Sky Clutter: If You Could See Every Satellite in Low Earth Orbit!

(UPDATED)

A thoughtful,  interactive piece, which clearly demonstrates the increasing clutter in low earth orbit.   

If You Could See Every Satellite, What Would The Sky Look Like? 360/VR

By Scott Manley  1.51M subscribers

There are over ten thousand satellites in orbit, but only the largest ones in low earth orbit are visible in the hours just after sunset. What would the sky look like if you could see everything in space? I took satellite data and rendered a view of the night sky for an 'average' viewer in North America.

All the code and files needed to make this are shared with my supporters at Patreon      https://www.patreon.com/posts/31591742

Background Music is Spatial Harvest by Kevin Macleod.

Satellite data from 

https://www.space-track.org/

https://celestrak.com

https://prismnet.com/~mmccants ... ' 

Robot Finding its Way Through Clutter

From the MIT Media Lab

RF Grasp: The robot that finds its way through clutter

MIT Media Lab

Robots are not capable of handling tasks as simple as restocking grocery store shelves as they cannot perceive the environment as good as humans. What if we could give robots radio perception to search for items that are not in their sight? Such an ability will give them superhuman power to work in warehouses, stores, and our homes. 

The Signal Kinetics research group present the design, implementation, and evaluation of RF-Grasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. Unlike prior systems that are constrained by the line-of-sight perception of vision and infrared sensors, RF-Grasp employs RF (Radio Frequency) perception to identify and locate target objects throughocclusions, and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in non-line-of-sight settings. 

RF-Grasp relies on an eye-in-hand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. It introduces two main innovations: (1) an RF-visual servoing controller that uses the RFID’s location to selectively explore the environment and plan an efficient trajectory toward an occluded target, and (2) an RF-visual deep reinforcement learning network that can learn and execute efficient, complex policies for decluttering and grasping. 

The research team implemented and evaluated an end-to-end physical prototype of RF-Grasp and a state-of-the-art baseline. They demonstrated it improves success rate and efficiency by up to 40-50% in cluttered settings, and also demonstrate RF-Grasp in novel tasks such mechanical search of fully occluded objects behind obstacles, opening up new possibilities for robotic manipulation.  ...'

Robots in Cluttered Environments

Like in the Smart Home,  or emergency interactions.   Robotics have to be able to adapt.

Quicker Eye for Robotics to Help in Our Cluttered, Human Environments   By University of Michigan News 

University of Michigan (UM) researchers have developed an algorithm that permits machines to sense their surroundings faster, which could help assistive robots operate more efficiently in unstructured environments.

The Pull Message Passing for Nonparametric Belief Propagation algorithm can precisely calculate an object's pose, or position and orientation, within 10 minutes, while previous approaches require more than 90 minutes.

The algorithm is designed to use "pull messaging" to condense the clutter of data-intensive messages about an object's various elements and relationships with each other into a concise dialogue between those elements.

UM's Karthik Desingh said, "We want to scale our work up to multiple objects and tracking them during action execution, and even if the robot is not currently looking at an object. Then, the robot can use this ability to continually observe the world for goal-oriented manipulation and successfully complete tasks."  ... '    Full Article.