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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a big week last week, mounting the Remote Sensing Mast and an array of navigation and sensing cameras on their latest Mars rover. Then on Friday Curiosity took its first drive, traveling about three feet back and forth on its brand new 20-inch aluminum wheels.

To the applause of cleanroom-clad NASA engineers, Curiosity crawled along the floor of a lab at JPL while being controlled remotely by wire, rather than by the software that will direct the rover’s movement on Mars. But as a milestone it’s fairly significant. Just a few weeks ago, Curiosity looked like spare parts; today it is the size of a small SUV – far larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars – and looks the part of a next-gen space exploration vehicle.

But the best is yet to come. While Curiosity is now outfitted with two navigation chams, two mast cameras and a laser chemistry camera, it will soon enough be augmented with its principal geology tool: a 6-foot robotic arm sporting a powerful jackhammer drill and a microscope.

If the schedule holds up, Curiosity should launch next year and arrive on Mars in August 2012. From there, it will explore the landscape for a suitable landing site for future missions while collecting and analyzing rock samples that should shed more light on the planet’s geological history.

See Curiosity go in the video below.

[MSNBC via Discovery]

Using computer algorithms, MIT researchers have designed a foam glider with a single motor on its tail that can perch like a bird. The work has implications for robotic planes, potentially allowing them to recharge their batteries by perching on power lines, according to MIT News.

Watch a bird careening through the trees, and you might wonder how it can suddenly stop and alight on a single branch. There are certainly no flying machines capable of such aerobatics.

It’s because birds take advantage of a phenomenon called stall -- not a word you usually want to hear in aviation.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall -- specifically, post-stall drag -- to help a plane come to a controlled landing.

It’s difficult to predict how the wing whirlwinds will manifest, so MIT Associate Professor Russ Tedrake, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Rick Cory, a PhD student in Tedrake’s lab, had to model what a stall looks like.

They also found they had to create error-correction controls to tweak the glider’s path in case it deviated from its flight plan. Using algorithms developed at MIT, they were able to calculate the degree of deviation that the controls could compensate for, MIT News says. The result is a model that looks like a series of tubes, which includes all the possible trajectories and the tolerance of the error-correction controls.

Once the glider is launched, it keeps checking its position and executing the command that corresponds to the flight path “tube” it is in.

To stop, it tilts itself up in a dangerous-looking stall and wafts forward, ultimately reaching a tiny perch, where it alights.

The team used wall-mounted cameras and an external computer to monitor the glider’s position and run the control algorithms. To expand the technology to robotic airplanes that interest the Air Force, more powerful on-board processors would be needed. Meanwhile, Tedrake's lab has already begun to address moving the glider's location sensors onboard, according to CSAIL.

[MIT]

Ranger, developed by Cornell’s Biorobotics and Locomotion Lab, made 108.5 laps around the running track at roughly 700 feet per lap, logging something like 70,000 steps on a single charge. The untethered ‘bot was controlled remotely by human handlers using a simple toy remote control.

For Ranger, the record-breaking performance spelled redemption. Ranger set a record of 5.6 miles in 2008 only to see Boston Dynamics’ somewhat frightening and much larger BigDog more than double the record shortly thereafter, setting the new standard at 12.8 miles.

But it’s also about energy efficiency; while BigDog can climb hills, stay upright on ice, and terrify children, Ranger walks with an efficient gate that emulates human walking, swinging its legs to take advantage of gravity and forward momentum. An understanding of the biomechanical tricks that allow robots to increase their efficiency should lead not only to breakthroughs in robotic design, but also in human prosthetics and rehabilitation.

The video below is a bit old, but it does show off the smooth gait that is the key to Ranger's walking prowess.

Sustained, self-contained locomotion is a major component in developing an all-in-one humanoid robot. You can read more on the sole American effort to do just that in our August issue cover story here.

[PhysOrg]

Lagoa Multiphysics, the software creation of Thiago Costa, allows for highly detailed, precisely tunable physics simulations of such phenomena as falling shovelfuls of moist earth, buckets of water being tossed at innocent bunnies, silk sheets crumpling and sliding, and unsavory-looking wobbly extrusions of an undefined plasticky substance that oozes and shivers.

Watch the video:

Next week, we'll be at SIGGRAPH 2010, bringing you more graphics amazingness.

[RedMotion via Gizmodo]

The tests, conducted in May and June, show the LaWS illuminating and then heating the underside of a drone aircraft shortly before it goes up in flames and loses trajectory, plummeting into the ocean below. Guided by Raytheon's Laser Close-in Weapon System (CIWS), a sensor suite that locks onto and guides the energy weapon, LaWS shot down three similar drones during the tests, which mark the first time a solid-state laser has shot down an aircraft on the wing over open seas.

There are three significant parts to this story. First, it's important to note that LaWS is a solid-state laser rather than a chemical laser, which means it's not quite so hazardous to handle and requires less energy to use. It's also smaller, which makes it a lot more feasible to pack onto a naval vessel. Second, solid-state lasers are generally weaker than chemical lasers, and that problem is compounded by the moist air in ocean climates, as that moisture can absorb laser energy and weaken the beam. So proving this solid-state technology can work at sufficient strengths over the ocean is a serious milestone.

But most importantly, Raytheon demonstrated that a laser integrated into the Navy's Phalanx anti-missile defense system -- a weapons system already mounted on many naval vessels -- can hit a moving target from the deck of a ship, which itself is moving and rolling along with the ocean. That's pretty sharp shooting, and it could arm U.S. seamen with a greatly enhanced last line of defense during aerial and ballistic missile warfare at sea.

Of course, what works on a moving naval platform also works from stationary, land-based positions, and Raytheon is also looking to mount the system on trailers much as Boeing has done with its Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated experiments (MATRIX). That system, along with some of Boeing's other directed energy systems, shot down several UAVs last year. But if Raytheon can do it in a smaller, less energy-intensive package the military might find that more compact solid-state lasers are the future.

Check out the CIWS roasting a drone below.

[Raytheon via BBC]

The thin films of carbon nanotubes create sound through a thermoacoustic effect, turning electrical pulses into tiny sound waves via heat generated in the air around the nanotubes when the pulses pass through. This effect was discovered and demonstrated back in 2008, as seen below, but it wasn't tested underwater.

Now, researchers including a team from UT Dallas have demonstrated that sheets of nanotubes can produce low-frequency sound ideal for mapping out the ocean depths with sonar, and those frequencies can be fine-tuned to cancel out other background noise, like the sound of the submarine itself moving through the water. That capability should help subs pinpoint the depth, location, and speed of other undersea objects -- like enemy subs -- without revealing their own positions.

[Eurekalert]

The team at UPenn devised a claw-like gripper that allows the quadcopters to grab onto flat surfaces and carry objects aloft. But the diminutive aircraft don't possess a whole lot of upward thrust, so to lift heavier objects the team introduced some team spirit to their software. A dose of cooperative logic allows two or more quadcopters to collaborate on the same task, lifting heavier payloads while maintaining impeccable balance. They can even carry the payload around without listing to one side or the other.

The degree of control and agility these things show is pretty amazing, and you can see it for yourself in the video below. Personally, we'd like to see the GRASP Lab put their quadcopters through the Tempur-Pedic test -- one glass of red wine riding atop those two-by-fours, four quadcopters, no spillage. By all appearances, it seems like they could do it. What's up, UPenn, feeling up to the challenge?

[via Engadget]