jawfish

DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
john posted in technologies on May 28th, 2005

The DARPA Grand Challenge is back and this time things will be different. The equipment that’s driving around the desert is going to change your life, and soon.

DARPA, the mil-tech juggernaut, may be creepy, impenetrable, and a big waste of your money ( if you are off-shore, that would be a big threat to your country, ahem). However, DARPA research has benign outcomes too, like the Internet. Well maybe you have some mixed feelings there, as well. I didn’t say change for the better necessarily, just a big complex change.

The Grand Challenge is a test of robot unmanned vehicles over unknown, rough terrain. It is really very difficult, as a human driver would have to work pretty hard to complete the course. Last year none of the competitors had completed basic testing and as result most were incapable of even starting the course. This year Stanford, and best of 2004, Carnegie-Mellon, are claiming to have breezed through a preliminary obstacle course test. Both entries claim to have done extensive real-world testing before the official preliminary test in May.

The Challenge is a time trial over a surprise course. No radio communication is allowed with the vehicle, although there were elaborate safety measures at the first test. The course will be like the first one, with off-road, gravel and paved sections. The vehicles not only have to maneuver to stay on course, they have to handle the large rocks, steep inclines, and gullies typical of an off-road test.

The Mojave is the likely location, which makes it the center of two 21rst century breakthroughs: robotic vehicles and commercial spaceflight.

I have no doubt that the test will be passed eventually, and the military will get its robotic land vehicles to go with the airplanes.

My guess is that a successful traverse of the course, a proof-of-concept, is an event equivalent to the flight of the Wright Flyer or Edison’s carbon-filament light bulb. This time though its not the mechanical technology thats revolutionary, it’s the software.

The decision-making software, the driver’s brain, is the hard part. Insects can cross rough terrain with far more agility than our bots today, and it’s going to be a long time before an ant’s level of efficiency is achieved. It’s not clear to me in civilian or military applications that large ground vehicles can be left alone without supervision, anyway, so inefficient, and just plain dumb bots, may be combined with a radio link. That’s basically remote control. The test calls for full autonomy, though, and there won’t be any connection to the vehicles as they try to pick their way across miles of desert.

What’s the significance of autonomous vehicles?

First, an autonomous vehicle is a ground-based robot like R2D2 or C3PIO with a jeep-like body.

That means that the hard part, the software, is directly adaptable to lots of other shapes – a small biped like a chicken, a small or large tank with crawler treads, a wheelchair, a snake, a lawn mower, a snack-cart, or a dump truck.

All science fiction you say, just magazine drivel. Well take a look at two commercial prototypes: the Toyota and Honda robots. The Toyota robot

can play a trumpet, sort of, and the Honda robot

can walk quite well and shake hands. Ho hum you say, but you have to understand, thats Good Enough to be very useful. We don’t need robot musicians or baseball players, we need cleaners, haulers, and DARPA needs substitutes for human soldiers. We aren’t talking Star Wars, we are talking smart tools, and substitutes for humans doing dangerous work. Controlling the military ramifications of this is a subject for another Jawfish post.

Military: at the moment the Army is bogged down fighting an MP’s war in Iraq. Soldiers are forced to go house to house in very dangerous conditions, and to drive convoys over roads that contain deadly IED mines. I’d guess reducing or eliminating the drivers in convoys would be attractive. Solutions to the house-to-house situation are more technically interesting, and they, I think, have the greatest potential for destabilizing weapons development.

Without being any sort of expert, you’d think that a house-searching robot would need to be able to approximate a man’s agility, though a chimpanzee or hummingbird would be much better. But maybe a simpler vehicle could be used for reconnaissance, as a way of protecting the soldiers. In any case, its small and maneuverable that’s needed. There are already bots on the market that have the agility to climb stairs, and generally manuever inside buildings. But, they still lack brainpower. Look at the IRobot site for some examples of military bots, already in production. IRobot says the PackBot will be autonomous by the end of 2005.

Civilian: Its really hard to believe that large general-purpose, and therefore dangerous, autonomous vehicles will be let loose. One failure that sends a robot jeep headed across a freeway will produce public panic. So my guess is that small, semi-disposable, and fenced uses are more likely. Industries with high labor costs and low-skill requirements will be the first target. There’s already the Roomba vacuum

Lawn mowing also comes immediately to mind.

Assuming a golf course would benefit from cutting the grass at night, with one instead of four groundskeepers on duty, you can see a model. Robot lawn mowers could run a fixed map of the course, with predetermined work areas and no-go boundaries, and a simple electronic fence like those used for dogs to contain them. One worker could watch and maintain them. The mowers would have to be smart enough to avoid obstacles, like a dead mower, or tree limb. Here is a prototype mower:

How about agriculture? Is the labor cost so high that flocks of robot chickens could tend row crops, or autonomous combines could harvest wheat on the giant industrial farms of the West? Maybe so, especially if there were savings on pesticide use with the robot chickens, and the ability to work 24×7 on the big farms.

If I am right, and not just indulging in Popular Mechanix fantasy, then there will be many uses we can’t foresee. The Roomba, Aibo, and Robosapiens are worth a look for an idea of what inexpensive bots can do.

School Rules
john posted in politics & culture on May 18th, 2005

Lets make some more rules and, well, rule!

Maybe just maybe, secondary schools really do mold children and introduce them to our civic world. Well then, what do schools mostly do?

They make rules. They live by rules. They are enmeshed in a fibroid tumor of rules. When three or four schools out of 20,000 or so have horrific shootings, they make zero-tolerance rules about verbal threats. When prescription drugs are abused, they make rules about tylenol and decongestants. When a parent complains they make rules into zero tolerance rules.

Just in: the California legislature has adopted a rule to limit school text books to 200 pages. Presumably because they are too heavy. Or maybe just skool-lite prevails. ( my kids are in an upscale district which maintains an extra set of books for classroom use, so the kids don’t have to tote them all the time. Its true the backpacks are still heavy.)

Not too long ago I dropped in to ask the high school administrator some everyday question which I forget now.
I was told, “You have to come back during Nutrition.”
- “But she’s sitting right there” (next office, and in view)
- “You have to come back during Nutrition. She only handles it during Nutrition”
- “I am not a student, whats Nutrition?” ( my hair is gray, and I don’t have any nose rings or tattoos)
- “Tomorrow between eleven and eleven-fifteen” ( at this point leaving was better than yelling: a good rule)

What do parents do? Besides feed, clothe, and house hungry, sleepy, backpack-burdened teenagers, we make rules too. You can’t watch the movie until your homework’s done. You have to go to church until you are confirmed. You have to follow the rules at school. All this at a time when the most Stalinist social group in the world, teenagers, is busy enforcing its rules – you can’t wear shorts above the knee; you can’t be too smart; you can’t be too cool; you can’t be too thin.

So when teachers are underpaid, what does the teacher’s union do? It makes rules about when you can fire teachers. When three nuts complain to the school board, it makes rules about leaving time for nuts to complain.

This would all be worth an ironic, things-never-change chuckle, until the legislature, Congress, and Lord forgive us, the Prez get involved. Neo-cons and liberals have their revenge- they love to make rules about school. They want to just say no to drugs, and just say yes to Jesus, send every kid to college, bus kids across town, and most of all they want to punish teachers and schools whose students don’t do better on standardized tests each year.

Last of all what do standardized tests test?
Rules.

So when the cop pulls you out of a line of 100 cars going the same speed for a ticket…. its the rules.
When you are at the head of the line and they make you start over in another….. its the rules.
When you need to ask your doctor-of-the-week at the HMO a question, you have to come in next month…its the rules.
If you think this is toxic hogwash and you want to make a pungent comment, but you have to submit it first….its the rules.

So what do we really learn in school? Rules are great when you get away with something; rules are unfair when you get caught. Rules are best when you are in charge.

So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when lawyers will do anything to win. When corporate officers gut the company’s assets and rip-off shareholders and customers, when pampered media stars disintegrate. Most of all, we should expect politicians to fold, spindle and mutlilate their way to power. They are all tired of being hemmed in by the rules.

The Cessna is Coming! The Cessna is Coming!
john posted in politics & culture on May 12th, 2005

A couple of errant pilots in a Cessna 150 buzzed Washington DC and brought the legislature to a halt. Reporters, schoolchildren, Senators were rushed out of the Capitol yesterday when authorities couldn’t turn around a tiny unarmed private plane. Papers didn’t say whether the Whitehouse also emptied, but they did report that the VP was whisked off to his undisclosed location.

Afterward, sober policemen conferred and congratulated themselves, albeit modestly, for a smooth evacuation. Did Dave Barry write this story?

Let me get this straight:
A plane that can barely fly at 105 knots, weighs 1000 lbs, and carries 500 lbs total, entered a resticted area that covers half of Maryland. The Air Force, charged with tracking incoming hypersonic ICBMs, couldn’t figure out what it was. Presumably they asked the air traffic folks too. Fearing it might be an attacker, the anti-aircraft cops waited until it was a couple of minutes from the center of town, and then pulled the emergency cord. This stopped Congress in its tracks, not an altogether bad thing I admit, and created a front page story. Representative Pelosi lost her shoe. Whooping sirens were heard all over town. Afterward people piously expressed fear and relief.

Cue Mr. Barry: ” I am not making this up.”

Huh? Our Brave Leaders are so frightened that they run for cover when a Cessna flies over? In DC they are much more likely to be mugged or car-jacked. What would have happened if their oft-mentioned Blackberries had gone dead? Panic in the streets?

Seriously: so what if a light plane flies into a building? It happens monthly, similar accidents happen on the freeways of America hourly. So what? Why are people so frightened? We baby-boomers grew up with the actual threat of total nuclear annihilation. Later we found out it was closer than we thought during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It probably changed popular culture, and we did have silly air raids ( what, we are protecting ourselves against vaporization by hiding under a desk?), but it was a real threat. So now we are such a flock of sheep that we run for cover when a shadow passes? No one was embarrassed?

Cue The Sneer: “Oh BTW the marines lost a few more body parts in Fallouja today, but there will be law&order any day now.”

Coverage of the Pope
john posted in politics & culture on May 10th, 2005

There was more press coverage of the recent change in papacy, than of the latest Democratic Convention. The LA Times devoted many pages each day to minute coverage of the last Pope’s condition, the countdown to choosing a new Pope, and bios of the new fella. I learned that the Beatle’s song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is about the arcane ritual that tests the Pope’s death using a little hammer. Huh, I always wondered about that song. NPR covered the story daily too.

Am I missing something here? The details of the innards of the Catholic church are interesting, and its soothing to find that ancient traditions still operate, but I don’t see how most of it was news. In the developed world the new Pope’s policy won’t make much difference. The papers wrote stories on how the Catholic Church is competing with Protestant missionaries in third world countries, and may have to choose, can you imagine? an African Pope. But that just leaves the Third Worlders between the proverbial rock and hard place as far as I can see.

What practical difference does the Pope make? They say that the last Pope offered encouragement to Solidarity in Poland during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thats nice; he also apologized to the Jews for the Church’s support for Nazism. Hey, its always good to see a religious organization separating itself from genocide. I am not ignoring the fact of a billion Catholics worldwide, who surely do care what the Pope says, though they don’t follow his guidance so much. But the coverage wasn’t about church history, or a study in the sociology of Catholicism. It was more like reporting the NFL draft: rapt, uncritical, full of a pop-culture reverence. Surely, nuclear proliferation, the fossil-fuel crisis, and Putin’s takeover in Moscow are three ongoing subjects with greater complexity, and far greater relevance?

Oh. Complexity. I’m sorry, I must be shouting into the wind again, expecting news organizations to deal with unstaged events, without juicy quotes and easy pictures, events that could plunge us into a depression or get us killed at the extreme.

My guess is that the affair was a giant travelogue, similar to the Royal Wedding, but with better weather and more drama. Lots of people cared a little, some deeply. Rome is a prized destination, with lots of picture opportunities. The sonorous march of events made it easy to keep up, there were lots of people to quote, and no need to work late. Huge, photogenic crowds gathered in a beautiful square, and except for the pickpockets, nobody got hurt. The Cardinals slow-marched like circus elephants with their handlers bearing censers under the Sistine ceiling. The dying Pope was old and sick, and ready to go, but slowly. The creaky machinery of the Vatican was dusted off, and worked reliably. The road crew had time to setup for all the shots. And the food was great.

So maybe asking for high seriousness is beside the point. Maybe the readers just needed a good dose of old-fashioned pomp and circumstance. Nobody does it better.

The new Pope: overheard in New York.

Welcome to Jawfishcomments
admin posted in other on May 4th, 2005

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