Happy IPv6 Day

Posted on June 9, 2011 by dkohn96

From IEEE Spectrum
June 8, 2011

Happy IPv6 Day
We’ve run out of IPv4 addresses. Time to test drive the new protocol

Interview Podcast found at http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/standards/happy-ipv6-day

Happy “World IPv6 Day.” If that’s not on your calendar as a major holiday, I’ll explain. Today, more than a thousand organizations, including such Internet giants as Google, Akamai, and Facebook are taking the latest version of the Internet’s most important protocol out for a one-day test drive.

And it’s just in the nick of time. It’s been four months since the final batch of IPv4 addresses were handed out to the Regional Internet Registries, which means we could run completely out of IPv4 addresses within a year’s time. IPv6 can handle some 340 undecillion unique addresses. That sounds like a made-up word, but my producer assures me it means there are about 10 to the 29th more addresses than the 4 billion addresses that IPv4 has space for.

The Internet doesn’t have a president or prime minister or czar or any other form of governance; there’s no one to say, okay, this is the day we’re all going to switch from one IP version to another. There’s the Internet Engineering Task Force, a volunteer organization that hammers out the details of the protocols themselves, and there’s the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that was created in 1992 in order to, as its charter says, provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, and policy. Earlier this year the Internet Society decided to devote a day to the new protocol. So what’s this day all about? And what does it mean for us Web surfers, bloggers, e-mailers, and Facebook updaters?

My guest is Leslie Daigle, the chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society. Previously, she served as chair of the Internet Architecture Board and before that, she worked on Internet directory systems with the Internet Engineering Task Force.

This interview was recorded 7 June 2011.
Segment producer: Ariel Bleicher; audio engineer: Francesco Ferorelli

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Hearst Electronic Products – Robot Issue

Posted on June 8, 2011 by dkohn96

Click on the image below to see the magazine on line:

Of special interest, to me at least, was the article Optimizing a mobile robot’s navigation performance

But all the articles listed under “Issue Special” are of interest to roboticists.

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New Sample Return Robot Challenge Detailed

Posted on June 7, 2011 by dkohn96

From The Space Review
via ASEE First Bell (June 7, 2011)

In an article for the Space Review (6/6), Ben Brockert of Armadillo Aerospace wrote about the new NASA-funded Centennial Challenge called the Sample Return Robot Challenge, asking participants to design “a fully autonomous robot…to venture around a course collecting pre-defined samples and bringing them back to a platform.” Teams will only have limited information about the course before the completion. Brockert is concerned that teams “must provide a full printout of their robot code along with a schematic of all electrical components” as this could have a “chilling effect” on competitors. Brockert is also worried that environmental conditions are not specified. To him, “time will tell whether the eventual rule set will drive innovation and a variety of approaches, like the regolith excavation challenge, or set up a problem so difficult no one will win, as in the regolith oxygen and strong tether challenges.”

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Treebot Learns to Autonomously Climb Trees

Posted on June 1, 2011 by dkohn96

From IEEE Specturm
May 18, 2011

This is Treebot. As you might expect, Treebot was designed to do one thing: climb trees. It is by no means the first robot able to do this, but its arboreal predecessors (RiSE and Modsnake and accidentally PackBot are just a few) weren’t autonomous and didn’t have the skills necessary to negotiate the complex network of branches that you tend to find on trees worth climbing.

The design of Treebot is fairly unique: it uses a set of flexible linear actuators connecting two gripping claws to allow it to move around like an inchworm. While the back gripper holds on, the front gripper releases and the body extends forward, allowing the robot to literally feel around for a good place to grip.

Keeping to the inchworm theme, the robot doesn’t use much in the way of fancy sensors. Instead, it’s all tactile. You can tell the robot which direction you’d like it to go and how far, and the robot will grope its way to its destination, adaptively navigating from trunk to branches.

At the moment, Treebot is more or less blind. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it could get where it wants to go much faster if it’s able to tell which branches have the highest potential to allow it to efficiently climb higher up, so researchers are working on ways to help Treebot optimize its climbing path.

TreeBot was designed by Tin Lun Lam and Yangsheng Xu from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and their research was presented at ICRA last week in a paper entitled “Treebot: Autonomous Tree Climbing by Tactile Sensing.”

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Robbot Juggler

Posted on June 1, 2011 by dkohn96

From IEEE Spectrum
May 31, 2011

UPDATE: The Czech roboticists updated their video with labels and a slow motion sequence, making it easier to see how the robot juggles three, and then four, and finally five balls, and also how it drops one ball at the end.

Robots are especially good at juggling. This is not to say that juggling is a particularly easy problem to tackle, because it’s not, but it’s a fun excuse to design a robot to demonstrate precision control and high-speed object tracking. The robot in the video above, for example, was built by three masters students from the Department of Control Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. It uses three linear motors, including one for each arm and a third for a central ball deployment system, along with two pivoting “hands” to catch and toss up to five balls at once. The feedback loop is closed using data from encoders built in the motors, and a high-speed camera helps to fine-tune the trajectories of the balls.

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Very Large Telescope HD Timelapse Footage

Posted on May 29, 2011 by dkohn96

From: PopSci
[with thanks to SvperNova09 of MidsouthMakers for pointing it out on IRC]

There’s very little we can write to preface the imagery below, so we’ll just set the scene and get out of the way. The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.

What makes this time lapse particularly amazing–because we’ve all seen plenty of time lapse videos of the night sky–is the four telescopes in the foreground. Watching these instruments work against a black background would be endlessly fascinating on its own. Unfortunately you won’t be able to pay them too much attention. Because damn, what a sky.

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Let’s Make Robots

Posted on May 27, 2011 by dkohn96

Looking for a wonderful place to see, learn and talk about robots? Try http://letsmakerobots.com/

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S.P.A.R.K.

Posted on May 27, 2011 by dkohn96

Looking for educational resources about robotics? Try S.P.A.R.K. (Starter Programs for the Advancement of Robotics Knowledge) at http://spark.irobot.com/. This website, sponsored by iRobot, the makers of the Roomba, has educational resources, links and videos and much more. Check it out!

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A Robotic Companion for Your Phone

Posted on May 27, 2011 by dkohn96

from: IEEE Spectrum May 23, 2011

The start-up Orbotix has created a Bluetooth-controlled robotic ball

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Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo Makes Its First ‘Feathering’ Flight

Posted on May 25, 2011 by dkohn96

From: PopSci May 5, 2011

Virgin Galactic just keeps on ticking off the milestones on its way to becoming the first commercial company to take tourists on high-altitude flights to suborbital space and return them safely through the atmosphere to Earth. In the video below, we actually get to see Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo (aka VSS Enterprise) making its first “feathered” flight.

“Feathering,” as it is known, is probably the biggest innovation integrated into SpaceShipTwo’s design. In the feathered position, the entire tail section of the plane rotates upward about 65 degrees, creating a different aerodynamic shape that is highly stable yet creates tremendous drag to slow the aircraft down during re-entry. Though that drag is pretty significant, the light weight of the aircraft keeps the skin temperature from rising too high, circumventing the need for heat shields and other thermal protection.

Moreover, when feathered correctly the aircraft is so stable that the pilot can more or less take his hands off the sticks and let the aircraft work its way through the atmosphere naturally, based purely on its aerodynamic shape. That’s a huge safety feature, as the pilot doesn’t have to maintain a specific degree of entry or rely on a sophisticated fly-by-wire computer.

The test shown below took place May 4 and did not actually include a trip to space. But this first feathering test, which began when SpaceShipTwo was dropped from the carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo at 51,500 feet, proves that Burt Rutan’s feathering design actually works as well in the air as it did on paper. Where you see the aircraft feather, keep in mind that it is basically falling straight down at 15,500 feet per minute, a rate that is slowed significantly by the aerodynamic drag generated by the feathering configuration.

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