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CMU's Snooping Robot Headed for Iraq
mike_the_kid writes "Here's an interesting article about a robot near the end of development at CMU. It's a four-wheeler called the Dragon Runner. This robot has no 'right side up,' so no matter which way it lands, its ready to go. The user (currently projected to be a US Marine) throws the robot over a fence or up a flight of stairs. The robot has cameras that send live video back to the operator, and directional microphones that can relay as well. A cool feature is that it can tell the operator where there is movement (via audio or tactile feedback)." We first mentioned the Dragon Runner a while back, but the previous article was more about the Dragon Eye, a small remote-controlled airplane.
The Dragon Runner is a definete improvement to the impractical (at least in it's current state) Dragon Eye. It will be much easier for a person to operate a small vehicle that is a bit more "stealthy" that a small plane. With the Dragon Eye, there were far too many variables for any combat troop to use with any real practicality.
This is definitely a neat little gizmo, that will help gather information that would otherwise be hard to collect.
If the Iraqi hostiles capture one of them, though, I would be willing to lay down cash that they will sell it to a US-hostile entity - I would guess Al Qaeda or possibly Red China.
Hope it's rigged to destroy itself via remote control...
A love beyond compare...
What happened to the Afghan eXplorer, a vehicle designed to work as in independent war reporter in insecure zones?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
This thing is amazing: Dragon Runner today is a 9-pound electric vehicle about 15 inches long, a little less than a foot wide and just five inches in height. Moreau said Dragon Runner can operate in three modes:
:)
Drive mode. The machine has a top speed of 20 mph and also can be operated slowly and deliberately. The video camera transmits color imagery to the operator, who controls it using a hand-held controller/view screen.
Sentry mode. It can operate as a stationary listening post, with a directional microphone and sensors that can detect motion up to 30 feet away. If it detects something, it can alert the operator by vibrating the hand control or sending a verbal "motion left" or "motion right" alert through an earphone.
Watch mode. Again, the vehicle would remain motionless, but would use its cameras to relay information.
You can also strap a bomb or weapon to it. This thing would definitely win the top spot in BattleBots.
Which makes me wonder how long until the only "combatants" that have to be sent into a war zone are the guys who throw these robots all over the place (or drop them from planes?) then hide in a secure place and view/control/eradicate problem. No casualties (on the side with the bots, that is), and no PR problems from increases in breadth and pervasiveness of combat coverage by the media.
Unless the media gets ahold of the video stream somehow. Better encrypt that well
everything in moderation
Hey Guys, i work in the educational department for the NREC (www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/education) and i've seen this running around and its pretty cool, it gets controlled by a gameboy looking device with like a 4 inch screen in the middle. They're really quiet too, you can never hear them running around. Very cool to see this up on slashdot and also the fact that its going over to support our troops is even cooler.
Here's the original post from robots.net...
A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.
My operating systems professor held up our "evacuation plan" for the case of a terrorist attack. The university administration felt the need to produce one after 9/11.
:-) )
It was really pretty funny.
First of all, you have to understand that CMU borders Squirrel Hill, which is a sizeable and extremely heavily Jewish community.
So a lot of "community centers" like churches volunteer for such things in the case of emergencies -- to be gathering points to identify people that need medical care and do head counts and all that.
So there's a long list of these, including a nearby Jewish temple listed as gathering points.
Naturally, the temple (and *only* the temple) has a asterisk next to it and a note at the bottom saying "in the event that this location is unavailable, children in the day care center will be taken to an undisclosed location", yadda yadda yadda.
Some suit clearly thought "Well, when those Arabs come over here, you can be *darn* sure that in addition to nailing a research institution, they're also going to be sure to waste any temples in the area." Sigh.
(That said, the fact that kids in day care would be taken to an "undisclosed location" would seem to do more to panic parents than anything else, but what do I know.
Research institutions are pretty boring targets. Many universities do work that end up in military stuff eventually, but there is a significant lag between a university doing work and practical stuff showing up in US military hardware.
Because of some quirks (like encryption and nuclear weapon simulation, some of the early computer uses) fell under the purview of the military, a good amount of computer science funding comes from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) rather than the NSF (National Science Foundation) as one would expect. Technically, CMU doesn't do classified research on campus, but it does do a *lot* of military-funded work. The SEI doesn't like to talk about exactly what it does, even though technically most of their research is supposed to be non-classified. Also, sometimes researchers get sold things as being somewhat different from their actual use. I've twice now spoken to people that got grants and worked on "non-combat" systems that were rather misleadingly labeled. One person was working what was billed to him as a "search and rescue" vehicle that could autnomously track people, map areas, and the like. He was rather appalled when he got the final vehicle chassis and there was a rather large weapon mount and fire control system on the controls system -- hardly the innocent "search and rescue" application that he had been told about.
CMU claims that it generally doesn't work directly on "combat systems". I get the vague impression that what this tends to come down to is that DARPA and friends have CMU (and some similar institutions) do the hard work (map-building, pathfinding, missile guidance, and the like), and then hire defense contractors to do the actual integration of such systems. The academics can, as long as they choose to do a bit of eye-averting, maintain a clean conscience and truthfully claim in PR releases "we don't make weapons here".
Unfortunately, as long as so much CS funding comes from DARPA, there isn't a whole lot that can be done about the situation -- if people want to be able to do research, they need to get funding from somewhere, and that is very frequently DARPA. The only fix would be to move more government budget from the DoD to the NSF, which doesn't seem very likely to happen.
It's a lot easier for Bush to demand billions for "homeland security" (of which much eventually winds up in the pockets of research institutions and defense contractors) from scared people than it is for someone to make a convincing request for "money for research in the sciences for the betterment of mankind" when so many people are getting old and are watching the Social Security funding that they were counting on rapidly slip away.
May we never see th
President Clinton ordered heavy bombing of Iraq in 1998 because he said that it had WMD.
He must have used 'smart bombs' because the WMD seems to have been destroyed without leaving any trace at all behind!
Nonsense. Weapons like this only make it more likely for people to be injured and killed. This kind of 'assymetric warfare' tool (i.e. we have 'em, the other guys don't) just makes it more likely that we will start and continue wars.
Robots are particularly nasty weapons, because it reduces the risk of injury to one side so much. A commander is more likely to attack a building and kill everyone inside if she is less likely to have any nasty injuries on her team. Can you tell the difference between an Iraqi that means you harm and an innocent civilian on a shakey, wireless TV picture, when one mistake means death for them and/or you? I'd guess no.
Seriously, I believe developing robots for combat purposes is immoral as it is deliberately removing the moral agent from the pointy end of things, even more than the already-illegal poison gas and neutron bombs.
Taking the long view, and supposing that robots become very smart and capable - and my colleagues in robot research are trying very hard to make it so - do we want them armed to the teeth and designed to kill people? I think not. Some will protest that this robot is for reconnaisance and is not armed, and they are right so far. But adding a gun or bomb is a technically trivial next step. It's alreay happened with the Predator drone.
I have 'No Evil Robots' web page that makes this point, and reminds me to keep my robots peaceful.
Besides, a toughened remote-control buggy is not a very interesting robot anyway. There are a hundred cool robots at CMU, and MIT, USC, NASA, that are not designed to spot Iraqis so we can kill them, and have more interesting technology. And that's just in the US - there are many CRAZY things going on in Japan. Check them out.