Mike Deliman

Remarkable

"Space... the final frontier" is how the pre-recorded message from NASA to the Crew of Discovery started this morning.

This afternoon while covering the final departure of Discovery from the ISS, the Newsman said "Remarkable - a remarkable bit of technology and a lasting mark on history" - or something to that effect. I thought "Remarkable" - that's a word Spock used to describe fantastic new technologies that had never been seen before. Things like Ion Drive in an autonomous space probe, or a life form that lives on something we'd considered impossible.

Some remarkable technologies demonstrated recently in the news include things like Northrop Gruman's X47B UCAS, and the comet flybys of Stardust NExT and DI Epoxi, and ongoing announcements of potentially hundreds of earth-like planets being found by Kepler Space Telescope.

One of the remarkable technologies just delivered to the ISS by Discovery is Robonaut R2. R2 is a telepresence operated robotic astronaut / assistant. It's the first robot designed to use the same tools as the astronauts, and to be able to assist them inside and outside on space missions.

Some other note worhty technology demonstrations/events coming up - later this month  MESSENGER will orbit Mercury.  In July  Dawn will go into orbit around asteroid Vesta.  Both of these orbital insertions represent "firsts" for mankind - the first time we've orbited and surveyed the sun-side of Mercury and the first time ever orbiting an asteroid.

All of these devices contain within them a bit of technology called VxWorks.  It's probably being used somewhere in the infrastructure that gets this posting to your monitor.  VxWorks has unparalled maturty and flexibility, going into everything from that internet modem in the closet to autonomous vehicles and robots.  I think that's also kind of remarkable...

Domesticated Robotics?

A discussion about robotics was started up in an online discussion forum.  A question was posed to the group:

Will unmanned vehicles eventually see duty in civilian applications?

Technology for unmanned military vehicles may eventually trickle down to commercial applications on Main Street. In the near future, autonomous vehicles will be used to deliver packages, collect garbage and fill potholes. http://bit.ly/bSrqfx

The way I read the question, it asks about unmanned "vehicles" in general.  Without specification I would regard this to include all autonomous robots, all sizes, all forms of motivation (wheels, legs, wings, whatever).

Part of my initial response was...

Given the increasing needs for communication points, bandwidth, and the increasing desire for remote data sensing (think: telerobotic tourism as an eventual end), it is an inevitability that unmanned robotic vehicles will play a significant role in the commercial and private sectors.

Expanding on this some, we are already seeing an expansion in domestic robotics.  Googling for "domestic robot" gets you nearly 58,000 hits!  There are devices covering from vacuums to "butlers" to sophisticated electronic teddy bears appearing in this fledgling market segment.

In the industrial sector, there are mining robots, deep sea robots, welders, archivists, pipe inspectors, and harmful-environments service robots.  Like the home PC market had in 1975, this market has some potential for growth. 

My instincts tell me the real question isn't "will there be unmanned vehicles [autonomous robotics] in civilian duty", but how will we best make use of the explosion of these devices, maximize their safety, provide some level of individual security for the owners/users, and ... make it all work on limited power budgets.

Getting back to the need for connections, your local municipality may begin to employ remote service machines.  These machines may be used (as in the referenced article's question) to maintain the infrastructure, and perform communal duties of domestic maintenance.  These collections of robots will need data channels to convey back the results of their duties, nominal status, and report noted exceptions.  One could foresee a day when semi-intelligent autonomous systems might be used to augment domestic and emergency services personnel.

Could you imagine if your area had some natural disaster, and the local water provider were able to send robotic pipe inspectors through the system to listen for people trapped inside buildings?  Or perhaps your vacuum cleaner reporting that your apartment is on fire while you're on vacation, and which room is on fire?  Though either of these sound a little fantastic, both are easily feasible with today's technologies.  It could easily be done with a mix of a hypervisor and use of existing software on a low-power multicore platform, the rest of it is just batteries, motors, radios, and a fancy box.

The security side of it can come from a mix of approaches and disciplines, depending on what the intended goals of the platform are.  For instance, you don't want intercepted pipe inspection data used wrongly (for industrial espionage, for instance), so the sensor feedback channels could require some form of encryption or pre-processing.

Larger systems / devices might require some form of review by certification agencies.

I don't think it's a question - will there be more unmanned gizmos working for us?  It's a certainty I think, just a mater of time.  I'm wondering how long until they want counted in the census...

Tolerating Delays

This may sound a bit funny, but in the space industry, we're constantly playing catch-up.  We're either looking at or for things that happened millions or hundreds of millions of years ago, sending rockets off to get to where something will have been just in time to take a picture of or bore a hole into it, or designing new rockets for flight 5 years from now with computer bits that would have been considered top-of-the-line 5 or 10 years ago.  When we're recovering data and sending commands from and to deep space probes, we point our antennae to where the probe is supposed to be 30 minutes from now and start sending our data now; the idea is by the time the data actually gets there the craft will be where it was expected and receive the commands, and send it's data back to us.

This process I just described - of anticipating where a craft is, transmitting before it's there - and it transmitting back - is pretty much how the Deep Space network is currently used.  It takes huge amounts of planning, all done in advance, to set up the multiple sessions that allow one successful exchange like that to work out.  People consult tables of times when craft will be "visible", consult tables of one-way light distances to find transmission times.  When they think they know when they need time, and how much data they expect to exchange (how much  time they need),  they contact the folks who run the big antennas.  if the time slot is available, arrangements are made, and that one set of transmissions can take place.  The folks who run the Deep Space Network and their customers do this sort of thing all the time - it's how they try to make the most efficient use of their giant antennae.

Thinking about this whole process, it would seem that you should be able to automate much of it, if not all of it.  There may be some circumstances where manual intervention is necessary, but if much of it were automated, automation might be able to help bringing data back indirectly.  For a given satellite or probe a table could be maintained with information about the DSN and other contact points it maintains regular connections with.  Other probes and satellites could maintain similar tables.  This would enable other deep space probes, satellites, orbiters, and craft for planet exploration (landers, crawlers, flying / roving automata) to plan and create connections as-needed to trade data with each-other.  On top of these communication connections you could layer protocols and methods, and from this, you could create a sort of network.

That is exactly what this article titled Dot Mars is about.  Delay Tolerant Networking, or DTN, is an experimental protocol to enable the internet to reach out off of the Earth.  JPL's Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) implementation was tested last summer between the Deep Impact / EPOXI satellite and the Deep Space Network.  The test results were: success.

DTN does more than just create another way to move data back from space.  And it's potential reaches into terrestrial applications as well as to oter planets.  The gains that could be leveraged by spacecraft could also be leveraged here.

In space DTN could be a key factor in project design.  If a team knew for sure that the DTN internet was available, and would offload data at regular intervals, they could take advantage of that fact.  If you knew you could send back a set amount of data per day every day, and you'd only ever have to store perhaps a week's worth of data backlog, you could leverage this in your craft's design.  You may be able to design-in less long-term storage, making the craft lighter.  You may have more bandwidth available, so you may decide to use sensors with more sensitivity or take more samples than you may otherwise have planned on.  Returning more data and possibly better data should mean a higher likelihood of a successful mission.  Overall, encorporating DTN into a space project could mean reduced costs and better returns.

Bringing the paradigm back down to earth, DTN could be deployed in a large number of terrestrial applications.  For example, remote sensors currently wait to be connected to and commanded to offload data, or they attempt to send back their data at regular intervals.  If they miss a specific connection it could mean lost data.  If they were able to organize and tap into a DTN style of network, they could possibly offload their data to some alternative trusted node and not have to incur any data loss. 

It could even affect your home life.  Sensors, for example in your car, could store event related data indicating you need the spark plugs replaced.  Right now if you disconnect the battery before a mechanic reads your OBDII data, you'd lose that information.  With a DTN-enabled system, the car's onboard computer could store that data, and tag it as important.  The next time it's near a trusted-node - at home, at work, or perhaps even hile filling-up at a gas station, it could email that data to the owner perhaps allerting them before a breakdown occurs.  Having your car break down at the just wrong time could be an intolerable delay.