Adobe interactive video editing

Check out the promotional video below showcasing some of the R&D at Adobe on editing and manipulating video. Faster computers and advanced computer vision algorithms are making it possible to process video in ways never thought possible before.

Mars Science Laboratory: Something to look forward to in 2009 and 2010

For the last few years, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers named Spirit and Opportunity and the Phoenix lander have been the three robotic explorers searching for signs of extraterrestrial life and performing a myriad of science experiments on Mars. Next year, NASA will be sending a new generation rover to continue the exciting work that begun with the successful Mars Pathfinder mission in 1996. The Mars Science Laboratory rover is the new NASA robotic planetary explorer currently under construction and scheduled to leave Earth for the long journey to the Red planet in the fall of 2009. This new rover is going to be much larger than the previous two. It will be the size of a small compact car. NASA's planetary exploration rovers have progressively increased in size since the very successful Sojourner rover.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover is a wonderful robot, equipped with lots of intelligent software for fault diagnosis, path planning, navigation, communications, and control of its many scientific instruments. Its 2-year mission is to answer questions about the existence of life on Mars as well as help characterize the planet's climate and geology and essentially help us prepare for a future manned mission there.

The rover's mobility is much improved over its predecessors partly due to its size and the 60 centimeter clearance its body has from the ground but also because of updated motion planning and navigation software. What this means is that during its 2-year mission, the rover will be able to explore a much larger area when compared to the other rovers.

The entire Mars Science Laboratory mission is an amazing feat of engineering starting form the construction of the plutonium-powered rover to the delivery and landing system. The video below shows a 3D animation of the rover's landing mechanism and function once safely on the planet's surface. It will have a laser and it will use it to shoot at rocks!

NVIDIA Tesla personal supercomputer

How would you like to have your own supercomputer for less than 10,000 dollars? It is your dream, you say? Well, if so then NVIDIA has just made your dreams come true having announced the Tesla personal supercomputer.

The Tesla is a desktop computer designed for those in need of a number crunching machine. It comes with an AMD Quad-core Phenom or Opteron or Intel Core2 Duo microprocessor and 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 multi-core add-on cards. The C1060 have 240 parallel processing cores and up to 4GB of memory each which means that the desktop configuration that comes with 4 of them packs a total of 960 cores and 16GB of dedicated memory. NVIDIA claims that this configuration provides customers with supercomputer performance under the desk. The official numbers are that the machine with 4 C1060 boards can do 3.732 Teraflops or roughly perform 250 times faster than your average desktop workstation.

The Tesla is programmable using the company's CUDA programming architecture which basically means that you can program it in C. This is no machine for playing games but for serious scientific computing; I know, scientists get to have all the fun, don't they? Imagine how much cheaper this technology is going to be in a few years. Personally, I can't wait to own one of these for a couple of thousand dollars. In the meantime, I may have to beg my employer to buy me one. :)

Check out the following video announcing the Tesla personal supercomputer at SC08.

Evolution Robotics raises money, wins award

Evolution Robotics Inc which has been out of the radar recently has had a very interesting last 10 days.

Last week, the company was able to raise 13.88 million dollars in funding from a number of venture capital firms. Evolution has been around since 2002 as a startup company with seed funding from Idealab and it is one of the few post dot-com bubble Idealab companies that, in my opinion, has some major chances for success considering the strength of their visual object recognition technology ViPR and robot control architecture ERSP (even though the recent rise of Microsoft's Robotics Studio is probably hurting the popularity of their product.) When the Sony AIBO was still under development, Evolution was providing the robot's visual recognition modules which allowed AIBO to recognize a number of different command cards. It will be interesting to see what Evolution will do with the extra cash in hand and what new technologies and robotics applications they might develop over the next few years. The consumer robotics market is expected to continue growing at fast pace over the next few years. All that is missing at the moment is the killer application that will encourage most people to buy robots (kind off like the iPhone for robotics.)

Today, Evolution also became the first recipient of the the first annual Robotics Development Innovator Award for the NorthStar 2.0 technology. NorthStar use artificial landmarks to help robots localize and navigate in an indoor environment. A partnership between Evolution and WowWee that was established last year came to fruition in the Rovio robot which uses NorthStar for navigation. Rovio has received lots of positive reviews ( unfortunately, I have not had one to test myself) since its release.

Finally, Evolution and WowWee also released a new web site with video tutorials for Rovio owners. Eventually, the same web site might also become a good resource for hackers and robot hobbyists. Check it out at NorthStarTutorials.com.

That's My Face: Your face in 3D

If you want to have some fun with a freely available piece of software for 3D face modeling, then click on to ThatsMyFace.com for some fun. The website and face modeling tool is the brainchild of a former PhD student from the University of Cambridge. His company Featuro offers you the pleasure of uploading a couple of photos of yourself to receive, in return, a 3D face model plus some other fun and very scientific information such as your attractiveness rating; the software also allows you to see what you would look like when older or if you were of the opposite gender. Moreover, when you are all happy with your 3D model, you can order a FaceStatue to display on your desk or give away as a gift. Not a bad idea for monetizing this technology.

The modeling algorithm is not fully automatic as it requires some help from the user but you can't have everything for free. The video below explains what this tool can do for you. Go and have some fun with your face.

Jaguar supercomputer for scientific research

The members of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) have something to be truly proud of. I am talking about the Jaguar supercomputer which after a number of upgrades is now the fastest supercomputer available for scientific number crunching. Jaguar is a combination of Cray XT4 and XT5 parts and after a recent upgrade boasts a total of 181,000 processing cores.

The XT system has grown in strength through a series of advances since being installed as a 25-teraflop XT3 in 2005. By early 2008 Jaguar was a 263-teraflop Cray XT4 able to solve some of the most challenging problems that could not be solved otherwise. In 2008 Jaguar was expanded with the addition of a 1.4-petaflop Cray XT5. The resulting system has over 181,000 processing cores connected internally with Cray's Seastar2+ network. The XT4 and XT5 parts of Jaguar are combined into a single system using an InfiniBand network that links each piece to the Spider file system.

The machine is built using 45,376 quad-core AMD Opteron CPUs and has a total of 362 Terabytes of memory. I won't even mention the amount of electrical power necessary to run this machine. In case you are wondering what operating system each of the nodes runs, you should know that it is a modified version of SuSE Linux; unsurprisingly, it had to be some flavor of UNIX.

Jaguar is available to universities, industry, government, and non-profit organizations all of which compete under a peer-reviewed process for access to the machine.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Quadro 5800 FX GPU that has 250 CUDA processing units. I referred to it as a massively parallel machine but compared to the Jaguar I have to admit that it is much like comparing a Ford Escort to a Lamborghini sports car.

NVIDIA announces the Quadro FX 5800 GPU

A couple of days ago, NVIDIA announced the Quadro FX 5800 GPU which comes equipped with a massive 4GB of RAM and 240 CUDA processors. In other words, if you have some serious number crunching to do (and most scientists are in such a predicament) and about $3500 to spend, then you are one lucky person.

According to the Press Release,

The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card offers unprecedented performance and scalability to rapidly visualize and interpret massive datasets that until now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board. Offering up to 240 CUDA(TM) programmable parallel cores and the industries first 4GB of graphics memory, the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is ideally suited for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific visualization.

In the past, I have more than once expressed my fondness for this type of hardware and its usefulness in artificial intelligence and robotics applications. Other than NVIDIA, ATI also make programmable general purpose GPU hardware and, of course, Intel are also developing multi-core CPUs with more than a handful of cores. Finally, don't forget about the MIT startup Tilera Corporation and their Tile64 processor.

The next couple of years are going to be very exciting with scientists and engineers trying to solve larger and larger problems using this and the next generation of massively parallel processing systems. I can't wait!

Caterpillar 797B robotic haul truck

Mining equipment giant Caterpillar want to automate their haul trucks and they recently struck a deal with Carnegie Mellon University's Tony Stentz to make it so. These soon to be robotic trucks are massive vehicles that cost more than $5,000,000 (that's five million dollars) each and are used for surface mining operations all over the world. A single Caterpillar 797B truck can haul over 300-tonnes of material on a single load. A single tire for this truck is worth over $40,000. Just so that you get a good idea of how massive these vehicles truly are, check out the video below showing a haul truck driving over an SUV (the 797B eats the average monster truck for breakfast.)

In case you are wondering why Caterpillar wants to automate these behemoths, there are many reasons. First of all, there is a shortage in skilled workers and the mining industry is hurting because of it. Second, the jobs are undesirable and difficult part because of the harsh weather and part because of the remote locations of many surface mines. People just don't want to work in very hot and dusty environments. Moreover, as you may have noticed from the video above, there are safety reasons why mining companies would prefer to remove people from operations that involve such large vehicles. Fatal accidents in mining happen more often than one expects. Finally, by automating the vehicles, the mining companies can increase their utilization and in effect their profits.

The CMU team is facing a huge challenge for the next few years. Automating a haul truck to operate in an unfriendly environment while minimizing the number of accidents will not be an easy job. But if any have the experience and know-how to create these robotic trucks then Tony Stentz (who is already working on autonomous underground mining) and his CMU field robotics group are Caterpillar's best bet. Expect these vehicles to make heavy usage of GPS receivers and laser sensors for localization and obstacle avoidance.

Honda's robotic legs

Honda have finally realized that developing and selling a complete humanoid robot at affordable prices is going to take longer than they expected when they invested millions of dollars in the development of ASIMO. Now, Honda wants to take advantage of some of the technology developed for ASIMO to build less complete but still massively useful robotic devices.

As a result, a couple of days ago, Honda unveiled a new robotic leg device which functions similarly to an exoskeleton but has a rather different design as you can tell from the photo at the left. The new device will be of great assistance for the elderly and the disabled.

According to an article by the Daily Telegraph,

The 6.5kg device - consisting of a saddle, leg-like frames and shoes - can reduce the load on users' legs while walking or climbing and descending stairs by supporting bodyweight, Honda said.

I should mention that Honda's robotic legs are still in prototype phase; in the meantime, Cyberdyne have already announced that their exoskeleton HAL is now available for renting in Japan. In North America, Sarcos have been developing an exoskeleton for use by the military. Because of these developments, expect exoskeleton technology to advance rapidly over then next few years.

So, without more delay, see below a video of Honda's robotic legs in action along with additional information about the development, testing, and possible release date for the device.

DARPA's top secret humanoid robot

Earlier today I received the following video sent to me by one of my contacts deep inside DARPA. The video shows the top secret military robot that has been in development for at least 10 years; it is a collaborative effort among MIT, CMU, and Stanford universities. The video shows a live trial of the robot (notice the clearly visible machine gun.) Rumor has it that these robots are nearing completion and several will be deployed in IRAQ in early 2009.