I don't know all that much about the Naval Research Laboratory when I arrive in DC for "the public's first opportunity to look inside" the space's new $17 million Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR). I give the cab driver the address, and he casually tells me that it "stinks," illustrating this notion with a universally familiar hand gesture. He means it literally, too - that you can smell the place, simply driving by in a cab, with the windows up. He says this with such assurance, such gusto, that I fully expect it to smell like the city dump. A wall of stink.
It's not much to go on, but it's something. And while I can thankfully report that his reaction was a bit overstated - at least on this particular day - there's certainly a distinct odor to the place. It's a sprawling 130-acre complex that sits sandwiched between the 295 freeway and the waters of the Potomac River; a series of nearly identical big, white buildings facing inward toward a grassy courtyard. On the way in, a space with what appears to be crushed cars is visible from the freeway
In the middle of it all is the giant bust of a man, bronzed and balding, looking a bit worse for wear, sitting atop a white stone column reading, simply, "Edison." It's a tribute to the reason this place exists - yet another feather in the man's already over-accomplished cap. The Navy pinpoints the precise moment of conception as a 1915 interview with The New York Times, in which the inventor told the Old Gray Lady that "the government should maintain a great research laboratory." The realization of that vision would come roughly eight years later, with the laboratory using its pre-war resources to pioneer technologies like radar and sonar. The Navy proudly boasts a hefty laundry list of scientific accomplishments that took place behind these gates - the nuclear submarine, the satellite and GPS all reportedly have roots here. That history is proudly displayed on a wall-sized timeline, and, to drive the point home, all of us will be sent off with a copy of the 10-minute documentary, The Naval Research Laboratory: A Timeless Journey.
As we arrive at the tollbooth, one reporter at time, we're greeted by a woman with a clipboard and directed toward what looks to be a repurposed school bus, old and painted white, idling by the curb. According to our Navy-designated tour guide, the organizers were expecting roughly a third of the number of journalists who ultimately responded to its initial solicitation. And, really, who wouldn't want to be one of the first outsiders to step foot in a new military robotics lab, even if it means spending a night in some god awful Best Western just off the freeway in Alexandria, Virginia?
After 20, maybe 30 minutes spent sitting on the bus, we're off, rolling roughly 100 yards before we stop and the doors open once again. All in all, the trip lasts about a minute, prompting chuckles from the invited guests. "I guess the Navy won't be going green this year." Ha, ha, ha. We file out onto the sidewalk, like permission-slip-wielding attendees of a grade school field trip, the uniformed adult supervision keeping close watch so none stray too far from the tour route. And indeed, when I excuse myself to use the restroom, a sailor is assigned to show the way, and stand guard outside the door.
For all of this cloak-and-dagger behavior and the Asimovian name gracing the building's white exterior, the front section of LASR is a decidedly mundane affair, a collection of cubicles, filing cabinets and fluorescent lighting. Our naval chaperones huddle us up and break us into groups, sending us through the doors and into a long, white hall - the entry to the facility we'd braved that grueling one-minute bus ride to see. We file past closed-door laboratories and testing facilities, attempting to glimpses through windows as we're shuffled through.
The first stop on the tour is the Desert High Bay, one of three simulated ecosystems housed under the 50,000-square-foot facility. There's a fourth, the Forest Highland, located behind the facility, though we won't be shown that on our trip, and our tour guide reassures us it's wholly unremarkable, a third of an acre devoted to testing things like autonomous logistic vehicles, a smaller version of facilities set up by the Army and Marines. The High Bays are designed specifically to represent the diverse and oft-unforgiving settings that will someday play host to naval robots.
The Desert High Bay is the smallest of the four spaces. It's also not all that much to look at. Those hoping to stumble into some Willy Wonka-style fantasy world would be sorely disappointed to begin their tour here. It's a fairly standard warehouse room, with off-white walls, gray floors and bright yellow beams running across the ceiling. The centerpiece is a two-foot deep bed of sand measuring 40 feet by 14 feet, butting up against an 18-foot-high rock wall that looks a fair bit like a climbing structure found in an upscale gym. A yellow stepladder leans up against the edge.
For our tour, a teal robotic arm sits bolted to the top of a three-legged workbench, embedded in the sand. A shovel at the end of the arm gingerly fiddles around an area next to a mock IED, peeking out from the sandbank. A number of thick wires connect the setup to an office computer sitting on a worktable. There are buttons that researchers can press from the exterior, to adjust the lighting or activate fans to simulate a desert sandstorm. Beyond that, there's not all that much customization to be done - no punishing desert heat or mischievous roadrunners.
The Littoral High Bay is a bit more impressive in scope than its desert counterpart - though it isn't much to look at itself. It's a big, cavernous, echoey space with a large indoor pool measuring 45 by 25 feet. The Navy has promised that it will muck up the water in the future with things like mud and gravel, to come a bit closer to the real-world marine conditions the space is designed to simulate. The pool comes equipped with a 16-channel wave generator and a sloping mechanism to change the otherwise consistent depth, both of which are removable courtesy of a large crane that hangs above.
For the moment, though, as we congregate around an old Dell Latitude seated on an office chair next to the metal guard rails, the water looks pristine and serene enough to dive into - were it not for that severely limiting 5.5-foot depth. Our guide has taken the laptop out for demo purposes, to show off a video of a prototype unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) that happens to be seated on an identical rolling office chair just to its right. It's a long, pill-shaped affair with a bright blue and yellow checkerboard shell that makes it look a bit as if it were birthed by the industrial design team at Nerf. There are two long holes on either side of the robot, from which sharp synthetic fins protrude.
Unfortunately, the demo isn't in working order today, so we're forced to crowd around the Latitude to watch the UUV swim laps across the pool in video form.
"We started looking at fish as inspiration, because we see them out in the ocean all the time operating in these kinds of environments," Dr. Jason Geder, one of the lab's engineers, begins, explaining the impetus behind the bot, which could some day see action as a reconnaissance tool in choppy waters not easily navigated with propeller-driven vehicles. "One of the fish that we saw, called the bird wrasse, uses, almost solely, its pectoral fins to maneuver. So that's where we took inspiration for that and then we started using some 3D computational fluid dynamics tools to really model those fins, match it up, make sure the forces were matching what biologists were measuring for the actual fish fin. Then we started to design, doing iterative process using the 3D CFD (computational fluid dynamics) tool along with mechanical engineering designs to build something that would be mechanically feasible, a simpler design, but would still maintain the high thrust, high force that basically the fish were getting."
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