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Билет 1 вопрос 2 Smart as a Bird: Flying Rescue Robot Will Autonomously Avoid Obstacles

ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2012) — Cornell researchers have created an autonomous flying robot that is as smart as a bird when it comes to maneuvering around obstacles.

Able to guide itself through forests, tunnels or damaged buildings, the machine could have tremendous value in search-and-rescue operations. Small flying machines are already common, and GPS technology provides guidance. Now, Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team are tackling the hard part: how to keep the vehicle from slamming into walls and tree branches. Human controllers can't always react swiftly enough, and radio signals may not reach everywhere the robot goes.

The test vehicle is a quadrotor, a commercially available flying machine about the size of a card table with four helicopter rotors. Saxena and his team have already programmed quadrotors to navigate hallways and stairwells using 3-D cameras. But in the wild, these cameras aren't accurate enough at large distances to plan a route around obstacles.

Graduate students Ian Lenz and Mevlana Gemici trained the robot with 3-D pictures of such obstacles as tree branches, poles, fences and buildings; the robot's computer learns the characteristics all the images have in common, such as color, shape, texture and context -- a branch, for example, is attached to a tree. The resulting set of rules for deciding what is an obstacle is burned into a chip before the robot flies. In flight the robot breaks the current 3-D image of its environment into small chunks based on obvious boundaries, decides which ones are obstacles and computes a path through them as close as possible to the route it has been told to follow, constantly making adjustments as the view changes. It was tested in 53 autonomous flights in obstacle-rich environments -- including Cornell's Arts Quad -- succeeding in 51 cases, failing twice because of winds. The results were presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Portugal Oct. 7-12.

Saxena plans to improve the robot's ability to respond to environment variations such as winds, and enable it to detect and avoid moving objects, like real birds; for testing purposes, he suggests having people throw tennis balls at the flying vehicle. The project is supported by a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

rescue - спасательный

maneuver - маневрировать

tremendousогромный, громадный

tackle - пытаться найти решение

slam - врезаться

swiftly - быстро

pole - столб

adjustment – регулирование, согласование

obstacle-rich - насыщенный

enableдавать возможность

Answer the questions:

  1. Why is an autonomous robot called “smart as a bird”?

  2. What does this robot can do?

  3. Why does Saxena plan to improve the flying robot?

Билет 2 вопрос 2 More silicon, less carbon

In fighting climate change, are computers part of the problem or part of the solution?

“Please consider the environment before printing this message." Those words, appearing at the bottom of many e-mails, are a visible manifes­tation of a trend that will gather momentum in 2009: the move towards more environmen­tally friendly information technology, or "green it". Advertisements for PCs already tout their meagre energy consumption just as prominently as their number-crunching prowess.

Overall, computing and telecom­munications today produce 2% of glo­bal emissions, according to the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (Gesi), an in­dustry group. Of these, 49% come from PCs and printers, 37% from telecoms networks and devices, and 14% from data centers—the large warehouses full of computers operated by companies.

The overall volume of emissions is comparable with mat from aviation. But the it industry, unlike aviation, has not provoked the wrath of environ­mental campaigners. Perhaps that is because computers are less visibly polluting, or their use is not deemed, like air travel, to be frivolous and unnecessary.

The aviation industry has found itself on the defen­sive, emphasizing its efforts to switch to less fuel-hungry aircraft in the coming years. Makers of computer and telecoms gear, by contrast, have chosen to highlight the volume of emissions their machines produce, because they already have newer, greener products to sell today. New processing chips, clever software that lets one machine do the work of many, and smarter cooling systems can all reduce energy consumption and thus carbon-dioxide emissions.

For vendors, in other words, the large environmen­tal footprint of computing presents a sales opportunity. That is one reason why the hubbub about green it will increase in 2009.

Tom Standage

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