In an airplane hanger on MIT's campus in Cambridge last week, a team of engineering students and researchers put the finishing touches on Talos, a Land Rover that drives itself. Talos is MIT's entry in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) robotic car race, which will take place on November 3, in Victorville, CA. Known as the Urban Challenge, the race will test the ability of robotic cars from 35 different teams to obey traffic laws and drive safely in a city-like environment without human assistance. The vehicles will need to find their way to a preprogrammed destination while paying attention to lane markers, other cars, and unexpected obstacles, such as potholes in the road. The Urban Challenge is a follow-up to DARPA's Grand Challenge race, held in 2004 and 2005, in which cars navigated an empty desert road.

This article appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review. Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear. Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability–the seeming intelligence–to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done. Taking stock on the beach, he crossed off items one by one. The Semantic Web initiative's basic standards were in place; big companies were involved; startups were merging or being purchased; analysts and national and international newspapers, not just technical publications, were writing about the project. Only a single item remained: taking the technology mainstream.

Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, is an expert ace at building machines that answer tough questions. An authority in programming languages and artificial intelligence, he has written an oft-cited book on AI (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, and was the head of computational sciences at NASA. In 2001, Norvig came to Google to be the director of search quality. Four years later, he became Google's director of research, overseeing about 100 researchers who investigate topics that range from networking to machine translation. Technology Review spoke with Norvig to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come.

The technology has been helping companies gain deep insight into customer purchasing patterns. While the technology is just now beginning to gain appeal, research to develop neural networks was started years ago by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a firm founded by technology visionary Robert Hecht-Nielsen, whose company, HNC Software, was acquired last fall by Fair Isaac, a developer of statistics-based consumer and corporate credit score software. "Traditional fraud detection operates with a delay of months or years," Tammy Delatorre, a spokesperson for Fair Isaac, told TechNewsWorld. "While useful, this approach does little to prevent fraudsters from committing costly fraud schemes and then disappearing with the money." To solve this fraud problem and to help predict customer trends, large corporations have begun to deploy neural-network technology -- so-called because it is patterned after the human brain's own synapses.

Teams of researchers are hoping to give life to a six-foot, 330-pound humanoid robot at the the Robotics Challenge in Homestead, Florida on December 20 and 21. The teams are expected to enable the robot--and others--to autonomously walk, use human tools, and drive a car. The event is sponsored by DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense that focuses on advanced research. DARPA said the program at the Homestead Miami Speedway, is aimed at developing robots capable of working hand-in-hand with humans during natural or man-made disasters. "Think of the nuclear plants that were damaged during the tsunami in Japan," said David Conner, a senior research scientist with TORC Robotics, whose team is includes with roboticists from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, better known as Virginia Tech.

It's a hot late-spring Friday on a cactus-studded cattle ranch in Mexico, and nothing is happening. Nothing, in fact, has been happening for going on a week now, and it's starting to get tedious. Ordinarily, the group of scientists, engineers, and students who have gathered here might have enjoyed a respite from their otherwise crazy schedules. But they didn't come here to catch up on their reading, play the guitar, or take long, leisurely walks. They came here to work. Their goal is to field-test one of the most intelligent and agile underwater robots ever crafted, a possible predecessor of a machine that might someday swim the vast, ice-crusted ocean of Jupiter's mysterious moon Europa. Called DEPTHX, for DEep Phreatic THermal eXplorer, the 1.3-metric-ton machine can maneuver freely, draw detailed, three-dimensional maps of its watery surroundings, and collect solid and liquid biological samples as it senses changing conditions in its environment. Most important, it does all that without any guidance from human operators. Such autonomy would be essential if the robot ever does swim on Europa--which may be warm enough, thanks to geothermal activity, to have given rise to some sort of life. Human control of a robot sub that far away isn't an option: radio waves don't effectively penetrate water. Even if they did, a round-trip radio signal would take 2 hours or more, making remote control unlikely. But today, on this sweltering retreat near the Gulf Coast of Mexico, with cicadas buzzing and a hazy sun beating down, Europa seems a long way off.

Out on the rocky horizon, the robot has stopped dead in its tracks. "Uh, Dave, I got a big problem out here," a voice crackles over the radio. "OK," David Wettergreen replies carefully, peering off in the direction of the machine. "Big" turns out to be a new part for the robot that doesn't quite fit and so prevents the robot's cameras--its eyes--from turning properly. Back at the laboratory, this would be a quick fix, but the robot, Wettergreen, three geologists, two software engineers, two sociologists, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a biologist are all out in the middle of Chile's vast Atacama Desert, [see map] many hours' drive from civilization. As he strides off to investigate, you get the sense Wettergreen's enjoying himself. For the better part of an hour, he and two colleagues will wrestle with the aberrant part [see photo, " All in a Day's Work"].

Hollywood has always been interested in science--and has employed consultants to get it right throughout most of its history. It's a relationship, though, that has been controversial at times, and in this article we look at how technical advisors resolve the tension between accurate science and dramatic storytelling. As an investigator and science planning engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Kevin Grazier, Ph.D., spends a lot of time with his head in the stars. Most days, he's concerned with the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. But every now and then he wrestles with the challenges of a more far-out world: "Battlestar Galactica"--a contemporary remake of the classic 1979 television show.

SSC Pacific and its predecessor organizations (SSC San Diego, NRaD, NOSC, NUC, etc.) have been involved in various aspects of robotics since the early 1960s. Please use the navigation panel on the left to explore our site, or click on any of the pictures above to go directly to a featured project. Note: This site is undergoing a major upgrade. Some pages are still being added or updated.

NASA artificial intelligence (AI) software - working on a network of personal computers - has designed a satellite antenna scheduled to orbit Earth in 2005. The antenna, able to fit into a one-inch space (2.5 by 2.5 centimeters), can receive commands and send data to Earth from the Space Technology 5 (ST5) satellites. The three satellites - each no bigger than an average TV set - will help scientists study magnetic fields in Earth's magnetosphere. NASA scientists have spent two years developing the evolutionary AI software that designed the antenna. "The AI software examined millions of potential antenna designs before settling on a final one," said project lead Jason Lohn, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley.