Tag Archives: collaborative

#437857 Video Friday: Robotic Third Hand Helps ...

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!):

ICRA 2020 – June 1-15, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

We are seeing some exciting advances in the development of supernumerary robotic limbs. But one thing about this technology remains a major challenge: How do you control the extra limb if your own hands are busy—say, if you’re carrying a package? MIT researchers at Professor Harry Asada’s lab have an idea. They are using subtle finger movements in sensorized gloves to control the supernumerary limb. The results are promising, and they’ve demonstrated a waist-mounted arm with a qb SoftHand that can help you with doors, elevators, and even handshakes.

[ Paper ]

ROBOPANDA

Fluid actuated soft robots, or fluidic elastomer actuators, have shown great potential in robotic applications where large compliance and safe interaction are dominant concerns. They have been widely studied in wearable robotics, prosthetics, and rehabilitations in recent years. However, such soft robots and actuators are tethered to a bulky pump and controlled by various valves, limiting their applications to a small confined space. In this study, we report a new and effective approach to fluidic power actuation that is untethered, easy to design, fabricate, control, and allows various modes of actuation. In the proposed approach, a sealed elastic tube filled with fluid (gas or liquid) is segmented by adaptors. When twisting a segment, two major effects could be observed: (1) the twisted segment exhibits a contraction force and (2) other segments inflate or deform according to their constraint patterns.

[ Paper ]

And now: “Magnetic cilia carpets.”

[ ETH Zurich ]

To adhere to government recommendations while maintaining requirements for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yaskawa Motoman is now utilizing an HC10DT collaborative robot to take individual employee temperatures. Named “Covie”, the design and fabrication of the robotic solution and its software was a combined effort by Yaskawa Motoman’s Technology Advancement Team (TAT) and Product Solutions Group (PSG), as well as a group of robotics students from the University of Dayton.

They should have programmed it to nod if your temperature was normal, and smacked you upside the head while yelling “GO HOME” if it wasn’t.

[ Yaskawa ]

Driving slowly on pre-defined routes, ZMP’s RakuRo autonomous vehicle helps people with mobility challenges enjoy cherry blossoms in Japan.

RakuRo costs about US $1,000 per month to rent, but ZMP suggests that facilities or groups of ~10 people could get together and share one, which makes the cost much more reasonable.

[ ZMP ]

Jessy Grizzle from the Dynamic Legged Locomotion Lab at the University of Michigan writes:

Our lab closed on March 20, 2020 under the State of Michigan’s “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order. For a 24-hour period, it seemed that our labs would be “sanitized” during our absence. Since we had no idea what that meant, we decided that Cassie Blue needed to “Stay Home, Stay Safe” as well. We loaded up a very expensive robot and took her off campus. On May 26, we were allowed to re-open our laboratory. After thoroughly cleaning the lab, disinfecting tools and surfaces, developing and getting approval for new safe operation procedures, we then re-organized our work areas to respect social distancing requirements and brought Cassie back to the laboratory.

During the roughly two months we were working remotely, the lab’s members got a lot done. Papers were written, dissertation proposals were composed, and plans for a new course, ROB 101, Computational Linear Algebra, were developed with colleagues. In addition, one of us (Yukai Gong) found the lockdown to his liking! He needed the long period of quiet to work through some new ideas for how to control 3D bipedal robots.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Thanks Jesse and Bruce!

You can tell that this video of how Pepper has been useful during COVID-19 is not focused on the United States, since it refers to the pandemic in past tense.

[ Softbank Robotics ]

NASA’s water-seeking robotic Moon rover just booked a ride to the Moon’s South Pole. Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been selected to deliver the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, to the Moon in 2023.

[ NASA ]

This could be the most impressive robotic gripper demo I have ever seen.

[ Soft Robotics ]

Whiz, an autonomous vacuum sweeper, innovates the cleaning industry by automating tedious tasks for your team. Easy to train, easy to use, Whiz works with your staff to deliver a high-quality clean while increasing efficiency and productivity.

[ Softbank Robotics ]

About 40 seconds into this video, a robot briefly chases a goose.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

SwarmRail is a new concept for rail-guided omnidirectional mobile robot systems. It aims for a highly flexible production process in the factory of the future by opening up the available work space from above. This means that transport and manipulation tasks can be carried out by floor- and ceiling-bound robot systems. The special feature of the system is the combination of omnidirectionally mobile units with a grid-shaped rail network, which is characterized by passive crossings and a continuous gap between the running surfaces of the rails. Through this gap, a manipulator operating below the rail can be connected to a mobile unit traveling on the rail.

[ DLRRMC ]

RightHand Robotics (RHR), a leader in providing robotic piece-picking solutions, is partnered with PALTAC Corporation, Japan’s largest wholesaler of consumer packaged goods. The collaboration introduces RightHand’s newest piece-picking solution to the Japanese market, with multiple workstations installed in PALTAC’s newest facility, RDC Saitama, which opened in 2019 in Sugito, Saitama Prefecture, Japan.

[ RightHand Robotics ]

From the ICRA 2020, a debate on the “Future of Robotics Research,” addressing such issues as “robotics research is over-reliant on benchmark datasets and simulation” and “robots designed for personal or household use have failed because of fundamental misunderstandings of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).”

[ Robotics Debates ]

MassRobotics has a series of interviews where robotics celebrities are interviewed by high school students.The students are perhaps a little awkward (remember being in high school?), but it’s honest and the questions are interesting. The first two interviews are with Laurie Leshin, who worked on space robots at NASA and is now President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Colin Angle, founder and CEO of iRobot.

[ MassRobotics ]

Thanks Andrew!

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Dr. Timothy Chung, a program manager since 2016 in the agency’s Tactical Technology Office, delves into his robotics and autonomous technology programs – the Subterranean (SubT) Challenge and OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET). From robot soccer to live-fly experimentation programs involving dozens of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), he explains how he aims to assist humans heading into unknown environments via advances in collaborative autonomy and robotics.

[ DARPA ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437845 Video Friday: Harmonic Bionics ...

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!):

ICRA 2020 – May 31-August 31, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Designed to protect employees and passengers from both harmful pathogens and cleaning agents, Breezy One can quickly, safely and effectively decontaminate spaces over 100,000 square feet in 1.5 hours with a patented, environmentally safe disinfectant. Breezy One was co-developed with the City of Albuquerque’s Aviation Department, where it autonomously sanitizes the Sunport’s facilities every night in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.

[ Fetch Robotics ]

Harmonic Bionics is redefining upper extremity neurorehabilitation with intelligent robotic technology designed to maximize patient recovery. Harmony SHR, our flagship product, works with a patient’s scapulohumeral rhythm (SHR) to enable natural, comprehensive therapy for both arms. When combined with Harmony’s Weight Support mode, this unique shoulder design may allow for earlier initiation of post-stroke therapy as Harmony can support a partial dislocation or subluxation of the shoulder prior to initiating traditional therapy exercises.

Harmony's Preprogrammed Exercises promotes functional treatment through patient-specific movements that can enable an increased number of repetitions per session without placing a larger physical burden on therapists or their resources. As the only rehabilitation exoskeleton with Bilateral Sync Therapy (BST), Harmony enables intent-based therapy by registering healthy arm movements and synchronizing that motion onto the stroke-affected side to help reestablish neural pathways.

[ Harmonic Bionics ]

Thanks Mok!

Some impressive work here from IHMC and IIT getting Atlas to take steps upward in a way that’s much more human-like than robot-like, which ends up reducing maximum torque requirements by 20 percent.

[ Paper ]

GITAI’s G1 is the space dedicated general-purpose robot. G1 robot will enable automation of various tasks internally & externally on space stations and for lunar base development.

[ GITAI ]

Malloy Aeronautics, which now makes drones rather than hoverbikes, has been working with the Royal Navy in New Zealand to figure out how to get cargo drones to land on ships.

The challenge was to test autonomous landing of heavy lift UAVs on a moving ship, however, due to the Covid19 lockdown no ship trails were possible. The moving deck was simulated by driving a vehicle and trailer across an airfield while carrying out multiple landing and take-offs. The autonomous system partner was Planck Aerosystems and autolanding was triggered by a camera on the UAV reading a QR code on the trailer.

[ Malloy Aeronautics ]

Thanks Paul!

Tertill looks to be relentlessly effective.

[ Franklin Robotics ]

A Swedish company, TikiSafety has experienced a record amount of orders for their protective masks. At ABB, we are grateful for the opportunity to help Tiki Safety to speed up their manufacturing process from 6 minutes to 40 seconds.

[ Tiki Safety ]

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is not messing around with ARMstrong, their robot for nuclear and radiation emergency response.

[ KAERI ]

OMOY is a robot that communicates with its users via internal weight shifting.

[ Paper ]

Now this, this is some weird stuff.

[ Segway ]

CaTARo is a Care Training Assistant Robot from the AIS Lab at Ritsumeikan University.

[ AIS Lab ]

Originally launched in 2015 to assist workers in lightweight assembly tasks, ABB’s collaborative YuMi robot has gone on to blaze a trail in a raft of diverse applications and industries, opening new opportunities and helping to fire people’s imaginations about what can be achieved with robotic automation.

[ ABB ]

This music video features COMAN+, from the Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Lab at IIT, doing what you’d call dance moves if you dance like I do.

[ Alex Braga ] via [ IIT ]

The NVIDIA Isaac Software Development Kit (SDK) enables accelerated AI robot development workflows. Stacked with new tools and application support, Isaac SDK 2020.1 is an end-to-end solution supporting each step of robot fleet deployment, from design collaboration and training to the ongoing maintenance of AI applications.

[ NVIDIA ]

Robot Spy Komodo Dragon and Spy Pig film “a tender moment” between Komodo dragons but will they both survive the encounter?

[ BBC ] via [ Laughing Squid ]

This is part one of a mostly excellent five-part documentary about ROS produced by Red Hat. I say mostly only because they put ME in it for some reason, but fortunately, they talked with many of the core team that developed ROS back at Willow Garage back in the day, and it’s definitely worth watching.

[ Red Hat Open Source Stories ]

It’s been a while, but here’s an update on SRI’s Abacus Drive, from Alexander Kernbaum.

[ SRI ]

This Robots For Infectious Diseases interview features IEEE Fellow Antonio Bicchi, professor of robotics at the University of Pisa, talking about how Italy has been using technology to help manage COVID-19.

[ R4ID ]

Two more interviews this week of celebrity roboticists from MassRobotics: Helen Greiner and Marc Raibert. I’d introduce them, but you know who they are already!

[ MassRobotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437800 Malleable Structure Makes Robot Arm More ...

The majority of robot arms are built out of some combination of long straight tubes and actuated joints. This isn’t surprising, since our limbs are built the same way, which was a clever and efficient bit of design. By adding more tubes and joints (or degrees of freedom), you can increase the versatility of your robot arm, but the tradeoff is that complexity, weight, and cost will increase, too.

At ICRA, researchers from Imperial College London’s REDS Lab, headed by Nicolas Rojas, introduced a design for a robot that’s built around a malleable structure rather than a rigid one, allowing you to improve how versatile the arm is without having to add extra degrees of freedom. The idea is that you’re no longer constrained to static tubes and joints but can instead reconfigure your robot to set it up exactly the way you want and easily change it whenever you feel like.

Inside of that bendable section of arm are layers and layers of mylar sheets, cut into flaps and stacked on top of one another so that each flap is overlapping or overlapped by at least 11 other flaps. The mylar is slippery enough that under most circumstances, the flaps can move smoothly against each other, letting you adjust the shape of the arm. The flaps are sealed up between latex membranes, and when air is pumped out from between the membranes, they press down on each other and turn the whole structure rigid, locking itself in whatever shape you’ve put it in.

Image: Imperial College London

The malleable part of the robot consists of layers of mylar sheets, cut into flaps that can move smoothly against each other, letting you adjust the shape of the arm. The flaps are sealed up between latex membranes, and when air is pumped out from between the membranes, they press down on each other and turn the whole structure rigid, locking itself in whatever shape you’ve put it in.

The nice thing about this system is that it’s a sort of combination of a soft robot and a rigid robot—you get the flexibility (both physical and metaphorical) of a soft system, without necessarily having to deal with all of the control problems. It’s more mechanically complex than either (as hybrid systems tend to be), but you save on cost, size, and weight, and reduce the number of actuators you need, which tend to be points of failure. You do need to deal with creating and maintaining a vacuum, and the fact that the malleable arm is not totally rigid, but depending on your application, those tradeoffs could easily be worth it.

For more details, we spoke with first author Angus B. Clark via email.

IEEE Spectrum: Where did this idea come from?

Angus Clark: The idea of malleable robots came from the realization that the majority of serial robot arms have 6 or more degrees of freedom (DoF)—usually rotary joints—yet are typically performing tasks that only require 2 or 3 DoF. The idea of a robot arm that achieves flexibility and adaptation to tasks but maintains the simplicity of a low DoF system, along with the rapid development of variable stiffness continuum robots for medical applications, inspired us to develop the malleable robot concept.

What are some ways in which a malleable robot arm could provide unique advantages, and what are some potential applications that could leverage these advantages?

Malleable robots have the ability to complete multiple traditional tasks, such as pick and place or bin picking operations, without the added bulk of extra joints that are not directly used within each task, as the flexibility of the robot arm is provided by ​a malleable link instead. This results in an overall smaller form factor, including weight and footprint of the robot, as well as a lower power requirement and cost of the robot as fewer joints are needed, without sacrificing adaptability. This makes the robot ideal for scenarios where any of these factors are critical, such as in space robotics—where every kilogram saved is vital—or in rehabilitation robotics, where cost reduction may facilitate adoption, to name two examples. Moreover, the collaborative soft-robot-esque nature of malleable robots also tends towards collaborative robots in factories working safely alongside and with humans.

“The idea of malleable robots came from the realization that the majority of serial robot arms have 6 or more degrees of freedom (DoF), yet are typically performing tasks that only require 2 or 3 DoF”
—Angus B. Clark, Imperial College London

Compared to a conventional rigid link between joints, what are the disadvantages of using a malleable link?

Currently the maximum stiffness of a malleable link is considerably weaker than that of an equivalent solid steel rigid link, and this is one of the key areas we are focusing research on improving as motion precision and accuracy are impacted. We have created the largest existing variable stiffness link at roughly 800 mm length and 50 mm diameter, which suits malleable robots towards small and medium size workspaces. Our current results evaluating this accuracy are good, however achieving a uniform stiffness across the entire malleable link can be problematic due to the production of wrinkles under bending in the encapsulating membrane. As demonstrated by our SCARA topology results, this can produce slight structural variations resulting in reduced accuracy.

Does the robot have any way of knowing its own shape? Potentially, could this system reconfigure itself somehow?

Currently we compute the robot topology using motion tracking, with markers placed on the joints of the robot. Using distance geometry, we are then able to obtain the forward and inverse kinematics of the robot, of which we can use to control the end effector (the gripper) of the robot. Ideally, in the future we would love to develop a system that no longer requires the use of motion tracking cameras.

As for the robot reconfiguring itself, which we call an “intrinsic malleable link,” there are many methods that have been demonstrated for controlling a continuum structure, such as using positive pressure or via tendon wires, however the ability to in real-time determine the curvature of the link, not just the joint positions, is a significant hurdle to solve. However, we hope to see future development on malleable robots work towards solving this problem.

What are you working on next?

For us, refining the kinematics of the robot to enable a robust and complete system for allowing a user to collaboratively reshape the robot, while still achieving the accuracy expected from robotic systems, is our current main goal. Malleable robots are a brand new field we have introduced, and as such provide many opportunities for development and optimization. Over the coming years, we hope to see other researchers work alongside us to solve these problems.

“Design and Workspace Characterization of Malleable Robots,” by Angus B. Clark and Nicolas Rojas from Imperial College London, was presented at ICRA 2020.

< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437789 Video Friday: Robotic Glove Features ...

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!):

RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Evidently, the folks at Unitree were paying attention to last week’s Video Friday.

[ Unitree ]

RoboSoft 2020 was a virtual conference this year (along with everything else), but they still held a soft robots contest, and here are four short vids—you can watch the rest of them here.

[ RoboSoft 2020 ]

If you were wondering why SoftBank bought Aldebaran Robotics and Boston Dynamics, here’s the answer.

I am now a Hawks fan. GO HAWKS!

[ Softbank Hawks ] via [ RobotStart ]

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a fully autonomous mobile robot to assist them in their research. Using a type of AI, the robot has been designed to work uninterrupted for weeks at a time, allowing it to analyse data and make decisions on what to do next. Using a flexible arm with customised gripper it can be calibrated to interact with most standard lab equipment and machinery as well as navigate safely around human co-workers and obstacles.

[ Nature ]

Oregon State’s Cassie has been on break for a couple of months, but it’s back in the lab and moving alarmingly quickly.

[ DRL ]

The current situation linked to COVID-19 sadly led to the postponing of this year RoboCup 2020 at Bordeaux. As an official sponsor of The RoboCup, SoftBank Robotics wanted to take this opportunity to thank all RoboCupers and The RoboCup Federation for their support these past 13 years. We invite you to take a look at NAO’s adventure at The RoboCup as the official robot of the Standard Platform League. See you in Bordeaux 2021!

[ RoboCup 2021 ]

Miniature SAW robot crawling inside the intestines of a pig. You’re welcome.

[ Zarrouk Lab ]

The video demonstrates fast autonomous flight experiments in cluttered unknown environments, with the support of a robust and perception-aware replanning framework called RAPTOR. The associated paper is submitted to TRO.

[ HKUST ]

Since we haven’t gotten autonomy quite right yet, there’s a lot of telepresence going on for robots that operate in public spaces. Usually, you’ve got one remote human managing multiple robots, so it would be nice to make that interface a little more friendly, right?

[ HCI Lab ]

Arguable whether or not this is a robot, but it’s cool enough to spend a minute watching.

[ Ishikawa Lab ]

Communication is critical to collaboration; however, too much of it can degrade performance. Motivated by the need for effective use of a robot’s communication modalities, in this work, we present a computational framework that decides if, when, and what to communicate during human-robot collaboration.

[ Interactive Robotics ]

Robotiq has released the next generation of the grippers for collaborative robots: the 2F-85 and 2F-140. Both models gain greater robustness, safety, and customizability while retaining the same key benefits that have inspired thousands of manufacturers to choose them since their launch 6 years ago.

[ Robotiq ]

ANYmal C, the autonomous legged robot designed for industrial challenging environments, provides the mobility, autonomy and inspection intelligence to enable safe and efficient inspection operations. In this virtual showcase, discover how ANYmal climbs stairs, recovers from a fall, performs an autonomous mission and avoids obstacles, docks to charge by itself, digitizes analogue sensors and monitors the environment.

[ ANYbotics ]

At Waymo, we are committed to addressing inequality, and we believe listening is a critical first step toward driving positive change. Earlier this year, five Waymonauts sat down to share their thoughts on equity at work, challenging the status quo, and more. This is what they had to say.

[ Waymo ]

Nice of ABB to take in old robots and upgrade them to turn them into new robots again. Robots forever!

[ ABB ]

It’s nice seeing the progress being made by GITAI, one of the teams competing in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Challenge, and also meet the humans behind the robots.

[ GITAI ] via [ XPRIZE ]

One more talk from the ICRA Legged Robotics Workshop: Jingyu Liu from DeepRobotics and Qiuguo Zhu from Zhejiang University.

[ Deep Robotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437763 Peer Review of Scholarly Research Gets ...

In the world of academics, peer review is considered the only credible validation of scholarly work. Although the process has its detractors, evaluation of academic research by a cohort of contemporaries has endured for over 350 years, with “relatively minor changes.” However, peer review may be set to undergo its biggest revolution ever—the integration of artificial intelligence.

Open-access publisher Frontiers has debuted an AI tool called the Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA), which purports to eliminate much of the grunt work associated with peer review. Since the beginning of June 2020, every one of the 11,000-plus submissions Frontiers received has been run through AIRA, which is integrated into its collaborative peer-review platform. This also makes it accessible to external users, accounting for some 100,000 editors, authors, and reviewers. Altogether, this helps “maximize the efficiency of the publishing process and make peer-review more objective,” says Kamila Markram, founder and CEO of Frontiers.

AIRA’s interactive online platform, which is a first of its kind in the industry, has been in development for three years.. It performs three broad functions, explains Daniel Petrariu, director of project management: assessing the quality of the manuscript, assessing quality of peer review, and recommending editors and reviewers. At the initial validation stage, the AI can make up to 20 recommendations and flag potential issues, including language quality, plagiarism, integrity of images, conflicts of interest, and so on. “This happens almost instantly and with [high] accuracy, far beyond the rate at which a human could be expected to complete a similar task,” Markram says.

“We have used a wide variety of machine-learning models for a diverse set of applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems,” says Markram. This includes simple bag-of-words models, as well as more sophisticated deep-learning ones. AIRA also leverages a large knowledge base of publications and authors.

Markram notes that, to address issues of possible AI bias, “We…[build] our own datasets and [design] our own algorithms. We make sure no statistical biases appear in the sampling of training and testing data. For example, when building a model to assess language quality, scientific fields are equally represented so the model isn’t biased toward any specific topic.” Machine- and deep-learning approaches, along with feedback from domain experts, including errors, are captured and used as additional training data. “By regularly re-training, we make sure our models improve in terms of accuracy and stay up-to-date.”

The AI’s job is to flag concerns; humans take the final decisions, says Petrariu. As an example, he cites image manipulation detection—something AI is super-efficient at but is nearly impossible for a human to perform with the same accuracy. “About 10 percent of our flagged images have some sort of problem,” he adds. “[In academic publishing] nobody has done this kind of comprehensive check [using AI] before,” says Petrariu. AIRA, he adds, facilitates Frontiers’ mission to make science open and knowledge accessible to all. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots