Gadgetory

we're standing here on Mars with NASA's Curiosity rover okay we're not really on Mars and this is really curiosity's sister robot but we are at curiosity's home base NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California and while Rovers like this one have captured the imagination of humans across the planet scientists at JPL have even more ambitious goals to one day have more than a billion human beings in space my name is Scott davidoff I'm responsible for delivering the user interfaces for the systems that command the JPL spacecraft and the challenge is that the next generation of Rovers and exploration vehicles are going to be tasked with doing many many things as opposed to just one thing I mean it sounds like you're describing basically remote-controlled robotic avatars for people well sometimes that's what it's like though the avatars aren't always like humanoid and so the mapping isn't always as real as natural as a hand to a hand so what are the biggest challenges your you're facing right now trying to translate human embodiment to robotic body probably the hardest is the delicacy of certain manipulations and then being able to not have a full picture of the environment so what are you doing with oculus when I show you three demos today the first one is seeing through the eyes of the robot so this is the first experience we're showing you basically stereo paired image warped on to a cylindrical display you can see your your arm you can see the pebbles on the distance the more textured environment the more really pops out at you from something like this it's much easier to discern whether the objects in front of you or it's the left or behind you as opposed to just looking at it in a 2d window this is incredible detail from these photos hopefully you give good feel what it's like to be on lunch makes me want to take a hike here this is an international space station so I've taken all the u.s. modules put them in here all right so I'm looking at this robot now that's Robonaut 2 it's a humanoid robot astronaut that's on the space station to have help astronauts do work that's a copula it's one of the windows to look outside well hang outside this is the entire space station there you're looking at Earth if you swim around and you see the son of the moon this one's a little simpler we're going to start you out at Gale Crater again but this time it's a 30 interactivity environment this is one of the ones where we think multiplayer could be really cool is if a lot of people could be in the same environment exploring that environment alongside this robotic avatar which is our Rover it's very cool I can just feel my stomach drop when I go up and down so we're standing here in front of one of the athletes one of the triathletes actually athlete is a six-legged vehicle it's actually two robots that combine together to make one six legged vehicle right now we have it in the single three legged position it was originally designed as a is a multi-purpose robot to do things like cargo offloading on the moon so if you imagine you have a lunar lander that comes down and your cargo is usually on top of the lander you need to get that cargo off the top the two triathletes can come up alongside take that cargo up move it to wherever you want and put that down what that enables you to do is to build a larger base on the moon from smaller pieces one of the challenges of you know landing on an asteroid is that bastard's have very low gravity and if you come down and as you come to a close approach if you use your thrusters to slow yourself down you can kick up all kinds of dust and debris and that will you know confuse your sensors cause all sorts of trouble the other thing is that because they're low gravity as you come down you have a tendency to really really bounce and these bounces can have really long periods and asteroids are generally on these these really long periodic orbits of the Sun so you don't have that much time to do your science because if that asteroids on a 60 year trajectory you've gotta land on that asteroid do your science and get off otherwise you're not coming back for another 60 years believe it or not landing a robot on an asteroid isn't the most difficult problem nASA has to solve how do you control a robot that's so far away that it might take as much as 20 minutes for a signal to region we have systems that help an operator to predict what the robot is going to do and understand the uncertainty in what it might accomplish that's that uncertainty is being introduced by that delay but still accomplish their goals and inefficient fashions this is a prototype that we've designed to allow people to control robotic spacecraft like the athlete more intuitively what's sort of unique about this demo is that it's rendering a 3d model in stereo much like if you go to a 3d movie you can see how things pop out at you but one of the differences is it's actually tracking where I put my head so it creates a much more holographic feel and I have a pen here that's also tracked and so I can reach into the space and I can actually grab the robot and manipulate it around I can grab it slims so we have joint by joint control so I can sort of fly the robot around and I can grab a single limb and I can move a single joint you click on its head and then click on the ground you can actually laser things on the ground so no demo would be complete without being able to fire the laser I'm feeling good about this projector name's Riley I've Ron and I've been an intern here for now there's my fourth summer and you developed this iphone app which makes this thing yeah exactly so last summer that was my project they said to me well controlling this thing is kind of hard right now and kind of confusing it takes a lot to keep people are a lot of different parties who have an interest in driving over around so making it you know easy enough for like a media correspondent to drive is is a good is a good thing for us to do so they said what's good choice while an iphone is very ubiquitous the lab hands them out if you don't have one so you can you can get one real easily so we use the iphone this so platform if you guys have any positions open for over pilots let me know this is my resume so this is one of our robots it's the Lemur robot and it has these micro spine claws use that to climb rocks it's the world's first rock climbing robot this is a micro spying wheel each of these little limbs here or legs has a hook in it and those hooks grasp asperities in the surface a little pips ledges bumps protrusions and allow the robot to grip that surface and and climb the Lemur robot is related to the to the two-wheeled climber the difference here is that this robot lemur is designed to climb in any orientation so it goes upside down it goes on vertical walls and we're also talking about using it for asteroids which would be zero gravity so that's kind of how they're related this one is we call it a power tool for astronauts you know drilling in microgravity is a really hard problem because the normal drills that we would use on Mars are not able to be used in microgravity there's no weight on bit you know normally when you drill you're pushing into the surface so on an asteroid with no gravity you're just as likely to push yourself away as you are to push force onto the bit and it gets even worse when you turn the drill on you're just as likely to start spinning around the drill as the drill bit is to start spinning on the rock you know this is kind of an early-stage prototype of what astronauts might one day use that add an asteroid to acquire samples obviously there's a lot of work to do before a billion humans are controlling robotic avatars and distant planets but the work is beginning here and someday you might be an observer in space using technologies like those you might already have in your home including the kinect the oculus rift or the leap motion and if NASA's vision comes true it won't just be robots or humans exploring space and dependently it will be an intimate partnership between two