Olympic Robot Building Manual

The 1989 AI Lab Winter Olympics will take a slightly different twist from previous Olympiads. Although there will still be a dozen or so athletic competitions, the annual talent show finale will now be a display not of human talent, but of robot talent. Spurred on by the question, "Why aren't there more robots running around the AI Lab?", Olympic Robot Building is an attempt to teach everyone how to build a robot and get them started. Robot kits will be given out the last week of classes before the Christmas break and teams have until the Robot Talent Show, January 27th, to build a machine that intelligently connects perception to action. There is no constraint on what can be built; participants are free to pick their own problems and solution implementations. As Olympic Robot Building is purposefully a talent show, there is no particular obstacle course to be traversed or specific feat to be demonstrated. The hope is that this format will promote creativity, freedom and imagination. This manual provides a guide to overcoming all the practical problems in building things. What follows are tutorials on the components supplied in the kits: a microprocessor circuit "brain", a variety of sensors and motors, a mechanical building block system, a complete software development environment, some example robots and a few tips on debugging and prototyping. Parts given out in the kits can be used, ignored or supplemented, as the kits are designed primarily to overcome the intertia of getting started. If all goes well, then come February, there should be all kinds of new members running around the AI Lab!

Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Microsoft Xbox(TM) Case Study

This paper discusses the hardware foundations of the cryptosystem employed by the Xbox(TM) video game console from Microsoft. A secret boot block overlay is buried within a system ASIC. This secret boot block decrypts and verifies portions of an external FLASH-type ROM. The presence of the secret boot block is camouflaged by a decoy boot block in the external ROM. The code contained within the secret boot block is transferred to the CPU in the clear over a set of high-speed busses where it can be extracted using simple custom hardware. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving the Xbox security system. One lesson of this study is that the use of a high-performance bus alone is not a sufficient security measure, given the advent of inexpensive, fast rapid prototyping services and high-performance FPGAs.

FastAero – A Precorrected FFT – Fast Multipole Tree Steady and Unsteady Potential Flow Solver

In this paper a precorrected FFT-Fast Multipole Tree (pFFT-FMT) method for solving the potential flow around arbitrary three dimensional bodies is presented. The method takes advantage of the efficiency of the pFFT and FMT algorithms to facilitate more demanding computations such as automatic wake generation and hands-off steady and unsteady aerodynamic simulations. The velocity potential on the body surfaces and in the domain is determined using a pFFT Boundary Element Method (BEM) approach based on the Green’s Theorem Boundary Integral Equation. The vorticity trailing all lifting surfaces in the domain is represented using a Fast Multipole Tree, time advected, vortex participle method. Some simple steady state flow solutions are performed to demonstrate the basic capabilities of the solver. Although this paper focuses primarily on steady state solutions, it should be noted that this approach is designed to be a robust and efficient unsteady potential flow simulation tool, useful for rapid computational prototyping.