Slashdot Mirror
Military Robots to Gain Advanced Sight
coondoggie brings us a NetworkWorld report discussing iRobot's plans to include Laser Radar technology in their military robots. Quoting:
"Specifically the robot-maker is licensing Advanced Scientific Concepts' 3-D flash Ladar which uses laser beams to scan and process targets. The system has the ability to create a virtual 3D picture of an entire area. IRobot ... believes the technology will provide new navigation and mapping capabilities for future generations of robots and unmanned ground vehicles and pave the way for autonomous vehicles to lead convoys into dangerous territory, search contaminated buildings for casualties, or enable bomb squads to safely investigate suspicious objects."
Hmm, you know what's next. Robots will be getting hearing aids and dentures next...
Pour all your intelligence into warfare and be not surprised when you reap greater harvests of war.
- Sarah Connor?
- Yes?
Maybe iRobot will put this into their Roombas and allow us to get rid of some of the IR gates that they use now. I don't know how many times I've stepped on one of them after they migrate to the center of the room in the dead of night.
Also, does anyone else find it disturbing that they also make military robots?
Am I glad that we're making military robots with advanced sight. I wouldn't want to waste any more time and money on distractions like an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, or beating the Taliban in Afghanistan, or healing the tens of thousands of maimed soldiers the Pentagon has created over there, or stopping nuke proliferation.
Yeah, subsidizing global R&D by inventing seeing military robots under the totally inefficient Pentagon budget is my idea of victory.
--
make install -not war
There's a freakin' REASON that they call it LIDAR. Don't just say something retarded like "laser radar." That makes NO sense whatsoever. If you really, really have to do this to impress the folks, call it a "laser-like radar."
Thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz5cl131KTk
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Well I, for one, welcome our new Natalie Portman scanning Robot Overlords, with frickin' laser beams attached to their frickin' heads, all the way from Soviet Pittsburgh.
"He Who Dares Wins"
And even more nice wargear to wreck havoc upon innocent citizens in foreign countries. One would think that with all the current scandals and severe losses on part of the "allied" forces (I can't believe how many people consider a "wounded" soldier to be a lot less probematic than a dead soldier per facto thus totally ignoring the fact that even someone who has lost an arm or a leg or is comatized also considers as "wounded") that the weapon and wargear development would be put to a lower priority.
So far the rant part. Nice to see how modern and future technology is going to be used to spread the word of freedom across the world. However, who is going to operate this stuff? Its nice and all that robots can now scan the battle field and go into attack, but who is going to order them to do just that? We've seen developments like this many times in the past too; devices which should make sure that its impossible for soldiers to fire on their own men (for example). But the whole outcome of all that military technology is still resulting in many casualties (yes, this includes wounded) due to friendly fire.
It puzzles me that whenever you read stories like these they allways seem to ignore the human factor. Thus, so far and ofcourse only in my opinion, resulting in the wargear getting smarter but the people operating getting... Having modern state of the art weapons is one thing, having a good strategy on the other hand is priceless.
In Skynet Russia, Roomba vacuums you.
"We go now, go get hightec ladar and find enemies"
"No worries, that truck has a build in radar, go get 'm soldier"
"No,no good. We go hightec. Please go get ladar!"
"Soldier, that van has radar build in. Don't worry, move out damnit!"
"No, we no need ladar, we need ladar!"
"<sighs>, what idiot thought up THAT name for platoons with Asian soldiers?"
(No offense to Asians)
I'd figure there also are a lot of civil applications for this technology? Contracting, driver-less cars, game-development? Oh, the fun we'd have.
"radar like laser" - I totally get where you are coming from tho..some of the stuff posted here *is* retarded
They're going to have lazer beams attached to their freggin heads?
pave the way for autonomous vehicles to lead convoys into dangerous territory
So they're saying that artificial intelligence is finally just around the corner (literally and figuratively)?
It used a laser to paint all your furniture and walls on the 2600... should have bought one while they were $5 at toys R us.
Anyone able to perform elementary image processing will be able to trace the laser light back to the source with pinpoint accuracy. So the laser targeting system has to do incredibly complicated analysis to dubiously ascertain its targets, but the enemy can pinpoint this system back unambiguously and easily. Might as well paint a bullseye on the unlucky bastards who have to operate this thing.
This is a big step forward. I know this technology. Back in 2004, when we were putting our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle together, I went down to Advanced Scientific Concepts in Santa Barbara to see the thing. Back then, they had a prototype that worked, but it was on an optical bench (one of those big plates with screw holes to which you attach optical components), nowhere near ready to go on a vehicle. It was just too early. We had to go with SICK rotating-mirror line scanners, like everybody else. But I was convinced it was the right direction to go, and I dragged a venture capitalist who had some underperforming photonics companies down there to see the thing. He didn't want to fund them, because they were too far from a consumer product; the near term market was DoD-only.
ASC kept working, and by 2006 they had working portable prototypes. By 2007, you could buy a LIDAR about the size of a large-format camera for about $100,000. Now they've downsized it further.
Unlike the laser scanners with spinning mirrors or sensors, which is what everyone else uses, this technology has no moving parts. The system has two main components - a pulse laser with diffusing optics, and a detection and timing IC with one LIDAR receiver per pixel. Neither of these is inherently expensive in quantity. It may take a while to get this down to webcam prices, but $1000 is a reasonable near-term target.
It's amazing that this can be done in an eye-safe way, since this approach is subject to the radar equation - returned power decreases as the fourth power of the distance. But the detectors can be made good enough. Some of their more sensitive detectors use a photomultiplier tube technology, like a night vision system. Night vision systems use a photoelectric detector plate - when a photon hits it, an electron pops out. Electric fields are used to accelerate the electron, which then hits one of the electron detectors on a specially designed IC. Photomultipliers have been around for decades, and can detect single photons. The neat thing about the photoelectric effect is that it's at the atomic level, and happens in picoseconds. So it can be used as a light amplifier for a time-of-flight LIDAR.
The current generation of compact sensor is 128x128 pixels at 30Hz. The sensors are currently smaller than the lasers, but for smaller robots where you need only 10m of range or so, a smaller laser can be used.
This is the sensor that will make automatic driving commercially feasible.
Everything is going to plan.
In 7 years, it begins.
*tick tick tick*
Isn't it called LiDAR ?
military robots are capable of killing us all!!
I'd have to question your "returned power decreases as the fourth power of the distance" claim.
:P
This is true with radar, yes, because your radar beam increases spatially in two dimensions on the way to the target, ping at a point source, then diffuses again in two dimensions from there.
With lidar, you have a coherent focused beam on the way there. Lasers are generally considered to not lose any significant power over distance in a vacuum. You still have the ping, or reflection event, at which point you'll no longer have coherent, focused light, and the return trip will indeed be subject to the two-dimensional decrease in power.
Hence lidar is subject to the inverse square law, not the inverse fourth-power law.
and as a brief aside, I did some research with nasa in what seems to be a similar field. We were evaluating commercial off the shelf "range imager units", which are effectively the same thing as described here, only with an array of phased-intensity IR led's instead of a laser, as with a laser, you actually have to scan a scene. That's the difference between lidar and range imaging. judging from the extremely light details in the article and being too asleep to do any further research of my own, i say this seems exactly like what they're doing. using COTS stuff that's been around for years (and quite small, and available commercially, since at least 2005), only they claim to be using a laser light source. I don't get it. they claim there is no moving parts, there is no scanning mechanism to flood the scene with a single laser beam, one point at a time. they allege that a single laser beam paints an entire scene with no moving parts. i call bs, unless that's one wide, wide laser beam. perhap's it's just laser diodes, and then the whole idea is -exactly- like the range imagers like i worked with years ago.
also, wtf is Ladar? it's Lidar, idiots
I'd have to question your "returned power decreases as the fourth power of the distance" claim. ...
With lidar, you have a coherent focused beam on the way there.
Not with a flash LIDAR. There's one big broad flash spread by a beam spreader, not a mechanically scanned narrow beam. I'm amazed that it works over substantial distances. There aren't that many photons coming back per pixel. They don't spread the beam very wide; 1 to 9 degrees is typical for the longer ranged units. At shorter ranges, a wider beam can be used. The detectors have to be really good. They use GaInAs, not PIN diodes. The semiconductor device physics behind this thing is impressive.
I know about the SwissRanger thing; it doesn't have enough range for outdoor operation, but it's a nice little package. That thing modulates an array of LEDs at 20MHz or so, then measures the phase shift of the returned signal in a detector array of about 10K pixels. That thing ought to sell for webcam prices, but it's made by hand in Switzerland and costs too much.
The original article posted to Slashdot doesn't say much; you have to check the ASC web site and read the papers to see how it works.
I, too, worked on the grand/urban challenges. At one of the post-competition conferences Ibeo (owned by SICK) claimed that they would be able to produce their 4-beam LIDARS (with builtin target tracking that works semi-OK in highway-type scenarios) for $300 by two years time. Of course the Ibeo ALASCAs and such still have moving parts and work in only specific situations, but they're getting pretty good.. or at least better.
Having said that, a *huge* problem with LIDARS (like RADARs or any other active sensors) in a military environment is that carrying a LIDAR is the same as carrying a homing device for any basic IR-targeted bomb/missile.
"Where's that convoy, Sam?"
"Put on your IR goggles and look for the huge disco light in the middle of the desert, Bob!"
"Wow, Sam, thats WICKED!"
So I'm not sure how they're addressing that, or if they're hoping for an application niche that doesn't deal with being shot at altogether.
Does anyone have some information regarding, how fast such sensor can be at the moment? Speaking in terms of scans per second. I used to work on a project dealing with a 3d laser scanner (although not in a military context ^^) and that one wasn't even close to being fast enough to sense and destroy a target before being blasted to pieces.
and up he goes!
New "ollywoo" blockbuster - Rise of the Roombas
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Still doesn't hold a candle to my AK-57-UZI-RADAR-LASER triple-barrel double-scoped heat-seeking shotgun.
Yes, actives are just too visible. It doesn't matter much in urban environments, though; it's not like you can hide an Army truck driving through a town.
Magoo
Have gnu, will travel.
Hi,
Can someone explain why disparity extraction from a stereo pair is not useful for car navigation ?
It seems to me heaps easier to build than LIDAR (I looked at the algorithms)
What is the problem ? Insufficient precision, easy to fool?
Just curious, there has to be a simple reason, otherwise none would bother with LIDAR.
If it sees with laser it toasts U with laser, if not now then one day; so let it be written, so let it be done.
Stereo is useful for getting distance to nearby obstacles with edges. It's not that useful on uniform pavement (no edges to register), gravel (detail too fine), wet surfaces, etc. What you really get from stereo is depth information of varying quality across the image.
Stereo from motion is in theory more useful, since the baseline is much larger, but it's much harder to do. Humans don't r seally do stereo vision beyond a few meters; our eyes are too close together. Depth from motion is how we really resolve the world.
One of the neater ideas in stereo vision is the Triclops, three cameras arranged in a triangle. With three cameras, most of the ambiguities that occur with two cameras go away.
Thanks again for the free marketing slashdot!
I don't get the news here. This is the standard sensor for all robots, and they've been using "lidar" for years.
Having said that, a *huge* problem with LIDARS (like RADARs or any other active sensors) in a military environment is that carrying a LIDAR is the same as carrying a homing device for any basic IR-targeted bomb/missile.
IF you're looking 250 meters your flash LIDAR would get a return within 1.7 microseconds. If you create a 1.7 microsecond flash at a frequency of 10Hz you're only emitting 0.0017% of the time.
Let's say the light you pulse is as bright as a 100kW bulb (i.e. a thousand 100W bulbs). With that duty cycle it would be the equivalent of a 1.7 watt bulb. That ain't much for a missile to lock onto.
Just my $0.02.
Military robots can be a great help in future.software company