Robots developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working everywhere and can move without human assistance in a variety of settings, according to this article from the MIT News Office, "Robots serve humans on land, in sea and air." For example, the famous PackBots were conceived at the MIT and are now used by the U. S. Army in Afghanistan and in Iraq. But engineers and robotic designers at MIT also are developing submarine-like vessels to help the U. Navy in mine warfare and battlespace preparation. And others are building 'intelligent' aircrafts, such as a 'robochopper' which would be better suited than surface robots to move in chaotic urban environments. Read more, especially about their 'robotoddler'.
Please read the article mentioned above to learn more about robots working on land. This section mainly talks about Professor Rodney Brooks, known for the humanoid Kismet robot, but also for being one of the founders of iRobot, which produces the Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner for home use and the PackBots used by the U. Army.
But don't miss this page about Rodney Brooks pet projects and this other one about the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) which plans to develop prototypes of autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots for exploration on the Moon and Mars.
Now, let's go in the sea to check what robots can do there.
Professor Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, director of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory (AUV Lab), envisions "robots filling the vast void of oceans, roaming around, observing, communicating, and reporting back." His lab has spent the past 15 years developing AUVs that have carried out missions ranging from surveying shipwrecks to testing underwater navigation and communication software.
The lab developed the Odyssey class of submarine-like vessels, which evolved into AUVs produced commercially by Bluefin Robotics, a company that spun out of the AUV Lab and still works closely with it. BlueFin vehicles aid research, survey offshore oil fields, and assist the U.
If you want to know more about the Odyssey class of submarine-like vessels, here are two links to its history and to a photo gallery.
One difference between humans and computers lies in the relative strengths in their respective abilities to understand symbolic relationships and to learn facts. A computer can remember billions of facts with extreme precision, whereas we are hard pressed to remember more than a handful of phone numbers. On the other hand, we can read a novel and understand and manipulate the subtle relationships between the characters—something that computers have yet to demonstrate an ability to do. We often use our ability to understand and recall relationships as an aid in remembering simple things, as when we remember names by means of our past associations with each name and when we remember phone numbers in terms of geometric or numeric patterns they make. We thus use a very complex process to accomplish a very simple task, but it is the only process we have for the job. Computers have been weak in their ability to understand and process information that contains abstractions and complex webs of relationships, but they are improving.
—Raymond Kurzweil, U. S. scientist, engineer. The Age of Intelligent Machines, ch. 1, MIT Press (1990)
Finally, let's look at the sky, for which another group is developing intelligent aircrafts, such as this helicopter.
Here is how the MIT's "robochopper" was flying a while ago (Credit: David Dugail/MIT).
Eric Feron and his research group in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems are working on several projects that may lead to more airborne robots. Those projects include intelligent aircraft, communication among multiple air vehicles, and automated takeoff and landing.
The group has already made progress in two of these areas. The "robochopper," a model helicopter outfitted with a sophisticated instrumentation box, can perform autonomous aerobatic maneuvers at the flip of a remote-control switch. Feron, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, also led the development of an intelligent aircraft guidance system that allows a pilot in one airplane to guide another unmanned airplane by speaking commands in English.
Here are two links to the 2002 announcement of this robotic helicopter, "MIT's robotic helicopter makes first acrobatic roll" and to a gallery of pictures and videos on Aerial robotics.
And for more information about all these MIT robots, you can read the full March 2, 2005 issue of MIT Tech Talk (PDF format, 8 pages, 824 KB). It contains two articles, "Robot’s gait mimics toddlers’" (Pages 1 and 4), and "Robots serve humans on land, in sea and air" (Page 4).
Here is how 'Toddler,' a walking robot developed at MIT, takes a step (Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT).
A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological life, undergo a process of evolution. With the passage of time, newer and more sophisticated varieties of apparatus, organization, and technique rise to replace older, simpler varieties. New technologies enter into areas of social existence where they had not been previously. Just as Darwin observes that the various species of life on the Galapagos Islands tend to specialize and diversify into particular biological niches, so it is that forms of technology continually spread into fresh areas of social utility. In both number and diversity the kinds of technical artifice available to human societies increase.
—Langdon Winner, U. S. political scientist, educator. “Engines of Change,” Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, MIT Press (1977)
Finally, if you're interested by this 'toddler' but don't want to load a PDF document, you also can read "Teams build robots that walk like humans" (February 17, 2005, but updated on March 2, 2005).
Sources: Lauren J. Clark, School of Engineering, MIT, March 2, 2005; and various websites at MIT and elsewhere
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Engineering
Military Applications
Robotics
Transportation.