"It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... a robot!"
I read Sagan's Cosmos during junior high school, back when I still thought I could become an astronaut. One of my most striking memories of the book is Sagan's proposal that there is no real reason why aliens should appear humanoid, be bipedal, earth bound, or show bilateral symmetry. In a fanciful description of what alien life might look like on another planet, say a gas planet like Jupiter, Sagan proposes that evolved Jovian life forms would appear much different than earth-bound ones. Sagan hypothesized (with the help of E. E. Salpeter) that ammonia-based life could evolve in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Sagan and Salpeter based this hypothesis on the ecology of terrestrial seas which have simple photosynthetic plankton at the top level, fish at lower levels feeding on these creatures, and marine predators which hunt the fish. Sagan and Salpeter hypothesized Jovian equivalents that they named "sinkers", "floaters", and "hunters". "Sinkers" could be plankton-like organisms which fall through the atmosphere, existing just long enough that they can reproduce in the time they are kept afloat by convection. "Floaters" could be giant bags of gas functioning like hot air balloons, using their own metabolism (feeding off sunlight and atmospheric molecules) to heat and cool their internal gas bladder. "Hunters," they proposed, could be squid-like predators that use jets of gas to propel themselves into "floaters" and consume them.
I was fascinated by the idea of these gas bound organisms - something we will never see on this planet - and for me, this was quite a paradigm shift for how I think about alien life. From that day on, every time I saw a hot air balloon I visualised it as a living thing.
Imagine my delight when I saw the cover of this month's Make magazine - "Invasion of the Blimp Bots!" These are the robotic equivalent of Sagan's gas planet aliens, created by artist Jed Berk. Referred to as "Blubber Bots," these robotic blimps composed of helium-filled mylar balloons drift through the air propelled by ultralight motorized fans. Blubber Bots are not just simple remote controlled blimps. They are autonomous entities, complete with sensor technology that provide them with light and spatial information. Embedded light sensors send them in the direction of the brightest light source, and bump sensors tell them to turn around if they run into something.
Blubber Bots also have "networking" abilities - an off the shelf detector of cellphone signals causes them to spin around and produce tones inspired by whale song. In a space with a ceiling that is high enough for a pack of bots (a pod? a floatilla?) they can drift about, emulating simple behaviors inspired by models of biological systems. This capability was developed along with artist, biologist, and systems designer Bruce Hubbard. The activity of a group of bots is a model of emergent behavior; for example, being attracted to light, or clustering together.
The best part! In response to all the many inquiries he received after exhibiting at conferences and art exhibits, Berk has developed a robotic blimp kit that is available at the Maker Store (store.makezine.com). NOTE: the current version is only available B.Y.O.H. (Bring Your Own Helium).
And for those of you who are fans of the Arduino microcontroller development environment, the good news is that a version is under development with USC professor Julian Bleecker. This version will provide code modules that will allow you to program your own behavior for the Blubber Bots. Berk and Bleecker have high hopes that this will be an important step in the creation of an open source platform for the small but growing field of blimp robotics.
By: Amaya B - Date:03/07/2008
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