Tag Archives: Project Tango

Google Project Tango Smartphone to Empower NASA Robots Aboard the ISS

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Smart SPHERES project manager Chris Provencher demonstrates one of NASA's robots at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California

Just when you believed that NASA’s robots couldn’t possibly be more awesome, the agency announced that it will equip some of them with Google’s Project Tango smartphone and send them into space, to join the ISS astronauts.

As weird as it may sound, enabling robots to sense depth is beneficial for us, or at least for the luckiest of us who get to go to space. Google’s Project Tango AR smartphones will give the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, the ability to create a 3D map of the interior of the ISS. Using quite a few motion-tracking cameras and an infrared depth sensor, the spherical robots will detect the sharp edges of whatever objects are on the space station. After doing that, the SPHERES will be able to move along undisturbed, as they would know ahead of time what obstacles await them.

Smart SPHERES project manager Chris Provencher mentioned in an interview with Reuters that “We wanted to add communication, a camera, increase the processing capability, accelerometers and other sensors. As we were scratching our heads thinking about what to do, we realized the answer was in our hands. Let’s just use smartphones.”

Since going out of the ISS for maintenance jobs is quite a dangerous activity for the astronauts, regardless of how well-trained they are, we can only hope that such depth-sensing robots will be able to take care of those tasks instead of them in the near future. This way, the astronauts can concentrate their attention on safer things that require human attention.

The SPHERES aren’t terribly fast, as their CO2 blasts can only push them through space at 1 inch per second. In other words, I don’t know how adequate these robots are for emergency situations, but I’m sure that NASA is going to improve them in many aspects, speed being one of them.

When referring to the goal the depth-sensing robots were built for, Provencher pointed out that “This type of capability is exactly what we need for a robot that’s going to do tasks anywhere inside the space station. It has to have a very robust navigation system.”

To be frank with you, I tremble at the thought of having some Sci-Fi football-sized robots hovering anywhere near the Earth. The following Doctor Who clip should give you an idea about what I’m referring to:

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Google Unveils Project Tango Tablet Dev Kit

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Project Tango TabletIn this case the rumors have held true and Google has announced a tablet device as part of project Tango from the Google ATAP group. This latest gadget is a smart tablet with technology on board to allow the device to “see” the world around it in 3D, giving it a greater understanding of its surroundings.

Applications of these Tango devices are fairly vast and sometimes seem a little obscure, but some examples given are the possibility of enhanced gaming involving your actual surroundings, assistance to the visually impaired or even just helping to locate items on shelves in a store you just walked into. The announcement allows developers to sign up for notification when the Tango Tablet Development Kit is available, stating a time frame of sometime later this year and a serious price tag of $1,024 USD.

The specs are a 7″ tablet driven by a NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It has WiFi, BTLE (low energy Bluetooth), 4G LTE available, 120 degree front camera, a 4MP back camera, and of course a motion tracking camera and a depth sensor on the back of the device.

Project Tango Tablet

Google To Experiment With 3D Imaging Devices

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Google has reportedly joined the 3d race and is working on tablets & smartphones capable of taking and displaying 3D images.

Starting next month, Google is set to release a first run of 4,000 devices with two rear-facing cameras and software. As we reported before, this is not official as of now and just rumors, but many developers claim to be already aware and working with the company, Google spoke last March of Project Tango, an organized project that would marry their devices with the 3D technology available today. Initial prototypes had been given to chosen developers to try out, so there should be progress in that area.

This way, Google would be joining the likes of Nintendo’s very own 3DS as one of the first portable devices capable of 3D without glasses, which were the biggest setback for this technology to catch on. We’re expecting this technology to eventually work along with Facebook’s newly acquired Oculus VR technology.

Source: BBC

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Google Works on 4,000 Project Tango Tablets for Its I/O Conference

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Google Project Tango

The Project Tango smartphone already was something out of this world, but the Wall Street Journal claims that Google has more of the same in the store for us.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the search giant is working on a cutting-edge tablet that is capable of seeing the world around it. At the moment, it is unknown whether Google intends to use Project Tango to replace the Nexus tablets that are manufactured by other companies, or if it will be sold as a totally different device. Still, the major selling point of the 7-inch Project Tango tablets will be the two back cameras, IR depth sensors and advanced software for 3D image capture.

Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group revealed a prototype smartphone in February that worked on the same principle of 3D mapping the surroundings of its user using a great number of sensors. One of the applications of this technology could be indoor navigation for the visually-impaired. On top of that, Google claimed that this could make video games more immersive. Not at last, 3D mapping could be used for guiding shoppers through a store by giving them step-by-step instructions.

Bryan Ma, an analyst at research firm IDC, pointed out that Google needs to involve some developers in this project, if it means to take this further: “It is critical to open the new technology to developers first as the key is how you can translate the technology into practical applications.” The Wall Street Journal reports that these tablets will be launched before Google’s I/O developer conference, which will take place at the end of June. Some of the 4,000 tablets will be given to developers, so that apps are built for the devices ahead of the public release.

Rajeev Chand, head of research at Rutberg & Co., an investment bank involved in the wireless and digital-media industries, added that “The technology is ahead of the applications.” Still, with such big names as Facebook and Google focusing on virtual reality and image processing, chances are that progress will be made quicker than usual.

It remains to be seen how Google’s innovative technology will be put to use, but as with all of this company’s projects, I’d say that we’re in for a huge surprise.

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Google’s Project Tango Is a Smartphone Aware of Space and Motion

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Google Project Tango

Project Aria wasn’t the only reason why Google insisted to keep Motorola Mobility’s employees when handing over this company to Lenovo. At the time, they were also involved in creating Project Tango, a smartphone capable of 3D mapping the physical world.

This revolutionary smartphone has a lot of useful applications, including capturing the dimensions of a house prior to purchasing furniture, mapping buildings to avoid getting lost in them, creating directions to new locations that are more accurate than just street-level. All in all, Project Tango is a great experiment with space and motion, and intends to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of these notions. It should be noted that unlike Google X projects, which are kept in great secret most of the time, this experimental smartphone is launched with an invitation for software developers to come help Google build it faster.

Johnny Lee, head of the ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) team, pointed out that this 3D mapping smartphone is the result of a collective effort: “Over the past year, our team has been working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners spanning nine countries around the world to harvest research from the last decade of work in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile phone. Now, we’re ready to put early prototypes into the hands of developers that can imagine the possibilities and help bring those ideas into reality.”

Project Tango is a 5-inch smartphone that packs custom hardware and software needed for tracking the full 3D motion of the device. More precisely, the prototype phone comes with a 4 MP camera, a motion tracking camera, an integrated depth sensor and two computer vision processors. The entire assemble can easily map the surrounding environment for future use in various contexts. As the sensors collect 250,000 3D measurements every second, accuracy is the least of the problems for this prototype.

At the moment, there are only 200 prototype dev kits that Google is looking to share with professional developers. The future collaborators will make experiments either in indoor navigation or single and multiplayer games that use the surrounding environment. By March 14th, 2014, Google intends to get rid of all the dev kits, so if you happen to have an idea about how the 3D mapping smartphone could be used, don’t hesitate to fill in the form available on the Project Tango page.

Google wanted to stress that while this smartphone runs Android, the 3D mapping technology and the software used for collecting data from the sensors is not yet part of this mobile OS, and it may take a while till it becomes so.

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