Robots, selfies and remote connectedness … It may be a lonely place to celebrate an anniversary, but on June 24th, Curiosity made the universe that much smaller – and robots that much more ubiquitous – by snapping a selfie to mark its one year anniversary on planet Mars. This photo will surely go down in history as a sign of the times.

To help celebrate Curiosity’s achievements, we’ve compiled a brief list of links, articles and videos that show just how far the Mars mission has come.

NASA press release reviews the first Martian year and the advances of MSL’s very succesful mission so far.

You can access all the photos (in RAW format also) from JPL’s dedicated MSL website as well as read NASA’s Curiosity webpage.

We covered Curiosity’s mission since its launch on November 2011 up until now, you can access all our articles here:

Robohub – MSL Curiosity articles

PS. Something a little more fun, in the tumblr blog named Martian Wiggles you can find a compilation of animated gifs made from the raw images provided by JPL like the following showing images from Left Navcam, during Sol 283:

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Space Robotics coverage on Robohub 
• Robot selfies, and the road to self-recognition
• Space mining: Robots in the final frontier
• Robots Podcast: Space business

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Curiosity Heading for Mount Sharp, during the 329th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (July 9, 2013). The turret of tools at the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm is in the foreground, with the rover’s rock-sampling drill in the lower left corner of the image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Tuesday, Jan. 7, 10:30AM – 12PM Eastern Time:  NASA and the Smithsonian team up to facilitate two panel discussions on Mars robotic and human missions. Held in NASM’s Moving Beyond Earth gallery, participants will discuss the MER program and its scientific successes. Participants also will provide updates on the agency’s activities to advance a human mission to Mars in the 2030s.

Panel I: Moderator – Pamela Conrad, Curiosity rover scientist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

• John Grant
• Steven Squyres
• David Lavery, program executive, Solar System Exploration, NASA HQ

Panel II: Moderator – James Green, director, Planetary Science, NASA HQ

• John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA HQ
• Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology, NASA HQ
• John Connolly, acting Chief Exploration Scientist, NASA HQ
• Alyssa Carson, NASA Passport Winner and student from Baton Rouge, LA.

Ask questions via Twitter using the hashtag #10YrsOnMars and #MER10.

Tweets about “#10YrsOnMars, OR #MER10 lang:en”

Why aren’t there more intelligent mobile robots in real world applications? It’s a good question, and one I’m often asked. The answer I give most often is that it’s because we’re still looking for that game changing killer app – the robotics equivalent of the spreadsheet for PCs. Sometimes I place the blame on a not-quite-yet-solved technical deficit – like poor sensing, or sensor fusion, or embedded AI; in other words, our intelligent robots are not yet smart enough. Or I might cite a not-fully-developed-capability, like robots not able to cope with unpredictable (i.e. human) environments, or we can’t yet assure that our robots are safe, and dependable.

Last week at euRathlon 2013 I realised that these answers are all wrong. Actually that would be giving myself credit where none is due. The answer to the question: why aren’t there more intelligent mobile robots in real world applications was pointed out by several of the presenters at the euRathlon 2013 workshop, but most notably by our keynote speaker Shinji Kawatsuma, from the Japan Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA). In an outstanding talk Kawatsuma explained, with disarming frankness, that, although his team had robots they were poorly prepared to use those robots in the Fukushima Daiichi NPP, because the systems for deployment were not in place. The robots are not enough. Just as important are procedures and protocols for robot deployment in an emergency; mobile infrastructure, including vehicles to bring the robots to the emergency, which are capable – as he vividly explained – of negotiating a road system choked with debris (from the Tsunami) and strained with other traffic (rescue workers and evacuees); integration with other emergency services; and, above all, robot operators trained, practised and confident to guide the robots through whatever hazards they will face in the epicentre of the disaster.

In summing up the lessons learned from robots at Fukushima, Shinji Kawatsuma offered this advice – actually it was more of a heartfelt plea: don’t build robots, build robot systems. And, he stressed, those systems must include operator training programmes. It was a powerful message for all of us at the workshop. Intelligent robots are endlessly fascinating machines, with all kinds of difficult design challenges, so it’s not surprising that our attention is focussed on the robots themselves. But we need to understand that real world robots are like movie stars – who (despite what they might think) wouldn’t be movie stars at all without the supporting cast, camera and sound crews, writers, composers, special effects people and countless other departments that make the film industry. Take the Mars rover Curiosity – an A-list movie star of robotics. Curiosity could not do its job without an extraordinary supporting infrastructure that, firstly, delivered her safely to the surface of Mars and, secondly, allows Curiosity’s operators to direct her planetary science exploration.

So, to return to my question why aren’t there more intelligent mobile robots in real world applications. The answer is plain. It’s because without supporting systems: infrastructure and skilled operators integrated and designed to meet the real world need, a robot – regardless of how innovative and intelligent it is – will never make the transition from the lab to the real world. Without those systems that robot will remain no more than a talented but undiscovered actor.

Hans-Arthur Marsiske, The use of robots in Fukushima: Shinji Kawatsuma Interview, Heise online, 25 September 2013 (in German).
K Nagatani, S Kiribayashi, Y Okada, K Otake, K Yoshida, S Tadokoro, T Nishimura, T Yoshida, E Koyanagi, M Fukushima and S Kawatsuma, Emergency response to the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants using mobile rescue robots, Journal of Field Robotics, 30 (1), 44-63, 2013.

Over the past two decades, robotic planetary exploration has generated an incredible wealth of knowledge about our neighbors in the Solar System. We now realize that celestial bodies within our reach can provide resources such as water, minerals, and metals, essential for sustaining and supporting robotic and human exploration of the Solar System. It is only matter of time before “living off the land” exploration enabled by in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) becomes a reality.  The Solar System offers almost unlimited resources, but the difficult part is accessing them. Thus, if the cost of mining and processing can be reduced, some of the minerals that are in high demand on Earth could in fact be brought back and sold for commercial gain.

In general, there are at least three bodies that have been seriously considered for resource exploitation. These include our Moon, Mars, and near-Earth asteroids. The Moon offers resources that could be used in-situ (such as water), and because of its proximity to Earth, other resources (especially rare Earth minerals) could be returned to Earth and sold. Resources on Mars could be used to sustain a human (and robotic) presence, and to fuel launches back to the Mars orbit and to other destinations. Asteroids are relatively easy targets because of their low gravity well, but the micro-gravity environment makes mining and mineral processing extremely challenging.

Knowledge of the vast resources in space has triggered an explosion of interest in space mining, especially over the last few years. NASA is working on several feasibility studies and architecture concepts for resource utilization from the Moon, Mars and asteroids. (Honeybee Robotics is contributing to some of these, including the Robotic Asteroid Prospector.) In 2009, NASA’s National Commission on Space study (PDF) argued that extracting resources from the Moon and asteroids will be essential for further space exploration and colonization. Private firms have jumped in with the goal of bringing space riches down to Earth. And with contests such as Lunabotics and the NASA Sample Return Challenge bringing new talent into the sector, training and education have expanded significantly.

What’s Honeybee’s role in this? We’ve been working on space mining and resource processing technologies for the past 25 years, providing feasibility studies, systems analysis, unique solutions and technologies, hardware development, test results, and flight systems for NASA and other space partners. Some of the approaches could be applied to both the Moon and Mars, but asteroid mining, because of the extremely low gravity field, is in its own category. Potential technologies would have to be thoroughly tested before they could be integrated into the asteroid mining spacecraft. Of course, the only true way to test new technologies is on a mission itself! The Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) recently determined that it would be feasible to bring a 7 meter, 500-ton asteroid near Earth by 2025, with asteroid identification, capture and return costing on the order of $2.6 billion (PDF). Such an asteroid parked at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point would be an ideal testbed for new space infrastructure, proximity operations, space mining and resource processing technologies.

And while there are many challenges to a successful space mining program (economics, fuel, human safety, etc.), one of the biggest hurdles is physically mining and processing materials in the extreme and unstructured environment of space. It is like nothing we encounter on Earth.

When it comes to physically collecting samples, especially in quantities beyond those needed for scientific analysis, designers face several challenges. Some risks such as proximity operations, landing, and traversing are easier to understand and model, and hence these risks could be quantified. However, mining and mineral processing in a vacuum — and especially in a reduced gravity environment — is difficult to imagine in the abstract. At this point, many risks are simply not addressable with the amount of information we currently have. In addition, the kinds of materials to be gathered, their location, the volumes needed, on-site processing required and the end use of the materials must all be clearly defined in order to develop the mining strategy and the overall system architecture.

Current materials acquisition and analysis systems are best suited to sampling and surveying objects of interest. Any viable mining mission relies on a comprehensive understanding of the chemical makeup and physical properties of the site early in the process. After gaining a technical understanding of the composition and material properties of the resource lode, larger-scale mining efforts could begin with spacecraft tailored to the given material. In terms of supporting settlement on the Moon or Mars, this would entail special tools and autonomous vehicles designed to gather regolith, ice deposits or other materials useful to habitation. Many astroid mining programs seek to extract useful resources (such as precious metals) and return them to Earth, and keep other resources (such as oxygen, hydrogen and water) in space to power future human exploration.

Given the complexity and constraints of drilling and mining in progressively more extreme and difficult-to-reach environments here on Earth, mining in space is challenging but realistic. And if we ever want to get serious about human exploration and colonization of the solar system, there’s no alternative to gathering local resources for fuel, water and construction materials. In this respect, space mining may be the ultimate high-risk, high-reward robotic initiative.

We’re not starting from scratch. Much of this technology is based on sample collection and analysis work that the space community, and Honeybee Robotics, has been working on for decades. Over the past 25 years, Honeybee has built over fifty sample acquisition, excavation, mining and processing systems; we’ve made ten of these devoted to acquiring cores for analysis, such as envisioned for the Mars 2020 mission. The following are a few examples that represent a breadth of unique space mining technologies.

Sample acquisition and caching concepts for Mars 2020 Mission

Current plans for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission are based on the Mars Science Laboratory landing system and vehicle platform, with enhanced tools and capabilities. Mars sample return is one capability NASA is exploring. Here, Honeybee demonstrates its expertise in planetary drilling, core sample acquisition, and sample caching with an architecture for a sample return mission.

Icebreaker / LITA Drill

The 1-meter class Mars drill, LITA, during field testing on Carnegie Mellon’s Zoe rover.

Honeybee’s next-generation space drill, LITA, is designed to reach more than 1 meter deep into Mars, Europa or other bodies in the solar system. The drill has performed successfully under Mars pressures in analogous environments, including the Arctic and in Antarctica. Here, it’s shown deployed on the Zoe rover built by David Wettergreen’s team at Carnegie Mellon University, where it is gathering subsurface samples from the Atacama Desert in Chile to test for signs of life.

Auto-Gopher Deep Drill

The Auto-Gopher drill, designed for deep planetary drilling from a small platform.

The Auto-Gopher drill is a wire-line rotary-hammer drill, whose depth of penetration is limited only by the length of the wire that suspends it. This enables drilling at great depths, beyond the reach of traditional or telescoping drill architectures. The drill has been successfully field tested in gypsum, which offers conditions similar to that of water-ice at low temperature. A 2012 field test showed the drill capable of capturing 32 cores down to a depth of 3 m, with cores pulled every 10 cm, over the course of 10 hours. Integration with in-drill sensors would enable in-situ analysis of deep subsurface geological and environmental characteristics.

Asteroid Water Extractor

The concept Asteroid Water Extractor, designed for reconnaissance and resource collection.

The Asteroid Water Extractor system concept gathers water from asteroids within tight mass and power constraints, making it an ideal system for early in-situ resource extraction in support of human spaceflight. The configuration of drills located on each lander leg adds redundancy and helps maintain down-force in a microgravity environment. Water collected from the icy dirt is removed and stored for later use.

Pneumatic Miner

A functional prototype of the pneumatic mining system in Honeybee’s vacuum chamber.

Pneumatic excavation is an emerging technology that uses gas to mine and transport regolith. Initial test results have shown that one gram of pressurized gas can loft almost 6,000 grams of soil under lunar-like conditions (low gravity and in a vacuum). The excavation gas can be carried in liquid form in a designated tank, generated on site by burning residual propellant in the lander, or even generated as a byproduct of the ISRU reaction process. Because the pneumatic system has no moving parts, it is ideally suited to the lunar environment, where pervasive and highly abrasive dust introduces opportunities for mechanical failure.

Percussive Excavator

Modular percussive excavation technology reduces down-force needed by a factor of 40.

Because many mining targets, such as the Moon and Mars, have just a fraction of gravity compared to the Earth, mining and excavation systems must not rely on large down force. Percussive excavation uses vibration or hammer action to reduce required digging forces by a factor of 40. This in turn reduces the mass requirement of the lunar excavator. Because every kilogram of Lunar mission payload adds approximately $100,000 to mission cost, this technology offers billions of dollars in savings. This is a flexible, modular technology that can be mounted on a variety of handheld tools or autonomous vehicles for maximum operational flexibility.

Eric Wind: What’s your title at NASA and what do you do?

Dave Lavery: My official title is Program Executive for Solar System Exploration, and that basically means is that I’m the person at NASA who has full-time responsibilities for several of the Mars exploration missions. Several of us have that job; responsibilities for different missions.

How much information do you think we can get out of robots or rovers, or are we reaching the limit of what rovers are capable of doing?

I think there’s still an enormous amount that the rovers and robotic systems can do. Right now, realistically, given it’s the only option we have, at least for the time being, we intend to exercise them as much as we can. Certainly the rovers that are there now – the two that are still operating right now, the Opportunity and Curiosity – are both enormously capable and represent the best that we are able to put on the surface of the planet right now.

We still have plans on extending those capabilities further; making them more capable, more intelligent and more autonomous as much as we can until we eventually get to the point where we can put humans on the planet.

Having said that, are they as capable as any human being? No, not yet, far from it. But, they are much better than nothing at all, or waiting until we can put a human there which could be decades away.

What’s the role of people in space exploration currently? Is just building these rovers, or continuing ISS missions, or missions for the moon?

Well, right now, humans are obviously building and operating the systems that we’re sending to the planet. We do have humans occupying the International Space Station continuously.

In addition to that, in terms of where we’re going to next, whether it’s going to be to the moon or onto asteroids or onto Mars; all of that is wrapped up in a redefinition process that we’re going through to redetermine and refine our ongoing human exploration strategy. So, that is actually something that is very much in development right now and we hope to have the agencies overall structure and strategy within the next couple months.

What’s the next big thing for robotics and space exploration?

Well, in terms of hard space exploration we’re working on now, we just landed the Mars Curiosity rover just a few months ago and beginning its own explorations of Mars. I think we just announced over the holidays, that we’ll actually be building a second iteration of Curiosity which will be launched around 2020.

The intent is that we’ll build a rover that is Curiosity’s twin sister, if you will, with the main difference being different size payload on board. It will take advantage of everything Curiosity finds and teaches us, and use that knowledge to help us define science package which will answer the next set of questions that Curiosity will raise.

What is an example of a question that Curiosity has raised?

Well, for example, the primary mission for Curiosity and one if its top-level objectives was to go and find an environment that is capable of potentially harboring life. That is not to say that Curiosity is looking for life. What it’s looking for environments on Mars that could have supported life. All of that is one of the steps for us to get to the question, “Was there ever life on Mars?”

Curiosity’s prime mission was two Earth years long, or one Mars year, and it was going to take about that long to get to a region where we could explore and find definitive evidence of a habitable environment. Well, it turned out that it actually took a month and a half. In the first six-weeks of operation, we were able to find an ancient river bed that Curiosity came across and was able to positively identify it as a region where there was a lot of water over an extended period of time in this region. By that, I mean that we could tell this was a region between two and four meters of water going by at two to four meters per second for many tens of thousands of years. Basically, there was a river here at one point in time, and for a long period of time. When we put together the fact there was a lot of flowing water here over a long period of time, we got that this was a warmer environment, a wetter environment and in addition to everything else we know that was there, it was the definition of a place where life could have existed. All the environmental characteristics are there.

So, Curiosity has found that already. What it will continue to do now is to explore over a larger region, to see how many other places like that we can find in the explorations. Now it becomes a matter of understanding, if at least one place on Mars was like that, then how many more can we find – how widespread a pattern of habitability can we begin to define. That’s what Curiosity is going to continue to do and try to find out just how ubiquitous this region of habitability may be.

One of the things it does raise is it’s going to define this one area on the planet, if we know that the environment was able to support life, then the next step is to say, ‘Okay, now we know where to look and these were the places that were able to support life, or the potential for life, then the next question is let’s go back to those places and actually search for signs of ancient life, if it ever existed.’ And that is one possible — and I’m wording this carefully because the final mission definition hasn’t been finished yet — but that’s one possible payload that the sister of Curiosity could carry in 2020.

Do you think people are still as excited about space exploration as they were 20 or 30 years ago?

What I can say based on recent events, in terms of interest based on landing on Mars and the massive positive public reaction that happened with that, as well as the very significant interested associated with what has been done with the space shuttles, and also just your question “What’s next?” Based on those observations, I think there is still a very strong interest on the part of the public in space exploration. That’s one of the things that NASA has been trying to step up to. You’ve seen all of our other stuff, and you should wait to see what we have coming next.

To that point, I’m sure there are still skeptics. What do you say to people to let them know how space and robotics are relevant to them?

There are several different ways that everything we do in the space program really comes back down to improving life here on Earth. First and foremost, one of the comments that people have many times is “We’re spending all of this money in space,” the reality is we haven’t spent a dollar “in space.” Everything we do is based on people who work here on Earth to design, build and launch these systems. That is a very significant market share in terms of the potential for advanced technology, high throughput jobs that are part of the American economic engine.

In addition to that, in terms of the investment that we make for every one of these activities, the return is the spin-off terrestrial applications. Depending on the studies you look at, the return is somewhere between 7-to-1 and 9-to-1. In other words, for every dollar we spend $7 – $9 are returned back into the U.S. economy in the form of spin-off products that can be used for other terrestrial application. The return in that sense is for future markets and future business opportunities for future products that would get consumed by the public on a very regular basis.

Those are both the practical reasons. Beyond that, the thing that it really does; it really feeds directly into our need to explore and to understand beyond our own personal experience. It basically gets to, as a nation, we have a history of being explorers. We are always trying to find and seek out what is beyond the next hill. That is part of what we are trying to do in space, as well. We are trying to understand what is beyond our Earth and what is out there, and are these places of interest or are these places that we can go. In the short term, that may mean going virtually through the eyes of a robotic system. Eventually, it will be sending people to these places. It’s addressing all of that.

We heard and enjoyed an anecdote you told in a previous interview, about Colin Angle building a robot called Tooth with just a few hundred dollars in Radio Shack parts. What role do you think DIYers have in space exploration or robotics, if any?

Well, the community of – what we used to call – hackers, in terms of robotic systems, still has an enormous role to play. One of the wonderful things about robotic systems right now is while there are some very advanced capabilities that are being developed in labs of universities and research organizations, the technology is still accessible enough.

People who are interested enough or who have a shop at home or garage, can get deep into the technology very very easily and very affordably. That allows people to make some very significant advances to, number one, just build their own machine and understand how they work and to get inside the technology, but then it has the potential to take different components and put them together into new ways and actually raise new additional technologies that can be spun back into these larger projects. It’s all absolutely right there.

I’d like to touch for a moment on robotic education. First, how did you get started in robotics?

For me, in my case, it was a situation where I had wanted to work in the space program ever since I was very young. Like everyone growing up in that particular time, my first thought was I wanted to be an astronaut, but I found out when I went into high school that my vision was so bad. At that time, the way you got to be an astronaut was you had to be a military test pilot first. My vision was so bad that I couldn’t be a test pilot and then I couldn’t be an astronaut. So, I said if I can’t do that then maybe I can just work on the machines and go into space with them as my proxies. Then I started studying artificial intelligence, became trained as a computer scientist, did graduate work and got a job working with robotic systems. I came to NASA on the robotics technology program, and then later the planetary robotics program, and that is sort of how I worked my way through it.

Basically, it was a desire to, first, go to space but then if I couldn’t physically do it myself then I would have my machines go there for me.

What’s been your role in advancing robotic education?

One of the things that NASA, across the entire agency, has done is get very involved in several robotic education activities. The biggest involvement we’ve had would be in FIRST Robotics. That is something I actually started 18 years ago when I was running the robotics technology program for the agency, and became aware of it first and became involved personally. I realized very quickly that these students who were going through the FIRST Robotics competition programs were the very students we were looking for to help fill the pipeline of robotics researchers that we were going to need for the future.

So, I brought the FIRST program back to my research organization and got the rest of NASA involved to the point where we sponsored one team 18 years ago, we now sponsor over 300 teams and ever NASA field center is involved. We are now personally in touch with tens of thousands of kids every year through our programs.

What would you tell kids is the importance getting into engineering or robotics?

The first and highest message is engineering, technology and science careers are just plain fun. These are areas where you have the chance to be creative, to be innovative and do things that no one has ever done before, and basically bring a whole new capability or technology to the world. You can have an enormously fun time doing it. Really, it’s a career you can have creating new things. It’s not something that you have in other markets. That’s the biggest part of it.

Beyond that, if you do what you do well, then you can be paid for it very well. Look at some of the wealthiest people, not just in this country, but across the world. The icon would be the Bill Gates’ of the world, who made their money because they created a new thing that the world wanted and the world needed. You’re not just limited to make your fortune to being an entertainer or playing basketball, but you can be very well rewarded for being innovative.

Just one last question. You said in a past interview that your name has been on a rocket every 26 months. How many rockets has your name been on exactly?

Well, my name, or finger print, or thumb print, or what have you, is virtually on the Mars missions I’ve worked over the years.

The first one I worked on was the Mars Pathfinder mission, which was launched in ‘96 and landed on the Fourth of July 1997. I worked on the Sojourner rover that was on-board that lander. After that, basically I’ve had some role either direct or indirect with every mission since then. The ones that I particular that I had a very hands-on, participatory role in were the Mars Polar lander in 1998 – which did not work. Obviously, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2003. The Spirit finally turned off a year and a half ago, and the Opportunity is still going. Then, Curiosity, which was supposed to launch in 2009 but launched in 2011 and only recently landed.

Beyond, I also had much more rich roles in things like Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, the MRO in 2005 and Phoenix in 2007.

10. Robot and Frank Film looks toward elderly care future

Among films like Real Steel and I, Robot, Robot & Frank emerged from the Sundance Film Festival as a refreshing film that offered roboticists a realistic vision for robots in elderly care.

9. First robotics ethics and law conference

The University of Miami School of Law hosted the first conferenceon legal and policy issues relating to robotics, a sign of things to come as unique enable robotics technologies raise new philosophical and legal concerns for lawyers and policymakers.

8. Baxter brings manufacturing robotics to small businesses

For four years, Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics (now called Rethink Robotics) remained in stealth mode as many wondered what the acclaimed researcher and iRobot co-founder was plotting for the “manufacturing” domain. Finally, we met Baxter, a two-armed robot that can be programmed by demonstration to perform pick-and-place tasks. But it’s the small $20,000 price tag that is turning heads.

7. Amazon acquires Kiva for $775M

Amazon shocked the robotics world with its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems, maker of the automated warehouse logistics robots. It may not be a price we’ll see again any time soon, but the purchase signals a maturation of mobile robots that have become an integral part of business logistics.

6. Robonaut, Curiosity pave the way in space, WAVE glider robot traverses Pacific

With recent news in Washington considering the future of NASA, 2012 was a great year for the agency’s robotics program. First, Robonaut aboard the International Space Station began the year with an iconic handshake with the ISS commander. Since then, it has performed a variety of tasks in flipping switches, turning knobs, and grabbing handrails. b. Of course there was the “terrifying” Mars landing of the Curiosity rover in July. Armed with an arsenal of tools and laboratory equipment, Curiosity is turning out to be a successful robotic explorer. And just this month we learned that an autonomous wave glider robot from Liquid Robotics completed its one-year, 9000-mile Pacific voyage from California to Australia.

5. U.S. Government flexes muscle with DARPA ROBOTICS challenge and NRI

Back in 2004 when DARPA announced its first Grand Challenge in robotics, a reliable driverless car was a dream. Now, well, see the #4 story of the year below. The blue sky agency is at it again with the Robotics Challenge, a $34 million effort with the goal of producing a capable humanoid robot for disaster response scenarios. An added innovation to the challenge is an open-source simulator being developed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which will serve as a contribution to the community but also permit a software-only team to earn a humanoid hardware platform and advance to the second phase of the challenge.

A year after the Obama Administration announced the National Robotics Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $50 million in funding toward collaborative robots. While the amount is small compared to programs in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, the NRI is the first coordinated research funding focus in the U.S. for non-military robotic applications. For that, U.S. efforts come in at number five.

4. Driverless car legislation becomes law

The Google self-driving car has racked up 300,000 miles on the road as California, Florida and Nevada (last year) passed legislation setting up the procedures and requirements that will be needed for commercial driverless products. Several others, including D.C., are reviewing bills. With car manufacturers now introducing advanced sensors and increasing autonomy features in upcoming models, the legislation is ahead of the technological curve for once.

3. ROS turns 5

The Robot Operating System from Willow Garage. There’s not much more to say than I already have in previous posts. But a five-year anniversary for an open-source robotics software framework that continues to grow is a significant achievement. How fast has it grown? According to Tully Foote’s blog post at ros.org, there are 3699 public ROS packages (up from 1600 three years ago), 90 community-supported robot platforms (up from 50), and people are using ROS on all seven (yes, seven) continents. The recently launched Open Source Robotics Foundation is also a good sign for a sustainable movement.

2. Maker and start-up culture pushes robotics

In the same year that the iRobot Roomba celebrated 10 years on the market, we saw an acceleration of viable robotics businesses and products. For years many said that venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with hardware startups; they were too risky and required upfront capital, manufacturing, and inventory. That has clearly changed now, with increasing investments in robotics startups and entrepreneurs figuring out how to create products and solutions using robotics technology. The prestigious Y Combinator program funded Double Robotics and their price-shattering telepresence robot. Dmitry Grishin, a Russian investor, launched Grishin Robotics with $25 million of his own funds to invest in personal robotics companies. As of this writing, he’s invested in Double and the RobotAppStore. Furthermore, The Robot Report’s detailed map of nearly 1000 companies indicates 173 startups, 89 in the U.S. alone (not including many others still in stealth mode). And lest we forget the crowdfunding movement, which has spawned several robotics products and dozens more related “Internet of Things” devices. Some of our favorites: Romo, Hexy the Hexapod, OpenROV, and Autom.

Feeding into this hardware movement has been the growing maker culture, with a combination of 3D printers, hacker spaces, and inexpensive microcontrollers like the Arduino reducing the barrier to tinkering, building, and experimenting. Similarly, the Do-It-Yourself drone community has taken off with Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson leaving his post to take over 3D Robotics full-time.

1. Drones take center stage

It seems a week didn’t go by without a major story involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as they continue to be used in warzones in Afghanistan and shadow campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and the horn of Africa. Regardless of the ethics, sovereignty concerns, and the like, drones have saturated the national discourse and are here to stay on the battlefield, and there is little doubt we will begin to see remote-controlled and semi-autonomous UAVs in domestic surveillance and commercial applications as soon as 2015 in the United States. For these reasons, they take the number one spot.

Have another top story we didn’t list? We’d love to hear them! Let us know in the comments section.

Link to audio file (47:00)

Link to transcript

In today’s episode we speak with Stephen Gorevan from Honeybee Robotics about how he and Chris Chapman started the company and how his childhood dream of working for NASA got them into space robotics. The interview, which was recorded before the landing of Curiosity on Mars, gives us all the details about the equipment they built for the Mars Science Laboratory, including the Sample Manipulation System (SMS) and the Dust Removal Tool (DRT) which will enable the mission to explore and analyze the Martian environment. We also hear about their latest developments in small scale satellites called Cubesats.

Stephen Gorevan

Stephen Gorevan co-founded Honeybee Robotics in 1983 and currently serves as the company’s Chairman. He is principally responsible for guiding the company’s direction toward the application of advanced robotic and automation techniques to new applications in the aerospace sector. His responsibilities include new technology development, company and engineering management, design and systems engineering. Gorevan has over 25 years of experience in leading advanced robotics and automation design, development, and implementation efforts for NASA, defense and industry. He currently serves as a Co-Investigator on the science teams for the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Mars Science Laboratory SAM instrument and is a member of the Venus Science Definition Team.

Sample Manipulation System

Ncube-2, a Norwegian Cubesat

The Dust Removal Tool (DRT)

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Link to audio file (28:07)

In today’s show we bring you to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Open House, just in time to prepare for the landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover in less than 10 days.

Every year, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory opens its doors to over 38,000 visitors. This year’s theme was “Great Journeys”, inviting visitors to share in the wonders of space through high-definition and 3-D videos, live demonstrations, interactions with scientists and engineers and a first look at JPL’s new Earth Science Center.

As we walk you through the JPL mission control center, clean rooms and facilities, we stop to chat with JPL engineers and developers about the many space systems we encounter including the rovers Athlete, Spirit & Opportunity and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This year’s highlight was the Mars Rover Curiosity, scheduled to land on August 5th. Curiosity, which is part of the the Science Laboratory Mission, will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.

People we had a chance to speak with include Tod Litwin & Megan Richardson (Mars Exploration Booth), Kit Kennedy (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), Mike Watkins (MSL Rover Curiosity) and Dimitri Zarzhitsky (Mobility and Robotic Technologies).

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Would you like to watch Curiosity pile up sand behind its wheels as it struggles up a slope, this video is about as close as you’re likely to get, at least until Curiosity actually lands on Mars. For more, check out the JPLnews channel on YouTube.

One of the biggest steps in space exploration, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) named Curiosity was launched today with an Atlas V 541 vehicle and it is now on its way to Mars. The Curiosity rover is similar in size and weight to a small car and it will be the largest spacecraft to ever land on Mars with a very elaborate procedure that not only enables it to reach safely the Martian surface but also to land in a relatively tight spot with great geological interest.

The mission cost approximately 2.5 billion dollars. It was scheduled for launch in 2009 but various delays forced NASA to abort that goal. The optimum launch window when Mars and Earth are in the relative position that makes the trip as short as possible occurs every two years so two years after 2009 it is now the time for launch. The primary mission will last one Martian year (98 earth weeks) and if the rover is operational it could be further extended for much more. Landing sequence is scheduled for August 2012.

The system is comprised by the rover, the descent stage and the two parts of the aeroshell, the back shell and the heat shield. The later is the largest one that has ever used for a capsule atmospheric re-entry. It is larger in diameter than the one used in the Apollo spacecrafts and it is covered by phenolic impregnated carbon ablator (PICA) tiles able to withstand the peak temperature of 2.100C.

The Curiosity rover is a scaled-up version of the design used in the Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity. It has six wheels, each powered by a hub brushless electric motor and four of them, 2 in the front and 2 in the back, can be steered independently. The chassis is suspended via a rocker-bogie system, the preferable for all NASA rovers. This allows the rover to stay almost level in uneven terrain and it provides stable movements to the very slow moving rover.

Instead of solar cells the MSL uses a thermoelectric radioisotope generator (multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator – MMRTG) that converts the heat emitted from a pellet of radioactive Plutonium-238 dioxide to electricity via a set of solid-state thermocouples. It is much simpler and compact (it weighs only 4.8kg) than a nuclear reactor and of course much safer (personnel that worked on it received negligible amounts of radiation). NASA calls it a ‘nuclear battery’ and apart from electricity it also provides heat for the electronics inside the vehicle’s cell. MMRTG could power the rover for years. Lithium-ion batteries are charged by this generator and provide peak current when needed in conditions that exceed the maximum power provided by the MMRTG.

The main objectives of the mission are the evaluation of the habitability of the planet, its ability to host life, the preservation of it and the study of past and present environments. Curiosity has on board the most advanced set of cameras and scientific instruments ever sent on Mars.

Curiosity will use a very innovative delivery system. Apart from being the largest interplanetary aeroshell ever used, the MSL capsule will be able to actively change its trajectory for the first time. While entering the atmosphere, tungsten ballast will drop off, thus creating an asymmetrical center of mass. That introduces an angle of incidence and by controlling the yaw of the aeroshell via the reaction control system installed on the backshell the spacecraft can modify its trajectory and glide almost like a winged aircraft. At mach 2 the heat shield is dropped and a parachute (the largest ever used in such a mission but similar to the ones used before) is deployed. Without the heat shield the downwards facing radar and landing systems are operational and at a lower altitude the parachute and the backshell are dropped while the deceleration is now provided by the final descent stage. This uses four pair of fully throttleable engines (derivatives of those used in the Viking missions) and it is able to position the craft over the desired landing spot. HD images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter help avoid rocks and rough terrain with great accuracy. At a very low altitude the rover is deployed through a system of cables and an umbilical cord with a specific rate controlled by a mechanical system that doesn’t allow it to spool very fast or too slowly. The relatively low landing impact is absorbed by the suspension and the descent stage is detached and crashed at a far distance.

This innovative sky crane system solved the problem of propulsive landing of a rover. The 3 previous rovers were landed via airbags but the Curiosity is too big for that and placing the rockets below the rover (similarly to other propulsive landing but static missions, like the Vikings) would overcomplicate the rover deployment. Sky crane was not very popular initially in JPL but extensive study and tests established it as a sound solution.

The chosen landing spot is the Gale-crater, a very tricky place for unpropulsive landing but accessible with this new much more precise method. This area is believed to be very interesting geologically and Curiosity will explore a significant part of it.

Scientist and engineers from JPL don’t seem to worry about the complicated landing procedure because of the very extensive tests. However there is always the risk of some software bug or small glitch that could endanger the mission. Everyone hopes that MSL starting from August 2012 will be able to continue the very successful missions of previous rovers.

You can find more on the MSL NASA mission page and JPL’s MSL Curiosity website.