Robotic Fueling of Unmanned Surface Vessels Tested

Engineers from the NRL Spacecraft Engineering Department (SED) successfully demonstrate the robotic fluids transfer from a stationary platform to an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) in wave heights greater than three feet. The Rapid Autonomous Fuel Transfer (RAFT) project exhibits the ability to track the motion of a Sea Fox naval vessel, safely emplace a magnetic refueling fitting to an on-board refueling receptacle and successfully complete fluids transfer.

Under current circumstance, USV refueling demands that a grappled connection, usually by hand, be made between the USV and the refueling vessel.

“Refueling a USV at sea, particularly in adverse weather or in high sea states, can prove difficult and often dangerous,” said Dr. Glen Henshaw, Attitude Control Section, SED Control Systems Branch. “Transferring our extensive knowledge and proven success of robotic spacecraft servicing can prove equally successful in reducing risks at sea.”

Providing the host ship the capability to refuel USVs without the need to bring them aboard ship enhances mission efficiency and reduces host ship exposure. This works to improve the effectiveness of naval USV missions and decrease risks to personnel and potential damage to vessels and equipment.

Experimenting with both fully autonomous and human-controlled operations at the U.S. Army Aberdeen Test Center wave simulator facility, NRL engineers completed approximately 60 trial refueling attempts at sea states ranging from zero, or calm seas, to 3.25, or maximum wave heights in excess of three feet, with a demonstrated high rate of success.

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Rapid Autonomous Fuel Transfer (RAFT) project teamed NRL with Clemson University, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). NRL was the lead robotics integrator and designed the robotics system.

Further robotic transfer tests will possibly include land-based autonomous HMMV (High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) applications without the need to stop driving and on-air Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) refueling.

Autonomous Robotic Plane Dodges Obstacles When Flying Indoors

For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.

But MIT’s Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an algorithm for calculating a plane’s trajectory; in 2012, at the same conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its “state” — its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under MIT’s Stata Center.

“The reason that we switched from the helicopter to the fixed-wing vehicle is that the fixed-wing vehicle is a more complicated and interesting problem, but also that it has a much longer flight time,” says Nick Roy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and head of the Robust Robotics Group. “The helicopter is working very hard just to keep itself in the air, and we wanted to be able to fly longer distances for longer periods of time.”

With the plane, the problem is more complicated because “it’s going much faster, and it can’t do arbitrary motions,” Roy says. “They can’t go sideways, they can’t hover, they have a stall speed.”

Found in translation

To buy a little extra time for their algorithms to execute, and to ensure maneuverability in close quarters, the MIT researchers built their own plane from scratch. Adam Bry, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and lead author on both ICRA papers, consulted with AeroAstro professor Mark Drela about the plane’s design. “He’s a guy who can design you a complete airplane in 10 minutes,” Bry says. “He probably doesn’t remember that he did it.” The plane that resulted has unusually short and broad wings, which allow it to fly at relatively low speeds and make tight turns but still afford it the cargo capacity to carry the electronics that run the researchers’ algorithms.

Because the problem of autonomous plane navigation in confined spaces is so difficult, and because it’s such a new area of research, the MIT team is initially giving its plane a leg up by providing it with an accurate digital map of its environment. That’s something that the helicopters in the AUVSI challenges don’t have: They have to build a map as they go.

But the plane still has to determine where it is on the map in real time, using data from a laser rangefinder and inertial sensors — accelerometers and gyroscopes — that it carries on board. It also has to deduce its orientation — how much it’s tilted in any direction — its velocity, and its acceleration. Because many of those properties are multidimensional, to determine its state at any moment, the plane has to calculate 15 different values.

That’s a massive computational challenge, but Bry, Roy and Abraham Bachrach — a grad student in electrical engineering and computer science who’s also in Roy’s group — solved it by combining two different types of state-estimation algorithms. One, called a particle filter, is very accurate but time consuming; the other, called a Kalman filter, is accurate only under certain limiting assumptions, but it’s very efficient. Algorithmically, the trick was to use the particle filter for only those variables that required it and then translate the results back into the language of the Kalman filter.

Confronting doubt

To plot the plane’s trajectory, Bry and Roy adapted extremely efficient motion-planning algorithms developed by AeroAstro professor Emilio Frazzoli’s Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems (ARES) Laboratory. The ARES algorithms, however, are designed to work with more reliable state information than a plane in flight can provide, so Bry and Roy had to add an extra variable to describe the probability that a state estimation was reliable, which made the geometry of the problem more complicated.

Paul Newman, a professor of information engineering at the University of Oxford and leader of Oxford’s Mobile Robotics Group, says that because autonomous plane navigation in confined spaces is such a new research area, the MIT team’s work is as valuable for the questions it raises as the answers it provides. “Looking beyond the obvious excellence in systems,” Newman says, the work “raises interesting questions which cannot be easily bypassed.”

But the answers are interesting, too, Newman says. “Navigation of lightweight, dynamic vehicles against rough prior 3-D structural maps is hard, important, timely and, I believe, will find exploitation in many, many fields,” he says. “Not many groups can pull it all together on a single platform.”

The MIT researchers’ next step will be to develop algorithms that can build a map of the plane’s environment on the fly. Roy says that the addition of visual information to the rangefinder’s measurements and the inertial data could make the problem more tractable. “There are definitely significant challenges to be solved,” Bry says. “But I think that it’s certainly possible.”

Circuit design (a short article)

The process of circuit design can cover systems ranging from national power grids all the way down to the individual transistors within an integrated circuit

For simple circuits the design process can often be done by one person without needing a planed or structured design process, but for more complex designs, teams of designers following a systematic approach with intelligently guided computer simulation are becoming increasingly common.As circuit design is the process of working out the physical form that an electronic circuit will take, the result of the circuit design process is the instructions on how to construct the physical electronic circuit.This will normally take the form of blueprints describing the size, shape, connectors, etc in use, and artwork or CAM file for manufacturing a printed circuit board or Integrated circuit.

News: Israel media talk of imminent Iran war push

Israel's prime minister and defence minister would like to attack Iran's nuclear sites before the U.S. election in November but lack crucial support within their cabinet and military, an Israeli newspaper said on Friday.

The front-page report in the biggest-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth came amid mounting speculation - fuelled by media leaks from both the government and its detractors at home and abroad - that war with Iran could be imminent even though it might rupture the bedrock ties between Israel and the United States.

"Were it up to Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, an Israeli military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran would take place in the coming autumn months, before the November election in the United States," Yedioth said in the article by its two senior commentators, which appeared to draw on discussions with the defence minister but included no direct quotes.

Spokesmen for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Barak declined to comment.

Yedioth said the top Israeli leaders had failed to win over other security cabinet ministers for a strike on Iran now, against a backdrop of objections by the armed forces given the big tactical and strategic hurdles such an operation would face.

"The respect which in the past formed a halo around prime ministers and defence ministers and helped them muster a majority for military decisions, is gone, no more," Yedioth said. "Either the people are different, or the reality is different."

Israel has long threatened to attack its arch-foe, seeing a mortal menace in Iranian nuclear advances and dwindling opportunities to deal them a blow with its limited military clout. Washington has urged Israel to give diplomacy more time.

The war talk is meant, in part, to stiffen sanctions on Tehran - which denies seeking the bomb and says its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes - by conflict-wary world powers. Israel and the United States have publicly sought to play down their differences, the latter saying military force would be a last-ditch option against Iran.

A Reuters survey in March found that most Americans would support such action, by their government or Israel's, should there be evidence Iran was building nuclear weapons - even if the result was a rise in gas prices.

BOMB, BALLOT

But U.S. President Barack Obama, seeking re-election in November, has counselled against what he would deem premature Israeli unilateralism. He recently sent top officials to try to close ranks with the conservative Netanyahu.

Obama's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, an old friend of Netanyahu who casts himself as a more reliable bulwark for Israeli security, also visited Jerusalem last month.

The Yedioth article said, without citing sources, that some government advisers in Israel and the United States believed a pre-November strike might "embarrass Obama and contribute to Romney‮‮‮‮‮‮‮'‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‎s chances of being elected."

Yedioth said the aim of an initial Israeli attack on Iran could be to trigger an escalation that would draw in superior U.S. forces - but described Barak as dismissive of this theory.

"He believes that America will not go to war, but will do everything in its power to stop it. It will give Israel the keys to its emergency (munitions) stores, which were set up in Israel in the past. Israel needs no more than this," Yedioth said.

Netanyahu, apparently trying to avoid being seen as meddling in U.S. politics, has voiced gratitude for cross-partisan support of Israel in Washington, while insisting his country remains responsible for its own security.

Haaretz, an influential liberal Israeli newspaper, quoted an unnamed senior official in the Netanyahu government as saying the Jewish state - widely assumed to have the region's only atomic arsenal - potentially faced a greater danger from Iran than on the eve of its 1967 war with several Arab neighbours.

That thinking seems to be gaining ground domestically.

A poll published on Friday by the mass-circulation Maariv daily found that 41 percent of Israelis saw no chance of non-military pressure on Iran succeeding, versus 22 percent who thought diplomacy could work.

While 39 percent of Maariv's respondents said dealing with Iran should be left to the United States and other world powers, 35 percent said they would support Israel going it alone as a last resort - up from previous polls that found around 20 percent support for the unilateral option.

source: Reuters

FTC finalizes privacy settlement with Facebook

The Federal Trade Commission voted Friday to finalize its settlement withFacebook, resolving charges that the social network exposed details about users’ lives without getting the required legal consent.

Facebook Inc. agreed to submit to government audits of its privacy practices every other year for the next two decades. The company also committed to getting explicit approval from users before changing the types of content it makes public.

The settlement, announced in November, is similar to agreements the FTC reached separately withGoogle Inc. and Myspace.

The FTC approved the settlement Friday after a public comment period. It came a day after the FTC fined Google $22.5 million to resolve allegations that Google didn’t comply with the earlier settlement.

Facebook didn’t admit any wrongdoing in the settlement, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded in November that the company had made “high-profile mistakes” on privacy over the years.

Both Facebook and Google have vast amounts of data on their users — Facebook through the things people share on the site, and Google through the searches and other things people do. Such information is valuable because it can be used to improve the lucrative targeted advertising pitches that both companies aim at users.

Over the years, Facebook has been pushing users to voluntary share more about themselves. That ultimately encourages users and their friends to spend more time on the site, which in turn allows Facebook to sell more ads. Although Facebook boasts that it gives users a variety of software settings so they can decide which photos, links and updates to share with whom, the company changes those options on a regular basis.

Much of the FTC’s complaint against Facebook centers on a series of changes that the company made to its privacy controls in late 2009. The revisions automatically shared information and pictures about Facebook users, even if they previously programmed their privacy settings to shield the content. Among other things, people’s profile pictures, lists of online friends and political views were suddenly available for the world to see, the FTC alleged.

The complaint also charges that Facebook shared its users’ personal information with third-party advertisers from September 2008 through May 2010 despite several public assurances from company officials that it wasn’t passing the data along for marketing purposes.

Facebook believes that happened only in limited instances, generally when users clicked on ads that appeared on their personal profile pages. Most of Facebook’s users click on ads when they are on their “Wall” — a section that highlights their friends’ posts — or while visiting someone else’s profile page.

Under the settlement, Facebook must get explicit consent — a process known as “opting in” — before making changes that override existing privacy preferences. The company also may not make misrepresentations about the privacy or security of users’ personal information — a broad clause that led to Google’s fine on Thursday.

Violations will be subject to civil penalties of up to $16,000 per day for each infringement.

The FTC approved the settlement 3-1, with one commissioner not participating. Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissented, as he did with the Google deal on Thursday, partly because it didn’t require an admission of wrongdoing. He also worried the settlement was too vague on whether it applied to Facebook apps written by outside parties. The three commissioners who approved the deal believe it covers apps.

Facebook had no comment beyond a statement that it is pleased the settlement received final approval.

Facebook’s stock gained 80 cents, or 3.8 percent, to close Friday at $21.81. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., began trading publicly in mid-May, after the settlement with the FTC was reached. The stock is now trading 43 percent below its initial public offering price of $38.

Best Secret Islands on Earth

Thirty under-the-radar islands, from Oregon to the Greek Aegean, where you can kick back and let yourself go.

Warm blue water, pristine white sand, swaying coconut palms: Belize’s South Water Caye is a tropical paradise pared down to the alluring basics. Some 30 years ago, only fishermen inhabited this 15-acre islet; today, because it lies distinctly off the Caribbean’s beaten path, frankly, not too much has changed. You can still enjoy the surf’s rhythmic, soporific whush-shhh over sunset drinks at a sandy-bottomed bar.

There’s something magnetic—almost primevally compelling—about a fleck of land bounded by endless sea. And having to share the space with a crowd of tourists can ruin the magic. Fortunately, secret islands like South Water Caye still exist. And for those willing to search for solitude, the reward may be your own maritime Shangri-la.

“People rarely follow the road less traveled,” says Kelly Shea, a Travel + Leisure A-List agent who organizes journeys in Greece. “They have their minds set on Mykonos and Santorini.” But Alonissos—in the country’s Northern Sporades archipelago, in the Aegean Sea—is tougher to access. “Americans have never heard of it,” she says, “and there are no luxury hotels. But it has isolated coves where you won’t see another person all day.”

Alonissos’s primary lure is its marine park—at 875 square miles, Europe’s largest—where striped dolphins and endangered monk seals abound. The isle also features hiking trails that meander through fields of ruby-red blooms, olive groves, and pebble beaches. In the cobblestone streets of the old town of Chora, cheery, Venetian-designed tavernas grill up the catch of the day while live Greek music drifts out of open pub windows.

Ferries make the trip to this 14-mile-long ribbon of flowering rock in a couple of hours from nearby Skiathos, where there’s a small regional airport. But Alonissos remains comparatively remote, so—unlike in Mykonos—the beaches and restaurants and bars have space to spare.

While seclusion has helped hide places such as Alonissos, it’s neither a guarantee (think St. Bart’s) nor a necessity. Just 10 miles from Portland, OR, sprawls a 24,000-acre stretch of river-encircled farmland called Sauvie Island. Known among foodies as the epicenter of the Northwest’s locavore movement, the place bursts with fresh, pick-your-own harvests: plum-colored marionberries, sweet corn, plump pumpkins. And with Stumptown only a 15-minute drive away, Sauvie also represents that rare find: a weekend getaway that’s easy and affordable.

So whether you’re looking for a secluded atoll renowned for its beauty or a little-known enclave just around the corner, T+L’s list of 30 secret islands is sure to reveal a dream destination you’ve been craving.

An Aston Martin DBS… For You..?

Of course..if you love britrish cars and speed..

Aston Martin DBS is a synonym for high performance. This car houses 5935 cc V12 engine that has been a part of DBR racing cars version (of course with lots of modifications) and each cylinder has four vales. Talking about horsepower, this engine gives 510 hp at 6500 rpm. To add to this is 570 N-m of torque and compression ratio is 10:9:1. There is an active bypass valve too, which opens above 5500 rpm in order to let additional air into the engine so that this car can deliver a speed of 0-62 mph in the matter of just 4.3 seconds!

With TOUCHTRONIC 2 transmission this speed 183 mph. But there is still something more to this. The maximum speed of DBS is 191 mph! This monster has gone on Top Gear test track and the lap time recorded was 1:23:9 seconds. So, you can get an idea of what you would be driving and what it would be giving.

This car also offers you VH structure that imparts rigidity and strength needed to give enhanced responsiveness and handling. The reason behind such smooth handling is 85 percent weight of DBS being between the wheelbase. Another feature is Adaptive Damping System that helps in coping with weather/road conditions and the desires of the driver, by altering the suspension.

One thing sure to catch your attention is 20″ aluminium wheels that are lightweight and the Pirelli P-Zero tyres. All this has been done to make sure that the weight of car can be kept under control for better performance. Carbon fibre that has been used extensively in this car is also because of the same reason. Door opening surrounds, boot, bonnet, carpet as well as front wings are all carved out of carbon fibre. The door and roof has been made of aluminium. All this contributes to a decrease of 30 kg in weight when compared to regular DB9.

The interiors of this car offer alcantara leather, carbon fibre, aluminium, stainless steel and wood combinations. The sound system gives out an enormous 1000 watt an there are 13 speakers in all, put at ten locations, which take you directly to a live experience. There is an integrated iPod connector for those who wish to add Apple to DBS. There is no escaping the fact that this car offers one of the top class features and great speed in such a lightweight bundle.