The Future of Unmanned Flight

Introducing one of the smartest planes in the world.  The Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, a tailless, jet-powered, combat ready autonomous unmanned aircraft.  In short, that’s a long range reconnaissance aircraft that flies itself, no ‘human pilots’ on the ground.  The Navy just upped its portfolio.  Hopefully ‘Skynet’ never gets ahold of one of these.

Meet the CaddyTrek. It’s designed so that you don’t have to carry your golf clubs around an entire 18-hole golf course. Instead, your bag is carried by an autonomous wheeled contraption that can sense your movements and follows your around the course. FTR Systems shows off their proprietary robotic system using advanced sensing and motion control technology. It is a way to reduce the physical demand of what is already one of the least physically demanding sports out there.

Contour crafting is effectively a form of 3-D printing. Using this technique they propose sending robots to seed the surface of the moon with the basic infrastructure for a moon base. Once the construction is completed, human crew could lift off and move into their new home. A robot arm extrudes concrete while automated trowels smooth the material into place. On earth, the promise it gives is low-cost, individually customized house construction—the same promises that 3-D printers give to object creation, but on an architectural scale.

Boston Robotics’ LS3 AlphaDog traipse around the confines of a lab last October, but the DARPA-funded quadrupedal robot was a mere puppy then, tethered to a set path. Now the robotic beast is living up to its name and heading to the great outdoors for field testing.

A swarm of 20 remote controlled Nano-Quadrocopters in perfect formation, breaking formation to buzz through a small opening, and then reforming formation looks and feels very much like the next big thing.  Expect to see GRASP Engineers at The University of Pennsylvania making a serious splash in the world of Remote Control-Autonomy and cloned flight. 

(Source: wired.co.uk)

It’s basically a space arachnid on roller skates.  The All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (aptly titled Athlete) follows its kin, Spirit and Opportunity, into the outer limits of Deep-Space Rover design.  The difference is, massive in scale and with articulated legs, ATHLETE has the ability to float, jump, crawl, drill, and a host of other reconnaissance and exploration based technology, all of which you operate as an avatar.