Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia

DARPA: Teaching computers to monitor by themselves.

joshbyard:

DARPA Funded Research Aims to Automate Video Surveillance, Teach Computers to Identify Suspicious Behavior

This approach relies heavily on advances by machine vision researchers, who have made remarkable strides in last few decades in recognizing stationary and moving objects and their properties.

It’s the same vein of work that led to Google’s self-driving cars, face recognition software used on Facebook and Picasa, and consumer electronics like Microsoft’s Kinect.

When it works well, machine vision can detect objects and people — call them nouns — that are on the other side of the camera’s lens. But to figure out what these nouns are doing, or are allowed to do, you need the computer science equivalent of verbs.

…that’s where Oltramari and Lebiere have built on the work of other Carnegie Mellon researchers to create what they call a “cognitive engine” that can understand the rules by which nouns and verbs are allowed to interact. Their cognitive engine incorporates research, called activity forecasting, …which tries to understand what humans will do by calculating which physical trajectories are most likely.

They say their software “models the effect of the physical environment on the choice of human actions.”

Both projects are components of Carnegie Mellon’s Mind’s Eye architecture, a DARPA-created project that aims to develop smart cameras for machine-based visual intelligence. Predicts Oltramari: “This work should support human operators and automatize video-surveillance, both in military and civil applications.”

(via U.S. looks to replace human surveillance with computers | Security & Privacy - CNET News)

Robotics: An inflatable robotic arm. Unsure about this. It would be useful.

thisistheverge:

DARPA’s new AIR robot can pick up objects with its inflatable arm

The softer side of robotics

Robotics: Another step forward for robotics.

joshbyard:

DARPA’s Cheap, Modular, Four-Fingered Hand has Disposable Fingers, Can Replace Flashlight Batteries

A Sandia National Laboratories research team has [designed] a modular, plastic proto-hand whose electronics system is largely made from parts found in cell phones.

The Sandia Hand can still perform with a high level of finesse for a robot, and is even capable of replacing the batteries in a small flashlight. It is expected to cost about $10,000, a fraction of the $250,000 price tag for a state-of-the-art robot hand today.

The researchers were able to scrimp in a number of clever ways. “One was scouring the globe for the least expensive, highest-performing components like motors, gears, etcetera,” says Curt Salisbury, the project’s principal investigator. “Another was to build the entire electronics system from commodity parts, especially those found in cell phones. We also moved from metal structural elements to plastic, being careful to design the structures so plastic would provide adequate strength.”

The Sandia Hand’s fingers are modular and affixed to the hand frame via magnets. This gives the researchers the flexibility to design interchangeable appendages tipped with screwdrivers, flashlights, cameras and other tools.

The fingers are also designed to detach automatically to avoid damage if the hand hits a wall or other solid object too hard. The researchers say the hand can even be manipulated to retrieve and reattach a fallen finger.

The Hand’s current incarnation has only four fingers, including the equivalent of an opposable thumb. “It turns out that for a wide range of manipulation tasks that humans do, four fingers is enough,” Salisbury says. Still, future iterations of the Hand could have any number of fingers and any arrangement of those fingers without adding much cost or complexity, he adds.

(via Four-Fingered Robot Can Replace Flashlight Batteries [Video] | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network) 

Bonus: Video via New Scientist

(via Robot hand for bomb disposal lets its fingers fall off)

DARPAs vision of the future of warfare - Warrior Web

8bitfuture:

DARPA program seeking to build the Crysis Nanosuit?

OK maybe not quite a CryNet Nanosuit, but DARPA’s new ‘Warrior Web’ program is seeking technology to build a lightweight undersuit capable of reducing injuries and ‘augmenting positive work done by the muscles’, while using less than 100 Watts of power.

The ultimate program goal is a lightweight, conformal under-suit that is transparent to the user (like a diver’s wetsuit). The suit seeks to employ a system (or web) of closed-loop controlled actuation, transmission, and functional structures that protect injury prone areas, focusing on the soft tissues that connect and interface with the skeletal system.

In addition to direct injury mitigation, Warrior Web will have the capacity to augment positive work done by the muscles, to reduce the physical burden, by leveraging the web structure to impart joint torque at the ankle, knee, and hip joints.

A Warrior Web suit system is not intended to interfere with current warfighter “soldier systems,” such as external body armor, rather it aims to augment them to improve warfighter effectiveness.

(via 8bitfuture)

Zombiesats - reusing space junk.

cozydark:

DARPA Makes First Award in Phoenix “ZombieSat” Program |

The DARPA Tactical Technology Office (TTO) has announced that NovaWurks, Inc. has been awarded a portion of the Phoenix Technologies contract to develop and demonstrate technologies to copperatively harvest and re-use valuable components from retired, non-operating satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The project will also demonstrate the ability to create new space systems at greatly reduced costs.

The $2.8M contract is the first of many such projects that NovaWurks will receive in this the companies first year of operation.

“We are so pleased to begin our first year with such a significant project. We were confident that with our unique process of affordably developing and delivering space systems, and with our extraordinary team of engineers we could out perform our competition,” said Talbot Jaeger, NovaWurks Chief Technologist and Founder.

Phoenix seeks to demonstrate around-the-clock, globally persistent communication capability for warfighters more economically, by robotically removing and re-using GEO-based space apertures and antennas from decommissioned satellites in the graveyard or disposal orbit. The Phoenix program envisions developing a new class of small ‘Satlets’, or nano satellites, which could be sent to the GEO region more economically as a “ride along” on a commercial satellite launch, and then attached to the antenna of a non-operational cooperating satellite robotically, essentially creating a new space system. continue reading

(via itsfullofstars)

I’m not so sure where this one will lead, But It´s a good step forward, however, needs to be monitored, but not chocked with oversight and watchdogs neither.

futurescope:

DARPA, Venter launch assembly line for genetic engineering

DARPA has launched a program called called “Living Foundries,”designed to apply the conventions of manufacturing to living cells, Wired Danger Room reports.

DARPA has awarded seven research grants worth $15.5 million to six different companies and institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, Cal Tech, and the J. Craig Venter Institute.

“Living Foundries” aspires to streamline genetic engineering for “on-demand production” of whatever bio-product suits the military’s immediate needs, starting with a library of “modular genetic parts.”

The agency wants researchers to come up with a set of “parts, regulators, devices and circuits” that can reliably yield various genetic systems. After that, they’ll also need “test platforms” to quickly evaluate new bio-materials to “compress the biological design-build-test cycle by at least 10X in both time and cost,” while also “increasing the complexity of systems that can be designed and executed.”

[via] [Wired] [image credit: VA]

(via futurescope)