Dateline: 2030, give or take. We’re at war. Bullets are flying, ordnance is exploding, and conditions are beyond dangerous. Soldiers are scattered across the landscape, bleeding and waiting for help. A commander gives the order, and suddenly a fleet of robots storms the battlefield to pull the wounded to the safety of waiting rescue helicopters.

What may sound like the plot of a “Saving Private Ryan” meets “Blade Runner” science fiction movie is actually a potential future application of MABEL, a robot built in a University of Michigan lab. The robot is believed to be the world’s fastest bipedal machine with knees, a prototype for robots that engineers hope can one day serve as soldiers or rescuers.

“It’s quite exciting,” says Jessy Grizzle, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I have never seen a machine doing a motion like this.”

Grizzle built MABEL in 2008 in collaboration with Jonathan Hurst, who was then a doctoral student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Grizzle and U-M doctoral students Koushil Sreenath and Hae-Won Park have spent the years since trying to perfect MABEL’s humanoid gait. They’ve been progressively improving the feedback algorithms that enable the robot to keep its balance while reacting to its environment in real time.

“We envision some extraordinary potential applications for legged robot research: exoskeletons that enable wheelchair-bound people to walk again or that give rescuers super-human abilities, and powered prosthetic limbs that behave like their biological counterparts,” said developer Hurst in a press release. Hurst is now an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University.

When researchers in the field of robotics first got started, robots had legs like pogo sticks. Even today few robots can run, and Grizzle says MABEL is the the only one to do it in a manner so closely human. Its … Next Page »

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Eric DeMarco, the CEO of San Diego’s Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, (NASDAQ:KTOS) is showing he learned the lessons of rapid growth during his years at former San Diego defense contractor Titan Corp.

Today Kratos announced it’s merging its Kratos Government Solutions division with Digital Fusion, a small defense contractor in Huntsville, AL, that trades over the counter, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $34 million. The deal with Digital Fusion, or DFI, follows Kratos’ acquisition of San Diego’s SYS Technologies earlier this year and Haverstick Consulting late last year.

DeMarco gained experience with many similar buyout deals while working as Titan’s CFO and COO during a growth-through-acquisition strategy that carried Titan from annual revenue of $138 million to roughly $1.5 billion. L3 Communications acquired Titan in 2005 in a deal valued at roughly $2.65 billion, including assumed debt.

DeMarco left Titan in 2003 to join San Diego’s Wireless Facilities, an ailing communications company that he subsequently changed into Kratos, a defense IT and engineering company.

With the DFI deal, DeMarco continues to transform Kratos from a collection of small defense companies into a mid-tier defense contractor. DFI brings Kratos about 280 employees and contracts in missile defense, aerospace, sensors, computerized modeling, and unmanned aerial vehicles.

If shareholders of both companies approve the deal, Kratos will have about 2,250 employees.
Under the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards at both companies, DFI’s stock will be converted into Kratos stock. The deal calls for Kratos to provide 1.7933 shares of its stock for each DFI share.

Kratos says it will issue about 25.4 million new shares of its common stock, which closed yesterday at $1.35 a share after the deal was announced. Upon closing, DFI shareholders will own approximately 20 percent, and current Kratos shareholders approximately 80 percent, of the combined company.

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