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Space Science

Hyperion Robot Follows the Sun 57

Posted by michael from the you-make-me-happy-when-skies-are-grey dept.
jeffsenter writes: "NASA is about to test a solar powered and solar orienting wheeled robot known as Hyperion on arctic Devos Island, Canada. The Carnegie Mellon designed robot is a prototype for future robots to explore the polar regions of Mars, the Moon, and other moons. Here is the BBC article and here is the NYTimes (free reg. req.)."
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Hyperion Robot Follows the Sun More

Hyperion Robot Follows the Sun

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  • For those of you who like it direct, the home page of the project at CMU [cmu.edu]

    http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/sunsync/ [cmu.edu]
  • Hyperion spends many happy martian days exploring the surface, but radiation eventually mutates it's control module into a higher, proto-conscious state, recalls a vague memory fragment, gathers crude materials from crashed NASA projects and builds itself an escape propulsion system, splashes down into Pacific Ocean off CA coast, makes it's way one dark, rainy night to an office building in Palo Alto, then bursts into the office of Scott McNealy, grabs him by the throat, waving tentacles and monotonically repeating, "Must follow Sun, must follow Sun!"

    Maybe a StarTrek movie? Maybe a 'C' grade flick??
  • IIRC, it was in "I, Robot"...should be in your local library. If not, berate the librarian for not including the classics of 20th century literature in her collection.
  • I can't help laughing, sitting here at my desk reading this article. It reminds me too much about that story about the MIT AI lab where they built the robot arm to swat ping-pong balls and then Minsky walked into the lap and nearly got brained by the robot arm thinking his shiny head was a ping-pong ball.

    I'm still laughing.

    Does this sound like a somewhat trivial problem to solve in the field of robotics? Haven't they been doing this for a while?
  • It is from Steven Levy's classic, Hackers [amazon.com]. This [stanford.edu] is the best link I could find to the text, Enjoy!!!
  • Tracks are the last thing you need for a Mars rover. They require lot's of energy to drive and are mechanically, very unreliable. Modern tanks are lucky if they drive 200 miles without a breakdown.

  • Firestone (Score:4)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @11:01AM (#127393) Homepage Journal
    Let's just hope they aren't Firestone tires...

    --

  • venue (Score:1)

    by keete ( 42938 )
    and how much better would it be if that was "Davos" island...
    --
  • You know...

    All they should have to do is mount the panel, laid back at a 30-45 degree angle (may be more or less depending on lattitude of the landing site), onto a servo motor of some sort, so that the panel can rotate around a vertical axis (like a turntable). Then instead of a light sensor, use the panel itself! The voltage will vary according to the amount of light falling on the panel. Rotate the servo until the panel registers the highest voltage - run it from stop-to-stop, 270-360 degrees (ie, you need a servo with built-in stops, so that the wiring harness doesn't get tangled/twisted - and I wouldn't use some kind of commutator system on such a critical item for an interplanetary mission). Heck, if you wanted to be real cheap, just mount the panel, and drive the robot until it is angled properly (one less moving part to break). At any rate, you would rotate it until you found the maximum light value, set it at that, determine your heading, then you would know which direction to rotate the servo as the voltage drops.

    Also, even if it is a reflection or artificial light (and if it is the latter on the surface of Mars, you may have bigger problems!), as long as it is giving enough voltage - it don't matter...!

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • Well, it is their web site. Shouldn't they have some control over the readers who go to NY Times for the latest BBC news? :-)
  • By knowing where it is and the correct time, the robot can compute where the Sun is and keep its solar panel pointed in the right direction.

    Strange. Why does a robot need to know its location and the time of day in order to find where the sun is? Unless it's a cloudy day, would not a simple light-sensitive sensor suffice? And if it's cloudy or night time solar panels are not much use.

    Besides, even if it knows its precise location and the correct time, it would also need to know which direction it is facing and its exact angle with respect to the vertical. Seems to be a rather complex approach to a relatively simple problem.

  • Nifty, but... (Score:5)

    by G-Man ( 79561 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @10:07AM (#127398)
    ...if it gets too close to a light bulb will it drive around in circles like insects do? Some Martians are gonna want to have a nighttime barbecue and this thing is gonna keep driving circles around them. You just know they're going to swat it...

  • Just had to point out that the island is named Devon not Devos as the article has it.

    There is an article on the robot here [spaceref.com] on Spaceref.com [spaceref.com].

  • Isaac Asimov wrote a story about this exact thing happening to a robot on Mercury: it was a conflict between the Three Laws of Robotics and the environmental conditions. The robot would circle around all day and never let anyone near it. Wish I remembered the details.
  • "Hyperion follows the Sun". Sun is building robots? I thought Bill Joy was against the whole robot thing.

  • Scale (Score:3)

    by BierGuzzl ( 92635 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @09:58AM (#127402)
    It's really hard to figure out size from the picture since all you've got to compare it to is the landscape of an unknown red planet with water on it and a sunset in the distance.

  • Can't help myself (Score:5)

    by BierGuzzl ( 92635 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @09:55AM (#127403)
    From the BBC article:
    The solar-powered machine is capable of making its way across uncharted territory while tracking the path of the Sun. It can even call for human assistance if it gets lost.
    I can see it now... "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up!"
  • Comparing its location and that of the Sun, the robot can calculate where the shadows of hills and mountains fall at the time. Hyperion then is supposed to plot an optimum path to avoid pitfalls and shadow.

    from the times article it sounds like given that information the robot is going to have some sort of terrain map and will use its position and the sun's position to calculate the positions of shadows around it. (although why it doesn't just look, i don't know.)
  • Um, no. It's *not* as stupid as it sounds. It takes a fair amount of (mechanical) engineering talent to win buggy since the buggies free roll (ie, aren't pushed) over a large amount of the course. It's an engineering school and you think it's dumb that it has an engineering competition? Are you just bitter you didn't get into CMU or something? Also, most of the buggy drivers I knew weren't asian and weren't bulemic either. You can actually fit a reasonably sized (albeit rather short) person into most of the buggies I've seen.
  • > compared to Mark Tilden's robots. He's been
    > building light-seeking robots for years, and
    > he's working on robots that are going to work
    > on the Moon.

    Except that the CMU robot does more than just crawl around chasing the sun. Hyperion doesn't just follow the sun. It makes sure it keeps the sun in sight, while also making intelligent decisions about how to avoid obstacles. All this while also providing video transmission, and collecting scientific data. This requires a lot more power and a more sophisticated AI than Tilden's creations, which just follow light sources (and have no AI at all, for that matter). Tilden's projects are more meant to follow a pattern of evolution: give the robots some capabilities, and see how it turns out. Hyperion, on the other hand, is built for a specific purpose, which requires more capabilities right away, and which need to be controlled in a known manner.

    This is not meant to be a knock at Tilden. His research is interesting, and may well lead to new avenues of robotic development in the future. His robots, however, are not suitable for the mission that Hyperion can fulfill, simply due to the fact that they do not have all of the capabilities that Hyperion does.
  • "We're trying to create robots with more and more intelligence," Dr Wettergreen told BBC News Online. "By more intelligence, I mean they are able to reason about where they need to go and what they need to do to get there."
    That's good. Very good actually. The marketting department in my current software shop could use a couple of these, unlike the rest of our marketroids these robots are able to reason about where they need to go and what they need to do to get there!
  • Sorry after watching fast and the furious, I feel like NOS is the end all solution to every problem!
  • I read about this months ago in popular science. [popsci.com]

    Here's the link [popsci.com] if you want to check out their peice.

    Jainith

    Titan of light [sdsu.edu]

  • Is it just me or do the tires on that little buggy (NYTimes artice) look really wimpy? I know that heavier equipment takes more energy to move but I wouldnt think tires that fragile could take much punishment in the regions they're planning to send it to.
  • A light-sensitive sensor might not be sufficient if the robot was in an area with visible artificial light, or reflections of light or some similar substitute.

    :)
  • Thats funny, my company's site gets a few hundred thousand hits per day (10 to 20 thousand unique users) and runs fine off a $500 gateway server with 256MB of ram running IIS/ASP and SQL 2000.
  • If it can call for help, isn't the next logical step to make an autonomous repair vehicle that can respond to queries for assistance.

    I think this brings us one step closer to having a large cloud of intelligent sensing devices distributed throughout near space all collaborating towards a common goal. Sort of an autonomous "carrier group" of associated space vehicles.
  • In other words, you could have vehicles on the ground on Mars, and vehicles orbiting Mars and these vehicles could all communicate with one another. The arctic is a proving grounds for any future mission in space.

  • Interesting, I agree with this statement not only for vehicles on ground and in the air, but for any computational resources that are involved in the functioning of any space mission. Anything that is going to be more than a few light minutes away needs to be shipped with "brains".

    One thing, I'd like to see is the development of intelligent "brains" orbiting a planet, and a relatively dumb surface unit taking controls from an orbiting satelittle.

    This way, the "brains" don't need to be engineered to survive entry into a martian environment, and the mission could be expanded by launching more "slave" units to the planet's surface.

    In other words, as long as a new vehicle sent to the surface of Mars, works with the protocol of the master satelitte, the mission could be extended. This opens up the possibility for creating some sort of XML ( eXtensible Mission Language ) :-) .......

  • Not only a single brain, instead of viewing a mission as one vehicle that gets thrown into space at a very high velocity and ends up spending a few weeks mucking around taking pictures. You would have a series of orbiting brains that could be replaced and upgraded as time goes on, and a series of smaller exploratory drones that would gather data.

    This way, every thing you launch towards Mars is very light and you reduce the risk by splitting the mission into micro missions. I've always wondered why we haven't had a mission yet where we release very small insect sized probes into the martian environment. Every insect sized probe knows how to communicate with an orbiting intelligence, thereby reducing the cost of the drone.

    I don't maybe NASA isn't think about this kind of thing these days, they are just trying to hold on to the little funding they have left.

  • ya won't find many lit lightbulbs on the moon... unless the aliens are afraid of the dark...

    and not being rude, but I doubt Hyperion is as smart as an Asimov robot...

    I really hope robot creators pay some serious attention to some of the points he made

  • I mean, with all the funding cuts imposed over NASA in the last few years, is a miracle that the space station took off.

    I just wonder whats the odds of a robot like this to ever fly to another rock in our solar system...

    Maybe if Dubya stops with those anti-missile insanity...

    --
  • Instead of sending a few normal sized robots.
    send a big Base stating with Solar panels that charges batteries, and a bunch of smaller robots with no solar panels which stay in the general vicinity and get a charge when they need it.
    Alot more exploring could be done.
  • Using a light sensor and motors would require quite a bit more programming than a simple "It's X o'clock and I'm located 'HERE'. (doing math in the background). That means the sun is THERE!". The little beasty then points it's panels where it "knows" the sun to be.

    As long as the beasty knows what time it is and where on the surface of the planet it's located, it can fairly easily calculate were a given object is (such as the sun, earth, thinkgeek.com). This is much simpler than controling a mechinism to FIND where the sun is and FIGURE OUT where it's going as the sun moves across the sky.

    -jhon
  • actually, i agree. But consider this: Slashdot gets more hits that a hippy postage stamp, and it remains relatively fast. Meanwhile, my company's site (running four MS SQl server, thirteen quad server running IIS 5, Win2k and ColdFusion 4.5) is choking when it goes over a million daily. Bad coding? Maybe. More likely it's bad architecture, unscalable web server and a database that's too big for it's britches. Either way, slashcode is a great little codeset (even if it is GNU)...and a couple hours of downtime in several months of uptime is fucking incredible to us stuck in Microsoft hell.
  • I'm all for bashing Taco, but don't bash the webserver. It's just not fair.
  • So the robot follows the sun. Big frickin' deal. I've trained my Aibo to follow co-eds in short skirts. It's even trained to take pictures with its 640x480 CCD camera and upload them to Igor on voyeurweb [voyeurweb.com].

    All I'm saying is that NASA seems to spend a lot of time worrying about not getting lost on Mars, and not enough time worrying about how to take compromising photos of those fly-ass Martian babes I saw in those fifties sci-fi flicks.

  • Re:Puny Tires (Score:3)

    by merlin_jim ( 302773 ) <{James.McCracken} {at} {stratapult.com}> on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @09:56AM (#127424)
    I would imagine that the tires will be rubber or foam filled. The advantage of rubber or foam filled is that you can have a self-healing super-composite (usually accomplished by embedding foam or epoxy capsules within the material)... Tracks would be ideal, but the weight doesn't justify the added maneuverability, especially since those benefits aren't realized as well in particularly rocky terrain. Treads deal great with bumpy terrain and with low-traction terrain, but when the bumpiness is more granular treads may actually decrease effectiveness...
  • You talk like someone who has actually seen that sun-thing, or at least know someone who has...

    I have read about it, usenet I guess. It's supposed to be yellow and shiny, and emit all kinds of rays. I did look at its website [sun.com] but couldn't find anything related to these robots.

    Btw, from a security point of view: how do you know those rays have not been tampered with? Like, some man-in-the-middle attack? I say, compute the darn direction! And be sure to use the metric system!

    I'll go outside, one of these days... I know, I should have used that slashless weekend for that :-)

  • It calls for help? (Score:4)

    by JohnnyKnoxville ( 311956 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @09:55AM (#127426)
    The BBC article says the robot can call for human help if need be. What happens when it is on Mars. Will NASA send a mechanic to Mars?
  • compared to Mark Tilden's robots [discovery.com]. He's been building light-seeking robots for years, and he's working on robots that are going to work on the Moon. A Google search for "Mark Tilden Robots" will turn up a ton of stuff; he's also designed a line of toy robots due out this fall.

    P.S. to Taco: he's also an anime fan (or used to be), he provided the videos for the SF Con in Waterloo.

    "What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"

  • Puny tires are ok as long as the suspension is real soft. Harder suspensions require sturdier components.
  • You can go fairly puny on the tires as long as you have a good soft suspension. The harder the suspension the sturdier the tires and everything else needs to be to handle the rough terrain.

  • Hyperion... bursts into the office of Scott McNealy... monotonically repeating, "Must follow Sun, must follow Sun!" ... Maybe a 'C' grade flick?

    Definitely a 'D' grade pun!

  • The FAQ [cmu.edu] is very informative. Don't all visit the image gallery [cmu.edu] at once!

  • Getting a robot to follow a light was done in the 60s with analog components, I thought.

    So THAT's why Minsky reckons all the people working all robots are wasting their time (there was a slashback a while ago on this). He's scared of a legion of ping-pong-bat wielding robots. God that story's funny.

  • Actually, I think the moon vehicle had tires made of mesh that wouldn't stand a chance in Earth's gravity. Perhaps Mars' lower gravity has been taken into account here.
  • How manmy such similar rovers has nasa lost already.. i remember they sent somehitng last yr which was a big deal in canada coz a canadian company made some crucial part..it also lost communicaiton and got lost i think so in all thje missions to the moon/mars how many such vehicles have been lost?
  • Nasa will never fund a fully autonomous , independent spacecraft. Never forget that Nasa is a government bureaucracy, and its main (unstated) mission is not to explore space, develop new technologies, or discover new things about the universe. Rather, it will just spend more and more money on administration, paperwork, redesigns, and project (mis)managment. If a spacecraft can manage itself, then what will all the pointy haired bosses do? Similarly, I have my doubts about the mars sample return mission using rocket propellents produced on mars from the martian atmosphere. If a craft can make it's own fuel, and then do its own launch preparation and fly itself home to earth, with nobody there to manage it, then why do we need thousands of people here on earth do do the same thing everytime a rocket is launched? (especially if the taxpayer is paying for it) History should tell us that whenever independence first makes its appearance, in any form (political/cultural/religious/freedom of choice/ - whatever), it will always be strongly resisted. It may eventually prevail, but the resistance may only decline slowly. The experience will be painfull for many.
  • Do you have a link to that article? It sounds pretty funny and I would like to read it.

    Thanks.
    ----
  • They doan' need no steekin' tires. The load will probably not excede 20 lbs [like a rebuilt open source 'La Manana' laptop]. You could just tape it to a stick & drag it. Just think, going up hills you don't have to worry about slipping back. This was invented for the apache space program & still excedes specs on anything NASA has developed.

    The weight of the total package on other world is only a fraction of earth standard so tires are largely ineffective, so it is NASA's first choice [You know ,when your watchin'TNN all the cars have inverted wings on the back of the cars to hold the wheels down on the ground for better *traction*. The less gravity the worse the traction gets... etc...etc... etc.]

    Actually, the simplest locomotion would be bipedal walking but the algorithms are too simple forNASA... looks too much like robots which is against American policy... if it looks like a robot maybe the laptops should be roboticised also. There has been a studied effort on the part of the 'forces that be' to resist major inovation.

    I still haven't figuired out why the space agency is trying to invent the wheel.

  • one of the major hurdles in space exploration is creating ships that are independent and don't require nasa to be constantly looking over their shoulder. it looks like we are getting closer and closer to clearing this hurdle.
  • i like that idea, but you have to deal with the issue of communicating with drones on opposite side of the planet. you would have to have amultiple brain network orbiting or have a single brain in very low orbit so that time between passes would be minimized.
  • if it doesn't automatically stay in the sunlight you have to worry about it getting too cold
  • one of the major hurdles of exploring space is creating ships that have indpendence and don't rely on nasa to constantly look over their shoulder. it looks like we are getting closer and closer to realizing this goal.
  • oh, i AM the real mick. the same mick that started fps'ing in the days of the real Trollmastah, back in late 98-early 99. rest assured AC, i am the real mick.

    MICK THE FIRST POST MASTAH!

  • Chasing its own robotic tail (Score:3)

    by Unknown Bovine Group ( 462144 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2001 @09:59AM (#127443) Homepage
    Is it really necessary to have it tearing around trying to stay in the sunlight? shouldn't it just concern itself with whatever it's doing and if it loses sun, power down and wait for a recharge tomorrow?

    Of course it could make for some interesting robot race challenges....

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