Editor’s note: Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures at research and technology development organization SRI International.
What have we learned over more than 65 years of invention and commercialization? There are several specific ways in which our venture processes stand in contrast to what is in vogue today. These are lessons that anyone in the business of innovation should… → Read More
Seriously: this is what is going to do our fighting soon. Imagine stand-off situations with this bastard rolling through the door and then skittering across the marble floor of Oslo City Hall straight into a crowd of hostages, aiming right at the gunman. The design is based on Big Dog, our former favorite dangerous monster robot, but this guy can to 18 miles an hour, five miles faster than the… → Read More
DARPA’s Shredder Challenge, a contest to reconstruct documents from a slurry of shredded paper, has been solved, suggesting that my grandmother may be barking up the wrong tree when she shreds the Campmor catalog. Three scientists with experience in computer vision and mobile technology, Otavio Good, Luke Alonso, and Keith Walker, scanned each chunk for unique characteristics that allowed them to… → Read More
A San Francisco-based team has just won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. DARPA, the government agency whose work led to the creation of the Internet, challenged the public to reconstruct five shredded documents. The winning team, called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” completed the task in 33 days, spending nearly 600 man-hours building algorithms and piecing together more than 10,000… → Read More
We’ve been following DARPA’s Nano UAV program since 2009, and it’s really remarkable how it’s gone from clumsy to cool to creepy in just a year and a half. DARPA thinks so too, so they put together a little video tribute to the thing. There isn’t much in the way of new footage in this, but it’s nice to have everything in one place. → Read More
DARPA has put out a request for full-disk encryption for iOS and Android-based devices. The deal is that the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency wants to have greater choice when it comes to smartphone selection, having used the BlackBerry for years without complaint. That’s because it was only the BlackBerry that met the agency’s encryption requirements. → Read More
Last month we mentioned how DARPA and Local Motors were trying out a crowdsourcing model for producing a concept combat vehicle. Well, the entries have been vetted and voted on, and they’ve put them into a nice gallery for you. They’re pretty awesome — kind of like the stuff I used to draw in school, but… you know, better. Here are the top 3 (more at Local Motors): → Read More
The X-47B is a new stealth unmanned aircraft intended for the US Navy. The plane is a large step toward virtual warfare, something claimed to help save lives. Not only does it require no human to fly, but it can take off and land on a carrier and refuel mid-flight, both considered one of the toughest challenges for today’s pilots. The X-47B has the ability to stay in the air… → Read More
DARPA, the Defense Department’s R&D wing, does some pretty amazing stuff. And when they aren’t getting what they want from their engineers, they let others help. Like in the Grand Challenge and its related programs — sometimes just dangling a cash prize and some specs out there is worth more than all your eggheads and skunk works combined. → Read More
From one military story to another. It looks like Lockheed and DARPA have jointly developed a system that makes it easier for snipers to pick off their targets. Yes, a real life aimbot of sorta. It’s called the integrated spotter scope, and means that snipers would be able to shoot effectively from a distance of up to 3,600 yards. That’s quite far, indeed. → Read More
Remember the DARPA red balloon challenge back in December? DARPA launched ten red balloons across the country and offered $40,000 to the first group of people who could identify the exact locations of all ten. All sorts of teams with different strategies participated, with the winning team coming from MIT.
Well, it turns out that TechCrunch helped find three of those balloons, more than any… → Read More
Shocking admission: I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie. Well, that’s not entirely true: I did see Episode One and Episode Three, but I’m pretty sure those don’t really count. (I liked the song “Duel of the Fates,” though, and the one that played when Anakin fought the other guy in the lava or whatever.) I bring this up because this story is about C3PO, the friendly robot that I’m only familiar with… → Read More
In a sense, the following story can be summed up thus: the US military wants new, hi-tech equipment. That’s not exactly breaking news, no, but there’s an Avatar connection, so if the world could stop rotating on its axis for a moment… It’s called Fine Detail Optical Surveillance, and the military wants Darpa to develop it. Think 3D spy cameras. Attach one to a Predator-type device and the boots… → Read More
This morning DARPA launched ten red balloons across the U.S. in a Network Challenge to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet. The first team to correctly locate all ten balloons will win a $40,000 prize.
The idea is to see how people can self-organize on the Internet and how information disseminates through social and viral networks. There are thousands of… → Read More
DARPA, everyone’s favorite organization that sounds suspiciously like Dharma, is working on tracking sensors that can be embedded into the sole of a shoe. Micro Inertial Navigation Technology, or MINT for short, is being jointly developed by Case Western University and Intersense (of the Massachusetts Intersenses). These sensors are designed to provide location information in places that… → Read More
Nope, your eyes aren’t broken or anything: that’s a beetle with a circuit board snapped into place. It’s the DARPA-funded handiwork of a group of scientists from the University of California, who are trying to better understand how the insect flies (while using so little energy). Data in hand, these scientists would then be able to help authorities develop better surveillance techniques, or to… → Read More
The energy debate isn’t going away anytime soon… if ever. Two of the big topics are of course, foreign oil and global warming. We want it here, we want it cheap and we want it clean. The Air Force (as a large fuel consumer) is trying to paint coal as a solution. → Read More
You read that correctly. In yet another freaky-yet-awesome move by DARPA, a team at Tufts University has been awarded a $3.3 million contract to develop a breed of “chemical robots” based on the caterpillar form of Manduca sexta. With bodies made of bioengineered, environmentally-friendly polymers, they’d theoretically be able to fit through spaces as small as 1cm wide. Looks… → Read More
Oh, DARPA. Everything you touch turns to semi-gold. Really, though — DARPA is great because they throw money at practically every cool new technology and even if it doesn’t turn into a neat gun, the residual advances from studying it often yield other interesting technologies. These daysthey’re looking into terahertz waves, those knicker-viewers the Brits were into a few months… → Read More
This kind of exoskeleton has been around for a while in prototypes and blueprints; I remember seeing one in DARPA paperwork years ago, but I think that now they’re getting out of the prototyping stage. The article compares it to Iron Man because it’s timely but I think that’s quite a stretch; it’s much more like a power loader or a dude from Exo-Squad. It can lift a payload… → Read More
When I say enormous, I mean enormous. We’re talking 500-ft wingspan here. The idea is it would be a permanent sub-orbital (60,000-90,000ft) base, powered by the sun and capable of carrying 1,000lb of gear. It could cruise around, taking high-res photos for map applications or meteorologists, or maybe a few of them could carry transceivers for bouncing signals around. Or, considering… → Read More
[photopress:fonera.jpg,full,center] Linux, as we’ve been stressing all week, is not just for desktops. Linux works in all sorts of ways on all sorts of devices. Embedded Linux is a popular choice with many manufacturers to keep development costs down on new hardware. It’s also good for portable devices with open architectures because if you know desktop Linux, you know portable Linux. → Read More
The humans the car did not kill. My alma mater, CMU, won the DARPA city challenge in which they had to build — and successfully deploy — an autonomous vehicle in a simulated city environment. Sure, any schlub can send a robot car across the desert. But can you send it through the mean streets of Scranton, PA or a simulation thereof? Didn’t think so. The Register has coverage of… → Read More
DARPA is known for doing some pretty interesting stuff. Their latest endeavor is to get a shortwave infrared camera that weighs only 10-grams. A camera this small could fit on goggles, helmets, or even weapons so that US forces could have an advantage at nighttime or relay information back to their headquarters for recon. Apparently making a camera this good isn’t easy though. There are only a… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
