Does Quest for Booty confirm the existence of a new Ratchet & Clank game?
August 15, 2008
Next week, Insomniac is releasing Quest for Booty on PSN, a downloadable sequel of sorts to last year’s incredible PlayStation 3 game Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. From what I hear, this expansion is short, but every bit as creative and polished as previous retail games. I, for one, cannot wait to play it!
Fans of the series will love to hear that at the very end of Quest for Booty, the following message appears: THE QUEST CONTINUES IN FALL 2009 …
You don’t have to be a lombax (or a sassy robot) to figure out that this must hint at the release of a brand new game in the Ratchet & Clank universe due out next year. But what kind of game will it be? It is obviously a direct sequel, but will it be a full game or an episodic entry? What do you think? No matter what it is, I am excited already!
[Via 1UP]
EA Showcase 08: Hands-on with NERF N-Strike for the Wii
August 15, 2008
NERF N-Strike is easily going to have the best peripheral ever made for a game. You will actually get a real working NERF gun that also doubles as the gun cradle for the Wiimote. There will be a removable one-shot NERF launcher where the Wiimote fits, and the NERF gun is even designed to accept the MotionPlus and allows for the Nunchuk to plug in for easy access.
There will be a story for the single-player mode, designed in a Saturday morning cartoon fashion, where the main character joins an elite NERF group and fights with NERF guns against robots. This is a kids’ game after all, so there won’t be any humans that are yelling out horrible one-liners to shoot at.
The game will support up to four players with around 24 events to play. I played a game with Emily from Ripten where we had to shoot as many balls as we could. Each time we hit a ball, a machine hanging above the stage would paint the ball your team’s colors until all the balls were destroyed. 
Players will have access to 25 guns, 12 of which are real NERF guns and 13 of which are brand new NERF guns designed for N-Strike. I played with a handgun, an automatic rifle and a sniper rifle during my playtime.
The game basically feels like Time Crisis, but with NERF guns. The main downside to all of this is that the gun and game package will cost .99, and the gun by itself will go for .99. That’s a great price point for the gun, but no arcade-style on-rails shooter is worth more than . Both the gun and game will be out in your local videogame section and toy section this November 4 for the Wii.
RCA Victor Dog And Robot
August 15, 2008
Robot and Dog Originally uploaded by lukeroot. It sure looks like the old RCA Victor dog, but it obviously isn’t hearing "His master’s voice."
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Mars robots begin test campaign
August 15, 2008
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
Engineers have unveiled the latest prototypes for a European rover that is due to land on Mars in 2015.
BBC News has had exclusive access to the test vehicles which are being put through their paces by space company UK Astrium at its HQ in Stevenage.
The British team on this European Space Agency (Esa) project has nicknamed the prototypes Bruno and Bradley.
The six-wheeled robots are claimed to be the most robust and manoeuvrable planetary rovers to be built.
According to Chris Draper, Astrium’s ExoMars rover vehicle industrial manager, they can go literally where no rover has gone before.
“Obviously, the American MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that were put up by Nasa enjoyed an extreme amount of success. They were able to travel large distances, well beyond their planned lifetimes. But we’re hoping that with our baby, we’ll be able to go places that are actually much further.”
EXOMARS MISSION CONCEPT- Set to leave Earth in 2013; primary aim is to search for life
- Will launch on a heavy-lift rocket, such as the Ariane 5
- Vented landing bags allow for a larger payload
- Rover will carry a 16.5kg ‘Pasteur’ instrument suite
- 30kg geophysics/environment static station also possible
- This would study the weather and listen for ‘Marsquakes’
- Concept to cost Esa states more than first estimates
Each prototype has six-wheel steering, which means that they can turn all six wheels and crab sideways.
They also have what engineers describe as “wheel walking capability”. This means that when the vehicles come across a particularly steep or slippery slope, they can anchor themselves with five of the wheels and inch each wheel forward one at a time, to crawl over an obstacle.
The prototypes have a unique intelligent navigation system which enables them to plot their own course.
Such is the distance between the planets, it can take 20 minutes for an instruction sent from Earth to arrive at Mars. The delay means instant commands to change direction are not possible and so a rover must have autonomy to make decision if, for example, it is approaching a dangerous precipice.
And because the rover will make its own decisions, it can also cover more ground.
ExoMars’ primary mission is to search for signs of past or present life.
To do that, it will make its way to locations thought most likely to support life and drill up to two metres into the ground. Sub-surface soil samples will be analysed by an onboard laboratory.
The rover will have the largest array of scientific instruments to be taken to Mars. So if it gets strong indications that organisms might be present, it will be able to subject samples to a wide range of tests to confirm initial readings.
But the executives at Astrium are concerned that after having done the groundwork in developing the vehicle systems (the chassis, locomotion and navigation systems), the company might actually lose the opportunity to build the final flight vehicle.
"It’s quite a tense period for us in Astrium and for the other companies involved in building ExoMars"Dr Ralph Cordey, UK Astrium
The concern stems from the recent funding difficulties faced by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), the agency which supports astronomy and space science in the UK.
The company won its role on the mission as leader of vehicle development partly because of the funding the STFC put through Esa. But Astrium’s science business development manager, Dr Ralph Cordey, said that given the recent squeeze on British astronomy and space resources, he was now unsure if that same level of funding would continue.
“It’s quite a tense period for us in Astrium and for the other companies involved in building ExoMars; and for all the many, many scientists who will depend on this mission,” he told BBC News.
“On the one hand, we are moving ahead with a great momentum, as you’ve seen. This is not a paper project - there is real engineering going on and we are on the verge of building the real hardware that will go on to the planet Mars. 
“But on the other hand, we do have a real problem. In order to complete the project, further funding needs to be made available and it won’t be until November that we are sure that that is in place.”
The cost of ExoMars has risen dramatically since European space ministers first approved the venture in 2005. Revised estimates to be agreed next month with industrial partners mean the price for ExoMars will nearly double from its original 650m-euro price tag.
If the UK wants to maintain its position on mission, it will have to boost its financial commitment to ExoMars or come to some other compensatory arrangement with Esa.
If the UK plays the wrong hand at the next space ministers’ meeting in November, UK Astrium warns, the contract to build the flight vehicle could go to a space company sited in another Esa member state.
The STFC said: “The UK will be working with its international partners to try to bring about a mission that has high impact and is affordable, in a process of negotiation that will culminate in decisions at the ministerial in November 2008.
“Meanwhile, it remains a high strategic priority for the UK as emphasised previously.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Battlebot
August 15, 2008
Battlebot Originally uploaded by Lane Brown. Just a cool battle robot created by Lane Brown.
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Robot wars
August 14, 2008
A competition to design new technology for the military is being held in a mocked-up wartime village on Salisbury Plain. The BBC’s Alison Harper has been to see it.
You can feel the tension in the air. The team’s eyes darting from rooftop to ground looking for threats.
Around the next corner, is there an ambush waiting
Or are they already targets in a sniper’s range
The answer could be right beside them. This is no battlefield, but a competition to discover the latest technology to locate and identify threats to our troops.
Copehill Down Village is a purpose built training facility in the heart of Salisbury Plain.It’s based on an Eastern European town complete with a church, hotel, school and bar.
The concrete facade could be hiding marksmen and the roadside could be littered with improvised explosive devices.
But here for today’s contest there is a mix of bizarre looking robots and flying machines all capable of spying on the enemy.
This may be a mocked-up wartime scenario, but the technology is very real and could be developed for use by our military.
Thermal imaging
The Moon Buggy wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond film.
Built by Surrey-based company Silicon Valley, there are two versions - a large diesel one which has stretchers attached to its sides, and a mini electric-powered version which can go at quite a pace over mixed terrain.
One has a 360-degree camera on board, the other thermal imaging. The latter’s antenna reaches high, and is able to gather images, beaming them back to a computer where they can be analysed for risk without anyone’s life being put in any danger.
The Silicon Valley group has a background in technology and research and says this robot has needed last-minute tweaking to improve its communications before the competition.
Team member Norman Gregory said: “It is close to getting to where we expect it, [but] we need more time to perfect it, because a key part is software for image recognition and threat assessment which has been developed by the University of Reading and Kingston University, and the maturity level of the software is improving as we speak.
“The system is designed to detect people who are stationary with weapons. It’s designed to pick up people images and vehicle images and process them.
“We’re going out to search for a certain type of target. If we know what we’re looking for we can probably find it.”
One step ahead
There is a demand for this new robotic technology.
With troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan facing daily dangers from, among others, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the Ministry of Defence is keen to find innovative, autonomous systems which can be used to identify the risks without putting lives on the line.
“We’re trying to help our armed forces, who are doing a very dangerous job, do that job more effectively,” says Professor Phil Sutton, the director general of science and technology strategy at the MoD.
“I don’t think the things we’re seeing now are ready to go for operational use, clearly we would need to do a bit more work to get them rugged.
“We now have an adversary that is very determined, very imaginative so it’s critical that our armed forces can be one step ahead of them. We need to be innovative, creative, agile and that’s really what this is all about, achieving that.”
The winners of the competition will take home the RJ Mitchell Trophy, named after the man known as the father of the iconic Spitfire.
It is cast from metal recovered from one of the planes flown in World War II.The winners will be announced on 19 August.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Rat-brain robot aids memory study
August 13, 2008
A robot controlled by a blob of rat brain cells could provide insights into diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Created at the University of Reading, the project marries 300,000 rat neurons to a robot that navigates via sonar.
The neurons are now being taught to steer the robot around obstacles and avoid the walls of the small pen in which it is kept.
By studying what happens to the neurons as they learn its creators hope to reveal how memories are laid down.
Hybrid machines
The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons.
Sensory input from the sonar on the robot is piped to the blob of cells to help them form new connections that will aid the machine as it navigates around its pen.
As the cells are living tissue, they are kept separate from the robot in a temperature-controlled cabinet in a container pitted with electrodes. Signals are passed to and from the robot via Bluetooth short-range radio.
The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot’s movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.
Once the robot can do this the researchers plan to disrupt the memories in a bid to recreate the gradual loss of mental faculties seen in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Studies of how neural tissue is degraded or copes with the disruption could give insights into these conditions.
“One of the fundamental questions that neuroscientists are facing today is how we link the activity of individual neurons to the complex behaviours that we see in whole organisms and whole animals,” said Dr Ben Whalley, a neuroscientist at Reading.
“This project gives us a really useful and unique opportunity to look at something that may exhibit whole behaviours but still remains closely tied to the activity of individual neurons,” he said.
The Reading team is not the first to harness living tissue to control robots.
In 2003, Dr Steve Potter at the Georgia Institute of Technology pioneered work on what he dubbed “hybrots” that marry neural tissue and robots.
In earlier work, scientists at Northwestern University Medical Center in the US wired a wheeled robot up to a lamprey in a bid to explore novel ways of controlling prosthetics
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
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