NanoSapiens » Singularity

Flying Robotic Swarm of Nano Quadrotors Gets Millions of Views, New Company

Aaron Saenz — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:14:29 +0000

These acrobatic robots can launch themselves through rings, duck and weave around obstacles, and even fly through your bedroom window. Hell, they can construct your bedroom window. Flying quadrotors first developed at UPenn’s GRASP Lab by Daniel Mellinger have reached the big time. Their latest video, released last week on YouTube, has garnered nearly 3 million views! What’s the big draw? Mellinger and his colleagues Prof. Vijay Kumar and Alex Kushleyev have created a swarm of 20 “nano quadrotors” – miniature versions of the stunt bots that can fly in complex 3D formations. The coordinated acrobatics of these quadrotors is truly amazing and exciting to behold (don’t miss the video below). Not only have the quadrotor team out done themselves with this latest demonstration, they’ve apparently formed a new company, KMel Robotics around the devices. Could swarming flying bots be coming soon to a store near you?

Mellinger has been developing various versions of the quadrotor system at UPenn for several years. In previous demonstrations he and Vijay Kumar have shown larger incarnations of the quadrotors buzzing around at high speeds, revving up their engines to “leap” through obstacles, and dashing about like mad hornets. The swarm showcased in the video above adds the element of coordinated movement across a large number of the robots, up to 20, and in complex three dimensional formations. While the scale of these movements is really impressive (3 million views doesn’t lie) it should be noted that the swarm relies upon external sensors for tracking position and movement. These robots aren’t quite smart or aware enough to fly so smoothly entirely on their own. Vicon cameras (the boxes seen along the walls in the video) provide a central control computer with necessary data to help the robots keep from smacking into one another. Simpler instances of coordination were seen in earlier demonstrations when quadrotors worked together to build basic structures out of prefabricated beams. In that light this nano swarm should be seen as a natural progression of the technology rather than a quantum leap.

On a related note, previous demonstrations from Mellinger also revealed that the larger quadrotors were purchased form Ascending Technologies, not produced in-house at UPenn. While the latest video doesn’t address this issue, the nano quadrotors bear a remarkable resemblance to AscTec’s Hummingbird ResearchPilot drone. Undoubtedly Mellinger and his colleagues augmented the devices to work with their tracking and coordinating system, but the robots themselves may not be proprietary to the team.

Which raises some interesting questions about what the new startup, KMel Robotics, will focus on. The KMel site has almost no information beyond the statement that they are preparing to tell the world more (that’s actually very understandable considering the enormous interest from the press and public the latest video has received). However, I will venture two guesses on the subject. First, while you can go to the AscTec site today and rent one of their quadrotors for aerial photography or acquire one for research, the capabilities developed by KMel are clearly above and beyond what the robot producer provides. That means KMel is likely going to focus on the networking/tracking/coordination side of swarm robotics, and that the quadrotors themselves may not be their actual product – just a test platform. Can you imagine similar feats of piloting performed with full scale military drones or surveillance UAVs? Definitely something worth forming a company around.

My second guess? Daniel Mellinger’s online handle is “The Dmel”, which probably means that the ‘K’ in KMel Robotics is for Professor Vijay Kumar. Singularity Hub is glad to see that partnership continue, likewise with their impressive work on flying drones. Kudos to KMel for pushing the envelope; showing the world that modern robots have evolved beyond their awkward origins and can now move with the beauty of a perfectly synchronized ballet.

[image and video credits: KMel Robotics]

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Computer Algorithm Used To Make Movie For Sundance Film Festival

Peter Murray — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:29:47 +0000

The Pandora of movies. Films by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation are clips pieced together by a computer algorithm.

Indie movie makers can be a strange bunch, pushing the envelope of their craft and often losing us along the way. In any case, if you’re going to produce something unintelligible anyway, why not let a computer do it? Eve Sussmam and the Rufus Corporation did just that. She and lead actor Jeff Wood traveled to the Kazakhstan border of the Caspian Sea for two years of filming. But instead of a movie with a beginning, middle and end, they shot 3,000 individual and unrelated clips. To the clips they added 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music, mixed it all together and put it in a computer. A program on her Mac G5 tower, known at Rufus as the “serendipity machine,” then splices the bits together to create a final product.

As you might imagine, the resultant film doesn’t always make sense. But that’s part of the fun! As the Rufus Corporation writes on their website, “The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes.”

It’s a clever experiment even if some viewers end up wanting to gouge their eyes out after a sitting. And there is some method to their madness. The film, titled “whiteonwhite:algorithnoir,” is centered on a geophysicist named Holz (played by Wood) who’s stuck in a gloomy, 1970’s-looking city operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Distinct scenes such as wire tapped conversations or a job interview for Mr. Holz are (hopefully) woven together by distinct voiceovers and dialogues. When the scenes and audio are entered into the computer they’re tagged with keywords. The program then pieces them together in a way similar to Pandora’s stringing together of like music. If a clip is tagged “white,” the computer will randomly select from tens of other clips also having the “white” tag. The final product is intended to be a kind of “dystopian futuropolis.” What that means, however, changes with each viewing as no two runs are the same.

Watching the following trailer, I actually got a sense…um, I think…of a story.

Rufus Corporation says the movie was “inspired by Suprematist quests for transcendence, pure space and artistic higher ground.” I have no idea what that means but I hope they’ve achieved it. Beautiful things can happen when computers create art. And it’s only a matter of time before people attempt the same sort of thing with novel writing. Just watching the trailer, it’s hard to tell if the movie’s any good or not. I missed the showings at the Sundance Film Festival, but even so, they probably didn’t resemble the trailer anyway. And that’s okay, because that’s the whole point.

[image credits: Rufus Corporation and PRI via YouTube]
[video credit: PRI via YouTube]
image 1: whiteonwhite
image 2: Rufus
video: whiteonwhite

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Dropping the F-BOMB, A Disposable Spy Computer Funded by DARPA

Peter Murray — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:25:01 +0000

Witha PogoPlug NAS box, a few antennae, flash memory and some batteries, and you've got a cheap, disposable F-BOMB with which to collect data on adversaries.

Attach a camera to a drone, fly the drone around the back of the house, locate the bad guys. Robotic UAVs are being used for surveillance by everyone from the military to local law enforcement to emergency personnel. But if you think about it, drones are kind of big and really noisy, not the ideal tool for spying on someone. Their data gathering capabilities are limited too and they’re really expensive. What about a computer, small and durable enough for you to toss over a fence or inconspicuously attach to a car? Equipped with Wi-Fi cracking software or GPS, it could infiltrate someone’s computer or track someone’s location without them knowing.

Allow me to drop the F-BOMB. The Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors, that is. Invented by Brandon O’Connor as an alternative to high-tech and costly spy devices, the F-BOMB is made so cheaply with off-the-shelf parts that you’ll feel perfectly okay with losing one or two. Very convenient when it’s sitting in the backyard of a drug lord hideout.

Before building the F-BOMB, O’Connor challenged himself with several constraints. He wanted multiple wireless radios, USB capability for expansion (add GPS for example), battery life that lasted hours to days, a size small enough that it won’t be found by the “bad guys with guns,” as he calls them, and do all this without spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars.

The key addition was the PogoPlug. The PogoPlug is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box, a data storage device through which people can share information over the Internet. It runs on Linux which makes it pretty user-friendly, according to O’Connor. Normally the boxes cost about $150, which would have made the F-BOMB too expensive for O’Connor’s purposes, but the company is having a hard time selling the devices. PogoPlug’s misfortune becomes O’Connor’s advantage as he can now purchase them for just $25 on Amazon.com. And that’s the most expensive bit of hardware. Add the antennae, eight gigabytes worth of flash memory and a plastic casting that’s 3D-printed and you’ve got a little spying computer you can build for under $49. Four D batteries will provide power for 30-plus hours.

Aside from being cheap and reproducible, building a monitoring device with commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, components from Amazon or craigslist means when the bad guys find it in their backyard they won’t be able to trace it to you. Were the F-BOMB to require any kind of made-to-order, a determined person could find the manufacture, start asking questions.

O’Connor talked about the F-BOMB (“because one time I worked for DARPA and they love terrible acronyms”) at ShmooCon 2012. As you’ll see in the video, he’s nothing if not enthusiastic.

The F-BOMB won an award from DARPA’s Cyber Fast Track program. The title of the project is “Reticle: Leaderless Command and Control,” which kind of makes me wonder what else he’s developing. As Forbes reports, O’Connor was tight-lipped about what DARPA might do with the technology.

But we can venture a few guesses. The platform can be attached to a quadcopter and dropped onto a roof. It can be hidden inside a carbon monoxide casing, or any other imaginative cover container such as a box of stale Triscuits that you’re pretty sure no one’s going to touch. As I mentioned before, Wifi-cracking software will allow you to eavesdrop on a person’s computer, and you can track someone with a GPS module. And if you’re more in the business of science than spying, you can add temperature or humidity sensors to collect data for meteorological research.

O’Connor has a security and software consultancy called Malice Afterthought. He learned about such things teaching at cybersecurity schools for the military as well as working in the security devisions of VeriSign and Sun Microsystems. The website describes him as “dreamer and mad scientist capable of making even the most challenging tasks into reality.” Being that he kind of runs the consultancy himself, he probably wrote the description himself, which is kind of weird. Anyway, he certainly has created a little security monster in the F-BOMB. Effin’ cool.

[image credits: Forbes and Wired]
[video credit: USSJoin via YouTube]
image 1: F-BOMB
image 2: F-BOMB
video: F-BOMB

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A Look At BMW’s Semi-Autonomous Driving Car

Peter Murray — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:29:25 +0000

The upright, folded hands is a sign of confidence. So is driving a BMW. With ConnectedDrive Connect, BMW owners can do both!

While robotic cars have a ways to go yet before rolling (themselves) out onto showroom floors, BMW is incorporating driver assistance features into its cars that drivers can use – and they can sell – sooner rather than later. Their semi-autonomous driving system, ConnectedDrive Connect, was announced last year. The car maker has finished its closed track test runs and has released a video of the car out on the Autobahn for some good old fashioned hands off driving fun.

ConnectedDrive Connect includes four types of sensors – radar, camera, laser scanners and ultrasound distance sensors – that allow it to track cars in front of it up to a distance of 50 meters. It also detects cars in adjacent lanes. A driving simulator produces driving strategies on the go. For example, the car slows if it’s moving to fast into a turn, and it taps the brakes to maintain control going downhill. Like any cruise control the driver sets the speed and the maintains a safe distance behind a car in front of it. The system can be enabled between speeds of 30 and 180 km/h (81 mph). I’d be a little worried if that truck in the next lane splashes some mud on the car that it doesn’t go pell mell into the car in front of me. The sensors are “largely resistant to dirt build-up” according to BMW, but I’d wipe down regularly just to be safe. BMW owners probably don’t need to be reminded of that anyway.

But it’s really no fun to just simply maintain a safe distance, not with a Beamer. If the car in front of you is going too slow, ConnectedDrive Connect senses your impatience, changes lanes, and leaves the slowpoke in the dust.

To date the BMW 5 Series has logged 5,000 kilometers in “highly-automated” mode on freeways. When can we expect to see BMW drivers begin using both hands to apply their makeup? The company says it’s a few years yet before CDC goes into production. One of the things they’ll have to improve is the GPS tracking. Right now they only take the car out on roads that they’ve mapped to within centimeter accuracy.

It is becoming increasingly likely that your next car will have some kind of driver assistance. Last year carmakers spent over $10 billion in advanced driver assistance systems. By 2016 that number could increase to $130 billion, according to an ABI Research projection. The rapid spread will be due largely to their incorporation into more mainstream cars rather than being an option for luxury cars. As the technology is improved production costs are decreasing, making it increasingly feasible to add driver assistance to less expensive cars. Volkswagon’s Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) is similar to ConnectDrive Connect in that it maintains a safe distance behind cars and keeps the car from veering out of the lane. And both Volkswagon and BMW get the job done without the ungainly periscope-looking sensor on Google’s Prius.

[image credits: World Car Fans]
[video credits: motorsixty via YouTube]
image: ConnectDrive Connect
video: ConnectDrive Connect

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Take A Look At Dropcam’s New High-Definition Surveillance Camera

Peter Murray — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:48:49 +0000

Dropcam adds HD, infrared and two-way audio to their new Dropcam HD.

The dropcam surveillance camera was already about as user-friendly as could be, now it’s added high-definition video and two-way audio to its arsenal of awesomeness. The previous model, Dropcam Echo rolled out in 2010, was presented as an affordable ($279, $199 direct) home surveillance system. Like the Echo Dropcam’s new camera, Dropcam HD, connects through Wi-Fi and works through Dropcam apps for iPhone and Android so you can stream video to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phone, and even a Kindle Fire tablet. The apps are free, but if you want to record the footage Dropcam offers a cloud-based DVR service. The $9.99/month plan allows up to 7 days of continuous recording with time-stamped motion and audio alerts. Because the data is recorded on Dropcam’s servers you don’t have to use valuable hard drive space to store video, which comes in handy given that the new camera has a 720p HD resolution, 16 times the resolution of Dropcam Echo. Storing videos in the cloud also allows users to log into the Dropcam network and review their videos from anywhere. You can keep the footage you want just by specifying date and start time and the length of time you want to save. New video recordings automatically erase old ones from offsite storage so you don’t have to do it manually. Email notifications are sent when the camera detects motion within its field so you don’t have to sift through hours of footage like a convenience store video rewind. And because Dropcam HD is powered by AC, you can potentially record your back patio 24/7.

Another feature added to Dropcam HD are twelve infrared LEDs that give it night vision for full 24-hour surveillance. Speakers have been added to so, together with the camera’s microphone, you can hear what’s going on and talk back. Who needs an iPad2 to Skype from anywhere?

Dropcam has also miniaturized the camera. It’s new circular plastic chassis fits into a wall bracket that gives it more pivot than the Echo had. And the small camera can be removed from the bracket and placed in a concealed location to make sure the babysitter isn’t pocketing the family silver.

In the following video CNET talks with Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy at CES 2012 about Dropcam HD.

Cameras such as dropcam are the perfect hardware to accompany video 2.0. Sites like Hulu and On Demand cable features mean you watch what you want, when you want. And YouTube revolutionized personal video. People can now instantly self-publish and share their videos, opening up an online dialogue in the form of comments, sharing and editing. Gone are the days of static content – Internet videos are works in progress. With its Wi-Fi connectivity and ease of use, Dropcam HD is the perfect “appware” to make creating videos as easy as sharing them.

[image credits: anandtech]
[video credits: CNET channel via YouTube]
images: dropcam hd
video: dropcam hd

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