Category Archives: Human Robots

Everything about Humanoid Robots and Androids

#439600 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

ROBOTICS
CyberDog Is a New Ominous-Looking Robot From Xiaomi
James Vincent | The Verge
“Looking at pictures of CyberDog…it’s clear Xiaomi isn’t pitching the machine as a rival to Aibo, Sony’s own robot canine. While Aibo is small and cute, CyberDog is sleek and futuristic—even a little menacing. …Xiaomi says CyberDog is nimble enough to perform backflips, has a maximum payload of 3kg, and can trot along at speeds of 3.2m/s (compared to Spot’s 1.6m/s).”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can AI Make a Better Fusion Reactor?
Rebecca Sohn | IEEE Spectrum
“The challenge, and it’s a big one, would be to accelerate the worldwide quest to tame instabilities in hot plasmas and ultimately provide a source of sustainable, and carbon-free power. …[The University of Lisbon’s] Diogo Ferreira recently collaborated with colleagues working on the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK in a study that detailed three different uses for AI, machine learning, and deep learning models for fusion research.”

TRANSPORTATION
Joby Aviation Makes Its Public Trading Debut on the NYSE
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“Joby is developing a five-seat electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, which it unveiled to much anticipation in February. The company, which has backing from Toyota and JetBlue, has released a slew of announcements in recent months as it geared up for the public listing. ‘A lot of people talk about us as a secretive company,’ Bevirt said in an interview with TechCrunch. ‘We’re not actually a secretive company, we just choose to do the work and then show our work, rather than talking about it and then doing it.’i”

ENVIRONMENT
The UN Climate Report: All Is Not Well—But All Is Not Lost
Matt Simon | Wired
“i‘Is it still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees? The answer is yes,’ [coauthor Maisa Rojas Corradi, the director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research at the University of Chile] said. ‘But unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reduction of all greenhouse gases, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees will be beyond the reach.’i”

INNOVATION
Without Code for DeepMind’s AI, This Lab Wrote Its Own
Grace Huckins | Wired
“The Google subsidiary solved a fundamental problem in biology but didn’t promptly share its solution. So a University of Washington team tried to re-create it. …Baker thinks that questions about information sharing between academia and industry will only grow more pressing. Problems in artificial intelligence require enormous time and resources to solve, and companies like DeepMind have access to personnel and computing power on a scale unimaginable for a university lab.”

SECURITY
AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test
Lily Hay Newman | Wired
“At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas this week, a team from Singapore’s Government Technology Agency presented a recent experiment in which they sent targeted phishing emails they crafted themselves and others generated by an AI-as-a-service platform to 200 of their colleagues …They were surprised to find that more people clicked the links in the AI-generated messages than the human-written ones—by a significant margin.”

COMPUTING
The Most Important Personal Computers in History, Ranked
Luke Dormehl | IEEE Spectrum
“Forty years ago this week, the iconic IBM PC made its debut, cementing the personal computer as a mainstream product category to be reckoned with. Within a few years, America—and the world—went computer wild, with home computers suddenly the province of ordinary people. But which desktop computers go down as the most influential of all time? Here are 10 that changed the game.”

SCIENCE
Physicists Create a Bizarre ‘Wigner Crystal’ Made Purely of Electrons
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | Quanta
“In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter—a crystal made from electrons. …Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades to nudge electrons into forming these so-called Wigner crystals, with limited success. In June, however, two independent groups of physicists reported in Nature the most direct experimental observations of Wigner crystals yet.”

Image Credit: Joel Filipe / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439596 Video Friday: Robo Chameleon

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USAWeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USAIROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]ROSCon 2021 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Honestly, the “robot” part of this robotic chameleon is not even a little bit exciting, but the skin attached to it is super cool.

It's not shown very well in the video, but the skin can do patterns, too! There are some pictures in the paper at the link below, open access in Nature Communications.

[ Paper ]

Designed and built based on the user feedback from real-world application scenarios and DEEP Robotics' deep understanding of industry applications, Jueying X20 features strong load capacity and scalability, autonomous charging, all-scenario coverage, great computing power, and perceptual precision while operating flawlessly in adverse weather conditions.

[ DeepRobotics ]

Volleyball? Now solved by robots, thank you!

The robot predicts the trajectory of a flying ball and generates motion in a fragment of a second based on past learning experiences immediately. The robot was developed by Dr. Kazutoshi Tanaka under the supervision of Professor Yasuo Kuniyoshi and with the cooperation of Dr. Ryuma Niiyama and Dr. Satoshi Nishikawa at Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Informatics (ISI Lab), Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo.

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Fan!

Haven't seen too much in the way of work on DRC Atlas lately, but UT Austin seems to still have some stuff going on, at least in simulation.

[ UT Austin ]

Meet Tready, HEBI robotics track base robot platform. Tready is an extremely versatile and agile mobile base, capable of navigating difficult and uneven terrain, climbing stairs, and accessing confined spaces.

If it comes with those googly eyes out of the box, I'm sold.
[ HEBI ]
Thanks Kamal!

NSF awarded a whole bunch of money for soft robotics research a few years ago, and we're starting to see some of the results.

[ Lehigh AIR Lab ]

Thanks, Fan!

The 2020 Cybathlon may have been virtual, but the winning cyborgs still got their trophies.

[ Cybathlon ]

Extend Robotics is combining a drone, robotics, and VR in a way that I don't totally understand, but that looks fancy anyway.

[ Extend Robotics ]

Pepper Robot for Healthcare and patients with Dementia. Research by the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

[ UMD ] via [ RobotLAB ]

The University of Canterbury in collaboration with edX is offering a Professional Certificate inHuman-Robot Interaction. The participation in this MOOC is free.

Free sounds good, but the website also seems to be asking me for $450, so not sure what's up with that.

[ edX ]

Rising star in robotics, Georgia Chalvatzaki, is an independent research group leader of the iROSA group at TU Darmstadt in Germany. Dr Chalvatzaki was also accepted for the renowned Emmy Noether Programme (ENP) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) which enables outstanding young scientists to qualify for a university professorship by independently leading a junior research group over six years. In her research group iROSA, Dr. Chalvatzaki and her new team research the topic of “Robot Learning of Mobile Manipulation for Assistive Robotics”.

[ iROSA ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439592 Robot Shows How Simple Swimming Can Be

Lots of robots use bioinspiration in their design. Humanoids, quadrupeds, snake robots—if an animal has figured out a clever way of doing something, odds are there's a robot that's tried to duplicate it. But animals are often just a little too clever for the robots that we build that try to mimic them, which is why researchers at
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL) are using robots to learn about how animals themselves do what they do. In a paper published today in Science Robotics, roboticists from EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory introduce a robotic eel that leverages sensory feedback from the water it swims through to coordinate its motion without the need for central control, suggesting a path towards simpler, more robust mobile robots.

The robotic eel—called AgnathaX—is a descendant of
AmphiBot, which has been swimming around at EPFL for something like two decades. AmphiBot's elegant motion in the water has come from the equivalent what are called central pattern generators (CPGs), which are sequences of neural circuits (the biological kind) that generate the sort of rhythms that you see in eel-like animals that rely on oscillations to move. It's possible to replicate these biological circuits using newfangled electronic circuits and software, leading to the same kind of smooth (albeit robotic) motion in AmphiBot.

Biological researchers had pretty much decided that CPGs explained the extent of wiggly animal motion, until it was discovered you can chop an eel's spinal cord in half, and it'll somehow maintain its coordinated undulatory swimming performance. Which is kinda nuts, right? Obviously, something else must be going on, but trying to futz with eels to figure out exactly what it was isn't, I would guess, pleasant for either researchers or their test subjects, which is where the robots come in. We can't make robotic eels that are exactly like the real thing, but we can duplicate some of their sensing and control systems well enough to understand how they do what they do.

AgnathaX exhibits the same smooth motions as the original version of AmphiBot, but it does so without having to rely on centralized programming that would be the equivalent of a biological CPG. Instead, it uses skin sensors that can detect pressure changes in the water around it, a feature also found on actual eels. By hooking these pressure sensors up to AgnathaX's motorized segments, the robot can generate swimming motions even if its segments aren't connected with each other—without a centralized nervous system, in other words. This spontaneous syncing up of disconnected moving elements is called entrainment, and the best demo of it that I've seen is this one, using metronomes:

UCLA Physics

The reason why this isn't just neat but also useful is that it provides a secondary method of control for robots. If the centralized control system of your swimming robot gets busted, you can rely on this water pressure-mediated local control to generate a swimming motion. And there are applications for modular robots as well, since you can potentially create a swimming robot out of a bunch of different physically connected modules that don't even have to talk to each other.

For more details, we spoke with
Robin Thandiackal and Kamilo Melo at EPFL, first authors on the Science Robotics paper.

IEEE Spectrum: Why do you need a robot to do this kind of research?

Thandiackal and Melo: From a more general perspective, with this kind of research we learn and understand how a system works by building it. This then allows us to modify and investigate the different components and understand their contribution to the system as a whole.

In a more specific context, it is difficult to separate the different components of the nervous system with respect to locomotion within a live animal. The central components are especially difficult to remove, and this is where a robot or also a simulated model becomes useful. We used both in our study. The robot has the unique advantage of using it within the real physics of the water, whereas these dynamics are approximated in simulation. However, we are confident in our simulations too because we validated them against the robot.

How is the robot model likely to be different from real animals? What can't you figure out using the robot, and how much could the robot be upgraded to fill that gap?

Thandiackal and Melo: The robot is by no means an exact copy of a real animal, only a first approximation. Instead, from observing and previous knowledge of real animals, we were able to create a mathematical representation of the neuromechanical control in real animals, and we implemented this mathematical representation of locomotion control on the robot to create a model. As the robot interacts with the real physics of undulatory swimming, we put a great effort in informing our design with the morphological and physiological characteristics of the real animal. This for example accounts for the scaling, the morphology and aspect ratio of the robot with respect to undulatory animals, and the muscle model that we used to approximately represent the viscoelastic characteristics of real muscles with a rotational joint.

Upgrading the robot is not going to be making it more “biological.” Again, the robot is part of the model, not a copy of the real biology. For the sake of this project, the robot was sufficient, and only a few things were missing in our design. You can even add other types of sensors and use the same robot base. However, if we would like to improve our robot for the future, it would be interesting to collect other fluid information like the surrounding fluid speed simultaneously with the force sensing, or to measure hydrodynamic pressure directly. Finally, we aim to test our model of undulatory swimming using a robot with three-dimensional capabilities, something which we are currently working on.

Upgrading the robot is not going to be making it more “biological.” The robot is part of the model, not a copy of the real biology.

What aspects of the function of a nervous system to generate undulatory motion in water aren't redundant with the force feedback from motion that you describe?

Thandiackal and Melo: Apart from the generation of oscillations and intersegmental coupling, which we found can be redundantly generated by the force feedback, the central nervous system still provides unique higher level commands like steering to regulate swimming direction. These commands typically originate in the brain (supraspinal) and are at the same time influenced by sensory signals. In many fish the lateral line organ, which directly connects to the brain, helps to inform the brain, e.g., to maintain position (rheotaxis) under variable flow conditions.

How can this work lead to robots that are more resilient?

Thandiackal and Melo: Robots that have our complete control architecture, with both peripheral and central components, are remarkably fault-tolerant and robust against damage in their sensors, communication buses, and control circuits. In principle, the robot should have the same fault-tolerance as demonstrated in simulation, with the ability to swim despite missing sensors, broken communication bus, or broken local microcontroller. Our control architecture offers very graceful degradation of swimming ability (as opposed to catastrophic failure).

Why is this discovery potentially important for modular robots?

Thandiackal and Melo: We showed that undulatory swimming can emerge in a self-organized manner by incorporating local force feedback without explicit communication between modules. In principle, we could create swimming robots of different sizes by simply attaching independent modules in a chain (e.g., without a communication bus between them). This can be useful for the design of modular swimming units with a high degree of reconfigurability and robustness, e.g. for search and rescue missions or environmental monitoring. Furthermore, the custom-designed sensing units provide a new way of accurate force sensing in water along the entirety of the body. We therefore hope that such units can help swimming robots to navigate through flow perturbations and enable advanced maneuvers in unsteady flows. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439589 Tiny ‘maniac’ robots could ...

Would you let a tiny MANiAC travel around your nervous system to treat you with drugs? You may be inclined to say no, but in the future, “magnetically aligned nanorods in alginate capsules” (MANiACs) may be part of an advanced arsenal of drug delivery technologies at doctors' disposal. A recent study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI is the first to investigate how such tiny robots might perform as drug delivery vehicles in neural tissue. The study finds that when controlled using a magnetic field, the tiny tumbling soft robots can move against fluid flow, climb slopes and move about neural tissues, such as the spinal cord, and deposit substances at precise locations. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439581 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

NEUROSCIENCE
This Is a Map of Half a Billion Connections in a Tiny Bit of Mouse Brain
Tatyana Woodall | MIT Technology Review
“Neuroscientists have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our own—the mouse. The map and underlying data set, which are now freely available to the public, depict more than 200,000 neurons and half a billion neural connections contained inside a cube of mouse brain no bigger than a grain of sand.”

SPACE
SpaceX Stacks the Full Starship Launch System for the First Time, Standing Nearly 400 Feet Tall
Darrell Etherington | TechCrunch
“SpaceX has achieved another major milestone in its Starship fully reusable launch system: It stacked the Starship spacecraft itself on top of a prototype of its Super Heavy booster, which itself is loaded up with a full complement of 29 Raptor rocket engines, and the Starship on top has six itself. The stacked spacecraft now represents the tallest assembled rocket ever developed in history.”

ROBOTICS
A New Generation of AI-Powered Robots Is Taking Over Warehouses
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“In the months before the first reports of covid-19 would emerge, a new kind of robot headed to work. Built on years of breakthroughs in deep learning, it could pick up all kinds of objects with remarkable accuracy, making it a shoo-in for jobs like sorting products into packages at warehouses. …Within a few years, any task that previously required hands to perform could be partially or fully automated away.”

FUTURE
The Pentagon Is Using AI to Predict Events Days Into the Future
Eric Mack | CNET
“The Pentagon hasn’t released many specific details on what exactly GIDE involves, but it certainly doesn’t include any precogs bathing in creepy opaque white liquids. Rather, the idea seems to be combining data with machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence to gain enough of an informational edge to enable the proactive approach [commander of NORAD Gen. Glen D.] VanHerck describes.”

AUTOMATION
China Targets the Robotaxi Industry
Craig S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum
“China’s self-driving vehicle market is moving faster than that of the United States thanks to government regulatory support. In the past year, Baidu and AV competitor AutoX, backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, have announced a series of steps in the race toward what promises to be a massive market.”

VIRTUAL REALITY
Facebook Can Project Your Eyes Onto a VR Headset, and It’s Exactly as Uncanny as It Sounds
Adi Robertson | The Verge
“Facebook Reality Labs wants to help people see your eyes while you’re in virtual reality—even if the results sit somewhere between mildly unsettling and nightmarish. Earlier this week, FRL released a paper on ‘reverse passthrough VR,’ a recipe for making VR headsets less physically isolating. Researchers devised a method for translating your face onto the front of a headset, although they emphasize it’s still firmly experimental.”

ENERGY
China Says It’s Closing in on a Thorium Nuclear Reactor
Prachi Patel | IEEE Spectrum
“There is no denying the need for nuclear power in a world that hungers for clean, carbon-free energy. At the same time, there’s a need for safer technologies that bear less proliferation risk. Molten salt nuclear reactors (MSRs) fit the bill—and, according to at least one source, China may be well on their way to developing MSR technology.”

SECURITY
Watch a Hacker Hijack a Capsule Hotel’s Lights, Fans, and Beds
Andy Greenberg | Wired
“The hacker, who is French but asked to be called by his handle, Kyasupā, says he found half a dozen hackable vulnerabilities in the internet-of-things systems used in a capsule hotel he stayed at in 2019. They allowed him to hijack the controls for any room at the hotel to mess with its lights, ventilation, and even the beds in each room that convert to a couch, all of which are designed to be managed by networked systems linked to an iPod Touch given to every guest.”

Image Credit: NASA / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots