Stanford Engineering Library Blog

Junior, Stanford's robot Volkswagen, passed a basic driver's test Thursday. A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot next to Google to test the car to see if it would qualify for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA's third competition for driverless vehicles.

Driving at 15 mph, Junior passed with flying colors, including a 3-point U-turn and successful navigation of a four-way stop with human-driven cars.

The team working on this project consists mostly of graduate students, research staff and faculty; the squad works in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).

From a recent CNET article:

Stanford Racing Team is notable because it won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a $2 million robot race across 132 miles of Nevada desert. At the time, Stanford was a new entrant to the DARPA Grand Challenges--which first began in 2004--and kept a lower profile than teams organized by institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, a pioneer in robotics that entered two cars in the race. But Stanford's robot, Stanley, finished the course in the fastest time--under 10 hours--making it the first to accomplish DARPA's mission for autonomous cars and set a new standard in artificial intelligence.

Now the Stanford team has drawn widespread attention and sponsors such as Google, Red Bull and Intel. A Google representative at the test site said that Google co-founder Larry Page called him up last year and said that "he wanted to sponsor the best teams."

6 August 2007—NASA’s latest Mars mission launched this past Saturday after being delayed for a day due to inclement weather. The Phoenix lander, scheduled to descend onto the Red Planet next May, carries instruments that will aid the quest to try to find evidence of life beneath the planet’s icy arctic region.

Despite all the attention given to the possibility of finding life on our planetary neighbor, Phoenix is only the first Mars lander properly equipped to do such identification and analysis since the 1976 Viking mission. It will land in Vastitas Borealis, the arctic plains of Mars, and will spend more than 90 days investigating the history of water on Mars, assessing whether the planet could have ever supported life, and examining weather and climate near the pole.

Phoenix is fitted with a robotic arm for digging trenches and collecting soil samples. The arm features a camera to capture detailed images of soil before and after it has been scooped up. The lander also carries a stereoscopic imager to capture full panoramas; electrical, chemical, and microscopy tools to analyze samples; and temperature and pressure sensors for meteorological observation. Phoenix’s brain is a radiation-hardened computer made by BAE Systems, at the heart of which is an IBM microprocessor.

Phoenix will be the first lander to communicate with Earth by relaying its messages through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which features the new Electra UHF relay transceiver, an attempt at providing higher bandwidth for space communications. -- Story source: IEEE Spectrum

Selected Engineering Library Resources:

Two spacewalkers assembled the stick-figure-shaped Dextre, also known as the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator (SPDM). Dextre is a robot with two smaller arms. It is capable of handling the delicate assembly tasks currently performed by astronauts during spacewalks. Read more about the robot on the NASA website.

El-E (pronounced like the name Ellie), a robot designed to help users with limited mobility with everyday tasks, can be instructed to to find and deliver an item it may have never seen before using a more direct manner of communication — a laser pointer. Read the story and watch a video about "her" at Georgia Tech News.

According to Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, robot creations are evolving similar to how life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By his calculations, by mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the scope of robots. More