Physical media fans need not panic yet—you’ll still be able to buy new Blu-Ray movies for your collection. But for those who like to save copies of their own data onto the discs, the remaining options just became more limited: Sony announced last week that it’s ending all production of several recordable media formats—including Blu-Ray discs, MiniDiscs, and MiniDV cassettes—with no successor models. “Considering the market environment and future growth potential of the market, we have decided to discontinue production,” a representative of Sony said in a brief statement to IEEE Spectrum. Though availability is dwindling, most Blu-Ray discs are unaffected. The discs being discontinued are currently only available to consumers in Japan and some professional markets elsewhere, according to Sony. Many consumers in Japan use blank Blu-Ray discs to save TV programs, Sony separately told Gizmodo. Sony, which prototyped the first Blu-Ray discs in 2000, has been selling commercial Blu-Ray products since 2006. Development of Blu-Ray was started by Philips and Sony in 1995, shortly after Toshiba’s DVD was crowned the winner of the battle to replace the VCR, notes engineer Kees Immink, whose coding was instrumental in developing optical formats such as CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs. “Philips [and] Sony were so frustrated by that loss that they started a new disc format, using a blue laser,” Immink says. Blu-Ray’s Short-Lived Media Dominance The development took longer than expected, but when it was finally introduced a decade later, Blu-Ray was on its way to becoming the medium for distributing video, as DVD discs and VHS tapes had done in their heydays. In 2008, Spectrum covered the moment when Blu-Ray’s major competitor, HD-DVD, surrendered. But the timing was unfortunate, as the rise of streaming made it an empty victory. Still, Blu-Rays continue to have value as collector’s items for many film buffs who want high-quality recordings not subject to compression artifacts that can arise with streaming, not to mention those wary of losing access to movies due to the vagaries of streaming services’ licensing deals. Sony’s recent announcement does, however, cement the death of the MiniDV cassette and MiniDisc. MiniDV, magnetic cassettes meant to replace VHS tapes at one-fifth the size, were once a popular format of digital video cassettes. The MiniDisc, an erasable magneto-optical disc that can hold up to 80 minutes of digitized audio, still has a small following. The 64-millimeter (2.5-inch) discs, held in a plastic cartridge similar to a floppy disk, were developed in the mid-1980s as a replacement for analog cassette tapes. Sony finally released the product in 1992, and it was popular in Japan into the 2000s. To record data onto optical storage like CDs and Blu-Rays, lasers etch microscopic pits into the surface of the disc to represent ones and zeros. Lasers are also used to record data onto MiniDiscs, but instead of making indentations, they’re used to change the polarization of the material; the lasers heat up one side of the disc, making the material susceptible to a magnetic field, which can then alter the polarity of the heated area. Then in playback, the polarization of reflected light translates to a one or zero. When the technology behind media storage formats like the MiniDisc and Blu-Ray was first being developed, the engineers involved believed the technology would be used well into the future, says optics engineer Joseph Braat. His research at Philips with Immink served as the basis of the MiniDisc. Despite that optimism, “the density of information in optical storage was limited from the very beginning,” Braat says. Despite using the compact wavelengths of blue light, Blu-Ray soon hit a limit of how much data could be stored. Even dual-layer Blu-Ray discs can only hold 50 gigabytes per side; that amount of data will give you 50 hours of standard definition streaming on Netflix, or about seven hours of 4K video content. MiniDiscs still have a small, dedicated niche of enthusiasts, with active social media communities and in-person disc swaps. But since Sony stopped production of MiniDisc devices in 2013, the retro format has effectively been on technological hospice care, with the company only offering blank discs and repair services. Now, it seems, it’s officially over.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY German Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL Enjoy today’s videos! Are wheeled quadrupeds going to run out of crazy new ways to move anytime soon? Looks like maybe not. [ DEEP Robotics ] A giant eye and tiny feet make this pipe inspection robot exceptionally cute, I think. [ tmsuk ] via [ Robotstart ] Agility seems to be one of the few humanoid companies talking seriously about safety. [ Agility Robotics ] A brain-computer interface, surgically placed in a research participant with tetraplegia, paralysis in all four limbs, provided an unprecedented level of control over a virtual quadcopter—just by thinking about moving their unresponsive fingers. In this video, you’ll see just how the participant of the study controlled the virtual quadcopter using their brain’s thought signals to move a virtual hand controller. [ University of Michigan ] Hair styling is a crucial aspect of personal grooming, significantly influenced by the appearance of front hair. While brushing is commonly used both to detangle hair and for styling purposes, existing research primarily focuses on robotic systems for detangling hair, with limited exploration into robotic hair styling. This research presents a novel robotic system designed to automatically adjust front hairstyles, with an emphasis on path planning for root-centric strand adjustment. [ Paper ] Thanks, Kento! If I’m understanding this correctly, if you’re careful it’s possible to introduce chaos into a blind juggling robot to switch synced juggling to alternate juggling. [ ETH Zurich ] Drones with beaks? Sure, why not. [ GRVC ] Check out this amazing demo preview video we shot in our offices here at OLogic prior to CES 2025. OLogic built this demo robot for MediaTek to show off all kinds of cool things running on a MediaTek Genio 700 processor. The robot is a Create3 base with a custom tower (similar to a TurtleBot) using a Pumpkin Genio 700 EVK, plus a LIDAR and a Orbbec Gemini 335 camera on it. The robot is running ROS2 NAV and finds colored balls on the floor using an NVIDIA TAO model running on the Genio 700 and adds them to the map so the robot can find them. You can direct the robot through RVIZ to go pick up a ball and move it to wherever you want on the map. [ OLogic ] We explore the potential of multimodal large language models (LLMs) for enabling autonomous trash pickup robots to identify objects characterized as trash in complex, context-dependent scenarios. By constructing evaluation datasets with human agreement annotations, we demonstrate that LLMs excel in visually clear cases with high human consensus, while performance is lower in ambiguous cases, reflecting human uncertainty. To validate real-world applicability, we integrate GPT-4o with an open vocabulary object detector and deploy it on a quadruped with a manipulator arm with ROS 2, showing that it is possible to use this information for autonomous trash pickup in practical settings. [ University of Texas at Austin ]

In the early 1970s, the Cold War had reached a particularly frigid moment, and U.S. military and intelligence officials had a problem. The Soviet Navy was becoming a global maritime threat—and the United States did not have a global ocean-surveillance capability. Adding to the alarm was the emergence of a new Kirov class of nuclear-powered guided-missile battle cruisers, the largest Soviet vessels yet. For the United States, this situation meant that the perilous equilibrium of mutual assured destruction, MAD, which so far had dissuaded either side from launching a nuclear strike, could tilt in the wrong direction. satellite program called Parcae to help keep the Cold War from suddenly toggling to hot. The engineers working on Parcae would have to build the most capable orbiting electronic intelligence system ever. A Parcae satellite was just a few meters long but it had four solar panels that extended several meters out from the body of the satellite. The rod emerging from the satellite was a gravity boom, which kept the orbiter’s signal antennas oriented toward Earth.NRO Dwayne Day, a historian of space technology for the National Academy of Sciences, the United States conducted large naval exercises in 1971, with U.S. ships broadcasting signals, and several types of ELINT satellites attempting to detect them. The tests revealed worrisome weaknesses in the country’s intelligence-gathering satellite systems. One of the big advances of the Parcae program was a three-satellite dispenser that could loft three satellites, which then functioned together in orbit as a group. Seen here are three Parcae satellites on the dispenser.Arthur Collier Even the mere existence of the satellites, which would be built by a band of veteran engineers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., would remain officially secret until July 2023. That’s when the National Reconnaissance Office declassified a one-page acknowledgment about Parcae. Since its establishment in 1961, the NRO has directed and overseen the nation’s spy-satellite programs, including ones for photoreconnaissance, communications interception, signals intelligence, and radar. With this scant declassification, the Parcae program could at least be celebrated by name and its overall mission revealed during the NRL’s centennial celebration that year. Aspects of the Parcae program had been unofficially outed over the years by a few enterprising journalists in such venues as Aviation Week & Space Technology and The Space Review, by historians like Day, and even by a Russian military advisor in a Ministry of Defense journal. This article is based on these sources, along with additional interviews and written input from Navy engineers who designed, built, operated, and managed Parcae and its precursor satellite systems. They confirm a commonly held but nevertheless profound understanding about the United States during that era. Simply put, there was nothing quite like the paranoia and high stakes of the Cold War to spur engineers into creative frenzies that rapidly produced brilliant national-security technologies, including surveillance systems like Parcae. A Spy Satellite with a Cosmic Cover Name Although the NRO authorized and paid for Parcae, the responsibility to actually design and build it fell to the cold-warrior engineers at NRL and their contractor-partners at such places as Systems Engineering Laboratories and HRB Singer, a signal-analysis and -processing firm in State College, Pa. Galactic Radiation and Background experiment, which was a cover name for the satellite’s secret payload; it also had a bona fide solar-science payload housed in the same shell [see sidebar, “From Quartz-Crystal Detectors to Eavesdropping Satellites”]. On 22 June 1960, GRAB made it into orbit to become the world’s first spy satellite, though there was no opportunity to brag about it. The existence of GRAB’s classified mission was an official secret until 1998. launched in 1961, and the pair of satellites monitored Soviet radar systems for the National Security Agency and the Strategic Air Command. The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Md., is responsible for many aspects of U.S. signals intelligence, notably intercepting and decrypting sensitive communications all over the world and devising machines and algorithms that protect U.S. official communications. The SAC was until 1992 in charge of the country’s strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Poppy Block II satellites, which had a diameter of 61 centimeters, were outfitted with antennas to pick up signals from Soviet radars [top]. The signals were recorded and retransmitted to ground stations, such as this receiving console photographed in 1965, designated A-GR-2800. NRO The GRAB satellites tracked several thousand Soviet air-defense radars scattered across the vast Russian continent, picking up the radars’ pulses and transmitting them to ground stations in friendly countries around the world. It could take months to eke out useful intelligence from the data, which was hand-delivered to NSA and SAC. There, analysts would examine the data for “signals of interest,” like the proverbial needle in a haystack, interpret their significance, and package the results into reports. All this took days if not weeks, so GRAB data was mostly relevant for overall situational awareness and longer-term strategic planning. declassified in 2004. With multiple satellites in orbit, Poppy could geolocate emission sources, at least roughly. Poppy program, the NRL satellite team showed it was even possible, in principle, to get this information to end users within hours or even less by relaying it directly to ground stations, rather than recording the data first. These first instances of rapidly delivered intelligence fired the imaginations, and expectations, of U.S. national-security leaders and offered a glimpse of the ocean-surveillance capabilities they wanted Parcae to provide. How Parcae Inspired Modern Satellite Signals Intelligence The first of the 12 Parcae missions launched in 1976 and the last, 20 years later. Over its long lifetime, the program had other cryptic cover names, among them White Cloud and Classic Wizard. According to NRO’s declassification memo, it stopped using the Parcae satellites in May 2008. Originally designed as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Atlas F was later repurposed to launch satellites, including Parcae. Peter Hunter Photo Collections Atlas F rocket to deliver three satellites in precise orbital formations, which were essential for their geolocation and tracking functions. (Later launches used the larger Titan IV-A rocket.) This triple launching capability was achieved with a satellite dispenser designed and built by an NRL team led by Peter Wilhelm. As chief engineer for NRL’s satellite-building efforts for some 60 years until his retirement in 2015, Wilhelm directed the development of more than 100 satellites, some of them still classified.. The satellites generally worked in clusters of three (the name Parcae comes from the three fates of Roman mythology), each detecting the radar and radio emissions from Soviet ships. To pinpoint a ship, the satellites were equipped with highly precise, synchronized clocks. Tiny differences in the time when each satellite received the radar signals emitted from the ship were then used to triangulate the ship’s location. The calculated location was updated each time the satellites passed over. A GRAB satellite was prepared for launch in 1960. Peter Wilhelm is standing, at right, in a patterned shirt.NRO Transmissions from the GRAB satellites were received in “huts” [left], likely in a country just outside Soviet borders. In between the two banks of receivers in this photo is the wheel used for manually steering the antennas. These yagi antennas [right] were linearly polarized.NRO Naval Security Group Command, which performed encryption and data-security functions for the Navy. The data was then relayed via communications satellites to Naval facilities worldwide, where it was correlated and turned into intelligence. That intelligence, in the form of Ships Emitter Locating Reports, went out to watch officers and commanders aboard ships at sea and other users. A report might include information about, for example, a newly detected radar signal—the type of radar, its frequencies, pulse, scan rates, and location. Early Minicomputers Spotted Signals of Interest To scour the otherwise overwhelming torrents of raw ELINT data for signals of interest, the Parcae program included an intelligence-analysis data-processing system built around then-high-end computers. These were likely produced by Systems Engineering Laboratories, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. SEL had produced the SEL-810 and SEL-86 minicomputers used in the Poppy program. These machines included a “real-time interrupt capability,” which enabled the computers to halt data processing to accept and store new data and then resume the processing where it had left off. That feature was useful for a system like Parcae, which continually harvested data. Also crucial to ferreting out important signals was the data-processing software, supplied by vendors whose identities remain classified. The SEL-810 minicomputer was the heart of a data-processing system built to scour the torrents of raw data from the Poppy satellites for signals of interest. Computer History Museum Over time, the Ships Emitter Locating Reports evolved from crude teletype printouts derived from raw intercept data to more user-friendly forms such as automatically displayed maps. The reports delivered the intelligence, security, or military meaning of the intercepts in formats that naval commanders and other end users on the ground and in the air could grasp quickly and put to use. Parcae Tech and the 2-Minute Warning Harvesting and pinpointing radar signatures, though difficult to pull off, wasn’t even the most sobering tech challenge. Even more daunting was Parcae’s requirement to deliver “sensor-to-shooter” intelligence—from a satellite to a ship commander or weapons control station—within minutes. According to Navy Captain James “Mel” Stephenson, who was the first director of the NRO’s Operational Support Office, achieving this goal required advances all along the technology chain. That included the satellites, computer hardware, data-processing algorithms, communications and encryption protocols, broadcast channels, and end-user terminals. From Quartz-Crystal Detectors to Eavesdropping Satellites The seed technology for the U.S. Navy’s entire ELINT-satellite story goes back to World War II, when the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) became a leading developer in the then-new business of electronic warfare and countermeasures. Think of monitoring an enemy’s radio-control signals, fooling its electronic reconnaissance probes, and evading its radar-detection system. NRL’s foray into satellite-based signals intelligence emerged from a quartz-crystal-based radio-wave detector designed by NRL engineer Reid Mayo that he sometimes personally installed on the periscopes of U.S. submarines. This device helped commanders save their submarines and the lives of those aboard by specifying when and from what direction enemy radars were probing their vessels. In the late 1950s, as the Space Age was lifting off, Mayo and his boss, Howard Lorenzen (who would later hire Lee M. Hammarstrom), were perhaps the first to realize that the same technology should be able to “see” much larger landscapes of enemy radar activity if the detectors could be placed in orbit. Lorenzen was an influential, larger-than-life technology visionary often known as the father of electronic warfare. In 2008, the United States named a missile-range instrumentation ship, which supports and tracks missile launches, after him. Lorenzen’s and Mayo’s engineering concept of “raising the periscope” for the purpose of ELINT gathering was implemented on the first GRAB satellite. The satellite was a secret payload that piggybacked on a publicly announced scientific payload, Solrad, which collected first-of-its-kind data on the sun’s ultraviolet- and X-ray radiation. That data would prove useful for modeling and predicting the behavior of the planet’s ionosphere, which influenced the far-flung radio communication near and dear to the Navy. Though the United States couldn’t brag about the GRAB mission even as the Soviet Union was scoring first after first in the space race, it was the world’s first successful spy payload in orbit, beating by a few months the first successful launch of Corona, the CIA’s maiden space-based photoreconnaissance program. A key figure in the development of those user terminals was Ed Mashman, an engineer who worked as a contractor on Parcae. The terminals had to be tailored according to where they would be used and who would be using them. One early series was known as Prototype Analysis Display Systems, even though the “prototypes” ended up deployed as operational units. Before these display systems became available, Mashman recalled in an interview for IEEE Spectrum, “Much of the data that had been coming in from Classic Wizard just went into the burn bag, because they could not keep up with the high volume.” The intelligence analysts were still relying on an arduous process to determine if the information in the reports was alarming enough to require some kind of action, such as positioning U.S. naval vessels that were close enough to a Soviet vessel to launch an attack. To make such assessments, the analysts had to screen a huge number of teletype reports coming in from the satellites, manually plotting the data on a map to discern which ones might indicate a high-priority threat from the majority that did not. When the “prototype” display systems became available, Mashman recalls, the analysts could “all of a sudden, see it automatically plotted on a map and get useful information out of it…. When some really important thing came from Classic Wizard, it would [alert] the watch officer and show where it was and what it was.” These capabilities were developed during shoulder-to-shoulder work sessions between end users and engineers like Mashman. Those sessions led to an iterative process by which the ELINT system could deliver and package data in user-friendly ways and with a swiftness that was tactically useful. Parcae’s rapid-dissemination model flourished well beyond the end of the program and is one of Parcae’s most enduring legacies. For example, to rapidly distribute intelligence globally, Parcae’s engineering teams built a secure communications channel based on a complex mix of protocols, data-processing algorithms, and tailored transmission waveforms, among other elements. The communications network connecting these pieces became known as the Tactical Receive Equipment and Related Applications Broadcast. As recently as Operation Desert Storm, it was still being used. “During Desert Storm, we added imagery to the…broadcast, enabling it to reach the forces as soon as it was generated,” says Stephenson. Over the course of a 40-year career in national security technologies, Lee M. Hammarstrom rose to the position of chief scientist of the National Reconnaissance Office. U.S. Naval Research Laboratory According to Hammarstrom, Parcae’s communications challenges had to be solved concurrently with the core challenge of managing and parsing the vast amounts of raw data into useful intelligence. Coping with this data deluge began with the satellites themselves, which some participants came to think of as “orbiting peripherals.” The term reflected the fact that the gathering of raw electronic signals was just the beginning of a complex system of complex systems. Even in the late 1960s, when Parcae’s predecessor Poppy was operational, the NRL team and its contractors had totally reconfigured the satellites, data-collection system, ground stations, computers, and other system elements for the task. Collier notes that in addition to supporting military operations, Parcae “was available to help provide maritime-domain awareness for tracking drug, arms and human trafficking as well as general commercial shipping.”

Seabed observation plays a major role in safeguarding marine systems by keeping tabs on the species and habitats on the ocean floor at different depths. This is primarily done by underwater robots that use optical imaging to collect high quality data that can be fed into environmental models, and compliment the data obtained through sonar in large-scale ocean observations. Different underwater robots have been trialed over the years, but many have struggled with performing near-seabed observations because they disturb the local seabed by destroying coral and disrupting the sediment. Gang Wang, from Harbin Engineering University in China, and his research team have recently developed a maneuverable underwater vehicle that is better suited to seabed operations because it doesn’t disturb the local environment by floating above the seabed and possessing a specially engineering propeller system to manuever. These robots could be used to better protect the seabed while studying it, and improve efforts to preserve marine biodiversity and explore for underwater resources such as minerals for EV batteries. Many underwater robots are wheeled or legged, but “these robots face substantial challenges in rugged terrains where obstacles and slopes can impede their functionality,” says Wang. They can also damage coral reefs. Floating robots don’t have this issue, but existing options disturb the sediment on the seabed because their thrusters create a downward current during ascension. The waves generated as the propeller’s wake directly hit the seafloor in most floating robots, which causes sediment to move in the immediate vicinity. In a similar way to dust blowing in front of your digital or smartphone camera, the particles moving through the water can obscure the view of the cameras on the robot and reduce the quality of the images it captures. “Addressing this issue was crucial for the functional success of our prototype and for increasing its acceptance among engineers,” says Wang. Designing a Better Underwater Robot After further investigation, Wang and the rest of the team found that the robot’s shape influences the local water resistance, or drag, even at low speeds. “During the design process, we configured the robot with two planes exhibiting significant differences in water resistance,” says Wang. This led to the researchers developing a robot with a flattened body and angling the thruster relative to the central axis. “We found that the robot’s shape and the thruster layout significantly influence its ascent speed,” says Wang. Clockwise from left: relationship between rotational speed of the thruster and the resultant force and torque in the airframe coordinate system, overall structure of the robot, side view of the thruster arrangement and main electronics components.Gang Wang, Kaixin Liu et al. The researchers created a navigational system where the thrusters generate a combined force that slants downwards but still allows the robot to ascend, changing the wake distribution during ascent so that it doesn’t disturb the sediment on the seafloor. “Flattening the robot’s body and angling the thruster relative to the central axis is a straightforward approach for most engineers, enhancing the potential for broader application of this design” in seabed monitoring, says Wang. “By addressing the navigational concerns of floating robots, we aim to enhance the observational capabilities of underwater robots in near-seafloor environments,” says Wang. The vehicle was tested in a range of marine environments, including sandy areas, coral reefs, and sheer rock, to show its ability to minimally disturb sediments in multiple potential environments. Alongside the structural design advancements, the team incorporated an angular acceleration feedback control to keep the robot as close to the seafloor as possible without actually hitting it—called bottoming out. They also developed external disturbance observation algorithms and designed a sensor layout structure that enables the robot to quickly recognize and resist external disturbances, as well as plot a path in real time. This approach allowed the new vehicle to travel along at only 20 centimeters above the seafloor without bottoming out. By implanting this control, the robot was able to get close to the sea floor and improve the quality of the images it took by reducing light refraction and scattering caused by the water column. “Given the robot’s proximity to the seafloor, even brief periods of instability can lead to collisions with the bottom, and we have verified that the robot shows excellent resistance to strong disturbances,” says Wang. With the success of this new robot achieving a closer approach to the seafloor without disturbing the seabed or crashing, Wang has stated that they plan to use the robot to closely observe coral reefs. Coral reef monitoring currently relies on inefficient manual methods, so the robots could widen the areas that are observed, and do so more quickly. Wang adds that “effective detection methods are lacking in deeper waters, particularly in the mid-light layer. We plan to improve the autonomy of the detection process to substitute divers in image collection, and facilitate the automatic identification and classification of coral reef species density to provide a more accurate and timely feedback on the health status of coral reefs.”