot o ...

A MARKET APPROACH TO TIGHTLY-COUPLED MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION: FIRST RESULTS By Nidhi Kalra and Anthony Stentz, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Proceedings of the ARL Collaborative Technologies Alliance Symposium, May, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT In multi-robot systems, a group of robots cooperate to accomplish tasks more e±ciently than could a single robot. In this paper, we apply the market approach to t ...

A MATTER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE June 10, 2005 Khaleej Times Online The reason why AI is an important area of research is not only because it aims to construct 'intelligent' computers, but also because it can attack problems that are very hard to solve using traditional computer science methods, says Dr. Michael Rovatsos in an interview with ANSHUMAN JOSHI. One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; Two, a robot must obey the orde ...

A Mechanism for Dynamic Coordination of Multiple Robots July 2004 Luiz Chaimowicz1;2, Vijay Kumar1 and Mario F. M. Campos2 1GRASP Laboratory { University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 19104 2DCC { Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, 31270-010 Autonomous Robots, Volume 17, Issue 1, July 2004: Pages 7 – 21. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper, we present a mechanism for coordinating multiple robots i ...

A micro-rover navigation and control system for autonomous planetary exploration April 2004 Authors: Landzettel K.; Steinmetz B-M.; Brunner B.; Arbter K.; Pollefeys M.; Vergauwen M.; Moreas R.; Xu F.; Steinicke L.; Fontaine B Publisher: VSP Abstract: This paper describes an end-to-end control system for autonomous navigation of a small vehicle at a remote place, e.g. in space for planetary exploration. Due to a realistic background of this study the proposed method has to deal with limite ...

A Mobile Hyper Redundant Mechanism for Search and Rescue Tasks By A. Wolf, H. Ben Brown Jr., R. Casciola, A. Costa, M. Schwerin, E. Shammas and Howie Choset, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA In Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, October 2003, Volume 3, Pages 2889-2895 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this work we introduce a new concept of a search and rescue robo ...

A Mobile Phone That Controls a Rolling Camera March 11, 2005 John Blau, IDG News Service PCWorld HANOVER, GERMANY -- What's a technology show without a wacky device? Here's one that lives up to that billing: a camera on wheels that can be controlled remotely with a mobile phone using short-range Bluetooth technology. Why you would want or need to do that is another question. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Today demonstrated the wireless robotic device, called Rob-1, at its CeBIT booth ...

A Modular Concept of the Robotic Vehicle for Demining Operations May 2005 Authors: HavlÍk, tefan Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: Paper analyses some most important characteristics that should be taken into consideration in building the robotic demining vehicle. Based on previous experiences from the development of demining technology the modular concept of the multipurpose vehicle and some its main functional parts are discussed. Such robotic vehicle can be used as general ...

A Modular Control System for a Cognitive Robotic Architecture July 18-20, 2005 By P. Ratanaswasd, W. Dodd, J. Phillips, K. Kawamura, and D. Noelle Center for Intelligent Systems Vanderbilt University 12th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), Seattle, WA Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Novel, complex movement tasks present a daunting challenge to an independent robotic system. This paper details a solution to the problem of generating such motions by selecting relevant behaviors with a Working Memory System and combining the selected behaviors with error-based control. This system is used to drive motion within the cognitive framework of the humanoid robot ISAC.

A modular dynamic simulation algorithm for complex robot systems May 2004 Bonaventura, C.S. Jablokow, K.W., ZETA-TECH Assoc. Inc., Cherry Hill, NJ, USA ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a modular approach for the dynamic modelling and efficient simulation of complex robot systems composed of multipl ...

A motion-planning approach to folding: from paper craft to protein folding February 2004 Guang Song Amato, N.M., Dept. of Comput. Sci., Texas A&M Univ., College Station, TX, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we present a framework for studying folding problems from a motion-planning perspective. The version of th ...

A Multi-robot Approach to Stealthy Navigation in the Presence of an Observer By Ashley Tews, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Maja J. Mataric Computer Science Department, University of Southern California IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 2379-2385, New Orleans, LA, May 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper we propose a simple reactive method for multiple robots carrying out sequential low-visibility navigat ...

A Multiagent Approach to Qualitative Landmark-Based Navigation September 2003 Authors: Busquets D.1; Sierra C.2; de Màntaras R.L Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: In this paper we present a multiagent system for landmark-based navigation in unknown environments. We propose a bidding mechanism to coordinate the actions requested by the different agents. The navigation system has been tested on a real robot on indoor unstructured environments. The full text article is available for purchase

A Multimodal Hierarchial Approach to Robot Learning by Imitation 2004 Weber, Cornelius and Elshaw, Mark and Zochios, Alex and Wermter, Stefan Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Lund University Cognitive Studies Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper we propose an approach to robot learning by imitation that uses the multimodal inputs of language, vision and motor. In our approach a student robot learns fr ...

A Navigation System for Assistant Robots Using Visually Augmented POMDPs Year of Publication: 2005 Authors María Elena López Electronics Department, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain 28805 Luis Miguel Bergasa Electronics Department, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain 28805 Rafael Barea Electronics Department, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain 28805 María Soledad Escudero Electronics Department, University of Alca ...

Report Date: 19 MAR 2004 Authors: SPATIAL INTEGRATED SYSTEMS INC ROCKVILLE MD Abstract: The development of a neuroprosthesis system utilizing spatial feedback control is presented in this project final report. During this phase, the RobotEyes (TradeMark) Functional Electrical Stimulation System (REFES) was developed as an intelligent vision based system. The system has capabilities in image capture and processing within a related small working environment. The working environment can be a fixe ...

A New Actuation Approach for Human Friendly Robot Design April-May 2004 M. Zinn, B. Roth, Design Division, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University. Stanford, CA 94305, USA O. Khatib and J.K. Salisbury Robotics Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. Stanford, CA 94305, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 4/5- Publication Date: 1 April-May 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full t ...

A New Approach to Humanitarian Demining: Part 1: Mobile Platform for Operation on Unstructured Terrain May 2005 Authors: Debenest, Paulo 1; Fukushima, Edwardo 1; Tojo, Yuki 1; Hirose, Shigeo Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: Landmines can deprive whole areas of valuable resources, and continue to kill and cause injuries years after the end of armed conflicts. Armored vehicles are used for mine clearance, but with limited reliability. The final inspection of minefields is st ...

A New Approach to Humanitarian Demining: Part 2: Development and Analysis of Pantographic Manipulator May 2005 Authors: Debenest, Paulo 1; Fukushima, Edwardo 1; Tojo, Yuki 1; Hirose, Shigeo Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: Humanitarian demining is an application in which the use of tele-operated machines and mechanisms has been gaining acceptance recently. Actually, demining is just one among many other field applications that require a high degree of mobility, manipulation ...

A New Low Cost System for Autonomous Robot Heading and Position Localization in a Closed Area September 2003 Authors: Hernández S.1; Torres J.M.2; Morales C.A.2; Acosta L. Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: A low cost system for the localization of mobile indoor robots is presented. The system is composed of an emitter located on a wall and a receptor on top of the robot. The emitter is a laser pointer acting like a beacon, and the receptor is a cylinder made out of 32 independent photovoltaic cells. The robot's position and orientation are obtained from the moments when the laser crosses each cell. The full text article is available for purchase

His colleague, Jeff Grossman, spoke of the evolving intelligence of robot soldiers. "Now, maybe, we're a mammal," he says. "We're trying to get to the level of a primate, where we are making sensible decisions." The hunter-killer at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center is one of five broad categories of military robots under development. Another scouts buildings, tunnels and caves. A third hauls tons of weapons and gear and performs searches and reconnaissance. A fourth is a drone in flig ...

A New Multi-Sensor Registration Technique for Three Dimensional Scene Modeling with Application to Unmanned Vehicle Mobility Enhancement March 2005 Faysal Boughorbel, Andreas Koschan*, and Mongi Abidi, Imaging, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer, Engineering, 409 Ferris Hall, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, United States Proc. of SPIE Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII, Vol. 5804, Orlando, FL, pp. 174-181, March 2005 Please visi ...

A Novel Fully Decoupled Two-Degrees-of-Freedom Parallel Wrist June 2004 M. Carricato, and V. Parenti-Castelli DIEM—Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 6 - Publication Date: 1 June 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In this paper we present a novel pointing parallel mechanism with fully decoupled degrees of freed ...

A novel gait generation for biped walking robots based on mechanical energy constraint June 2004 Asano, F. Yamakita, M. Kamamichi, N. Zhi-Wei Luo; Bio-Mimetic Control Res. Center, Inst. of Phys. & Chem. Res., Nagoya, Japan IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 565- 573 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper proposes novel energy-based gait genera ...

A numerical test for the closure properties of 3-D grasps June 2004 Xiangyang Zhu Han Ding Wang, M.Y. Sch. of Mech. Eng., Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., China; IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 543- 549 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a numerical test for the closure properties (force closure and form closure) of multifingered grasp ...

A Paradigm for Dynamic Coordination of Multiple Robots: Special Issue on Analysis and Experiments in Distributed Multi-Robot Systems (Guest Editors: Nikolaos P. Papanikolopoulos and Stergios I. Roumeliotis) July 2004 Authors: Chaimowicz L.1; Kumar V.2; Campos M.F.M Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: In this paper, we present a paradigm for coordinating multiple robots in the execution of cooperative tasks. The basic idea in the paper is to assign to each robot in the team, a r ...

A parameter variation modeling approach for enterprise optimization August 2003 Masin, M. Shaikh, N.I. Wysk, R.A., Harold & Inge Marcus Dept. of Ind. & Manuf. Eng., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract The past two decades have seen significant improvements in optimization modeling ...

A pseudodistance function and its applications April 2004 Xiangyang Zhu Han Ding Tso, S.K. Sch. of Mech. Eng., Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., China IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 2 On page(s): 344- 352 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract By using the concept of gauge function, a pseudodistance function is defined for quantifying the clearance or the penetration depth ...

A real-time expectation-maximization algorithm for acquiring multiplanar maps of indoor environments with mobile robots June 2004 Thrun, S. Martin, C. Yufeng Liu Hahnel, D. Emery-Montemerlo, R. Chakrabarti, D. Burgard, W., Comput. Sci. Dept., Stanford Univ., CA, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Volume: 20, Issue: 3, On page(s): 433- 443 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract T ...

A Real-Time Image Recognition System for Tiny Autonomous Mobile Robots Year of Publication: 2005 Authors Stefan Mahlknecht Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology Roland Oberhammer Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology Gregor Novak Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology Publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers Norwell, MA, USA ABSTRACT Intelligent sensors for mobile robots play an important rol ...

A Region-based Approach for Cooperative Multi-Target Tracking in a Structured Environment By Boyoon Jung and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA 2002 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 2764-2769, EPFL, Switzerland, Semptember 30 - October 4, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper addresses the problem of tracking multiple targets using a network of communicating robots ...

A rescue robot system for collecting information designed for ease of use — a proposal of a rescue systems concept March 2005 Authors: Ito, Kazuyuki; Yang, Zhixiao; Saijo, Kazuhiko; Hirotsune, Kazuyuki; Gofuku, Akio; Matsuno, Fumitoshi Publisher: VSP Abstract: A remote controlled robot for collecting information in disasters, e.g. earthquakes, is one of most effective applications of robots, because it is very dangerous for human beings to locate survivors in collapsed buildings and, in a ...

A robot for building planes 4/13/05 innovations report Fatronik Technological Centre has put the finishing touches to the development of a portable climbing robot capable of carrying out precision operations and originally designed for the aeronautics sector. Despite being a highly technological industry, most aeronautical assemblies are still little automated, given the ever greater size of aeroplanes and the need to have large and expensive means of production. Given this problem, Fatro ...

A robot Named Boudreaux November 08, 2004 By Angus Lind Copyright 2004 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company The next time humans return to space to explore the moon or Mars, they could be accompanied by Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. Technically identified as "Extra Vehicular Activity Robotic Assistants," the two dog-like robots were named by robotics engineer Jeffrey Graham of S&K Technologies, a NASA contractor from Baton Rouge. Graham, a 1991 LSU graduate, nicknamed Boudreaux in honor of ...

A robot That Ties The Knot February 10, 2005 PhysOrg.com An ASME member and retired engineer who once designed biomedical instruments is busy in his basement building a machine that can automatically tie a knot in a necktie. Dr. Seth Goldstein, who has worked as a mechanical engineer for 40 years, will complete the robotic device this summer for display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. There, the job of Why Knot will be to inspire the analytical and creative abilities of young men a ...

A Robot to Stop the Earth Discover Magazine March 2004 Every year landslides cause 25 to 50 deaths and $1.5 billion in damage in the United States. They account for 15 percent of the deaths from natural disasters in Europe. And in December, a single event killed more than 200 people in the Philippines. Sending workers to stabilize mountainsides using steel rods and cement can help prevent disaster, but it introduces new difficulties. Vibrating drills generate noxious dust and loosen heavy, ...

The Electric New Paper OCT 18, 2004 A MOUSE uses its whiskers to feel its way around. But what if you cut the whiskers out and stick them on a robot? A robot with real mouse whiskers could represent an important step towards developing simple robots that navigate by mimicking rodents. Such mini robots could eventually be used to perform repairs in pipes. The bristly bot, known as AMouse (Artificial Mouse) was built by researchers from the University of Tokyo in Japan and the University ...

A Robotic CAD System using a Bayesian Framework Kamel Mekhnacha, 1, Emmanuel Mazer 2, and Pierre Bessiere 1 1 Leibniz/IMAG, 46, Avenue Felix Viallet, 38031 Grenoble, France 1 GRAVIR/IMAG, INRIA Rh^one-Alpes, ZIRST, 38330 Montbonnot, France Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present in this paper a Bayesian CAD system for robotic applications. We address the problem of the propagation of geometric uncertainties and how esian CAD system for robotic ap ...

A robotic platform for testing moth-inspired plume tracking strategies May 2004 Rutkowski, A.J. Edwards, S. Willis, M.A. Quinn, R.D. Causey, G.C., Dept. of Mech. & Aerosp. Eng., Case Western Reserve Univ., Cleveland, OH, USA ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract A mobile autonomous robot capable of tracking an odor plume to it ...

A Robotic Wayfinding System for the Visually Impaired By Vladimir Kulyukin, Chaitanya Gharpure, Pradnya Sute, Nathan De Graw, John Nicholson; Department of Computer Science, Utah State University, Logan, UT, 84322 Proceedings of the Sixteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-04), San Jose, CA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present an emerging indoor assisted navigation system for the visually impaired. The core ...

A RoboticWalker That Provides Guidance By Aaron Morris 1, Raghavendra Donamukkala 1, Anuj Kapuria 1, Aaron Steinfeld 1, Judith T. Matthews 2, Jacqueline Dunbar-Jacob 1, Sebastian Thrun 1,2, 1 School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 2 School of Nursing, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '03), May, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This p ...

A Rolling Robo-Spy May 24, 2002 By Paul Eng ABCNews.com High-flying, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have helped soldiers spot and fight terrorists in Afghanistan's hilly terrain. But some military planners believe that UAVs won't be as useful in future battles — especially those that will take place in urban landscapes and buildings. In such confined spaces, soldiers would be more concerned with more immediate dangers — such as threats around the next corner, as well as what's behind the bui ...

A Scalable Approach to Human-Robot Interaction By Ashley Tews, Maja J. Mataric´, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme USC Robotics Lab, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Taipei, Taiwan September 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: Much of the current research in human-robot interaction is concerned with single ...

A Semi-Autonomous Robot for Stripping Paint from Large Vessels July/August 2003 B. Ross, J. Bares, and C. Fromme National Robotics Engineering Consortium, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 7/8 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. The National Robotics Engineering Consortium and UltraStrip Systems Inc. have developed a highly flexible and productive r ...

A Set Theoretic Approach to Dynamic Robot Localization and Mapping Year of Publication: 2004 Authors M. Di Marco Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Siena, Via Roma, 56-53100 Siena, Italy. dimarco@dii.unisi.it A. Garulli Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Siena, Via Roma, 56-53100 Siena, Italy. garulli@dii.unisi.it A. Giannitrapani Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Siena, Via Roma, 56-53100 Siena, Italy. g ...

A simple and analytical procedure for calibrating extrinsic camera parameters February 2004 Fei-Yue Wang, Key Lab. of Complex Syst. & Intelligence Sci., Chinese Acad. of Sci., Beijing, China IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a simple and analytical procedure for calibrating extrinsic camera parameters. First, a ca ...

A Simulation Framework for Evaluating Mobile Robots By Stephen Balakirsky and Elena Messina, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Intelligent Systems Division, Gaithersburg, MD Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS) Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, August 13-15, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract As robotic technologies mature, we are moving from simple systems that roam our laboratories to heterogeneous gro ...

A SMA actuated artificial earthworm May 2004 Menciassi, A. Gorini, S. Pernorio, G. Dario, P., Center for Res. in Microeng., Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy; ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents the design and development of a microrobot which aims to replicate the locomotion principle of earthworms. ...

A Small Rolling Spy for the Marines By Paul Eng ABC News May 24 High-flying, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have helped soldiers spot and fight terrorists in Afghanistan's hilly terrain. But some military planners believe that UAVs won't be as useful in future battles — especially those that will take place in urban landscapes and buildings. In such confined spaces, soldiers would be more concerned with more immediate dangers — such as threats around the next corner, as well as what's behind ...

A SMALL SUBMARINE ROBOT FOR EXPERIMENTS IN UNDERWATER SENSOR NETWORKS By Vitaly Bokser, Carl Oberg, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Aristides Requicha, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 International Federation of Automatic Control Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV), 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper describes a small underwater robot designed for experiments with sensor-actuator networks. The robot is based on the mote platform, which is used extensively in the sensor networking community as an experimental testbed. The components and construction of the robot are described. Preliminary tests of depth regulation and temperature measurement are reported and analyzed.

A Sony subsidiary creates a robot that is designed to play with toddlers 11 May 2005 News Target In a nursery school in California, there is a robot named Qrio that actually plays with children up to two years of age. This robot was designed by Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc. in order to see how a robot can be accepted by humans and live in harmony with them. The children at the nursery school were initially unsure what to make of the robot, but they now accept it as one of ...

A Spatio-temporal Extension to Isomap Nonlinear Dimension Reduction By Odest Chadwicke Jenkins & Maja J Matari´c, Robotics Research Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, 941 W. 37th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pages 441-448, Banff, Alberta, Canada, Jul 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present an extension of ...

A Study of Polynomial Curvature Clothoid Paths for Motion Planning for Car-like Robots By Mihail Pivtoraiko and Alonzo Kelly Tech. report CMU-RI-TR-04-68, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, December, 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this report we present an overview of our investigation into constructing motion templates. We start with a successful implementation of elementary concepts that worked well on previous projects, then proceed with a generalization of that approach through a study of spatial distinctness of the same type of paths, and finally present a further generalization that looks at all possible motions through space.

A Submersible Robot Dives for Steamship Gold The New York Times November 16, 2004 By WILLIAM J. BROAD When the 250-foot Odyssey Explorer docked here this week to unload a trove of gold coins and valuable artifacts from the wreck of the Republic, a 19th-century steamer, the Explorer's deck was a blur of activity, bristling with the modern technology now necessary for the recovery of sunken treasure. A seven-ton submersible robot held pride of place. Its flexible arm was equipped with tiny su ...

A Survey of Commercially Available and Proven Remote Control Machines for Excavation and Recovery of Buried Ordnance March 1, 2002 By C. Pruneda; A Bilstrom Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (US) Office of Scientific and Technical Information Description/Abstract The issue of unexploded ordnance excavation and removal is complicated by the interaction between the independent robotics systems (e.g. manipulator, sensors, and software). A review of commercially available robotic systems ...

A survey of probabilistic models, using the Bayesian Programming methodology as a unifying framework 2003 Julien Diard, Pierre Bessière, and Emmanuel Mazer, Laboratoire GRAVIR / IMAG – CNRS, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, 655 avenue de l’Europe, 38330 Montbonnot Saint Martin FRANCE Proceedings International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (IEEE-CIRAS), Singapore. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents a surv ...

A Tale of Two Helicopters By Srikanth Saripalli1, Jonathan M. Roberts2, Peter I. Corke2, Gregg Buskey3, Gaurav S. Sukhatme1 1Robotics Research Lab, University of Southern California Los Angeles, USA 2CSIRO Manufacturing & Infrastructure Technology PO Box 883, Kenmore, Qld 4069, Australia 3University of Queensland St. Lucia, Qld 4066, Australia IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 805-810, Oct 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in ...

A team of mobile robots and monitoring sensors—from concept to experiment July 2004 Author: Skrzypczyski P. Publisher: VSP Abstract: This paper describes the underlying concepts, architecture and implementation of a robotic system consisting of heterogenous mobile robots and stationary sensors, cooperating in a task of collective perception and world modeling. The navigation capability of a group of robots can be improved by sharing available information about the state of the environment ...

A Test Bed for Autonomous Formation Flying By David J. Naffin and Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Robotic Embedded System Laboratory, Robotics Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles California 90089-0781 Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems Technical Report IRIS-02-412, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper outlines the design of an autonomous flying vehicle (AFV) for use in research ...

A Testbed for Experiments with Sensor/Actuator Networks By Mohammed Rahimi, Rohit Mediratta, Karthik Dantu, Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781, USA Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems Technical Report IRIS-02-417, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe a table-top testbed for experiments in mobile sensor networks. The t ...

A Tiered Planning Strategy for Biped Navigation By JOEL CHESTNUTT 1 and JAMES J. KUFFNER 1,2 1 Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA 2 Digital Human Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 2-41-6 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan 135-0064 Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids'04), 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper ...

A Unified Model For Developmental Robotics 2003 Williams Paquier, Nicolas Do Huu, Raja Chatila, LAAS/CNRS, 7 avenue du Colonel Roche, F-31077 Toulouse Cedex 04, France Proceedings Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 101, pages pp. 173-174, Boston, MA, USA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present the architecture and distributed algorithms of an implemented system called NeuSter, th ...

A Versatile Implementation of the TraderBots Approach for Multirobot Coordination By M. Bernardine DIAS, Robert ZLOT, Marc ZINCK, Juan P. GONZALEZ, and Anthony (Tony) STENTZ The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA March, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper reports details of a versatile implementation of the TraderBots approach: A market-based approach to multirobot coordination. The architectural layout, implementation details, and variety of features are described. Experimental results are presented using a team of Pioneer II DX robots engaged in exploration and distributed sensing tasks. Different features and strengths of the approach and the implementation are highlighted in the experimental results.

A-380 soars in style at Paris Air Show 21 June , 2005 walletwatch.com Chennai: If there were record crowds at the Paris Air Show, especially on the last three days when the exhibition was open to the public, it was because of one aircraft - the Airbus-380. As many as 4,80,000 people visited Le Bourget, outside Paris, where for a week, beginning June 13, the world's aviation industry had gathered to showcase its latest. Some 3,00,000 people visited the show last year; the previous recor ...

Accurate and Flexible Simulation for Dynamic, Vision-Centric Robots By J. Go, B. Browning, and M. Veloso, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, November, 2004 tech. report CMU-CS-04-180 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract As robots become more complex by incorporating dynamic stability or greater mechanical degrees of freedom, the difficulty of developing control algorithms directly on the robot increases. This is especially true for l ...

Achieving Collaborative Interaction with a Humanoid Robot December 2003. By D. Sofge1, D. Perzanowski1, M. Skubic3, N. Cassimatis2, J. G. Trafton2, D. Brock2, M. Bugajska1, W. Adams1, A. Schultz 1,2Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Laboratory Washington, DC 20375 3 Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science University of Missouri-Columbia Columbia, MO 65211 Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, Singapore Please visit the web site to view t ...

Active Damping of a Flexible Beam By Rasmus Olsson, Alessandro Bindi, Anders Robertsson 2004 Conference Paper Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper describes the active damping of a flexible beam connected to the end-effector of a robot manipulator. An observer-based feedback controller is developed and experimental results are presented. Iterative feedback tuning (IFT) is applied to shape the step response.

ACTIVE-TWIST ROTOR CONTROL APPLICATIONS FOR UAVs 2004 Matthew L. Wilbur* and W. Keats Wilkie ASC ABSTRACT The current state-of-the-art in active-twist rotor control is discussed using representative examples from analytical and experimental studies, and the application to rotary-wing UAVs is considered. Topics include vibration and noise reduction, rotor performance improvement, active blade tracking, stability augmentation, and rotor blade de-icing. A review of the current status of piezoelectric fiber composite actuator technology, the class of piezoelectric actuators implemented in active-twist rotor systems, is included. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety.

Active-Vision Control Systems For Complex Adversarial 3-D Environments By Eric N. Johnson, Anthony J. Calise, Allen R. Tannenbaum, Stefano Soatto, Naira Hovakimyan, and Anthony J. Yezzi Proceedings of the American Control Conference, 2005 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This tutorial session covers recent developments in methods that utilize 2-D and 3-D imagery (e.g., from LADAR, visual, FLIR, acoustic-location) to enable aerial vehicles to autonomous ...

Ad-Hoc Localization Using Ranging and Sectoring By Krishna K. Chintalapudi, Amit Dhariwal, Ramesh Govindan, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA IEEE INFOCOM 2004, Hong Kong, Mar 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Ad-hoc localization systems enable nodes in a sensor network to fix their positions in a global coordinate system using a relatively small number of anchor nodes that know ...

Adaptable machines By Scott Kirsner New York Times News Service Sun-Sentinel.com NAHANT, Mass.· Joseph Ayers was crouched over a laptop computer, watching a black lobster through a rectangular acrylic window. Ayers' shed is adjacent to a fiberglass saltwater tank that looks like an above-ground swimming pool, and through the window, he observed the 7-pound lobster clamber across the sandy bottom and struggle to surmount small rocks. "He's pitched backwards onto his tail, and his front le ...

Adapting Human Motion for the Control of a Humanoid Robot By Nancy S. Pollard 1, J.K. Hodgins 2, M.J. Riley 3, and C.G. Atkeson 4 1 Computer Science Department, Brown University. 2 School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. 3 College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology and ATR Human Information Science Laboratories. 4 Atkeson is at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and ATR Human Information Science Laboratories. Proceedings of the IEEE Inte ...

Adaptive control of robot manipulators using multiple neural networks September 2003 By Choon-Young Lee Ju-Jang Lee; Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Korea Adv. Inst. of Sci. & Technol., Daejeon, South Korea Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract A new adaptive controller based on multiple neural networks for unce ...

Adaptive Dynamic Walking of a Quadruped Robot on Irregular Terrain Based on Biological Concepts 1 March 2003 Yasuhiro Fukuoka and Hiroshi Kimura Graduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan and Avis H. Cohen Department of Biology and Institute, for Systems Research, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 3 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is re ...

Adaptive Output Feedback for Altitude Control of an Unmanned Helicopter Using Rotor RPM August 2004 By Nakwan Kim, J.V.R. Prasad and Anthony J. Calise, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0150 J. Eric Corban, Guided Systems Technologies, Inc. McDonough, GA 30253-1453 AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. This paper proposes an adaptive approach for altitude control for an unmanned helicopter. The ...

Adaptive Sampling for Environmental Robotics By Mohammad Rahimi1,3, Richard Pon1,2, William J. Kaiser1,2,, Gaurav S. Sukhatme4 , Deborah Estrin2, and Mani Srivastava 1,2 1Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 2 Department of Computer Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 3 Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 4 Department of Computer Science, USC, Los Angeles, CA 90089 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ...

Adaptive Sampling for Marine Microorganism Monitoring By Bin Zhang, Gaurav S. Sukhatme and Aristides A. G. Requicha, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe the design and construction of an underwater sensor actuator network to detect extreme temperature gradients. We are motivated ...

Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Organization in Groups of Robots By Torbjørn S. Dahl, Maja J. Mataric´, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme Robotics Research Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IROS), Lausanne, Switzerland, Oct 2002. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper presents experiments, in simulation, with a group of robots that improve their perfor ...

Adaptive tracking control of underwater vehicle-manipulator systems based on the virtual decomposition approach June 2004 Antonelli, G. Caccavale, F. Chiaverini, S. Dipt. di Automazione, Univ. degli Studi di Cassino, Italy IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 594- 602 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract A novel adaptive control law for the end-effector t ...

Adaptive Trajectory Control for Autonomous Helicopters By Eric N. Johnson and Suresh K. Kannany AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics Vol. 28, No. 3, 2005. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. For autonomous helicopter flight, it is common to separate the flight control problem into an innerloop that controls attitude and an outerloop that controls the translational trajectory of the helicopter. In previous work, dynamic inversion and neural network based ...

Technology Review November 2004 By Gregory T. Huang After 50 years of research, scientists have yet to build a robot that can learn to manipulate new objects as proficiently as a one-year-old child. Robots don’t react well to new situations; most of their movements must be programmed in advance. Some use sensors to fine-tune their movements in real time, but they generally don’t retain and interpret the sensor data. So while they might navigate a room without bumping into things, they can’t s ...

Advanced Sonar with Velocity Compensation February 2004 Lindsay Kleeman Intelligent Robotics Research Centre, Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 2 - Publication Date: 1 February 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Robotics research is dependent on intelligent, fast, accurate, reliable, and cheap sensors. Sonar sensin ...

Advanced Technologies hails Vigilante's ability to 'shoot back' UVOnline.com February 2005 Advanced Technologies company officials believe the Vigilante became the first unmanned aerial vehicle anywhere to fire weapons while under control of another aircraft, said Kevin McGonigle, a spokesman with Advanced Technologies, during its succesful weapons trials in Yuma, Ariz, on Dec 13. "What people have found with these unmanned vehicles is that if you don't have the ability to shoot back at the ...

[20] T.H. Cormen, C.E. Leiserson, and R.L. Rivest, Introduction to Algorithms. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. [21] J.D. Crisman and J.A. Webb, “The Warp Machine on Navlab,” IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 451-465, May 1991. [22] T. Darrell, G. Gordon, M. Harville, and J. Woodfill, “Integrated Person Tracking Using Stereo, Color, and Pattern Detection,” Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 601-608, 1998. [23] U.R. Dhond and J.K. Aggarwal, ...

Wired News October 26, 2004 by David Cohn If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there's not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain. If mastered, the technology could be used to help spinal cord injuries, amputees or stroke victims. "I still think prosthetics is at an early stage ... but this is a big step in the right direction," said Chance Spalding, a bioengineering graduate student who worked on the project. The prosthetic ...

AeroVironment Flies World's First Liquid Hydrogen Powered UAV; Enables Persistent Communications Relay and Remote Sensing Breakthrough Systems June 28, 2005 BusinessWeek BALTIMORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 28, 2005--AeroVironment (AV), a world leader in the development of unmanned High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) aircraft, has successfully completed the world's first liquid hydrogen powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight tests. The fifty-foot wingspan prototype aircraft accomplished a ...

AF robots make bomb-hunting safer May 05, 2005 by Larine Barr Air Force Research Lab Public Affairs PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) -- After a civil engineer was injured by a submunition while clearing a beddown area during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom at Tallil Air Base, Iraq, it was time to find a solution to the problem Robotics research group officials are investigating the next generation of robotic devices to address rising threats from terrorist explosives. The Ty ...

Agent-based Multimodal Interface for Dynamically Autonomous Mobile Robots June 2003 By Donald Sofge, Magdalena Bugajska, William Adams, Dennis Perzanowski, Alan Schultz; Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR2003) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Agents provide a flexible and scalable method of integrating a ...

Agents With or Without Emotions? By Matthias Scheutz, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame In Proceedings of FLAIRS 02, AAAI Press Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents a critical view of the status quo of some of the emerging research efforts on emotional agents. It attempts to isolate (at least roughly) some of the reasons why emotional agents may be desirable and points to the diculties of making notions of emotion precise. It lists various problems connected to emotional agents and concludes that it is counterproductive to the whole endeavor of understanding and modeling emotions if "emotion labels" are conferred upon states of agents prematurely without justication.

Air Force OKs $272 million for Northrop July 13, 2005 By Bruce V. Bigelow Sign On San Diego In another sign that the Pentagon is extending its fleet of unmanned aircraft, the Air Force yesterday awarded a $272.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman's San Diego-based Integrated Systems business. The order calls for the company to produce four of its second-generation Global Hawk robotic surveillance aircraft. The latest version of the unmanned, high-altitude jet, which is designated G ...

Air Force picks radar for unmanned combat plane Military & Aerospace Electronics January 25, 2005 EL SEGUNDO, Calif., 25 January 2005. Raytheon Company's option to proceed with its X-band thin radar aperture (XTRA) contract has been exercised, allowing the company to produce the next generation radar antenna technology for the J-UCAS (Joint Unmanned Air Combat System) that could revolutionize manned and unmanned combat systems. The AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) exercised the option f ...

Air Force Requests $5.7B for 144 More Predators 21-Mar-2005 Defense Industry Daily The USAF announced plans to spend $5.7 billion over the next five years to buy roughly 144 of GA Aeronautical Systems' Predator UAVs - enough to add 12 squadrons of 12 robotic aircraft each, plus 36 support packages including ground control station, satellite terminals and other equipment. The USAF has accepted 114 Predators as of last month, and lost 26 Predators in combat since 2002. This brings overall losse ...

Air Force seeking 144 more Predators March 19, 2005 By Bruce V. Bigelow Sign On San Diego.com Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper told Congress last month that he wants to buy every Predator robotic spy plane that San Diego's General Atomics Aeronautical Systems can possibly build. Yesterday, the Air Force quantified that goal. The service announced plans to spend $5.7 billion over the next five years to buy roughly 144 Predators – enough to add 12 squadrons of the robotic airc ...

Air Force testing robot guard vehicles June 23, 2004 CNN.com EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Florida (AP) -- The Air Force wants to take away Staff Sgt. Miguel Jimenez's job, and that's just fine by him. The Miami airman was plucked from his normal security duties at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base to help test whether a robotic vehicle can take the place of humans in guarding air bases and troops. "If somebody wants to spend the money and send something like that out there instead of my life, I'm all ...

Air Force testing robot vehicles for guard duty June 23, 2004 SiliconValley.com EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., (AP) -- The Air Force wants to take away Staff Sgt. Miguel Jimenez's job, and that's just fine by him. The Miami airman was plucked from his normal security duties at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base to help test whether a robotic vehicle can take the place of humans in guarding air bases and troops. ``If somebody wants to spend the money and send something like that out there instead of ...

USA Today 6/22/2004 By Bill Kaczor EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The question of whether to use robotic vehicles instead of humans to guard the perimeter of Air Force bases is a no-brainer for Staff Sgt. Miguel Jimenez. The Miami airman was plucked from his normal security force duties at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base to help with proof-of-concept testing at this Florida Panhandle installation. It is designed to determine if semiautonomous vehicles would be practical for detecting, detainin ...

Airport, county emergency workers preparing for worst 22 July o5 By Ed Brock News-Daily.com Feeling its way up the metal ramp, the robot clutches a suspicious package in its glittering claw and approaches the huge, black metal sphere. It deposits its hazardous cargo on a shelf in the sphere and backs away. Officers with the Atlanta Police Department's K-9/Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport close the door on the sphere remotely while standing ...

New Mexico Business Weekly May 28, 2004 Dennis Domrazalski NMBW Staff NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is holding an arm-wrestling contest in San Diego in March 2005, and Albuquerque scientist and inventor Mohsen Shahinpoor wants to win. So Shahinpoor is getting his arm in shape for the big event. But the mechanical engineer isn't doing pushups, curling dumbbells, drinking muscle-building shakes or even sweating to get his biceps bulging. In fact, Shahinpoor hasn't lifted a weight o ...

Algorithms and Sensors for Small Robot Path Following By R.W. Hogg, A.L. Rankin, S.I. Roumeliotis,M.C. McHenry,D.M. Helmick, C.F. Bergh, and L. Matthies Proc. 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Washington D.C. Abstract Tracked mobile robots in the 20 kg size class are under development for applications in urban reconnaissance. For efficient deployment, it is desirable for teams of robots to be able to automatically execute path following behaviors with one or mor ...

All-Terrain Robotics July-August 2005 by Patrick Tucker The Futurist Snakelike robot slithers over rough landscape. The newest robot to come out of the University of Michigan is anything but yourThe Ommn/Tread: Univ of Michigan Mobile Robotics Laboratory typical droid. The OmniTread, nicknamed "snakebot," resembles a slinking, slithering monster more than an engineering marvel. The robot’s five breadbox-sized segments, interconnected via a long drive shaft, are covered in thick rubber trac ...

Although Combat Proven, Global Hawk Has Yet to Pass Key Tests November 2004 by Sandra I. Erwin National Defense Magazine In an upcoming evaluation of the U.S. Air Force Global Hawk reconnaissance unmanned aircraft, testers will determine whether a military system that already has seen extensive combat can pass the rigorous tests the Defense Department, by law, requires before an aircraft can be deployed. The Global Hawk, which provides field commanders with high resolution and near-real-tim ...

Ambiguities in Visual Tracking of Articulated Objects Using Two- and Three Dimensional Models June 2003 J. M. Rehg, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 D. D. Morris and T. Kanade Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213 International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Three-dimensional (3D) kinematic models are widely-used in video ...

America unleashes robots of war Concord Monitor February 2, 2005 By DAVID L. ULIN Late last week, in a parking lot in New Jersey, the U.S. Army unveiled what may be the future of war: 3-foot-tall robotic "soldiers," outfitted with tank tracks, night vision and mounted automatic weapons capable of firing more than 300 rounds at a burst. Known as SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems), these battle bots are on the leading edge of a new kind of warfare, in which ...

America's Robot Army? March 02, 2005 Travis Marshall The imaginations of Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, James Cameron, and many other science-fiction visionaries may not have been as wild as they seemed years ago. The concept of an automated robot army fighting on the front lines of battle has been slowly moving from a fantasy to a reality over the last thirty years. Even now, hundreds of robots are sparing soldiers from potential danger by digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, standing as armed g ...

Amplified Intelligence Jul 28, 2004 The AI Problem, Interview with Ken Ford by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter The Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) was established in 1990 as an interdisciplinary research unit of the University of West Florida. Since that time, IHMC has grown into one of the nation's premier research institutes with more than 115 researchers and staff investigating a broad range of topics related to understanding cognition in b ...

An Activation-Based Behavior Control Architecture for Walking Machines 1 March 2003 Jan Albiez, Tobias Luksch, Karsten Berns and Rüdiger Dillmann Forschungszentrum Informatik an der, Universität Karlsruhe (FZI), Interactive Diagnosis and Servicesystems, Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 3 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. The high complexity of the mechanical system ...

An Actuator with Mechanically Adjustable Series Compliance By Jonathan W. Hurst, Joel E. Chestnutt, and Alfred A. Rizzi Tech. report CMU-RI-TR-04-24, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, April, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Running is a complex dynamic task which places strict requirements on both the physical components and software control systems of a robot. This report explores some of those requirements and in particular explor ...

An Actuator with Physically Variable Stiffness for Highly Dynamic Legged Locomotion By J.W. Hurst, J. Chestnutt, and A. Rizzi, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Running is a complex dynamical task which places strict requirements on both the physical components and control systems of a robot. This paper explores some of th ...

An Affect-Sensitive Human-Robot Cooperation –Theory and Experiments By Pramila Rani1, Nilanjan Sarkar2, 1 and Craig A. Smith3 1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 2Department of Mechanical Engineering 3Department of Psychology and Human Development Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, September,2003, Taipei, Taiwan. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract A novel affect-sensitive h ...

An Agent Driven Human-centric Interface for Autonomous Mobile Robots 2003 By Donald Sofge, Dennis Perzanowski, Magdalena Bugajska, William Adams, Alan Schultz, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375 7th World Multiconference on System, Cybernetics and Informatics Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT One of the challenges in implementing a dynamically autonomous mobile robot is achieving ...

An Agent-Based Architecture for an Adaptive Human-Robot Interface By Kazuhiko Kawamura, Phongchai Nilas, Kazuhiko Muguruma, Julie A. Adams, Chen Zhou, Vanderbilt University 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'03) - Track 5 January 06 - 09, 2003 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper describes an innovative agent-based architecture for mixed-initiative interacti ...

An analytical expression for the generalized forces in multibody Lagrange equations April 2004 Kool, P. Dept. of Mech., Vrije Univ. Brussel, Brussels, Belgium IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 2 On page(s): 340- 343 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper describes how the partial derivative of the kinetic energy, with respect to the generalized coordinates in ...

An Approach Toward an Automated Object Retrieval Operation with a Two-Arm Flexible Manipulator March 2004 Tomohiro Miyabe, Atsushi Konno, Masaru Uchiyama Department of Aeronautics and Space Engineering, Tohoku University, Aoba-yama 01, Sendai 980-8579, Japan and Mitsuhiro Yamano Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Yamagata University, Jonan 4-3-16, Yonezawa 992-8510, Japan International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 3 - Publication Date: 1 March 2004 You can view the ...

An Automated UAV Mission System By Katherine D. Mullens, Estrellina B. Pacis, Stephen B. Stancliff Aaron B. Burmeister, Thomas A. Denewiler (SAIC), Michael H. Bruch, H.R. Everett SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego 53406 Woodward Road, San Diego, CA 92152 Unmanned Systems in International Security 2003 (USIS 03), London, England, September 9-12, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT In March of last year, engineers from SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego ( ...

An Efficient Data Association Approach to Simultaneous Localization and Map Building January 2005 S. Zhang, L. Xie and M. Adams School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, BLK S2, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 24 Issue 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Abstract In this paper we present an efficient integer programming (IP) based data association approach to sim ...

An Enhanced Occupancy Map for Exploration via Pose Separation By Robert Grabowski, Pradeep Khosla, and Howie Choset; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 2003 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Las Vegas, NV, USA, October 2003, Volume 2, Pages 1691-1696 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We develop a new occupancy map that respects the role of the sensor measurement bearing and how it relates to the resolution of the exis ...

An Evolutionary Algorithm for Trajectory Based Gait Generation of Biped Robot September 2003 By Ruixiang Zhang and Prahlad Vadakkepat, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore, 117576 Proceedings of the international conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Singapore. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The evolution of a dynamic walking gait ...

An Experimental Study of Localization Using Wireless Ethernet By Andrew Howard Sajid Siddiqi Gaurav S. Sukhatme, USC Robotics Research Laboratory, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A Proceedings of the International Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR), Jul 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper studies the use of wireless Ethernet (Wi-Fi) as a localization sensor for ...

An Experimental Study of the Autonomous Helicopter Landing Problem By Srikanth Saripalli 1, Gaurav S. Sukhatme 1, and James F. Montgomery 2 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA 2 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA Proceedings, International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Sant'Angelo d'Ischia, Italy, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Intro ...

An Extensor Mechanism for an Anatomical Robotic Hand By David D. Wilkinson1, Michael Vande Weghe1, Yoky Matsuoka1, 2 Robotics Institute1 and Mechanical Engineering2, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '03), May, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The human finger possesses a structure called the extensor mechanism, a web-like collection of tendi ...

An H/sub /spl infin// control-based approach to robust control of mechanical systems with oscillatory bases April 2004 Toda, M. Dept. of Ocean Sci., Tokyo Univ. of Marine Sci. & Technol., Japan IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 2 On page(s): 283- 296 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper deals with robust control problems of mechanical systems with oscillatory ...

An Incremental Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Robot Teams By Andrew Howard, Maja J. Mataric´, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme Robotics Research Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IROS), Lausanne, Switzerland, Oct 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper describes an algorithm for deploying the members of a mobile robot team into an unknown ...

An Incremental Self-Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Sensor Networks By Andrew Howard, Maja J. Mataric´, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme; USC Robotics Lab, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles Autonomous Robots Special Issue on Intelligent Embedded Systems, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper describes an incremental deployment algorithm for mobile sensor networks. A mobile ...

An Infrastructure for Large-Scale Human-Robot Interaction By Ashley Tews, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Maja J. Mataric´ Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) Technical Report CRES-02-001 August 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: While there is much research in human-robot interaction on the personal, or one-to-one level, there is little on the large scale, or many-to-many. We propose an interaction infrastructure for many human operators to u ...

An Innovative High-Level Human-Robot Interaction for Disabled Persons By Phongchai Nilas1, 2, Pramila Rani3, Nilanjan Sarkar2, 3 1Department of Instrumentation Engineering, King Mungkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand. 2Department of Mechanical Engineering 3Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. USA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, USA, April 2004. Please visit the web ...

An Intelligent Approach to Coordinated Control of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles By George Vachtsevanos, Liang Tang, Johan Reimann; School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332. U.S.A. AHS International Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper introduces a novel architecture for the coordinated control of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and a differential game theoretical approach to ...

An Interval Analysis Based Study for the Design and the Comparison of Three-Degrees-of-Freedom Parallel Kinematic Machines Jume 2--4 D. Chablat, Ph.Wenger, F. Majou Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes, 1, rue de la Noë, 44321 Nantes, France and J.-P. Merlet INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis, France International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 6 - Publication Date: 1 June 2004 You can view the abstract online. ...

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2004 Jennifer Carlson and Robin R. Murphy Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue University of South Florida 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB 118 Rm. 342 Tampa, Florida 33620 Paper #145  Abstract The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of a diagnosis technique which uses Minimum Message Length (MML) for autonomous mobile robot fault diagnosis. A simulator was developed based on a behavior-based robotic sys ...

An Ontogenetic Model of Perceptual Organization for a Developmental Robot 2004 Remi Driancourt, Intelligent Robot Laboratory, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennoudai Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 51-58, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents an ontogenetic model of self-organization for robotic intermed ...

An SVM Learning Approach to Grasping By Rafael Pelossof, Andrew Miller, Peter Allen and Tony Jebara, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University EEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, April 29, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Finding appropriate stable grasps for a hand (either robotic or human) on an arbitrary object has proved to be a challenging and difficult problem. The space of grasping parameters coupled with the d ...

AN ULTRA-WIDEBAND RF METHOD FOR LOCALIZING AN AUTONOMOUS MOBILE ROBOT 2004 Ka C. Cheok* & G. E. Smid G. R. Hudas & J. L. Overholt ASC ABSTRACT A technique for a new ad hoc, high-speed update and high precision location system that would establish a reliable navigation technology for autonomous unmanned vehicle systems was investigated. The system would employ a new ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging & communication (RAC) concept that incorporates time arrival information into the recent direct s ...

Analysis and Removal of Artifacts in 3-D LADAR Data By J. Tuley, N. Vandapel and M. Hebert, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2005 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Errors in laser based range measurements can be divided into two categories: intrinsic sensor errors (range drift with temperature, systematic and random errors), and errors due to the inte ...

Analysis of Multirobot Localization Uncertainty Propagation By S.I. Roumeliotis 1 and I.M. Rekleitis 2 1 Department of Computer Science Engineering University of Minnesota 2 Mechanical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Abstract This paper deals with the problem of cooperative localization for the case of large groups of mobile robots. A Kalman filter estimator is implemented and tested for this purpose. The foc ...

Analysis of the Robotic-Assisted Seach and Rescue Response to the World Trade Center Disaster By Mark Micire, Master Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering ,College of Engineering. University of South Florida Major Professor: Robin Murphy PhD Approved July 17, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The World Trade Center disaster was signicant in that prior to these events no urban search and rescue response had used robotic technology ...

Analysis: The triumph of the robots 20041231 By Phil Berardelli Science & Technology Editor The Washington Times The human side of the U.S. space program remains problem-plagued, with the shuttle fleet still grounded and the International Space Station hanging in limbo. NASA's robotic craft exploring Mars and the Saturnian system in 2004, however, have carried off feats that are unparalleled in human history -- and they promise to deliver more wonders in the new year. Next Tuesday, NASA w ...

Anchoring of semiotic symbols 2003 Paul Vogt, Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology, University Maastricht, The Netherlands Robotics and Autonomous Systems 43(2):pp. 109-120. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents arguments for approaching the anchoring problem using {em semiotic symbols}. Semiotic symbols are defined by a triadic relation between forms, meanings and referents, thus having an implicit relation to the real world.An ...

Anchoring symbols to sensorimotor control July 16, 2003 Paul Vogt, University Maastricht, The Netherlands Proceedings Belgian/Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference BNAIC'02. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper investigates how robots may emerge a lexicon to communicate complex meanings about actions such as `I am going to the red target' using simple (one-word) utterances. The main issue of the paper concerns the way these complex mea ...

Animalistic robots ready to unleash October 3, 2003 by Chris Walz, Pentagram staff writer dcmilitary.com Defense Advanced Research Project Agency researchers have studied many animal characteristics over the years. Scientists have longed to better understand how nocturnal animals function and whether the capabilities certain species possess might have practical applications for the military. For example, the agency is intrigued by a dolphin's ability to sleep portions of its brain, while ...

Anonymous Cooperation in Robotic Sensor Networks By Ben Grocholsky and Vijay Kumar GRASP Laboratory University of Pennsylvania USA; Hugh Durrant Whyte ARC Centre of Excellence in Autonomous Systems University of Sydney Australia AAAI-04 Workshop on Sensor Networks, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Potential performance benefits motivate the application of networks of proactive robotic sensor platforms to information gathering tasks. To achieve s ...

Anxiety Detecting Robotic System-Towards Implicit Human-Robot By Pramila Rani1, Nilanjan Sarkar2, 1, Craig A. Smith3, and Leslie D. Kirby4 1Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 2Department of Mechanical Engineering 3Department of Psychology and Human Development 4Department of Psychology Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 Robotica (2004), 22:85-95 Cambridge University Press Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract A novel ...

Application of CLAWAR Machines 1 March 2003 Manuel Armada, Pablo González de Santos, María A. Jiménez and Manuel Prieto Automatic Control Department, Industrial Automation Institute, CSIC, 28500 La Poveda, Madrid, Spain International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 3 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In the last two decades in particular, climbing and walking robots have been the subject of important research activity wo ...

APPLICATIONS OF ADAPTIVE NEURAL-NETWORK CONTROL TO UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES July 2003 By Anthony J. Calise, Eric N. Johnson†, Matthew D. Johnson‡ School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0150 and J. Eric Corban Guided Systems Technologies, Inc., P.O. Box 1453, McDonough, GA 30253 AIAA/ICAS International Air and Space Symposium and Exposition: The Next 100 Years, Dayton, OH Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract ...

Applications suitable for unmanned and autonomous missions utilizing the Tactical Amphibious Ground Support (TAGS) platform By Paul J Lewis , Mitchel R. Torrie , Paul M. Omilon - Autonomous Solutions Inc., 1946 South 1600 West, Young Ward, UT, USA 84339 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT The value of unmanned vehicles is directly related to the applications to which it can be successfully applied. Many applications exist and have been identified as suitab ...

Applied Perception wins grant to develop Agile Robotic Vehicles for Wounded Soldier Extraction May 26, 2004 Military & Aerospace Electronics PITTSBURGH, May 26, 2004. Applied Perception, Inc. (API), a Pittsburgh-based company that develops and licenses robotics-related technologies to market-leading companies in the fields of defense, transportation, and agriculture, today announced that it has been awarded a follow-on, $1 million Phase II Plus Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contra ...

Approximate Jacobian control for robots with uncertain kinematics and dynamics August 2003 Cheah, C.C. Hirano, M. Kawamura, S. Arimoto, S., Sch. of Electr. & Electron. Eng., Nanyang Technol. Univ., Singapore IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Most research so far in robot control has assumed either kinematics or Jacobian matrix ...

AQUA: an aquatic walking robot By Christina Georgiades*, Andrew German**, Andrew Hogue**, Hui Liu‡, Chris Prahacs*, Arlene Ripsman**, Robert Sim ‡‡, Luz-Abril Torres ‡‡, Pifu Zhang ‡, Martin Buehler*, Gregory Dudek ‡‡, Michael Jenkin**, Evangelos Milios ‡ * Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, 3480 University St., Montreal, PQ, Canada **Computer Science and Engineering, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada ‡Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, 605 ...

Arc Carving: Obtaining Accurate, Low Latency Maps from Ultrasonic Range Sensors By David Silver, Deryck Morales, Ioannis Rekleitis, Brad Lisien and Howie Choset; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, New Orleans, LA, April 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper we present a new technique for improving the azimuth resolution of ultrasonic range sensors frequently used w ...

Architecting a Simulation and Development Environment for Multi-Robot Teams By Stephen Balakirsky, Elena Messina, and James Albus National Institute of Standards and Technology Intelligent Systems Division Gaithersburg MD Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multi Robot Systems, Washington, DC, March 18 - 20, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Collaborative multirobot teams have great potential to add capabilities and minimize risk within ...

Are Cyborg Troops Our Future Army? November 24, 2003 By Anjana Ahuja Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Limited Aurora and Ivy are two remarkable rhesus macaque monkeys. They can play computer games, not by using a joystick, but by harnessing the power of thought. Courtesy of Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiology at Duke University in North Carolina, the brains of these two primate pioneers have been implanted with forests of electrodes -each slimmer than a human hair. The electrodes ...

Are robots gonna rule over the world? JULY 25, 2005 SANJAY MOOLCHANDANI NDIATIMES NEWS NETWORK Japan has stepped into the future with the release of a "robot suit" that can help workers lift heavy loads or assist people with disabilities climb stairs. The 15-kg battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them. It can also move on its own accord, enabling it to help elderly or handicapped people wal ...

Area bot-ballers win 'E' for effort July 18, 2005 Bruce Fessier The Desert Sun Coachella Valley student robot makers may not have conquered the nation at the fourth annual National Conference On Educational Robotics this week in Jacksonville, Fla. But their academic prowess impressed educators and NASA engineers. The centerpiece of the five-day conference, presented by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics from Norman, Okla., was the International Botball Tournament, in which small ro ...

Argo Robotic Instrument Network Now Covers Most of the Globe UCSD November 30, 2004 By Mario Aguilera Scientists have crossed an important threshold in an international effort to deploy a global network of robotic instruments to monitor and investigate important changes in the world’s oceans. Researchers with the international Argo program announced they have reached the point where 1,500 ocean-traveling float instruments—half the target 3,000-float array— are now operating. This marks an i ...

Policeone.com 04/19/2004 Suspect in Mesa church-lot slaying arrested at rest stop State troopers used a police robot at a rest stop to arrest a 19-year-old man suspected in a church-lot killing early Monday. DPS officials say Robert Jason Biggs was found asleep in the back of the victim's sports utility vehicle parked at a rest stop on Interstate 8 near Yuma. Biggs is accused of shooting to death Marco Antonio Torres, Jr., a 20-year-old Mesa resident, during a confrontation in the parki ...

Arm wrestling robots beaten by a teenaged girl March 8, 2005 By Duncan Graham-Rowe NewScientist.com news service Flesh and bone triumphed in the first ever man-versus-machine battle of brawn - an arm wrestling contest between robots and humans in California on Monday. The champion, beating all three robotic arms each in matter of seconds, was a 17-year-old girl called Panna Felsen, a high school student from San Diego, US. The contest was set up by Yoseph Bar-Cohen at NASA's Jet Propuls ...

Armed Robots Provide Glimpse of Future Warfare September 2003 By Stephen Trentanelli REDCOM Magazine Warren, Mich.-The Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center and the Special Operations Command jointly hosted a demonstration of modular payload systems on robotic platforms that was held recently at Avon Park Bombing Range, Fla. The research center's contribution to this demonstration consisted of plug and play modular armament payloads, which include the M202, the 40mm grenade l ...

Armed robots soon marching to battle? December 3, 2004 By Sgt. Lorie Jewell Army News Service ORLANDO, Fla. (Army News Service, Dec. 3, 2004) – Soldiers may have armed robots as battle buddies by early next year, according to industry and military officials attending the biennial Army Science Conference. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS, will be joining Stryker Brigade Soldiers in Iraq when it finishes final testing, said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordill ...

Armed Robots to March into Battle December 6, 2004 By Sgt. Lorie Jewell / Army News Service US Department of Defense ORLANDO, Fla., Dec. 6, 2004 – Soldiers may have armed robots as battle buddies by early next year, according to industry and military officials attending the biennial Army Science Conference. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS, will be joining Stryker Brigade soldiers in Iraq when it finishes final testing, said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tord ...

Armed/Weaponized Infantry Robots for Urban Warfare and Counterinsurgency Ops December 13, 2004 by David Crane DefenseReview DefenseReview recently attended the 24th Army Science Conference, in sunny Orlando, FL. The conference was held at the truly spectacular JW Marriott Orlando, Grande Lakes (where we stayed, thanks to the U.S. Army). The conference itself was pretty terrific, as well. O.k., I'm going to discuss a number of very interesting military/military-applicable technologies I obse ...

Army alters robots' role in military service November 2, 2003 By Liam M. Truchard News-Leader; Wire Fort Leonard Wood, UMR and Boeing are redefining technology to work with soldiers. Fort Leonard Wood — In a colorless, faceless building at Fort Leonard Wood, the Army's future is crawling along the floor. The two objects look crude, but the devices resembling oversize radio-controlled vehicles are the latest and greatest robots the Army has at its disposal. "They're ugly, but robots were n ...

Army Awards $32 Million Contract to Improve iRobot's PackBot April 16, 2004 By W. David Gardner TechWeb.com A few days ago, there was great celebration among the staff at the iRobot Corp. in Burlington, Mass., when it was learned that one of its products was blown up in Iraq. An iRobot PackBot -- a 42-pound toy-like tank -- has blown up while detonating an explosive device and in the process it may have saved the life of the American soldier guiding the robot. The PackBot has become an in ...

Fielding to be staggered Staying on schedule is important, Cartwright noted, since the Army intends to field each of the FCS constituent systems as it becomes ready. “The Army is converting all its units to a modular organization,” Cartwright said. “To be complete, that organizational design is waiting for the FCS systems and technologies to be delivered to the warfighters. The Army chief of staff asked us not to wait until the end of the program to deliver all the systems, but to deliver the ...

Army expands iRobot’s combat robot funding to $37M Mass High Tech 01/24/2005 urlington’s iRobot Corp. has won additional funding for the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, bringing the total committed to $37.3 million. iRobot is developing a next-generation Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV) for the FCS program. According to iRobot, the funding will allow the company to increase its SUGV team to 32 people within its government and industrial robotics division and accelerate t ...

Cnet Newscom May 12, 2004 By David Becker LOS ANGELES--The U.S. Army is looking for a few good gamers. Beginning the second year of its experiment in using free, custom-built PC games to give young people a taste of military life, the Army is finding the games to be not only spectacularly popular but a uniquely powerful promotional tool. Chris Chambers, deputy director of the "America's Army" project, said in an interview at the E3 gaming trade show here that prospective soldiers who cont ...

AR News By Gary Sheftick July 23, 2004 WASHINGTON (Army News Service, July 23, 2004) -- The Army plans to accelerate the fielding of some Future Combat Systems such as armed robotic vehicles, unattended ground sensors and unattended munitions. The Army is taking advantage of leaps and bounds in wireless technology to “spiral” FCS development, said Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Yakovac, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology. He said spiraling ...

Army of Robots Drills for Military Project January 13, 2004 By Elise Ackerman Copyright 2004 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service When Randy Gobbel joined SRI International a year ago, one of the coolest things about his new job in the Engineering Building was the little red robots wandering the halls. Wobbling around on three wheels and resembling mutant ladybugs, they'd stop at Gobbel's open office door and silently peer inside. "Sometimes you feel like you just want to pet them," said Go ...

National Defense Magazine May 2004 by Roxana Tiron Army researchers are working on a program that would pair autonomous unmanned aircraft with ground robots. A demonstration of this networking capability is scheduled for October, at Fort Dix, N.J., under the oversight of the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center. The program itself “is still in the gestation period,” said Charles Shoemaker, chief of robotics at the Army Research Laboratory. “What we are d ...

nj.com July 11, 2004 BY KRISTEN ALLOWAY Star-Ledger Staff Call it war games with a mouse and a joystick. At Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township, engineers are firing weapons that don't shoot, stalking enemies that can't hurt them, fighting battles that rage only in a computer game. Armed with a computer screen, keyboard and joystick, they are looking for ways to convert one of the hottest video games into a military training tool. The game is called "America's Army" and was ...

Army recruits robot April 13, 2004 By Robert Weisman, The Boston Globe International Herald Tribune PackBot seeks to get in fighting shape BURLINGTON, Massachusetts Over the past two and a half years, a remote-controlled reconnaissance robot manufactured by iRobot here has been deployed to search for survivors in the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York, for live ammunition in caves in Afghanistan and for explosives under abandoned vehicles in Iraq. But those missions may be o ...

ARMY SCIENCE: Robots, Liquid Armor and Virtual Reality 2005 By Staff Sgt. Lorie Jewell Military.com Many of the ideas and technologies that are already being used on today's battlefield, or are due to arrive soon, were being displayed and discussed at this year's Army Science Conference. One such system, the Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS, will be joining Stryker Brigade Soldiers in Iraq after final testing, said SSG Santiago Tordillos of the Explo ...

Army seeks simpler UAV controls Military & Aerospace Electronics 3 March 2005 LITTLETON, Colo., 3 March 2005. PercepTek, Inc., was awarded Part Two of the Unmanned Autonomous Collaborative Operations (UACO) program for the U.S. Army. The UACO program will develop and demonstrate a prototype system that will enable a single operator to control multiple unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to support soldiers operating in urban areas. The 30-month, $7.9 millio ...

Army to deploy robots that shoot December 1, 2004 By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com Next year, the U.S. Army will give robots machine guns, although humans will firmly be in control of them. The Army next March will begin to deploy Talon robots from Waltham, Mass.-based Foster-Miller. The robots will be mounted with M240 or M249 machine guns, said a Foster-Miller spokesman. The units also can be mounted with a rocket launcher. Defense agencies have been testing an armed vers ...

Army to send robot fighters to help in Iraq The Washington Times January 23, 2005 ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. (AP) — The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the men gathered in a parking lot surely would prefer to be inside. But the weather couldn't matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun leading the way. The Army is preparing to send 18 of these remote-controlled robotic warri ...

Army Unmanned Air Vehicles Proliferate in the Battlefield May 2004 by Roxana Tiron National Defense Magazine The U.S. Army is committing increasing resources to developing sharply enhanced surveillance, communications and weapons for unmanned aerial vehicles. It also is developing tactical doctrine to deploy these assets from corps to company levels. Because of mounting soldier demand for UAVs, officials are looking to fortify unmanned capabilities without crowding the battlefield. In O ...

Army's 705th Keeps Bagram Safe from UXO January 2003 By U.S. Army Pfc. Debralee P. Crankshaw DefendAmerica.com BAGRAM, Afghanistan - Some people may call them crazy, but the 705th Explosive Ordnance Detachment from Fort Polk, La. deals with the threat of unexploded mines, rockets and bombs injuring or killing them every time they do their job. The detachment's mission is to dispose of unexploded ordnance on base to ensure the safety of the soldiers, said Sgt. Cesar Soto, 705th EOD. “When a ...

Army's newest soldier has nerves of steel NorthJersey.com February 4, 2005 By ROD ALLEE It's little, lethal and a lifesaver for American soldiers. Officials at Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway Township - the Army's Grand Central Station for munitions - on Thursday demonstrated their new SWORDS system for remotely firing ordinary combat weapons. The system is mounted atop a Talon robotic "tank" that weighs but 170 pounds and looks like a Tonka toy minus the shiny plastic. It is, said an assoc ...

Army's robot for no man's land Jan.30, 2004 By Yuki Noguchi MSNBS News Defense firms develop the 'brains' to remake war The education of Stryker, an 18-ton military monster truck, begins in the warehouse lab of General Dynamics in Westminster, Md. There, Stryker, one of the U.S. Army's newest infantry vehicles, is fitted with a "ladar" scanner, the equivalent of a mounted pair of eyes that see by emitting 400,000 laser and radar beams and snap 120 camera images every second. Its brain -- ...

FCW.com Feb. 24, 2004 By Frank Tiboni The Army expects to spend much more than originally planned on unmanned aerial vehicles, a top official said this week. And the Homeland Security Department wants to spend $10 million to test UAVs next year. The Army will spend more on UAVs now that the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter program has been canceled, Lt. Gen. Richard Cody said during a Feb. 23 media briefing at the Pentagon. The service's investment in unmanned aerial vehicles will be much more tha ...

Artifical Immune Networks for Robot Control 2004 Juergen Rattenberger,Patrick M. Poelz, and Erich Prem, Austrian Researh Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria Emma Hart, Andrew Webb, and Peter Ross, Napier University School of Computing, Edinburgh UK Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 151-152, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Ab ...

Artificial antenna helps ’cockroach robot’ scurry along walls Innovations Report March 14, 2005 Student-made device sends obstacle warnings to mechanical bug’s brain Can a robot learn to navigate like a cockroach? To help researchers find out if a mechanical device can mimic the pesky insect’s behavior, a Johns Hopkins engineering student has built a flexible, sensor-laden antenna. Like a cockroach’s own wriggly appendage, the artificial antenna sends signals to a wheeled robot’s electronic ...

Artificial Athletes Compete in RoboCup May 10, 2005 ABC 7 News ATLANTA (AP) - Robot dog soccer is one of five games that teams of scholars competed in during the 2005 RoboCup U.S. Open, held Monday at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The aim of the three-day competition, which ends Tuesday, is to develop software for better robots with the long-term goal of fielding a robot soccer team good enough to play a human team by 2050. It looked like a scene from a sci-fi flick. Hugging the sidel ...

Artificial muscles based on conducting polymer and carbon nanotubes Daily Science News January 05, 2005 Researchers at the NanoTech Institute at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) have been awarded a $750,000, 20-month grant to develop artificial muscles that convert chemical energy to mechanical energy. The award was made by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose charter is to develop new technologies for military applications. UTD NanoTech Inst ...

Artificial Muscles Get a Grip on Human Hand PhysOrg.com March 01, 2005 Six years ago a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., issued a unique challenge: build a robotic arm using artificial muscles that could arm wrestle a human. The results of that challenge will be determined next week, when three such robotic arms will "step into the ring" to compete against a 17- year-old high school student. The ultimate goal is to win against the strongest human on Earth. ...

ASYMPTOTICALLY STABLE RUNNING FOR A FIVE-LINK, FOUR-ACTUATOR, PLANAR BIPEDAL ROBOT March 2005 C. Chevallereau, E.R. Westervelt, and J.W. Grizzle Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract— Provably asymptotically stable running gaits are developed for the five-link, four-actuator bipedal robot, RABBIT. A controller is designed so that the Poincar´e return map associated with periodic running gaits can be computed on the basis of a model with impulse-effects that ...

Atlanta airport upgrades security with new equipment 22 July 05 Access North Ga.com The latest technology to guard against bioterrorism is now available at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, officials said. The new containment technology, an explosive response truck and a robot to retrieve suspicious devices were shown off during a news conference Thursday. Airport manager Ben DeCosta called it "a major milestone" in providing safety and security for the traveling public that ...

Attention and Communication: Decision Scenarios for Teleoperating Robots January 2005 By Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Stevens Institute of Technology; Steven S. Skiena, State University of New York at Stony Brook Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 9 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract The economics of robot manufacturing is driving us toward si ...

Attitude control for a micromechanical flying insect via sensor output feedback February 2004 Schenato, L. Wei Chung Wu Sastry, S., Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we study attitude stabilization strategies via output sensor feedback for ...

Augmented Reality Combining Haptics and Vision By Guangqi Ye, Jason J. Corso, Gregory D. Hager, and Allison M. Okamura Technical Report 03, The Johns Hopkins University, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Recently, haptic devices have been successfully incorporated into the human-computer interaction model. However, a drawback common to almost all haptic systems is that the user must be attached to the haptic device at all times, even though force ...

Augmented-reality machine works in real time 03 February 2005 Will Knight NewScientist.com news service Computer-generated scenery can be realistically added to live video footage, using a machine vision system developed at Oxford University, UK. Researchers Andrew Davison and Ian Reid say the augmented-reality system could also in the longer term enable robots to navigate more effectively. Or it could be used to virtually decorate a real house or plan engineering work. It allows a compu ...

Augmenting RRT-planners with local trees May 2004 Strandberg, M., Centre for Autonomous Syst., R. Inst. of Technol., Stockholm, Sweden ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract During the last few years, Rapidly-exploring Random Trees, RRTs, has been recognized as a very useful tool for designing efficient single-shot path plann ...

O'Dwyer is a passionate advocate of applying technology to modern warfare and networking in defence thinking. Now he runs his company with like-minded warriors. Recently appointed CEO David Smith was president and chief operating officer of SenSyTech Inc, a publicly traded high-tech defence organisation. David Smith signed a contract with Dragonfly Pictures Incorporated (DPI) in June 2005, and reported to shareholders and the public on the Metal Storm website that the contract “will be the first ...

Austrian experts adapting soccer robots for mine-clearing duties The Detroit News June 30, 2004 VIENNA, Austria - Robots designed to play soccer are being adapted to clear mines in countries ravaged by war, an Austrian professor in charge of the project said Tuesday. The small robots, which combine mechanics with artificial intelligence, were expected to be effective mine clearers, said Peter Kopacek, who leads a research team at the Vienna Technical University's Institute for Robot Science ...

ScienceDaily 2003-12-11 A new computer vision system for automated analysis of animal movement — honey bee activities, in particular — is expected to accelerate animal behavior research, which also has implications for biologically inspired design of robots and computers. The animal movement analysis system is part of the BioTracking Project, an effort conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology robotics researchers led by Tucker Balch, an assistant professor of computing. "We believe t ...

Automated Derivation of Primitives for Movement Classification BY Ajo Fod, Maja J. Mataric´, and Odest C. Jenkins; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Autonomous Robots, 12(1):39-54, Jan 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: We present a new method for representing human movement compactly, in terms of a linear superimposition of simpler movements termed primitives. This method is a part of a larger research project aimed at modeling mo ...

Automated Kinematics Equations Generation and Constrained Motion Planning Resolution for Modular and Reconfigurable Robots March 29, 2004 By Francois G. Pin; Lonnie L Love.; David L. Jung, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Conference: 227th American Chemical Society Meeting, Anaheim, CA (US), Descrdiption/Abstract Contrary to the repetitive tasks performed by industrial robots, the tasks in most DOE missions such as environmental restoration or Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) c ...

Automated mining still a dream April 15, 2005 By Denis St. Pierre - Sudbury Star Canoe -- CNEWS SUDBURY, Ont. (CP) -- The use of artificial intelligence to create truly-automated machines remains decades away, an expert on the subject told a mining conference Monday. "Why can't we make a machine that's a miner?" Marvin Minsky said in his address to the International Symposium on Mine Mechanization and Automation and Telemin 1 Conference at Laurentian University. "We can make these big, pow ...

Automated Modularization of Human Motion into Actions and Behaviors By Odest Chadwicke Jenkins and Maja J Matari´c; Robotics Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) Technical Report CRES-02-002, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper we address the problem of automatically deriving vocabularies of motion modules fro ...

Automatic 3D underground mine mapping By Daniel F. Huber and Nicolas Vandapel, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 The 4th International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, July 14?16, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract For several years, our research group has been developing methods for automated modeling of 3D environments. In September, 2002, we were given the opportunity to demonstrate our ma ...

Automatic Detection and Response to Environmental Change By Scott Lenser and Maneula Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Proceedings of ICRA-03, the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '03), May, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Robots typically have many sensors which are underutilized. This is usually because no simple mathematical models of the sensors have been developed ...

Automatic gait-pattern adaptation algorithms for rehabilitation with a 4-DOF robotic orthosis June 2004 Jezernik, S. Colombo, G. Morari, M. Univ. Hosp. Balgrist, Zurich, Switzerland; IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 574- 582 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents newly developed algorithms for automatic adaptation of motion for a rob ...

Automatic Synthesis of Communication-Based Coordinated Multi-Robot Systems By Chris Jones and Maja J Mataric, Computer Science Department University of Southern California To appear in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Sendai, Japan, Sep 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract To enable the successful deployment of task achieving multirobot systems (MRS), coordination mechanisms must be utilized in order to effe ...

Automating Barrier Assessment with Mobile Security Robots By Daniel Carroll, Doriann Jaffee (CSC), Katherine Mullens, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego (SSC San Diego), Code 2371, 53406 Woodward Road, San Diego, CA 92152-7383 AUVSI Unmanned Systems in International Security 2003 (USIS 03), London, England, September 9-12, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT Barrier assessment is the time consuming and labor-intensive process of manual ...

Automating Terrain Analysis: Algorithms for Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield By Charles Grindle, Michael Lewis - University of Pittsburgh; Robin Glinton, Joseph Giampapa, Sean Owens and Katia Sycara Carnegie Mellon University PROCEEDINGS of the HUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS SOCIETY 48th ANNUAL MEETING Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Terrain information supplies an important context for ground operations. The layout of terrain is a determinin ...

Autonomous 3-D positioning of surgical instruments in robotized laparoscopic surgery using visual servoing October 2003 Krupa, A. Gangloff, J. Doignon, C. de Mathelin, M.F. Morel, G. Leroy, J. Soler, L. Marescaux, J. Lab. des Sci. de l'Image de l'Informatique et de la Teledetection, Strasbourg I Univ., Illkirch, France IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 5 On page(s): 842- 853 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to v ...

Autonomous Communication Relays for Tactical Robots By H G Nguyen1, N Pezeshkian1, M Raymond1, A Gupta1, J M Spector2 1Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Department of Electrical Engineering San Diego CA 92152 7383 USA 2University of Florida IEEE 11th Int. Conf. on Advanced Robotics (ICAR 2003), Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The high-bandwidth digital radio link between a mobile robot and its remote ...

Autonomous Deployment and Repair of a Sensor Network using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle By P. Corke *, S. Hrabar **, R. Peterson ***, D. Rusy ****, S. Saripalli ** and G. Sukhatme ***, * CSIRO Manufacturing & Infrastructure Technology, Queensland, Australia ** Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA *** Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA **** Computer Science and Artificial Intelligen ...

Autonomous Exploration via Regions of Interest By Robert Grabowski, Pradeep Khosla, and Howie Choset; Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 2003 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, October 2003, Volume 1, Pages 705-710. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe a new paradigm for exploration of unknown spaces based on maximizing the understanding of obstacles rather than the exposure of ...

Autonomous feature-based exploration September 2003 By Newman, P. Bosse, M. Leonard, J.; MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents an algorithm for feature-based exploration of a priori unknown environments. We aim to build a robot that, unsupervised, plans its motion such tha ...

Autonomous Ground Vehicle Technologies Applied to the DARPA Grand Challenge By Carl D. Crane III*, David G. Armstrong Jr.*, Mel W. Torrie**, and Sarah A. Gray** * Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics, Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA **Autonomous Solutions, Inc., Young Ward, Utah, USA August 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: This paper describes the design, development, and ...

Autonomous mobile communication relays By Hoa G. Nguyen*a, H.R. Everett, a, Narek Manouk, a, and Ambrish Verma, b a Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, CA 92152-7383 b University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 SPIE Proc. 4715: Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology IV, Orlando, FL, April 1-5, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT Maintaining a solid radio communication link between a mobile robot entering a building and ...

Autonomous Stair-Hopping with Scout Robots By S. A. Stoeter, P. E. Rybski, M. Gini, N. Papanikolopoulos, University of Minnesota, Center for Distributed Robotics IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, September/October 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Search and rescue operations in large disaster sites require quick gathering of relevant information. Both the knowledge of the location of victims ...

Autonomy and manual operation in a small robotic system for under-vehicle inspections at security checkpoints By W. Smuda 1, P. Muench 1, G. Gerhart 1, and Kevin L Moore 2; 1 U.S. Army TARDEC Robotic Mobility Lab, Warren, MI 2 Center for Self-Organizing Intelligent Systems, University of Utah April 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) technology can be used in a number of ways to assist in counter-terrorism activitie ...

Avoiding Detection in a Dynamic Environment By Ashley Tews, Maja J. Matari
and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California Los Angeles, USA, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 3773-3778, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract— Remaining elusive while navigating to a goal in a dynamic environment containing an observer requires taking advantage of opportunistic cover ...

Awaiting the call of duty April 13, 2005 By Metro ThisisLondon.com Anyone who has seen Robocop knows there are certain pitfalls with letting robots take care of security. Thankfully, a small, man-shaped security device unveiled in Japan yesterday does not feature the parts of dead policemen. Instead, Nuvo, the 39cm-tall (15in) robot, relies on a digital camera in its head linked to a mobile phone to let families see images of their home while they are out. The world's first humanoid se ...

Baby Bot Learns to Stride Right February 17, 2005 Associated Press Wired News WASHINGTON -- The difference between man and machine is shrinking. Scientists have developed a robot that "learns" to walk like a toddler, improving its step and balance with every stride. The walking robot looks more like a moving Erector set than a human being, but the machine has the unmistakable gait of a person strolling along. The robot uses its curved feet and motorized ankles to spring its legs forward, i ...

Bacterium-inspired Robots for Environmental Monitoring By Amit Dhariwal, Gaurav S. Sukhatme and Aristides A. G. Requicha, Department of Computer Science, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 1436-1443, New Orleans, Louisiana, Apr 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Locating gradient sources and tracking them ...

Baptist adds surgical robot to staff July 8, 2005 By Meg Pace Clarionledger.com Da Vinci is scrubbing in at Baptist Medical Center. The da Vinci is a surgical robot that urologists Jason Blalock and Patrick Daly are using to perform prostate surgeries at Baptist. Baptist is the only hospital in the state to use the da Vinci Surgical System, which incorporates modern robotics in the operating room. The system allows surgeons to make smaller incisions that reduce bleeding, pain and recovery ...

Basque technology centre develops portable robot for aircraft assembly work April 18, 2005 EiTB24 The robot is also fitted with an artificial vision system that enables it to orient itself in the work zone and modify its work programme in real time thanks to a numeric control support system. Basque technology centre Fatronik, specializing in mechatronics, has successfully developed a portable climbing robot capable of performing precision drilling operations basically in the aerospace indus ...

Battle bot: the future of war? January 27, 2005 Gregory M. Lamb The Christian Science Monitor Sharpshooting robots evoke 'Terminator.' The more pertinent question is how these automated soldiers will transform military conflict. They've spied on the enemy, sniffed for deadly chemical and radioactive emissions, and sacrificed themselves to detonate terrorist bombs. Now robots are ready to strap on guns and fight the battles too. This spring, the United States armed forces are expected t ...

Battlefield robot could permanently change warfare May 4, 2004 By Bryan Harris / WFAA-TV WFAA.com Urban warfare continues to be what American troops fear the most in Iraq, but a Grand Prairie company is working on a a battlefield robot that could change the pattern of infantry battle forever. In Iraqi cities, Marines brave streams of gunfire without knowing where it's coming from. They know that what's around the next corner could kill them. "The Mule" will change that. It's a sophistica ...

Battlefield robots keep on rollin’ July 1, 2004 C4ISR Journal The company iRobot Corp. of Burlington, Mass., recently announced that it had finalized a contract worth about $32 million to develop a next-generation Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV) for the U.S. Army’s networked Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. The vehicle will be a portable, reconnaissance and tactical robot that can enter and secure areas that are either inaccessible to or too dangerous for humans. The SUGV will be ...

Battlefield Robots Leap From Science Fiction to Reality July 1, 2004 By Brian Handwerk National Geographic News Once the fantasy of science fiction, battlefield robots are now a reality. "The whole idea is to take the war fighter out of harm's way," Robin Laird said. Laird is supervisor of the Unmanned Systems Branch of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. "In my mind, someday we'll be doing battle with robots—not killing people," said Laird, whos ...

Battlefield robots saving lives, proving their worth in Iraq June 9, 2005 By Byron Spice Pittsburgh Post-Gazette One measure of how effective battlefield robots have become, says a top Pentagon robotics official, is that the enemy has begun to target them. "The enemy realizes that if they take out [the robot], they can really hurt our capabilities," said Cliff Hudson, who directs the Joint Robotics Program for the Department of Defense. Reconnaissance robots, such as the backpackable Drago ...

Battlefield robots: science fiction becomes reality December 10, 2004 by Lorie Jewell Army News Service Soldiers may have armed robots as battle buddies by early next year, according to industry and military officials attending the biennial Army Science Conference. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS, will be joining Stryker Brigade Soldiers in Iraq when it finishes final testing, said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos, a bomb disposal test and evaluatio ...

Battlefield Robots: to Iraq, and Beyond June 20, 2005 Defense Industry Daily The Joint Robotics Program Working Group meeting at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA offered a window into current progress in robotics. EOD robots and reconnaissance robots such as the backpackable Dragon Runner "throwbot" are performing in Iraq, where they're affecting the direction of future military robotics and saving soldiers' lives. The U.S. Marines deployed a dozen Dragon Runners to Iraq a ...

Bayesian Programming Multi-Target Tracking : an Automotive Application June 5, 2003 C. Cou´e, C. Pradalier, C. Laugier, Inriaa Rh?one-Alpes & Gravirb-CNRSc, 655 av. de l'Europe, Montbonnot, 38334 St Ismier Cedex, France Int. Conf. on Field and Service Robotics July 14-16, 2003. Lake Yamanaka (Japan) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract A prerequisite to the design of future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for cars is a sensing system providing all the ...

PilotOnline.com November 3, 2004 By MATTHEW JONES VIRGINIA BEACH — There will be bombs in the future, but Tuesday morning the robot focused on a running shoe. It lay there, laces up, in the front seat of an unmarked police car, waiting to be plucked by the MR-5’s mechanical claw. Police Officer Don Noha stood nearby, watching the new bomb robot in action. Officer Dave Cook sat out of sight in the bomb squad’s office, working the robot remotely via a length of fiber-optic cable. Watchi ...

Behavior-Based Early Language Development on a Humanoid Robot By Paulina (Varshavskaya) Varchavskaia, Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT, NE43 937, 200 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA, 02139 US Second International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Edinburgh, UK, August 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We are exploring the idea that early language acquisition could be better modelled on an artificial creature by considering the pragmatic aspect of ...

Best and brightest vie in robot games 7/13/2005 By TARO KARASAKI asahi.com OSAKA--Sports have a long connection with national pride, but robots? How about soccer-playing robots? The "beautiful game" is just one of the events in a weeklong international robot competition that kicks off today. More than 330 teams of automatons from 31 countries will be trying to outdo and outfox one another in soccer matches, search-and-rescue exercises and even dance at the RoboCup 2005 Osaka. While the ...

Better Vision through Experimental Manipulation By Giorgio Metta 1, Paul Fitzpatrick 2 1 LIRA Lab, DIST, University of Genova Viale F Causa 13 16145 Genova Italy 2 MIT AI Lab, 200 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139 US In EPSRC/BBSRC International Workshop, Biologically-Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W. Grey Walter, Bristol, UK, August 2002. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Experimentation is crucial to human progress at all scales, from so ...

Beyond Gazing, Pointing, and Reaching: A Survey of Developmental Robotics 2003 Max Lungarella, Neuroscience Research Institute, Tsukuba AIST Central 2, Tsukuba 305-8568, Japan and Giorgio Metta, LIRA-Lab, DIST, Univ. of Genova, 16145 Genova, Italy Proceedings Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 101, pages pp. 81-89, Boston, MA, USA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Developmental robot ...

Beyond Science Fiction - NASA Tests Human-Robot Cooperation In Utah Desert April 28, 2005 SpaceWar.com Designing, then teaching robots to converse and to work in teams with human beings seems like the stuff of science fiction. Yet, NASA already has been taking steps in a Utah desert that may lead the space agency even beyond the creative imagination of science fiction writers. "One of our biggest problems is to break out of preconceived notions rooted in science fiction or existing robotic ...

BIG BOOST FOR PREDATOR FLEET March 21, 2005 DefenseTech The U.S. Air Force is looking to expand its fleet of flying drones, big time. Right now, the service has three active squadrons of Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. But that could expand to 15 squadrons of the robotic planes under a $5.7 billion plan just introduced by the Air Force. In recent years, the Air Force and CIA have used the bulbous-nosed, propeller-driven Predator UAVs to blast insurgents in Iraq, take out Al Qaeda ...

Bilateral time-scaling for control of task freedoms of a constrained nonholonomic system By Siddhartha S. Srinivasa, Michael A. Erdmann, and Matthew T. Mason, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA - 15213 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '03) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We explore the control of a nonholonomic robot subject to additional constraints on the state variables. In our pro ...

Binding tactile and visual sensations via unique association by cross-anchoring between double-touching and self-occlusion 2004 Yuichiro Yoshikawa 1, Koh Hosoda 2 and Minoru Asada 3 1 Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Yamada-Oka 2-1, Suita, Osaka Japan 2 Graduate School of Engineering, 3 HANDAI Frontier Research Center, Osaka University Yamada-Oka 2-1, Suita, Osaka Japan Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robo ...

Bio-inspired modules open new horizons for robotics IST Results November 17, 2004 Inspired by cell biology, European researchers have created the world’s first shape-shifting robot made of many modules, which could lead to new applications in fields ranging from medicine and space exploration to education and entertainment. On display at IST 2004 in The Hague and being showcased on 17 November in Tokyo, the HYDRA project’s robots have broken new ground in robotics and artificial intelligen ...

Once the neural network has learned to fly level by growing its weights, it makes the classic novice's mistake of going for too much of a good thing: It keeps on increasing its weights until it starts veering off course in the other direction. That's when the feedback loop kicks in again. DeMarse's computer translates the data on the errant overcompensation maneuver and decreases the frequency of the feedback in the attendant channel, attenuating its effect until the aircraft is again level. De ...

Biologically Inspired Joint Control for a Humanoid Robot November 2004 DAMIEN KEE, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia, 4072 GORDON WYETH and JONATHON ROBERTS, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia, 4072 IEEE Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids2004) November 10-12, Los Angeles, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ...

Somerville Journal May 27, 2004 By Auditi Guha Caterpillars' nervous systems studied by Tufts tech builders Barry Trimmer has been playing with caterpillars since he was a boy. Now his interest is literally worth a million dollars. The Tufts University neurobiologist has had a fascination for the creepy crawlies since he was 6, but now he is studying their motion to create the world's first flexible robot. Why caterpillars? "They are very popular for people who want to learn how the nervo ...

Computer September 2004 Linda Dailey Paulson From the ominous Klaatu of The Day the Earth Stood Still to the Terminator, we've seen robots typically portrayed on screen as stiff, humanoid machines. But it's not just Hollywood that has locked robots to the human form. "A lot of conventional thinking pervades the field of robotics," says Morley Stone, a program manager in the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's defense sciences office. "They still look very much like they are depict ...

Biomimetic sensor suite for flight control of a micromechanical flying insect: design and experimental results September 2003 By Wei-Chung Wu Schenato, L. Wood, R.J. Fearing, R.S.; Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Four prototypes of bio ...

Bionic suit offers wearers super-strength 09 April 2005 John Boyd Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition A ROBOT suit has been developed that could help older people or those with disabilities to walk or lift heavy objects. Dubbed HAL, or hybrid assistive limb, the latest versions of the suit will be unveiled this June at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which opened last month. A commercial product is slated for release by the end of the year. HAL is the result of 10 years' work b ...

Bipedal robot learns to run December 16, 2004 By Will Knight NewScientist.com The latest version of Honda's humanoid robot Asimo can perform several new tricks thanks to a hardware overhaul. In a demonstration in Japan, the robot impressed onlookers by showing off the ability to run for the first time. A short video released by the Japanese car manufacturer shows Asimo jogging along. Its gait is rather comical and resembles that of a person trying to creep up quietly. The robot can be s ...

TheFeature September 2 2004 By David Pescovitz Bluetooth is finally taking off. Literally. A small robotic blimp floats gently through the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, wirelessly interacting with a desktop computer to literally evolve its own navigation software without human intervention. What the blimp sees via its onboard sensors is Bluetoothed to the PC for processing. The artificially evolved "brains" are then transmitted back to the mylar b ...

Boeing project takes aim at wars of the future 12 July 2005 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS TACOMA, Wash. -- Already, more than 600 workers at Boeing facilities in Kent are employed by the Army's biggest, most complicated acquisition project ever. And Kent is expected to get 100 more jobs by the end of next year because of the Army's Future Combat System. At a media briefing Monday, project officials said the 700 jobs are a tenth of the total number of engineers, software developers and others across t ...

Boeing says robotic craft is gathering data in Iraq katu.com November 28, 2004 ST. LOUIS - Boeing developers say a robotic airplane called Scan-Eagle has done more than a thousand hours of intelligence and reconnaissance work for the Marines in Iraq. The unmanned aircraft was developed and built by the St. Louis-based defense unit of Boeing Co. and the Washington-based Insitu Group. Boeing officials said they could not comment on specific Scan-Eagle missions. But they spoke generally of ...

Boeing supports space education for teachers at Space Foundation's Summer Institute 21 July 2005 SpaceRef.com Demonstrating its commitment to education, teachers, and future generations, The Boeing Company has fully sponsored one of the Space Foundation's Summer Institute programs. Boeing supported 40 teachers who participated in "Space Technologies in the Classroom," in which they learned about the use and applications of satellites and the function of the Global Positioning System, built t ...

Boeing's Little Bird flys high by remote control The Business Journal January 28, 2005 Adam Kress The Boeing Co. is developing an unmanned helicopter at its Mesa location that could provide the company with a new, locally produced product line while changing the way wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are fought. The Unmanned Little Bird is a modified MD 530F helicopter that's been in military service for 30 years. The small, agile aircraft is similar to those used by police departments aroun ...

Bomb disposal robot unveiled February 17, 2004 By Paul Adams BBC Defence Correspondent BBC News Two children are killed in Baghdad when an improvised explosive device detonates in their playground. A bomb disposal team sent to investigate finds and defuses a second bomb. Another roadside bomb explodes in the capital, killing no-one and causing little damage. Such events are sadly commonplace in Iraq, a constant headache for coalition troops and local policemen alike. When they can, ...

Bomb Disposal Robot Used to End Standoff October 14, 2004 By Ken Speake KARE 11 News A standoff in a high rise Minneapolis apartment building has ended through the use of a bomb disposal robot. The standoff started when a man shot a gun through the wall of his third floor apartment into the apartment of his neighbor. She was not injured. When police contacted him for questioning, he challenged them to come in and get him. They retreated, evacuating the second, third and fourth floors of t ...

Bomb robot newest addition to Leavenworth Police Department 7-5-05 By JOHN RICHMEIER, Times Staff Writer Officially, it's an Andros F6A, but the new bomb robot used by the local bomb team has been nicknamed "Jimmy." The $158,000 robot arrived in Leavenworth Thursday, and officers had it on display Friday afternoon at the Justice Center. The robot, which sports a long mechanical arm, four cameras, and two-way communication equipment, will be used by the bomb team made up of members of the Le ...

Bomb robot set to serve BPD February 27, 2004 by Kelseyanne johnson Western Front Online The robot inched forward, stretched out its arm and clamped down on a grenade. With painstaking deliberation, it lifted the device and deposited it into a box a few inches away. If the grenade had been active, Bellingham Police Department's new hazardous devices ANDROS F6A robot would have successfully completed its mission. The BPD's Hazardous Devices Team showed off its new addition to the public dur ...

Bone-mounted miniature robot for surgical procedures: Concept and clinical applications October 2003 Shoham, M. Burman, M. Zehavi, E. Joskowicz, L. Batkilin, E. Kunicher, Y., Fac. of Mech. Eng., Technion-Israel Inst. of Technol., Haifa, Israel IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 5 On page(s): 893- 901 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a ne ...

FCW.com May 14, 2004 BY Frank Tiboni Officials at the Border Patrol, part of the Homeland Security Department's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, will start using two leased unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on the Arizona/Mexico border next month, an agency official said. The vehicles will be the first UAVs used outside of the military and in operational missions within the country by DHS. They will support the department's Arizona Border Control Initiative announced in March to comba ...

Bowling robots into battle June 24, 2004 By Anne Watzman e4engineering.com Carnegie Mellon University robotics researchers, in conjunction with the US Marine Corps' Warfighting Laboratory, have developed a small, throwable, remote-controlled prototype robot designed for surveillance in urban settings. Several of the robots are being sent to Iraq for testing. The robot, known as Dragon Runner, has the ability to see around corners and deliver information to Marines while keeping them out of ...

Brain in a Dish Flies Plane Oct. 22, 2004 By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News A University of Florida scientist has created a living "brain" of cultured rat cells that now controls an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator. Scientists say the research could lead to tiny, brain-controlled prosthetic devices and unmanned airplanes flown by living computers. And if scientists can decipher the ground rules of how such neural networks function, the research also may result in novel computing systems ...

Brain-controlled 'robo-arm' hope February 18, 2005 By Michelle Roberts BBC News Scientists in the US have created a robotic arm that can be controlled by thought alone. Developed at the University of Pittsburgh, it has a fully mobile shoulder and elbow and a gripper that works like a hand. In early tests, monkeys had tiny probes inserted into their brains and had their limbs restrained - but were then able to manipulate the robotic arm. The inventors believe it could help people who ...

By Charles Choi United Press International Published 6/7/2004 11:00 AM NEW YORK, June 7 (UPI) -- Researchers in New York City are teaming with the U.S. Navy and scientists in Russia to build electronic circuits that mimic the brain, producing an agile controller that can maneuver robot vehicles with speed and precision. The devices are based on a circuit in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps organize the body's motions. Specifically, the new technology imitates the olivocerebel ...

Brainy PCs on Wheels April 10, 2005 Steve Hamm BusinessWeek Most robots you hear about are welding cars on assembly lines, crawling into volcanoes, or waiting on rich Japanese. Most of them are pretty expensive and not very smart. Now comes the merger of two tiny robot companies that promises to deliver smart robots at affordable prices. The "brains" in this union are provided by Frontline Robotics, an Ottawa outfit with just 11 employees that has designed Robot Open Control, a robot operat ...

Brazil to Have World's First Robotic-Arm Surgery Controlled by Patient's Brain June 16, 2005 Newsroom Brazil News Miguel Nicolelis, a world-renowned Brazilian neuroscientist will perform the world's first operation on a human that will allow the brain of the patient being operated on to control robotic arms. The Teaching and Research Institute of the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital in São Paulo (Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa do Hospital Sirio-Libanes), announced today a unique scientific agreeme ...

Breakthrough in artificial muscles promises to revolutionize the robotics industry 10 June 2004 Mike Adams News Target Network How do you a build the musculoskeletal system a humanoid robot? If you're Sony, you use a system of servo motors, gears, metal rods and cables. But that's a poor imitation of the human body where the movement of limbs is dictated by the smooth, coordinated contraction of muscle fibers. Enter the breakthrough: electroactive polymers, also called artificial muscles. Re ...

Bridging into the future December 5, 2004 By Mike Wereschagin TRIBUNE-REVIEW A tiny, four-wheeled robot zipped across the table Saturday toward the pair of eye glasses it had been programmed to retrieve. Five engineers watched anxiously to see what would come of their two months of design and programming work. When the robot's recovery arm crashed down, missing the glasses and sending the robot into an empty-handed retreat, 10 small hands shot out towards it, tweaking this and reattaching ...

Bright Idea: NMSU aim: self-thinking helicopter The Albuquerque Tribune April 4 , 2005 By Sue Vorenberg Gadgets are getting smarter at New Mexico State University. It isn't quite the evil robot from the film "Terminator" - not yet, he laughed - but Ram Prasad, an associate engineering professor, and about 30 students have spent the past year developing a helicopter that can think and act on its own. The machine, which should be finished this year, will be able to fly to a destination and ...

Brit flying car earns its wings The Register February 3 , 2005 By Lester Haines UK flying car outfit Avcen (beware: Flashtastic site) - the hopeful future manufacturer of the Jetpod city-hopping airborne taxi - has been in touch to keep El Reg up to speed on the project's progress. To recap, we reported back in November that Avcen was hoping to fill the skies above Blighty with its $1m Jetpod by 2010, funding permitting. We noted that the said vehicle comes in a range of flavours: the T-10 ...

Brooks Forecasts Future of Robotic Technology April 13, 2005 by Maya Rao The Cornell Daily Sun Artificial intelligence and robotics expert Rod Brooks forecasts major changes in the next 50 years. Much in the way that computers have revolutionized society, robots may take on an increasingly significant role in people's lives. As part of the Gerard Salton Lecture Series, Brooks delivered a talk yesterday entitled "Flesh and Machines: Robots and People" to discuss potential applications of int ...

BUFFALO SOLDIER: Protecting Troops From IEDs 2005 By Jason Chudy, Stars and Stripes, Mideast edition SUV ON STEROIDS: Task Force Iron Claw's Buffalo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the dangerous, bomb-ridden streets of Abu Ghraib, the Buffalo is the only thing that will survive the blast of a hidden IED. Part indestructible robot and part bloodhound, the Buffalo allows troops to safely scrutinize the roads and clear deadly IEDs out ...

Building a better robot December 2, 2004 By Charla Brautigam The Herald News Lincoln-Way Central: Students' device wins national competition NEW LENOX — As he sifted through the odd assortment of plywood, PVC pipe and duct tape, Lincoln-Way Central High School senior Mike Sucich wondered how he and his classmates were supposed to build a working robot from such scraps. "What are we supposed to do with all this garbage?" he asked himself as he brainstormed with 25 other students in his e ...

BUILDING AN AUTONOMOUS HUMANOID TOOL USER By WILLIAM BLUETHMANN, NASA Johnson Space Center, 2101 NASA Parkway, M/C ER3 Houston, TX 77058 USA ROBERT AMBROSE, MYRON DIFTLER, ERIC HUBER, Dexterous Robotic Laboratory, NASA JSC, 2101 NASA Parkway Houston, TX 77058 USA ANDY FAGG, MICHAEL ROSENSTEIN, ROBERT PLATT, RODERIC GRUPEN, Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts CYNTHIA BREAZEAL, ANDREW BROOKS, ANDREA LOCKERD, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, ...

Building Grounded Abstractions for Artificial Intelligence Programming by Robert A. Hearn, Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AI Technical Report 2004-004 June 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Most Artificial Intelligence (AI) work can be characterized as either "high-level" (e.g., logi ...

Building One-of-a-Kind Robot to Test in Zero-Gravity July 8, 2004 SpaceDaily.com Springfield MO (SPX) Will a cat still land on its feet in zero gravity? That's the question four Drury students are attempting to answer when they travel to the Johnson Space Center as part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program this July. The idea began as a class project in Dr. Greg Ojakangas' Mechanics II course in the fall of 2003, but student interest in angular momentum in microgravit ...

Building Robot Soldiers MSNBC News June 24, 2003 Last November, an unmanned Predator aircraft flying high over Yemen killed six suspected Al Qaeda terrorists with a Hellfire missile, leaving little more than scorch marks on a desert highway. The mission was nothing less than robotic warfare: a tactical success with zero risk to American personnel. Today, as casualties continue in Iraq, it’s hard not to ask the question: when will similar robot warriors relieve our foot soldiers as well? THE ...

Building robots for all budgets July 4, 2005 MATHEW INGRAM The Globe and Mail One can juggle gigantic space satellites as though they were tennis balls. The other can pick up a paper cup, if you have a lot of time on your hands and know what you're doing. One is the length of a school bus and cost about $100-million to build. The other is about 10 centimetres long and costs less than $100, and so far there are about a million and a half of them, with more on the way. The giant arm is kno ...

Building Terrain-Covering Ant Robots: A Feasibility Study Year of Publication: 2004 Authors Jonas Svennebring Opto Division, Zarlink Semiconductor, Bruttovagen 1, Box 520, 175 26 Jarfalla, Sweden. jonas.svennebring@zarlink.com Sven Koenig Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781,USA. skoenig@almaak.usc.edu Publisher Kluwer Academic Publishers Hingham, MA, USA ABSTRACT Robotics researchers have studied robots that can follow t ...

C-Space Entropy: A Measure for View Planning and Exploration for General Robot-_sensor Systems in Unknown Environments December 2004 Y. Yu Broadcom Corporation, 200 Brickstone Square, Andover, MA, 01810, USA and K. Gupta School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A1S6, Canada International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 12 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Abstract We consider the view planning ...

Call and Response: Experiments in Sampling the Environment By Maxim A. Batalin1;2, Mohammad Rahimi1;3, Yan Yu1;3, Duo Liu1;4, Aman Kansal1;4, Gaurav S. Sukhatme1;2, William J. Kaiser1;4, Mark Hansen1;5, Gregory J. Pottie1;4, Mani Srivastava1;4, Deborah Estrin1;3 1Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 2Department of Computer Science, USC, Los Angeles, CA 90089 3Department of Computer Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095 4Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA ...

Call me HAL: Japan looks to robots for elderly care 19 Jul 2005 By Masayuki Kitano Source: Reuters TOKYO, (Reuters) - They won't be leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but Japan's growing number of elderly may someday have a new lease of life that allows them to care for themselves -- and maybe even pump a little iron. As the country's population ages rapidly and its workforce shrinks, care workers may be hard to come by, so researchers are trying to develop the ultimate personal car ...

Can Roomba maker iRobot clean up on Wall Street? July 27, 2005 By Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com iRobot, maker of the Roomba, has filed papers for an initial public offering, and they demonstrate all the promise and peril of the robotics market. Rather than try to sell humanoid companion robots, the company designs and sells robots for jobs that are, in iRobot's own description, "dull, dirty or dangerous." The Burlington, Mass.-based company makes the Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner, as ...

bllingsgazette.com August 11, 2004 It's not exactly a Mountie in a red coat, but the most-likely rescuer for the imperiled Hubble Space Telescope does appear to be a Canadian - a gawky robot named Dextre. NASA officials said Tuesday that Dextre - formally the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator - has demonstrated to engineers that it's fully capable of replacing Hubble's failing hardware and installing two new scientific instruments. Unless an engineering show-stopper emerges between now ...

Carl Hayden robotics students beat MIT - again Jun. 20, 2005 Karina Bland The Arizona Republic azcentral A group of inner-city kids from Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix placed third in a national underwater robotics competition in Texas - not as good as last year's first place finish but, hey, they still beat Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last year, four students from Carl Hayden stunned educators and scientists when they won a national underwater robotics competition in Cal ...

Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm Robot Makes Unprecedented 200-mile Autonomous Run 2005-07-13 Science Daily PITTSBURGH-Carnegie Mellon University's autonomous robotic HUMMER Sandstorm drove an unprecedented 200 miles in seven hours without human guidance last week in preparation for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a 175-mile driverless desert race with a $2 million winner-take-all prize. Sandstorm uses sensors to "see" and computers to "drive." It drove 131 laps on the 1.5-mile racecourse at ...

Technology India Sydney, Aug.25 The wheels in your car might soon be replaced by cockroach legs, with ongoing research revealing that replacing wheels with legs that replicate the speed and spryness of the cockroach will make it easier for vehicles to traverse rough terrain. American scientists Roy Ritzmann of Case Western University in Cleveland along with Roger Quinn, professor of engineering at Case Western have been working on 'cockroach vehicles for almost 50 years now and recently rev ...

Case Studies of a Borehole Deployable Robot for Limestone Mine Profiling and Mapping By A. Morris, D. Kurth, D. Huber, C. Whittaker 1, and S. Thayer Robotics Institute: Field Robotics Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 1 Workhorse Technologies, LLC., 484 West 7th Avenue, Homestead, PA 15120 International Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR), July, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Inherent dangers in mining operat ...

Centibots: Very large scale distributed robotic teams By K. Konolige, D. Fox, C. Ortiz, A. Agno, M. Eriksen, B. Limketkai, J. Ko, B. Morisset, D. Schulz, B. Stewart, and R. Vincent, University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering Proc. of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER-04) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe the development of Centibots, a framework for very large teams of robots that are able ...

Central air conditioner-cleaning robot developed June 21, 2005 Peoples' Daily Shanghai-based Donghua University has developed a robot specially for cleaning central air conditioners. It is the first air duct-cleaning robot for which China has its own intellectual property rights and has applied for four patents. Currently dozens of cleaning companies have contacted with the university for commercialization, according to report by Shanghai's Oriental Morning Post. 32 centimeters long, 16 cen ...

Cerebellar Augmented Joint Control for a Humanoid Robot June 2004 Damien Kee and Gordon Wyeth, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia Robocup-2004: Robot Soccer World Cup Symposium, Lisbon, June 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract. The joints of a humanoid robot experience disturbances of markedly di®erent magnitudes during the course of a walking gait. Consequently, simple feedback control ...

Chain-whipping Robot's a Mine-Blower in Afghanistan May 14, 2002 By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service dcmilitary.com WASHINGTON, May 14, 2002 -- The hard case, dressed in olive drab, sat sullenly on the floor. The nickname, "mini," seems a misnomer; there are stories about chains being whipped about to explosive effect. The dangerous job of blowing up anti-personnel land mines is the remote-controlled mini flail's specialty. Co- developed by the Army and Marine Corps, the rob ...

Chennai engineer ‘mapping’ brain of home robot June 20, 2005 Siliconindia LAUSANNE: Chennai-born engineer Shrihari Vasudevan's claim to fame may not be a long walk when he completes the "brain mapping" of a "home companion" robot, a prestigious project of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, expected to be accomplished by 2008. "Yes, it will be a dream come true for me. I am giving it my best shot," says Vasudevan, who is pursuing doctorate in robot technology at the institute here, 8 ...

Children, Humanoid Robots and Caregivers 2004 Artur Arsenio, Computer Science and Arti¯cial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 19-26, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. ...

China develops anti-terrorism robot Team India Dec 7, 2004 Chinese scientists have developed a remote-controlled anti-terrorism robot to help defuse explosives in public venues. The one-armed robot, code named 'Super-D', is expected to serve at airports and in other public places. The robot is controlled via a remote controller. It is 120 cm tall, weighs 200 kilograms, can move 40 meters per minute and can climb ladders or slopes above 40 degrees in gradient, Xinhua news agency reported. ...

China develops spherical robot July 26, 2005 By People's Daily Online After years' arduous efforts, the research group led by Professor Sun Hanxu from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications have developed China's first spherical robot to which the country enjoys intellectual property rights. The robot, a project under the National Natural Science Foundation, has reached world advanced level and passed the appraisal by experts. Beijing University, as asked by the appraisal pane ...

CHQ: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Scheme CHQ: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Scheme September 2004 By Hiroshi Osada, Satoshi Fujita, Hiroshima University, Japan Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on (IAT'04) You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we propose a new reinforcement learning scheme called CHQ that could efficiently acquire appropria ...

CIA DRONES FLYING OVER IRAN March 1, 2005 Defense Tech Usually, hunting for missiles and reactors from the sky would be a job for the Air Force. But those spy drones that are flying over Iran, looking for nukes -- they belong to the CIA, according to Aviation Week. "They are using the I-Gnat and Predator [drones that the CIA] used early in the Afghanistan war... They focus on small areas, and that's what they need to find those dispersed [nuclear weapons development] sites," a senior Air For ...

Classifier Fusion for Outdoor Obstacle Detection By Cristian S. Dima, Nicolas Vandapel and Martial Hebert, Carnegie Mellon University, The Robotics Institute, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, April, 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper describes an approach for using several levels of data fusion in the domain of autonomous off-road navigation. We are focusing on outdoor obstacle detectio ...

CLAWAR Modularity for Robotic Systems 1 March 2003 Gurvinder S. Virk School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS2 9JT, UK International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 3 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. This paper presents the activities of the CLAWAR TN project to identify the status for the area of applied robotics and how the traditional robotics industry can evolve to meet the w ...

Birmingham Post October 1 2004 Climbing robots are the latest weapon in the fight against arson in the West Midlands. CCTV cameras which can climb up lampposts are to be deployed in arson hotspots in a bid to catch the culprits in the act. The devices were unveiled at an Arson Task Force seminar in Birmingham. Police and fire brigades from across the country gathered at Handsworth fire station for the conference to discuss the best ways of tackling the menace. They were given a demonstrati ...

Closure and Quality Equivalence for Efficient Synthesis of Grasps from Examples June 2004 N. S. Pollard Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 6 - Publication Date: 1 June 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. One goal of grasp selection for robotics is to choose contact points tha ...

Club goes high-tech 07.12.05 By Sarah Berkley Sonoma Index-Tribune In the middle of bustling summer camp - basketball games, juice boxes, arts and crafts - a technological renaissance is happening at the Boys & Girls Club Valley of the Moon. As construction crews hammer away, a techno-geek's dream - flat screen monitors, advanced digital recording and editing equipment, all the latest design software - are waiting quietly in the wings. Only they're not for geeks. They're for kids of all ...

CMU Robot finds life 'all by itself' Pittsburgh Post-Gazette March 15, 2005 By Byron Spice A Carnegie Mellon University rover called Zoe is the first robot to remotely detect life, finding fluorescent signals from both visible lichens and microscopic bacteria in Chile's barren Atacama Desert. The NASA-sponsored field test last fall thus demonstrated that scientists can use robots to identify life in harsh regions, a critical technology as automated exploration on Mars shifts from a search f ...

CMU Robotics Institute celebrates 25 years October 11, 2004 By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Tomorrow night's induction ceremony for the five newest members of the Robot Hall of Fame will kick off three days of activities celebrating the 25th anniversary of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. The celebration, Robots and Thought, will include a daylong series of presentations on campus by institute researchers on Tuesday and an international symposium on the grand challeng ...

CMU's snooping robot going to Iraq May 21, 2004 By Byron Spice Pittsburgh Post-Gazette A robot designed for urban warfare will soon be on its way to assist U.S. Marines in Iraq, where the scrappy machine can peer around corners and snoop in areas too dangerous or inaccessible for human soldiers. Called Dragon Runner, the four-wheeled device is small and light enough to be carried in a soldier's backpack and rugged enough to be tossed over fences and up or down stairwells. "We've thrown it ...

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette October 11, 2004 Scientists in Pittsburgh who are evaluating data being gathered in Chile by the robot called Zoe are using a computer interface called EventScope developed at Carnegie Mellon University. EventScope was originally developed as an educational tool to display scientific data from missions such as NASA's Mars Exploration Rover. But scientists in NASA's Life in the Atacama project last week were using it not only to look at data downlinked from Zoe, but to ...

Co-evolution of morphology and walking pattern of biped humanoid robot using evolutionary computation:designing the real robot September 2003 By Endo, K. Maeno, T. Kitano, H.; Kitano Symbiotic Syst. Project, Japan Sci. & Technol. Corp., Tokyo, Japan Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, a method for c ...

Courier-journal.com October 11, 2004 By Roger Alford BELFRY, Ky. — Every day when Leck Puckett goes to work operating a bulldozer on mountain-size stockpiles of coal, he has to worry about being swallowed up by the voids that sometimes form beneath the surface. "It can happen at any time," he said. "That's just something that everybody watches for." But thanks to borrowed technology that toughens bulldozers with super-strong windows similar to those used in fighter jets, there is a great ...

Coast Guard’s Unmanned Aircraft Set for Testing February 2005 by Joe Pappalardo National Defense Prototypes of the Coast Guard’s unmanned tilt-rotor aircraft are to be flown in February, according to officials, who add that a number of operational questions remain outstanding. Future use of the system, called Eagle Eye, depends on drafting rules to operate in airspace used by commercial air traffic and ensuring that sensors perform at high altitude, said Cmdr. Melissa Bulkley, who was detac ...

UCBerkeley News September 16 2004 Robert Sanders BERKELEY – A cockroach-like robot named RHex is the starting point for a major project to understand animals' most distinguishing trait - how they move without falling over. The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today (Thursday, Sept. 16) a $5 million, five-year grant to the University of California, Berkeley, that will fund an all-star team of biologists, engineers and mathematicians from universities across the country to try to un ...

Cockroaches Inspire Robot Antenna Design April 8, 2005 Stefan Lovgren National Geographic News To most of us, cockroaches are a nasty nuisance. But to a team of engineers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the pesky critters are excellent role models. So when the scientists set out to build an antenna for a robot, they turned to cockroach biology. The sensor-laden antenna they built resembles a cockroach's navigational appendage. The antenna sends signals to the robot's el ...

NewScientist.com 17 September 04 Will Knight Robots that change shape and even split into smaller parts to explore unfamiliar terrain could soon be feasible thanks to new algorithms designed to enable such metamorphic tricks. Zack Butler and colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, developed algorithms to control robots made from identical components, each capable of moving on their own but also able to attach to one another. As this is beyond current hardware, they constructed ...

COGNITIVE TOOLS FOR HUMANOID ROBOTS IN SPACE 2004 By Donald Sofge1, Dennis Perzanowski1, Marjorie Skubic2, Magdalena Bugajska1, J. Gregory Trafton1, Nicholas Cassimatis1, Derek Brock1, William Adams1, and Alan Schultz1 1Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375 2Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211 Proceedings of the16th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aer ...

Collaboration Development through Interactive Learning between Human and Robot 2003 Ogata, Tetsuya and Masago, Noritaka and Sugano, Shigeki and Tani, Jun Proceedings Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 101, pages pp. 99-106, Boston, MA, USA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper, we investigated interactive learning between human subjects and robot experimentally, and its esse ...

Collective Construction with Multiple Robots By Jens Wawerla, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Maja J. Mataric´ Robotics Research Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IROS), Lausanne, Switzerland, Oct 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: We study the problem of construction by autonomous mobile robots focusing on the coordination strategy employed by ...

Newscientist.com 16 August 04 Will Knight A robot fighting contest that draws huge crowds in Japan each year has highlighted sophisticated technological trends in robotics, experts say. The 2004 Robo-One contest, held in Kawasaki, central Japan on 8 August, drew hundreds of spectators. The event is inspired by the sport K-1, a combination of kick-boxing other martial arts that is popular in Japan. But the contestants are remote controlled robots constructed and operated by robotics enthusi ...

Combined Optic-Flow and Stereo-Based Navigation of Urban Canyons for a UAV By Stefan Hrabar and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA and Peter Corke, Kane Usher and Jonathan Roberts, CSIRO ICT Center, P.O. Box 883 Kenmore 4069, Queensland, Australia Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2005. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract ...

Combining Laser Range, Color, Texture Cues for Autonomous Road Following By Christopher Rasmussen, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Washington, DC, May 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe results on combining depth informa tion from a laser range-finder and color and texture image cues to segment ill-structured dirt, gravel ...

Command and Control for Mixed Manned and Unmanned Security Forces By Daniel Carroll, Gary Gilbreath, Kelly Grant (CSC), Laura Day, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego (SSC San Diego), Code 2371, 53406 Woodward Road, San Diego, CA 92152-7383 AUVSI Unmanned Systems in International Security 2003 (USIS 03), London, England, September 9-12, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT The Multiple Resource Host Architecture (MRHA) performs Command an ...

COMMERCIALIZATION OF A JAUGS AUTONOMOUS DEVELOPMENT VEHICLE By Mel W. Torrie, Paul Lewis, Don L. Cripps - Autonomous Solutions, Inc. SPIE Conference on Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology IV, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT Autonomous systems have not become mainstream because of the shortcomings in the sensing of the environment and the required intelligence to react to it appropriately. Another hindrance to its maturity is the lack of a stand ...

Common platform sought for service robots March 29, 2004 By Yoshiko Hara EE Times Tokyo — Looking to build a larger market for robotic services, three Japanese companies that develop robots have proposed the formation of the Robot Service Initiative. Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Sony aim to use the initiative, announced at the second Robodex Forum last week, to create a common platform that will allow networked robots to be controlled by the same commands. The three companie ...

Jewish World Review In 2035, sleek humanoid robots that walk, talk and think will be as common as iPods. At least they are in "I, Robot." When the big-budget thriller hits movie screens, it will be hard not to notice the gap between the clunky robots of today and those doing battle with Will Smith's Detective Del Spooner. Yet the future is arriving, one bot at a time. Robots today conduct surgery, build cars and explore other planets. They're even living in our homes. The Roomba robotic vacuu ...

Communication and Mobility Enhancements to the Scout Robot By Andrew Drennery, Ian Burtz, Brad Kratochvily, Bradley J Nelson, Nikolaos Papanikolopoulosy, Kemal Berk Yesinz, Center for Distributed Robotics Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Minnesota Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Small scale distributed robotic systems are ideal for t ...

Communication Efficiency in Multi-Agent Systems By Mary Berna-Koes, Illah Nourbakhsh and Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University In Proceedings of ICRA 2004, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Despite the growing number of multi-agent software systems, relatively few physical systems have adopted multi-agent systems technology. Agents that interact with a dynamic physical environment have requirements not shared by virtual agent ...

DenverPost.com July 21, 2004 By Julie Dunn In last weekend's $52 million box-office smash "I, Robot," robots are employed to do all sorts of menial jobs, including walking dogs and picking up garbage. Bernd Liepert, chief executive of Kuka Roboter, Europe's largest manufacturer of industrial robots, envisions a higher calling for robots - from protecting America's borders to performing emergency surgery. Liepert is in Denver this week - along with a Kuka robot that was featured in the ...

Comparing cockroach and Whegs robot body motions May 2004 Schroer, R.T. Boggess, M.J. Bachmann, R.J. Quinn, R.D. Ritzmann, R.E., Dept. of Mech. & Aerosp. Eng., Case Western Reserve Univ., Cleveland, OH, USA; ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Abstracting cockroach locomotion principles with reduced actuation can lead to a s ...

Comparison of Control Strategies for an EMG Controlled Orthotic Exoskeleton for the Hand May 2004 By Matthew DiCicco*, 1, Lenny Lucas*, Yoky Matsuoka*, **; *Mechanical Engineering, **Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '04) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract To restore dexterity to paralyzed hands, we have designed and constructed ...

Complete path planning for a planar 2-R manipulator with point obstacles May 2004 Liu, G.F. Trinkle, J.C. Milgram, R.J., Dept. of Comput. Sci., Rensselaer Polytech. Inst., Troy, NY, USA ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper we develop a systematic topological approach to motion planning for a planar 2-R man ...

Complex Task Allocation For Multiple Robots April 2005 Robert Zlot and Anthony Stentz, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213 USA Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Recent research trends and technology developments are bringing us closer to the realization of autonomous multirobot systems performing increasingly complex missions. However, existing ...

Composition of Local Potential Functions for Global Robot Control and Navigation By David C. Conner, Alfred A. Rizzi, and H. Choset, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA In Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA October 2003, Volume 4, Pages 3546-3551. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper develops a method of composing simple control policies, applicable over a limited ...

Computation of multi-rigid-body contact dynamics May 2004 Tong Liu Michael Yu Wang, Dept. of Autom. & Comput.-Aided Eng., Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, China ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract A system of rigid bodies with multiple simultaneous contacts is considered in this paper. The problem is to predict the velocities ...

Computation on Parametric Curves with an Application in Grasping July-August 2004 Y.-B. Jia Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-1040, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 7/8- Publication Date: 1 July-August 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Curved shapes are frequent subjects of maneuvers by the human hand. In robotics, it is well known that antipodal grasps exist on curve ...

Concept Acquisition Using Isomap on Sensorimotor Experiences of a Mobile Robot 2003 Poelz, Patrick M. and Prem, Erich Proceedings Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 101, pages pp. 175-176, Boston, MA, USA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present results about the application of a novel method for multi dimensional scaling (Isomap) for concept acquisition in mobile robotics. The a ...

Conceptual Spaces and Robotic Emotions 2003 Antonio Chella, Department of Computer Engineering, University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy Proceedings Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 101, pages pp. 161-162, Boston, MA, USA. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In recent years, there has been a growing interest in modelling emotional responses inside the perception ...

Conductive Polymer “Molecular Wires” For Neuro-Robotic Interfaces By Alik Widge 1, Malika Jeffries-El 2, Carl F. Lagenaur 3, Victor W. Weedn 3 and Yoky Matsuoka 5 1The Robotics Institute 2 Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition 3 Department of Mechanical Engineering 4 Department of Chemistry 5 Molecular Biosensors and Imaging Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15213 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '04), Ma ...

Conflict Metric as a Measure of Sensing Quality By Jennifer Carlson, Robin R. Murphy, Svetlana Christopher, Jennifer Casper; Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, University of South Florida 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper shows that the Con metric from Dempster-Shafer theory is a good indicator of sensing quality, where an increase in the conflict metric value corr ...

Consistency verification in modeling of real-time systems February 2004 Yi Deng Jiacun Wang Mengchu Zhou, Sch. of Comput. Sci., Florida Int. Univ., Miami, FL, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract To real-time system designers, end-to-end time delay between external inputs and outputs is among the most important constraints. To e ...

Constrained Coverage for Mobile Sensor Networks By Sameera Poduri and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California Los Angeles IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 165-172, New Orleans, LA, May 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We consider the problem of self-deployment of a mobile sensor network. ...

Constrained Initialization of the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Algorithm July/August 2003 S. B. Williams, H. Durrant-Whyte Australian Centre for Field Robotics, J04, The University of Sydney, 2006, Australia and G. Dissanayake Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, 2006, Australia International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 7/8 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In th ...

Constructing Radio Signal Strength Maps with Multiple Robots 2004 By Mong-ying A. Hsieh, Vijay Kumar and Camillo J. Taylor; GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation, New Orleans Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Communication is essential for coordination in most cooperative control and sensing paradigms. In this paper, we investigate the construction of a map of radio signal strength that can be used to plan multirobot tasks and also serve as useful perceptual information. We show how nominal models of an urban environment, such as those obtained by aerial surveillance, can be used to generate strategies for exploration and present preliminary experimental results with our multi-robot testbed.

Construction and Automated Deployment of Local Potential Functions for Global Robot Control and Navigation By D.C. Conner, A. Rizzi, and H. Choset Tech. report CMU-RI-TR-03-22, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, November, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This report presents a method for addressing integrated navigation and control tasks for constrained dynamical systems. Specifically, we focus on solving this problem for an ideali ...

Construction by Robot Swarms Using Extended Stigmergy April 2005 Justin Werfel, Yaneer Bar-Yam & Radhika Nagpal Massachuseetts Institute of Technology, Camridge, MA Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe a system in which simple, identical, autonomous robots assemble two-dimensional structures out of identical building blocks. We show that, in a system divided in this way into mobile units and structural units, giving the blocks limited communic ...

Contact State Estimation using Multiple Model Estimation and Hidden Markov Models April-May 2004 T.J. Debus, P.E. Dupont Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA 02445, USA and R.D. Howe Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 4/5- Publication Date: 1 April-May 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full ...

Contention Scheduling: A Viable Action-Selection Mechanism for Robotics? By Virgil Andronache and Matthias Scheutz, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame 2002 Proceedings of the Thirteenth Midwest AI and Cognitive Science Conference Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Contention scheduling Cooper Shallice 2000 is a wellknown action selection mechanism in cognitive science. It can account for normal action sequencing o ...

Continuous-time restless bandit and dynamic scheduling for make-to-stock production December 2003 Dusonchet, F. Hongler, M.-O., Inst. de Production et Robotique, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract We study the "Whittle relaxation" version of the continuous time, discrete, and con ...

Control of Flexible Robot Arm By J. D. Lee, L. S. Hayna, Ben Li Wang, and Kwang-Horng Tsia, Robot Systems Division, National Bureau of Srandard, Gaithersburg, Maryland Modelings and Control of Robotic Manipulators and Manufacturing Processes, SME, pgs 241-251, 1987 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT This work is a computer simulation of the control of flexible robot arm. The dynamic equations for a single-link flexible robot arm have been derived rigo ...

Control of Robotic Vehicles with Actively Articulated Suspensions in Rough Terrain By KARL IAGNEMMA, ADAM RZEPNIEWSKI AND STEVEN DUBOWSKY Department of Mechanical Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology Autonomous Robots, Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Future robotic vehicles will perform challenging tasks in rough terrain, such as planetary exploration and military missions. Rovers with actively articulated ...

Control Synthesis for Dynamic Contact Manipulation By Siddhartha S. Srinivasa, Michael A. Erdmann and Matthew T. Mason; The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA - 15213 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, April, 2005. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We explore the control synthesis problem for a robot dynamically manipulating an object in the presence of multiple frictional cont ...

Controlling Hopping Height of a Pneumatic Monopod By Kale Harbick and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Robotics Research Laboratories, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 In Proceedings of the IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation vol. 4, pp. 3998-4003, Washington, D.C., May 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe a model-based height controller for a ho ...

Conversational interface aids robot navigation EE Times March 31, 2004 By Chappell Brown HANCOCK, N.H. — Inching across the surface of Mars or racing through the Mohave desert, autonomous vehicles are breaking new ground in hands-free navigation. At the same time, the difficulties and deficiencies of such machines are all too evident. Despite supercomputer level control systems and pin-point GPS data, the lead vehicle in last month's Grand Challenge race was only able to complete 7.4 mil ...

Converting Sequences of Human Volumes into Kinematic Motion By Chi-Wei Chu, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Maja J Matari´c, Robotics Research Laboratories, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) Technical Report CRES-02-003, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present an approach for producing articulated motion for human from a sequence of 3D points f ...

COOL TECH THIS WEEK: Ray Gun Plans, Robotic Fish, Powered Exoskeleton Suits 2004 By Noah Shachtman and Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, DefenseTech.org Military.com A step closer to working ray guns, RoboPike and RoboTuna, and Starship Troopers for real -- keep up with the cutting-edge military tech news from the past week. Industry Bigs Team Up on Ray Guns Two of the heavyweights of the defense industry are teaming up to develop "a laser armed combat vehicle," Baltimore Business Journal says. No ...

Cooperative task excecution of a search and rescue mission by a multi-robot team March 2005 Authors: Shiroma, Naoji; Chiu, Yu-Huan; Sato, Noritaka; Matsuno, Fumitoshi Publisher: VSP Abstract: Rescue robots have proved to be an extremely useful work partner for urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. Human rescuers who carry out these missions frequently enter dangerous zones to search for survivors; however, due to the unstable nature of collapsed buildings or objects, their lives may al ...

COORDINATED FLOCKING OF UAVS FOR IMPROVED CONNECTIVITY OF MOBILE GROUND NODES By Prithwish Basu, Jason Redi and Vladimir Shurbanov BBN Technologies, 10 Moulton St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance operations for the past few decades. The recent proliferation of wireless networking technologies enables the equipment of UAVs with wirele ...

Corps May Buy New UAV UV Online March 2005 The capabilities of this new air vehicle, intended for use at the regimental level, would fill the gap in range and payload capability between the two current UAVs. An acquisition plan was working its way up the approval chain as of late February. ‘There is a gap between the short-range, backpacked Dragon Eye and the Pioneer, which has a 110 nautical mile range, five hours of [flight time] and 75-pound payload capability,’ said Major John Giscard ...

Correction of shading effects in vision-based UUV localization Sept. 2003 By Garcia, R. Cufi, X. Carreras, M. Ridao, P., Comput. Vision & Robotics Group, Girona Univ., Spain Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper describes the improvements achieved in our mosaicking system to assist unmanned underwater v ...

The Register By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Published Monday 8th December 2003 14:28 GMT Aided by backing from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Segway Human Transporter may well be the first scooter of mass destruction. The enchanted minds at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) - an arm of the DoD - have funded the Segway Robotic Mobility Platform (SRMP), which is a modified version of the fabled scooter designed for more military pursuits. At present, researchers scattered thro ...

Couple receive grant to develop robots May 17, 2005 USA Today LARAMIE, Wyo. (AP) — A couple who work in the University of Wyoming's Computer Science Department have received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to further develop tiny robots that could help clean up oil spills or respond to a terrorist attack. The robots would zero in on the source of chemical or biological hazards. "Somebody from the National Science Foundation came out here and said we had the best robotics work h ...

Courier robots get traction in hospitals after fits and starts July 6, 2004 By Mike Crissey, Associated Press USAToday.com PITTSBURGH — Near a pair of swinging doors at a local hospital, a cart sits apparently abandoned. Yet at the push of a button, it perks up to say, "thank you" and rolls itself out the door toward the pharmacy. The 50-pound machine, which looks like a vacuum cleaner mated to a cabinet, is designed to autonomously ferry loads of linens, medical supplies, X-rays, food and ...

Coverage control for mobile sensing networks April 2004 Cortes, J. Martinez, S. Karatas, T. Bullo, F. Coordinated Sci. Lab., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 2 On page(s): 243- 255 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehic ...

Coverage, Exploration and Deployment by a Mobile Robot and Communication Network By Maxim A. Batalin and Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Robotic Embedded Systems Lab, Computer Science Department, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Telecommunication Systems Journal, Special Issue on Wireless Sensor Networks, 26(2):181-196, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We consider the problem of coverage and exploration ...

ScienceDaily 2003-07-07 It can follow a search instruction plan, classify, and map underwater mines in turbulent ocean surf zones. It travels about 6 feet per second on land, and about 2 feet per second in the water. It avoids obstacles. These 90-lb, fully autonomous amphibious reconnaissance vehicles may look like no more than overgrown remotely operated toy tanks, but they have been used to search under the World Trade Center after 9/11, to search Afghan caves, to look at underwater wreckage ...

Crawling on the Heart: A Mobile Robotic Device for Minimally Invasive Cardiac Interventions By Nicholas A. Patronik1, Marco A. Zenati2, and Cameron N. Riviere1 1The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, Springer, September, 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper descri ...

Charlotte Observer Sep. 29, 2004 MELINDA JOHNSTON UNC Charlotte professor James Conrad's office is crawling with robotic bugs. Conrad, who teaches computer engineering, has a special affinity for "Stiquito", a robot bug that bears a strong resemblance to the real six-legged stick bug. What good is a robot bug? Stiquito is used to introduce high school and college students to robotics and the fields of mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. Conrad has sold Stiquito books, kits, a ...

Crucial Factors Affecting Cooperative Multirobot Learning By Poj Tangamchit 1 John M. Dolan 2 Pradeep K. Khosla 1,2 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering 1, The Robotics Institute 2 Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2003, October, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The effectiveness of multirobot learning in achieving optimal, cooperati ...

Crucial Factors Affecting Decentralized Multirobot Learning in an Object Manipulation Task By Poj Tangamchit 1 John M. Dolan 2 Pradeep K. Khosla 1,2 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering 1, The Robotics Institute 2 Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA ACM/SIGART Workshop on Agent Swarm Programming 2003 (WASP'03), September, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Decentralized multirobot learning refers to the ...

CSIRO robots in MIT deal May 26, 2005 Chris Jenkins The Australian AUSTRALIAN-designed robots may soon be doing the dirty work at mines around the world, thanks to a new partnership between the CSIRO and the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, better known as MIT. The agreement, announced yesterday at the CeBIT technology trade show in Sydney, had formalised the friendly relations between the two institutions, said Peter Corke, research director for the CSIRO's aut ...

Cutting-edge robotics head for battle May 19, 2005 By Kristin Wilson The Sentinel Robots are changing the way today's military forces fight wars, provide medical attention to soldiers in the field and develop intelligence against the enemy. Examples of just some of the cutting-edge technologies that are making their way onto today's battlefields were on display Wednesday at Carlisle Barracks. The aerial, ground and bunker-hole devices all have similar missions — to defeat enemy forces whil ...

Cyclops first to enter eye of storm By Ben Caddaye Australian Department of Defense News WHEN No. 382 Expeditionary Combat Support Squadron’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Section is called on to cope with a potentially hazardous situation, one member of the team is often sent in first to do the dirty work. But you’ll never hear any complaints. The EOD Section’s Mark 4D “Cyclops” EOD robot is specifically designed for circumstances where the risk to personnel may be too great. The EOD ...

Dances With Robots May 9, 2005 By Christian Caryl, Newsweek International MSNBC News Norihiro Hagita recently put a 3-year-old girl and her mother into a room with a robot and kept them there for two hours. At first, the girl and the robot chatted and played. When the robot asked her to give him a hug, she happily complied. But after a time the two of them ran out of new things to do, and the little girl plopped down on the floor for a nap. The robot waited to make sure the girl had truly lo ...

FCW.com Aug. 19, 2004 BY Frank Tiboni Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a $1 billion contract to an industry team led by Northrop Grumman Corp. to build three robotic reconnaissance aircraft and a computer operating system to help fly them for the Air Force and the Navy. The Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) marks the first program to develop an unmanned aerial vehicle flown by both services. The X-47B will fly 1,500 nautical miles carrying 4 ...

The Register By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Published Monday 17th May 2004 19:04 GMT Fresh off the failure of the first Grand Challenge robot race, DARPA has decided to double the prize money for a second event to be held next year. DARPA quietly slipped word of the now $2m prize on the Grand Challenge web site. At present, the cash award is the only definite detail for the second running of the robots. DARPA is expected to begin rolling out more information on how long the course will be and ho ...

FCW.com October 13, 2004 BY Frank Tiboni Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency officials awarded a $766.7 million contract to Boeing Co. to continue work on the X-45C Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) that will fly in demonstration tests in 2007. J-UCAS will consist of communications, navigation and sensor systems designed to evade enemy radar. Air Force and Navy warfighters will use the robotic aircraft to spy in enemies' airspace and jam their air defense systems. The contr ...

Gizmo One of the most interesting entries in the recent DARPA GRAND CHALLENGE was an autonomous motorcycle entered by the GhostRider Robot team, headed by 23 year old Anthony Levandowski and is Berkeley University’s official entry. Levandowski, is a serial entrepreneur at just 23 years of age and has invested a lot of his own money in getting the project up. We spoke with Anthony prior to the event and subsequent to the event to see what he’d learned. Gizmo: What did you learn? We learned a ...

FCW.com April 19, 2004 By Frank Tiboni Ron Brachman's curiosity about robots programmed to think on their own dates back to his childhood in New Jersey. It was the 1960s, "Star Trek" first appeared on television and putting a man on the moon became a remarkable reality. When he was in high school, Brachman and his father, an electrical engineer, built a robot equipped with a light and photo sensor that allowed it to follow a taped line on the floor of his basement, even in darkness. He beca ...

DARPA's Debacle in the Desert June 2004 By Joseph Hooper Popular Science Behind the scenes at the DARPA Grand Challenge, the 142-mile robot race that died at mile 7 When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying the ...

The Register By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Published Saturday 13th March 2004 23:14 GMT The $1 million Grand Challenge ended with a dull thud on Saturday as not one robot vehicle came close to completing the 142 mile course in the Mojave Desert. Seven miles was the best any team could muster with both the Red Team out of Carnegie Mellon University and SciAutonics II out of Thousand Oaks, California reaching that distance. Most of the 15 teams in the field failed to go more than a few hundred ya ...

DARPA's Grand Challenge... Robotics Race or Components Race? May 10, 2004 By David Duke Robotics Trends Sensors are key enabling components for advanced robotics applications. In many ways, sensor component technology is driving the robotics market, especially as the demands on robotics applications become greater and the "reach" robotics applications extends beyond manufacturing and assembly environments. But are sensors driving the robotics market, or is it the other way around? The DARP ...

Data-mining approach to production control in the computer-integrated testing cell February 2004 Choonjong Kwak Yuehwem Yih, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN, USA IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 1 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a data-mining-based production control approach for the testing and rework cell in a dynamic computer-integrated man ...

DAYTIME WATER DETECTION BY FUSING MULTIPLE CUES FOR AUTONOMOUS OFF-ROAD NAVIGATION 2004 A. L. Rankin*, L. H. Matthies, and A. Huertas ASC ABSTRACT Detecting water hazards is a significant challenge to unmanned ground vehicle autonomous off-road navigation. This paper focuses on detecting the presence of water during the daytime using color cameras. A multi-cue approach is taken. Evidence of the presence of water is generated from color, texture, and the detection of reflections in stereo ran ...

Decentralized Algorithms for Multi-Robot Manipulation via Caging July-August 2004 G.A.S. Pereira, M.F.M. Campos, VERLab–Vision and Robotics Laboratory, DCC, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-010 Brazil and V. Kumar GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 7/8- Publication Date: 1 July-August 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view th ...

Deep-Sea HD TV LieScience.com January 18, 2005 Robert Roy Britt The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is converting a 224-foot Navy ship into a science research vessel that will produce high-definition video from the bottom of the sea. The USNS Capable will be the only ship with a dedicated science-class deep-ocean robot, or remotely-operated vehicle, or ROV, officials said this week. In the image above, a similar ROV inspects the Titanic. In the new setup, a tow sle ...

Quad-City Times October 30, 2004 By Craig Cooper . Science fiction writers have long been fascinated by the idea of wars being waged by machines rather than humans. . That isn’t possible yet, but machines are taking over some hazardous and mundane duties in Iraq and a joint agreement between Deere & Co. and iRobot could further eliminate some of the fiction and leave the science in the future. . In the next three years, the heavy duty M-Gator military version of Deere’s versatile Gator ...

Defence robotic submarine applies data to mines Computerworld 25/11/2004 Julian Bajkowski, Datamining of a different kind got a more than a dry run this week, with the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) pitting the skills of programmers guiding an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) against a series of dummy sea mines. Conducted in waters off the Victorian town of Portland, the series of trials tested a range of technology applications of DSTO's UUV Wayamba. These included ...

Defense contractors pin hopes on pilotless aircraft June 19, 2005 BY KATIE FAIRBANK projo.com PARIS -- Unmanned aircraft just keep getting more popular. They can be cheap. They don't risk life and limb of flight crews. And they seem to get the job done. As the darling of the reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering world, unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, are on everyone's wish list. The U.S. Army, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and spy agencies are looking at different UAV progr ...

Defense Dept. funds Carnegie Mellon battle robot ZDNet February 14, 2005 By Michael Kanellos The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded $26.4 million to Carnegie Mellon University and United Defense Industries to more fully develop their robotic military vehicle prototype, code-named Gladiator. The Defense Department wants a third of all battle vehicles to be unmanned by 2010. The robot is primarily designed for reconnaissance missions, and thus is similar to a robot being developed by John Deere and iRobot. Other robots, such as the Talon which will be soon deployed in Iraq, is used in a more offensive capacity. It comes with a machine gun. The Talon drives itself, but a human (in a remote location) operates the gun.

Demand for Predators soars February 16, 2005 By Bruce V. Bigelow Sign On San Diego Sharply increased military demand for robotic aircraft has spurred San Diego's General Atomics Aeronautical Systems to significantly expand its ability to make the Predator unmanned plane. The company is obligated to build seven Predators this year under its current Pentagon contract, said Thomas Cassidy, Aeronautical Systems' president and chief executive. But in recent weeks, the Air Force has sought a ...

Technology Review By Gregory T. Huang July/August 2004 Stories about superhuman strength permeate popular culture from Atlas to Zeus, Superman to Schwarzenegger. But now, says University of Utah robotics expert Stephen Jacobsen, it’s time to deliver in the real world. With funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, Jacobsen’s Salt Lake City-based company, Sarcos, has built a robotic suit that does just that. A person wearing this powered “exoskeleton” on his or her legs can carry massive lo ...

DEPLOYING AIR-GROUND MULTI-ROBOT TEAMS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS By L. Chaimowicz, A. Cowley, D. Gomez-Ibanez, B. Grocholsky, M. A.Hsieh, H. Hsu, J. F. Keller, V. Kumar, R. waminathan, C. J. Taylor; GRASP Laboratory – University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia – PA – USA 2005 Multirobot Workshop, Washington DC Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present some of the work performed in the GRASP Laboratory with the objective of deploying multi-robot teams in u ...

Deployment and Connectivity Repair of a Sensor Net with a Flying Robot P. Corke1 and S. Hrabar2 and R. Peterson3 and D. Rus4 and S. Saripalli2 and G. Sukhatme2 1 CSIRO ICT Centre Australia 2 Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA 3 Dartmouth Computer Science Department, Hanover, NH 03755 USA, 4 Computer Science and Articial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA 9th International Symposium on Experimental Ro ...

Policeone.com 04/23/2004 Art Campos, He stands 4 feet tall, weighs 450 pounds and has one arm and four "eyes." He has no fear of bombs, guns, knives or poisons. This unnamed character is the Placer County Sheriff Department's new bomb robot, designed to approach explosives, roll into houses where an armed suspect might be hiding and send clear visual images to deputies monitoring a television screen. A $170,000 federal grant awarded for homeland security allowed Placer to buy the mechanical ...

Deriving Action and Behavior Primitives from Human Motion Data By Odest C. Jenkins and Maja J. Mataric´ Robotics Research Lab, University of California, Los Angeles IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IROS), Lausanne, Switzerland, Oct 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: We address the problem of creating basis behaviors for modularizing humanoid robot control and representing human activity. These behaviors, call ...

Dermarob: A safe robot for reconstructive surgery October 2003 Dombre, E. Duchemin, G. Poignet, P. Pierrot, F., LIRMM, Montpellier, France IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 5 On page(s): 876- 884 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a novel and safe robotic system for skin harvesting, the first one in reconstructive surgery. It is intended to s ...

Desert derby to find top battlefield bot March 10, 2004 By Marsha Walton CNN $1 million at end of 210- mile race of unmanned vehicles CNN) -- A million bucks. That's the prize waiting at the finish line of a race fueled by stiff competition and the government's search for a better robot. Out of 25 teams invited to build unmanned vehicles for this week's race, only 20 made it to a qualifying racetrack in Fontana, California. The teams will be put through the paces, making sure they mee ...

Desert Hawk - Mini UAV Goes Operational April 2003 By Eric Hehs Code One Magazine The Desert Hawk, a small unmanned aerial vehicle, could pass as something pulled off the shelf at your local Toys-R-Us. The seven-pound airplane is constructed of a white Styrofoam-like material. Velcro tabs secure the tail to the fuselage. The aircraft launches into the air with a long bungee cord. A top speed of fifty knots, maximum altitude of 500 feet, range of ten kilometers, and endurance of about one hou ...

Desert Hawk aids deployed members Jul. 30, 2003 By Jeanne Grimes AFMC News Service TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. (AFMCNS) — It launches with a bungee cord and looks like it’s made of Styrofoam, but security force pilots using it say its ability to transmit real-time images is critical for base security. In fact, three deployed members of the 72nd Security Forces Squadron swear by their “Desert Hawk” and the technology behind it. “It’s a force multiplier,” said Master Sgt. Randy Morningstar, ...

Desert Hawk UAV patrols Tallil Air Force Link 2/07/05 by Master Sgt. Terry J. Nelson Airmen of the 407th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron here are using a miniature UAV called a “Desert Hawk” that provides an extra set of eyes in the sky, gathering information and identifying threats. The small, 7-pound remote control-led aircraft is used by security forces Airmen and is currently part of the Air Force’s force protection airborne surveillance system. It has a four-foot wingspan and ca ...

Design and control of a mobile hyper-redundant urban search and rescue robot Authors: Wolf, Alon; Choset, Howard H.; Brown, Benjamin H.; Casciola, Randall W. Source: Advanced Robotics, Volume 19, Number 3, March 2005, pp. 221-248(28) Publisher: VSP Abstract: In this work we introduce a new concept of a search and rescue robotic system that is composed of a hyper-redundant robot (HRR) which is mounted on a mobile base. This system is capable not only of inspecting areas reachable by the m ...

Design and control of a novel 4-DOFs parallel robot H4 September 2003 By Choi, H.B. Company, O. Pierrot, F. Konno, A. Shibukawa, T. Uchiyama, M.; Dept. of Aeronaut. & Space Eng., Tohoku Univ., Sendai, Japan Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper deals with the design and dynamic control simulation of ...

Design and Implementation of the Robotic Platform January 2004 Authors: Loffler M.S.1; Chitrakaran V.2; Dawson D.M Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: The diversity of robotic research areas along with the complex requirements of hardware and software for robotic systems have always presented a challenge for system developers. Many past robot control platforms were complex, expensive, and not very user friendly. Even though several of the previous platforms were designed to pro ...

Design and Use Paradigms for Gazebo, An Open-Source Multi-Robot Simulator By Nathan Koenig, Andrew Howard, Robotics Research Labs, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0721, USA IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Sendai, Japan, Sep 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract—Simulators have played a critical role in robotics research as tools for quickly and efficiently testing new concepts, strateg ...

Design for robust component synthesis vibration suppression of flexible structures with on-off actuators June 2004 Jinjun Shan Dong Sun Dun Liu, Dept. of Manuf. Eng. & Eng. Manage., City Univ. of Hong Kong, China IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 20, Issue: 3 On page(s): 512- 525 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract This paper presents a development of component synthesis vibrat ...

DESIGN OF A HIGH IMPACT SURVIVABLE ROBOT By Daniel O'Halloran Carnegie & Howie Choset Ph D Carnegie Mellon University Mechanical Engineering Bennett Conference April 11 2003 Pittsburgh PA Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT This paper presents a design for a two wheeled mobile robot platform that has high survivability when subjected to large impact forces and general rough handling The design of the drive transmission system and integrated suspension ...

Design of the continuous symbol space for the intelligent robots using the dynamics-based information processing May 2004 Okada, M. Nakamura, Y., Dept. of Mechano-Inf., Tokyo Univ., Japan ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Volume 4 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we design a continuous symbol space using a dynamics-based information processing s ...

Design Your Own Robot May 2005 By Joe Brown Popular Science Accompanying the Vex Robotics kit, featured in this month’s What’s New section [page 24], is the Vex Robotics Design System’s Inventor’s Guide. The guide is more than just a stapled pamphlet with instructions on how to build a cookie-cutter robot. It introduces and explains basic engineering concepts relating to the Vex system, penned under direction from the Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Follow the link to ch ...

DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND FIELD DEMONSTRATION OF EXPLORER: A LONG-RANGE UNTETHERED LIVE GASLINE INSPECTION ROBOT SYSTEM October 1, 2003 By Hagen Schempf Office of Scientific & Technical Information Abstract This program is undertaken in order to construct and field-demonstrate 'EXPLORER', a modular, remotely controllable, self-powered, untethered robot system for the inspection of live gas distribution 150 mm (6- inch) to 200 mm (8-inch) diameter mains. The modular design of the system all ...

Designers ruthless in bid for competitive edge March 5, 2004 by Martha Thorn dcmilitary.com It has the strength of a weight lifter, the build of a linebacker and it loves to play ball. A cooperative effort between eight midshipmen and about 25 students from Severn School, Broadneck High School and Severna Park High School, the robot, Das Goat 165, will be competing against other robots at the academy March 18 - 20. In the two-minute competition, the Das Goat team has everything timed do ...

Designing A Flexible Robot Cover All Oct 23, 2003 SpaceDaily.com The skin of a robot has to fulfil two apparently opposing needs: it must be elastic enough to lend the robot human-like dexterity, and yet carry enough wiring to allow it to sense its environment. If engineers connect the robot's sensors to metal wires these will break when the skin stretches. An emerging answer might be to embed a broad corrugated metal film in an elastic covering instead. In an article appearing in this week ...

Designing a Low-cost, Expressive Educational Robot By Thomas Hsiu, Steve Richards, Ajinkya Bhave§, Andres Perez-Bergquist§, Illah Nourbakhsh, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 In Proceedings of IROS 2003, Las Vegas Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The Trikebot is the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost educational robot for secondary level education and home use. This ...

Designs of the Future In future designs the team plans to use optic flow, which detects changes in the robot's field of view image. Optic flow works by comparing these changes from one video frame to another. For example, if an object is seen to be getting larger from frame to frame, the robot can deduce that it is getting closer to the object. "Another thing we can do with vision is motion detection," says Dave Smith, a lead artificial intelligence engineer. "We keep the robot still for a few ...

Designing Robots That can Reason and React May 26, 2003 SpaceDaily.com In a large room in Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Thomas Collins is tweaking the behavior of a machine. Around him stand a gaggle of robots, some with trash can figures, others resembling miniature all-terrain vehicles. They appear to be merely functional, plodding pieces of equipment. But these unlikely contraptions can "think" in the sense that they can react to and reason about their environment. Collins, a seni ...

Detecting Moving Objects using a Single Camera on a Mobile Robot in an Outdoor Environment By Boyoon Jung and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS), pages 980-987, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Mar 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract. ...

Detection and Tracking of External Features in an Urban Environment Using an Autonomous Helicopter By Luis O. Mej´as 1, Srikanth Saripalli 2, Gaurav S. Sukhatme 2 and Pascual Campoy Cervera 1. 1 DISAM-Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain 2 Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA To appear in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2005. Please visit the web ...

Determination of Singularities in Delta-Like Manipulators January 2004 Raffaele Di Gregorio Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat,1, 44100 Ferrara, Italy International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 01 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. The DELTA robot and the manipulators derived from the DELTA robot are a relevant class of translational manipulators. In this paper, the mobility analysis of these parall ...

Determination of the optimal geometry of modular parallel robots September 2003 By Merlet, J.-P. , INRIA, France Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Modular parallel robots are mechanisms which can adapt their geometry according to the task to be performed, usually by changing the location of the attachment points of ...

Determining the bodily motion of a biomimetic underwater vehicle under oscillating propulsion Sept. 2003 By Jenhwa Guo Forng-Chen Chiu Chih-Chieh Chen Yueh-Sheng Ho; Dept. of Eng. Sci. & Ocean Eng., Nat. Taiwan Univ., Taipei, Taiwan Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract The paper describes a biomimetic autono ...

Developing detailed a priori 3D models of large environments to aid in robotic navigation tasks April 2004 Brad Grinstead*, Andreas Koschan, Mongi A. Abidi Imaging, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems Laboratory 334 Ferris Hall Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering The University of Tennessee Proc. SPIE Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VI, vol. 5422, Orlando, FL, USA, pp. 561-568, April 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT In order to ef ...

Development and control of autonomous, biped locomotion using efficient modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques September 2003 By Hardt, M. von Stryk, O. Wollherr, D. Buss, M.; Simulation & Syst. Optimization Group, Technische Univ. Darmstadt, Germany Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Methods for mod ...

Development and Deployment of a Line of Sight Virtual Sensor for Heterogeneous Teams By Robert Grabowski, Pradeep Khosla, and Howie Choset; Carnegie Mellon University, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Department 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, New Orleans, LA April 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract For a team of cooperating robots, geometry plays a vital role in operation. Knowledge of ...

Development of a Robot with a Sense of Self June 27-30, 2005 By K. Kawamura, W. Dodd, P. Ratanaswasd and R. A. Gutierrez Center for Intelligent Systems, Vanderbilt University 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA), Espoo, Finland Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper describes our efforts to develop a robot with a sense of self using a multiagent-based cognitive architecture and control w ...

Development of a Soccer-Playing Dynamically-Balancing Mobile Robot By Brett Browning, Paul Rybski, Jeremy Searock, and Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, USA Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'04), May, 2004. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we present a new domain, called Segway Soccer, for invest ...

Development of a Tethered Epicardial Crawler for Minimally Invasive Cardiac Therapies By Nicholas A. Patronik1, Marco A. Zenati2, and Cameron N. Riviere1 The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA1, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA2 IEEE 30th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference, IEEE, April, 2004, pp. 239-240 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper describes the developmen ...

DEVELOPMENT OF AN INSPECTION PLATFORM AND A SUITE OR SENSORS FOR ASSESSING CORROSION AND MECHANICAL DAMAGE ON UNPIGGABLE TRANSMISSION MAINS February 1, 2004 By George C. Vradis Office of Scientific and Technical Information Description/Abstract This development program is a joint effort among the Northeast Gas Association (formerly New York Gas Group), Foster-Miller, Inc., GE Oil& Gas (PII), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) through the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Th ...

Development of Mine Hands: Extended Prodder for Protected Demining Operation May 2005 Authors: Furihata, Naota 1; Hirose, Shigeo Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: The over 100 million landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) are buried in disaster-affected countries. Although significant efforts have been made at addressing this problem, few have resulted in practical removal tools, especially in the hazardous, yet essential, LV-3 survey. We propose a mechanical master-slave ...

Development of remote microsurgery robot and new surgical procedure for deep and narrow space September 2003 By Ikuta, K. Yamamoto, K. Sasaki, K.; Dept. of Micro Syst. Eng., Nagoya Univ., Japan Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract We developed both new operation procedure and new robot system for remote micro surge ...

Developmental Learning: A Case Study in Understanding “Object Permanence” 2004 Yi Chen and JuyangWeng, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 35-42, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The concepts of muddy environment and muddy tasks set the ground for us to understand the ess ...

Developmental Stages of Perception and Language Acquisition in a Perceptually Grounded Robot 2004 Peter Ford Dominey and Jean-David Boucher, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, CNRS, 67 Blvd. Pinel, 69675 Bron Cedex, France Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 43-50, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The objective of this research is to develop a s ...

Dexterous robot conquers art of origami May 25, 2004 By Will Knight NewScientist A robot that can make delicate paper models using the ancient Japanese art of origami has been developed by a US student. Origami involves folding and sometimes tearing paper to build three dimensional models of animals, people and other objects. It may be relatively simple for a skilled human to make such paper structures, but origami is a new challenge for robots. This is because robots are normally require ...

Differential GPS and odometry-based outdoor navigation of a mobile robot July 2004 Authors: Ohno K.; Tsubouchi T.; Shigematsu B.; Yuta S. Publisher: VSP Abstract: This paper describes outdoor navigation for a mobile robot by using differential GPS (DGPS) and odometry in a campus walkway environment. The robot position is estimated by fusion of DGPS and odometry. The GPS receiver measures its position by radio waves from GPS satellites. The error of GPS measurement data increases near high ...

Digital Advances Produce Improved Unmanned Aerial Vehicles May 2, 2005 By Gerry J. Gilmore DefenseLINK News WASHINGTON, May 2, 2005 – One day on a gray-painted aircraft carrier tossed by turbulent seas, a grizzled Navy commander awaits the arrival of a new pilot. A teeny knock pings from the outside of the officer's watertight steel door. "Come in," the commander growls. The door swings open and a squat, cylindrical object negotiates itself over the threshold and then trundles into the o ...

Direct Plane Tracking in Stereo Image for Mobile Navigation By Jason Corso, Darius Burschka, and Gregory D. Hager; Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore MD Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 875-880, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present a novel plane tracking algorithm based on the direct update of surface parameters from two stereo images. The plane ...

Directional Audio Beacon Deployment: an Assistive Multi-Robot Application April 2004 By Dylan A. Shell and Maja J. Mataric; Interaction Laboratory Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), New Orleans, LA Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper addresses the problem of directional audio beacon deplo ...

Dispersion behaviors for a team of multiple miniature robots September 2003 By Pearce, J.L. Rybski, P.E. Stoeter, S.A. Papanikolopoulos, N.; Dept. of Comput. Sci.and Engineering, Minnesota Univ., Duluth, MN, USA Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract To safely and efficiently guide search and rescue operations in d ...

Distributed Control of Multi-Robot Systems Engaged in Tightly Coupled Tasks Year of Publication: 2004 Authors Terry L. Huntsberger Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. Terry.Huntsberger@jpl.nasa.gov Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA Hrand Aghazarian Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA Paul S. Schenker Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove ...

Distributed Cooperative Outdoor Multirobot Localization and Mapping By RAJ MADHAVAN, Intelligent Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD; KINGSLEY FREGENE, Honeywell Laboratories, 3660 Technology Drive, Minneapolis, MN 55418, USA; and LYNNE E. PARKER, Department of Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-3450, USA Autonomous Robots 17, 23–39, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract. The ...

B. Zimmel, M. Long, J. Carlson, R. Murphy, also to appear in 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2004. Abstract The implementations of a distributed, autonomous error handler (EH) and a human-robot interface (HRI) are presented. The interface is combined with the EH to allow a human operator to see that a failure has occurred on a robot and whether or not it has been served by the EH. An experiment was run to test how well the EH and the interface work together, as well as the usefulness of the EH. The results were inconclusive, although the EH and interface worked together successfully. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety.

Distributed Multi-Agent Diagnosis and Recovery from Sensor Failures By Matthew T Long and Robin R Murphy, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida Lynne E Parker. Department of Computer Science University of Tennessee Center for Robot Assisted Search & Rescue, University of South Florida Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents work extending previous research in sensor fault, tolerance, classification, ...

Distributed Multi-Robot Localization By S.I. Roumeliotis and G.A. Bekey IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Oct. 2002 Abstract In this paper we present a new approach to the problem of simultaneously localizing a group of mobile robots capable of sensing each other. Each of the robots collects sensor data regarding its own motion and shares this information with the rest of the team during the update cycles. A single estimator, in the form of a Kalman filter, processes the availabl ...

Distributed Multi-Robot Task Allocation through Vacancy Chains March 2004 By Torbjrn S. Dahl, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), Postboks 25, 2027 Kjeller, Norway; Maja J. Mataric and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of Southern California 941 West 37th Place, Los Angeles, California 90089-0781 Submitted to Autonomous Robots Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Existing multi-robot task allocation ...

Distributed Planning and Control for Modular Robots with Unit-Compressible Modules September 2003 Z. Butler and D. Rus Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3510, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 9 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Self-reconfigurable robots are versatile systems consisting of large numbers of independent modules. Effective use of these systems requires parallel a ...

PR Newswire - National Center for Defense Robotics selects first six projects for funding - Projects made possible by federal funding supported by Congressman Doyle PITTSBURGH, Oct. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- The Robotics Foundry, an independent, non-profit economic development organization, today announced that its National Center for Defense Robotics (NCDR) operation has awarded $800,000 to several regional companies and universities to execute six, defense-related, "agile robotics" techno ...

DNA robot takes its first steps 06 May 2004 Jenny Hogan, Boston Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition A microscopic biped with legs just 10 nanometres long and fashioned from fragments of DNA has taken its first steps. The nanowalker is being hailed as a major breakthrough by nanotechnologists. The biped's inventors, chemists Nadrian Seeman and William Sherman of New York University, say that while many scientists have been trying to build nanoscale devices capable of bipedal motion, t ...

Do Androids Dream of First Amendment Rights? February 2002 By Brad Wieners AlterNet A Net-controlled robot reporter from MIT may be headed for Afghanistan -- to get the kind of scoop Pentagon doesn't want human journalists to have. "Have you seen Rambo III?" Chris Csikszentmihalyi asks over the phone from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I went to Blockbuster to see what movies they had on Afghanistan, and it was the only one I could find. It's amazing to watch now ...

RT: How did you come to the idea of developing a robotic vacuum cleaner? CA: Actually it was pretty easy. For example, when we formed the company and spoke to people, the response was invariably “When are you going to build a robot that can clean my floor?” To the average person faced with robots, they think of Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. They want robots that can do work around the house. The problem was that we did not know how to make a floor vacuuming robot for anywhere near the cost ...

Government Computer News 04/29/04 By Susan M. Menke GCN Staff The Defense Department already has about 70 robots on bomb disposal duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Joint Robotics Office in the Office of the Secretary is preparing to buy 163 more for about $18 million, at the request of Central Command. Cliff Hudson, head of the joint office, said today that DOD will “down-select from five models to one or two for the field, based on operational assessments” by soldiers. Speaking at ...

E-Health Insider 11 Jun 2004 From automated call-centre systems to car assembly factories, it seems that wherever you look, a robot is waiting to take a human's job. Now, in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, a robot does the rounds instead of a doctor. Charmingly, with its beige frontage, retro TV screen and pointy antennae, Dr Robot (pictured) wouldn't look completely out of place in a second-hand electrical store. The project is the brainchild of Dr Louis Kavoussi, professor of urology ...

Dogs And Robots Share NIST Special Test Arena April 21, 2005 ScienceDaily.com Bomb and drug sniffing dogs are regular visitors to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for training, not for emergency work. Every month as many as 10 to 20 dogs and their handlers from federal agencies as well as from local county and municipal police departments visit the arenas that NIST uses to test and evaluate urban search and rescue and explosive ordnance disposal robots. The arenas re ...

Doing it with robots e4engineering.com April 29, 2004 By Christopher Sell Earlier this month, Warwick University hosted the first- ever UK Robot Football Championships where, ahead of thissummer's European Robot Football Championships in Munich, rival robots equipped with cutting edge technology were pitted against each other. While an entertaining application of a technology, this competition clearly demonstrates the progress made in the field of intelligent systems. Robotic ability in rea ...

Domo Arigato, Doctor Roboto February 14, 2005 By Karen Epper Hoffman TechnologyReview.com It's a routine that anyone who's been hospitalized will be familiar: the doctor rounds. But for a smattering of patients recovering at a handful of hospitals across the country, including Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore and the University of California at Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, the experience is taking a decidedly high-tech turn as the patients come face to face with the brave ne ...

Dr Robot is a total success November 17, 2004 News.com.au SURGERY became art this month when doctors at the Royal Adelaide Hospital used the $3 million da Vinci robot for the first time. In a complex procedure, the director of urology, Dr Peter Sutherland used the robot to remove a cancerous prostate from patient Robert Hogan. The da Vinci robot, guided by Dr Sutherland, conducted the keyhole surgery perfectly – and for Mr Hogan that meant less blood loss, less post-operative pain, a swifte ...

Dragon Runner Mobile Ground Sensor U.S. Joint Forces Command Dragon Runner is a small, four-wheeled, rear-wheel drive, front-wheel steer, man-portable mobile ground sensor designed to increase situational awareness. It will give tactical Marine units the capability to “see around the corner” in an urban environment. Dragon Runner is part of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's Project RSTA, an effort to develop a reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition network of sensors that portray ...

Driverless Car July 7, 2005 By Blair Johnson KVAL 13 A group from Oregon State University has developed a driver-less car that could help the school win a $2 million prize. At first glance, it looks like a dune buggy. "We felt like we had an ideal platform because of this mini-baja car which was an award winner in off-road manned competition," said Dr. Belinda Batten from OSU's School of Engineering. But the Oregon "Willamette Autonomous Vehicles Enterprise" or WAVE Runner is different. ...

Driverless Hummer struts its stuff May 06, 2005 By Byron Spice Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The red Hummer drove forward about 50 yards, cut left, then right and drove straight for another hundred yards or so, avoiding a couple of plastic garbage cans in its path. Fancier, death-defying driving no doubt was then being displayed on the Parkway West, but for more than 100 people gathered at the former LTV site in Hazelwood yesterday morning, this simple maneuver merited a round of applause. This ...

Driving Rovers a Very Slow Task for Engineers February 17, 2004 Copyright 2004 Marin Independent Journal, a MediaNews Group Publication John Wright, a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses 3-D liquid crystal goggles while planning the day's activities for Spirit. Each six-wheel-drive rover travels at less than one-tenth of a mile per hour - hardly a fast clip. Regardless, driving Spirit and Opportunity is as racy a job as any on the $820 million mission, say ...

Drone School, a Ground's-Eye View May 27, 2005 By Noah Shachtman Wired News FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona -- The loping, wooden barracks here look pretty much the same as they did in the 1880s, when soldiers marched off to chase Geronimo and his Apache guerillas. From the open, double-story porches, you can still see the adobe home where commanders planned one of the U.S. Army's final cavalry charges on horseback, 30 years after that. Just five miles away, on a lonely airstrip on the base's northw ...

Drones See, Smell Evil From Above Mar. 24, 2003 By Noah Shachtman Wired News The generals have their drones. Now soldiers in the field are getting robotic spies of their own. The newest drone in the U.S. military's growing robotic arsenal looks like an Apollo-era model rocket, and is small enough to fit in a golf bag. So it probably isn't going to make Saddam Hussein quiver in his bunker. But the Silver Fox unmanned aircraft could prove useful to military commanders on the ground in Ir ...

Drugs delivered by robots in the blood October 1, 2004 By Will Knight, Sendai NewScientist.com A microscopic swimming robot unveiled by Chinese scientists could eventually be used for drug delivery or to clear arteries in humans, say researchers. The 3 millimetre-long triangular machine was constructed by Tao Mei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China. The craft is propelled using an external magnetic field which ...

Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid November 4, 2004 PhysOrg.com A wall-climbing, book-sized autonomous vehicle made by a Duke University team drove up a challenging vertical course to win first prize in an international competition Sept. 22-24 in Madrid. The student competition was part of the seventh annual International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots. Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke’s electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robo ...

Dynamic behaviors for a hybrid leg-wheel mobile platform By C. Steeves1, M. Buehler1, S.G. Penzes2 1McGill University, Center for Intelligent Machines, Ambulatory Robotics Lab, 3480 University Street, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3A 2A7 2Defence R&D Canada, Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES), Box 4000 Medicine Hat, AB, Canada T1A 8K6 Proc. SPIE, 2002, Vol. 4715, pp 75-86, Orlando, April 2-3, 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. ABSTRACT A hybrid platfo ...

Dynamic preshaping for a robot driven by a single wire September 2003 By Higashimori, M. Kaneko, M. Ishikawa, M.; Graduate Sch. of Eng., Hiroshima Univ., Japan Proceedings. ICRA '03. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2003. You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract Dynamic preshaping is important for high speed capturing robot to catch a moving object successfully. This paper discus ...

Dynamic Proxies and Haptic Constraints By G¨unter Niemeyer and Probal Mitra, Telerobotics Lab, Stanford University Presented at ICRA: Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, April 26 - May 1, 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Summary Haptic simulations strive to provide users with realistic renditions of virtual environments but often struggle to display convincing rigid constraints or impacts. They generally utilize a proxy represent ...

Dynamic Proxy Objects in Haptic Simulations By Probal Mitra and Gunter Niemeyer, Telerobotics Lab, Stanford University Presented at IEEE Conference on Robotics, Automation, and Mechatronics (RAM), December 1 - 3, 2004, Singapore. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Haptic simulations aim to provide users with realistic renditions of increasingly complex virtual environments. These may involve multiple users, multiple hands, and complex virtual tools. For ...

Dynamic sliding PID control for tracking of robot manipulators: theory and experiments December 2003 Parra-Vega, V. Arimoto, S. Yun-Hui Liu Hirzinger, G. Akella, P., Mechatronics Div.-CINVESTAV, Mexico City, Mexico IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract For a class of robot arms, a proportional-derivative (PD) controller plus grav ...

DYNAMIC WAYPOINT NAVIGATION USING VORONOI CLASSIFIER METHODS 2004 J. Overholt*, G. Hudas, G. Fiorani, M. Skalny, A. Tucker U.S. Army RDECOM-TARDEC Robotics Mobility Laboratory Warren, MI 48397-5000 ASC ABSTRACT This paper details the development of a dynamic waypoint navigation method which introduces and utilizes Voronoi classifiers as the control mechanism for an autonomous mobile robot. A Voronoi diagram may be generated by any finite set of points in a plane. For mobile robot control eac ...

Eat Your Heart Out, AIBO July 2004 By Jonathan Coulton| Popular Science Why buy a robot that follows a colored ball when you can spend hundreds of hours building your own? Dept.: You Built What?! Tech: Robot vision Cost: $200 Time: Many long nights It's midnight and I'm exhausted. For 200 hours, I've been caught in a mind-numbing loop: unplug, tweak code, compile, load, plug in, pause for sigh and brief prayer. Once again, I crouch on the floor and wave a pink ball in front of ...

Ecobot Eats Dead Flies for Fuel Dec. 15, 2004 By Lakshmi Sandhana Wired News Robots walk, robots talk and, soon, robots will eat, too. Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol, are working on creating autonomous robots that power themselves using substances found in the environment. Professors Chris Melhuish and John Greenman plan to give robots their very own guts -- artificial digestive systems and the corresponding metabolisms that will allow robots to digest food ...

Educational Results of the Personal Exploration Rover Museum Exhibit By Illah Nourbakhsh, Emily Hamner, and Brian Dunlavey, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Debra Bernstein and Kevin Crowley, Learning Research and Development Center University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Submitted to ICRA-2005 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The project described here is the third stage of the Personal Rover Project, whi ...

Effective Sampling and Distance Metrics for 3D Rigid Body Path Planning By James J. Kuffner, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA & Digital Human Research Center, National Institute of Advanced, Science and Technology (AIST), 2-41-6 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan 135-0064 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Important implementation issues in rigid body path planning are often overlooked. In particula ...

Effects of Visual Feedback Distortion for the Elderly and the Motor-Impaired in a Robotic Rehabilitation Environment May 2004 By Bambi R. Brewer*, Roberta Klatzky**, Yoky Matsuoka*,*** *Robotics Institute, **Psychology Department, ***Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '04) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In order to design a ro ...

Efficient Algorithms for the Identification of Potential Track/Observation Associations in Continuous Time Data February, 2005 By J.M. Kubica, A. Moore, A.J. Connolly, and R. Jedicke, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University tech. report CMU-RI-TR-05-10 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper we examine the problem of spatial data association - identifying which track/observations pairs could feasibly be associated. Efficiently and accur ...

Efficient Construction of Globally Consistent Ladar Maps using Pose Network Topology and Nonlinear Programming By Alonzo Kelly and Ranjith Unnikrishnan, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 152133890 Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR '03), November, 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Many instances of the mobile robot guidance mapping problem exhibit a topology that can be represente ...

Efficient Exploration Without Localization By Maxim A. Batalin and Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 2714-2719, Taipei, Taiwan, Sep 2003 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract— We study the problem of exploring an unknown environment u ...

Simhon, S., and Dudek, G. 1998. Selecting targets for local reference frames. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Leuven, Belgium, Vol. 4, pp. 2840–2845. Smith, R. C., and Cheeseman, P. 1986. On the representation and estimation of spatial uncertainty. International Journal of Robotics Research 5(4):56–68. Stroupe,A.W., Martin, M., and Balch,T. 2000. Merging Gaussian distributions for object localization in multi-robot systems. Proceedings of the ...

Efficient Monitoring for Planetary Rovers By Vandi Verma, Geoff Gordon, and Reid Simmons; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 International Symposium on Artificial Intelligenceand Robotics in Space, May, 2003. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Planetary rovers operate in environments where human intervention is expensive, slow, unreliable, or impossible. It is therefore essential to monitor the behavior of these robots so that contingencies ...

Efficient Optimal Search of Euclidean-Cost Grids and Lattices By James J. Kuffner, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 and Digital Human Research Center, National Institute of Advanced, USA Science and Technology (AIST) Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'04), IEEE, September, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We describe a simple technique to speed up optimal p ...

Efficient Optimal Search of Uniform-Cost Grids and Lattices By James J. Kuffner The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA & Digital Human Research Center, National Institute of Advanced, Science and Technology (AIST), 2-41-6 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan 135-0064 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract A simple technique is described to speed up optimal path planning on Euclidean-cost grids and lattices. Man ...

Spectrum October 5 2004 By Yoseph Bar-Cohen I ISSUED A CHALLENGE a few years ago to my fellow researchers: build a robot using muscles of electrically activated polymers that could arm-wrestle a human. I was trying to jump-start research in the field of electroactive polymers, or artificial muscles, and given the state of the art at the time, I didn't really expect to see the challenge fulfilled for a couple of decades. I was wrong. A little over a year ago, researchers from SRI Internatio ...

Electro-Oculographic Guidance of a Wheelchair Using Eye Movements Codification July/August 2003 R. Barea, L. Boquete , L. M. Bergasa, E. López and M. Mazo Electronics Department, University of Alcala, Campus Universitario s/n, 28871 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 7/8 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In this paper we present a new method to guide mobile robots. An eye-control dev ...

Electronic eye outsmarts speedsters April 18, 2005 Jennifer Viegas Discovery News A smarter speed trap that drivers can't detect is being developed and its inventors say it could render radar detectors useless. The inventors, from the University of Florida, will outline the research in a paper in an upcoming issue of the journal Transactions on Robotics and Automation, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The technology is so new that police are not yet equi ...

Elevate your hands or I ignite Aug 26th 2004 Economist.com high-tech weapon for the war to win Iraqi hearts and minds AMONG the many fields in which Americans excel are technological wizardry and not speaking foreign languages. So it was only a matter of time before someone invented a robot that can translate spoken English into other tongues. Enter the “Phraselator”, a palm-held electronic polyglot built by a firm in Maryland called VoxTec. Its most immediate application is military. Fle ...

Embedded Linux drives PatrolBot surveillance robot Sep. 11, 2003 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. Embedded Linux and a high-end Versalogic single board computer (SBC) form the brain behind ActivMedia's new $30K "PatrolBot," which ActivMedia calls "the first fully autonomous robotic surveillance and monitoring system available off-the shelf." VersaLogic will demo PatrolBot at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston next month. The device runs an unspecified version of embedded Linux on ...

Embodied cognition through cultural interaction 2004 Bart De Vylder, Bart Jansen, and Tony Belpaeme, Artifcial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium Proceedings Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems 117, pages pp. 141-142, Genoa, Italy. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this short paper we describe a robotic setup to study the self-organiz ...

Emergent Robot Differentiation in Distributed Multi-Robot Task Allocation By Torbjørn S. Dahl 1, Maja J. Mataric´ 2, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme 2 1 Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) 2 Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, University of California, Los Angeles 7th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS'04) Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract: We present a distributed mechanism for automatically allocating tas ...

Emotion-Based Control of Cooperating Heterogeneous Mobile Robots Authors: Robin R Murphy, Christine Lisetti, Russ Tardif, Liam Irish, Aaron Gage Corresponding Author: Dr Robin R Murphy Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Previous experiences show that it is possible for agents such as robots cooperating asynchronously on a sequential task to enter deadlock, where one robot does not fulfill ...

Enabling Learning From Large Datasets: Applying Active Learning to Mobile Robotics By Cristian Dima, Martial Hebert and Anthony Stentz, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, April, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Autonomous navigation in outdoor, off-road environments requires solving complex classification problems. Obstacle detection, road following an ...

Endurance test for robot Humvee July 13, 2005 BBC News Last Updated: Wednesday, 13 July, 2005, 10:17 GMT 11:17 UK E-mail this to a friend Printable version Endurance test for robot Humvee Sandstorm completed the trial race in seven hours A robotic Humvee has managed to drive itself for seven hours without crashing on a race course in the US. The robotic vehicle built by Red Team Robot Racing from Carnegie Mellon University covered 200 miles (322 kilometres) during the ...

Energy-time-efficient adaptive dispatching algorithms for ant-like robot systems May 2004 Chang, H.J. George Lee, C.S. Yung-Hsiang Lu Charlie Hu, Y., Sch. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN, USA ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract In this paper, we investigate energy-time-efficient dispatching methods ...

Engineer builds prototype of water-walking robot September 13, 2004 By ASSOCIATED PRESS MSNBC.com PITTSBURGHUSA - It could be called a mechanical miracle -- a robot that walks on water. With inspiration from nature and some help from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team led by Carnegie Mellon engineering professor Metin Sitti built a tiny robot that can walk on water, much like the insects known as water skimmers or Jesus bugs. It's only a prototype, but some res ...

Engineering students construct mine rover November 23, 2004 By Georgeanne Barrett Arizona Daily Wildcat Two UA engineering students have built a radio-controlled rover to explore the mysteries inside old mines in the Arizona desert. Keith Brock and Jessica Dooley, both aerospace engineering seniors, were curious about what was inside a mine northeast of Phoenix near Congress, Ariz., but were not willing to risk their lives to find out. Brock and Dooley, members of the UA's Aerial Robot ...

Engineering Test Satellite VII Flight Experiments For Space Robot Dynamics and Control: Theories on Laboratory Test Beds Ten Years Ago, Now in Orbit May 2003 Kazuya Yoshida Department of Aeronautics and Space Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai, 980-8579, Japan International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 5 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. The Engineering Test Satellite VII (ETS-VII), an unmanned spacecraft equipped with ...

Engineers Deliver Robot To Neutralize Remote Explosives June 30, 2005 by Timothy R. Anderl, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate Tyndall AFB SpaceWar Engineers from the Air Force Research Laboratory Materials and Manufacturing Directorate have rapidly prototyped, developed, and delivered low-cost expendable robots to disable and dispose of improvised explosive devices. The BomBot, which has already established its value during a variety of mission profiles in Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq, ...

Engineers fabricate robot bumper mounts January 13, 2004 by Timothy R. Anderl Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) -- A ramp and bumper mount for carrying small robots on armored Humvees was fabricated by engineers at the Air Force Research Laboratory materials and manufacturing directorate here. Explosive ordnance disposal crews needed the items to transport and operate robots without having to use a trailer. EO ...

Engineers to Develop Robot Swarms from MARS May 17, 2005 PhysOrg.com Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have received a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense to develop large-scale "swarms" of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky. The Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors or the Swarms Project, as it is known takes organizational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robo ...

Enhanced Modelling and Performance in Braided Pneumatic Muscle Actuators 1 March 2003 International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 3 Steve Davis, N. Tsagarakis, J. Canderle and Darwin G. Caldwell Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Salford, Salford, Lancashire M5 4WT, UK You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. Pneumatic technology has been successfully applied for over two millennia. Even today, pneumatic cylind ...

Enhancing Functionality and Autonomy in Man-Portable Robots April 13-15, 2004 By E. Biagtan Pacis a , H. R. Everett a , N. Farrington a , D. Bruemmer b a Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego b Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory Please visit the web site to view the whole article. ABSTRACT Current man-portable robotic systems are too heavy for troops to pack during extended missions in rugged terrain and typically require more user support than can be ...

Enhancing Multi-Robot Coordinated Teams with Sliding Autonomy July 2004 By Jonathan D. Brookshire, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15232 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science TR-04-40 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Introduction The combination of human intelligence, autonomous precision, and robotic strength has the potential to bridge the gap which leaves ...

Enlisting robots for day care June 23, 2005 By Michael Kanellos CNet News Rubi, a teacher's assistant at the Early Childhood Education Center in San Diego, has eyes sometimes in back of her head, along with antennas and a couple of microprocessors. The robot is part of an experiment at the University of California San Diego to study how robots and humans interact. Rubi is capable of tracking heads, detecting faces and interpreting basic expressions. Additionally, it can teach songs and--t ...

Entries for robotic ground vehicle competition due by Feb. 11 Air Force Times January 25, 2005 Einsteins and Edisons aiming to create an unmanned, robotic ground vehicle that can navigate a course across the southwestern United States have until Feb. 11 to file their applications for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which carries a $2 million winner’s purse. At least 95 new teams and 34 teams returning from the 2004 competition had submitted applications as of Tuesday, according to the event ...

Entry in Pentagon contest goes wide right May 3, 2005 By THOMAS J. PROHASKA The Buffalo News LOCKPORT - The robot all-terrain vehicle lurched over the starting line, hesitated, veered right and went into reverse, chasing a man with a camcorder across the yard. Oh, well. The light bulb didn't work the first time Thomas Edison turned on the juice, either. Two local inventors came up short Monday in their efforts to win $2 million from the Department of Defense by creating technology that ...

EOD adds high-tech tool to their arsenal September 23, 2004 MarineCorpsNews CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti (Sept. 23, 2004) -- For the last month, Detachment 20, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 8 has been testing the capabilities of a versatile tool that has recently been added to their arsenal. The Vanguard MK II, a mere two-foot tall remote operated robot, may not be the biggest weapon the EOD technicians have, but it’s a potential lifesaver, says Petty Officer 1st Class Taylor Hatcher, E ...

EOD robots performing tech wonders in Iraq Army News Service January 10, 2005 By Spc. Jonathan Montgomery BAGHDAD, Iraq (Army News Service, Jan. 10, 2004) – Whenever an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician heads downrange, one thing is certain: the robot goes first. “The cost of losing a robot is not nearly as close as losing a trained EOD person,” said Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Carroll, noncommissioned officer in charge of the 184th Ordnance Battalion, an EOD Robotics team from Fort Gillem, ...

ERGODIC DYNAMICS BY DESIGN: A ROUTE TO PREDICTABLE MULTIROBOT SYSTEMS By Dylan A. Shell, Chris V. Jones, Maja J. Mataric´, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-0781, USA To appear as a poster paper in The Third International Naval Research Laboratory Multi-Robot Systems Workshop, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, Mar 2005 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We define and discuss a class of ...

ESA astronaut goes underwater to test European Robotic Arm SpaceRef/com. December 04, 2004 The WET model of the European Robotic Arm (ERA) was comprehensively inspected and tested at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow last week. ESA astronaut AndrÈ Kuipers donned a Russian Orlan spacesuit for the occasion. He spent over three hours underwater with the model of the robotic arm, which was built in 1998, but is nevertheless in perfect condition. Impressive The impressive r ...

Estimating Articulated Human Motion With Covariance Scaled Sampling June 2003 C. Sminchisescu and B. Triggs INRIA Rhône-Alpes, GRAVIR-CNRS, 655 avenue de l'Europe, 38330 Montbonnot, France International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 22 Issue 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. We present a method for recovering three-dimensional (3D) human body motion from monocular video sequences based on a robust image matching metric, incorporatio ...

Ethics for the Robot Age Wired January 2005 By Jordan Pollack Most people's expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity. Both visions are wrong. The artificial intelligence to animate robots remains several orders of magnitude less than what's neede ...

EU funds project on humanoid technology and cognitive neuroscience Cordis News January 7, 2005 As it becomes increasingly clear that mental processes are profoundly shaped by the physical structure of the body and by its interaction with the environment, so the study of cognition and intelligence is becoming more and more dependent on the use of physical bodies and ultimately on the use of humanoid robots. The European Commission is therefore funding a new project, RobotCub, aimed at moving ...

Evaluation of Control Strategies for Multi-Robot Search and Retrieval By P. E. Rybski, A. Larson, A. Schoolcraft, S. Osentoski and M. Gini, University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science and Engineering 7th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-7), pp. 281-288, Marina del Rey, CA, March 2002. Abstract We are interested in studying how environmental and control factors affect the performance of homogeneous multi-robot team doing a search and rescue task. In ...

MCAD Cafe Oct. 5, 2004— PASADENA, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Oct. 5, 2004— Evolution Robotics, a leading provider of next-generation robotics technologies and component solutions, today introduced NorthStar(TM), a new, low-cost, hardware and software localization solution that enables mobile devices to navigate more intelligently in indoor environments. Similar to global positioning systems (GPS), the NorthStar system measures a device's exact coordinates and heading using harmless and invisible ...

Technology Review May 19/26, 2004 By Kimberly Patch Evolution has worked pretty well for biological systems, so why not apply it to the systems that control robots? Evolutionary computing has been tapped to produce coherent robot behavior in simulation, and real robots have been used to evolve simple behavior like moving toward light sources and avoiding objects. Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Utah have advanced the field by combining artificial neu ...

Evolution-Based Deliberative Planning for Cooperating Unmanned Ground Vehicles in a Dynamic Environment By Talib Hussain, David Montana, Gordon Vidaver, Department of Distributed Systems and Logistics, BBN Technologies, Cambridge MA, USA, 02138 BBN Technologies Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract. Many challenges remain in the development of tactical planning systems that will enable automated, cooperative replanning of routes and ...

Evolving Robocode Tank Fighters By Jacob Eisenstein October 28, 2003 AIM-2003-023 MIT AI Lab Publication Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper, I describe the application of genetic programming to evolve a controller for a robotic tank in a simulated environment. The purpose is to explore how genetic techniques can best be applied to produce controllers based on subsumption and behavior oriented languages such as REX. As part of my implementation, I developed TableRex, a modification of REX that can be expressed on a fixed-length genome. Using a fixed subsumption architecture of TableRex modules, I evolved robots that beat some of the most competitive hand-coded adversaries.

Roam if You Want To If you have more than one robot in an office, the robots might cooperate with each other depending on the way they are built and the degree of sophistication of their pre-programmed learning behaviors. All robotic office assistants are equipped with wireless technologies to relieve roaming workers and business travelers of repetitive tasks. The following describes how you can use wireless technology to communicate with or even call up a robotic office assistant (the one wh ...

Exact solution and infinite-dimensional stability analysis of a single flexible link in collision December 2003 Ching, F.M.C. Wang, D. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation Volume: 19, Issue: 6 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text or it can be purchased online. Abstract There is an increasing interest in examining the use of flexible link manipulators in tasks where there is contact with the environment. Presently, there has been ...

Executive Overview: Jane’s Electro-Optic Systems June 5, 2005 By Michael J Gething Janes Iraq, and to a lesser degree Afghanistan, continue to attract the headlines and the explosive demand for night vision in all formats. As noted last year, the production and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continues unabated with a corresponding increase in the need for and refinement of TI sensor turrets. Naval systems Work continues to refine and develop Infra-Red Search and Track (IRS ...

Exemplar-Based Primitives for Humanoid Movement Classification and Control By Evan Drumwright, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, and Maja J Matari´c; Interaction Lab/USC Robotics Research Labs 941 West 37th Place, SAL 300, Mailcode 0781, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 140-145, Apr 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract We present a unified methodology for human ...

Exercising a Native Intelligence Metric on an Autonomous On-Road Driving System By John A Horst, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 100 Bureau Drive MS 8230, Gaithersburg, Maryland Proceedings of the Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS) Workshop, September 16-18, 2003, Gaithersburg, MD Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract The intelligence of artificial systems is well quantified by the amount of specified complexity inh ...

Expected Shortest Paths for Landmark-Based Robot Navigation July-August 2004 A.J. Briggs, C. Detweiler, D. Scharstein, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA and A. Vandenberg-Rodes Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 7/8- Publication Date: 1 July-August 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. In this paper we address the problem of planning reliable landmarkbased r ...

Experimental Analysis and Control of a Chaotic Pendubot September 2004 H.G. González-Hernández, J. Alvarez, Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación, Superior de Ensenada CICESE, Depto. de Electrónica y Telecomunicaciones, Km. 107 Carr., Tijuana-Ensenada, 22860 Ensenada, B.C., México and J. Alvarez-Gallegos Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, CINVESTAV-I.P.N. Depto. de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Sección de Mecatrónica Ap. Postal 14-740. 07000, México, D.F. México Internatio ...

Experimental Study of Dynamic Based Feedback Linearization for Trajectory Tracking of a Four-Wheel Autonomous Ground Vehicle July 2005 Authors: Javid, S. 1; Eghtesad, M. 2; Khayatian, A. 3; Asadi, H Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers Abstract: In this paper, experimental study of dynamic based trajectory tracking of an autonomous ground vehicle is presented. The vehicle with two front (steering) and two rear (driving) wheels and also an on-board computer, two DC motors, two batteries ...

Experimental Study of Humanoid Robot HRP-1S April-May 2004 K. Yokoi, F. Kanehiro, K. Kaneko, S. Kajita, K. Fujiwara and Hirohisa Hirukawa Intelligent Systems Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science, and Technology (AIST), 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568, Japan International Journal of Robotics Research Volume 23 Issue 4/5- Publication Date: 1 April-May 2004 You can view the abstract online. A subscription is required to view the full text. We have developed a ...

Experimental study on fine motion control of underwater robots December 2004 Authors: A. Hanai; H.T. Choi; S.K. Choi; J. Yuh Publisher: VSP Abstract: This paper considers thruster dead zones and saturation limits, which are nonlinear elements that complicate fine motion control of underwater robots. If the vehicle is configured with redundant thrusters, the respective dead zones and their surrounding nonlinear regions could be avoided by implementing a null motion solution for the command ...

Experimental Validation of a Framework for the Design of Controllers that Induce Stable Walking in Planar Bipeds June 2004 E. R.Westervelt Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA, G. Buche Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble, Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs Electriciens de Grenoble, BP 46, 38402 St Martin d’Hères, France and J.W. Grizzle Control Systems Laboratory, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Michig ...

Experimentally Validated Bounding Models for the Scout II Quadrupedal Robot By Ioannis Poulakakis and James A. Smith, Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 2A7, Canada AND Martin Buehler1, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA International Conference on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, LA, USA, April 2004, Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract In this paper the authors discuss control and modeling issues significant fo ...

Experiments in Multirobot Air-Ground Coordination By Luiz Chaimowicz, Ben Grocholsky, James F. Keller, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor; GRASP Laboratory - University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104 Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, 2004 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper addresses the problem of coordinating aerial and ground vehicles in tasks that involve exploration, identification of targets and maintaining a connecte ...

By SOREN ANDERSON THE TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE Jul 16, 2004 SMW) - Here they come again, mechanical men out to do us humans harm. Here they come in "I, Robot," the Will Smith blockbuster - opening Friday - based loosely on the late Isaac Asimov's famed collection of sci-fi stories of the same name. They come, intending to do some serious damage to Smith, who plays a cop out to stop a bunch of ominous-looking robonasties in their metallic tracks. Once more, our technology rises up to bite us in t ...

JS Online July 24, 2004 By GINA BARTON Bomb experts rely on smarts, not wire cutters The glowing numbers counted down the seconds before detonation: 10, nine, eight . . . The FBI agent wiped the sweat from his brow. He stared at the rapidly changing numbers, then switched his focus to the curly wires. He fumbled with the wire cutters. Red or blue? Red or blue? If he chose the wrong one, the whole house could go up. Maybe the whole block. The agent inhaled deeply as instinct took over. R ...

Exploiting Critical Points to Reduce Positioning Error for Sensor-based Navigation By Ercan U. Acar, Howie Choset, Carnegie Mellon University Proc. 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, Washington DC May 2002 Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract This paper presents a planner that determines a path such that the robot does not have to heavily rely on odometry to reach its goal. The planner determines a sequence of obstacle boundarie ...

Exploiting physical dynamics for concurrent control of a mobile robot By Brian P. Gerkey, Maja J. Mataric´, and Gaurav S. Sukhatme; Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781, USA Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2002) pages 3467 - 3472, Washington, DC, May 11 - 15, 2002. Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract Conventionally, mobile robots are controlled through ...

EXPLOITING THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN ROBOTIC AUTONOMY AND NETWORKS March 2003 Jason Redi and Joshua Bers, BBN Technologies* 2003 NRL Symposium on Multi-Robot Systems, Arlington, VA Please visit the web site to view the article in its entirety. Abstract For teams of autonomous robots to fully utilize their distributed problem solving and collaboration capabilities, they require a self-organizing, self-healing, multi-hop communication network. Robot teams compose a unique kind of multi-hop n ...

Exploring Caves Safely With Fester the Robot August 2002 By Spc. Erica Leigh Foley, 28th Public Affairs Detachment Defend America When a soldier clears a cave, he has to look for booby-traps and trip wires, making all the dangers inherent to him personally, said U.S. Army Col. Bruce Jette of the robotics team. So Jette had his work cut out for him. After being hand-picked by the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, he rounded up the best people he could find for the job and set out to help soldi ...

HB: So in Phase I, did any of these actually get built? PB: No. Phase I, with NIAC, is a six-months-long brain-straining, pencil-pushing study, to scope out the state of the art of the relevant technologies. In Phase II, we're going to do a limited amount of prototyping and field-testing, over a two-year period. This is far less than what one might need for an actual mission. But, of course, that is NIAC's mandate, to examine technology 10 to 40 years out. We're thinking this is probably in th ...

Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robots Outfitted With Weapons August 2003 by Frank Colucci National Defense Magazine In a live demonstration last month, the U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center tested the performance of an armed robot, called Talon. Explosive ordnance disposal experts at the New Jersey facility operated the robot with a remotely-aimed weapons mount and a new fire control system. The Talon has attracted the attention of several potential users looking ...

Exposing the Spy Sub of the Future 30 June 2005 By Bill Sweetman Popular Science Robot mini subs, navy seal launches, high-tech espionage: the submarine of the 21st century has arrived Common wisdom in this age of door-to-door combat dictates that the U.S. submarine fleet is of diminishing utility—after all, there are no terrorists hiding underwater. But common wisdom does not so easily apply to the USS Jimmy Carter, a giant Seawolf-class nuclear submarine modified into a spy ship. The submarine, commissioned in February, will serve as a stealthy weapon near enemy shores: tapping into undersea fiber-optic cables, covertly delivering Navy Seals into enemy ports, and, if necessary, directly attacking enemy ships and land-based targets.

Expressing Bayesian Fusion as a Product of Distributions: Application in Robotics March 2, 2003 C´edric Pr