From the seas to the stars, Microsoft Research is trying to increase its impact. The Redmond, WA-based computer science research organization is releasing new software tools aimed at helping scientists manage and visualize huge amounts of information, and make discoveries in fields as diverse as astronomy and oceanography. The announcement of the free tools, called Project Trident, is being made today at the 10th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond.

Everyone knows information overload is a huge issue. Just try being a scientist these days. With increasing amounts of data available from the Internet, satellites, telescopes, cameras, gene sequencers, and networked sensors, researchers—and organizations in general—are looking for ways to cut through the deluge and focus faster on doing the analysis and getting results, rather than sorting through data.

It’s also a problem faced by big companies, financial analysts, and medical institutions. So, ultimately, Project Trident is not aimed at spearing purely scientific research problems—it’s software that also could yield big results for business down the road. “If we look back at the challenges faced in business, scientists were facing them years if not decades before,” says Roger Barga, a Microsoft researcher and principal architect on Project Trident. “We’re getting an early look at what our business customers will expect in their products in 3-5 years. It’s pushing another Microsoft [Windows] platform into new areas.”

Project Trident started around 2006, when Barga began collaborating with legendary Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (who was lost at sea in January 2007) on tools to help oceanographers make sense of volumes of data on things like temperature, salinity, and the physics of seafloor hydrothermal vents. “There’s a clear understanding of the science and how to put instruments in the ocean, but there’s a gap in how to convert data streaming in from the ocean to useful analysis,” Barga says. “Jim had this vision of …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Greg told you last month about Bedford, MA-based iRobot’s collaboration with the University of Washington to turn its Seaglider undersea robot into a commercial product. Not to be outdone, Cambridge, MA-based Bluefin Robotics announced this week that it has received its first commercial contract for a similar autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the Spray Glider.

And it looks like Bluefin, iRobot, and a third local company—Falmouth, MA-based Webb Research, recently bought by Teledyne—will all be going up against each other for a big Navy contract for at least 154 of the glider-class robots. The torpedo-shaped vehicles, which can be outfitted with a variety of sensors, have no external moving parts and move through the ocean simply by altering their buoyancy.

Bluefin’s contract, announced Monday, is with Horizon Marine, an oceanographic services company in Marion, MA, that helps oil and gas companies map ocean currents in the vicinities of offshore oil rigs. Bluefin will supply an unspecified number of Spray Glider submarines to Horizon, which will use them as part of its so-called “Eddy Watch” program, which detects strong currents that can damage undersea drilling equipment. “We chose Bluefin Robotics and the Spray Gliders because they offer long-term unattended deployments at a reasonable cost,” said Horizon president James Feeney in a statement.

Bluefin, a 1997 spinoff of the AUV Laboratory at MIT’s Sea Grant College Program, licenses the technology behind the Spray Glider from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, where it was originally developed. Like the UW/iRobot Seaglider and Webb Research’s Slocum Glider, the Spray Glider is designed for autonomous missions lasting up to six months. The winged vehicle can move up and down in the water by moving oil between internal and external bladders. When the oil is inside the robot’s pressurized hull, the vehicle has negative buoyancy, so it sinks; when the oil is moved to the external bladder, it leaves an air-filled space inside, giving the vehicle positive buoyancy and causing it to rise. As it moves up and down in the water column, its wings deflect it forward, so that the vehicle’s overall path resembles the teeth of a saw.

In the course of a single mission, the Spray Glider can dive and ascend 800 times, going as deep as 1,500 meters and covering a total distance of 4,000 kilometers. Every time the vehicle surfaces, it uses GPS to get a fix on its position, and sends the data it’s collected back to controllers via an Iridium satellite phone connection. (The Seaglider and the Slocum Glider function much the same way; all three vehicles were developed in response to an Office of Naval Research challenge to the scientific community about 10 years ago to build an “autonomous ocean sampling network.”)

Bluefin has been manufacturing the Spray Glider for oceanographic research organizations and military agencies since 2004. But the Horizon deal marks the first time that Bluefin has supplied the craft to a commercial client. “The contract is important to us in that it’s really the first time that the oil and gas industry has come to look at this platform,” says Jeff Smith, Bluefin’s director of programs. “Traditionally this has been an academic research vehicle. The Navy has recently looked at using it for data collection to give advantage to the warfighter, and now with this Horizon Marine contract we’re seeing it in real-time applications for commercial oil and gas exploration.”

Smith couldn’t divulge the size of the contract, but he says that each Spray Glider vehicle costs about $100,000 when fully equipped with conductivity, temperature, and depth sensors. (Which isn’t much when you compare it to the $30,000 per day it can cost to send out manned oceanographic survey ships.)

While the Horizon contract is important for Bluefin, however, it’s the Navy relationship that could develop into a real gold mine for the company. In partnership with General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems division, Bluefin just submitted a final proposal to supply 154 Spray Gliders, along with data communications gear and other mission support subsystems, to the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). Powered and unpowered AUVs are a key part of SPAWAR’s planned Littoral Battlespace Sensing, Fusion, and Integration (LBSF&I) program, which would provide a better picture of global ocean conditions to naval mission planners.

Smith believes that iRobot and Webb Research have submitted competing proposals to supply gliders for the LBSF&I program. “It’s a very large procurement,” he says. The winning organization could be in an admirable position for the future, since the current LBSF&I contract “is just the first component of a six- or seven-tiered acquisition that the Navy is putting together to get a broader picture of the ocean,” says Smith.

The Navy is expected to announce which organization will receive the initial contract on September 15.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

This week, iRobot made a splash with the news that it has signed a sole licensing agreement with the University of Washington in Seattle to commercialize UW’s “Seaglider” underwater robot. The specific terms of the deal with UW TechTransfer were not disclosed, but the announcement marks the Bedford, MA-based robotics company’s first foray into the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) market.

Best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaners and military PackBots, iRobot is diving into a field that includes local competitors like Cambridge, MA-based Bluefin Robotics and Hydroid in Pocasset, MA. The company sees oceanographers and military planners as the main potential buyers of the technology—anyone who wants to monitor the properties of the ocean environment accurately and over long periods of time.

“We’ve been looking at entering the underwater space for a while,” says Helen Greiner, cofounder and chairman of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). She says her team was impressed by the Seaglider technology, and earlier this spring, after talking with UW, she sent MIT roboticist and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks (an Xconomist) out to Seattle. “He bridged the gap between the academic community and the company, and was a really good ambassador,” Greiner says. “Universities exist for scientific reasons, for doing research, while at the same time they want to get their baby out into the world.”

What impressed Greiner most about the Seaglider was its efficiency and durability. Developed by researchers at the UW Applied Physics Lab and School of Oceanography, each Seaglider is about the size of a person (1.8 meters long, 52 kilograms) and is shaped like a torpedo with wings that allow it to “glide” through the water. It can travel distances of several thousand kilometers—going out to sea for six or seven months at a time—diving to depths of up to 1 kilometer and surfacing periodically to get a GPS fix or transmit data. (You can even track in real-time where the 70-odd Seagliders are deployed in the field, including one off the coast of Washington, here.)

It does all this with no moving external parts, which is key—most AUVs out there use propellers, which allow them to move much faster than the Seaglider’s 25 centimeters per second, but they don’t last very long in the field (just a few days, for instance). With Seaglider, “you don’t need a ship in the area to pick them up and drop them off,” says Fritz Stahr, head of the Seaglider Fabrication Center at UW, which builds the vehicles for research groups. “You deploy them and go away.”

The iRobot deal should benefit the University of Washington’s development teams in terms of reach and exposure. “We can’t build very many at the same time, so we’ve usually had a year-long backlog,” says Stahr. “So it’s always been in the university’s plan to do a license. This will allow the vehicle to see uses far beyond academia, to make it to markets heretofore unseen.”

Seagliders can be equipped …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

IRobot, (NASDAQ: IRBT) the Bedford, MA-based maker of robots that clean floors, scrub gutters, and defuse roadside bombs in Iraq, said today it acquired a license from the University of Washington to develop technology for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can be used by oceanographers and military planners. The UW technology, called Seaglider, uses a buoyancy system meant to enable missions that run thousands of kilometers and last for months at a fraction of the cost of traditional research vessels, iRobot said. The move puts iRobot into direct competition with other New England AUV makers including Pocasset, MA-based Hydroid and Cambridge, MA-based Bluefin Robotics.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

OK, we’re big on robots around here. From iRobot’s landmark court case to Kiva’s shuffling warehouse bots, from the FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology) high-school robot competition to Hydroid’s Navy contract for robot submarines, we’ve been covering the business of bots in depth and on the ground since our inception. And why’s that?

Well, for one thing, robots are just cool. They capture our imagination like few other technologies do. Robots are R2-D2 saving the day, the Terminator delivering one-liners in an Austrian accent, and Iron Man flying through the air, guns ablaze. It’s why anyone ever got into the business in the first place.

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales, according to the official state organization presiding over it all—the Massachusetts Robotics Cluster, which is a subgroup of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship and promotes tech companies.

Not that it’s necessarily a boom time for robotics firms. Everywhere you look, budgets are tight. “It’s a bit tough for early stage companies,” says Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan who watches iRobot. “Very few have viable business models.” To be successful in today’s climate, he adds, it’s becoming more important “to roll up and come to market with a proven model.”

With this state of the robotics union firmly in mind, we wanted to provide the definitive local guide. Following our stories on the greater Boston Internet video cluster and the hidden hub of music and technology, we wanted to track down every commercial outfit doing significant work in robotics—everything from mobile to medical robots, software to hardware, electromechanics to exoskeletons. We drew the line if the company made sensors, electronics, or energy sources that could be used by robots, but did not focus primarily on robot products.

Looking at the list, a few things leapt out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications. We’ve also included a couple of non-companies—organizations that we feel are making a direct impact on the industry. But this is by no means a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed something, please leave us a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

We’re also working on putting together a networking event to bring the local robotics community together to talk about the pressing issues, and maybe raise a few of our own—like what are the potentially transformative applications for robots in society that nobody is thinking of? In the meantime, enjoy our guide…

Aurora Flight Sciences
Cambridge, MA
Vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicles for defense and aerospace applications. The company is headquartered in Manassas, VA, but established an R&D center in Kendall Square in 2005.

Barrett Technology
Cambridge, MA
Best known for its WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulation), a state-of-the-art robotic arm, used for rehabilitation and manufacturing applications such as spray-painting. It might even be used to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Barrett began in 1990 as a spinoff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Black-I Robotics
Tyngsborough, MA
Incorporated in 2006, Black-I develops unmanned ground vehicles for security and defense. Its robots have been tested by the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan Airport for detecting and disrupting car bombs.

Bluefin
Cambridge, MA
Autonomous underwater vehicles for detecting surface mines, and other defense applications using sonar and hydrophones. The company was spun out of MIT in 1997, and became a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute in 2005.

Boston Dynamics
Cambridge, MA
Founded in 1992 out of MIT, Boston Dynamics focuses on human movement simulations and legged robots that can walk and run over rough terrain. A recent YouTube video of the company’s remarkable Big Dog quadruped robot has attracted millions of viewers—and generated a hilarious parody. …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

The Naval Oceanogaphic Office, the wing of the Defense Department responsible for charting the ocean bottom, has signed a five-year support contract with Hydroid, the Pocasset, MA-based maker of robot submarines. Okay, they’re actually called AUVs, or autonomous underwater vehicles—not to be confused with UAVs, for unmanned aerial vehicles (though we wrote about those earlier this week.)

The office, based at Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, owns four AUVs supplied by Hydroid: one Remus 100 sub and three Remus 6000 vehicles. (Remus, of course, is another acronym, standing for Remote Environmental Measuring Units.) The Remus 6000 can dive to a depth of 20,000 feet, carrying sensors such as side-scan sonar, video cameras, and acoustic imagers. The vehicles are used in hydrographic surveys, harbor security, debris field mapping, and scientific sampling and mapping.

Under the contract, Hydroid will supply the office with spare parts, service, and support for the Remus vehicles. The amount of the contract was not revealed.

“We are excited to see our technology making an impact on naval oceanography and underwater exploration and look forward to continuing our partnership with NAVO,” Christopher von Alt, Hydroid’s president and co-founder, said in the company’s announcement of the contract.

Comments | Reprints | Share: