NATO confirms helicopter drone crashed in Libya

An autonomous helicopter drone crashed in Libya while flying a surveillance mission for NATO as it continues to enforce a no-fly zone over the country, officials confirmed Tuesday.

The robotic chopper used by the U.S. Navy, known as a MQ-8B Fire Scout, was hovering above Libya’s central coast at 12:20 a.m. PDT when NATO’s command center lost contact with it.

“This drone helicopter, unmanned, was performing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance over Libya to monitor pro-Kadafi forces threatening the civilian population,” NATO Wing Cmdr. Mike Bracken said at a press conference. “We are currently looking into the reasons behind this incident.”

It is unclear whether the Fire Scout was shot down or simply lost its communication link with troops on the ground. Either way, it may be the first time a helicopter drone was down in battle.

The video above was posted to YouTube by Agence France-Presse -- the video is only viewable on YouTube, and not allowed for embedding on U.S. websites. The AFP says that Libyan state TV aired footage saying that pro-Kadafi government forces shot down an Apache attack helicopter, built by Boeing Co.

When asked whether these claims were true, Bracken replied: “What I can say is NATO confirms that it's not lost any attack helicopters during Operation Unified Protector. More information will be provided on this incident as it becomes available.”

In an article, the Navy Times said “it is unclear exactly from where the unmanned helicopter was being controlled, where it was attached, or where it flew from.”

The Fire Scout, developed by Northrop Grumman Corp. in Rancho Bernardo, Calif., was first deployed to battle this year. There are currently two aboard the USS Halyburton and three more in Afghanistan. The drone was not known to be used in Afghanistan.

Although the causes of Tuesday’s crash are not known “there have been previous control problems with Fire Scout,” as the Navy Times says.

In a test flight last August from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., operators lost contact with the robotic chopper and it wandered into restricted airspace near Washington. Navy operators were able to get control of the drone and later blamed the Fire Scout going rogue on a software problem.

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Photo: MQ-8B Fire Scout Credit: Northrop Grumman Corp.

Northrop Grumman shows off optionally piloted Firebird spy plane [Video]

Northrop Grumman Corp. has released video of its new optionally piloted Firebird drone as it coasted through the skies above the Mojave Desert.

A story about the spy plane, which can operate with or without a pilot sitting in the cockpit, and its capabilities appeared in Monday's Times.

The Century City-based company has quietly developed the Firebird over the last two years at its Scaled Composites design shop in the Mojave. The aircraft was one of the last designs overseen by renowned aerospace engineer Burt Rutan before he retired from the company in April.

Northrop said the spy plane began flight testing early last year. So the company had plenty of material to choose from to put together the YouTube clip -- which with its jump cuts and shots of behind-the-scenes design work has the feel of a music video.

Northrop does not have a government contract for the Firebird. It is developing the propeller-powered plane at its own expense. The company hopes to get the government's attention later this month at the Pentagon's Empire Challenge, a showcase where defense firms demonstrate technologies that can be used in the field in the near term.

The Firebird is designed to fly at 30,000 feet at speeds of about 230 mph.

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Boeing's next-generation drone makes first flight from Edwards Air Force Base [Video]

Northrop Grumman produces music video of X-47B drone's first flight [Video]

-- W.J. Hennigan

Twitter.com/wjhenn

Boeing's next-generation drone makes first flight from Edwards Air Force Base [Video]

Boeing Co. has released video of its stealthy Phantom Ray drone's maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base.

A story about the robotic jet and its first flight appeared in Tuesday's Times.

Watch the video above as the Phantom Ray taxis onto the runway and takes to the skies. Takeoff begins at about 1:15.

The Chicago-based company said the Phantom Ray climbed to 7,500 feet and reached a speed of 205 mph hour in a covert 17-minute event that took place April 27. Boeing officials did not confirm details until Tuesday.

Boeing plans on continuing test flights throughout the year at Edwards. The Phantom Ray is designed to fly at 40,000 feet at speeds of more than 600 mph.

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Not your daddy's Boy Scout merit badge: Robots!

Boy Scouts have a pretty good idea of what it takes to earn a merit badge: backpacking a mountain trail, snagging a trout at the local pond, or perhaps paddling down a stream in a wooden canoe.

But nowadays, heading into the great outdoors is the old way of getting yourself a badge.

Earlier this week, the Boy Scouts of America unveiled a new merit badge that’s earned when scouts design and build a robot.

The new “robotics” merit badge was created through a collaboration between the Boy Scouts and NASA in order to help scouts develop skills that are relevant and needed in today's world, the groups said in a joint release.

"While the guiding principles of scouting -- service to others, leadership, personal achievement, and respect for the outdoors -- will never change, we continue to adapt programs to prepare young people for success in all areas of life," said Bob Mazzuca, the Boy Scouts of America’s chief scout executive.

Here's a sampling of what it takes to earn a badge:

"Design your robot. The robot design should use sensors and programming and have at least 2 degrees of freedom. Document the design in your robot engineering notebook using drawings and a written description."

"Share your robot engineering notebook with your counselor. Talk about how well your robot accomplished the task, the improvements you would make in your next design, and what you learned about the design process."

The Boy Scouts said that more than 10,000 robotics merit badges are expected to be earned within a year.... Hmm. Doing the math here, that's an awful lot of robots.

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Top photo: The head of "ROBBIXA," created and developed by ZigZag Productions, shown during the "Innovo" fair on March 24 in Lyon, France. Credit: Philippe Merle / AFP/Getty Images

Second photo:  The robotics badge. Credit: Boy Scouts of America

Google's Driverless Car project is personal for engineer Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is on a mission to get people out of the driver's seat.

"As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident, like this," Thrun said, snapping his fingers before an audience at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach last month. "And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving 1 million people every year. Now, I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report. But I need to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars."

Thrun is a Stanford University robotics professor and a project leader on Google's Driverless Car effort -- a system that enables cars to drive on their own, safely, without human input. So far, Google's driverless cars have safely logged more than 140,000 miles on California roads, Thrun said in his TED Talk presentation, which can be seen in the video below.

While Thrun's contributions to the Google project are personally motivated, the engineer believes that the technology can eradicate traffic jams and curb fuel consumption, as well as save humans now-wasted time and prevent needless deaths.

"Now, I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who've died," Thrun said at TED. "Did you know that driving accidents are the No. 1 cause of death for young people? And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error and can therefore be prevented by machines?

"Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane but on robotic precision, and thereby drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes and do away with all traffic jams on highways?" 

Thrun said he foresees a future in which driverless cars become the norm.

"I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars."

A nod goes to Autoblog, which uncovered the YouTube video of Thrun's TED speech Tuesday.

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Image: A Toyota Prius equipped with Google's Driverless Car technology drives in San Francisco. Credit: Google / TED

Artificial intelligence researcher from Harvard wins Turing Award, considered the Nobel of computing

A Harvard University professor whose artificial intelligence work has helped the advent of “thinking machines” has won what is regarded in computing circles as the equivalent of the Nobel prize for technology research.

Leslie G. Valiant, who teaches computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the 2010 recipient of the A.M. Turing Award from the Assn. for Computing Machinery.

His work has helped speed along machines such as Watson, the IBM computer that dominated two "Jeopardy" game show champions last month.

The $250,000 prize is funded by Intel Corp. and Google Inc. It is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who was part of the team working to crack the German Enigma cipher and Tunny encoding machine during World War II.

Valiant seems to have had a less antagonistic relationship with machines. His decades of research explored how to make computers mimic the human thinking and reasoning process.

In addition to pioneering new fields of theoretical computer science, Valiant also advanced the study of computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition and computer vision.

More recently, he has explored computational neuroscience, examining the brain’s ability to quickly access enormous databases of information.

Robots and androids are looking more and more like Bicentennial Man and the Blade Runner replicants. Developers are hard at work on increasingly sophisticated machines with the ability to help humans –- like caretakers Nao and Paro -– and also interact with what seems like personality, such as the Philip K. Dick android project.

Valiant will receive the award on June 4 in a San Jose ceremony.

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Photo: Leslie G. Valiant. Credit: Assn. for Computing Machinery

The best Web security against hackers and spammers: advanced math!

If you don't want spam-bots or bad guys breaking into your site, make them do calculus.

That's the approach the folks at a Croatia's Ruđer Bošković Institute are taking. Before you can log in to the research institute's Quantum Random Bit Generator service, you have to enter your name, password and affiliated organization, and then solve a math problem that would make most people run for the hills:

The challenge is an extra-hard version of a regular CAPTCHA-type question (see image here), where users are prompted to retype a set of letters from a blurry image. And, like CAPTCHAs, users are given clemency if they can't get the first one right. "If you don't know the answer to this question," it says, "reload the page and you'll (probably) get another, easier question."

How kind of you.

It seems these scientists want to ward off ruffians who can't do advanced math. After all, the service they're offering is access to truly random numbers -- a difficult computer science feat on its own, and one that only responsible adults should have access to.

But these math elitists may have a problem on their hands. As calculus teachers around the world are now discovering, the Internet will now do your math homework for you. Just go to WolframAlpha and pop in the problem, and boom, you'll have access to all the random numbers your heart could desire:

Ha, ha, how do you like your little trick now, eggheads! Everyone knows the derivative of the sin of 2X minus pi over two plus six where x = 2 pi is zero!

Isn't it?

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Northrop Grumman produces music video of X-47B drone's first flight [Video]

If you enjoyed listening to the rock stylings of Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" while F-14 fighter jets zipped through the air during "Top Gun," you might like this.

Century City-based Northrop Grumman Corp. posted a music video of the first flight of its bat-winged robotic jet, dubbed the X-47B. Yes, that's right, a music video -- chock-full of jump cuts and guitar licks.

The flight, which took place earlier this month at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, was a significant milestone for the program. In the 29-minute test flight, the drone climbed to 5,000 feet.

The X-47B is being developed to take off from an aircraft carrier, drop a bomb on an enemy target and then land back on a carrier, controlled entirely by a computer. It's a big step up in technology because current combat drones, such as the Predator and Reaper, are controlled remotely by a human pilot.

But it's still years down the line before the X-47B will be carrier ready. In the meantime, we have the video.

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Consumer Electronics Show: Sphero, a toy ball driven by smart phone or tablet

Sphero, a small, rolling ball controlled by a smart phone or a tablet computer, is a toy that is being shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But Orbotix, the Boulder, Colo., start-up company that makes Sphero, hopes its baseball-sized invention will end up being more than just a toy and is using the CES to court retailers, the media and developers.

"We see it as a new gaming platform," said Orbotix Chief Executive Paul Berberian. "We have a sumo game app where people drive balls into each other. We're also working on a game where people can solve math problems to allow them to take control over other people's Sphero until that person can solve a math problem."

Xbox or PlayStation this is not, but an affordable gateway into gaming and robotics is what Berberian is hoping will make Sphero catch on with consumers, namely kids.

Sphero is due for sale online and in stores, which have yet to be named, by the end of the year for less than $100.

The ball, which connects to smart phones or tablets via Bluetooth, is controlled by apps on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

Users can use their fingers to drive Sphero or tilt the smart phone or tablet itself to move the ball around. Inside the app, a user can change Sphero's color and speed.

Orbotix is also working on an augmented-reality app for Sphero that would display obstacles on screen that a player would have to dodge.

"Inside the ball, we use components from air traffic controllers," he said. "Everything is programmed with open source code, and it's very easy to program for. So, we think this could be great for education too. It's really an inexpensive way to get into programming and robotics."

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Video: Sphero at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Credit: Nathan Olivarez-Giles/Los Angeles Times. Photos: Sphero in hand and a screen shot of the Sphero App. Credit: Orbotix

Consumer Electronics Show: Robots, robots, everywhere!

Though Skynet couldn't make it, there are cleaning robots, massage robots, even robots modeled after dinosaurs at the Robotics TechZone at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Japanese company Cyberdyne is showing off its Robot Suit HAL cyborg at the CES in Las Vegas. The suit senses nerve signals sent by the brain to muscles through the skin and directs the robotic covering to move along with the body.

The suit is able to help users walk, climb, hold and lift and could be used for physical training and rehabilitation as well as to support heavy labor and disaster rescue efforts. Iron Man is also likely interested.

Autom, the robotic weight-loss coach, was there. Vstone Co. has its walking humanoid robots, which can also fight and breakdance. DreamBots brought its palm-size WheeMe massager robot, which silently steers itself and presses using four small wheels.

There's also a slightly more prehistoric but more lifelike option: Pleo rb, the animatronic baby dinosaur that has "feelings." The robotic camarasaurus, which has been around since 2006, constantly developing new responses to his environment.

Each Pleo evolves differently, revealing a wide range of moods and emotions and adapting to its owner with a multitude of noises and motions. The robot is programmed to play tug of war, whimper to show fear, arch its back when stroked, nap and steer clear of table edges.

The price of this inquisitive companion: A cool $469.

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