The simplistic design of a robot snake—a long articulated tube—is also what makes them appealing for a variety of applications. Sending one slithering down a pipe to look for blockages or damage is one obvious application, but they can also be useful for traversing countless types of terrain. Two-legged robots that walk are getting better at it, but the act of balancing is computationally intensive, resulting in robots like Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS costing millions of dollars.
Snakes are much simpler life forms than humans, and emulating how they move and locomote results in a simpler and cheaper robot, at least compared to a two-legged humanoid. And now, thanks to a joint research project at Kyoto University and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan, roboticists have improved where robot snakes can go. A newly developed gait, which has this robot snake bending and twisting its smooth body to create a series of connected shapes, allows it to slowly but securely wrap itself around each rung as it climbs a ladder.
It isn’t going to win any ladder-climbing races, but it means this robot can now more accurately recreate the abilities of a real snake, which include climbing trees and other obstacles. For disaster recovery situations, which robots like these are often developed for, the robo-snake could more easily traverse piles of rubble or damaged infrastructure that lay in ruins, which even humans, and human-like robots, would have trouble with.
There’s nothing worse than having to pore over a pile of PDFs containing documents scanned as images when you quickly have to find a specific file. Dropbox is making it easier to do that by introducing automatic image recognition, which extracts texts from photos and PDFs and makes them searchable. According to the cloud storage provider, there are 20 billion image and PDF files stored on Dropbox. Around 10 to 20 percent of those are photos of documents, so the new feature can be very, very useful.
To look for a specific photo or PDF, you simply have to type in a keyword or phrase like you would on a search engine. Dropbox will then show you the files that contain those words or phrases. The company told VentureBeat that this is “the most computationally intensive project its machine learning team has ever undertaken.” They were particularly challenged by PDFs, since multi-page documents require a lot more processing power than an image file. In order to make indexing them feasible, they designed the system to stop extracting and indexing text after 10 pages.
Automatic image text recognition works for English-language JPEG, static GIF, PNG, TIFF and PDF files on Dropbox, even those uploaded before the service rolled out the feature. However, it’s availability is fairly limited. Dropbox Business Advanced and Enterprise users might be able to access it soon, depending on when their account administrators switch it on, while Dropbox Professional subscribers will get the feature in the coming months. Ordinary users will have to keep on looking for documents the old-fashioned way.
Google launched its 3rd-generation Chromecast dongle today, still priced at a very reasonable $35.
The new Chromecast comes in either Chalk or Charcoal, but really, the device hasn’t changed all that much. In its blog post, Google states this Chromecast has a 15% improvement in hardware speed, plus they say, “Our newest Chromecast supports smooth streaming in 1080p at 60 frames per second.”
On top of that, Google says you’ll be able to add this refreshed Chromecast to speaker groups, meaning multi-room audio goodness. Sadly, that’s coming “later this year.”
If you’re in need of a fresh dongle, follow the link below.
This artist rendering shows an aerial view of the liftoff of the SLS rocket during Exploration Mission 1.
NASA
Boeing has been building the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket for the better part of this decade, and the process has not always gone smoothly, with significant overruns and multiyear delays. A new report from NASA’s inspector general makes clear just how badly the development process has gone, laying the blame mostly at the feet of Boeing.
“We found Boeing’s poor performance is the main reason for the significant cost increases and schedule delays to developing the SLS core stage,” the report, signed by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin, states. “Specifically, the project’s cost and schedule issues stem primarily from management, technical, and infrastructure issues directly related to Boeing’s performance.”
As of August 2018, the report says, NASA has spent a total of $11.9 billion on the SLS. Even so, the rocket’s critical core stage will be delivered more than three years later than initially planned—at double the anticipated cost. Overall, there are a number of top-line findings in this report, which cast a mostly if not completely negative light on Boeing and, to a lesser extent, NASA and its most expensive spaceflight project.
Schedule slips
The report found that NASA will need to spend an additional $1.2 billion, on top of its existing $6.2 billion contract for the core stages of the first two SLS rockets, to reach a maiden launch date of June 2020. NASA originally planned to launch the SLS rocket on its maiden flight in November 2017.
However, given all of the development problems that the SLS rocket has seen, the report does not believe a mid-2020 date is likely either. “In light of the project’s development delays, we have concluded NASA will be unable to meet its EM-1 launch window currently scheduled between December 2019 and June 2020,” the report states.
There are other troubling hints about schedule in this new report, too. One concerns facilities at Stennis Space Center in Southern Mississippi, where NASA will conduct a “green run” test of the core stage of the SLS rocket. This is a critical test that will involve a full-scale firing of the rocket’s core stage—four main engines along with liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks—for a simulated launch and ascent into space.
The report found that Boeing’s development of “command and control” hardware and software needed to conduct this test is already 18 months behind a schedule established in 2016. This means the Stennis facility won’t be ready to accommodate a green run test until at least May 2019, with further delays possible.
This is critical, because often the most serious engineering problems are uncovered during the phase when key rocket components are integrated and tested. The delay in green-run testing means that any problems that crop up during that phase of development will only push the maiden launch of the SLS further into the future.
Reasons why
There is a rather remarkable section of the report that discusses the reasons for these delays. Boeing evidently told the inspector general that initial delays for SLS development were caused by “insufficient funding.” Notably, Boeing said the SLS contract was underfunded for 2015, and therefore it could not maintain its delivery schedule for the first two core stages.
The inspector general appeared to be having none of this, however. ”By the end of FY 2015, the company had received $706 million, only $53 million less than requested for its work to build two core stages,” the report states. “In addition, due to a congressional ‘plus-up’ the following year, Boeing received approximately $200 million more than what NASA estimated was needed to meet the original 2017 launch schedule. Further, in May 2016 NASA added almost $1 billion in additional contract value—bringing the total contract value to $5.2 billion—with only minimal changes in the scope of work.”
NASA officials told the inspector general that they did not believe the schedule slippage could be explained by a lack of adequate funding.
In response to a query from Ars, Boeing issued the following statement: “An unprecedented rocket program has inherent challenges; developing the first unit of a system that will safely carry humans into space, even more so. But the program described in the OIG’s report does not represent the Space Launch System program today.”
Implications of this
Another thrust of the report is that NASA has improperly awarded tens of millions of dollars to Boeing for performance fees the company has not earned. “We question nearly $64 million in award fees provided to Boeing since 2012 for the ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ performance ratings it received while the SLS Program was experiencing substantial cost increases, technical issues, and schedule delays,” the report states.
In his response to the new report, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, essentially shrugs off the criticism by saying building big rockets is hard work.
“The SLS is the largest launch system in the history of space flight,” Gerstenmaier’s response states. “The design, development, manufacturing, test, and operations of the system are highly complex and represent a national investment in a long-term commitment to deep space exploration.”
This may be true. But it seems an increasingly difficult sell after SpaceX developed the not-quite-as-large-or-complex Falcon Heavy rocket for $500 million. It is not clear what will happen next. In the past, Congress has largely ignored criticism of the SLS rocket, even from official sources. After all, the vehicle has 1,100 contractors in 43 states, covering a lot of legislative districts.
However, there are a few critics close to the White House who have been whispering concerns and criticisms about the big, expensive rocket to Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the National Space Council. To be clear, the vice president has been publicly supportive of the SLS rocket to date. But this report will at the very least add fuel to the fire of the criticisms he is hearing.
