The Mars Science Laboratory rover, aka Curiosity, is currently undergoing assembly and testing. Scheduled for a 2011 launch, Curiosity is way bigger, and capable of a lot more science, than either little Sojourner or not-so-little Opportunity (which is still going, by the way). It must be pretty stressful to be an engineer working on MSL, knowing that at some point you just have to say, “okay, looks good” and then the robot takes off for Mars and there’s nothing more you can do, ever. And for better or worse, Spirit and Opportunity have set some pretty high (I’m not sure whether to say “unrealistic”) standards for durability and performance. I’m optimistic, though, and as long as the crazy landing scheme works out, MSL has tons of potential. Video of the robotic “skycrane” that’ll set Curiosity down on the surface of Mars, after the jump. [ MSL ]

Last month, South Korea deployed an armed surveillance robot at a guard post within the demilitarized zone in Gangwon Province. The robot consists of an array of cameras and sensors plus a 40mm grenade launcher. Now, let’s be clear: this robot is remote controlled. It appears to have autonomous sensing and targeting capability, but it doesn’t fire autonomously… Rather, it can be fired remotely by a human. In this respect, it’s much the same as a Predator drone or a Talon SWORDS, except that it’s stationary. This approach is very efficient if you have a lot of static area to monitor, since many robots can be controlled by a small group of humans, with each robot only alerting its controllers if its sensors detect something relevant. Human soldiers would probably perform better at most aspects of the task, certainly, but humans are very expensive to train, equip and maintain, while each of these robots costs only $330,000. I managed to dig up a video from 2006 of what I’m pretty sure is the same basic robot; it’s in Korean, so if anyone can translate some of the interesting stuff, please post in the comments. If this trial proves successful, South Korea plans to deploy the robots at all guard posts along the DMZ, and possibly to some offshore islands. VIA [ Chosun ] POST NAVIGATION

The DelFly II from TU Delft is one of the most promising flapping wing micro UAVs we’ve seen, and at the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition last week the little MAV got quite a workout. The video shows the robot flying along with a feed from the onboard camera and some of the vision algorithms being used to navigate. Especially cool is how the DelFly II actually runs into a wall at one point and bounces right back, which is one of the big advantages of a flapping wing design over a rotary wing. Also, that optic flow navigation technique is something that we’ve written about before; it replicates the way that insects navigate, using simple moving patterns to determine speed and direction relative to objects. It’s not specified in the video what level of autonomy was used on the Delfly II… The competition permitted both full autonomy and remote control based on onboard video. At the very least, the first sequence (the figure eight around the two orange poles) seems to be completely autonomous, albeit (as far as I can tell) using a ground station to interpret the video and send steering commands to the robot. If you think 16 grams is pretty small for an autonomous robot, don’t forget the DelFly Micro, which weighs just a hair (literally) over 3 (!) grams, and also manages to carry an onboard camera that can transmit streaming video. The DelFly Nano (1.5 grams) still seems to be a work in progress, and as for the DelFly Pico, somebody at TU Delft sneezed nearby and now they can’t find it. Yeah, I was kidding about that last one. [ TU Delft ] [ IMAV 2010 ]

I keep on wondering why robotics researchers persist in designing humanoid robots specifically for domestic applications… Quite often, it seems to because they figure if the robot looks like a person, then it’ll be easier for people to relate to it and become comfortable having it in their home. Such figuring isn’t quite right, and in fact may be entirely wrong, at least according to this 2008 study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and EPFL\. Researchers surveyed 240 people at a home and living exhibition in Geneva about their feelings on robots in their lives, and came up with some interesting data, including the above graph which shows pretty explicitly that having domestic robots that look like humans (or even “creatures”) is not a good idea, and is liable to make people uncomfortable. The location for the survey was chosen because the people attending the exhibition weren’t interested in robots specifically, but rather home technology in general, making them potential early adopters for robots in the home. And since they decided that going to a home and living exhibition was a fun way to spend their time, it’s probably safe to assume that they’d spent some time thinking about what they would and wouldn’t like to get out of a robot. After the jump, more data on what respondents see robots doing for them in the near future. The researchers point out that tasks involving relationships score far lower than general manual labor replacement, suggesting that people aren’t interested (at this point) in dealing with a robot on any deeper level than as a tool (although that may change with use). Personally, I was rather disappointed to see driving get such a negative response. It makes sense, I suppose, since also getting negative responses were other tasks in […]