Innovations in Autonomous Robot Technology: Are Flying Robots the Future of Construction?


Two recent demonstrations of autonomous quadrotor helicopter technology have sparked renewed interest in the potential for using automated robotics for construction and search and rescue operations.


In early December last year, ETH Zurich roboticist Raffaello D'Andrea and architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, also from ETH, created an art installation titled 'Flight Assembled Architecture' just outside of Paris.
The installation used a series of miniature quadrotor helicopters to autonomously build a six metre tower from Styrofoam blocks.
Four robots worked on the project at any one time, relying on detailed blueprints and a motion capture system embedded in the roof to accurately construct the tower at a rate of 100 blocks per hour.


On the other side of the pond, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab recently uploaded a video to Youtube demonstrating their advancements in so-called 'swarm' technology.
The video shows twenty miniature quadrotors performing complex manoeuvres, navigating around obstacles and otherwise demonstrating what the team describes as "complex autonomous swarm behaviour."
While the technology demonstrated by these two teams is far from market ready, its potential applications are intriguing.

Larger versions of the building robots, for example, could potentially be used in the construction industry to erect buildings faster and more efficiently, while significantly reducing the occupational health and safety risks for associated workers.


While GRASP's demonstration has raised some concerns as to the use of similar technology for unauthorised surveillance operations, the ability of the quadrotors used in their experiment to successfully navigate obstacles points to some very useful potential applications in the area of search and rescue.

For example, rescue workers could potentially use a similar system to explore high risk areas, and to gain access to enclosed spaces that are too small for a human being to explore.
With the development of such advanced autonomous technology inevitably comes moral and ethical concerns over its use, but if utilised in the right way, self-guiding robots could be used in a variety of applications to complete tasks more efficiently, and importantly, with far less risk for human workers. 


source: Internet

The Home of the Future

Building for the Future




It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle.
Minimizing the time and cost that goes into creating shelters will enable aid workers to address the needs of people in desperate situations. This, at least, is what Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering and director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies, or CRAFT, at the University of Southern California, hopes will come of his inventions.



“Initially it will be most beneficial to developing countries to eradicate their slums. Next is emergency shelter construction where war and natural disaster uproots thousands of people,” says Khoshnevis. “[It] can build much cheaper and much faster and can produce dignified housing rather than tents and boxes.”
Khoshnevis says his system could be ready two years from now, but it may end up on the moon before we see it in Haiti or Somalia. In late November, NASA awarded a grant as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to Khoshnevis and his collaborators as a possible way to build lunar structures. The team’s next step is to test the process at the Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) facility in Arizona.

Contour Crafting

Khoshnevis calls his technique “Contour Crafting” and it operates on roughly the same principle as consumer 3D printers like MakerBot’s Thing-O-Matic. His robot pours out a trail of viscous concrete while tracing along the footprint of a wall. As the nozzle sweeps back and forth, the layers rapidly build, with the lower ones hardening enough to support the increasing weight. Its speed puts construction workers to shame.
“We are talking about a technology that can build a square foot of wall in less than 20 seconds,” Khoshnevis says. At that rate, Contour Crafting can put together a whole room in just an hour.
It took a while to figure out how to make a printer that could build large objects at that speed. Most 3D printers — those that make shapes using plastics — build in tiny layers, often only .01 mm thick. The number of layers determines the resolution of the object. Just like the pixels in a digital camera, and the more you have, the more accurate the product will be. But when Khoshnevis tried building from such thin layers, the process took too long to be useful.




Eventually, he found that he could build with much bigger layers, over an inch thick, if he used a tool to smooth out the concrete as it flowed from the nozzle. Ultimately, he attached two swiveling trowels that let him remold the concrete into any angle.
Other robotic fixtures could be added to the printer, giving it the capability to install plumbing and electrical wiring. A gripper would place support beams and lay out a layer of metal over the top of the walls to create a base for the ceiling and roof.

Printing a cube or an octopus

Size is now the only thing holding back the technology. “We have a machine that can build a structure about 23 feet long, about 7 feet high and about 15 feet wide at this point,” says Khoshnevis.
He estimates that a full-scale printer would break down into three pieces and be small enough to fit onto a flatbed truck. All construction would happen on site. First, a designer would bring a digital blueprint for the house on a thumb drive and plug it into the printer while workers loaded it with concrete. Once the printer was activated, humans would play a supporting role, laying out supplies for the robotic gripper arm and preparing fresh batches of concrete. Humans would also install the windows and doors, since the task is so easy it’s not worth automating, Khoshnevis previously said.
Not only will it be faster, 3D printing could enable architects to design in completely new ways.
“There are definitely interesting implications,” says Sean Bailey, an architect and artist in New York City. “Whereas traditional fabrication techniques require additional resources as complexity increases, 3D printers are not bound to this logic.” With a 3D printer, it takes the same amount of time and money to turn a glob of concrete into a cube as it does to turn it into an octopus, says Bailey.
As masonry has become more of a specialized, and therefore expensive, skill, curvy architecture has become more difficult to produce. 3D printing could bring back some of these shapes.
“There are numerous shapes that you can make with Contour Crafting that cannot be made by conventional construction, such as doubly curved surfaces which would be extremely cost prohibitive to build by current methods,” says Khoshnevis.

How NASA Makes Those Incredible High-Res Images of Earth




In recent weeks, a pair of high-resolution images of the Earth has captivated the public. Taken by the Suomi NPP satellite, these pictures portray our planet’s incredible beauty with 8,000- by 8,000-pixel and 11,500- by 11,500-pixel detail.

How were these highly detailed images created? The satellite flies 512 miles above the Earth, but the images appear as if they were taken from a much higher perspective: an altitude of 1,242 for the first image and 7,918 miles for the second. This little trick was accomplished by stitching together data from several orbits, creating an image that appears to be “pulled back.”
NASA launched the 4,600-pound Suomi in October to remotely sense variations in the Earth’s oceans, continents, and atmosphere and get a better understanding of climate change. It passes directly from pole to pole 14 times a day, imaging 1,865-mile swaths of our planet with each trip.
On board Suomi, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument takes pictures in red, green, and blue wavelengths. For the whole-Earth images, those wavelengths were combined to create a natural color photograph. It is not an exact representation of what an observer sitting in space would see, because particles in the atmosphere scatter short wavelengths of light, and our planet would actually appear more blue-tinged. The photos more accurately portray how the oceans and continents appear from the ground.

Oceanographer Norman Kuring, who compiled the two pictures, said the original image, showing North and Central America, was made as a favor to project scientist James Gleason who was looking for an ocean color image to show in a presentation. Word got out of the striking picture and NASA officials released it on Jan. 25, resulting in 3 million people viewing it in one week.

With the popularity of this first image and requests from the public for another perspective, the agency produced a second image on Feb. 3 showing Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

The photos follow in the footsteps of NASA’s other great Earth images. The original Blue Marble — one of the most famous pictures of all time — was captured by the crew of Apollo 17 from a distance of 28,000 miles. Since 2002, the agency has stitched together up to 10,000 satellite images to produce other incredible detailed images. One of the most recent, from 2007, had a mind-boggling resolution of 86,400 pixels by 43,200 pixels.
Such pictures have proved time and time again to be among the most-viewed and best-loved NASA photos. What accounts for their enduring popularity?
“My guess is that people know that this is the only place we have to live. When they see an image showing these beautiful blues and greens, it speaks to them,” said Kuring. “This is our home.”
  
via Wired.com