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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.
= 9J =
"We've thrown it out of second- and third-story windows," said Capt. Dave Moreau, project officer for Dragon Runner at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va. "We've thrown it off the back of a moving vehicle at 45 miles an hour."
If they can make the robot out of this stuff, why not make the whole Marine out of it?
So far the US approach has been to bomb the crap out of building with helicopters and planes from miles away, and then go an look at the bodies.
If the marines are never close enough to people when they are alive to identify that it is a wedding party not a group of fighters then this is hardly going to help. Unless of course it can be deployed from 20 miles away.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Just like the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, June 30th is just another mile marker that'll cause people to think that the war is over, when really it won't be.
June 30 is not the day that US troops will walk out leaving the country alone, it's just the day that Paul Bremer gives his authority to Iraqis that the USA will hand pick and announce shortly.
Iraq still doesn't have a stable military or police force that's capable of stamping down warlords who declare themselves mayor of a town, and until that is established, there's no way legit government would be able to survive the challenges from such insurgents.
So, at least the frist attempt at forming a stable Iraqi government will happen on June 30th... but that still is a long way from America being out of there.
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
Personally, I don't know if sending more things that don't know "right side up" to Iraq is a good decision at this point.
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