RoboCup Rescue 2009 photos

Amir, one of the participants in this year's RoboCup Rescue competition was kind enough to let me know of a large collection of photos from the competition that he would like to share with all of us. For context, the rescue competition is designed to stimulate research in building autonomous or semi-autonomous mobile robots that can assist in rescue operations in disaster zones, e.g., finding survivors in a collapsed building after a major earthquake. The competition has been taking place annually for more than a decade and I can tell you that the rescue robots are becoming more advanced every year. I am very optimistic that in another 10 years such robots will become a rescuer's best friend helping save many lives.

With Amir's permission I have included a couple of the photos at the bottom of this post, but if you want to see the entire collection of more than 100 high resolution photos, go here.

Thank you Amir and I hope your team was successful at the competition.

Wiimote control of a 15-tonne machine

If there is anything Australians know how to do well, it is mining. Transmin engineers had some fun building a steel monster controlled using a Wiimote. It is not something that you will be able to buy for home use (not that you would ever want one of these machines for home use) but it is a fun little project attached to a very serious project of building a massive piece of equipment for mining. Watch the video and share in the fun.

Thanks Adrian for the heads up.

Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC 2010)

It seems like yesterday when CMU won the DARPA Urban Challenge and Stanford the DARPA Grand Challenge. And yet, it was nearly 1.5 years ago when the most recent of the two concluded. A similar challenge event also took place in the UK and Google still has an ongoing Lunar X Prize. The Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC 2010) cosponsored by the Defence Science & Technology Organisation (DSTO) in Australia and the Research Development & Engineering Command (RDECOM) in USA is a new event that was announced at the begining of this month.

MAGIC is different than the other challenges because it no longer focuses on the development of a single intelligent vehicle but an entire team of cooperating intelligent vehicles. The goal of this multi-agent team will be to perform "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission in a dynamic urban environment."

Creating a team of cooperating agents is a much more difficult task than creating a single agent; these agents have to be able to share information and workout cooperative plans that take advantage of all information available to all agents which may be difficult to communicate in certain circumstances.

On the other hand, it can be far more efficient to use multiple vehicles to complete a particular task. If the task can be broken down into smaller tasks that different vehicles can complete and then merge the solutions, e.g., cooperative mapping of a large space can be achieved twice as fast by two vehicles compared to just one.

MAGIC participants will have to complete the following tasks:

(i) Accurately and completely explore and map the challenge area; (ii) correctly locate, classify and recognise all simulated threats; and (iii) complete all phases within 3.5 hours.

There are some prize money for the winners and a small amount of funding for select participants. More specifically, 5 teams will receive funding of $100,000 each. The top 3 teams will receive $750,000, $250,000, and $100,000 respectively. The final event is scheduled to take place during the week of November 8, 2010, somewhere in South Australia.

I'm curious to see what kind of multi-vehicle teams robotics researchers design to tackle this challenge.

How does the Willow Garage Personal Robot work? Watch the video to find out.

A bit less than a month ago, Willow Garage demonstrated their Personal Robot 2 achieving the second milestone on their roadmap to building an open source, dexterous, mobile robot. They successfully demonstrated the robot navigating an office-like environment, opening and going through doors, and finding outlets to recharge its batteries. You can watch the video of the demonstration in our previous post here.

A few days ago, the Willow Garage engineers posted a new video explaining some details about how their robot actually works. In the video below, Sachin Chitta and Melonee Wise explain how the robot uses occupancy grid maps to navigate dynamic environments, uses vision and laser information to detect door handles and power outlets, and, finally, plan its actions to satisfy its goals.

Watching the video, I have to admit that it must take some serious effort to calibrate all these sensors. If the sensors are not calibrated and the relative poses among them are not known, it will be very difficult to fuse the data from them into a single, accurate estimate of the world's state. It would then be very difficult for the robot to act correctly in the presence of noisy sensors and actuators. In other words, I think achieving this milestone is not a trivial task and the Willow Garage team is certainly doing a great job.

The video explanation of how PR2 achieved Milestone 2 follows.

Flapping-wing Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) from AeroVironment

According to a recent press release, DARPA has agreed to continue financing a research program for creating a small flapping-wing flying robot. AeroVironment are the happy recipients of 2.1 million dollars to continue NAV's development after achieving several breakthroughs during the now completed phase I of the project; phase I started in 2007 and lasted for 2 years while phase II is expected to continue until the summer of 2010. Specifically and as you can see from the below video, AeroVironment engineers have successfully built a small flapping-wing robot capable of hovering and flying in all directions under remote control.

The company plans to develop a robot that weighs no more than 10 grams and can be controlled from up to 1 mile away with a top speed of 10 meters per second. Obviously, there are numerous military applications for such robots including surveillance, reconnaissance, and even delivery of deadly payload with high precision.

For another nice high speed video of a flapping wing micro-robot, check out our previous post on the Butterfly Ornithopter.

Cute robot makes coffee

HINA, one of the cutest robots to have ever been created is shown in the carefully edited video below making a cup of coffee for her owner, or better yet, her friend. Although the robot does do all the work as shown, it definitely did not do any of it under its own will or on a single try. Just think of the video like a well choreographed kung-fu fight in a movie. Enjoy!

More information about the robot here (website in foreign language which I am guessing is Japanese.)

Netflix prize claimed by international research team

In the span of 3 years, some 40,000 teams from around the world took up Netflix's challenge of improving movie recommendations by 10% over the company's Cinematch engine. And just a day ago, one of these teams has claimed the top prize and the $1,000,000 that go with it. This team consists of the 2007 and 2008 progress prize winning team BellKor from the USA, Austria's Big Chaos team, and Canada's Pragmatic Theory team. Until recently, the teams were competing against each other unable to reach the 10% improvement threshold but they put an end to the competition when they joined forces.

Other teams now have 30 days to submit their solutions and outdo the top team for a chance to claim the top prize for themselves; keep an eye on the official leaderboard here. Can others do it? Well, you never know so it will be an interesting 30 days.

I have to admit that a couple of years ago I really didn't think that this day would come. I was certain that the 10% improvement had been selected by Netflix to prevent people from ever claiming the million dollar prize. I guess, I was wrong after all.

That said, I am currently reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' best seller Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and I think the Netflix competition would make for a great story for this book. It is yet another example of how computers and the Internet allow thousands of people across the globe to collaborate effectively and efficiently to solve problems at a fraction of the cost of a single corporation doing the work in house. I don't know how much money in Research and Development Netflix will save from this competition but I suspect they stand to make a lot of money from the 10% improvement in recommendation accuracy. They will certainly make back the prize money in no time (if they haven't already considering that improvements over 7% have been achieved by many teams over the course of the last 2 years.)

Kudos to the teams for their achievement and kudos to Netflix for taking a chance most corporations would never dare take.