Yesterday, we ran the first installment of an extended interview with Steve Gillis, the biotechnology pioneer who’s now a managing director at Arch Venture Partners. Today, we have the second half of the conversation, in which Gillis talks more about ways biotech entrepreneurs can adjust to the tough fundraising climate, and Seattle’s realistic assets as a biotech cluster—when it’s unlikely anyone will ever create another Immunex or Amgen.

Xconomy: Do you have any advice for the scientific entrepreneurs out there now who are in their late 20s or early 30s?

Steve Gillis: Jump in with both feet. What’s the downside? If you have technology that will lead to products that help people treat some unmet medical need, first and foremost before you think about financial return, that should be a motivating factor. Whether you’re going to be public or bought. If you’re worried about the fact that if you’re successful you’ll be acquired and likely out of a job, and therefore you shouldn’t be successful or shouldn’t be acquired, that doesn’t really make sense to me. So what? If you’re bright and entrepreneurial, you can do it again.

At Arch, one of the things we tend to do is back people who made us money in the past. It’s a lot easier hurdle for someone who’s been successful to say, “I’ve been successful with this, and now I want to start something else, and damn it, I can be successful with that.” It’s a pretty good argument. It certainly takes management risk off the table, of risks you’re talking about when you’re considering making an investment in a startup company.

X: You mentioned that the IPO market no longer really exists for startup drug companies, and some people like to say the venture model is broken for biotech. What do you think is going on?

SG: I don’t think it’s broken at all. It used to be that you could raise $100 million in private money, take a molecule through proof of concept in man—whatever that means to whatever audience you’re talking to. But usually it meant the product had a tolerable safety profile, and you knew it worked in some set of patients. You might not have done a study that was highly statistically significant as compared to the standard of care, but as one of my partners once said, you knew there was a pony there. And you could be rewarded with a public valuation of $500 million.

Today, you can get through those same steps, having put $100 million into a company, and be rewarded with a public valuation that’s $50 million. That’s no fun for anybody. So you have to be able to get to that same proof of concept on less money. And presumably, a shorter period of time. The way to do that is with bright people who have done it before. Platform technology with multiple product opportunities, and yeah, maybe you license off one or two product opportunities so you can have non-dilutive capital in your company and not always be beholden to investors for capital. You get there, and get there in a way that some bigger fish is not just interested, but feels they have to have you for dinner.

X: Are there a couple good examples here locally that you think are following this new model?

SG: They are all following the model. They are all bright people. They all know the public market is not a viable option for them or their investors. We’re pushing all our portfolio companies to find sources of opium. As in “OPM”—other people’s money. Whether it’s DARPA, stimulus money, licensing deals. They all hear us. They are all doing it, and will continue to do it.

X: Cancer and immunology are a couple of historic strengths of this cluster, and seems to be gaining prominence globally within Big Pharma. How does this position the Seattle cluster for the future?

SG: I think it positions the area well. There are a lot of good things happening here. But it’s Seattle. Try as you might, it’s not going to be Boston or Cambridge. It’s not going to be …Next Page »

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North Bridge Venture Partners has committed to participating in a planned $5 million Series A round of financing for stealthy startup MC10, which the Waltham, MA-based VC firm formed last year to commercialize stretchable silicon material, according to MC10 CEO Dave Icke. The stretchable silicon is both flexible in a literal sense and in terms of its potential utility, providing a vast range of possible commercial products for industrial and biomedical applications.

MC10, which is currently housed at North Bridge’s office in Waltham, recently revealed it has licensed the stretchable silicon technology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where material scientist and MC10 co-founder John Rogers invented the technology and has been developing it for several years. The company’s planned Series A round of financing will likely be led by North Bridge, which has provided seed funding for the startup, and involve one other, unnamed venture firm, Icke says.

MC10 says it aims to deliver the high performance of brittle, rigid semiconductors in a flexible, stretchable material. The technology could be used to embed advanced electronics in products that can conform to moving, multi-dimensional surfaces. For example, this could be useful in putting sensors in …Next Page »

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Nano-Terra is sticking to its original strategy: Let other companies spend the money on manufacturing and marketing products that arise from its inventions, while making its money from licensing its nanotech creations and pulling in royalties on product sales. Now the Cambridge, MA-based startup is considering spinning off separate businesses to pursue more applications, including one to commercialize a novel particle to combat counterfeiting, Nano-Terra CEO Myer Berlow tells Xconomy.

Berlow’s company has attracted international attention for its suite of nanotechnology patents licensed mostly from Harvard University. This latest potential spin-off gives a glimpse at a new way the intriguing technology could be put to practical use in the marketplace.

The potential spin-off company would make the nano-sized particles for companies that would put trace amounts of them into products such as perfume, Berlow says. These particles, which Berlow says cannot be replicated, could be quickly detected in a bottle of perfume with a handheld device to show whether the product is a fake. And the structure of the particles—which are way too small to see with the naked eye—can be altered over time to throw off counterfeiters.

“What you have to be careful of—even though we are thinking about a number of [potential spin-offs]—is you have to make sure that you are staying within your area of expertise,” says Berlow, who is a former president of global marketing for Internet company America Online.

Spinning off companies would be a new approach for Nano-Terra to commercialize its technology. The firm, founded in early 2005, typically seeks corporate partnerships to apply its innovations in surface chemistry and materials science, many of which originated from lab of renowned Harvard chemist and company co-founder …Next Page »

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When San Diego-based Avaak made its debut earlier this month at the spring DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA, chief executive Gioia Messinger offered a grand description of the company’s personal video technology.”It’s like your own personal Google Street View, except it’s live, expandable, sharable, and easy—very, very easy,” Messinger told the Demo audience.

The technology enables users to easily set up a wireless Internet gateway and two small video cameras for $300, providing real-time video of anything from a family gathering to a company warehouse that can be viewed online via a personal “VueZone” account. In the same way that YouTube became ubiquitous and Google Earth forever changed the way people view the planet, Messinger said in a company statement, “We believe the Vue personal video network will transform the way consumers use remote video viewing.”

Since Avaak plans to begin selling the technology in the next few months, I met recently with Messinger and marketing vice-president Dan Gilbert to hear the Avaak story.

Messinger told me the idea for Avaak’s technology was hatched about five years ago, when the Pentagon was searching for inexpensive sensors that U.S. troops could leave behind when they must evacuate an area after securing it. In particular, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was looking to expand on wireless networking technology developed by a UC Berkeley computer science team headed by Kris Pister. The Berkeley team created wireless networks consisting of millimeter-sized sensors that were so small and so inexpensive that Pister coined the term “smart dust” to describe them. (Avaak itself is the Hebrew word for dust.) Such technology could be used by the military to track enemy movements, or to detect poisonous gas or radioactivity. Since then, Pister has founded his own startup, Dust Networks, a Hayward, CA-based company commercializing …Next Page »

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In the 11 years since Andrew Hibbs started QUASAR, the privately held company has flourished by developing a smorgasbord of sophisticated sensing technologies under various government research and development contracts.

I met Hibbs more than a decade ago, during the formative years of San Diego’s Quantum Magnetics, where he led development of advanced electromagnetic sensors so sensitive they could detect the unique molecular resonance of explosives. His work resulted in the first commercially available explosives detector using Nuclear Quadrapole Resonance, a technology akin to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that are commonly used in medical diagnostics.

Hibbs founded QUASAR in 1998, after InVision Technologies acquired Quantum Magnetics (and General Electric acquired InVision in 2004). Hibbs acquired a penchant for studying the quantum phenomena at the core of such technologies while earning his PhD in physics at England’s Cambridge University. In fact, he named the company for Quantum Applied Science & Research.

Since QUASAR was founded, Hibbs has formed a group of several related companies focused on biomedical, geophysical, and various military applications of electromagnetic sensing. The company bills itself as a world leader in low-frequency electromagnetic sensing systems that operate at room temperatures (at frequencies from 0.01 Hz to 5 MHz).

When I dropped in for a briefing earlier this week, Hibbs was out of town, so I met with Lowell Burnett, chief technology officer for QUASAR Federal Systems and at least four other PhDs who oversee different development efforts within the group. Burnett told me the QUASAR group has grown to about 70 employees (at least a third are former Quantum Magnetics employees), funded solely by revenues from government contracts.

Burnett says QUASAR’s scientists have made steady advances in electromagnetic sensors, particularly in electric field sensors, with each group applying …Next Page »

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If you’re a glass-half-empty person, you might say the mesh networking technology pioneered by Boston’s Ember Corporation is a solution in search of a problem. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’d probably call the company’s eight-year history a case study in flexible thinking. Regardless, after years of market struggles, Ember seems to have found a niche where its technology for self-organizing digital radio networks will shine: smart-energy systems designed to give utilities and consumers more control over how they use energy.

Andy Wheeler and Robert Poor, who built experimental wireless sensor networks for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency while they were students at MIT, founded Ember in 2001 with $3 million in seed funding from Polaris Venture Partners, DFJ New England, Stata Venture Partners, and Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe. (In subsequent funding rounds over the years, the company has raised an additional $78 million.) The idea was to find applications for the concept of ad-hoc mesh networking, in which pairs of transceivers in a network set up two-way communications as conditions allow, and messages hop from node to node until they reach their destination (roughly the same way they do inside the Internet).

In its early years, Ember made mesh-networking software for other companies’ microchips, usually equipment designed to be embedded in temperature sensors for petroleum refinery pipes and other similar devices. But over time, the company has evolved into a chipmaker in its own right—just one that happens to have a special expertise in the software running on its chips. And it has gone open-source, investing heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking.

Wheeler and Poor have both moved on to other companies. Meanwhile, Ember has moved on to new application areas—with the biggest near-term payoffs likely to emerge from a utility industry initiative called the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. In pilot AMI projects in states like California and Texas, computerized “smart meters,” or energy gateways, are being attached to utility customers’ homes. The devices communicate wirelessly both with utility control centers and with in-home thermostats, displays, and smart appliances, allowing utilities to dial back electrical usage during hours of peak demand and giving customers more information about their energy consumption patterns. The home side of these communications depends on technology from Ember, which is the leading supplier of communications chips for AMI devices.

“The core technology is not that different from what Andy and Rob had in mind,” Ember’s president and CEO, Robert LeFort, says. “But it’s being used in applications they never had in mind when they were developing it.”

LeFort joined Ember in 2006 from semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies, where he had spent four years as president of the company’s North American operations. I interviewed him about Ember’s development and its business opportunities last week at the company’s headquarters in the Fort Point district of South Boston. An abridged version of our talk follows.

Xconomy: How did Ember evolve from a software company into a chip company?

Robert LeFort: It’s just very hard to make a business case for embedded software. You typically earn a royalty on a per-instance basis, and you don’t usually cover even the cost of developing the software. So you need to be doing more than just software. The end devices and modules [using Ember's software] were interesting to us, and chips seemed to be a better fit. So in 2003 we introduced our first chip, the 2420, which we still sell today. And in 2004 Ember acquired RF [radio frequency] technology and the chip team that developed it from Cambridge, UK-based Cambridge Consultants. [The company's main products today are newer microprocessor models called the EM250 and EM260, both announced in 2006.] We monetize our software through the chips. I think it’s fair to say that there’s nobody who uses our software who doesn’t also buy our chips. And if you look at our competitors from the 2000 era, the ones who went up the chain and sold just software have not fared so well.

X: Talk a little about the company’s recent turn toward smart energy applications.

RL: There were a variety of things that converged, and some other things that fell off the table. When I first came, we were very excited about commercial buildings and lighting. Wireless mesh networking is perfect for that application, but we learned that it is a very fragmented market that moves very slowly. It’s still a good market for us, but it’s incremental. The home automation market is also good, but somewhat limited until they get the costs down and the maturity up.

Meanwhile, I think smart energy will work really well. It’s something we saw from being so tightly involved with the ZigBee Alliance, just from being down in the trenches and talking to guys about what they were doing. I would say smart energy only made up about 10 percent of our revenue in 2008, but we expect it to be 40 or 50 percent in 2009.

X: You mentioned the ZigBee Alliance. As I remember it, when ZigBee started out years ago it was mainly pitched as low-bandwidth alternative to the Bluetooth standard for home entertainment and automation applications. The one that sticks out in my mind was a remote control for opening and closing your blinds, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at the time. But Ember became instrumental in adapting the standard for more advanced applications, like monitoring devices for their energy usage. How did Ember help to advance that standard, specifically?

RL: We were big proponents of the ZigBee Pro networking standard, and fundamental to that is true ad-hoc routing. We believe that RF links are inherently unreliable. Unlike a Bluetooth device or a cell phone, a temperature sensor that loses its signal can’t move six inches to the right to get a better signal. You need a network that can handle that efficiently. We wanted to build a network where you wouldn’t be constrained by …Next Page »

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It was the week before Christmas, and the deals were flying. Could San Diego’s economy be downturn defying? Heed the tech news and be of good cheer! We wish you an Xconomy Xmas and Xponential New Year!

—The big deal of the week came Wednesday, when Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT) exercised its option to acquire Ibis Biosciences from Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) for $215 million—plus continuing payments from sales of Ibis’ diagnostics products.

—San Diego’s Ligand Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: LGND) also scored with a big pharma partner, GlaxoSmithKline, (NYSE: GSK) by awarding exclusive rights to Glaxo for its drug candidate shown recently to effectively boost blood platelet cells. Glaxo agreed to pay $5 million now and as much as $158 million later, not including royalty payments.

—San Diego’s Solera Holdings, which makes software for the auto claims industry, announced it has paid $117.4 million to buy HPI Ltd, a British firm that compiles a data base of used car histories. Solera was founded in 2005 by Tony Aquila, a former president of Mitchell International, a rival auto claims software developer also based in San Diego.

—San Diego’s Huntington Capital raised $78 million in capital commitments for its second fund, which the boutique venture lender launched in May. The firm hopes to raise a total of $100 million for “Fund II” by early next year.

—Privately held Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, NV, completed its buyout of SpaceDev, which is based in the suburban San Diego community of Poway, in a deal estimated at roughly $30 million. SpaceDev said its shareholders approved the deal Monday.

—Ardea Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker: RDEA]]), the San Diego biotech developing small molecule drugs for inflammatory diseases, raised more than $30 million in a private stock placement.

—Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), sensing new opportunities in stem cell research for treating diabetes, formed a two-year collaboration with San Diego’s Novocell.

—Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, who made his fortune as the founder of MP3.com, launched a new version of Gizmo5 technology at SIPphone. The new technology, GizmoCall.com, enables users to log onto a Web site to make VOIP calls (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and can be used with any computer running a Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating system.

—Finally, the government awarded a couple of noteworthy contracts this week to San Diego’s SAIC, (NYSE: SAI) the research and engineering company also known as Science Applications International Corp. The first, from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was for a $14.9 million biofuel contract to develop ways of using algae to make JP-8 grade jet fuel. The second deal, from NASA, could be worth as much as $69 million over the next five years to SAIC for engineering services and support for the Constellation program, which calls for returning astronauts to the moon.

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It turns out that DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D funding agency, awarded two biofuel development contracts last week, and both went to San Diego companies. As we reported, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $19.5 million contract to a consortium headed by General Atomics. Yesterday, the Pentagon said DARPA also awarded a $14.9 million contract to SAIC, the engineering and research company. Both contracts call for developing economical methods for making JP-8 grade jet fuel from algae.

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Venture and private equity firms apparently have clamped down on much of their funding activities in San Diego, but some local firms were able to take advantage of state and federal sources of cash last week. We also saw the Food and Drug Administration give Amylin a break and Qualcomm’s top executives offer their outlook for next year.

—One significant development for San Diego’s biotech community is that the state’s stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, opened its spigot for funding business ventures. The change is important because the institute has doled out more than $614 million through 229 grants since it was created in 2005, with all but one grant going to academic scientists at non-profit universities and research centers. Last week the institute awarded six grants to life science companies, and four with operations in San Diego got a total of more than $3.3 million.

—San Diego’s Cohu, which has traditionally been one of the most cautious players in the semiconductor industry, agreed to pay $80 million in cash to buy German rival Rasco from Dover Corp. Cohu makes thermal pick-and-place test handling machines used by chipmakers to test the performance of semiconductors with wire leads. Rasco specializes in gravity-feed machines that test smaller chips used increasingly …Next Page »

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Whether it’s John McCain or Barack Obama, what should the new American president do to promote technological innovation and global competitiveness? Computerworld asked a collection of tech luminaries from around the country for their advice, and published their thoughts today. Here are contributions from three info-tech experts in Xconomy cities.

Rick Rashid, senior vice president at Microsoft and head of Microsoft Research, writes, “Over the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a retreat from the successful research investment strategies of the past—strategies that created modern computing and the Internet.” Rashid advises that the new administration “work toward restoring a balanced system of support for long-term basic research in science and technology with a goal of ensuring the future competitiveness of the U.S.” Specifically, he advises that the administration “work with Congress to eliminate or limit [noncompetitive] earmark funding for science, restore the ‘long-term risk-taking’ parts of DARPA to its 1970s/1980s form, and fund the American Competitiveness Initiative.”

Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington (and former chairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee), gives a five-point plan that begins with restoring integrity to U.S. science policy. “It is essential that federal policy benefit from the most complete, accurate and honest scientific and technological information available,” he writes. Lazowska also advises doubling federal investment in fundamental research over the next 10 years, making a “national commitment to science education at all levels,” making the R&D tax credit permanent, and using technology to address the critical challenges of the 21st century. That includes energy independence, climate change, global hunger, national security, and urban infrastructure. “None is optional,” he says.

Victor Zue, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (and advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense and National Science Foundation), writes, “Advances in information technology and computer science…are the primary force that powers our economy.” Achievements like the Internet, mobile communication, and user interfaces “typically originated from university research and often took more than a decade to realize a $1 billion market.” So Zue says the new administration should “significantly increase its budget for long-term, fundamental research, e.g., by doubling the NSF budget annually for the next four years. We must invest in educating the next generation of [information technology] professionals.”

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Electrics Cars Coming to America

Think, a Norwegian company that makes cars that run only on electricity, has opened a North American division and hopes to start-selling its autos in the U.S. in 2009, Business Week reports. The Think Ox is about the size of a Prius, runs for 125-155 miles per charge on rechargeable lithium ion batteries, and goes from 0 to 60 mph in 8.5 seconds. One wonders if the Ox name, presumably designed to evoke clean air, will have the same effect on sales that the Chevy Nova—”no go” in Spanish—legendarily had on sales in Latin America.

Changing MPG Standard Could Save Fuel

The way we think about fuel efficiency could be undermining our ability to actually figure out how much a car can save us in gas costs, researchers at Duke University suggest. New Scientist reports that a study found that people think doubling the miles per gallon of a compact car has the same effect on overall fuel consumption as doubling it in an SUV: that is, going from 10 to 20 mpg saves five gallons per 100 miles, while going from 25 to 50 mpg saves only two. The scientists want to flip the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard on its head, from miles per gallon to gallons per (100) miles, which they say would make the picture clearer

Big Business Wants a Climate Plan

Ninety-nine large businesses from all over the world, including ALCOA and Shell, want global leaders to get together on greenhouse-gas targets and an international carbon market, Bloomberg says. The statement, prepared by the World Economic Forum, was presented ahead of next month’s meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations. The U.S. has said it won’t agree to any binding targets unless China and India do also.

DARPA Not Underperforming, Director Says

Following on a report that the Department of Defense took away $32 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency because the agency was having a hard time allocating the funds, DARPA’s director says the Pentagon doesn’t understand how the agency works. According to Wired, director Tony Tether says there was unspent money because of his heightened supervision of projects. Some finished early, before all the money was spent, and some were cancelled because of poor performance, he says.

Court Debates the Meaning of “Infringement”

A federal judge may grant a mistrial in a file-sharing case after conceding he may have given the jury the wrong information about whether an action was a copyright infringement, Ars Technica reports. The judge had told the jury that merely making a copyrighted song available on a peer-to-peer network counted as infringement. But a friend-of-the-court brief from nine professors of copyright law argue that “making available” isn’t the same as “distributing” someone else’s property. The case could help define the line between stealing and fair use.

Heart Imaging Drugs Can Cause Death, FDA Warns

The continued use of certain drugs, known as contrast agents, to improve ultrasound images of the heart is leading to deaths, the Food and Drug Administration says. An AP story on Forbes.com reports that the FDA put out a warning in October, but since then has received four reports of patients dying after being injected with Definity, a drug formerly marketed by Bristol Myers Squibb. Researchers have been developing agents that are easier to see on ultrasound or MRI scans as a way to spot hard-to-find defects.

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Court Finds Text Messages Are Private
You can now text your BFF to your heart’s content and not worry about somebody reading the transcript, thanks to a federal court ruling. CNET News reports that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must get a user’s consent before getting a service provider to turn over copies of text messages. The ruling came in a case where police supervisors in Ontario, CA, wanted to see officers’ messages to determine if they were work-related.

FDA Targets Internet Nostrums
The Internet not only provides a handy source of information about diseases and their treatments, it can also link ill people to sellers of purported remedies, offering cures without any scientific proof they actually work. Now the Food and Drug Administration has sent warning letters to 25 companies that market pills, lotions, and tonics that claim to cure cancer, the Los Angeles Times reports. The FDA fears the fake cures could interfere with legitimate treatments or otherwise harm patients

Doctors Don’t Use Electronic Records
Digitizing health records can improve the quality of medical care by speeding access to information and reducing errors. But the New York Times reports that a new study shows fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s doctors have adopted electronic records. A big part of the problem is that small, private practices don’t want to spend the $15,000 to $20,000 per doctor it would take to make the conversion.

House Bill Would Spend More on New Energy
A spending bill for fiscal year 2009 would increase spending on energy research by 21 percent, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The House Appropriations subcommittee approved the bill, raising the budget for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to $4.86 billion. Among the provisions: $100 million to establish two dozen new Energy Frontier Research Centers

Home Uses Solar Panels to Produce Hydrogen
Speaking of energy frontiers, Scientific American brings us the story of a New Jersey man who’s taken his home off the grid by installing solar panels on his roof and using their power to split tap water into hydrogen he can use when the sun’s not shining. The project cost $500,000, of which $400,000 came as grants from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. Whether such a setup could be made economically feasible is an open question.

DARPA Suffers Loss of Personnel and Funds
The Department of Defense is diverting $32 million from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency to other, “higher-priority” areas, according to Wired. Apparently DARPA is having trouble finding enough qualified people to fill its program manager jobs. Also, delays in the approval process for research project mean the money isn’t getting allocated

4-H Wants Boost in Science Education
Fearing the country isn’t producing enough scientists and engineers to keep the U.S. competitive with the rest of the world, the National 4-H Council went to Washington this week to lobby members of Congress to promote science to youngsters, says the Wall Street Journal. 4-H wants funding for programs that give kids hands-on experience with science, such as building rockets. The council pledges to prepare one million of the nation’s youth for science careers by 2013.

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Burlington, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced today that it has received a $3.3 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office to develop a soft, pliable robot that can “maneuver through openings smaller than its actual structural dimensions” to perform reconnaissance and urban search and rescue operations. IRobot will work with MIT and Harvard researchers to develop the so-called chemical robots, which will depend on advances in chemistry, materials science, and other fields.

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Talk about a long flight. While the world’s longest passenger jet trip (the 18-hour, 40-minute journey from Newark to Singapore) may be a killer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has hired a group of organizations with Massachusetts operations, including Aurora Flight Sciences, Draper Laboratories, and BAE Systems, to build a plane that can stay in the air for five years.

Manassas, VA-based Aurora (which has a research lab in Cambridge, MA—I profiled it here in October) announced today that it has been selected under DARPA’s “Vulture” program to help build an unmanned aircraft that can keep a 1,000-pound payload of camera and radio equipment aloft in the stratosphere for five years without landing. (Apparently the military has run out of inspiring birds to name aircraft after, and has now turned to the unsavory ones.)

The plane would need to be powered by solar energy, fuel cells, and/or extremely efficient internal combustion engines, since DARPA has ruled out nuclear or radiation-based power systems. The craft will mainly function as a surveillance tool—with a lifetime approaching that of some orbital satellites. Indeed, DARPA calls Vulture a “retaskable, persistent pseudo-satellite…in an aircraft package.”

Aurora’s design concept for the Vulture, called Odysseus, works on solar energy during the day and stored solar energy at night. Aurora teamed on its proposal with Cambridge, MA-based Draper Labs, which will develop high-reliability electronics and control systems for Odysseus, and BAE Systems, which has offices in Acton, MA and will work on payloads and sensors. A fourth partner, Sierra Nevada Corporation of Sparks, NV, specializes in autonomous refueling systems.

For the first phase of the Vulture project, expected to last 12 months, the Odysseus team members will need to come up with a basic design and build scale-model demonstration craft. Phase 2, expected to run from 2009 to 2012, will culminate in the testing of a demonstrator that can stay aloft for three months. DARPA wants the finished Vulture craft—which will only be built if the Phase 2 tests are successful—to be capable of station-keeping (circling over a set location such as a battlefield) 99 percent of the time at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet, where 100- to 200-mile-per-hour winds are common.

The inspiration for Vulture comes partly from experimental unmanned planes designed and tested by NASA, including Helios, a single-wing, solar-powered craft that set an altitude record in 2001 by flying above 96,000 feet for 40 minutes. (In a later test Helios broke up and crashed into the ocean.)

I wasn’t able to get through to anyone at Aurora for comment about the DARPA award, but the company said in its press announcement that it foresees “a broad range of potential applications” for Odysseus-type craft, other than military surveillance. “Prime among these are global climate change research, weather monitoring, and regional-scale telecommunications,” the company said.

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Back in December, Cambridge, MA-based BBN picked up $5.67 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop mobile-device software that will translate printed foreign-language documents into English. Now the company’s general R&D efforts on automated language translation are getting another boost from DARPA. BBN has won a $13 million grant through DARPA’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program to work on speech and text transcription, the company announced today. BBN merited the award by meeting or exceeding goals for automatic translation of Arabic newswire text and broadcast news during the program’s first two years; GALE calls for awardees to reach 90 percent accuracy by the end of the five-year research program.

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Burlington, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) has made two announcements in as many days, touching on both sides of its business, military robots and home robots.

On the military side, iRobot said Monday that it has received an award to design and develop robots for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s LANdroids program. LANdroids (the LAN stands for local area networking) are DARPA’s answer to the problem of radio-signal blockage and interference in complex urban warfighting areas, an issue that tends to degrade communications between soldiers whenever they aren’t within each other’s direct line of sight.

The agency wants iRobot and other robot makers to develop fleets of small robots that would basically function as mobile, autonomous repeater antennas. The book-sized or palm-sized bots would be dropped or thrown into an urban environment, where they’d fan out, navigating based on signal strength measurements to the optimal positions for maintaining a wireless mesh network. The network would then relay communications between soldiers, or between field units and headquarters. The robots would even form themselves into virtual chains or “tethers,” automatically maintaining communications with units that wander away from the main mesh.

Picture a desktop Wi-Fi base station with a few antennas sticking out and couple of tank treads attached, and you’ll have DARPA’s basic vision for a LANdroid. According to briefing documents, distributed last June by DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office for bidders on the project, the robots will need to be not just agile but intelligent. They’ll need the ability to navigate within a signal-strength map to the location with the best signal; respond to the movements of other LANdroids; “heal” the mesh when other bots are lost or broken; and calculate the trade-off between the energy required to pick up a signal and the energy required to move to a location with a better signal. They’ll also need to be energy-efficient (since there might not be anyone around to recharge or replace their batteries) and inexpensive—under $100 per unit, according to DARPA.

IRobot did not specify the amount of the award it has received from DARPA, but the agency’s briefing documents state that the program’s target award size is $1 million or less per year per effort, spread over three project phases lasting one year each. In a press release, iRobot co-founder and chairman Helen Greiner said, “Research and development awards such as the DARPA LANdroids program enable us to continue driving innovation towards the next generation of revolutionary mobile, tactical combat robots that deliver advanced situational awareness and help keep warfighters out of harm’s way.”

Another array of iRobot products, just expanded today, is intended to keep swimmers out of muck’s way. Last April, iRobot introduced its Verro 300 and Verro 600 pool-cleaning robots, which were developed by Aquajet and Aquatron and brought to market under the iRobot brand name. The robots, which are tethered to an electrical transformer, are designed to be dropped into a swimming pool, where they are propelled by hydrojets, vacuuming up debris into a filtration bag and power-washing an entire pool surface in 60 to 90 minutes.

Today, iRobot surfaced two additions to the Verro line, the Verro 100 and the Verro 500. The Verro 100, expected to go on sale in April, is a simplified, economy model designed for above-ground pools, while the Verro 500, available now, features rubber rollers and brushes for more thorough surface scrubbing.

“A desire to build on iRobot’s heritage of practical and easy-to-use indoor/outdoor home helper robots was the impetus for expanding the popular Verro line,” Sandra Lawrence, president and general manager of iRobot’s home robots division, said in the company’s announcement about the new products. “As the swimming pool season kicks off in much of the country, we wanted to provide the best solutions for pool maintenance that enable pool owners to spend their leisure time enjoying their pool, rather than cleaning it.”

The company has apparently dropped the Verro 600 model. IRobot is pricing the Verro 100, Verro 300, and Verro 500 at $399, $699, and $999, respectively.

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BBN Technologies of Cambridge said today that it has won a $5.67 million contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects agency to develop prototype optical character recognition and translation software for mobile devices and laptop and desktop computers that will turn printed and handwritten foreign-language text documents into English, including hard copy, PDF files, photographs, newsprint, and road signs. The company said the DARPA grant is extendable to as much as $30 million.

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A robot car built by MIT faculty and students was one of just six autonomous vehicles to successfully complete the DARPA Urban Challenge competition this weekend. However, when the results were announced Sunday afternoon, Team MIT had missed out on the big prize money, which went to the first three finishers: Tartan Racing (led by Carnegie Mellon University), the Stanford Racing Team, and VictorTango from Virginia Tech.

The challenge, presented by the Defense Advanced Research Agency, was designed to advance the state of the art for autonomous vehicles for use by the military. After semi-final qualifying rounds in late October, 11 teams were chosen for the finals, which took place on Saturday at the abandoned George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. Their task was to navigate a mock-city environment that contained busy four-way intersections and other obstacles designed to simulate conditions that vehicles might encounter in a military supply mission. The event offered $3.5 million in prize money, with $2 million going to the winner, $1 million to the second-place finisher, and $500,000 to the third-place team.

MIT’s robot vehicle, dubbed Talos, was one of just six of the 11 finalists to complete the three challenges given the finalists and finish the course in under six hours. We checked in throughout the day Saturday to watch the competition via DARPA’s live webcast. By noon EDT, all 11 teams were successfully on the course. But almost immediately, some ran into trouble. Intelligent Vehicle Systems, an entry from Ford, Honeywell, and Delphi, got stuck right out of gate and had to be manually backed up and restarted. Similarly, Team Oshkosh Truck, which looked like a giant yellow Tonka truck, also encountered early difficulties.

Around this time came what might have been the world’s first autonomous vehicle traffic jam—seven vehicles piled up at a four-way intersection. A little over an hour and a half into the challenge, Oshkosh (oh gosh), Annieway (from Germany and the only team led by a woman), and ISV were being removed from the course. A half-hour after that, the Knight Rider bot (University of Central Florida) drove into a house, unfortunately a disqualifying error.

But given all the challenges of an urban environment, with stop signs, intersections, moving traffic, and various additional obstacles, it was impressive that even six robots finished the course. Indeed, with many of the vehicles at times traveling very quickly while obeying all traffic rules, it was sometimes difficult to believe they were completely autonomous. In addition to the four already mentioned, Team Cornell and the Ben Franklin Racing Team (University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University) completed all the tasks.

MIT’s robot, with by far the most sensors of any robo-vehicle in the race, according to commentators, might have been done in by its own sophistication. The car carried 40 computing cores cooled by a rooftop air conditioning unit, all of which was powered by a 6-kilowatt generator. It seemed to get stuck repeatedly. And indeed, webcast commentators began asking such questions as, ‘Does MIT’s car think too much?’

“They’ve got enough going on in there to operate two or three cars,” said commentator Jamie Hyneman, co-host of the hit Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. “You don’t hear the car, you hear the generator and the air conditioner.” However, he added, “once they get those bugs worked out, watch out, it’s quite a vehicle.”

At 4:44 pm, Stanford’s “Junior,” became the first team to finish all three missions. One minute behind it was Tartan Racing (the winner was not just selected by time, but based on its overall performance throughout the challenge, much like an equestrian competition). When Talos finally completed the course, the commentator enthused, “MIT, in their first-ever DARPA challenge, finishes fifth across the line.”

We reached MIT aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of the team leaders, for comment late Sunday. “I congratulate CMU, Stanford, and Virginia Tech on excellent performances,” How wrote in an e-mail. “While we trailed them by some time, we are very pleased that we finished the full 55 miles and came in fourth place. I think this was a great accomplishment for a first time team, and think that the students and postdocs did an outstanding job. I am very proud of what the team was able to accomplish in the past year and a half.”

“By the way,” How continued, “I thought the race was going to be fun, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be that much fun. It truly was amazing to watch these robots driving around at speed with all that traffic on the road. What a blast.”

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It wasn’t a shoo-in, according to MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jonathan How. But Team MIT learned this afternoon that it has won a qualifying berth in the DARPA Urban Challenge finals on Saturday, when observers will learn which competing institution’s autonomous vehicle is best at navigating a complex mock-city environment replete with moving traffic, busy four-way intersections, and numerous obstacles.

A surprising number of prominent teams, including Team Caltech, Team Princeton, and Axion Racing, were definitively eliminated after qualifying events held at George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA, from October 26 through 31. And while MIT wasn’t one of the teams eliminated, it also wasn’t among a group of six teams named by DARPA as qualifiers on Wednesday, creating considerable suspense as to whether the MIT “supercomputer on wheels”—a Land Rover loaded up with sensors, servers, and software by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students from MIT and Olin College—would be allowed to compete for the $2 million grand prize on Saturday.

But officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsors of this year’s challenge as well as two previous robot-car races in 2004 and 2005, released a list of five more qualifying teams this afternoon, including MIT. In the end, 24 of the 35 teams who traveled with their robot cars to Victorville were eliminated from the competition. MIT was the only team from New England to make the finals (or even the semi-finals).

How, who spoke with me from his office at MIT before boarding a plane for California, says he listened in on the announcement remotely as a colleague in Victorville held up a cell phone. “It’s nice to get this far,” How says. “There are good friends of mine who did not, and it would have been tough to have done this amount of work and not get through. I really feel bad for those guys. But I’m just hoping we can go out there and put on a good show so that MIT can be proud.”

How says the main point of the qualifying events was “to make sure that every vehicle in the race is sufficiently safe that they can just leave the robot driving around.” That’s probably a good thing, given that the environment on Saturday will be more complex than anything any of the teams have dealt with before. All 11 robot cars will be on the course simultaneously, along with as many as 80 other vehicles, including chase cars and spectator vehicles. “It’s going to be a lot of fun to see what happens,” How says.

According to How, Team MIT didn’t make it into the first group of qualifiers because the Land Rover had trouble with one particular event, a loop designed to test how well the robot cars could merge into moving traffic. “You’re facing two lanes of oncoming traffic,” explains How. “You turn left across that traffic, merge with moving traffic, drive around a loop, cut across traffic again, join moving traffic again, and so on. The question was how many laps could you do in 20 minutes.” Tartan Racing—one of the first six qualifiers—completed 16 loops in the given time. Team MIT completed six or seven. (Stanford’s team, the defending champions from the 2005 Grand Challenge, did well in the qualifing events and was on the list of six teams announced Wednesday.)

Every team had two chances at the merging-traffic event, and some were able to fine-tune their planning and navigation software sufficiently to improve on the second go-round. Others weren’t. “The traffic was only moving at 10 miles per hour, so a human would probably have been okay with it, but it is a hard problem” for robots, How remarks.

Past DARPA challenges simply involved getting a robot car from the start line outside Los Angeles to a finish line near Las Vegas. Saturday’s finals, where all team members will be forced to look on from spectator stands at the edge of a suburb-like test course, “will be quite a bit different,” How says. “We’ll get to see [the cars] over an extended time. And once the robots start meeting up, then it really becomes stochastic”—a big word for completely chaotic.

How’s own specialty, as I wrote after visiting MIT’s Urban Challenge team in early September, is developing path-planning algorithms like those used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to cross unknown territory safely. And that, as it turns out, is the exact problem the robot cars will face on Saturday. “Say there’s a robot blocking the road. Do you sit there and wait? What if he is waiting for you? Do you move back? You need a very general strategy that’s able to handle many different scenarios,” How says. How well MIT’s car handles such unpredictable situations will be evident in a couple of days—when the event will be webcast live at http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/.

UPDATE 11/2/07 2:40 p.m.: DARPA has released the list of all 11 teams that have advanced to Saturday’s finals.

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Driving in urban traffic is a stupendously tricky task demanding a constant stream of split-second, almost subconscious decisions. In fact, if you give it too much thought—Am I driving inside the lane markers? How much space should I give the car ahead of me? Who got to this intersection first? Is that old lady going wait for the walk signal?—you’ll probably steer yourself right into an accident. Yet creating an autonomous vehicle that can handle such decisions in real time is the whole point of the DARPA Urban Challenge, the third major robot-car competition mounted by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. And to meet that challenge, a team at MIT has built what amounts to a supercomputer on wheels.

On August 9, DARPA named the MIT team as one of 36 semi-finalists for the Urban Challenge, to be held October 26 through November 3 at the urban military training facility at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. The institute’s team will be the only one representing New England in the DARPA challenge, and believe it or not, it’s the first time MIT has won a berth in a DARPA robot-car event, which this time around carries a $2 million first prize.

That creates just a “little bit” of stress for Team MIT, acknowledges aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of four principal investigators (PIs) leading the school’s effort. “The MIT name is on the side of the car,” How pointed out last week as we peered into the team’s extensively pimped-out Land Rover 3. “Is it possible to add more pressure? I don’t know.”

How’s specialty is developing path-planning algorithms of the type used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to chart safe trajectories through unknown territory. And planning will be one of the big tasks preoccupying the 40 CPUs, or “cores,” bolted into in the way-back of the Land Rover, which currently occupies the Aero/Astro hangar in MIT’s Building 33. With all that computing power on board—more than any other team’s vehicle will be carrying, as far as How knows—the MIT car will, in theory, be able to think its way out of dilemmas that may stymie other vehicles navigating the DARPA course (the details of which are kept secret until the day before the competition). “We have algorithms in place that are using 15 to 18 of our cores,” says How. “If you didn’t have 40 computers you couldn’t do it that way—so we have a design freedom that others may not have.”

Ostensibly, How and co-PI Seth Teller, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), invited me over to the hangar to show off the Land Rover. (See a brief slide show of my visit here.) But we spent most of our hour together talking about its sensors and planning algorithms—which is probably a sign of how the field of autonomous-vehicle research has progressed.

Teller and How explained that thanks in part to technology developed and tested during DARPA’s previous competitions, it’s now fairly easy to equip a car for autonomous operation. Attach electric servo-motors up to the gas pedal, brakes, and steering column, and throw in a few dozen off-the-shelf automobile radars, laser range finders, and video cameras, and you’re done—well, if you have the expertise of several MIT departments and a team of undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering* to call on.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s going to drive so well in an urban setting,” says How. That’s because the real challenge in the DARPA competition lies in building the software that will give the vehicle the ability to picture its surroundings and respond to encroaching hazards, all the while moving toward the finish line.

Vehicles participating in the DARPA challenge will need every ounce of awareness their builders can provide, given that the race itself has become much more complex since its earlier incarnations. In the 2004 and 2005 DARPA robot challenges, cars zoomed through the open Mojave desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. (Or rather, in 2005 they did; five vehicles crossed the finish line that year, with Stanford taking first prize, whereas the best team in the disastrous 2004 competition progressed no further than about 7.5 miles.) This time, cars will have six hours to navigate along a series of checkpoints, such as intersections, that will be handed to teams 24 hours prior to the competition.

Each robot car must plan its own route between the checkpoints and make the journey completely autonomously, using only sensor data and GPS systems to navigate. The cars must also obey all California traffic laws, such as ceding the right-of-way to preceding vehicles at four-way intersections. Judges will deduct points if cars fail to avoid obstacles such as lane markers, curbs, or traffic barrels.

“There are at least three levels of planning happening in the car,” Teller explains. “There is the long-range planning of ‘What intersections do I visit?’ Then there’s ‘What is the next few hundred meters of trajectory? What road segment should I choose to advance the mission?’ And then there’s, ‘What’s coming up in the next five or 10 meters, or the next few hundred milliseconds?’ [And] how should the gas and steering and brakes be moved so that the car meets the higher-level trajectory goals.” (See video of the MIT vehicle in action here.)

“It’s a lot more dynamic than previous challenges,” sums up How. It’s also, arguably, more socially relevant. As Teller notes, “If you could have safe autonomous cars, you might be able to avoid many of the 40,000 highway deaths we have every year in the United States. You could probably save a lot of fuel by having cars drive in a more smoothly coordinated fashion. And you could improve productivity by letting people read or work in the back seat while their cars drive.”

That relevance is part of the reason MIT threw its weight behind the project this year. But students from MIT’s Aero/Astro, Mechanical Engineering, and EECS departments also had a fair bit to do with it, say Teller and How. MIT didn’t send a team to the challenge at all in 2004. A student-led group raised $100,000 to build a vehicle in 2005, but the institute provided minimal additional support, and the team failed to qualify. A self-critical article in the November/December 2006 MIT Faculty Newsletter argued that “MIT can do much better” in supporting student projects. The new effort reflects that philosophy, and has also won the sponsorship of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, the Ford-MIT Alliance, and a number of other sponsors.

“We have had a very motivated group of graduate students who very early, in June 2006, basically banged on the table and said, ‘We really want to do this,’” Teller says. “We were game to do it, but to have them come and basically insist that we do it pushed us over the edge.”

Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun, who led his team to victory in the 2005 competition and will again head the Stanford entry in Victorville, says he welcomes the new competition. “I was sad to see MIT absent in past Grand Challenges,” Thrun says. “I am a big fan of the MIT team, since it has recruited world-class robotic researchers…I predict the level of technical innovation will be remarkable for this team in the 2007 race.”

Indeed, when MIT faculty enter a competition, they enter to win. At least, that’s the impression I got from inspecting the team’s Land Rover, which is bristling with sensors on the outside and stuffed with processing power on the inside. To gather information about its position, the car carries an inertial sensor to track short-term changes in direction, precise odometers to measure the amount of ground the car has covered, and a high-end GPS receiver. To see what’s around it, the car is also equipped with mid-range laser scanners or “LIDAR” (for light detection and ranging) that project a skirt of laser beams around the body, detecting objects within about 60 meters. This is supplemented by about 15 longer-range automotive radars of the same type used on luxury passenger cars for adaptive cruise control—and, to provide an extra level of awareness, a fleet of video cameras, which are mainly used to detect road edges.

All in all, the car’s sensors sweep a disk-shaped area about 150 meters in radius. “Within that disk, we have pretty good situational awareness of what we have to avoid,” says Teller. From there on, it’s a matter of finding the way between checkpoints and adapting to last-minute changes in the course, doubling back if necessary—which is all the job of How’s planning algorithms.

On the final day of the competition—November 3, regardless of rain or fog—the most important task will be “establishing what you know and what you don’t know, and planning effectively through that in an uncertain world,” says How. “I think what we have here is a car that, both from a sensing perspective and a computing perspective, will achieve sufficient understanding so that we can proceed. That’s the only thing we’re thinking about right now. That, plus winning the race, of course.”

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