Items tagged with Darpa
Previously, we reported on artificial intelligence being pitted against human pilots in a head to head dogfight challenge. The event has now concluded, with the AI going undefeated in five rounds of air-to-air combat, handily beating the human opponent in the final round. At the open of this multi-day event, eight teams entered the virtual airspace for the opportunity to go up against a human fighter pilot in virtual reality at the end. They all competed against simulated opponents at first, then progressing to each other. The AI v. AI fights reduced the number of competitors in the ring to just four: Aurora Flight Sciences, Heron Systems, Lockheed Martin, and PhysicsAI. In a bracket type system,...
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Are artificially intelligent pilots better at taking to the skies than human fliers? We are about to find out. The final competition in DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials are set to take place on August 18-20, though virtually instead of in-person because of the Coronavirus pandemic. And don't worry, nobody will be harmed in this competition (just potentially hurt egos). Human pilots and AI opponents will not actually be flying real fighter jets and shooting one another down. The dogfights will take place in a virtual reality F-16 simulator. The matchup will culminate on the last day of the competition, pitting the top AI against an experienced Air Force fighter pilot, where virtual pride is on the...
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Intel and Brown University announced today that they are working on a DARPA-funded project that is called Intelligent Spine Interface. The project is aiming to use AI tech to restore movement and bladder control in patients who have severe spinal cord injuries. During the two year-program, researchers will record motor and sensory signals for the spinal cord. The team will use AI networks to learn how to stimulate the post-injury site to send motor commands. During the study, surgeons at Rhode Island hospital near Brown University will implant electrode arrays on both ends of a patient's injury site. The electrodes will create an intelligent bypass to allow the severed nerves to communicate in...
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It does not matter what your political affiliation is, if any, we should all be able to agree that more can be done to take care of our military veterans. That is why DARPA (Defense Advanced Researched Projects Agency) deserves major kudos this holiday season. DARPA has developed a sophisticated bionic arm and is offering these upper-limb prostheses to amputees who are U.S. war veterans. The prosthetic system is cleverly named LUKE, which stands for Life Under Kinetic Evolution, but is also an intentional reference to the limb Luke Skywalker wielded in Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. It is a battery powered limb that is about the size and weight of a flesh and blood arm. The prosthetic...
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There's quite a bit of poaching that goes on in the highly competitive tech industry, and this time it was Facebook that scored a prize, prying Regina Dugan from Google. Dugan lead the Advanced Technologies and Projects Group at her former employer, and prior to that, she was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Now Dugan will head up a new hardware group at Facebook called Building 8. The group will focus on breakthrough technologies and innovative products designed to advance Facebook's mission of "connecting the world." In particular, Dugan and Building 8 fit into Facebook's 10-year roadmap announced at its F8 developer conference. The roadmap is focused on...
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We’ve seen gremlins wreak havoc before, and it looks as though Department of Defense’s advanced research division, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is looking to create a little bit of mayhem on its own with aerial drones. DARPA has awarded contracts to four companies — Composite Engineering, Dynetics, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Lockheed Martin — to develop low-cost, reusable aerial drones that can be launched and potentially even be recovered mid-air upon the successful completion of a mission. DARPA hopes that it will be able to load up these gremlins in large bombers or military cargo aircraft and deploy them en masse to blanket an area either with ordinance...
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DARPA has a penchant for putting outlandish ideas forward, but that's sort of the point. Without far-fetched ideas, how is one's military and technological prowess to evolve? For those just catching up, DARPA is the United States miltiary's advanced tech arm, and a new filing makes clear that at least a few mad scientists within its walls are thinking about floating aircraft carriers of a different kind. Presently, floating aircraft carriers float on water, but if DARPA has its way, they'll float on air. Flying aircraft carriers seem like an idea that would take shape within a major motion picture, but the Distributed Airborne Capabilities project is very much a real initiative. With the surge...
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Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, lead a DEKA Research and Development team that built an amazing prosthetic arm that they affectionately call “Luke” (after the handless hero of Star Wars), and that arm has now been approved for sale in the U.S. by the FDA. What makes the Luke DEKA Arm System so compelling is that it uses electrodes attached to a user’s muscles--be they shoulder, arm, leg, or whatever muscles a given patient can use--to control a five-fingered robotic hand that has movement in all five digits as well as the wrist. Source: DARPA According to Bloomberg, it can perform six grip patterns and detect up to ten movements from the user’s brain. Users can...
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When Google unexpectedly sold off Motorola to Lenovo after investing heavily in the Moto X and Moto G smartphones and owning the Motorola brand for less than two years, the fate of the Project Ara modular smartphone seemed doomed, but it appears that the project is very much alive and well. According to Time’s TechLand, Google did not sell off a key department: the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which is responsible for Project Ara. So just how “alive” is Project Ara? The group announced that it’s holding a developers' conference on April 15-16 with a focus on the Ara Module Developers’ Kit (MDK). Further, the prototype will be ready within weeks,...
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DARPA, a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, has developed quite a few technological innovations for the military that wind up trickling down to us civilians, and now the agency is open sourcing some of its projects with an eye toward fostering even better R&D. The DARPA Open Catalog is a “curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications”, meaning that the agency isn’t just offering up anything and everything its working on, but in any case the first project posted on the site is the XDATA program. The XDATA program pertains to big data, so any fruitful collaboration on that project would be a boon to essentially everyone. If there’s sufficient...
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Qualcomm is developing NPUs, or “neural processing units”, which would present a different and powerful way for machines to handle information by more closely mimicking the way that the human brain works. Essentially, Qualcomm and its partners are trying to artificially create neurons, and NPUs are designed for parallel processing and high efficiency. The company has apparently been successful enough in that endeavor that it’s ready to start designing and manufacturing these NPUs commercially. In fact, IT News says that Qualcomm has developed prototypes in conjunction with a powerful ally in the Brain Corporation, which is funded in part by DARPA (U.S. Defence Advanced Research...
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DARPA is known for doing some pretty outlandish things, partly in the world of technology and partly in the world of military. And often, those sectors cross paths. DARPA's Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT) program has launched this week, aiming to transform how unattended sensors are developed for the military by using an original design manufacturer (ODM) process similar to that of the commercial smartphone industry. The goal is to develop low-cost, rapidly updatable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors in less than a year, a marked improvement to the current three-to-eight year development process. The program has developed the core ADAPT hardware and software package...
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GPS is a powerful navigational tool that’s changed the way we travel, but it’s not without its shortcomings. The simple chip-to-satellite communication can be disrupted far too easily, for example, such as when a user goes through a tunnel or if there’s simple interference nearby. Being that GPS was originally developed for the military, those limitations are not just inconvenient, but life- or mission-threatening. DARPA researchers at the University of Michigan have been developing a “timing & inertial measurement unit” (TIMU) that will augment GPS when needed to help a user navigate. “Three pieces of information are needed to navigate between known points...
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A real cheetah can run as fast as 70-75 mph in short bursts, so DARPA's Cheetah robot still has a ways to go in that regard. But as far as robotics go, DARPA's mechanical Cheetah is the fastest legged robot in the history of mankind, hitting a top speed of 28.3 mph on camera (see embedded video below). To put that into perspective, Cheetah is capable of exceeding the speed limit in residential areas. It's also faster than Usain Bolt, who set the world speed record for a human in 2009 when he hit a peak speed of 27.78 mph during a 20-meter split. So, what's the point? "Modeling the robot after a cheetah is evocative and inspiring, but our goal is not to copy nature. What DARPA is doing with its...
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Last month, we discussed the split between IBM and the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) over the highly ambitious 'Blue Waters' project. Blue Waters was the name of a planned supercomputer that would've been entirely water-cooled and included as many as 524,288 CPU cores. The disintegration of the deal came as some surprise, given the amount of work that'd already been done on the project. New details have come to light on why the University of Illinois and IBM ultimately parted ways over the project. One of the major issues appear to have been the clock speeds of the CPUs. The project selected IBM in 2007 as the supercomputer vendor for the Blue Waters project based on...
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Four years ago almost to the day, the National Science Board handed the National science Foundation a mandate to build the most powerful petaflop-class supercomputer in the world. The NSF announced in turn that the system would be based on IBM's Power7 processor technology. One of the features that won IBM the contract was the fact that the cluster doesn't require message passing and could theoretically be programmed as a single system. As of today, Blue Waters is officially canceled. The news comes less than a month after IBM announced it would begin commercial shipments of the individual nodes that were originally supposed to make up the building blocks of the Blue Waters system. The MCM modules...
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NVIDIA isn't just a graphics company. Many only think of the company's GPU line, which is certainly their most forward segment in the industry. But they're also a software company, and they also make all sorts of other hardware (like the 3D Vision kit for example). They also operate in the high performance computing space. Recently, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer made its debut, and clearly the company has a mind to create even more robust supercomputer systems. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, just granted NVIDIA with a huge gift, and a huge responsibility. $25 million is headed the company's way, and it will be working with Cray, Inc., Oak Ridge National...
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Someone at NIST is a Star Trek fan, and TOS, to boot, as they have no compunction against using references to the "Universal Translator" in this video about their TRANSTAC project, done jointly with Darpa. The project, involving three different systems. At least one of them, as seen in the video below, is none other than an HTC Nexus One (indeed, not an iPhone for once). Check out the progress on the English - Pashto / Pashto - English translator below....
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An SUV named "Boss" won the $2 million challenge in the DARPA robot race on Saturday.The Tartan Racing Team, based at Carnegie Mellon University, walked away with a $2 million prize on Sunday for coming in first in this year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race, held at a former Air Force base.The team's robotic vehicle, "Boss," turned in the top performance as it navigated itself through the 60-mile (100-kilometer) Urban Challenge course at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville this weekend.The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency took over the deserted base for the past week to offer an obstacle course tailor-made for city traffic. Boss, a modified Chevy Tahoe, competed...
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