Meet the eight astounding finalists of DARPA's Robotics Challenge onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Meet the eight astounding finalists of DARPA's Robotics Challenge

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This past weekend, eight robots distinguished themselves from the rest at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, earning them a place at the 2014 Grand Challenge. Here's what you need to know about these great eight.

DARPA launched the challenge as a way to encourage the development of robots that can work with people as they respond to both natural and human-made disasters. The competition consists of both robot systems (Class A) and software teams (Class B and C) — and it's designed to be challenging.

When the competition first started in June, there were 100 robots. The recently concluded competition, held at a racetrack complex near Miami, featured 16 teams, of which eight qualified for the finals. The winning robot, which will be decided at the end of 2014, will earn a $2 million award.

Here are the top eight robots:

Team SCHAFT, Robot S‐One, lead organization: SCHAFT Inc. (27 points)

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The SCHAFT robot (or S-One) is made by SCHAFT of Japan — now one of Google's primary robotics research labs. During the competition, this bot won four out of eight tasks, including terrain, ladder, debris, and hose. It stands at a compact 4'11" (1.48 meters), weighs 209 pounds (95 kilograms), is gangly limbed, 2-legged, and is notable for its use of a capacitor to drive high-voltage liquid cooled motors rather than a battery and normal servos, allowing for stronger and faster muscles. As the overall winner, S-One was particularly strong when it came to tasks requiring dexterity and mobility.

Team IHMC Robotics, Robot Atlas‐Ian, lead organization: Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (20 points)

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Finishing in second place was the the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition's Atlas, or Atlas-Ian. The IHMC is a Track B team that's focusing its efforts on software development, namely walking and manipulation code. Built and supplied by Boston Dynamics, the six-foot robot excelled at navigating a 25-yard course consisting of three piles of cinder blocks. It took the 330-pound robot about 30 minutes to do it — but it was the best of the competition.

Team Tartan Rescue, Robot CHIMP, lead organization: Carnegie Mellon University, National Robotics Engineering Center (18 points)

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CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP, is a human-sized robot designed to perform tasks like climbing ladders, driving vehicles, and closing valves. The Carnegie Mellon designers describe it like this:

With four limbs and a head-like sensor array, CHIMP will look vaguely simian. But the way it will move around — on rubberized tracks at the end of each limb — is more comparable to a tank.

CHIMP normally will travel with all four of its tracks on the ground, although it can stand upright and move on the treads of just two limbs when it needs to turn valves, operate power tools or perform similar tasks...The robot is five-feet, four-inches tall (four feet when crawling) and 2 1/2 feet wide, but will weigh just more than 400 pounds.

Software developers have been writing code to control the robot for months, using a stand-in robotic arm and computer simulation for testing. The robot will be able to perform the demanding tasks of the DRC through supervised autonomy - receiving high-level commands from a remote operator while employing its own intelligence to maintain stability and keep itself from harm.

The remote operator will be able to visualize and map the environment where the robot is working using immersive 3D sensing and perception systems developed by the NREC. The robot will be able to perform certain tasks autonomously.

Team MIT, Robot Atlas-Helios, lead organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (16 points)

This is another iteration of Boston Dynamics' Atlas, this one driven by algorithms and user interfaces designed by a team from MIT.

Team RoboSimian, Robot RoboSimian, lead organization: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (14 points)

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Even more than CHIMP, NASA's RoboSimian is designed to imitate a non-human biped form. NASA describes the "simian-inspired" robot like this:

This groundbreaking RoboSimian uses deliberate and stable operations to complete challenging tasks under supervised tele-operation while in a degraded human environment. This emphasis on stability over dynamics and deliberation over reaction will result in faster and more robust overall operations by decreasing missteps for both robot and human operator. To accomplish this end, the team will employ design methods, system elements, and software algorithms that have already demonstrated success for JPL's unique ATHLETE and Lemur robots, JPL's first-place DARPA ARM-S team, and Stanford's selectively compliant DARPA ARM-H design. In particular, RoboSimian will use its four general purpose limbs and hands, capable of both mobility and manipulation, to achieve passively stable stances; create multi-point anchored connections to supports such as ladders, railings, and stair treads; and brace itself during forceful manipulation operations. Risk is further decreased through heading-agnostic perception, mobility, and manipulation in which costly reorientation steps and body motion are eliminated through the axi-symmetric distribution of the limb workspace and visual perception.

Team TRACLabs, Robot Atlas, lead organization: TRACLabs Inc. (11 points)

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Another B-Track team operating an Atlas robot, this one by TRACLabs.

Team: WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS), Robot Atlas-Warner, lead organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute (11 points)

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Called WARNER, WPI's robot was the only the only version of ATLAS to successfully complete the driving challenge. The team members of this C-Class team have expertise in robotics software, balancing and walking behaviors, robot perception, and professional software engineering.

Team Trooper, Robot Atlas, lead organization: Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs. (9 points)

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Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories created a version of Atlas that rounded out the top eight. The company is focusing on autonomy and control software that can guide robots.

And for those who are curious, NASA's Valkyrie finished at the bottom with zero points.

Images: Department of Defense/DARPA, NASA,

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Meet the eight astounding finalists of DARPA's Robotics Challenge

This Planetarium Show Will Blow Your Mind onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Planetarium Show Will Blow Your Mind

With its new show Dark Universe, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has turned an already-awesome planetarium experience into something mind-blowing. Not only will you be filled with wonder, but you'll be treated to an incredible science story about dark matter, dark energy, and all the other strange forces that shape our universe.

The AMNH's Department of Astrophysics curator Mordecai-Mark Mac Low and awesomely-titled Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart broke the stereotype with their series of Space Shows: technically-demanding and visually-amazing experiences that use cutting-edge data to demonstrate how astrophysics is exploring the universe, and reconstructing some of the most amazing views in the cosmos. (A history of their renderings of the familiar Milky Way offer a glimpse into the rigor of their modeling process.) Most recently, 2009's Journey to the Stars examined the life cycle of stars inside and out, making the most of astonishing new visuals from and giving billions of years of context to the sunrise.

But their newest show, Dark Universe, is their best yet, in no small part because it takes a refreshing approach to its data: it puts you smack in the center of the unknown.

Four years in the making, with a development process that involved dozens of contributors and a century of data, Dark Universe has several hours' worth of information packed into only half an hour, but doesn't overwhelm. In part, that's because it's smartly structured more like a cosmic detective story than a typical planetarium presentation. With all of cosmic history as its backdrop, it follows a century of scientific investigation into the mystery behind dark matter, that crucial but elusive quasi-substance that somehow holds the galaxies in place, and its effects on the observable universe.

Einstein's theories about gravitational lensing act like the corpse that jump-starts the investigation into what prevents clusters of galaxies from flying apart, since their gravity alone isn't enough to keep them there. Enter dark matter (modeled and visualized by Stanford's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics & Cosmology, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Emmart). It's presented with blockbuster-FX flair as a cross between spiderwebs and sinister smoke, compressing clusters of galaxies into groups and thus definable by what you can't see, in a mappable universe that looks eerily like a collection of nerve cells.

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(image source)

But of course, any investigation of space ends up following that informal Carl Sagan rule: you must first invent the universe. Starting with one of the most visually compelling run-throughs of the expanding universe ever projected, with fireworks of red shift that prove the universe is moving away from you no matter where you are, the scope narrows to an infinitesimal but crucial blip on the cosmic radar: the Galileo probe that was sent to dense, primordial Jupiter to analyze its chemical makeup and determine if the elements present matched with the Big Bang. So meticulous is the rendering that even the Galileo's botched antennae gets recreated, like a half-open umbrella gliding into orbit. (And as with any planetarium show, every leap of understanding makes an eloquent argument for funding further cosmic research.)

Supernovas, cosmic background radiation, and the Big Bang all help paint the landscape on which the dark-matter mystery is playing out. And the picture can't get any newer – Mac Low and Emmart made leleventh-hour tweaks to the modeling of cosmic background radiation when they managed to get hold of the 2013 Planck data, so detailed as to allow for calculation of the percentages of dark energy, dark matter, and 'real' matter in the observable universe. (Real matter? Five percent, tops.) But the undercurrent of Dark Universe is that it's framing an investigation by focusing on what's left to know, and the thrill of getting there. It's a refreshing approach to the data, presenting mysteries within its facts, and charting them as a series of questions rather than a list of conclusions.

Since there's thirteen billion years to cover, it's at times an overwhelming vastness, but the sheer scope provides a beauty of its own. Perhaps the most haunting image of the entire show is the sequence that begins with the sphere of our observable universe with the Milky Way at the center. Given that every galaxy is therefore considered to be at the center of a sphere of similar size, the model plucks a galaxy from the very edge of our observational range, and a new sphere blooms...and another, and another, soap bubbles of neighboring universes. (It's so epic as to be intimidating, but so familiar as to spark the imagination; while the show itself doesn't mention it, the map of galaxies upon galaxies quietly suggests a numbers game in which Earth as a life-bearing planet can't possibly be alone.)

More than anything, Dark Universe breaks down its wealth of information into a handful of fascinating concepts, and then offers enough mystery to make us curious about knowing the rest – a goal at the very heart of scientific exploration.

Dark Universe will be playing at the American Museum of Natural History throughout 2014.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Planetarium Show Will Blow Your Mind

Giant public Dinosaur-Toilet found onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Giant public Dinosaur-Toilet found

In Argentinien haben sie eine riesige öffentliche Toilette der Dinosaurier gefunden. Das Dino-Klo ist 240 Millionen Jahre alt, 900m² groß und mit 94 Kackhaufen pro Quadratmeter beschissen. Die Scheißer waren vor allem Dinodontosaurus’ und die Latrine stammt aus dem Trias, der Zeit, in der die ersten Dinosaurier auftauchten. Holy Crap!

A gigantic “communal latrine” created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina. Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say. The 240-million-year-old site is the “world’s oldest public toilet” and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds. […]

Fossil “coprolites” as wide as 40cm and weighing several kilograms were found in seven massive patches across the Chanares Formation in La Rioja province. Some were sausage-like, others pristine ovals, in colours ranging from whitish grey to dark brown-violet. […] The perpetrator was Dinodontosaurus, an eight-foot-long megaherbivore similar to modern rhinos. These animals were dicynodonts – large, mammal-like reptiles common in the Triassic period when the first dinosaurs began to emerge. […]

A density of 94 poos per square metre was recorded by the researchers. And the excrement was spread across patches 900 square metres in size.

Giant prehistoric toilet unearthed

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Giant public Dinosaur-Toilet found