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Hyperion Robot Follows the Sun
jeffsenter writes: "NASA is about to test a solar powered and solar orienting wheeled robot known as Hyperion on arctic Devos Island, Canada. The Carnegie Mellon designed robot is a prototype for future robots to explore the polar regions of Mars, the Moon, and other moons. Here is the BBC article and here is the NYTimes (free reg. req.)."
Hyperion spends many happy martian days exploring the surface, but radiation eventually mutates it's control module into a higher, proto-conscious state, recalls a vague memory fragment, gathers crude materials from crashed NASA projects and builds itself an escape propulsion system, splashes down into Pacific Ocean off CA coast, makes it's way one dark, rainy night to an office building in Palo Alto, then bursts into the office of Scott McNealy, grabs him by the throat, waving tentacles and monotonically repeating, "Must follow Sun, must follow Sun!"
Maybe a StarTrek movie? Maybe a 'C' grade flick??
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
IIRC, it was in "I, Robot"...should be in your local library. If not, berate the librarian for not including the classics of 20th century literature in her collection.
I can't help laughing, sitting here at my desk reading this article. It reminds me too much about that story about the MIT AI lab where they built the robot arm to swat ping-pong balls and then Minsky walked into the lap and nearly got brained by the robot arm thinking his shiny head was a ping-pong ball.
I'm still laughing.
Does this sound like a somewhat trivial problem to solve in the field of robotics? Haven't they been doing this for a while?
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You know...
All they should have to do is mount the panel, laid back at a 30-45 degree angle (may be more or less depending on lattitude of the landing site), onto a servo motor of some sort, so that the panel can rotate around a vertical axis (like a turntable). Then instead of a light sensor, use the panel itself! The voltage will vary according to the amount of light falling on the panel. Rotate the servo until the panel registers the highest voltage - run it from stop-to-stop, 270-360 degrees (ie, you need a servo with built-in stops, so that the wiring harness doesn't get tangled/twisted - and I wouldn't use some kind of commutator system on such a critical item for an interplanetary mission). Heck, if you wanted to be real cheap, just mount the panel, and drive the robot until it is angled properly (one less moving part to break). At any rate, you would rotate it until you found the maximum light value, set it at that, determine your heading, then you would know which direction to rotate the servo as the voltage drops.
Also, even if it is a reflection or artificial light (and if it is the latter on the surface of Mars, you may have bigger problems!), as long as it is giving enough voltage - it don't matter...!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
By knowing where it is and the correct time, the robot can compute where the Sun is and keep its solar panel pointed in the right direction.
Strange. Why does a robot need to know its location and the time of day in order to find where the sun is? Unless it's a cloudy day, would not a simple light-sensitive sensor suffice? And if it's cloudy or night time solar panels are not much use.
Besides, even if it knows its precise location and the correct time, it would also need to know which direction it is facing and its exact angle with respect to the vertical. Seems to be a rather complex approach to a relatively simple problem.
...if it gets too close to a light bulb will it drive around in circles like insects do? Some Martians are gonna want to have a nighttime barbecue and this thing is gonna keep driving circles around them. You just know they're going to swat it...
Just had to point out that the island is named Devon not Devos as the article has it.
There is an article on the robot here on Spaceref.com.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
"Hyperion follows the Sun". Sun is building robots? I thought Bill Joy was against the whole robot thing.
It's really hard to figure out size from the picture since all you've got to compare it to is the landscape of an unknown red planet with water on it and a sunset in the distance.
Um, no. It's *not* as stupid as it sounds. It takes a fair amount of (mechanical) engineering talent to win buggy since the buggies free roll (ie, aren't pushed) over a large amount of the course. It's an engineering school and you think it's dumb that it has an engineering competition? Are you just bitter you didn't get into CMU or something? Also, most of the buggy drivers I knew weren't asian and weren't bulemic either. You can actually fit a reasonably sized (albeit rather short) person into most of the buggies I've seen.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
"We're trying to create robots with more and more intelligence," Dr Wettergreen told BBC News Online. "By more intelligence, I mean they are able to reason about where they need to go and what they need to do to get there."
That's good. Very good actually. The marketting department in my current software shop could use a couple of these, unlike the rest of our marketroids these robots are able to reason about where they need to go and what they need to do to get there!
You can't handle the truth.
Thats funny, my company's site gets a few hundred thousand hits per day (10 to 20 thousand unique users) and runs fine off a $500 gateway server with 256MB of ram running IIS/ASP and SQL 2000.
Interesting, I agree with this statement not only for vehicles on ground and in the air, but for any computational resources that are involved in the functioning of any space mission. Anything that is going to be more than a few light minutes away needs to be shipped with "brains".
:-) .......
One thing, I'd like to see is the development of intelligent "brains" orbiting a planet, and a relatively dumb surface unit taking controls from an orbiting satelittle.
This way, the "brains" don't need to be engineered to survive entry into a martian environment, and the mission could be expanded by launching more "slave" units to the planet's surface.
In other words, as long as a new vehicle sent to the surface of Mars, works with the protocol of the master satelitte, the mission could be extended. This opens up the possibility for creating some sort of XML ( eXtensible Mission Language )
------ Tim O'Brien
Not only a single brain, instead of viewing a mission as one vehicle that gets thrown into space at a very high velocity and ends up spending a few weeks mucking around taking pictures. You would have a series of orbiting brains that could be replaced and upgraded as time goes on, and a series of smaller exploratory drones that would gather data.
This way, every thing you launch towards Mars is very light and you reduce the risk by splitting the mission into micro missions. I've always wondered why we haven't had a mission yet where we release very small insect sized probes into the martian environment. Every insect sized probe knows how to communicate with an orbiting intelligence, thereby reducing the cost of the drone.
I don't maybe NASA isn't think about this kind of thing these days, they are just trying to hold on to the little funding they have left.
------ Tim O'Brien
actually, i agree. But consider this: Slashdot gets more hits that a hippy postage stamp, and it remains relatively fast. Meanwhile, my company's site (running four MS SQl server, thirteen quad server running IIS 5, Win2k and ColdFusion 4.5) is choking when it goes over a million daily. Bad coding? Maybe. More likely it's bad architecture, unscalable web server and a database that's too big for it's britches. Either way, slashcode is a great little codeset (even if it is GNU)...and a couple hours of downtime in several months of uptime is fucking incredible to us stuck in Microsoft hell.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'm all for bashing Taco, but don't bash the webserver. It's just not fair.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
So the robot follows the sun. Big frickin' deal. I've trained my Aibo to follow co-eds in short skirts. It's even trained to take pictures with its 640x480 CCD camera and upload them to Igor on voyeurweb.
All I'm saying is that NASA seems to spend a lot of time worrying about not getting lost on Mars, and not enough time worrying about how to take compromising photos of those fly-ass Martian babes I saw in those fifties sci-fi flicks.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I would imagine that the tires will be rubber or foam filled. The advantage of rubber or foam filled is that you can have a self-healing super-composite (usually accomplished by embedding foam or epoxy capsules within the material)... Tracks would be ideal, but the weight doesn't justify the added maneuverability, especially since those benefits aren't realized as well in particularly rocky terrain. Treads deal great with bumpy terrain and with low-traction terrain, but when the bumpiness is more granular treads may actually decrease effectiveness...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
The BBC article says the robot can call for human help if need be. What happens when it is on Mars. Will NASA send a mechanic to Mars?
P.S. to Taco: he's also an anime fan (or used to be), he provided the videos for the SF Con in Waterloo.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
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You can go fairly puny on the tires as long as you have a good soft suspension. The harder the suspension the sturdier the tires and everything else needs to be to handle the rough terrain.
"Secrecy is the Beginning of Tyranny" "No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law" -Robert Heinlein
one of the major hurdles of exploring space is creating ships that have indpendence and don't rely on nasa to constantly look over their shoulder. it looks like we are getting closer and closer to realizing this goal.
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
Of course it could make for some interesting robot race challenges....
m00.