Real Robots for the Real World(s)

Real Robots for the Real World(s)

Dateline: 03/23/99

Earlier this year, we have published a two-part article about home robotics industry. Although these products introduced some very impressive features, the biggest progress has to be made somewhere else. Several research teams are making great efforts to develop robots that can successfully cope with environments that could not be fully anticipated nor programmed into the robot in advance.

An average house environment is quite a challenge for the today's mobile machines. Now add ambient temperature ranges of -125C to +125C (minimally), vacuum and low gravity environments (move faster than 30 cm per second on an average asteroid and you'll launch yourself right into the open space), and you'll begin to realize the size of the problem...not to mention that the surface of Mars or some asteroid is usually much rougher than your living room floor.

We have learnt as much as we could by just looking at these asteroids. Now it is a time to get the spade out and dig...

The Nanorover Technology Task at Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a technology development effort to create very small (10-100s of grams) but scientifically capable robotic vehicles for planetary exploration. It will hopefully follow the path of its successful predecessors like Sojourner in future missions to asteroids, comets, and Mars. It has been selected as a technology experiment on the world's first asteroid sample return mission, MUSES-C, a collaboration between Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences and NASA, that is scheduled for launch in January 2002. The target asteroid will be Nereus or 1989ML. Nanorover will be delivered to the surface of one of these asteroids, where it will gather close-up imagery and spectral data, and relay this information via the spacecraft back to Earth. The final target of this mission is to collect (using a complicated pyrotechnic sampling device) and return the samples of the asteroid surface.

The current nanorover prototype consists of a four-wheel mobility chassis designed so that each wheel strut can be positioned independently. It weights 2 kilograms, and looks more or less like a cube with a size of approximately 28x28 cm. The approach "bigger is better" doesn't work here: apart from that, we are talking about very versatile machines here. The nanorover can pose its body in any orientation to perform various tasks. It can operate upside-down, intentionally flip over, recover from accidental overturning, place its body flat on the ground (for sensor placement), run low to the ground on severe slopes or under barriers, lift wheels atop obstacles, etc. The chassis is designed around two main science instruments: a multiband camera system for gathering images, and a near-infrared point reflectance spectrometer to provide mineralogical information. The nanorover is designed to be completely solar powered, requiring only 1 watt of power to operate, including an RF telecommunications system for communications between the rover and a lander or small-body orbiter for relay to Earth.

Another new technology that will be used in nanorovers is known as "artificial muscles". The viewing windows of sensors onboard the rover will be protected of dust by two miniature wipers powered by electroactive polymers (EAP).

When your corporate mission statement is "Make money, have fun, build cool stuff, change the world" and your management team consists of people like Rodney Brooks, Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and Grinell Moore, chances are that great robotics devices will come out of it soon.

Research on "real-word robots" doesn't stop at NASA. There is simply too much space on our mother planet that is beyond the limits of our technology. Named by Fortune Magazine as one the Top 20 coolest companies, IS Robotics develops wide variety of intelligent robots for innovative use in entertainment, commercial, industrial, and advanced research realms. Using the same approach as NASA, ISR's robots are breaking new ground in autonomy here on Earth. As Prof. Rodney Brooks from MIT is one of the its founders, subsumption architecture (now called Behavior Control) made its way into the ISR robots. There are so much exciting projects here that I will try only to briefly mention some of them.

As for the software, there are two major software development systems currently in use at ISR. The MOBILITY™ Robot Software Development Environment Package is a new object-oriented, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) based robotics control architecture. Essentially, it gives programmers a set of flexible, powerful, extensible "building blocks" and easy-to-use tools for construction of any kind of robot control system. Mobility's Java-based graphical user interface enables you to easily observe, tune, configure and debug your entire control environment at runtime.
The second major system is the "L" system, a proprietary AI development environment and run time software architecture for a highly efficient dialect of Common Lisp that includes multi-threading extensions. It has proven to be successful in behavioral control approaches that rely on many independently running processes, each with specific responsibilities.

On the other (hardware) side, things look equally impressive, starting with rFLEX™, the RWI Division's new "central nervous system" for robots. It links your robot's sensors and actuators to its brain, using simple and standard hubs, 10baseT Ethernet cables and nodes. Here are just of few projects from their list:

Ariel, Autonomous Legged Underwater Vehicle, designed to remove mines and obstacles on land and underwater in the surf zone
DARTs (Devices for Acceleration and Rapid Turning), series of small autonomous underwater vehicles that emulate the efficiency, acceleration, and maneuverability of a fish
Fetch II, a project developing team of low cost robotic mine hunters that will provide rapid and complete coverage of a mine field
Gecko, advanced micro-robot modeled after the gecko lizard
Holon, 36 degree of freedom, untethered, autonomous robot designed for experiments in the control of many degree of freedom systems
MUMS (Micro Unattended Mobility System) project aimed to add a mobile component to unattended sensor systems
STRIDE (System Tasking and Recon Information Display Equipment), where robot becomes part of the reconnaissance team, able to respond to verbal orders with local initiative and intelligence
Urban Robot project that was instituted to develop a robust robot to aid military operations in urban terrain

And for the end, I recently found out that the toy producer Hasbro formed exclusive alliance with IS Robotics to create "21st Century Toys", featuring the latest in interactive technologies. Can't wait to see what is coming up next...

Site(s) of interest:

Ants
The Ants are a community of cubic-inch microrobots built at MIT.
IS Robotics
IS Robotics is developing a wide variety of intelligent robots for innovative use in entertainment, commercial, industrial, and advanced research realms.
MUSES-C
MUSES-C is a sample return mission to the asteroid Nereus or 1989ML.
Nanorover
JPL Nanorover technology home page.
Telerobotics
The home page for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL's) Rover and Telerobotics Technology Program, sponsored by NASA.
The Rockettes
Another MIT project: building autonomous, 10 gram mobile robots for planetary exploration. These "nanorovers" would make it possible to send many robots instead of a single larger rover.