Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Photo: NASA

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft successfully berthed with the International Space Station this morning after a long overnight approach including several unplanned maneuvers. The crew at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, concluded a long night of flight demonstrations and troubleshooting by watching astronaut Don Pettit control the station’s robotic arm and grapple the Dragon at 6:56 a.m. PDT.

“Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit said from the station’s Cupola module once the capture was made.

Pettit’s successful capture of the Dragon was greeted by cheers at both SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters and NASA’s mission control in Houston. For both SpaceX and NASA the capture moment marks the beginning of a shift in how cargo will be delivered to and from the space station, with the eventual goal of changing how manned flight itself is done to low Earth orbit.

But Dragon’s overnight approach was not without hiccups, demonstrating the true test-flight nature of the mission. A problem with the devices used to guide the Dragon as it approached the station forced an initial retreat. In the end there were a handful of changes made to the initial flight plan, but at 6:49 a.m. PDT, the Dragon sat just 10 meters (32 feet) from the ISS when NASA flight director Holly Ridings gave the command SpaceX had been waiting years to hear: “go for capture.”

Early Friday morning the SpaceX team in Hawthorne completed the approach initiation burn of the Dragon’s Draco thrusters to move the spacecraft roughly 1,000 meters to a point where it could change its alignment relative to the station before performing the first series of demonstration maneuvers close to the ISS. The Dragon spacecraft could be seen on Earth by its flashing strobe light against the night sky.

Once in place at 350 meters, Dragon completed a 180-degree yaw rotation to align itself, and then another short burn was performed to move to the 250-meter point where the demonstrations would begin.

At 2:29 a.m. PDT, the SpaceX team confirmed Dragon was holding at 250 meters (820 feet), but Andre Kuipers, the Dutch astronaut on board the station, noticed the spacecraft was slightly forward of where it was expected to be. NASA engineers in Houston said the position was acceptable.

Sketch of the demonstration maneuvers planned for Dragon near the ISS. Image: NASA

As the ISS and Dragon passed in and out of sunlight orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, the teams in Houston and Hawthorne prepared for what has long been considered the most challenging and critical part of the mission, demonstrating Dragon can make several different maneuvers in close range to the ISS, with commands being sent from both the ground and from the astronauts on the station.

Just before 3:00 a.m. PDT, with a short burst of the thrusters, Dragon again began approaching the ISS. Minutes later, with the Dragon 220 meters from the station, astronaut Kuipers sent a command via the UHF communications link and Dragon aborted its approach as expected and returned to the 250 meter hold position. Test one was complete.

Kuipers planned to send a command for Dragon to hold at 235 meters, but problems with Dragon’s on-board thermal camera used for the rendezvous with the ISS kept it at the 250 meter point. After a few minutes the test resumed and Kuipers issued Dragon a hold command at 235 meters, but it happened a bit earlier than planned.

Over the next half hour or so, the teams in Hawthorne and Houston were busy evaluating the data from the on-board sensors to make sure both the station and Dragon agreed on their relative positions before moving any closer, particularly inside the simply named “Keep Out Sphere” that surrounds the ISS at 200 meters.

As time progressed, some questions were raised from the data being analyzed from Dragon’s thermal image sensors and the on-board LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors. The two different devices are used to independently measure the distance between the two spacecraft. This information is then used by Dragon’s guidance system as it approaches the ISS. The data provided by the thermal cameras was causing the engineers to further evaluate the sensor.

Dragon was sent to an unplanned hold position at 200 meters in hopes of giving the thermal sensors a chance to obtain better data on the position of Dragon relative to the ISS.

Dragon at 30 meters from the station. Photo: NASA

By 4:20 a.m. PDT Dragon was once again on the move, this time to a position 150 meters from the station. After checking the sensors again, Dragon was cleared to fly to the next hold point at 30 meters. But less than 20 minutes later Dragon was held at 78 meters as SpaceX made some changes to the spacecraft’s LIDAR equipment. At 5:21 a.m. PDT the approach was resumed but just four minutes later SpaceX issued a retreat command, moving Dragon away from the ISS.

Dragon returned to 78 meters while a problem with the LIDAR was analyzed. It turns out the laser used by the LIDAR was receiving stray reflections from the Japanese Kibo laboratory on the station. Over the course of the next half hour, SpaceX engineers analyzed how to resolve the problem with the stray LIDAR signals, eventually deciding to narrow the view of the LIDAR. Essentially they put blinders on the sensors so they could only see straight ahead, where the Dragon was set to be berthed with the station.

Eventually Dragon was given the go-ahead to proceed to the 30-meter point, and then to the 10-meter location where it would be captured by the station’s robotic arm. After rescheduling the planed grapple a few times during the morning, the go-ahead was given for a capture at 7:02 a.m., which would take place in the dark as the two spacecraft passed over Australia. Dragon took roughly 20 minutes to fly the final 20 meters to its final hold position.

The station’s robotic Canada arm approaches Dragon. Photo: NASA

With Dragon in place at 10 meters, NASA’s Holly Ridings sat at her flight director desk in Houston with a purple stuffed dragon toy on the console above her. She anxiously twirled her pen in her hand as she told astronaut Pettit that Dragon was operating on a single LIDAR and should that one fail, the spacecraft would abort.

But in the final minutes, everything went well as Pettit maneuvered the arm towards Dragon. As the end of the arm inched towards the capsule, lights from the ISS bathed Dragon in an orange glow. A few minutes ahead of schedule at 6:56 a.m. PDT, capture was confirmed by NASA, marking the first time a private spacecraft was attached to the International Space Station.

The capture occurred 3 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds after the Falcon 9 had lifted off from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Tuesday morning. After another hour and a few reconfigurations of Dragon the robotic arm slowly pulled the capsule towards the station and at 8:52 a.m. PDT NASA confirmed Dragon was firmly attached to the station itself and the robotic arm was no longer holding it in place. After tightening the 16 bolts attaching Dragon to the station’s Harmony module, the ISS officially had its first private spacecraft visitor.

Dragon berthed to the Harmony module on the ISS. Photo: NASA

There are several more steps before the hatch between the ISS and Dragon will be opened early Saturday. Once opened, the crew on board the station will spend several days unpacking the 1,014 pounds (460 kilograms) of cargo on board Dragon. Once empty, the crew will load up Dragon with 1,367 (620 kilograms) of cargo before the spacecraft is released from the station and returns to earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on May 31.

For those who attend them, furniture fairs and “design weeks” are full of parties and relaxed lunches. But for those who exhibit at them–especially young designers–they can be fairly nerve-wracking. “Seeing our projects in Milan, London, Stockholm or Paris gives us goosepimples,” write Spanish design team MUT Design.

The young office of four debuted a number of pieces at the Milan Furniture Fair in April. Among the new work, which included a hanging chair and these Koi fish tiles, was Zig Zag, a faceted mirror that reflects distortions and optical illusions.

ZIg Zag is actually more of a modular system than a piece of furniture. Each mirror is a series of octogonal aluminum extrusions, faced on one side with a strip of mirror. The extrusions are airbrushed in rusty oranges and muted blues, forming lovely gradients of colors “inspired by the favorite landscapes of the team.” Then they’re soldered together at varying widths and oblique angles, creating reflections that fracture and displace the user.

Like the fun Spanish cousin of a Donald Judd piece, Zig Zag invokes abstract expressionism with a big dose of play. MUT, for their part, say the mirrors are about human interaction: “They’re faithful to the promise of creating designs whose final results depend on the participation of the user.”

Read more on MUT’s website here.

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

Bot vid: Darpa’s Robbie

One of the more interesting robotics programs that DARPA funds is the Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project, designed to produce robots that can perform relatively complex tasks without too much supervision (obvious military implications here). As revealed over at the Automaton blog, robot maker RE2 has a robot in this program, cheerfully dubbed Robbie. The strength of the robot’s design is in its grippers that approximate human hands. They have sensors so the machine even feels “touch” a little like we do.

Bot vid: Smart Tripod

The winner of this year’s Microsoft Robotics @Home competition is interesting: It’s a tripod on a mobile base that can follow its subjects around, using a Kinect sensor to navigate and detect the movements of its human subjects for control purposes. The tech can be used for, say, creating a low-budget movie’s tracking shots. The winner was Arthur Wait, who earned a check for $10,000.

Bot vid: Fukushimabot

The Future Robotics Technology Center in Japan has just demonstrated its new robot destined to help assess and perhaps clean up the nuclear mess at Japan’s tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear site. Rosemary, as the machine is called, is roughly the size of a lawnmower and has unusual feet that swivel to navigate obstacles or crawl up a slope of greater than 60 degrees. Best of all it’s strong enough to carry gear weighing up to 60 kilos (approx. 132 lbs.), making it ideal for ferrying sensors, imaging units, and perhaps clean-up equipment into radiation-damaged zones.

Bot News

Robofish. This week a large yellow robot fish could be seen swimming in the ocean off the Spanish port of Gijon, taking part in free water tests of its systems. The five-foot, $31,000 European machine is crammed with sensors designed to detect pollutants that have leaked from vessels or underwater facilities like pipelines, and the goal is to have many fish swimming in sensitive areas to give a very early warning of contamination. Its fish-like design is an attempt to avoid problems like propeller snarl on debris.

Ocean swimmers. On Monday the famous WaveGlider robots from Liquid Robotics were sent off from their stopover at Hawaii en route to their final destinations in Japan and Australia. The experiment is already a success, and the devices have proven useful in collecting data on sea and air environments to aid climate studies and weather forecasting. They swim autonomously, propelled by the motion of water waves.

Australian telepresence museum bot. By November this year the Australian National Museum, in concert with science body CSIRO, will have a robotic telepresence droid roaming its corridors. Equipped with sensors and clever camera units, the idea is to give remote students access to each of the museum’s exhibits in more detail than may be possible with a visit in person. It’s a six-month experiment that may become permanent.

Bot Futures: The First President of the Robot Era?

When the next President of the United States takes office in 2013, it’s unlikely he’ll have to get to work on a raft of robotics legislation. But as an intriguing NPR piece points out this week, he is likely to be the very first president who has to deal with robotics-related issues on a regular basis.

That’s simply because robots are everywhere, and their presence in places of work, military forces, police forces, emergency services, farms, factories, and homes is only increasing. Robotic technology is penetrating deeply into American lifestyles.

Robots are, for example, finding uses on farms where they can simplify many of the more mundane farming jobs like tilling, distributing pesticide, and even crop-harvesting–potentially driving up efficiency and thus lowering production costs. Robot technology is being used in schools to drive student interest in science and engineering…and even to teach some lessons or boost student writing skills. They’re going to take over the role of some military pilots soon enough, and the ever-expanding drone fleet means U.S. robots are killing enemy combatants, and, sadly, making mistakes overseas right now. Drone robots are even penetrating the skies of the U.S. And there are early examples of the use of robots as political agitators, as in the case of the ONE Street Tweeter, which prints political protest tweets on the streets like a giant mobile inkjet printer.

A few of the thorny issues facing the next president: Of course robots in the workforce improve efficiency and help drive costs down, but is it better for the population to have more folk employed and working slightly less efficiently? Will American citizens tolerate police forces using drones for surveillance, as they become ever more aware of their right to privacy? What happens when the first armed police drone kills a bystander?

By 2017, when the next Comander in Chief takes office, he or she may actually have to develop policies on robots in addition to economic, social, health care, and military matters. Such mechanical issues may even be part of the campaign.

Image: U.S. Navy

“The process of drawing,” says Swedish illustrator Kilian Eng, “makes it impossible for me to not create a story along the way.”

Eng illustrates scenes that seem vaguely familiar–a movie whose title you can’t recall, or a story you read as a child, maybe. Space shuttles land in day-glo jungles. Billowing neon ghosts chase children across Aztec ruins. Robots mingle outside an apartment where a human sits reading a comic book. But while Eng does pay tribute to sci-fi tropes like Dune, or the work of comic artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), he usually draws scenes pulled entirely from his imagination.

“Alternative worlds can become visible just by opening a kitchen drawer or listening to the sound of cars on the street,” he explains. The 29-year old, who lives in Stockholm, works mainly on the computer, moving between illustration and animation (he’s also a musician). He says that video was a natural outlet for his narrative style, and a new monograph called Object 5 collects his still works, which have appropriately mysterious titles like At The Edge Of The Jungle, Mystery Prayer, and The Statue.

“If you draw a character, an alien, a human, or a robot (I like to think robots have feelings too),” Eng writes over email, “it’s always nice to think about that character’s background, values and dreams. In that sense, I guess there is a story in every image, even if it doesn’t have a discernible beginning or end.”

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

Dallas Lawrence writes about emerging media trends, online reputation management, and digital issue advocacy. Follow him @dallaslawrence.

What a difference a week makes. Some seven days ago, media outlets from around the world were stumbling over themselves covering “the most anticipated IPO in history.” Even Facebook and its investment bankers drank their Kool-Aid, upping both the number of available shares and the price in the final hours before the world had a chance to own a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room brainchild.

One week later with a botched NASDAQ IPO and a tanking stock price, the knives have come out. During one 24-hour period on Wednesday, Google tracked more than 40,000 online news stories about the fumbled IPO. And never one to miss a media opportunity, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro announced a review of the “issues” that led to the chaotic initial public offering.

In times of increased scrutiny and potential crisis, when it rains, it usually pours. And for Silicon Valley’s golden child, a tsunami of criticism has suddenly washed ashore. The good news for Zuckerberg and Co. is that despite the current coverage and deflated stock price, the future still looks very bright. Here’s why Facebook’s impending demise has been greatly exaggerated.

• Size Matters: Facebook recently crossed the 900 million user mark. While an impressive number, it is the tip of the global iceberg. According to a recent Times of India piece, in just the past six months, new Facebook users have grown 20% in India, 65% in Japan, and 56% in South Korea. This number will continue to grow and Facebook will have no trouble doubling in size in the next few years.
• Data is King: If Facebook unplugged tomorrow they would still own the most powerful repository of global human data ever collected. Age, race, sex, marital status, kids, employer, and education history are all table stakes for Facebook. They also know what we like, who we like, what we don’t like, and what we read, listen to, and watch. It’s all cataloged and tagged. The best part is that Facebook doesn’t have to use creepy data-scrapping technology to gather this information. More than 900 million people voluntarily provide and update it every day. If data is the new currency, Facebook will be printing money plentifully well into the future.
• Humans are Social:Facebook’s in-house cultural anthropologist (they actually have one) often speaks about how, since the beginning of organized civilization, we have gathered together in groups of several hundred. No more, and not much less. When the number gets too large for the kind of social interaction we crave (interestingly a number eerily close to the average number of friends a typical facebooker engages with), the village breaks off to form a new conclave and a new “social network.” This social connectivity is what sets us apart as a species, and Facebook knows how to leverage that.And while every digital platform has their “gee wiz” engagement numbers, Facebook continues to stand out on the metrics that really count. More than half a billion unique users log into Facebook each day sharing three billion likes and uploading 300 million photos. Of their 900 million current users, 398 million visit the site six out of every seven days. These numbers relay far more than just engagement. They showcase social interaction at the deepest levels.

  Think about it. When was the last time you printed a photo to share with friends or family? Why would you when they can see it on Facebook? When was the last time you used an event-planning website to organize a social gathering or even attended a high school reunion? Why would you? All of your friends are on Facebook. Humans are instinctively social and Facebook is providing the organizing conceptual framework we crave as social creatures.

The challenge for Facebook now is to move past their reluctance to forcefully engage in the communications marketplace and remind investors, users, advertisers, and developers of what is working at Facebook. GM may have cut advertising, but thousands of businesses large and small are seeing huge successes in targeted social advertising and will continue to.  Facebook needs to share these stories every day.

And while mobile has been piled on as another touchy point for the company, it’s worth noting that there were still half a billion mobile Facebook users in April 2012. That’s more than twice the number of every iPhone ever sold. And with mobile projected to explode in emerging and developing markets in the next two years, Facebook will be positioned to further leverage its growing revenue potential into areas such as payments, social gaming, and shopping.

To be sure, Facebook’s current flood waters of criticism must be addressed first and directly by the company. It’s completely in their power to stabilize and grow, in spite of what’s happened. What they don’t want is to let their critics –and there are plenty–define them. That could leave the company with decidedly fewer “friends” and “likes.”

Thumbnail image courtesy of Katrina.Tuliao and Crunchies2009 via Flickr