DARPA has put up an interesting job posting. It involves a new research and development program called ARM. DARPA wants to build a robot that can use its arms to autonomously grasp objects.

The robot should be able to “hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand” without any help from humans. The human who is the target should be able to leap up in the air, paddle his feet furiously and then zip away like Bug Bunny.

Thanks DARPA. You sure don’t make it easy to sleep at night.

[PP]

If you don’t freak out at the sight of BigDog, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Imagine how enemy soldiers will feel, seeing it walk toward them. And soon they will meet.

Darpa has finally approved the contract for Boston Dynamics’ LS3 (Legged Squad Support System) for the US Marines. Like BigDog, it will travel autonomously for 20 miles without needing to refuel, carrying 400 pounds of equipment for the soldiers in its squad.

[Gizmodo]

Yeah, cyborg beetles. RC cyborg beetles. It’s the work of a team at UC Berkley, who have successfully wired beetles up with electrodes, allowing them to be enslaved remotely.

“We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radioequipped miniature neural stimulating system,” the team reported in a paper titled Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. “The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery.”

Guess who is sponsoring their work. DARPA of course. Soon wars may be fought with wave upon wave of cyborg beetles, with the enemy crying, “Get it off me! Dear god, get it off me!”

[Dvice]

DARPA has done it again. This time with a tiny 10-gram robot that flaps its wings like a bird. It’s the first wireless robot this tiny that can also carry its own power supply. Bad guys will be trying to swat this nano-bot like a mosquito one day soon.

They still have to work out some of the finer details of course. It’s better than a mosquito in wind, but still can only withstand breezes of around 5 mph. It also has some endurance limitations. It can only stay in the air for 20 seconds before the batteries have to be recharged.

Maybe next it can zap bad guys with an electric jolt and kill itself much like a bee.

[Dvice]

DARPA is like that weird kid all alone on the playground, torturing insects. All we can really do is steer clear of him and stay the hell away. The kid is always creepy and always busy. Check this out. Cornell researchers have implanted electronic probes into tobacco hornworms. This way when the worms go through the pupae and chrysalis stages, the moths can be controlled.

This scenario is part of DARPA HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect MEMS). They expect that these zombie bugs can be used in security applications.

[Robot Snob]

Military researchers have built a tiny drone that looks and flies just like a hummingbird. Even your garden isn’t safe now. Next time you see that pretty hummingbird sucking nectar from your flowers, you may just think twice about how cute it is.

This thing flaps its robotic wings to stay in air like the real thing. So far, the bird has only stayed aloft for 20 seconds at a time, but it has shown its capability as a spy already. AeroVironment doesn’t just want the little drone to fly like a bird but also to look like one. So it has been given another $2.1 million(By DARPA) to build a humming bot version 2.0.

[New Launches]

The end is near. DARPA’s Self-Explanation Learning Framework (SELF) program “seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction.” The first thing that comes to mind is…Is everyone at DARPA F’ing nuts?

You can easily imagine a robot helping to build itself. It’s almost as real as me pooping a little in my pants when I learned of this.

“The system might know the requirements for various tasks in its repertoire, and it may try to perform those tasks to verify functionality.”

Eh…I think I’ll give myself a laser. Maybe a hand that shoots missiles. I’ll also need something to rip the rectums from humans and scoop out their eyeballs. I’m glad my creator had the foresight to let me go all Build-A-Bear on myself.

[Technabob]

Darpa is too lazy to train their killer cyborg dogs themselves so they are on the lookout for machines to do that for them. “Automated mammalian training devices” are the latest idea from Pentagon research arm Darpa. The agency is seeking proposals to create a portable gadget that “automates the training of complex behaviors in animals without human intervention.”

[Wired]

DARPA is all happy today. They announced a minor milestone in their effort to develop programmable matter, something they’ve been working on for a while, dreaming of a liquid metal Terminator that they can control. Control for a little while at least. They want:

A material that can perform several operations in sequence: upon activation by an external signal, decode and propagate instructions; translate information into action, transport particles and assemble shapes; interlock particles to form an object; perform error-checking and encode final state information, again activated by external signal; and disassemble into the starting material.

The milestone is this. Each of the five university groups working on the problem have confirmed a theoretical approach as viable and developed mathematical models critical for the next phase of research. The pictures above are sample shapes formed by MIT’s millimeter-scale autonomous microsystem particles.

[Robots.net]

The DEKA robotic arm is basically “a DARPA funded project intended to restore functionality for individuals with upper extremity amputations.” It’s used via brain control, with only one day of “training” necessary. This is one of the best out there if not the best. The video is amazing.

[Techeblog]