carnegie mellon

Dungeon masters with deep, dark pockets no longer need imagine how the venerable tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons might play on a futuristic multi-touch platform. Six students at Carnegie Mellon University recently released a video showing off their D&D concept for Microsoft's Surface Table, complete with a storyboard slideshow and rolling the virtual 20-sided die.

At Carnegie Mellon, those masters-of-the-robo-universe have a dedicated lab for studying snake locomotion and applying it to robots that can swim, climb telephone poles and wriggle up walls.

Manipulating virtual objects on a computer screen is no big deal—we all do it daily. But haptic, or touch-based, interfaces add another dimension to that experience, relaying a sense of touch to the user. Now Carnegie Mellon researcher Ralph Hollis and his team have produced a set of advanced, magnetic-levitation-based haptic interfaces that they say produce the most realistic sense of touch of any device of its kind in the world.

The results are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing took the $2 million top prize, Stanford Racing—last year's winner—came in second for $1 million, and Virginia Tech rounded out the top three, pocketing $500,000.

It sounds platitudinous, but every one of the six teams that finished this year's course should be proud of their accomplishment. By situating the race in an urban environment crammed with buildings, four-way stops, and robotic and human traffic, DARPA forced the robot entrants to make a quantum leap in their ability to respond to the unexpected—a crucial skill if their self-driving descendants are ever to take to the streets.—Elizabeth Svoboda

2 PM: "Ladies and gentlemen," the race caller intones, "Junior, the first bot to see the finishing checkered flag!" With spectators standing on the bleachers, hanging over the chainlink fence, and screaming their lungs out, Junior, the Stanford Racing Team's VW Passat, crosses the finish line. After finishing its long, hard slog, the car sits still and silent in the middle of the track for a minute, as if nonplussed by its feat. A moment later, Carnegie Mellon's Boss bot zips past the finishing flag, followed closely by Virginia Tech's Odin. The three other bots on the course are still chugging away.

Two years ago, when Stanford's Stanley bot was first to enter the finishers' circle, Stanford team members instantly erupted with joy and emotion, jumping into the car for a honk-filled victory lap and dumping Gatorade over the head of their fearless leader, Sebastian Thrun. There's no such revelry this time around, possibly because the results aren't so self-evident. All three teams know that final score calculations still have to be made and that the close finish means any of them could take the top prize.

Though the anti-climactic finish Whitaker predicted has come to pass, members of the finishing teams are still basking in the afterglow. "This is an unbelievable day," says Thrun. "The fact that three vehicles came back already shows that we've made tremendous progress." OK, so it's not "We have a winner," but it's something. Check back tomorrow for the race's final results.—Elizabeth Svoboda

1 PM: One more team has scratched—Germany's CarOLO—but the remaining six contenders are looking strong. The three current front-runners are Stanford, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing. All have completed two of the three prescribed missions, meaning they're about two-thirds done with the race. The Cornell and MIT vehicles were locked together side-to-side for several minutes, Ben Hur chariot-style, but both managed to disentangle themselves and are motoring along again.

It's difficult to describe a self-driving vehicle to someone who's never seen the phenomenon firsthand, but suffice it to say these cars move in a way that's both wobbly and overly meticulous, like they're being steered by phantom drivers still a little unsure of their ability. (Trust me, I know that driving style—I nearly failed my road test as a teenager for being too slow and tentative behind the wheel.)—Elizabeth Svoboda

The New York Times reports today that Google and IBM are sinking $30 million into a two-year project to build remote data centers that can handle sophisticated computing research remotely. No World of Warcraft player will again be safe now that students can crunch probabilities with the 1600+ processors Google is installing in an undisclosed location.

But seriously: the two companies—along with six universities (Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington)—are cooperating to get an inadequately funded area of research off the ground. The Times succinctly defines "cloud-computing" as a "new kind of data-intensive supercomputing" that "often involves scouring the
Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and
insights." It's typically used by major corporations to analyze web traffic and refine big systems, but now any university kid with a password will be able to create programs and software that can take advantage of the horsepower Google and IBM are providing. —Jacob Ward

Like many of you, I'd imagine, I have at least three old Palm Pilots scattered about my place, collecting dust in drawers and boxes. I just never got into the habit of using one regularly. But all still work, so I've started hunting for alternate uses for them. Look for something in the May issue on this, but as a preview, here's one of my favorites: A kit from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute for a fully autonomous robot that uses the Palm as a brain. It even has optical sensors to get around walls. Seems like a great way to get started on robotics projects. —Mike Haney

Dept.: You Built What?
Cost: $200
Time: Many long nights
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