Curiosity's First Year on Mars | Twelve Months in Two Minutes

Here is a rover's eye view of driving, scooping and drilling during Curiosity's first year on Mars, August 2012 through July 2013.

DARPA Robotic Challenge

The DARPA Robotic Challenge will focus on developing robots that can operate in rough terrain and austere conditions, using aids (vehicles and hand tools) commonly available in populated areas. Specifically, proving that the following capabilities can be accomplished:

1. Compatibility with environments engineered for humans (even if they are degraded)
2. Ability to use a diverse assortment of tools engineered for humans (from screwdrivers to vehicles)
3. Ability to be supervised by humans who have had little to no robotics training.

Supervised autonomy is critical, as it allows simple tasks to be performed by the robot without full-time operator intervention. This will be especially important in unreliable communications environments.

DARPA-Developed Tools:
DRC Simulator: To facilitate robot software development, DARPA is developing an open source simulation tool: the DRC Simulator. The Simulator will be populated with models of robots, robot components, and field environments and will be made available to organizations skilled in robotic software development. This simulator will help to expand the supplier base for ground robot systems (both hardware and software), increase capabilities, and in the future will help lower acquisition costs.

Atlas: The most successful teams (Track B and C) in the Virtual Robotics Challenge will be given a humanoid robot called Atlas. Atlas is one of many robots being developed to complete the physical tasks planned for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials and Finals events, and requires software expertise to program the robot to accomplish the objectives.

Robot Touch Screen

Microsoft Research's prototype of a haptic feedback touch screen called TouchMover.

Researchers uploaded a full set of MRI brain scans and demoed how doctors might scroll through them and annotate specific slides. And with some additional programming, the researchers could also make the TouchMover provide haptic feedback based on the material properties and texture of the skull bone and pulpy brain tissue, making the screen feel like palpating an actual brain.

IBM Watson Healthcare

IBM has taken a major step forward with partners Memorial Sloan Kettering and WellPoint in putting IBM Watson to work in healthcare.

On Friday, February 8th, the team unveiled the first commercially-developed Watson-based breakthroughs. These innovations have the potential to help transform the quality and speed of care — and the entire healthcare industry — through individualized evidence-based medicine.

via IBM Watson

Self-Healing Plastic Skin

Stanford researchers has created the first synthetic material that is both self-healing at room temperature and sensitive to touch--a breakthrough that could be the beginnings of a new kind of robot skin.

The researchers took a thin strip of the material and cut it in half with a scalpel. After gently pressing the pieces together for a few seconds, they found the material gained back 75 percent of its original strength and electrical conductivity. The material was restored close to 100 percent in about 30 minutes.

The researchers succeeded by combining two ingredients – the self-healing ability of a plastic polymer and the conductivity of a metal.

They started with a plastic consisting of long chains of molecules joined by hydrogen bonds – the relatively weak attractions between the positively charged region of one atom and the negatively charged region of the next.

“These dynamic bonds allow the material to self-heal,” said Chao Wang, a co-first author of the research. The molecules easily break apart, but then when they reconnect, the bonds reorganize themselves and restore the structure of the material after it gets damaged, he said. The result is a bendable material, which even at room temperature feels a bit like saltwater taffy left in the fridge.

The team’s goal is to make the material stretchy and transparent, so that it might be suitable for wrapping and overlaying on electronic devices or display screens.

[Stanford Engineering]

Digits: A Wrist-Worn Gloveless Sensor

From Oct. 7 to 10 in Cambridge, Mass., Microsoft researchers attending UIST 2012; the 25th Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology; will be sharing projects and ideas with an international gathering of scientists and practitioners focused on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Microsoft Research’s work in "HCI" helps the company achieve its long-term vision of creating intuitive interfaces that not only revolutionize interactions between humans and computers, but that also empower people from of all walks of life. Digits is one of several research projects presented during UIST 2012 that help further this vision.

Mobility always has been one of the research team’s goals. To enable ubiquitous 3-D spatial interaction anywhere, Digits had to be lightweight, consume little power, and have the potential to be as small and comfortable as a watch. At the same time, Digits had to deliver superior gesture sensing and “understand” the human hand, from wrist orientation to the angle of each finger joint, so that interaction would not be limited to 3-D points in space. Digits had to understand what the hand is trying to express, even while inside a pocket.

Digits is meant to be a general-purpose interaction platform, and to prove the utility of the technology, both the Digits technical paper being presented during UIST 2012 and an accompanying video present interactive scenarios using Digits in a variety of applications, with particular emphasis on mobile scenarios, where it can interact with mobile phones and tablets.

via Microsoft Research