Autonomous Robot Explores Antarctica

rhet writes "Here's an interesting article about an autonomous robot that is exploring the Antarctic looking for meteorites. So far it has found three of them. The robot, Nomad, is built by Carnegie Mellon. Nomad's home page is here."

Comments

Nomad not OS partisan

[xeer0]

"There are four computers on Nomad during this expedition. Two PCs running Windows NT control the panoramic camera, perform landmark based navigation, and run the autonomous classification software. A third computer running Red Hat Linux coordinates robot navigation and obstacle avoidance with the stereo cameras and the laser rangefinder. Finally, a VME processor cage with a Motorola 68060 processor controls Nomad's real-time processing, such as translation of driving commands into servo motor movements and the monitoring of all systems on Nomad."

I found the above from following one of the links in the article. Very cool. Nomad is rad! I want one of these.

It uses the Linux box

[Anonymous Coward]

dk() is the safest way to do it.

Thank you.

Gas powered? It's polluting Antarctica!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the articel:

On this expedition, the robot will be powered by a gasoline generator,

And I doubt it's even required to pass a smog check. We've got probes on Mars that can scurry about on solar panels (and solar radiation is weaker on mars too), but we're burning gool ol' dirty fossil fuels at the South Pole. Well, I guess it'll be all right. There's probably a wealth of oil under all that ice. Fuel for another 50 years, eh?

Re:Gas powered? It's polluting Antarctica!

[Anonymous Coward]

It had to pass the NSF standards. This thing puts out less than a snow mobile does. Nomad is a prototype. Those guys are working on solar but to push the rest of the technology, they gotta use off the shelf PCs or else their gonna waste some serious $$$.

Re:Gas powered? It's polluting Antarctica!

[inferno7000]

It's not so much that the robot is polluting, but it is wasting money. In Minnesota, where I live, I can't start my car at -20F. So how does this start at -80F?!

Re:Gas powered? It's polluting Antarctica!

[izzylobo]

In Minnesota, where I live, I can't start my car at -20F. So how does this start at -80F?!

I'm guessing here, but given that it's running a gasoline powered generator (to generate power for the inwheel electric motors) that it never actually shuts the generator down, just throttles it back to a very low idle.

As for pollution, the amount of pollution generated by this little guy (well, not so little, actually), is probably pretty low, especially when compared to all the other stuff that's already down there (helicopters, snowmobiles, tracked transports, etc.). Not something to worry about.

Similarly, the cost of gas while idling is also pretty low; city traffic sucks consumption wise because of the stop and start; an idling engine is pretty fuel efficient.

Scott Taylor

Re:Competing Autonomous Robot: The Fundie Special

[Anonymous Coward]

"rocks don't fall out of heaven"

Please point me to some evidence that they do.

"Lambda"? Is that a sign of homosexuality? If so, please contact me.

CMU: Commies Must Unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, Carnegie Mellon is only a viable option if you're a hardcore Chomsky worshipper, otherwise it just doesn't make sense. Why go to a school that refuses to release it's code as open source when there are much better alternatives? And don't get me started on Pittsburgh: I can hardly imagine hell to be a worse place. I myself dredged through 2 years there before I finally got smart and transferred to DeVry Tech (it was the commercials, man!), and then 'earning' my PhD. from this place. My best investment ever! Buy one, get one free! CMU certainly can't beat that, now can they!

Why Humans are better.

[CamMac]

This is a shining example of why a human explorer will always be better.

covering about 100 square feet daily.
And on favorable terrain. I could cover that in 15m, in any kind of terrain.

15 feet away, searching for anything that seems like a rock
Now, in a terrain loaded with rocks, 15 feet might be just right. But when you hit a dry spot, and all the rocks are 16 feet from you... you need more range. Esp when it takes you 20minutes to move a foot.

No mechanics or spare parts were taken along, either, since the aim is to make Nomad completely autonomous.
At least Nomad doesn't need to run to the crapper ever few hours. But if they ever get it to assimlate surrounding materials in order to make spare parts, it probably will.

``The breakthrough technologies are robotic classification and search. Humans classify every time they sort pennies from nickels, and they search every time they lose their car keys,'' said William ``Red'' Whittaker, founder of the Field Robotics Center at CMU. ``But these are new skills for robots.''
Ah... the entire reason for OpenSource... Use existing source code!

``It's quite moody actually,'' he said. ``Some days it's perfect, and others nothing will work.''
I appologize, they did.


I have never understood the reason behind robotic exploration. Sure, NASA didn't have to call the Mars Landers parents, but its not like we force people to make the choice. A human explorer is more capable of collecting information, moving around the terrain, and surving the experiance. And then said explorer goes from around the country, making money talking about what he did. And all the ppl "Oh" and "Ah", and all the kids say "I wanna do that when I grow up".

I think Nomad is great, it took alot of hard work, and I don't see the problems overcome as being easy ones. And I personally wouldn't want to spend several years walking around a piece of ice looking for rocks when I could get a robot to do it for me. But robotic explorers are not the way togo... they should be kept to the menial work that we are to lazy todo.

--Cam

Re:Why Humans are better.

[Tassach]

I have never understood the reason behind robotic exploration.

Because sending humans out into space is hideously inefficient -- the vast majority of your mass has to be dedicated to keeping the people alive & somewhat comfortable. With a human, you need to send up food, air, water, life support machinery, safety equipment, etc, as well as any mission equipment and instrumentation you need. A robot probe does not need any of this parasitic load, and can devote more of it's mass to sensors and equipment to perform it's mission.

Re:Not necessarily.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indefinitely: Wood is less dense than water.

Not all wood, usually only dried wood (the moisture dries out leaving air pockets.) Also, certain dense hardwoods just do not float. That is why there is so much woody debris in ponds, etc.

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[Hellmongr]

Actually I think that NASA is funding this because the research will help them out alot with their planned mission (not sure if its officially planned but they've been saying they'd like to do it) to Jupiter's moon Europa. They want to employ some sort of underwater autonomus vehicle to break through the icy surface of the frozen moon because they think that there may be oceans down there that might contain life (I doubt it but its worth a shot and at least they'll come up with important research as to what lies beneath the moon's crust).

In The Mountains Of Madness

[Elbereth]

H.P. Lovecraft warned us about searching for funny rocks in Antartica. Get ready for crazy shit to wake up and destroy humanity...

Re:In The Mountains Of Madness

[oznoid]

Maybe Nomad will turn up the Loc-Nar.

Re:Slight Variation - One Question, One Answer!

[letchhausen]

NEWSFLASH!

NASA scientists have merged the programmable robot technology with the "Real Doll" (see http://www.realdoll.com/) and have finally solved what has become known in Psychology circles as the "Geek Date Syndrome". The programming interface and the variety of body styles offered by the Real Doll company have finally made the dreams of Geeks everywhere come true!

"Why my gal, Priss, loves to play Quake with me for hours and hack the Linux kernel!!!" said one enthusiastic beta tester of the new technology.

The downside for many college students and others who may wish to purchase their own 'Dream Date"TM is that the high cost means that only those with the high salaries and stock options of computer programmers will be able to afford them.

Get yours today!

Re:You're in luck...

[Cramer]

With other planets, you don't have governments complaining about being spied upon. That's the only thing preventing us from doing that right now. (And I'm sure there are highly detailed topographic maps of the earth. They just aren't public knowledge.)

The Theory of Expanding Asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

My asshole doubles in size every two years. Eventually you will fall inside and be my Asshole Slave. You will have to lick the encrustulated feces from the inside of the asshole. Only when my asshole is clean enough to eat chili off of will I set you free. I just thought I should warn you so that you don't miss any doctors appointments or anything due to being trapped inside my ever-growing asshole. Thank you.

No, moderate him UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

neo-gritsman loves don knots. he is my idol. thank you.

Re:No, moderate him UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don Knots guy fully indorses grits guy.

Thank you.

Aibo "piss and eat it's own poop" module

[Anonymous Coward]

Powered by OpenDK

Thank you.

Open Source Rover

[jheinen]

Given that off-the-shelf components are relatively cheap, it strikes me that it would be feasible to cobble together an open source rover for exploration of remote areas. Cameras and sensors are cheap. A ham radio satellite link can be used for communication. Just get someone to take the rover along on an Antarctic resupply mission (I live right by the company that supports the Antarctic research stations - I could talk to someone there), set it down and let 'er go. Even if no valuable data is gained from the project, it would at least be fun. And we all know that's the most important thing anyway.

Heck, this could even lead to amateur-built, open source space probes ;) Make something small and relatively self-sufficient, and you could buy some space on the shuttle or an Arianne rocket. That's how hams get their satellites up. I think it would be WAY cool to have our own, cheap orbiting web cam :)

Wow! Slashdotted w/o bandwitdth saturation

[maan]

Yup, I'm *in* CMU, and I can't get to the server. I guess slashdot does indeed have a huge audience...

What if...

[T3kno]

A bunch of penguins programmed to create the perfect OS find the damaged NOMAD and attempt to repair the programming of it. They redesign it to look for the perfect operating system and steralize all those that are not perfect.

When NOMAD finds the imperfect OS'es Win9x and Win2K as well as MacOS and steralizes them. Captain Gatesvolds of the USS Blue Screen is sent to find out why his creations were destroyed. He uploads NOMAD onto the Blue Screen and NOMAD mistakes him for the creator. SpJobs, Gatesvolds first officer does a mind meld with NOMAD and finds out that the creator was Torvalds. NOMAD then erases the memory of SAM and kills unit Registry because it sees that they are not perfect. Gatesvolds tells NOMAD that he is the creator and that he is not perfect so NOMAD should destroy itself but NOMAD is too smart for Gatesvolds and kills him too because he wears unstylish glasses and is obviously not perfect. NOMAD then destroys the USS Blue Screen and goes in search of his perfect creator Torvalds and his first officer Cox on board the USS-Kernel Panic. NOMAD becomes a little more human when Torvalds tells him that Linux is not perfect but sharing is a lot more fun than hoarding.

The End...

FOR NOW...BUM BUM BUM...

Re:I'll be impressed when...

[Dinosaur Neil]

Better yet, a team of Aibos(TM), pulling a sled...

not a failure?

[double_down]

It's nice to hear of something created in electronics for a mission that doesn't break on it's first run. Seems that every mission we hear about somthing breaks right away or is a failure, although that is probably due to our overly negitive and always there media:). Thats a great school out there in Pittsburg and this just might show it. Man, if things like this happen, NASA might start taking notes.

Famous Last Words

[naloxone]

"If the Carnegie Mellon group finds a meteorite this year, that would be an achievement," said Ralph Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He heads the human team sponsored by NASA that has looked for meteorites in Antarctica for more than 20 years. "The robot is still having a hard time figuring which way is up." - From a Post-Gazette article at http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19981012 nomad2.asp It found, what... 3 so far? Not bad for a first run.

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[Detritus]

You can run almost any operating system on a VME bus system. It's just a question of what operating systems are supported by the vendor of the CPU board. One of the labs that I work in has several VME bus based Windows NT systems.

You may be thinking of the Forth based Open Firmware that is used on some PCI bus cards.

Moderate this up!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funnier than at least 55% of the shit in here!

Robots

[Dudds]

They need to explore other planets now, space travel would be my ideal search area.

Re:Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think it would stay away from my house if I put up signs with the following text:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Re:Robots

[Mr. X]

While space exploration sounds like a good idea, there are plenty of areas of Earth that haven't been explored yet. I've heard we know more about space than the Earth's oceans. Exploring the oceans most likely would be cheaper and yield more bang for the buck than NASAs current Mars programs.

Re:Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

it wouldn't yeild any bang

Re:Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

it wouldn't yeild any bang

Sure it would! Marianas Tubeworm McNuggets!

Yum!

Re:Robots

[infojack]

The Distro they are actually using is nomad linux, you can find it at Nomad Linux

and now you too can have a robot to go around your house and identify stuff.

Re:Robots

[Anonymous Coward]

While space exploration sounds like a good idea, there are plenty of areas of Earth that haven't been explored yet. I've heard we know more about space than the Earth's oceans. Exploring the oceans most likely would be cheaper and yield more bang for the buck than NASAs current Mars programs.

Given the international laws that strictly regulate who can get mineral resources from the ocean bottom (and how), they might find it difficult to get a lot of "bang for buck" out of it - although it'd be interesting to see how much funding they could get from it - and who.

On the other hand, it would a lot easier to get towards autonomous robots usable on other planets if we take it in small steps. Conditions on other planets are at least partially simulable on Earth, and it's a lot easier to get to them if things go wrong. Nomad looks like an important step.
- M.C.

Re:Robots

[Foogle]

Your ideal search area for meteorites is outer-space? Egads man - what a breakthrough!! ;)

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[Anonymous Coward]

VME buses are just like any other BUS (PCI, ISA, etc). You pick a processor and function cards
just like you were building a PC, except it's VME based.

THEN your program the system based on what processor is in the system, etc. People run linux, dos, NT, and about a billion other OS's
on VME based systems.

Chances are, given that it's a CMU based project, and the system is described as REALTIME, they
are running vxWorks on it.

sigh. Does the average slashdotter not even know what a bus is?

sorta like mars..

[Anonymous Coward]

hope it goes better then our space exploits..

Re:Not necessarily (please reconsider)

[Davoid]

On the same idea: with your figures, the robot has a density of 52 kg/m3, so I don't think it would even sink in water (density 1000 kg/m3), if it is waterproof.

I think you are basing the above calculation on the assumption that the net volume of the Nomad is (2.4m)^3 == 13.84 m^3. But this is the "bounding box" volume... or the volume of a box that could just fit the robot when fully extended. In a deep puddle that robot would probably sink like a rock.

Re:Can't they come up with...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's uh... R. Daneel Olivaw :) Give the robot the respect he deserves.

I'll be impressed when...

[Rodney L Caston]

I'd like to see an Aibo lead an expedition to the south pole.

Re:I'll be impressed when...

[Nastard]

the aiboditarod ?

Re:I'll be impressed when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a BeoWULF sled!

Re:I'll be impressed when...

[jawad]

Err.. Offtopic? Moderators, don't moderate people down if you don't know what they're talking about. Just cuz *you're* a little slow, doesn't justify bad moderation.

Aibo - The Sony dog.
Iditarod - The dog sled race.

I thought this was a little funny... The moderator that knocked it down should at least have the decency to reply to the thread to nullify the moderation.

Enter my creation!

[drnomad]

;)

Re:OpenDK powered robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Carnigee Mellon uses OpenDK? I never knew! Do they contribute to the project?

Thank you.

OT whining

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet someone else had submitted this about a week ago. I dunno, just got a psychic feeling about it.

Still, I was surprised for the damn thing to have found three meteorites already.

Re:check this out....

[TummyX]

Ofcourse NT can be set to reboot when the kernel crashes. And when setup properly it's unlikely NT will BSOD. I doubt anyone will be playing quake or installing fancy devices/device drivers on the box.

Sponsoring nomad

[Captain Zion]

The search engine companies are missing a nice opportunity to sponsor nomad. That would make an ideal ad :)

Re:Stereoscopic vision?

[oznoid]

This is actually a pretty straightforward computer vision approach. You use two cameras, and, since you've carefully calibrated the cameras and know how far apart they are, you can compute the distortion between the two images pixel by pixel. Since the cameras are in slightly different locations (separated by a fixed baseline and angle of difference), any disparity will be the result of the different angles of view of the two cameras.

One interesting point is that the farther apart the eyes are, the more sensetive the apparatus is. So one way to get better depth perception is to put your eyes out on stalks.

Here is a paper on fast stereo vision.

The first schizophrenic robot???

[Pig Hogger]

I guess that Marvin (the paranoïd androïd, of HHGTTG fame) is no longer the only robot with mental problems...

(seen on the p age describing the robot) :

> Nomad is a powerful computing platform. Its size allows all necessary
> processing to be performed on the robot. There are four computers on Nomad
> during this expedition. Two PCs running Windows NT control the panoramic
> camera, perform landmark based navigation, and run the autonomous
> classification software. A third computer running Red Hat Linux
> coordinates robot navigation and obstacle avoidance with the stereo
> cameras and the laser rangefinder.
> Finally, a VME processor cage with a Motorola 68060 processor controls
> Nomad's real-time processing, such as translation of driving commands
> into servo motor movements and the monitoring of all systems on Nomad.

Now, let's introduce the schizo robot!!!

And I wonder what effet it will have to make the robot look through Microsoft-coloured glasses...

(Now, I wonder that OS runs on the 68060)...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[Sloppy]

Now, let's introduce the schizo robot!!!

Isn't that basically what happened to Nomad in the original Star Trek episode?

---

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[Pig Hogger]

Before you never Forth with obviously programmed...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[spiral]

> Now, I wonder that OS runs on the 68060)...

It probably doesn't have an OS, as such. As far as I understand it, VME busses are programmed via a variant of Forth.
If this is true, only the Forth interpreter would be running (bare metal).

Of course, the use of Forth is enough to question its sanity.

Re:The first schizophrenic robot???

[Soong]

(Now, I wonder that OS runs on the 68060).

It runs vxWorks. (Hence the real-time processing, being an RTOS and all.)

Re:Autonomous robot explores...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but it would get lost in those vast halls of pink grossness

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[schporto]

Not sure how much I like that idea. I thought they missed what they were aiming at on Mars with the Mars Lander. Not by much, but people in Argentina might not be pleased. Of course if they miss that metric conversion thing again I might get hit even here in the US. Yes I mean this as sarcastic and only aimed at the part about landing things here from space. The rest of the idea is good I think.
-cpd

Quote from Miguel on Nomad:

[Anonymous Coward]

"I could write Nomad's image recognizer into GNOME very easily. It's trivial."


On a related note, GNOME 3.0 will also be able to perform natural language comprehension, in fact, it's trivial!

Re:check this out....

[quonsar]

Hmmm... how do they reboot the NT boxes when they BSOD? *grins*

silly! thats why there are 2! a cron job on the linux box alternates the reboots.

======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

Nomad

[BWS]

Noo! This is a Bad Idea. Rememeber Star Trek when the Probe Nomad meets with an Alien Probe and their identifies merge?
Instead of an perfect AI Robot seeking Alien Races, Nomad becomes an Robot who's goal is to destory inperfect biological organisms. That means our Nomad will merge with an dophin and become NOMAD, Goal to throw metroites at big tall Politicans. Then we'll need Shatners's great logic to stop it.

NOooo!

Re:Nomad

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a dork.

Dorks shouldn't post. And this is their punishment.

Re:Nomad

[mikek]

I happen to know a few people who worked on the robot at the robotics institute and i know that most of the computers there have been dual-booting redhat for many years now. I'm not an expert, but i think they had a 4.1 installation running. I'm not sure when that was since i only started with 5.0, but maybe someone else knows.

Re:Can't they come up with...

[Sloppy]

Well, it's better than GORF!

Space cadet, fight like a robot!

---

Re:check this out....

[TummyX]

Well, many people around here would probably like to point out NT doesn't have Telnet. But they could have installed a 3rd party telnet program.
Aparently the VME is supposed to be controlling the robot arm, but almost any system inbetween could have caused the trouble.

Re:Images from Nomad

[oznoid]

Yep, that was Dante. There's still some stuff up at NASA about it. Actually the other thread on "sending a robot to Hell" reminded me of Dante, too...

Re:Autonomous (NOT) Robots

[oznoid]

Yes, Xavier often has his manservant with him, but it's been a while since he's had to hit the kill switch. Xavier and Amelia both come to my office and annoy me, unattended. I'm in the same corridor and my door is often open (5303).

Flo the Nursebot is an interesting new development. It uses speech recognition, synthesis, and face tracking, nominally intended as a "robotic assistant for the elderly." The 'lips' move when flo talks, and the eyes track the face of whoever it thinks it's talking to.

Robotics still has a long way to go, but things are starting to get interesting. Robots get a lot more interesting to me when you can talk to them; sometimes i wish they would just shut up when i tell them to, though.

Passle of robo projects at CMU

[oznoid]

If you want to look over a bunch of robotics projects at CMU, here's a nice list. It's not complete, but there are a bunch of pictures of robots and links to more info.

Re:check this out....

[shogun]

Umm lets get this straight, this is a wheeled and armed robot with various science sensors and you doubt it would have any fancy devices or drivers?

Anonymous Robot seeks Anarchy

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an interesting
article about an anonymous robot
that is exploring the Anarchic world to seek and destroy uncivilized people. So far it
has found three of them. The robot, Verymad, is built by Mellon heads. Verymad home page is unlisted.

Re:There is no snow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol :) Me too :) I guess those last 3 times I watched Matrix were a bit too much :)

Re:Why don't they just send fucking jews und commi

[StMaybe]

I think you meant gassed, not gased. While I am certain you know how to spell, what you are indicating is that you have not taken the time to review what you wish to submit, let alone reflect upon the social ramifications of your suggestions. I only hope that you are joking, however unfunny it may seem to me, because if you must hate someone, then at least take an educated stance and hate individuals as you feel circumstances merit it.

Robot wars in space anyone?

[DrSkwid]

It would certain make all those bot's that just flip you over a bit useless
.oO0Oo.

13 cu. m and 725 kg?! Why doesn't it sink in snow?

[Anonymous Coward]

The probe is 2.4m x 2.4m x 2.4m and 725 kg. Unless rolling over solid ice, it'll get stranded in anything fluffy.

Re:check this out....

[SuperJ]

Anybody notice the Star Trek Reference?
I am Nomad. You are creator. I am Nomad.
fatal exception in NOMAD.EXE at 034:FF:678
ERROR! ANALYZE ERROR! ERROR! ANALYZE!

Re:Robot

[Anonymous Coward]

saying "first post" when you got 4th makes you look like such a fucking moron.

how could you be so fucking stupid? are on you on aol? a 14.4, perhaps? or do you just type really really slow?

Re:Can't they come up with...

[Anonymous Coward]

Annihilator 9000? Ultron?

What a dork.

Competing Autonomous Robot: The Fundie Special

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the sucess of other Autonomous Robots at finding meteorites, The Fundie Special has been launched. Nearly identical to its competitor, it differs in only two lines of code:


if(object == meteor && containsFossils(object))
destroyObject(object);

Re:Competing Autonomous Robot: The Fundie Special

[lambda]

Actually, we have very few European meteorite samples before the 18th century. Why you ask? Scientists said "rocks don't fall out of heaven", and got various large collections destroyed.

Re:Competing Autonomous Robot: The Fundie Special

[Tau Zero]

Fortunately, that would run afoul of international treaties.
--

robot ego

[intmainvoid]

my university has a strong research presence in antartica, and from what i know i'm sure Nomad would have a lot more charisma than most of them.

at least Nomad won't spend it's time wondering why antartic stories don't impress the opposite sex!

Look out Carnegie Mellon !

[Secx]

That robot could be abducted by evil open-sourced penguins controlled by NASA so they can send another robot to Mars ;P

Re:check this out....

[TummyX]

I was talking more of video cameras etc ...
however, those science sensors and stuff (the arms etc are controlled by the VME computer) are most likely interfaced with through the standard parallel and serial ports, not 'fancy' devices. Any 'fancy' devices they may have developed as ISA/PCI cards would more than likely have had device drivers written by them, thus i doubt they would have been as big a problem as poorly written drivers by 3rd parties.
So yes, I do doubt they have fancy devices and drivers.

Robots Are Expensive

[inferno7000]

I think it is a complete waste of money to be sending a robot around in the antartic wasteland to search for space rocks (Remember that you could pay many people $50,000 per year to do something like this and they would be happy). A robot that can do this must cost an incredible amount of money and would probably also have trouble coping with the frigid cold of the Antarctic because of all the moving parts and powering system. This will require it to be rescued by real people and waste more money. My final point is that the robot will also pick up all sorts of crap it thinks is a meteorite wasting even more time.

Re:What do you do for power?

[Tau Zero]

Another possibility would be to grab some ice, melt it, and electrolyze H and O out of it. Use the H for a fuel cell.

This will get you exactly nowhere. Just a hint: look up "conservation of energy".

I wonder of you could make biodegradable blivets?

Things don't biodegrade on the ice sheet; it's too cold for bacteria, and there's no liquid water. Photodegradation is another matter. The researchers pack out their trash (including feces), but they pee on the ice; solar UV breaks the urea down into CO2 and NH3. I suppose you could air-drop solid fuel, like coal or wax, but this still requires someone to fly out frequently. This is not particularly safe even for professionals, and well beyond the capabilities of a group of amateurs (which was my impression of the original idea).
--

Re: Why doesn't it sink in the snow?

[SkurfGod]

Uh... Not only that, but am why would any "meteorites" be laying around on the surface of the snow/ice?

Cold heavy metal.

[jued0001]

I know the music industry is going crazy against MP3, but is it necessary to send 64MB of MP3 to the Antarctic? What is NASA trying to get away with, an illegal copy of "Enter Sandman" by Metallica?

=]

"Experimental prototype" == excuse to pollute

[Anonymous Coward]

The air force does this all the time. Lots of "experimental" rockets and planes burning really dirty solid propellants. Even a plane that tried to burn the nitrogen in the air as a source of free unlimited fuel. You can imagine how "clean" that thing burned.

How do hot incoming meteors end up on ice surface?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocks falling into the earth aren't exactly cool to the touch when they first reach the surface. Wouldn't they melt themselves a few feet at least into the ice? How is the probe going to dig them out?

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[theonetruekeebler]

Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit

Probably be a whole lot easier just to throw the thing out of an airplane. Of course, g, atmospheric density, and delta-atmospheric density, will all be different on Mars than in Antarctica, meaning rate of descent and impact energy will all be different, too.

Does the lander bouncy-ball have any sort of cameras or guidance mechanism? It seems like a drogue chute, a couple of fins and a range-finder could do an awful lot of inexpensive good towards getting the thing to land someplace flat.

--

Nomad

[Ertai]

"Nomad is a powerful computing platform. Its size allows all necessary processing to be performed on the robot. There are four computers on Nomad during this expedition. ... A third computer running Red Hat Linux ..."

"I am Nomad. I am perfect."

"... Two PCs running Windows NT "

"Error! Error! Sterilze error!"

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

this robot can cover a 10' by 10' square a day. at that rate it will be done about the time the sun crashes into the earth.

Re:OpenDK powered robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a pathetic life this dude must have. Lonely, desperate for attention, sitting in a dark room all alone in front of a computer, finally finding someone to pay attention to him here in slashdot... What a miserable existence it must be, we should all pity him...

Re:OpenDK powered robot

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait to see his witty, bitingly sarcastic comeback too...

Do you know what "aibohphobia" is?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fear of palindromes.

Not necessarily.

[Robert S Gormley]

Think a person on skis. Think a pond skater (the insect, not Tonya Harding on a picnic with friends). It's more to do with surface area/tension (I forget which). The higher the surface area, especially if rolling, not stepping, the less likely it is that this will be the case.

Another example: your home pool. Put a long pole flat on the water (maybe the skimmer) - it'll last a few seconds. Put a large sheet of wood. See how long it lasts... extrapolate.

Re:Not necessarily.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put a large sheet of wood. See how long it lasts...
Indefinitely: Wood is less dense than water.

On the same idea: with your figures, the robot has a density of 52 kg/m3, so I don't think it would even sink in water (density 1000 kg/m3), if it is waterproof.

Re:Not necessarily.

[Robert S Gormley]

I bow to your superior and more exact knowledge ;-)</sincere>

MODERATORS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent comment is not offtopic. Don't make me come over there.

Re:Colleges should work together for...

[Whyaduck]

Check out this site at NASA. It describes a satellite built by undergraduate students at Arizona State University. It was launched successfully on Jan. 27. I belive students could actually register for a class where the lab involved working on the satellite (I'm not sure...I'm EE, not Aerospace). In any case, the numbers are pretty impressive: more than 350 students worked on the program including a substantial number of undergrads. The launch vehicle also boosted a number of projects from other universities into orbit as well.

You're in luck...

[MrHat]

Check out Nasa's Website, specifically the page on STS-99. The shuttle will be fitted with a large arm, capable of creating high-resolution topographical maps of Earth. The mission is eleven days long and dubbed the "Shuttle Radar Topography Mission".

They mention that one of the motivations for the research is the fact that we currently have better maps of other planets than of our own...

Re:Images from Nomad

[Tau Zero]

I seem to recall coverage on a legged robot called Dante, which was sent to investigate a volcanic crater in Antarctica. Could you be thinking of that?
--

Re:Colleges should work together for...

[h2odragon]

OK, sorry, but I gotta practis my journalism skills here: "being an american college student ... thought it was exciting to have a 'trampoline' program"

...oh, that's what you meant by "higher education"...

robots

[CoolHnd30]

I never thought it would take until I was 30 years old for someone to actually make a decent use for a robot. I have to admit the time has finally arrived though. Maybe in another 30 years we'll actually make it to Mars.

No melon. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. No lemon

[mangu]

Sex at noon taxes.

Sex-aware era waxes.

Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel, and Ellen sinned.

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!

A man, a plan, a cat, a canal; Panama?

A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal--Panama!

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, hero's, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama! Sides reversed is: a man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!

A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac, a liar, a hoop, a pint, a catalpa, a gas, an oil, a bird, a yell, a vat, a caw, a pax, a wag, a tax, a nay, a ram, a cap, a yam, a gay, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a parabola, a dog, a pat, a cud, a nu, a fan, a pal, a rum, a nod, an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a lever, a hair, a pad, a tapir, a door, a moor, an aid, a raid, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a catnip, a pooh, a rail, a calamus, a dairyman, a bater, a canal--Panama.

A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac, a liar, a hoop, a pint, a catalpa, a gas, an oil, a bird, a yell, a vat, a caw, a pax, a wag, a tax, a nay, a ram, a cap, a yam, a gay, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a parabola, a dog, a pat, a cud, a nu, a fan, a pal, a rum, a nod, an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a lever, a hair, a pad, a tapir, a door, a moor, an aid, a raid, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a catnip, a pooh, a rail, a calamus, a dairyman, a bater, a canal - Panama!

Re:Why don't they just send fucking jews und commi

[Anonymous Coward]

whats an amerikansky? an American? they did fight against Hitler's army you know.

Slight Variation - One Question

[Ruthless_Advisorette]

Will Version 2.0 Find Date Robot help out those of us female geeks? I can deal with the nice legs and hot ass, but large breasts don't do much for me. ;) "The light at the end of the tunnel is inevitably the headlamp of an oncoming train." - Mrs. Murphy

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[Tassach]

Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit...

This would be a very expensive option, if not a bad idea.

The cost of getting ANYTHING into orbit is still prohibitive. Plus we would essentially have to build the rover to it's flight-hardened specifications since it will be spending some time in space, and this means more money.

Deploying it from the Shuttle is another, probably less expensive option and certainly might be more feasible.

There are cheaper alternatives to the Shuttle that are almost as good and far cheaper. You could use an obsolete ICBM. This would put it in a sub-orbital ballistic trajectory. This would get it out of the atmosphere, which should be sufficient to simulate orbital re-entry. This would be very cheap - since you are not trying to achive orbit, you probably wouldn't have to modify the ICBM at all, except for replacing the payload.

Another possibility would be to drop it from a high-altitude aircraft. It was not widely publicized, but when the USAF mothballed the SR-71 (Blackbird) fleet, NASA got a couple of them (2 or 3, IIRC) for high-altitude / high-speed research. The SR-71 has hardpoints on the top of it's fuselage, which were originally intended to launch a pilotless drone aircraft into hostile airspace. The SR-71 flies so high that it's effecively in space. While it would not be a perfect simulation, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else.

Finally, you could just drop it out of the bomb bays of a B-1B. By putting the plane in a steep climb on full afterburners up to it's maximum altitude, you could "loft" the payload in to a ballistic trajectory. A small off-the-shelf rocket booster could kick it into an even higher altitude.

You're missing the point

[edremy]

It can make some fairly simple yet effective walkers, that have no concept of what to do when they get there, or even have any concept of getting there. They just go, they don't do anything else. They are toys.

So, walking across broken ground is a "toy" action? Degrading gracefully upon damage is useless?

Hate to tell you this, but these are problems that the top-down school of AI has not been able to solve worth a damn. The military spent a fortune trying to get various AI labs at places like MIT and Stanford to build autonomous walkers- the AI labs failed dismally.

Tilden's developed simple, robust walkers. Couple these with cameras and some basic logic and transmission stuff and you have a cheap robot explorer.

So they can't learn. Who cares? They walk, and that's proven to be harder than most anyone imagined.

Eric

Re:check this out....

[Winged Cat]

The page also states that Nomad classified meteorite #12322 as "interesting". I wonder if others are classified as "funny" or "troll"...

Given the rocks' likely (lack of) combustibility, they're probably not "flamebait". But how does it avoid nervous breakdown, knowing that each one of its positive ratings is thoroughly meta-moderated?

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The expedition marks the first time an independent four-wheeled robot has been used to search for extraterrestrial materials that have fallen to Earth

Why so specific? There must have been other vehicles with a different number of wheels doing the exact same thing.

They made it sound really successful till the last line of the article: ``It's quite moody actually,'' he said. ``Some days it's perfect, and others nothing will work.''

That pretty much contradicts what was in there about it being so successful.

Re:Quote from Miguel on Nomad:[long post]

[Zurk]

yes it is. but not for the reason you mentioned.
Have a look at :
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html
All the source is there including :
BrainTech's Odysee Development Studio - Commercial program - A drag-and-drop environment for vision system prototyping and testing (a la Wit,
Vision Blox, Khoros, etc.). It is also an open architecture so that one can import their own C/C++ functions. (by Ajay Sidda / Odysee / BrainTech)
Camera Calibration - Routines for calibrating using Roger Tsai's perspective projection camera model. (by Reg Willson / CMU)
Convex grouping algorithm - Robustly locates salient convex collections of line segments in an image.
Edge list approximation code - From Nonparametric segmentation of curves into various representations, PAMI 1995 pp 1140-1153. by Paul Rosin and
Geoff West.
GSnake - Contour modeling, extraction, detection, and classification.
Hidden Markov Model routines - Implementation of Forward, Backward, Viterbi and Baum-Welch algorithms. The code follows Rabiner and Juang
notation. Written in c. (by Tapas Kanungo / Center for Automation Research / University of Maryland, College Park)
Intel Video Capture Card Libraries for Linux - Research libraries for the Intel Create & Share Camera Pack and the Smart Video Recorder III to be
used with C, Matlab, or Java on a Linux system
Facilitates high speed image capture into Matlab and C, and slower capture into Java. (by Jeff Norris / Learning and Vision Group / MIT)
KLT - An implementation of the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi feature tracker. (by Stan Birchfield / Stanford Vision Lab / Stanford University)
Logical/Linear Operators (by Lee Iverson)
MMach - A Mathematical Morphology Toolbox for the Khoros System
Maximum-Flow Stereo Algorithm - Code for the maximum-flow formulation of the N camera stereo correspondence problem. (by Sebastien Roy / NEC
Research Institute)
MeasTex - A framework for quantitative measurement of image texture classification algorithms.
MegaWave - Wavelet, Snake and Segmentation source code.
Microsoft Easy Camera Calibration Tool - a flexible camera calibration technique, which only requires the camera to observe a planar pattern shown at a
few (at least two) different (unknown) orientations. (by Zhengyou Zhang / Vision Technology Group / Microsoft Corp.)
NIST Handwriting OCR Testbed - OCR software and datasets for UNIX systems.
Perceptual Organization Software
Performance of Optical Flow Techniques - Implementations of a number of optical flow algorithms as well as test data and results.
These programs are described in John Barron, David Fleet and Steven Beauchemin, Queen's University Tech Report RPL-TR-9107, July 1992 (revised July
1993).
SAMPLEX Color Classifier - Demos and software (requires licensing) (Purdue University)
SRI Stereo Engine Software - fast stereo software for PCs. It performs disparity calculations and filtering in real time on images up to 320x240 in size. (
SRI Artificial Intelligence Center / SRI International)
SUSAN - Low-level image processing.
SUSAN is an acronym for Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus. The SUSAN algorithms cover image noise filtering, edge finding and corner
finding. (by Steve Smith / Oxford University)
SatherVision - An object oriented framework for artificial vision.
Includes low-level operations (FFTs, convolutions), pipes, Tk widgets, stereo and optical flow modules.
Segmentation of Skin-Cancer Images - Implementation of an algorithm for segmenting images of skin cancer and other pigmented lesions (see Image and
Vision Computing, January 1999, pp. 65-74).
An automatic method for segmention of images of skin cancer and other pigmented lesions is implemented. This method first reduces a color image into an
intensity image and approximately segments the image by intensity thresholding. Then, it refines the segmentation using image edges. Double thresholding
is used to focus on an image area where a lesion boundary potentially exists. Image edges are then used to localize the boundary in that area. A closed elastic
curve is fitted to the initial boundary and is locally shrunk or expanded to approximate edges in its neighborhood in the area of focus. Segmentation results
from twenty randomly selected images show an average error that is about the same as that obtained by four experts manually segmenting the images. (by L.
Xu, M. Jackowski, A. Goshtasby, C. Yu, D. Roseman, S. Bines, A. Dhawan, A. Huntley / Intelligent Systems Laboratory / Wright State University)
SketchUp - A demo package for recognizing hand-drawn sketches through Size Functions. ( Vision Mathematics group / University of Bologna)
Steerable Pyramid
Check Eero's home page for a tar file. (by Eero Simoncelli)
TargetJr - A C++ Computer Vision Environment - C++ programing environment with libraries to support: image processing; image segmentation;
camera modeling; 2-d and 3-d geometry; a graphical user interface based on FRESCO.
TargetJr has been developed over the last 10 years, starting at GE's Corporate R&D Center. Currently TargetJr is used by a number of vision research
groups with emaphasis on geometric algorithms and object recognition. TargetJr is written in C++ and organized into a number of libraries including:
numerics; spatial objects; image; image processing; segmentation; computational geometry; 3-d modeling; and user interface. (by Joseph Mundy, William
Hoffman, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Peter Vanroose and Rupert Curwen / GE Corp. R&D, Oxford University, University of Leuven)
ToolDiag - Pattern recognition of multivariate numerical data.
UNL Fourier Features (UFF) - An implementation of a general purpose 2-D shape description method. (by Thomas Rauber)
University of Calgary vision software - Includes chain code, Hough transform, and others.
ZipPack Polygon Mesh Zippering - Combines several range images into a polygonal mesh.

Re:Why don't they just send fucking jews und commi

[Anonymous Coward]

That because of nazi shit bags like you, that amerikansky are hated all over the world ...

I want to see a beowulf cluster of these things!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of all the rock you could find!

Re:Why don't they just send fucking jews und commi

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't associate the rest of us Americans with guys like this. Trust me, most of us wouldn't lose sleep if these sick fucks accidentally shot themselves or something.

There is no snow.

[Tau Zero]

It can't get stranded in snow, because there's no snow there. Just ice. Nomad is running in an area where the ice is actually evaporating; if snow was accumulating, the meteorites would be buried and thus extremely difficult to detect. The beauty of the conditions where Nomad (and other Antarctic meteorite hunters) operate is that the sublimation of the ice sheet exposes all the things which have fallen onto it over the hundreds of miles and thousands of years before. The ice flows like a river and brings everything to that one area, like streams washing gold dust into every crevice in the stream bed. To a meteoriticist, this is just like panning for gold
--

Re:There is no snow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I expected a more "There is no spoon"ish type response when I read the author name... How disappointing...

Your link is funny

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDK Development Team Thanks you.

Thank you.

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[legLess]

Maybe NASA should try blowing a big crater somewhere in the Antartic, dropping the robot into it, and then seeing if they can get a response. From a robot on Mars :)

Or maybe...

[Tau Zero]

.. it's called Nomad because it wanders the ice?
--

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[Crixus]

This stuff is great - it will lead to the sort of technology we will need to allow autonomous robots to explore other planetary bodies, such as Mars or the Moon, but if it breaks down we can just walk up to it and figure out what broke. We can work out the kinks here where we can fix it.

NASA has been sponsoring this type of research for about 2 decades. But we still can't plan for all of the variables involved in getting a rover to the surface of an alien world, and its stay on the world.

Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit...

This would be a very expensive option, if not a bad idea.

The cost of getting ANYTHING into orbit is still prohibitive. Plus we would essentially have to build the rover to it's flight-hardened specifications since it will be spending some time in space, and this means more money.

Deploying it from the Shuttle is another, probably less expensive option and certainly might be more feasible.

However, the amount of flack you are going to receive from people like environmental groups for the potential harm to the Antarctic environment (if it crashed or something else horrible happened) would mean something like this would never fly. I'm not sure I don't agree with them.

Stereoscopic vision?

[Kev Vance]

I found it interesting that Nomad can use two cameras for depth perception. According to the site, it creates a "disparity map" based on the differences. Does anyone know where I can find more information on this technique? It sounds fascinating...

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[mrfunnypants]

I agree it is pretty high, but how stupid is it spending 2 million for 30 seconds to advertise a .com address during the SuperBowl, by the way I forget almost all of those stupid .com commercials 30 minutes after the SuperBowl was over with, what a waste of money. I did remember that e*trade one with the Monkey and the Bud one with the Dog, but besides those, a waste, in fact if almost all those .com commercials had put their money together we probabley could of almost launched another shiny metallic thing in space(sarcasm ;). )

in case you have ever wondered

[Laplace]

fyi

meteoroid: a rock from from space that is in space

meteor: a rock from space that is in the atmosphere

meteorite: a rock from space that has landed on the earth

Laplace

Can't they come up with...

[Snarfvs Maximvs]

...better names for these robots?

Mars: Sojourner
Antarctica: Nomad

We get the point already!

What about R2-D2? Or maybe Annihilator 9000? Ultron? Daneel Olivaw?

Re:Can't they come up with...

[BlightX]

You're forgetting the greatest robot of all time, GORT from The Day The Earth Stood Still! Imagine, "Today GORT landed on Venus. GORT patrolled the venusean surface where GORT found..."etc etc. Just hearing a newscaster say GORT and keeping a straight face would be a feat.

A thought

[pnevares]

``If it fails, it fails,'' said Apostolopoulos. ``We need to know why it failed.''"

Maybe I'm alone here, but isn't it time NASA took the same approach with the Mars probe?


Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Re:A thought

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA took this approach with Chalenger. It was a bad idea then, It is a bad idea now.

Re:A thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Challenger 1) was a lot more complicated than Nomad and 2)had human lives depending on it. Also, the space shuttle program is many orders of magnitude greater in cost. Also, NASA didn't take that approach with Challenger; it was a lot more careful about things than the people at NOMAD have been. the Space Shuttle had a mission; Nomad's Mission is to test technology, and hopefully work in Antarctica. Just a completely different situation than the space shuttle.

They refresh so quickly! Nomad rocks with OpenDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Super!

Can someone please moderate this guy down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay we get it, Don Knotts. Funny. I don't know what you fell the need to disguise the link as something we would actully want to look at. Don Knotts, we get it. let it alone....it's over.

The expedition

[pnevares]

Here is the official website for the expedition.


Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Colleges should work together for...

[MicroBerto]

The amount of research done by colleges always impresses me, but one thing I've noticed is that they're really never doing anythign up in space. I think colleges could possibly link up and actually get something done out there in conjunction with NASA. Would it not be a nice step towards more space exploration? Colleges know mucho!

And back to the article... wouldnt' this be a perfect place to put a super-overclocked processor in the robot? :)
- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto

Re:Colleges should work together for...

[grizzo]

they are working in conjunction with NASA! NASA is forking out a million bucks a year for this project. i mean, sure the kids aren't being blasted out into space for 4 credits a term but still i think this qualifies as working together...

and PS, being an american college student myself i think it's safe to say that if schools started sending kids out in to space there'd be a HELL of a rush to get registered for those classes :) and i thought it was exciting to have a "trampoline" program here...

Re:Colleges should work together for...

[Captn Pepe]

The amount of research done by colleges always impresses me, but one thing I've noticed is that they're really never doing anythign up in space. I think colleges could possibly link up and actually get something done out there in conjunction with NASA. Would it not be a nice step towards more space exploration? Colleges know mucho!

Actually, it's more a case of NASA/JPL taking all the credit for the missions that get the publicity. Don't take this the wrong way, they do a great job on these missions, but if you read through the science reports that come out, you find that most of the instruments are experiments run by scientists at one or more universities.

Just running down some of the projects I know came out of the lab where I work (at the U. of Chicago), our scientists were responsible for the dust sensor on one of the Halley's Comet missions, we've got one of the principal investigators for Ulysses, the scientist who designed Pathfinder's APXS (the rock composition sensor thing) ... and that's just from walking down one hallway.

Believe me, universities the world over are heavily involved in every space science mission that goes up. But it's the people with the big press room and private TV network that get to make the announcements.

BEAM

[craw]

The Smithsonian magazine had a very nice article about Mark Tilden and the "chaotic" robots that he makes at Los Alamos. These robots are called generally refered to as BEAM (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics). They are relatively simple in design and are made of parts that can be easily purchased. But the nice thing about them is that can exhibit learning capabilities and seem like they are alive.

If you have some spare change, then check out Solarbotics. If you want to build one from scratch, then go to some search engine, and search for Mark Tilden (that should get you going). So get out your soldering iron and electrical tape, and get to work making your very own robot.

Re:BEAM

[Soong]

BEAM is useless.

I've talked to Mark Tilden, and seen his robots. They cannot learning anything more complex than resonance. That is definately a neat trick that many other systems have a hard time doing, but it is their only trick.

It can make some fairly simple yet effective walkers, that have no concept of what to do when they get there, or even have any concept of getting there. They just go, they don't do anything else. They are toys.

What do you do for power?

[Tau Zero]

There's just one thing left: find someone to go to the probe every so often, and fill it up with gas. (Nomad is gasoline-powered and cruises at about 1 MPH.)

There might be alternatives. There's a reasonable amount of wind on Antarctica, and enough sunlight during the summer months that the meteorite hunters who camp out there use solar panels to charge their laptop batteries. Running a mobile probe off this might be challenge, though. Unlike the gas-powered version you have a much smaller power supply, no waste heat for thermal control, and a host of other added constraints. Anyone trying to do this would have their work cut out for them.
--

Re:What do you do for power?

[jheinen]

RE: Power - I like the wind generator idea. Another possibility would be to grab some ice, melt it, and electrolyze H and O out of it. Use the H for a fuel cell. Another possibility: air drop blivets of gas and let the rover find them and fuel itself. I wonder of you could make biodegradable blivets?

Re:Hmm... send the bot to hell. Dejavue (SP?) ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. We have a robot off exploring somewhere that's a little dangerous and which actively discourage human visitors.

What?

Someone sent a robot into Microsoft headquarters in Redmond?

I hope they disinfect it when it comes out...

CMU RULES!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Post all rabid love of CMU posts on this thread

Re:CMU RULES!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDK LOVES CMU!

{{{{{{Thank you}}}}}}

Limitations of autonomous robots demonstrated

[Goonie]

This is a good example of the limitations of autonomous robots in natural terrain. While things have improved from 20 years ago, where mobile robots were first tried, it's still pathetic compared to what a pair of geologists with appropriate transport could do.

While research into mobile robots is very valuable stuff, you're still going to need people if you want to do real exploration on bodies out of radio range of Earth.

Re:Glad to see NASA funding this

[Migraine]

it would be a good idea, but getting anoything into space costs millions of dollars. ($80 million ish?)

since this was such a low budget, and other projects like it, they can only afford the one ride.

IMHO, we should scrap pretty much everything except research into finding a half way decent meathod of getting into orbit. $80 mill a pop is plain stupid!

Give it a tank turret!

[Voltage_Gate]

Good lord I hope it's got some defenses! I heard mars rock is the single most expensive rock on earth. This raises a problem with robot independence - any free roaming robot is going to be stolen or vandalized, or at least teased until it breaks.

Re:Give it a tank turret!

[vansinnig]

Those antarctican bastards! Can't they just leave the poor thing alone?

Power and tech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, it looks like this thing wanders around the icy tundra for days on end. Now what I want to know is where is it getting its power? There doesnt look to be a large solar pannel or anything like that. And on another note, how do you detect a space rock under the snow? Does it just use a metal detector? The tech part of the www site doesnt look to be done, or really started at all. By the look of the logs for each day it may just look for dark spots on the ice. Does it probe at all? I also noticed it doesnt look to be done. Is it actually finding anything yet?
Anyway, it looks really cool :)

Klaatu Verata Niktor

[Anonymous Coward]

What if someone spoke the magic words? Need not be one from the 1950's TDTESS generation, could be from the "Army Of Darkness" chainsaw prothetic arm period

Snow is less dense than water

[mangu]

In Colorado, I have skied in snow that seemed to have zero density, but my skis floated on that. I think a properly designed robot could roam indefinitely in Antarctica.

Re:check this out....

[Northern Hunter]

And I quote from the Jan 27th logs

> PROBLEMS:
>
> Had difficulty telneting into meteorite computer.
> Power cycled computer several times before we
> were able to connect to it.

That's an NT box. And this from the 28ths logs.

> SUMMARY: Tried to do more testing in the moraine
> but the science computer was failing preventing
> these tests. Nomad was driven back to camp. Extra
> spectra were taken in camp by placing rocks in
> front of Nomad and manually moving the arm.

If I'm not mistaken, that's likely another NT box, unless it's the VME 68060... I'm not clear on which system controls the robot arm.

What strikes me is how slow this thing is going. It's a _big_ machine, and it's not going on solar power, and it's got three fast computers, just what's holding it up? Is it all the time spent doing the analysis of all the rocks it finds?

Hmm... send the bot to hell. Dejavue (SP?) ?

[Forge]

Wow. We have a robot off exploring somewhere that's a little dangerous and which actively discourage human visitors.

So what exactly is new here ? Maybe it's that this baby runs by itself and doesn't need some human twiddling it's remote control joystick. Maybe it's because this Robot has some built in intelligence and actually tries to "think" it's way around.

One thing though is that if this baby breaks down it is possible for some Homosapien to go out and drag it back unlike other explorer robots that go to places that humans have never visited before. Even the moon and orbiter robots went before people could get the spacesuits to work properly ( I.e. trust the gear ).

Glad to see NASA funding this

[joshv]

This stuff is great - it will lead to the sort of technology we will need to allow autonomous robots to explore other planetary bodies, such as Mars or the Moon, but if it breaks down we can just walk up to it and figure out what broke.
We can work out the kinks here where we can fix it.

Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit, while simulating the kinds of communications delays we have with a distant probe. Seems like it would be a lot cheaper, and we would learn a heck of a lot more even if the mission failed. One of the biggest problems with the recent Mars mission is that we have no idea what went wrong. If we did it might have been worth the $165 million we blew, at least we would not make the same mistake twice.


-josh

This is a Good Thing

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

Anything that catches the public's eye and encourages research is a Good Thijng.

Too often, R&D is considered a necessary evil - something to be reduced in times when money is tight. Spiffy events that draw public attention help foster a culture where science is perceived as fun and interesting, and not as Evil and Threatening.

Spread the word! Get kids interested! Help make science fun!

For more "Robot" Information - general robotics.

[tidepool]

This is _semi_ related. For more information on Robots in the news, check some of the below links:
CNN - Second robot to work on recovery of EgyptAir 'black boxes' - November 8,
Biped robot research in the world
Enjoy.

Ben Brewer
brewer@nullified.org

Slight Variation:

[Skyshadow]

NASA Scientists today unveiled a robot designed to find a date for lonely NASA Scientists.

"Quite simply, the robot first searches for certain characteristics," said NASA researcher Jason Godfrey. The robot locates candidates based on a number of factors, including "nice legs, large breasts and what we technically refer to as a 'hot ass'".

Once a viable candidate is identified, the robot moves in for a much closer look.

"First, the robot takes a photo using a special stereoscopic camera and relays back to base. This allows us to filter out unsavory characteristics like too-large noses, unibrows and pimples." Godfrey continued, "if a candidate passes this test, it is further studied for compatibility," including hobbies, interests and ability to perform the Vulcan 'Live Long & Prosper' hand sign. It also attempts to collect information, such as name, weight, and phone number.

Although the robot is capable of parsing up to three blocks of downtown bar area per hour, the robot has yet to locate a single candidate which worked out. "Our most promising subject turned out to be a total bitch," said Godfrey, based on the fact that she gave a "fake-o phone number".

----

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Don Knots funny.

Thank you.

Elephant poop?

[cfish]

the Elephant poop makes me think about the New York Art show "Sensation" that stired the media. I have a feeling that this thing is gona trip over one of those big ones some day...

Oh here's a mirror.

Re:A thought (unfortunately offtopic)

[pq]

The problem was money: NASA couldn't afford the extra $5 million. Think about that - for less than the cost of a minute of SuperBowl advertising, we would have known exactly what went wrong - all we needed was an omnidirectional transmitter with its own power supply (and the weight penalty would have added the $5 mil). Oh well - maybe next time Congress will allow a few more dollars.
Face it - this is rocket science, and it doesn't come cheap.

Re:AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS

[Anonymous Coward]

quit making fun of est! hes done much more for free software then you or stallman (stalinman)

Re:Images from Nomad

[naloxone]

That was the one. I remember it as being very large, with a hefty computer in each leg. Its center of gravity was also more than a bit high.

Looks like Carnegie Mellon is catching on to the Smaller, Cheaper, Faster bandwagon as well. Good for them.

CMU: Commies Must Unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, Carnegie Mellon is only a viable option if you're a hardcore Chomsky worshipper, otherwise it just doesn't make sense. Why go to a school that refuses to release it's code as open source when there are much better alternatives? And don't get me started on Pittsburgh: I can hardly imagine hell to be a worse place. I myself dredged through 2 years there before I finally got smart and transferred to DeVry Tech (it was the commercials, man!), and then 'earning' my PhD. from this place. My best investment ever! Buy one, get one free! CMU certainly can't beat that, now can they!

NASA funding

[Tungz10]

I have an idea for NASA increasing it's funding. They mass produce a bunch of the little robots, install an internet package in each one of them, then open up an All-Advantage account for each one, giving referral credit to some master account at NASA.

Then program them to open a mailbox in anarctica. Program them to do useful exploration tasks like opening the check, and depositing it automatically.

Why waste money making them mobile? Just put the robots in backpacks and strap them to penguins!

Re:AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll keep that in mind next time, esr.

Re:No melon. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. No le

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, a Toyota! Kool!

Autonomous (NOT) Robots

[Soong]

The problem with the current state of autonomous robots is that we don't trust them. The researchers who build them are really watching them every second with a finger on the kill switch.

You may remember Xavier the CMU robot with the web interface anyone could command. It showed live pictures from the robot's perspective of the halls it was wandering. What it didn't show was the grad student walking behind it every step of the way ready to kick the bumpers if Xavier got wiely.

One of the big supposed features of Nomad is that it has "Safeguarded Teleoperation" whereby you tell it to go somewhere and it goes there by a safe route -i.e. a route that doesn't have any obstructions or slopes too steep. But, in testing just a couple months ago Nomad nearly fell into the river when it rolled down a slope that was too steep.

There's your little update on the state of robotics. In large part it comes down to a general problem of software reliability in unpredictible circumstances. Robotics hasn't yet found what Operating Systems have found in their UNIX-mind-state of what should and shouldn't be and gereral purpose tools and solutions.

check this out....

[Anonymous Coward]

And I quote: "Nomad is a powerful computing platform. Its size allows all necessary processing to be performed on the robot. There are four computers on Nomad during this expedition. Two PCs running Windows NT control the panoramic camera, perform landmark based navigation, and run the autonomous classification software. A third computer running Red Hat Linux coordinates robot navigation and obstacle avoidance with the stereo cameras and the laser rangefinder. Finally, a VME processor cage with a Motorola 68060 processor controls Nomad's real-time processing, such as translation of driving commands into servo motor movements and the monitoring of all systems on Nomad."

Hmmm... how do they reboot the NT boxes when they BSOD? *grins*

Re:check this out....

[Captain Zion]

Two PCs running Windows NT control the panoramic camera, perform landmark based navigation, and run the autonomous classification software.

Humm... here's another quote from the page: "Between January 22 and January 26 Nomad autonomously found and correctly classified in-situ 3 indigenous meteorites. Nomad also found but incorrectly classified a fourth meteorite as terrestrial rock." :) The page also states that Nomad classified meteorite #12322 as "interesting". I wonder if others are classified as "funny" or "troll"...

Images from Nomad

[naloxone]

There's a fair amount of information about an earlier expedition with the Nomad robot in the Atacama Desert (including archives of some images from and of it) at http://img.arc.nasa.gov/Nomad/nomad.html

Does anyone else remember a NOVA special on this robot? Or was it about one of the many previous robots from Carnegie Mellon?

Nomad in the NYTimes

[DaKrzyGuy]

There was an article on the front page of the Science Times of the New York Times a few weeks ago. The link can be found here. The robot is very cool. And what is really cool is that they allow undergrads to help work on it too.

But what does it look like?

[Wah]

Oh, for that go here

Even includes pictures of microscopic interstellar life, err, rock.

Delivery Mechanism

[chazR]

"A highly sophisticated, rather delicate, very ingenious robot that is a credit to its developers and a triumph of Human ingenuity is being tested in the antarctic"

"It was transported there with great care by a number of highly skilled scientists and engineers, who will monitor its every step with loving care."

"Then we'll stuff it on the top of a rocket, do our level best to shake it to bits on launch, expose it to unimaginably rapid changes in temperature and leave it alone for 9-12 months"

"Once we're bored with that, we'll plunge it into the atmosphere of a small planet, allow it to hit the ground in way that will make it lucky not to leave a significant crater. Then, whatever happens, we'll spend the next several months bombarding it with incredibly faint radio signals, just to see what happens. Either way, we're going to need more funding."

Apologies. This is capable of being one of the peaks of human endeavour. But I'm glad I'm not the robot.