Autonomous Robtic manupliation Arm Phase 1

DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) program is developing software to perform human-level tasks quickly and with minimal direction.Only part of a bigger project to create a larger robot that can open doors handle small objects.
        This video shows the ARM robot performing 18 grasping and manipulation tasks using vision, force, and tactile sensing with full autonomy – no active human control. The DARPA-supplied robot was built using commercial components that include an arm, hand, neck, and head sensors.

During rigorous testing in November 2011, the best team achieved 93% success in grasping modeled and unmodeled objects.  The ARM program has entered its second phase, where focus turns to complex bi-manual manipulation scenarios. This program is being carried out by the department of defense With conjunction of a larger robotic program.

Darpas real weapon

       From planes that fly across the country in an hour to explosive detection based on a dog’s nose to photoluminescent polymers, I dare you not to be riveted by Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

      Rocking a leather jacket and a t-shirt with the logo “I-cubed” — meaning “impossible, improbable, inevitable,” which Dugan said is the natural progression of discovery — she said in an interview with Walt Mossberg that DARPA’s “singular mission is the prevention and creation of strategic surprise.”
As you’ll see below, she is one of our nation’s best secret weapons:

DARPA's 3d Display Technology

You probably point and laugh at your friends when they have big, bulky 3D glasses perched on their noses in theaters. That kind of tomfoolery just won't do amongst the military brass, who frown at the slightest hint of snickering in the operations room. This new 3D system, called the Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD), should help. It's a DARPA project, a fully holographic table (no glasses required) that can be scaled up to six feet diagonally and allows visual depth of up to 12-inches. The technology comes courtesy of Zebra Imaging, which earlier wowed us with some insane 3D printouts, and the data will come from LIDAR systems like this ROAMS bot. No word on when the system will be deployed to the field, but it should allow grizzled commanders and uppity businessmen to find unobtanium deposits, even if they happen to be located right under a big 'ol tree.

Many of today's conflicts occur in urban settings, making the ability to visualize conditions in urban areas increasingly important to commanders and mission planners. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently completed a five-year program called Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD) that creates a real-time, color, 360-degree 3D holographic display to assist battle planners. Without having to wear 3D goggles or glasses, a team of planners can view a large-format, interactive 3D display. Until now, two-dimensional, high-resolution flat panel color displays and 3D static monochrome images have been the most advanced visual planning tools available.

UPSD assists team-based mission planning, visualization and interpretation of complex 3D data such as intelligence and medical imagery. It permits simultaneous viewing for up to 20 participants and is interactive, allowing the image to be frozen, rotated and zoomed up to the resolution limit of the data. The holographic display enables full visual depth capability up to 12 inches. The technology also enables realistic two-dimensional printouts of the 3D imagery that front line troops can take with them on missions.

UPSD is based on full-parallax technology, which enables each 3D holographic object to project the correct amount of light that the original object possessed in each direction, for full 360- degree viewing. Current 3D displays lack full-parallax and only provide 3D viewing from certain angles with typically only three to four inches of visual depth.

Presently UPSD is a scalable display platform that can be expanded from a six-inch diagonal size up to a six-foot diagonal, in both monochrome and color formats.

UPSD is part of DARPA's broader efforts in 3D technology research. DARPA recently demonstrated a wide-area 3D LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) mapping capability under DARPA's High Altitude LIDAR Operations Experiment (HALOE). HALOE is providing forces in Afghanistan with unprecedented access to high-resolution 3D data, collected at rates orders of magnitude faster and from much longer ranges than conventional methods. UPSD's 3D display can support the rapid exploitation of this data for detailed mission planning in rugged, mountainous and complex urban terrain.

DARPA is initially transitioning the UPSD technology to an Air Force research center and two Army research centers to apply the technology to critical applications where the 3D holographic display will provide a unique benefit.

Zebra Imaging of Austin, Texas, was awarded the initial contract in 2005 and has researched and developed the technology.

singularity One of DARPA'S Main Goals

On May 5, 2009 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced that it is preparing to begin an exciting new research program that may be the most ambitious and direct effort by the United States Government to to push human technology closer to the edge of the awaiting Singularity. The program is referred to as Physical Intelligence, and DARPA is currently soliciting interested research groups to develop project proposals for submission. The ultimate goal of the effort will be to fundamentally understand the physical phenomenon of intelligence and to then demonstrate the characteristic in a man-made electronic or chemical system.
 via@http://neuronnews.dynamicpatterns.com/2009/05/11/darpas-path-the-the-singularity/



The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.” Thermodynamics is founded on the conversion of energy into work and heat within a system (which could be anything from a test-tube solution to a planet). The processes can be summed up in formalized equations and laws, which are then used to describe how systems react to changes in their surroundings.
Via@http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/darpa-heat-energy-brains-now-make-us-some/

Physical Intelligence

The Physical Intelligence program will address its overall objective through a coordinated effort in three complementary domains:  theory, implementation, and analysis.  The objective of the theory domain is to develop and validate a physical formalism that unifies and expands ideas from diverse domains such as evolution, thermodynamics, information, and computation.  The objective of the implementation domain is to demonstrate the first human-engineered open thermodynamic systems that spontaneously evolve nontrivial "intelligent" behavior under thermodynamic pressure from their environment.  The objective of the analysis domain is to develop analytical tools to support the development of human-engineered physically intelligent systems and to understand physical intelligence in the natural world.
via@http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Physical_Intelligence.aspx