Category Archives: Technology

Robot Rodeos Conjure Up Disasters and Pancake Contests

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Alberquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

A sultry day was in the offing near Purnell OK, the seat of McCurtain County in the state’s southeast quadrant, just a dozen miles northwest from the triple point where Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma meet. One hundred forty miles northeast, the National Weather Service Doppler radar station KSRX at Ft. Smith Arkansas, was monitoring a cold front approaching from the west, driven by a mass of cool dry air sweeping down from the northern plains. Typical for the late spring in the American prairie, this eastbound mass was colliding with a warm, wet air mass streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, now roiling under a cool dry tongue at 700 mb. Buoyant but trapped under heavier cool air, supercells were forming in the humid 850 mb surface layer twenty miles west of Purnell.

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This Football-Sized Robot Sub Handles Law Enforcement's Underwater Beat

This Football-Sized Robot Sub Handles Law Enforcement’s Underwater Beat

From inspecting cargo ships in NYC Harbor to searching for missing persons in South Texas, law enforcement is increasingly supplementing its human divers with these football-sized remote submersibles.

The VideoRay Pro 3 GTO is a tethered, remotely-controlled micro-submersible. The eight-pound machine can dive as far as 500 feet and move at up to 4.1 knots, thanks to its dual 100 mm horizontal thrusters. It’s sensor suite includes, among others, sonar imaging, GPS, water quality sensors, and metal thickness gauges. The Pro 3 GTO, which the NYPD employs also includes a grappling arm, wide-angle front-facing color camera illuminated with Dual 20W Halogen lamps, and an LED-lit HG black-and-white camera on the rear. The submersible is controlled remotely from a suitcase-sized control board.

The device is finding extensive use among in government agencies, like the US Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, the ICE, and the US Coast Guard. Nearly 2,000 of the $31,000 machines are in use across the country—especially where conditions are too dangerous to prohibit human divers.

via This Football-Sized Robot Sub Handles Law Enforcement’s Underwater Beat.

Apple, Cool but What Happens Next?

Farshad Manjoo, “10 Lessons from the Coolest Company, Anywhere,” in Fast Company, offers some interesting history and observations on Apple. He writes:

The one-time underdog from Cupertino is the biggest music company in the world and soon may rule the market for e-books as well. What’s next? Farming? Toothbrushes? Fixing the airline industry?

As much as I respect Steve Jobs, I don’t see him changing farming or fixing the government, as is suggested in the Fast Company article. The cool iPhone / iPad apps that identify trees and constellations can not tap a maple tree, milk a cow, slaughter and butcher a cow, hog, or chicken. The iPhone can’t even scramble eggs or make a cup of coffee.

Apple makes mistakes, as the “Death Grip” on the iPhone 4 proves. And they are on and overloading the AT&T network; maybe they should switch to another carrier.  Be that as it may, as Manjoo says:

Right now, it seems as if Apple could do all that and more. The company’s surge over the past few years has resembled a space-shuttle launch — a series of rapid, tightly choreographed explosions that leave everyone dumbfounded and smiling. The whole thing has happened so quickly, and seemed so natural, that there has been little opportunity to understand what we have been witnessing.

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