标签: DARPA

DARAP又出新花样了，这次是比赛机器人的用电效率，效率越高，一次充电可以行走的距离就更远，这种机器人就更有用处。现在，一家名为SRI的公司，已经拿出Durus人形机器人参加挑战赛。据说SRI之前在2013年已经和DARPA签订秘密合同，旨在创造低功耗驱动器。 这次比赛将波士顿Dymanics公司的阿特拉斯机器人功耗效率定位1，要求参赛者的功耗效率必须达到20-30，即是阿特拉斯机器人功耗效率的20-30倍。而参赛的Durus采用新的电池系统，然后置于在跑步机上，一次充电，它走了2小时35分钟，行程2.05公里。 该机器人因此获得了1.5的行走平均成本，研发小组认为，它经过继续优化之后，行走平均成本可以下降到1。而对比一下，自然人的行走平均成本是0.2，这意味着机器人还有很长的路要走才能达到人类的水准。被视为有效的人。如果研发小组能让Durus机器人达到1的行走平均成本，这意味着它使用2.2千瓦电池可以行走10公里。

I usually just roll my eyes and move on when I hear an end-of-the-world story. However, I heard a message at Design Automation Conference (DAC) a few months ago that still has me thinking. People have been talking about the end of Moore's Law for some time, but those discussions became a lot more urgent and heated at DAC in June. Many reasons have been postulated as to why Moore's Law might end, including not being able to overcome some physical limitation—perhaps a design issue that is preventing the whole chip from being powered up at the same time. More recently the matter of cost has been raised, where it will become so expensive to design a chip at the next node that nobody will be able to afford it. The concern has been that, with fewer design starts using the latest technologies and lower chip volumes, manufacturers would then not invest in wafer fabs for the next technology. I am not sure I fully get behind any of these arguments, but if we do stop making these advances what really happens? Is there no room for innovation if monolithically integrated devices cannot get more complicated? I am sure that some companies will be affected by this "crisis" as their commercial lead is contingent on being ahead of the design and fabrication curve rather than having the best design. Such an end may well transform our industry, but then we cannot expect the ride we have been on for 50 years to continue without some kind of change. Robert Colwell, who works for DARPA, said at DAC that the end of Moore's Law would be a US national security threat. This is based on the assertion that if the US does not stay ahead of the rest of the world in terms of computing power and associated technologies, then the rest of the world will become as capable as the US and be able to do things without the US government finding out—and they will be able to find out what the US is planning to do. Similar assertions can and are made in terms of weapons, of course. My first reaction is a political one. Why can we not spend more time getting along with people so that this is just not an issue that we care about? OK, so I am idealistic and I understand that some people may not think this is realistic or pragmatic. Does innovation die when we cannot create more complex devices? I hope this is not true. I hope that we would find ways to use our knowledge and the capabilities we have in better and more optimal ways, exploring different architectures where we have just accepted those in existence today because that is easier and faster. What about biological computing or coming up with computers that operate more like the brain rather than just accept that binary arithmetic is the way to go? So, what happens if the whole world has equal access to technology? Does stability depend on one country having a bigger stick than everyone else? Brian Bailey EE Times

George Heilmeier began his career at RCA's Sarnoff Research Center where he discovered that an applied voltage could change the color of dye-doped liquid crystals in the 1960s. Credited as the inventor of the LCD by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Heilmeier had secured his place in electronic history, alongside other hall-of-famers like Thomas Edison and Steve Wozniak, after working at RCA for only six years. In the 1970s Heilmeier entered government service as a White House Fellow and special advisor to the Defense Department. Then in 1975 he was appointed Director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. At DARPA he shepherded-in the modern era of high-tech weaponry including stealth aircraft, space-based lasers and smart-bombs using artificial intelligence (AI).        George Heilmeier . Heilmeier invented the LCD before becoming Director of DARPA, CTO at Texas Instruments and CEO of Bellcore.            One thing few people know about Heilmeier, however, is the waves he made upon taking over DARPA, where he introduced the concept of accountability to an organization that until then had operated as a good-old-boy network. He met entrenched resistance to his accountability efforts from former good-old-boys who told Heilmeier "your job is to get the money to the good people and don't ask any questions," said Heilmeier in a Charles Babbage Institute interview in 1991. Heilmeier pushed back by informing DARPA contractees that no longer were they "going to get a couple million dollars from DARPA just by saying that, 'We're going to go off and do good things'...That era was over. You would get your money based on articulating what you were trying to do and how it was done today and the limitations of current practice...Those were the questions that became known as 'Heilmeier's Catechism'," said Heilmeier. Today Heilmeier's Catechism is used by organizations from venture capitalist to urban planners. After leaving government service, Heilmeier applied his catechisms to a variety of industries, from Texas Instruments (TI) where he served as chief technology officer in the 1980s, to Bellcore (now Telcordia) where he served as president and chief executive officer in the 1990s. Today Heilmeier is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Defense Science Board and the National Security Agency Advisory Board. He also serves on the boards of Fidelity Investments, Teletech Holdings and the Board of Overseers of the School of Engineering and Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania. A Philadelphia native, Heilmeier earned his EE from the University of Pennsylvania and his doctorate in solid-state electronics from Princeton University. He holds 15 patents and innumerable awards including the Kyoto Prize, IEEE David Sarnoff Award, two Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service medals, and in 2012 the Charles Stark Draper Prize, which he shared with Wolfgang Helfrich, Martin Schadt and T. Peter Brody who developed his seminal LCD discoveries into the modern active-matrix twisted nematic configuration used today. Heilmeier's original LCD used a method he called dynamic scattering, which Helfrich and Schadt improved with the twisted nematic field effect which drastically cut LCD power consumption. Brody later invented the active matrix drive circuitry which enabled the faster response times needed to use LCDs for motion video on television.

Last month, I read this fascinating story in an issue of Physics Today about "listening" to your data—literally, see " Shhhh. Listen to the data ." The article showed how making real-world data audible allows the ear and brain to sense patterns, extract features, and find occurrences which might otherwise not be found by conventional data-analysis packages. This may seem a counterintuitive throwback to those quaint, ancient methods in our software-intensive world, but reality is that the brain can extract things that even our most impressive computers and algorithms can't, or which require significant computing power to achieve. Also, the brain is good at dealing with the unexpected, while even the best data-analysis package can only find what it has been "programmed" to expect. A few years ago, I spoke to some people doing software for the DARPA autonomous-vehicle road race, and asked them about the biggest challenges they faced. The answer was pretty quick and unambiguous: having the vehicle "see" where the actual road was, and not be misled by trees, signs, fences, obstacles, distractions, road irregularities, and the almost countless other realities of what the vehicle's cameras could see. Many lines of code and corresponding MIPS were dedicated to image recognition and feature extraction, they added. The irony is that seeing and then knowing where the road is turns out to be pretty easy for almost anyone, even those with poor actual driving skills. Yet the brain is not executing millions of lines of code, nor doing MFLOPS of processing to figure it out. Whether using audible, visual, or other senses, the brain is amazingly good at determining patterns and anomalies. And don't kid yourself: we have almost no idea how the brain does this, despite what the neuroresearchers would like you to think. Experienced engineers use all their senses when designing, assessing what's going on, and finding out what's not going as expected. Good design and debug is a combination of formal tools and also the human ones: sight, sound, feel, and yes, smell. The best debugging methods I have seen and used are also the oldest: look, listen, expect the unexpected, and then stop and think, before jumping to your next step. Have you ever used the informal tools of human senses individually or in combination, to find the source of your problems or assess your designs? Did you do this intentionally or accidentally?