darpa

In the world of robotic cars, human relations can be tricky.

The organizer of an upcoming "Robotic Grand Prix" in Long Beach, Calif., has retracted the title of its event after representatives from the Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University robotic racing teams took issue with how the event was being marketed. On Monday, the Toyota Grand Prix issued a press release that said autonomous cars from Stanford, CMU, and Lehigh University--finishers of last year's DARPA Urban Grand Challenge--would race against each other again later this month.

Jim Michaelian, CEO of the Grand Prix Association of Long … Read more

Further details about this event have emerged. Please refer to this story for more information.

The robotic stars of last year's DARPA Urban Grand Challenge, an autonomous car race, will have a rematch at the Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach, Calif., later this month.

This time, their competition will be solely about speed.

"Boss," an autonomous Chevy Tahoe from Carnegie Mellon University and winner of the $2 million Urban Grand Challenge, will compete once again against "Junior," a robotic Volkswagen Passat from Stanford University, which took second place in the contest. The two teams, … Read more

What's half deer, half dog, and half robot? Give up? It's Boston Dynamics' DARPA-funded "BigDog," a four-legged, all-terrain creature designed to go anywhere, carry heavy loads, and, presumably, perform dangerous tasks.

Watch the video on Gizmodo of the BigDog prancing its way up a wooded hillside, regaining its footing on icy asphalt, and clambering over obstacles: "New Video of BigDog Quadruped Robot Is So Stunning It's Spooky"

DARPA-funded researchers are racing to develop an energy-efficient, heat-resistant mechanical nanocomputer that could be used in everything from cars and toys to dishwashers and machine guns.

Mechanical computers depend on millions of microscopic moving parts instead of solid-state transistors and other components to push the electrons to perform calculations. Gates, pillars, levers, and pistons create the binary switches, which compute the ones and zeroes that drive modern computers, explains the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Because they are more rugged and can perform at much higher temperatures than conventional silicon chips, scientists … Read more

Update July 19, 2008: Escape from Berkeley is now scheduled for Oct. 10-13, 2008.

If you're a regular reader of Geek Gestalt, but not of its sister blog, Green Tech, I thought I'd point you to an entry I just posted there about what sounds like one heck of a cool event scheduled for this summer.

The so-called Escape from Berkeley race will task contestants with getting their non-petroleum-based fuel vehicles from the famously liberal Bay Area city to the famously outrageous Sin City, Las Vegas, over the July 4 weekend.

Part Burning Man, part Power Tool Drag Races, … Read more

DARPA is close to awarding a contract for the initial development phase of an unmanned aircraft capable of staying aloft for five years at a time, according to the aviation magazine Flight.

"Aviation has a perfect record--we've never left one up there. We will attempt to break that record," DARPA Vulture program manager Daniel Newman told Flight Global. "We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft."

Call it a "persistent pseudo-satellite capability in an aircraft package"--DARPA does. Documents from the R&D agency envision the Vulture … Read more

The mission statement at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is pretty much this: Look beyond the cutting edge, throw money at whatever's out there (and we do mean "out there"), and see what happens. Case in point: DARPA's budget request for the government's fiscal year 2009, in which the agency is asking for $3.29 billion to investigate, among other things, laser-guided bullets, robotic vehicles for land, sea, and air, and a project called Synapse, for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics--chips that mimic gray matter.

For more, see this post on Wired'… Read more

When attached to a nanotube delivery system, the same stuff that keeps Wonder Bread fresh is 5,000 times more effective than anything available in preventing radiation sickness, according to a trio of Texas researchers.

Jim Tour of Rice University and two colleagues from other Houston health institutions have found that common food preservatives BHA and BHT prevent radiation sickness in mice. Exposure to radiation can disrupt cells by "freeing molecules from their chemical bonds and allowing them to run amok inside the nucleus," the Houston Chronicle reported.

The "free radicals" destroy the cell's DNA, … Read more

The University of Texas at Dallas has entered the race to produce a more powerful semiconductor using a $1.75 million grant from DARPA to develop a microchip that is "faster than anything" on the market today.

The new technology will still be silicon-based but will use photons rather than electrons to speed things up, according to a UT press release.

"This research is intended to produce a completely new class of components that could have a revolutionary impact on information engineering," Professor Duncan MacFarlane said. "The photonic integrated circuit (PIC) we're developing will … Read more