Registrado: Mar Ene 20, 2009 9:29 pm Mensajes: 161
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Un Laboratorio de investigacion en Nueva Zelandia, ha estado desarrollando un robot bipedo altamente sofisticado llamado "Flame". La importacia de este tipo de investigaciones radica en que podria ser usado para ayudar a personas que tengan dificultades motoras.
Asunto: The Space Elevator Games -The Next Big Reality TV Show? (VIDEO)
Publicado: Dom Ago 16, 2009 2:52 pm
Miembro magico
Registrado: Sab Mar 28, 2009 2:39 pm Mensajes: 730
It"s right out of NOVA or the scifi channel: Microsoft is sponsoring the 2009 Space Elevator Conference,
a four-day long event with movies, presentations, and workshops where
engineers and entrepreneurs gather to discuss the technical and
logistical issues of building an actual elevator to space.
"It"s bringing top people around to present ideas from a research
standpoint and a business standpoint," said conference spokesperson
Melinda Young. "We"re talking about a way to supplement travel to space
by rockets."
While the idea of a space elevator has been around for about 100 years, the idea became more feasible by the 1991 discovery of "carbon nanotubes," tiny atoms that can come together and make a cylinder. The elevator is built around the idea of a ribbon and tether that could lift people thousands of miles into near space to a destination such as the International space station
Meanwhile, in
final proof that sports channels don"t know what the hell they"re
doing, for the last five years NASA and The Spaceward Foundation have
been running "The Space Elevator Games" - a competition to build a
robot and cable to literally CLIMB INTO SPACE - and TV still shows
skateboarding instead. The future is happening, and nobody"s watching.
Similar to the X Prize and the Google Lunar Prize, the Space
Elevator games are based on offering a big chunk of money to access the
incredible inventive potential available outside of established
agencies. The games attract university teams of student researchers,
the next generation of the field, with a total prize purse of four
million dollars. Which is more than you"ll get at the average track
meet.
The games have two events: climbing space cables, and
making them. The Climber battle is an awesome combination of
edge-pushing technologies as it requires lightweight cargo-carrying
robotics and power-beaming technology to drive them. As a model of an
actual space elevator, a cable into orbit, the machines can"t carry any
power source - they need to have energy transmitted to them. This
means that the games involve experimental robots climbing a one
kilometer cable suspended by a helicopter while high energy lasers fire
at them, or in other words, about five action movies happening at once.
The
second stage of the competition is building a the cable, or "tether",
so the competition really is bootstrapping space elevation: they"re
working out how to build the cable and then climb it, aka "Most of the
stuff you need to get this scifi idea actually working." While the
climbing prize is based on speed, the cable competition requires
continual improvement: to win the prize you have to do 50% better than
last years winner. If there"s ever been a better acceptance of
exponential technology acceleration we"ve yet to see it.
It"s an
awesome motivation for a whole new generation of scientists, and even
those who don"t win have an incredible boost in the field of "Thinking
of something awesome and making it happen." Plus, with a $900,000
prize awarded at a climbing speed of 2 m/s (and the most recent record
being 1.8 m/s) sometime soon a student dorm is going to have the best
bigscreen in the world.
Luke McKinney
Space Elevation http://www.spaceward.org/elevator2010
The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code genome that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it.
The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly mated and mutated to produce a new generation of programming. Within nine generations, the robots became excellent at finding the positive resource, and communicating with each other to direct other robots to the good resource.
However, there was a catch. A limited amount of access to the good resource meant that not every robot could benefit when it was found, and overcrowding could drive away the robot that originally found it.
After 500 generations, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it all for themselves. Even more telling, a third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming!
So far, the research has more application in explaining the evolution of behaviors in the natural world than in developing new programming for robots. But if you think that means I"m one step closer to trusting robots, then you"re probably the sort who"s attracted to the blue light.
Oh, Japan, you never cease to amaze. From the country that brought you water powered jetpacks, robots that make dinner and tentacles that do...other things, comes a floating UFO that will dutifully clean Osaka"s public waterways.
Designed by the engineering house NTT Facilities, these floating solar powered water processing plants will be deployed in Osaka"s Dotonbori canal and in the moat of Osaka castle. They remove pollutants from 2,400 gallons of water a day, sucking in the bad water through the bottom and shooting the clean water out the top like a fountain. Not only does the fountain look pretty, but the water spray cools down the solar panels, increasing efficiency.
Solar UFO Water Purifier Diagram:Duck not to scale nbsp;via Pink Tentacle
They are being deployed as part of a year-long effort to revitalize Osaka"s waterfront. The purifier in the canal will remain in place until October, and the one in the moat will float there until March of next year, after which it will presumably blast off back to its home planet.
Asunto: Robots en el espacio, nuestra exploración futuro?
Publicado: Sab Sep 05, 2009 4:16 pm
Miembro magico
Registrado: Sab Mar 28, 2009 2:39 pm Mensajes: 730
Mientras que el "hombre" en la humanidad que falta en estos dÃas, con nuestros más audaces y valientes esfuerzos de ser criticado tan costoso o peligrosas por las personas que pueden "ni siquiera deletrear las palabras, que" re aún aventurarse en el espacio ultraterrestre. Si podemos "t go, con nuestros jubilados y nuestros autobuses claro futuro, "he construido batallones de robots para explorar el espacio exterior para nosotros. duran más tiempo, que don" t quejan de viajes de ida o muerta de frÃo, y la probabilidad de inteligencias artificiales volver a matar se ha medido como "sólo ocurrió en el 10% de las pelÃculas de Star Trek." Un explorador interplanetario ya está en acción: el mercurio de las explosiones sonda MESSENGER el pasado una vez o dos veces al año, la cartografÃa de algunos de los más calientes de bienes raÃces en el sistema solar cada vez. Estos sobrevuelos son tentadores sabores de los datos que vienen al mensajero "s chi camino
