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January 13, 2009

The Darpa Super Technology Military Robot

Filed under: U.S. Elections — Tags: — admin @ 4:55 am

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has for years explored the possibility of using legged robots to carry troop supplies where wheeled robots dare not tread (particularly through narrow mountain passes or up across uneven terrain). Turns out, building a legged robot that’s more of a benefit than burden isn’t so easy.

A robot doggedly moves forward

The 165-pound (75-kilogram) BigDog represents a major step forward for legged locomotion, a problem whose complexity had frustrated engineers, even prompting some to believe it was impossible to solve. How, for example, could a robot know where to place each foot when walking? “The problem seemed too hard; it just didn’t seem like it could be done,” says Sanjiv Singh, a research professor with Carnegie Mellon University’s (C.M.U.) Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh who in 2005 and 2006 worked with BigDog creator Boston Dynamics to develop its computer vision system.

Robot engineers logged some successes in the early 1990s with the Dante 1 and Dante 2 units built to gather gas samples from the Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica. Both robots were “dynamically stable” because at least three of their four legs touched the ground at all times, reducing the likelihood that the robot would fall, says Singh, who contributed to the Dante 1 mission. Dante 2 operated like two overlapping coffee tables (each with four legs) sliding over each other to slink to its destination—slow and steady but not very nimble.

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert pushed the dynamic stability concept further in subsequent years as he moved from the Robotics Institute to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and then formed Boston Dynamics. (The company declined to be interviewed for this article.) Improvements in a legged robot’s agility could only come when the robot could operate each leg independently without sacrificing the machine’s stability. Raibert showed this could be done, Singh says, by creating a robot that was able to sense its different body parts, just like an animal, without the use of cameras or laser sensors.

“You know where your body parts are even when you can’t see them,” Singh says. “When you run, you don’t watch your feet the whole time, but you can tell when you’re slipping, or when the ground is softer than what you expect. There is a way to encode in robots different gaits that are not based on decision making, you just sort of step [and deal with the consequences]. This is basically the genius of what they’ve done with BigDog.”

The biggest challenge in making BigDog work is “you don’t have one joint per leg—you’ve got four of them,” says Robert Mandelbaum, the program manager in DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques (IPTO) and Tactical Technology offices who is in charge of the agency’s biorobotics program, which includes BigDog. “You’ve got to navigate a 16-dimensional space and make sure they’re all working together to keep its center of gravity.” (For more on BigDog, read “Leggy ‘BigDog’ Robot Set to Step Up for the Military.”)

LittleDog’s big challenges

What’s so difficult about creating autonomous legged robots? In short, “everything,” says Tom Wagner, program manager in DARPA’s IPTO. Robots such as 4.9-pound (2.2-kilogram) LittleDog are designed to sense the world around them, make decisions based on the information they gather, and then attempt to take some action based on this information. “There are fundamental research challenges that lie in all of these areas, [such as] whether the system can differentiate tall grass from a barbed wire fence, plan its path accordingly, and then follow along that planned path even when the terrain is uneven and difficult,” he adds. For an autonomous system like LittleDog, all of the difficulties with perception, cognition and action are combined with the engineering challenges posed by the mechanical system.

Put another way, legged robots must be taught how to walk, and different surfaces require different adjustments. It is a lesson that animals pick up at an early age by using their brains to understand what works and what does not during the learning process. (Walking on carpet is a lot different than trying to navigate a slippery tile floor.) “Look at a gazelle—all of its software is in its brain,” says James Kuffner, an associate professor at C.M.U.’s Robotics Institute, one of six teams of robotics researchers (along with the Florida University System’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, M.I.T., Stanford University, the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania) that DARPA asked to improve on the same basic LittleDog quadruped robot platform, built for them by Boston Dynamics. (For more on LittleDog, read “DARPA Pushes Machine Learning with Legged LittleDog Robot.”)

The ultimate robot

A robot’s surroundings can prevent it from doing exactly what it is told to do. When a computer uses artificial intelligence to play chess, there is no uncertainty about where the pieces are and where they can be placed. That is not true in a real-world environment, which has endless possibilities that no amount of programming can ever anticipate. To get around this problem, BigDog does not use cameras or laser sensors to determine its location. Instead, it steps first and then reacts to the terrain. This means it must very quickly determine its position at any given time, compare that with its desired position, and immediately take corrective action based on the difference between these two. “BigDog is reacting at 1,000 times per second as it tries to keep its center of gravity,” Mandelbaum says. “It only finds out about terrain after the fact.”

BigDog does this by sensing the positions of its joints. As it moves, the robot will bend one of its knee joints and then straighten it; if the knee joint fails to straighten, the robot determines that it cannot put weight on that leg without falling over. Using onboard sensors that indicate whether it is tilting left or right or is otherwise unbalanced, BigDog’s software checks its weight distribution and relies on its other legs to regain its balance. The strategy seems to have worked: The robot is able to avoid falling when it is on ice and after being kicked in the side.

In addition to controlling BigDog’s joints, other major challenges are making the robot durable (so it doesn’t break down in the field), efficient (it needs to be able to carry its own fuel and/or batteries in addition to military equipment), and quiet (its two-stroke engine is noticeably loud and may require mufflers).

Gait control—determining when to walk, trot, run, etcetera—will play an important part in BigDog’s success, Mandelbaum says. “When a kangaroo achieves maximum speed, it recovers 93 percent of the energy expended,” he adds. With that sort of return on energy expenditure, BigDog could get away with having a smaller and possibly quieter engine; its current power plant produces a loud, mind-numbing drone when in operation.

In the end, having robots that can walk like animals means building ones that more closely mimic them, both in the way they move and the way they think. A handful of other robotics researchers—including those at Japan’s Kyoto Institute of Technology—have over the past decade been developing quadruped robots, but none appear to have BigDog’s high levels of adaptability, balance and perseverance nor LittleDog’s intelligence and awareness. In the end, the U.S. military wants robots with all of these traits to accompany its troops on the ground.

Black Widow, NSA Spying Computer

Filed under: U.S. Elections, World News — Tags: , — admin @ 4:43 am

The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.’
Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun’s national security correspondent, David Wood: “The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.”

In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.

The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: “The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.”

This gives the word “dragnet” an especially chilling new meaning.

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer, director of its National Security Project, adds that the new statute, warming the cold hearts of the NSA, “implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind.”

Why did Obama vote for this eye-that-never-blinks? He’s a bright, informed guy, but he wasn’t yet the President-Elect. The cool pragmatist wanted to indicate he wasn’t radically unmindful of national security—and that his previous vow to filibuster such a bill may have been a lapse in judgment. It was.

What particularly outraged civil libertarians across the political divide was that the FISA Amendments Act gave immunity to the telecommunications corporations—which, for seven years, have been a vital part of the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program—thereby dismissing the many court cases brought by citizens suing those companies for violating their individual constitutional liberties. This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.

That’s OK with the Obama administration? Please tell us, Mr. President.

Some of us began to see how deeply and intricately the telecoms were involved in the NSA’s spying when—as part of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit—it was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant’s fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio on November 7, 2007, he disclosed: “It’s not just AT&T’s traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T’s network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest [the one firm that refused to play ball with the government], Global Crossing, UUNet, etc.”

December 21, 2008

Obama adopts sober style as he gets ready

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bill Clinton could erupt in red-faced rage while George W. Bush had his Texas swagger. So far, President-elect Barack Obama has ditched lofty rhetoric in favor of a sober style as he prepares to take power.

Obama’s public appearances since he was elected on November 4 have been largely limited to a series of news conferences to announce members of his incoming administration.

In these events, the 47-year-old former Illinois senator has announced his choices and described their tasks in a workmanlike manner, as if weighed down by the economic and national security challenges that await him.

His campaign rhetoric was long on hope and idealism but since defeating Republican John McCain, Obama has focused on the task at hand and avoided straying from his talking points.

“The magnitude of what the country faces would bring down anybody’s rhetoric,” said Dartmouth College political scientist Linda Fowler. “The whole point I think is to not create expectations that the administration can’t meet.”

Americans so far approve. A Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday gave Obama a 65 percent approval rating, meaning he has picked up support from many who did not vote for him.

During the campaign, the candidate and his staff clung to a “no-drama Obama” style. They never got too excited or too upset about the daily combat, instead taking a long view.

That discipline continues.



SELF-CONTAINED

The only time Obama has gotten ruffled was when a Chicago Tribune reporter asked him about the scandal involving Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s alleged scheme to sell the Senate seat Obama had vacated when he won the White House.

“Let me stop you right there because I don’t want you to waste your question,” he said.

By contrast, Clinton could get downright testy with the media, while Bush stayed cool and folksy.

“This fellow is very self-contained,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at George Washington University. “He’s very disciplined. In some ways he’s the un-Clinton.”

In an interview with Time magazine, Obama said he does occasionally get angry but that, “I’m not a shouter.”

When he gets rankled by his staff, he said, he tries to make them feel guilty.
“Hollering at people isn’t usually that effective. Now, there are exceptions. There are times where guilt doesn’t work, and then you have to use fear,” he said.

Obama has methodically put together what most experts consider to be strong economic and foreign policy teams to confront a deepening recession and national security challenges that include fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In doing so, he has repeatedly stressed that Bush is still in charge.

“What he’s trying to do is lay the foundation; to say ‘we know what we’re doing, we’re going to hit the ground running on January 20,’” said Democratic strategist Jim Duffy.

“There’s nothing fancy about it. He’s just taken this period to try to reassure people that ‘I can in fact get something done when I have the power,’” he said.

(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan, editing by Alan Elsner)

December 10, 2008

The New Team of 44th US President Barack Obama - You Decide!

Filed under: U.S. Elections — Tags: , — admin @ 4:40 am

Barack Obama is
relying on a team of advisers
who will help choose the members of a new
Obama administration.
Potential candidates — of the New
US President Barack administration

By www.70news.com 12 december 2008
Author: Alex Truth

Candidates:

Attorney General - Eric H. Holder Jr.

Agriculture - ?

Commerce - Bill Richardson

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Defense - Robert M. Gates

Education -Linda Darling-Hammond - Arne Duncan - Joel I. Klein

Energy - Steven Chu - Jason S. Grumet - Dan W. Reicher - Edward G. Rendell

Health and Human Services - Tom Daschle

Homeland Security - Janet Napolitano

Housing and Urban Development -Adolfo Carrion Jr.

Labor - David E. Bonior

State - Hillary Rodham Clinton
Interior - Raúl M. Grijalva - John A. Kitzhaber
Transportation - Jane F. Garvey
Treasury - Timothy F. Geithner
Veterans Affairs - Eric K. Shinseki

Chief of Staff
:
Rahm Emanuel

National Security Adviser
:
James L. Jones

United Nations Ambassador
:
Susan E. Rice

White House Counsel
:
Gregory B. Craig

White House Press Secretary
:
Robert Gibbs

Defense and Homeland Security
Rand Beers
Max Cleland
Richard J. Danzig
Tammy Duckworth
Jane F. Garvey
John J. Hamre
Anthony Lake
James B. Steinberg

Economics
Xavier Becerra
Michael Froman
Jason Furman
Austan Goolsbee
Jacob J. Lew
Peter R. Orszag
Christina Romer
Laura D’Andrea Tyson
Paul A. Volcker

Education
Linda Darling-Hammond
Arne Duncan
Joel I. Klein
Kathleen Sebelius

Energy and Environment
Carol M. Browner
Steven Chu
Jason S. Grumet
Mary D. Nichols
Dan W. Reicher

Foreign Policy
Dennis C. Blair
Michael Froman
Richard C. Holbrooke
Anthony Lake
Denis McDonough
James B. Steinberg

White House
Lisa Brown
Cassandra Quin Butts
Adolfo Carrion Jr.
Ronald Klain
Jacob J. Lew
Christopher Lu
Phil Schiliro

December 9, 2008

Barack Obama and the World Crisis

Filed under: Featured, U.S. Elections — Tags: , , , — admin @ 8:11 am

Obama and the World Crisis
Western Drive towards World Domination
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