This is the first year that the HAMMER facility was used as the disaster area and none of the teams had any prior knowledge of the location of anything on the field.
If you read the rules of the competition you'll find that they address this issue directly.
The reason they allow a ground-station to be used for processing is because they consider it to be much more of an economic hurdle than a technical one. The idea being, if you can build an "affordable" ground station that does real-time processing for the robot, with a little more $$ you can put the processing on-board -- it's not a technology issue.
Bear in mind that with MARVIN there was an huge amount of computing power on-board the helicopter. It would be silly do the critical processing (i.e., flight dynamics) anywhere but on-board. Put it this way -- if the robot lost the radio link to the groundstation it wouldn't crash, it would simply stop receiving way-point data and go into fail-safe mode. If it didn't recover radio contact it would abort the mission and return to base.
Some more info & a description of the video
on
Smart Flying Robots
·
· Score: 4
In order to fly autonomously (by itself), MARVIN uses a LOT of hardware: 3 accelerometers, 3 gyroscopes, 3 compasses (redundancy), 2 ultrasonic range finders, a differential GPS system (accurate to 2 centimeters), a fire detector, and an altimeter. It also has an onboard CPU, communications equipment, power distribution, etc.
The helicopter itself looks like a standard.60-size XCell.
Anyone who has ever flown an RC helicopter knows how difficult it is for a human, much less a computer. The software usually involves use of a Kalmon Filter to fuse the sensors, and neural networks to build fuzzy control rules for the flight surfaces (aileron, rudder, collective, etc) in real-time.
The video, boring for some, shows the helicopter taking off and flying over the disaster area. The heli adjusts its location constantly for better views of targets then flies away and lands. There are good shots of the ground station showing Mission Control, robot-vision, and flight-path mapping. Also some good shots of not-so-successful flights and what can go wrong.
This is the tenth year of the IAR Competition; each year the mission gets more complicated. In 1991, autonomous flying vehicles (no hovercraft) simply needed to pick up a disc at one end of the field and drop it off at a deposit-point on the other end. No one completed the mission that year.
As a side point, let me just say that technology can always be used for evil, but development of robots such as these are most useful in what the industry terms D^3 (D-cubed) environments: Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous. Dull: Flying over thousands of acres of forest painstakingly examining almost each tree for insect damage. Dirty: A disaster area with potential exposure to lethal gases and the like. Dangerous: Photographing a volcano for threat analysis.
I have a copy of the 90 MB mpeg -- I'll try to mirror it on Mojo Nation, but my one-way cable modem might not like it.
You miss the point -- it's not a matter of whether writing code involves creativity or not. It's a matter of whether DeCSS is a form of expression, and clearly it is. Imagine an author with some technical background became fascinated by the copy control mechanism "CSS". Imagine this author studied the mechanism, spent significant time researching it, then for the benefit of his readers wrote an article describing how the mechanism works, its weaknesses and its nature. Would this article be a form of expression? Of course it would. In many ways, expressing these items in code is so much more effective (and efficient) than expressing them in a natural language. The Dr. Touretzky's life work involves studying systems security -- he expresses himself in articles and in code which exercise his understanding of the systems he studies. Personally, I derive a lot more information about CSS from the DeCSS code than I would from an article describing it; to me, DeCSS is CLEARLY expressive. Imagine how limited the professor would be in his work as a computer scientist if he was precluded from expressing his understanding of systems' security in the form of computer code. -Chernyakov
Slashdot Mirror
You are full of sh*t (at best).
This is the first year that the HAMMER facility was used as the disaster area and none of the teams had any prior knowledge of the location of anything on the field.
If you read the rules of the competition you'll find that they address this issue directly.
The reason they allow a ground-station to be used for processing is because they consider it to be much more of an economic hurdle than a technical one. The idea being, if you can build an "affordable" ground station that does real-time processing for the robot, with a little more $$ you can put the processing on-board -- it's not a technology issue.
Bear in mind that with MARVIN there was an huge amount of computing power on-board the helicopter. It would be silly do the critical processing (i.e., flight dynamics) anywhere but on-board. Put it this way -- if the robot lost the radio link to the groundstation it wouldn't crash, it would simply stop receiving way-point data and go into fail-safe mode. If it didn't recover radio contact it would abort the mission and return to base.
In order to fly autonomously (by itself), MARVIN uses a LOT of hardware: 3 accelerometers, 3 gyroscopes, 3 compasses (redundancy), 2 ultrasonic range finders, a differential GPS system (accurate to 2 centimeters), a fire detector, and an altimeter. It also has an onboard CPU, communications equipment, power distribution, etc.
.60-size XCell.
The helicopter itself looks like a standard
Anyone who has ever flown an RC helicopter knows how difficult it is for a human, much less a computer. The software usually involves use of a Kalmon Filter to fuse the sensors, and neural networks to build fuzzy control rules for the flight surfaces (aileron, rudder, collective, etc) in real-time.
The video, boring for some, shows the helicopter taking off and flying over the disaster area. The heli adjusts its location constantly for better views of targets then flies away and lands. There are good shots of the ground station showing Mission Control, robot-vision, and flight-path mapping. Also some good shots of not-so-successful flights and what can go wrong.
This is the tenth year of the IAR Competition; each year the mission gets more complicated. In 1991, autonomous flying vehicles (no hovercraft) simply needed to pick up a disc at one end of the field and drop it off at a deposit-point on the other end. No one completed the mission that year.
As a side point, let me just say that technology can always be used for evil, but development of robots such as these are most useful in what the industry terms D^3 (D-cubed) environments: Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous.
Dull: Flying over thousands of acres of forest painstakingly examining almost each tree for insect damage.
Dirty: A disaster area with potential exposure to lethal gases and the like.
Dangerous: Photographing a volcano for threat analysis.
I have a copy of the 90 MB mpeg -- I'll try to mirror it on Mojo Nation, but my one-way cable modem might not like it.
You miss the point -- it's not a matter of whether writing code involves creativity or not. It's a matter of whether DeCSS is a form of expression, and clearly it is. Imagine an author with some technical background became fascinated by the copy control mechanism "CSS". Imagine this author studied the mechanism, spent significant time researching it, then for the benefit of his readers wrote an article describing how the mechanism works, its weaknesses and its nature. Would this article be a form of expression? Of course it would. In many ways, expressing these items in code is so much more effective (and efficient) than expressing them in a natural language. The Dr. Touretzky's life work involves studying systems security -- he expresses himself in articles and in code which exercise his understanding of the systems he studies. Personally, I derive a lot more information about CSS from the DeCSS code than I would from an article describing it; to me, DeCSS is CLEARLY expressive. Imagine how limited the professor would be in his work as a computer scientist if he was precluded from expressing his understanding of systems' security in the form of computer code. -Chernyakov