gathering dirt

 

NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Two trenches dug in Martian soil by the robotic arm of the Phoenix Mars Lander.

After days of struggling with sticky Martian dirt, the Phoenix Mars Lander has unexpectedly succeeded in getting its first soil sample into an onboard laboratory for analysis, jubilant NASA scientists said on Wednesday.The breakthrough came after the lander spent days vibrating a screen over its onboard Thermal Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) in hopes that the clumpy soil would break loose and fall into the onboard ovens. The scientists were caught by surprise when the trick worked on the seventh, and likely last, try.

Members of the normally staid Phoenix team, who have been forced to watch for much of the last week as their first Martian soil sample lingered maddeningly close to the ovens, celebrated by cheering and dancing around the room to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s 1970s disco hit “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.”
New York Times. June 12, 2008

Myths for Machines

Mars Rover Opportunity

When the Mars Rover Opportunity rolled onto the planet’s surface it started up its systems and played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”.

It’s a song drenched in nostalgia for a type of sleek, streamlined machine that represented escape and romance for young adults. It hadn’t been Bruce Springsteen’s era. He wasn’t sentimental about a vanishing age. He was just sharpening his wits, learning how to tell stories for his own time by first re-telling the stories that had filled him with wonder. I think that NASA, by giving Opportunity this song, has given the machines that inhabit Mars – Spirit, Opportunity and now Phoenix – myths of their own.

Phoenix landed on Mars recently with a library on a disc strapped to its hull, with visions, dreams and nightmares Earth-dwelling humans have had of Mars. It includes messages from writer/scientists Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, the telling of “War of the Worlds” by both H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, and excerpts of books by J G Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. And a video explaining Phoenix’s mission and giving its specifications and workings.

When I heard Bruce Springsteen perform “One Headlight” with the Wallflowers, it struck me that it could be added to Opportunity’s collection of myths.

Spirit and Opportunity continue to operate long after their termination time, heroically battling the malfunction of their own components and the tough Martian climate to send back footage from Mars. “One Headlight” is an ode to a stoic machine. A disillusioned Cinderella dies of a broken-heart and a grieving Prince Charming bravely faces the realisation that there’s no happily ever after. He didn’t need a magic coach, he decides he could have driven himself and Cinderella through life with a trusty old machine with one headlight.

 

 

The Romance of Robots

Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very.
Rachael: I’m Rachael.
Deckard: Deckard.
Rachael: It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.
Deckard: Replicants are like any other machine – they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.

Blade Runner

 If humans still exist two centuries from now and are able, and wish to, look back on the history of robotics, the period from 1984 to the discontinuing of Sony’s AIBO robot dog early in the new century, will seem like a high romantic period, a digital equivalent of the renaissance, swooningly beautiful and sensual. A lifelike owl swooped through the high-domed art deco hall in Tyrell’s penthouse like Merlin’s wise pet, at the beginning of the era and at its end Sheila Metzner photographed a melancholy, lonely paradise that looked like it was on Mars. A version of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house was inhabited by a languid beauty and her AIBO (“man’s next friend”) in Bergdorf Goodman ads published in the New York Times Magazine in 1999.

The dream imploded with the crash of the stock market: the business plans of the dot.com companies now seemed like nothing but hallucinations. In the twilight of the consumer robot industry Sony’s humanoid robot Qrio appeared in an episode of Astro Boy, the Japanese animated series about a robot boy with a human heart. When Star Trek: The Next Generation ended, the concept of a machine yearning to be truly human faded when the android crew member Data was no longer on our screens.

 

One of the proponets of intelligent machines, continuing to do research in this area, is Rodney Brooks. He was one of a number of academics asked by the Boston Globe  today to suggest what technologies will change our lives in the coming decade as much as the personal computer and mobile communiciations technologies have. He replied:

“As the baby boomers age, the demographics of Europe, North America, East Asia, and Australia will demand that the productivity of all aspects of manual work increase dramatically. Fortunately, robots are just now maturing to the point where they can help with real productivity at practical prices. From virtually no mobile robots deployed anywhere in the world six years ago we now have thousands on active duty in the US military and millions cleaning the floors of American homes. This is the lead-up to a classic hockey-stick growth curve. Just as computers we interact with personally (e.g., desktops, laptops, PDAs, cellphones) transformed our lives over the last 25 years, so, too, will robots transform our lives over the coming 25. And it just so happens that Massachusetts is the epicenter of this nascent industry.”

His predictions seem to be borne out by the manipulation, by thought, of a robot arm by a monkey.

Cortical Control of a Prosthetic Arm for Self-Feeding (Nature)

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. A grid in the monkey’s brain carried signals from 100 neurons for the mechanical arm to grab and carry snacks to the mouth.

“The reality of this is so remarkable. The potential impact, in terms of quality of life for amputees and patients with spinal cord damage, is awesome.” Ron, Chicago
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

The Mars Rover, Phoenix, has just landed on the planet’s surface and has left a footprint like mark.

Phoenix landing on Mars.

 It will be instructed, from earth, to use its robot arm to dig for ice and soil samples.

 

On Bldgblog, these two robotic experiments have Geoff Manaugh thinking about a new class of sentient robots.

Two unrelated bits of news this week strangely merged for me, to surreal effect.
First, we learned that two monkeys were able to move a robotic arm “merely by thinking.” The arm, which included “working shoulder and elbow joints and a clawlike ‘hand’,” was controllable after “[p]robes the width of a human hair were inserted into the neuronal pathways of the monkeys’ motor cortex.”
This field of research is referred to as “mind-controlled robotic prosthetics” – but the mind in control here is not human.
Second, the New York Times reported that “NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has successfully lifted its robotic arm” up there on the surface of another planet.
“Testing the arm will take a few days,” we read, “and the first scoops of Martian soil are to be dug up next week.”
And while I know that these stories are not connected, putting them together is like something from a Thomas Pynchon novel: monkeys locked in a room somewhere, controlling the arms of machines on other planets. As if we might discover, at the end of the day, that NASA wasn’t a human organization at all – it was a bunch of rhesus monkeys locked in a lab somewhere, enthroned amidst wires and brain-caps, like some new sign of the Tarot, lost in private visions of machines on alien worlds. An experiment gone awry.
Their “dreams” at night are actually video feeds from probes moving through outer darkness.

 

Toolmaker celebrated

The New York Times has an obituary for Peter Staudhammer, a designer of tools and machines for NASA’s landing missions on the Moon and Mars.

In the 1960s, while working for the defense contractor TRW, Dr. Staudhammer was the engineer in charge of developing a way to put a manned spacecraft safely on the surface of the Moon. His team developed a powerful throttling engine that allowed astronauts to control the descent of the lunar lander, softening its landings in the historic series of manned lunar missions that began in 1969.

Later, in the 1970s, Dr. Staudhammer helped design the compact traveling laboratory that accompanied the Viking missions to Mars. The laboratory, known as the Viking biology instrument package, was placed on the planet’s surface, where it heated soil samples, studied the resulting gases and relayed the findings from the scene. Scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped to discover conditions favorable to primitive life — and perhaps even find single-cell organisms — but the instruments revealed what was an essentially sterile environment.