Z-Man allows People to be Geckos on Glass

They call it “Z-Man” but only because “Spider Man” had already been taken and put under trademark, said Eugene Choi, Technology Leader for the climbing device developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The literature described Z-Man as designed to “enable the warfighter carrying a full combat load to scale vertical walls.”

Choi said the military already had a lot of gear to help with climbing in the field, but “we didn’t have a very good way to climb those surfaces” that troops would meet in city combat, such as glass, concrete or dry wall.

Z-Man prototypes consisted of hand-held devices that stick to any surface and bear loads of more than 300 pounds. The handhelds have ropes that attach to the feet of the climber and literally allow the climber to walk up the wall.

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A Robopocalypse That can Adapt Like Animals

Robots that can adapt like animals

Authors:

Cully et al

Abstract:

Robots have transformed many industries, most notably manufacturing, and have the power to deliver tremendous benefits to society, such as in search and rescue, disaster response, health care and transportation. They are also invaluable tools for scientific exploration in environments inaccessible to humans, from distant planets to deep oceans. A major obstacle to their widespread adoption in more complex environments outside factories is their fragility. Whereas animals can quickly adapt to injuries, current robots cannot ‘think outside the box’ to find a compensatory behaviour when they are damaged: they are limited to their pre-specified self-sensing abilities, can diagnose only anticipated failure modes, and require a pre-programmed contingency plan for every type of potential damage, an impracticality for complex robots. A promising approach to reducing robot fragility involves having robots learn appropriate behaviours in response to damage , but current techniques are slow even with small, constrained search spaces Here we introduce an intelligent trial-and-error algorithm that allows robots to adapt to damage in less than two minutes in large search spaces without requiring self-diagnosis or pre-specified contingency plans. Before the robot is deployed, it uses a novel technique to create a detailed map of the space of high-performing behaviours. This map represents the robot’s prior knowledge about what behaviours it can perform and their value. When the robot is damaged, it uses this prior knowledge to guide a trial-and-error learning algorithm that conducts intelligent experiments to rapidly discover a behaviour that compensates for the damage. Experiments reveal successful adaptations for a legged robot injured in five different ways, including damaged, broken, and missing legs, and for a robotic arm with joints broken in 14 different ways. This new algorithm will enable more robust, effective, autonomous robots, and may shed light on the principles that animals use to adapt to injury.

MIT's Cheetah Bot Bounds to the Robopocalypse

pop sci write up.

eMotionButterflies: Festo Making the Robopocalypse Buggy, but Beautiful

BionicANTs: Festo Making the Robopocalypse Buggy, but Cooperative and Autonomous

US Navy's Robopocalypse: That's not a SHARK!

The American military does a lot of work in the field of biomimicry, stealing designs from nature for use in new technology. After all, if you’re going to design a robot, where better to draw inspiration than from billions of years of evolution? The latest result of these efforts is the GhostSwimmer: The Navy’s underwater drone designed to look and swim like a real fish, and a liability to spook the bejeezus out of any beach goer who’s familiar with Jaws.

The new gizmo, at five feet long and nearly 100 pounds, is about the size of an albacore tuna but looks more like a shark, at least from a distance. It’s part of an experiment to explore the possibilities of using biomimetic, unmanned, underwater vehicles, and the Navy announced it wrapped up testing of the design last week.

The robot uses its tail for propulsion and control, like a real fish. It can operate in water as shallow as 10 inches or dive down to 300 feet. It can be controlled remotely via a 500-foot tether, or swim independently, periodically returning to the surface to communicate. Complete with dorsal and pectoral fins, the robofish is stealthy too: It looks like a fish and moves like a fish, and, like other underwater vehicles, is difficult to spot even if you know to look for it.

link.

MIT's Pure Electric Cheetah Runs 10 MPH/16 km/h Towards Robopocalypse

The Robopocalypse Grows...Plant-like

link.

The First Synthetic Leaf

The "first man-made biological leaf" could enable humans to colonise space from Dezeen on Vimeo.

hmm.  I wonder how the chloroplasts can be sustained outside the plant cell...

Forget Spiderman! DARPA Made GECKO MAN!

Gaining the high ground in the throes of battle can mean the difference between victory and defeat, but getting to the top can be a challenge. To give United States soldiers the upper hand, DARPA is taking a cue from one of the animal kingdom’s best climbers: the gecko.

With a name befitting a spy film, DARPA’s Z-Man program successfully demonstrated technology that allowed a full-grown man to scale a glass wall with no climbing equipment other than gecko-inspired paddles. The Z-Man program was created with the sole purpose of discovering a bioengineered wall-climbing method that trumped ropes.

link.

hmm.  I wonder if they'd include this on the TALOS project.  ;)

The Robopocalypse Will be Cockroached

Jellyfish Vanguard of the Robopocalypse (micro version)

Up, up in the sky: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a . . . jellyfish? That's what researchers have built -- a small vehicle whose flying motion resembles the movements of those boneless, pulsating, water-dwelling creatures.

The work, which will be presented at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting on November 24 in Pittsburgh, demonstrates a new method of flight that could transport miniaturized future robots for surveillance, search-and-rescue, and monitoring of the atmosphere and traffic.

Many approaches to building small aerial robots try to mimic the flight of insects such as fruit flies. The challenge in that, explained Leif Ristroph of New York University, is that the flapping wing of a fly is inherently unstable. To stay in flight and to maneuver, a fly must constantly monitor its environment to sense every gust of wind or approaching predator, adjusting its flying motion to respond within fractions of a second. To recreate that sort of complex control in a mechanical device – and to squeeze it into a small robotic frame – is extremely difficult, Ristroph said.

After some tinkering, he devised a new way of flapping-wing flight that doesn't need any sort of control or feedback system to be stable, and is akin to the swimming motions of jellyfish. The prototype device, weighing just two grams and spanning eight centimeters in width, flies by flapping four wings that are arranged like petals on a flower. While the up-and-down motion of the wings resembles a pulsating jelly,, the device's ultimate fluttering flight may be more similar to that of a moth. The vehicle can hover, ascend, and fly in a particular direction.

In addition to showing that the flying device is indeed stable, Ristroph and Stephen Childress, also at NYU, found that the size of the machine mainly depends on the weight and power of the motor.

The prototype is limited: it's attached to an external power source and can't steer, either autonomously or via remote control. Although researchers are still far away from building a practical robot, these new results show a proof of principle, forming a blueprint for designing more sophisticated and complex vehicles, Ristroph said.

And, he adds, the simplicity of design bodes well for miniaturizing the vehicles. The longstanding goal for researchers has been to shrink flying robots down to the size of a centimeter, allowing them to squeeze into small spaces and fly around undetected. The simpler the better, he said. "And ours is one of the simplest, in that it just uses flapping wings."

link.