Flying robots play keyboard

It was a good lineup; the TED audience barely had time to put its socks back on before they were knocked off yet again. Better yet, probably to the delight of the investors in the audience, many of the projects are in the process of being commercialized.

Here’s a glimpse what the future may hold:

Flying robots: Vijay Kumar and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania build robots — called “Quadrotors” — that can fly incredibly quickly and intelligently. While sensing their surroundings and movement, the robots can avoid obstacles, right themselves and carry and deposit things. Kumar showed a robot jumping through a flying hoop and drawing a 3-D map by navigating a physical space.

Even better, the robots can work together with decentralized control. They can take actions based on local information while being agnostic to who their neighbors are. Kumar said potential applications for the robots include first response work and construction.

Check out this video made for TED of the Quadrotors playing music (take that, OK Go!)

Professor Donald Sadoway diagrams his liquid metal batteries.

Liquid metal batteries: MIT professor Donald Sadoway is building liquid metal batteries to try to separate power supply from power demand. The goal is to help the electrical power grid do a better job of storing energy, including renewable energy. Sadoway dreamed up the idea of combining magnesium and antimony, a process he diagrammed at TED with chalk on a blackboard. Among other benefits, like cheap materials and long lifespans, liquid metal batteries are built to run hot, so they can handle temperature increases.

Sadoway’s research team — which is now also a company funded by Bill Gates — has created a pizza-shaped 16-inch cell battery with a capacity of 1 kilowatt hour, and it expects to manufacture a version four times as big in two years, Sadoway said.

Mach 20 flight: DARPA has conducted two tests of hypersonic vehicles, the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. Towed into space by rockets, both gliders crashed in the Pacific Ocean, but along the way they generated a great deal of data and more information than ever before about how to fly so fast, said DARPA Director Regina Dugan.

Mach 20 speed would mean traveling from New York to Long Beach, Calif. (where TED is held), in 11 minutes and 20 seconds, Dugan said. The flight would be quick, but it would also be incredibly hot.

A remote-controlled hummingbird flies onstage at TED.

Dugan, whose team conducts research for the U.S. military, was the surprise hit of our D9 conference last year. I imagine her TED video is going to do pretty well, too.

Dugan urged the TED audience to “be nice to nerds” (probably not that tall an order, given this constituency) and told them to ask themselves, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” (She sounded a lot like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who has made “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” a sort of mantra.)

In addition to Mach 20 flight videos, Dugan demonstrated a remote-controlled mechanical flying hummingbird, and showed pictures and videos of a nano-adhesive modeled on geckos, metals that are lighter than Styrofoam and a prosthetic hand controlled by a human mind. She might have the best bag of tricks in the business.

RELATED POSTS:

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• A TED View of the Future: Hypersonic Gliders, Liquid Batteries and Flying Robots
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• TED Tech Preview: Robots, Crowdsourcing and Bill Nye

Photos by James Duncan Davidson for TED.

Preliminary analysis suggests a clean separation of the HTV-2 from the Minotaur IV launch vehicle. Furthermore, an initial review of the data collected during the flight test reinforces that the Minotaur IV launch vehicle again successfully delivered the HTV-2 to its preprogrammed release point, at the appropriate velocity and orientation. This is not an easy task. According to Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, HTV-2 program manager and PhD in aerospace engineering, “What the Minotaur IV did was make a three-point shot from the California coastline into a basket between California and Hawaii.”

Most launch vehicles spend very little time — and perform minimal maneuvers — inside the atmosphere. To deliver the HTV-2 to the required mission start point, the Minotaur IV spent its entire flight inside the atmosphere while safely and reliably performing a series of aggressive banks and turns.

Throughout the flight, more than 20 air, land, sea and space data collection systems were operational. Scientists believe that very high-quality data collected from the combined test range assets will aid our further understanding of this unique flight environment.

Data collection assets also provided visuals of flight from the ground. “We were fortunate to also obtain handheld camera footage of the HTV-2 flight. It gives us a visceral feel for what it means to fly at Mach 20,” says DARPA Director Regina Dugan. A video released last week shows how rapidly a vehicle can travel from horizon to horizon at Mach 20. The video was captured from a handheld camera operated by a crewmember aboard the Pacific Tracker — the first sea-born telemetry collection asset able to visually monitor the HTV-2’s initial entry into the atmosphere.

A second video provides an animated visual comparison between the speeds of the HTV-2 at Mach 20, the F18 at Mach 1.5 and the C-5 at Mach .6.

As a test flight, with the goal to validate current assumptions and increase technical understanding of the hypersonic regime, successful collection of data by the largest collection of test assets ever assembled to monitor a test flight was critical. “Data collection was so important during HTV-2 flight tests that 25 to 30 percent of the total test flight cost was spent on collection assets,” explained Schulz.

It’s from the initial analysis of data collected by those assets that another preliminary data point emerges. “We’ve been working for more than 50 years to identify how to predict when the transition from laminar to turbulent flow will occur. This allows us to assess when a vehicle is about to experience its highest drag and heat load. Initial assessment of the data indicates that our pre-flight models successfully predicted transition to within ten seconds of actual transition point,” explained Dugan. “If this information proves true upon further analysis, we’ll have a better understanding of overall system capability and flight dynamics — how far it can fly with more accuracy.”

In an onstage interview at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference in June, Regina Dugan — who is director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — riveted the crowd by talking about a plane in development that can fly at a speed of Mach 20.

That would be 13,000 miles per hour, or 20 times the speed of sound.

Now DARPA is trotting out the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 for its second and final launch this morning at 7 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

According to the DARPA site, the aircraft will be boosted into the atmosphere via a rocket, and will blast around for 30 minutes. (See the chart below for the info as to how it does so.)

On its first outing, the plane already proved it can maintain Global Positioning System (GPS) signals while traveling 3.6 miles per second. But DARPA also lost contact with the vehicle, which had a controlled landing in the ocean.

The goal of the second flight, said DARPA, “is to validate current assumptions and increase technical understanding of the hypersonic flight regime. More than 20 test assets will collect continuous flight data to achieve this goal.”

Cool.

Here’s a video of the full interview at D9, with DARPA director Dugan talking about the Mach 20 flight and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110810/darpa-thats-mach-20-baby/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110627/darpas-regina-dugan-takes-it-to-mach-20-the-full-d9-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110627/darpas-regina-dugan-takes-it-to-mach-20-the-full-d9-interview-video/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:02:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=91153
From planes that fly across the country in an hour to explosive detection based on a dog’s nose to photoluminescent polymers, I dare you not to be riveted by Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Rocking a leather jacket and a t-shirt with the logo “I-cubed” — meaning “impossible, improbable, inevitable,” which Dugan said is the natural progression of discovery — she said in an interview with Walt Mossberg that DARPA’s “singular mission is the prevention and creation of strategic surprise.”

As you’ll see below, she is one of our nation’s best secret weapons:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110627/darpas-regina-dugan-takes-it-to-mach-20-the-full-d9-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-regina-dugan/ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-regina-dugan/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:00:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=80648 As head of the Defense Department’s best-known research branch, Regina Dugan oversees the agency’s technological engine. Its mandate: “The prevention and creation of strategic surprise.” In a Wednesday morning session at D9, Dugan discussed security on the civilian Internet, explosive detection, homomorphic encryption and how DoD relates to the tech industry. Below, some highlights from the session on what’s sometimes described as “the coolest agency you’ve never heard of.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-regina-dugan/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-director-regina-dugan-live-at-d9/ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-director-regina-dugan-live-at-d9/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:11:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=80849 Dr. Regina Dugan is director of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, where she researches, develops and demonstrates high-risk, high-payoff projects for the current and future combat force, prevents strategic surprises for the U.S., and creates strategic surprises for its adversaries. She took the stage for an interview with Walt Mossberg Wednesday morning at D9. Here’s our live coverage:

9:10 am: Walt takes the stage. “Sometimes people wonder who invented the Internet, and the answer is DARPA.”

Regina Dugan: Well, not me personally.

Once a month we have T-shirt and jeans day at DARPA, Dugan says, explaining her rather casual attire. She says the “I cubed” insignia on her T-shirt stands for “impossible, improbable, inevitable”–the natural progression of things.

Dugan: “Our singular mission is the prevention and creation of strategic surprise.” But she won’t reveal any surprises.

9:13 am: Dugan is the first woman to lead DARPA, and previously was a program manager there. She worked on a project on explosive detection based on a dog’s nose. It involved studying things like photoluminescent polymers, and also traveling to mine removal sites in Mozambique, where they drive vehicles through land minefields to blow mines up. She says there was “a black humor to it.” But, “‘the jumpers you never get used to, though, the ones that explode waist-high and hit the windshield.”

Walt: How does DARPA relate to the technology industry?

Dugan: We’re agnostic, but our currency is national security. We look for ideas in universities, small businesses, large businesses. Project managers join DARPA for three to five years and focus and catalyze bridging of ideas across communities.

Walt: GPS and ARPANET started for security purposes, but evolved elsewhere. Do you still have work now that will have that kind of impact on civilian society?

9:21 am: “It’s no small coincidence that the things we would advance would have cascading benefits for society as a whole….We’re working on technology now that would help us to produce vaccines in tobacco plants, and might have implications elsewhere.”

DARPA pilots have millions of tobacco plants growing where we hijack protein production to make vaccines.

Walt: In Silicon Valley there’s less stigma about failure, but that’s not true in the government. Can you take risks?

Dugan: It’s part of the fabric of the agency, this desire to have a big success. That means they can’t fear failure. We have a hypersonic program at DARPA, Mach 20–could get you back to D.C. in an hour, but it might be a little warm.

It’s a big, big reach. Last year we had a flight in August, and we didn’t make it the whole way, but got nine minutes of Mach 17-plus data that we didn’t have before.

“Failure isn’t the problem, it’s the fear of failure.” The nerve you need for success is the exact same nerve until the moment it’s going to be [a failure].

On working with the rest of the defense department: “The reason we can make big reaches is because others work the evolutionary advances.” We have a gang of five too: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine and DARPA.

Walt: When you look at security issues of the civilian Internet, and the implications for foreign policy, does this make you nervous for national security?

9:30 am: “I think with every opportunity there’s a flip-side risk.” We pay a lot of attention to cyber security and we have a large investment there. We looked back over the state of affairs and observed that if you look at the number of attacks they continue to grow exponentially. We’re in this battle where we’re not convergent with the threat. It’s as if we’re in the middle of the ocean and we’re treading water. If that’s your only strategy, it’s going to be a problem.

We looked at the number of lines of code in security software combined to malware over the last decades. Of the 9,000 different viruses, etc., we looked at, there have consistently been about 125 lines of code.

We have a program called DARPA PROCEED to develop fully homomorphic encryption. So it’s never decrypted. For three decades people used this as an example of something that’s impossible. About a year and a half ago Craig Gentry did this, and then there was another version that was simple and functional. But it’s too slow–about 14 orders of magnitude too slow. If we could accomplish that, it would be a breakthrough for everyone.

9:35 am: Walt asks, have we ever lost war plans that would help an enemy? Dugan says she can’t answer.

Dugan also says policy-making is not her responsibility.

Walt asks if DARPA was asked to help with WikiLeaks. Dugan replies: “DARPA has one of the highest densities of significant, technically trained people in the government. We have 120 program managers that are best in class. And we don’t have any entitlements at DARPA.” But she won’t comment directly on WikiLeaks.

Dugan: We have been investigating this whole prospect of how do you design software and hardware inside a computer so it can evolve based on its own experience with a threat. So it’s modeled after the human immune systems. And it manages small threats in ways invisible to the user.

Dugan says DARPA absolutely talks to companies like Google about new platforms and opportunities. One way to interact with the private sector is to transition technology out to the commercial world and then buy it back.

Audience question: Do you talk about this with the President as well, or just the Defense Department? Dugan: We deal with four-star [generals] and civilian equivalents. I have not personally interacted with the president but I would love to tell him about our hypersonic programs.

9:46 am: Audience question: What’s an example of something you came close to realizing but had to pull the plug on? Dugan: An awful lot of our time is spent on this very difficult task of choosing–how to choose between that which is a good opportunity and that which is a better opportunity. We look for places where we are underinvested. An example: In ISR (Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance) we’re swimming in sensors and drowning in data. So we made some decisions to stop doing some of that to maximize speed.

Walt: The potential for data mining creeps me out.

Dugan: I understand the concern, and it’s something that we take very seriously. I don’t think anybody has great answers but it would be inconceivable given the nature of our work that we wouldn’t be investigating areas that make people uncomfortable. But we know we need to handle so-called “creepiness” ethically and responsibly.

In response to an audience question about talent, Dugan says she likes to call DARPA “the nation’s elite army of futuristic techno-geeks.”

Dugan tells an anecdote about students who came in for 90-day program, had a breakthrough at day 82, decided to keep going and three weeks later found themselves in a forward-operating cell in Afghanistan.

Ending line: Dugan says, “I’m at DARPA to serve my country.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/darpa-director-regina-dugan-live-at-d9/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110531/d9-promo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110531/d9-promo/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 17:45:40 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=79766 If you work in tech, or are a fan of it, the first of the summer blockbusters is here.

At 6 pm PT Tuesday, D: All Things Digital 9 kicks off, beginning three days of candid, no-holds-barred conversation with tech’s thought leaders. Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, DARPA director Regina Dugan, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, and others will all take the D stage in the coming days, and we’ll be covering every moment of their appearances right here with as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference.

Liveblogs, videos, streaming video, attendee interviews, photo galleries–you’ll find them all here in the days ahead.

Join us here this evening for what promises to be the first of several fascinating, unscripted conversations: Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110531/d9-promo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/war-theres-an-app-for-that-but-only-on-android-please/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/war-theres-an-app-for-that-but-only-on-android-please/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:00:44 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=22181 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–DARPA–yesterday unveiled a proposal seeking new apps useful in, well, waging wars.

And–sorry, Apple (AAPL)–it wants those apps to be written for Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100305/war-theres-an-app-for-that-but-only-on-android-please/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091221/cray-darpa-concern-overblown/ http://allthingsd.com/20091221/cray-darpa-concern-overblown/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:45:14 +0000 Tiernan Ray http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=19397 Shares of Cray (CRAY) continue to trade down today as they have for the last month or so, prompting a note from Thomas Weisel analyst Doug Reid this morning reiterating his “Overweight” rating on the shares. Cray’s stock is being held back by concerns the company won’t get its full reimbursement from the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency for R&D expenses on work it’s done for the agency. Investors’ concerns are ill-placed, Reid writes.

Though there’s a delay in reimbursement, Cray likely won’t have to take a lower rate on future reimbursement from DARPA, he believes.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091221/cray-darpa-concern-overblown/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091204/spot-10-balloons-win-40000/ http://allthingsd.com/20091204/spot-10-balloons-win-40000/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:50:35 +0000 Matthew Rivera http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18747 If you look up and see red weather balloons this weekend, take note. You’ve unwittingly entered into a social experiment.

The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, launched 10 balloons, each eight feet wide, around the country as part of its “Network Challenge.” The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000. Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”

But it’s more than a simple test of crowdsourcing, which has been used to build public databases like Wikipedia or in Wired’s recent hunt for Evan Ratliff.

Peter Lee, director of Darpa’s transformational convergence technology office, which focuses on tech and social trends, said that by giving participants an incentive, like the prize money, the contest tests how people organize themselves and how they validate information.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091204/spot-10-balloons-win-40000/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo/ http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:30:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=2312

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your Apple (AAPL) iPhone or computer, originated at the Stanford Research Institute and spun out as an artificial intelligence project financed by DARPA.

In its demo for Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Siri tried to show how it was an alternative to search to get a user things like tickets and pizza–using a combination of innovative technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

Here’s the video of the full D7 Siri demo:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo-2/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:01:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15618

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your Apple (AAPL) iPhone or computer, originated at the Stanford Research Institute and spun out as an artificial intelligence project financed by DARPA.

In its demo for Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Siri tried to show how it was an alternative to search to get a user things like tickets and pizza–using a combination of innovative technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

Here’s the video of the full D7 Siri demo:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090709/siri-the-full-d7-demo-2/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090528/d7-tech-demo-siri/ http://allthingsd.com/20090528/d7-tech-demo-siri/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 19:00:37 +0000 Oliver J. Chiang http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=252

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets it start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next flight out or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

Demo Highlights

Live Blog

• Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus comes out. He introduces himself and the product. It’s been many years of work in the making, he says.
• Siri is about making interactions between the Web and user much simpler. It is focusing on mobile first. He shows the interface on an iPhone with both a Google screen and Siri screen side by side. Dag types in a flight query to both.
• Siri figures out what you mean. Dag asks it a question, compares the results between Siri and Google (GOOG). Walt: Google is terrible! Dag: It gets really interesting when you ask it do a service. Walt: Can’t Bing do this?
• It can take actions on your behalf too. For instance, “Il Forniao [Italian restaurant] reservations tonight for 3 at 5pm.” Siri takes your information and pulls up the reservation function for the restaurant.
• Siri is sort of a giant mashup of services, Dag says.
• It’s “Carol Bartz,” not “Sheryl Bartz,” Dag. Now let’s try asking for a movie. Siri returns the closest location and time for “Angels and Demons.” Siri has an API.
• “Get red sox yankees tickets in boston”–this is one for Walt, says Dag. $1,649–the price is wrong? But Siri delivers. Shows a map of the stadium and seats/tickets.
• Walt: so Google is constantly stupid, we see that now. But is it only good for certain services? How about ballet? Dag: It learns, we break it out into various areas of expertise. Right now, for instance, it doesn’t do TV listings. Siri has a Q&A function. Dag asks a question to the True Knowledge Web service. Kara: Ask it “How old is Kara?” Siri’s answer: “Dag, it’s not polite to ask about women’s ages.” It’s arguably broken Asimov’s Second Law already. Someone get John Connor, just in case.
• Now Dag is demoing on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, speaking into the phone. Voice recognition is pretty good. He tells it: “Find a plumber near my house.” Siri pulls up a list of nearby plumbers. Kara: Do you have to have a voice like yours for it to work? Dag: It gets pretty good, it learns. Kara: I like.
• Walt: Will it be in the App Store? Dag: This summer, and it will be a free app. Walt: Revenue stream? Dag: Tie-ins with the other platforms, i.e., OpenTable. We’ll start with mobile and then build it out.
• Walt and Kara: Thanks; that was really cool.

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