Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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22 posts tagged robots
Mojave Desert Tests Prepare for NASA Mars Roving |
Team members of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission took a test rover to Dumont Dunes in California’s Mojave Desert this week to improve knowledge of the best way to operate a similar rover, Curiosity, currently flying to Mars for an August landing.
The test rover that they put through paces on various sandy slopes has a full-scale version of Curiosity’s mobility system, but it is otherwise stripped down so that it weighs about the same on Earth as Curiosity will weigh in the lesser gravity of Mars.
Information collected in these tests on windward and downwind portions of dunes will be used by the rover team in making decisions about driving Curiosity on dunes near a mountain in the center of Gale Crater.
First, however, the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, launched Nov. 26, 2011, must put Curiosity safely onto the ground. Safe landing on Mars is never assured, and this mission will use innovative methods to land the heaviest vehicle in the smallest target area ever attempted on Mars. Advances in landing heavier payloads more precisely are steps toward eventual human missions to Mars.
Curiosity is on track for landing the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early on Aug. 6, Universal Time and EDT) to begin a two-year prime mission. Researchers plan to use Curiosity to study layers in Gale Crater’s central mound, Mount Sharp. The mission will investigate whether the area has ever offered an environment favorable for microbial life.
![Finding ET May Require Giant Robotic Leap |
Autonomous, self-replicating robots — exobots — are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, who notes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — SETI — is in its 50th year.
“The basic premise is that human space exploration must be highly efficient, cost effective, and autonomous as placing humans beyond low Earth orbit is fraught with political economic, and technical difficulties,” John D. Mathews, professor of electrical engineering, reported in the current issue of theJournal of the British Interplanetary Society.
If aliens are out there, they have the same problems we do, they need to conserve resources, are limited by the laws of physics and they may not even be eager to meet us, according to Mathews.
He suggests that “only by developing and deploying self-replicating robotic spacecraft — and the incumbent communications systems — can the human race efficiently explore even the asteroid belt, let alone the vast reaches of the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, and beyond.”
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Finding ET May Require Giant Robotic Leap |
Autonomous, self-replicating robots — exobots — are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, who notes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — SETI — is in its 50th year.
“The basic premise is that human space exploration must be highly efficient, cost effective, and autonomous as placing humans beyond low Earth orbit is fraught with political economic, and technical difficulties,” John D. Mathews, professor of electrical engineering, reported in the current issue of theJournal of the British Interplanetary Society.
If aliens are out there, they have the same problems we do, they need to conserve resources, are limited by the laws of physics and they may not even be eager to meet us, according to Mathews.
He suggests that “only by developing and deploying self-replicating robotic spacecraft — and the incumbent communications systems — can the human race efficiently explore even the asteroid belt, let alone the vast reaches of the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, and beyond.”
NASA Flight Tests New ADS-B Drone On Ikhana UAS |
NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center flew its Ikhana MQ-9 unmanned aircraft with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, device, for the first time on March 15.
It was the first time an unmanned aircraft as large as Ikhana — with a 66-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of more than 10,000 pounds, and a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet — has flown while equipped with ADS-B. ADS-B is an aircraft tracking technology that all planes operating in certain U.S. airspace must adopt by January 2020 to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations.
It also was the first flight of hardware for the NASA Aeronautics research project known as UAS in the NAS, which is short for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System. continue reading
Sand Flea from Boston Dynamics |
From the makers of the Big Dog and the Little Dog comes the Sand Flea jumping robot. Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings. Current development of Sand Flea is funded by the The US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. more info
Today I was treated to a tour of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Highlights included a full-sized, fully functional Mars Science Lab rover and a bird’s eye view of exploration mission operations control center. At the time we were passing through, data packets from the Dawn mission to Vesta were being received. Another highlight was a 1/3 scale model of the lunar ATHLETE rover which was just kinda hanging out in a shed. - ZU
Honeycombs & Hexacopters Help Tell Story of Mars |
In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces.
To add to this mystery’s allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some local lava: it might help explain the history of Mars. But with trips to Mars hard to come by, the interns of the 2011 Lunar and Planetary Sciences Academy (LPSA) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., traveled to the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington state. It’s a region that has been helping scientists understand the forces that shape planetary surfaces for a century “The Legacy of Megafloods.” continue reading
Dinosaur Robots (seriously): Paleontologist and Mechanical Engineer Team Up at Drexel University |
Could Tyrannosaurus rex run down its prey or did the eight-ton “tyrant lizard” shuffle its feet on the ground like an elephant? How did large dinosaurs lay eggs? Could they kneel down or did they simply drop off their offspring from 2 1/2 stories in the air and hope they survived?
Short of the wildly advanced genetic engineering imagined in Jurassic Park, robots might be the best tools that we have for answering these kinds of questions. Hence the partnership between paleontologist Dr. Kenneth Lacovara and mechanical engineer James Tangorra, both of Drexel University, who are using 3D printing to create the most advanced dinosaur models the world has ever known.
“We’re hitting the point where we’re going to be able to study extinct creatures in the same way a biologist can study a raccoon or tuna,” says Lacovara. “It’s going to go beyond informed guesswork to testable hypotheses.” continue reading
Amazing Coffee-Filled Robot Can Beat You at Darts |
They’ve beaten us at Jeopardy, taken our manufacturing jobs and now robots are coming for the one thing many of us hold dear — the ability to win at pointless bar games. Okay, so that’s not what the universal jamming gripper is meant for, but you still wouldn’t want to face off against it in a game of darts or pop-a-shot basketball.
This robotic gripper was actually built to solve a problem that has confounded many robots in uncontrolled environments: how to best pick up objects when you have no idea how big the object will be or what it will be shaped like.
Robots in factories don’t face this problem. They are programmed and calibrated to pick up the same-sized part again and again. In a messy home or out on the battlefield, things are much different. A robot arm that can quickly pick something up, no matter what it is, is invaluable.
How does the universal jamming gripper do this? By utilizing a latex balloon filled with coffee grounds.
“We use coffee grounds because they’re lightweight. When they’re unjammed they flow around nicely and when they are jammed they harden up really well,” explained John Amend, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University who helped start the project back in 2009. “Another nice thing about coffee is that it’s super-cheap. It’s hard to argue with the price.”
Basically, the loose coffee grounds conform to an object and when the air is sucked out, a pinching effect occurs that uses friction to lift it up. The process is so delicate that the gripper can pick up an egg without breaking it and so strong that it once lifted a pool ball attached to a gallon of water.
The team discovered the gripper’s unique dart-shooting ability by accident.
