Day: October 11, 2013

Wow! This is just too cool! Maybe we will end up with a real, live superhero!

US Army plans ‘Iron Man’ armor for soldiers

BBC News – The US Army is working to develop ‘revolutionary’ smart armor that would give its troops ‘superhuman strength’.

It is calling on the technology industry, government labs and academia to help build the Iron Man-style suit.

Other exoskeletons that allow soldiers to carry large loads much further have already been tested by the army.

The Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (Talos) would have such a frame but would also have layers of smart materials fitted with sensors.

The suit would also need to have wide-area networking and a wearable computer similar to Google Glass, the US Army said.

Increase strength

It should be made of smart material fitted with sensors to monitor body temperature, heart rate and hydration levels.

The exoskeleton, which could be attached to arms and legs, would be likely to use hydraulics to greatly increase strength.

‘The requirement is a comprehensive family of systems in a combat armor suit where we bring together an exoskeleton with innovative armor, displays for power monitoring, health monitoring, and integrating a weapon into that,’ said Lt Col Karl Borjes, a science adviser at the US Army’s research, development and engineering command.

‘It’s advanced armor. It’s communications, antennas. It’s cognitive performance. It’s sensors, miniature-type circuits. That’s all going to fit in here, too,’ he added.

Magnetic field

According to US Army Sgt Maj Chris Faris, ‘no one industry can build it’.

Instead the army is calling on research and development organisations, private industry as well as government labs and academia to support the project.

The US Army said it was likely that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be involved in the design.

An MIT team is currently developing liquid body armor – made from fluids that transform into a solid when a magnetic field or electrical current is applied.

Large robot

In an interview with US news site NPR, MIT professor Gareth McKinley compared the futuristic armor to that seen in Hollywood films.

‘It sounds exactly like Iron Man,’ he said.

‘The other kind of things that you see in the movies… would be the kind of external suit that Sigourney Weaver wears in Aliens, where it’s a large robot that amplifies the motions and lifting capability of a human.’

The aim is the get the Talos armor out in the field within three years.

An Open Source Robotic Operating System. How cool is that?!

Open-source Robot Operating System

Wired – The coding world is getting weirder. You’d think that a guy who aspires to be the artisan maestro of world robotic operating systems would have some kind of real job and an official title, but not only does he not have one, he doesn’t much seem to need one.

‘The masterstroke in Quigley’s design is not strictly technical but social.’ Actually, it’s strictly technically social, because if you strip the support hardware and social-code out of the ROS scene and try to write it all down with a paper and pencil, there’s nothing there; it’d be like Facebook done as a college yearbook.

Three decades ago, the availability of many versions of DOS helped spark the boom in personal computers. Today, Robot Operating System, or ROS, is poised to do the same for robots. Morgan Quigley programmed the first iteration of what grew into ROS as a graduate student in 2006, and today his open-source code is redefining the practical limits of robotics. Since version 1.0 was released in 2010, ROS has become the de facto standard in robotics software.

‘To visit Quigley’s office at the Open Source Robotics Foundation in Mountain View, California, the organization he cofounded last summer to steward ROS, is to step into a future of robotics where hardware is cheap, and it’s quick and easy to snap together preëxisting pieces to create new machines. Quigley’s workspace is littered with dozens of mechanical fingers—modules that form a robotic hand. “The hands themselves can talk ROS,’ Quigley says. His T-shirt is emblazoned with a programming joke: shirtcount++;.

(((Tangentially — ever since I started blogging about robots on the site here, you should see how my advertising pop-ups have changed. I don’t know which surveillance-marketer is on my case, but they’ve got me staked-out demographically as some kind of Quigley-in-waiting; I’m getting pitches for Arduinos, Leap Motions, even hardware I’ve never heard of, and I thought I’d heard of plenty.)))

Unlike more conventional robotic technology, Quigley’s four-fingered hand is not controlled by a central processor. Its fingers and palm distribute computing chores among 14 low-cost, low-power processors dedicated to controlling each joint directly. That greatly simplifies the internal communication and coördination (((<— TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has automatic umlauts in their website code, that’s pretty impressive))) required to execute a task such as picking up a pencil. Both the software and electronics are open source. Any robot builder can take Quigley’s design and use or improve upon it.

Ultimately, Quigley hopes, these innovations will lead to more agile, more capable robots that can perform a variety of jobs and don’t cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And no longer will engineers have to start from scratch to design the functions that go into a robot—they’ll have an open-source base of code and hardware. Already, engineers using ROS are working on robots that do everything from folding laundry to repetitive operations in advanced manufacturing. ‘It will allow applications we couldn’t dream of before,’ Quigley says….”