Tag Archives: conference
#437796 AI Seeks ET: Machine Learning Powers ...
Can artificial intelligence help the search for life elsewhere in the solar system? NASA thinks the answer may be “yes”—and not just on Mars either.
A pilot AI system is now being tested for use on the ExoMars mission that is currently slated to launch in the summer or fall of 2022. The machine-learning algorithms being developed will help science teams decide how to test Martian soil samples to return only the most meaningful data.
For ExoMars, the AI system will only be used back on earth to analyze data gather by the ExoMars rover. But if the system proves to be as useful to the rovers as now suspected, a NASA mission to Saturn’s moon Titan (now scheduled for 2026 launch) could automate the scientific sleuthing process in the field. This mission will rely on the Dragonfly octocopter drone to fly from surface location to surface location through Titan’s dense atmosphere and drill for signs of life there.
The hunt for microbial life in another world’s soil, either as fossilized remnants or as present-day samples, is very challenging, says Eric Lyness, software lead of the NASA Goddard Planetary Environments Lab in Greenbelt, Md. There is of course no precedent to draw upon, because no one has yet succeeded in astrobiology’s holy grail quest.
But that doesn’t mean AI can’t provide substantial assistance. Lyness explained that for the past few years he’d been puzzling over how to automate portions of an exploratory mission’s geochemical investigation, wherever in the solar system the scientific craft may be.
Last year he decided to try machine learning. “So we got some interns,” he said. “People right out of college or in college, who have been studying machine learning. … And they did some amazing stuff. It turned into much more than we expected.” Lyness and his collaborators presented their scientific analysis algorithm at a geochemistry conference last month.
Illustration: ESA
The ExoMars rover, named Rosalind Franklin, will be the first that can drill down to 2-meter depths, where living soil bacteria could possibly be found.
ExoMars’s rover—named Rosalind Franklin, after one of the co-discoverers of DNA—will be the first that can drill down to 2-meter depths, beyond where solar UV light might penetrate and kill any life forms. In other words, ExoMars will be the first Martian craft with the ability to reach soil depths where living soil bacteria could possibly be found.
“We could potentially find forms of life, microbes or other things like that,” Lyness said. However, he quickly added, very little conclusive evidence today exists to suggest that there’s present-day (microbial) life on Mars. (NASA’s Curiosity rover has sent back some inexplicable observations of both methane and molecular oxygen in the Martian atmosphere that could conceivably be a sign of microbial life forms, though non-biological processes could explain these anomalies too.)
Less controversially, the Rosalind Franklin rover’s drill could also turn up fossilized evidence of life in the Martian soil from earlier epochs when Mars was more hospitable.
NASA’s contribution to the joint Russian/European Space Agency ExoMars project is an instrument called a mass spectrometer that will be used to analyze soil samples from the drill cores. Here, Lyness said, is where AI could really provide a helping hand.
Because the Dragonfly drone and possibly a future mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa would be operating in hostile environments with less opportunity for data transmission to Earth, automating a craft’s astrobiological exploration would be practically a requirement
The spectrometer, which studies the mass distribution of ions in a sample of material, works by blasting the drilled soil sample with a laser and then mapping out the atomic masses of the various molecules and portions of molecules that the laser has liberated. The problem is any given mass spectrum could originate from any number of source compounds, minerals and components. Which always makes analyzing a mass spectrum a gigantic puzzle.
Lyness said his group is studying the mineral montmorillonite, a commonplace component of the Martian soil, to see the many ways it might reveal itself in a mass spectrum. Then his team sneaks in an organic compound with the montmorillonite sample to see how that changes the mass spectrometer output.
“It could take a long time to really break down a spectrum and understand why you’re seeing peaks at certain [masses] in the spectrum,” he said. “So anything you can do to point scientists into a direction that says, ‘Don’t worry, I know it’s not this kind of thing or that kind of thing,’ they can more quickly identify what’s in there.”
Lyness said the ExoMars mission will provide a fertile training ground for his team’s as-yet-unnamed AI algorithm. (He said he’s open to suggestions—though, please, no spoof Boaty McBoatface submissions need apply.)
Because the Dragonfly drone and possibly a future astrobiology mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa would be operating in much more hostile environments with much less opportunity for data transmission back and forth to Earth, automating a craft’s astrobiological exploration would be practically a requirement.
All of which points to a future in mid-2030s in which a nuclear-powered octocopter on a moon of Saturn flies from location to location to drill for evidence of life on this tantalizingly bio-possible world. And machine learning will help power the science.
“We should be researching how to make the science instruments smarter,” Lyness said. “If you can make it smarter at the source, especially for planetary exploration, it has huge payoffs.” 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
#437776 Video Friday: This Terrifying Robot Will ...
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!):
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.
The Aigency, which created the FitBot launch video below, is “the world’s first talent management resource for robotic personalities.”
Robots will be playing a bigger role in our lives in the future. By learning to speak their language and work with them now, we can make this future better for everybody. If you’re a creator that’s producing content to entertain and educate people, robots can be a part of that. And we can help you. Robotic actors can show up alongside the rest of your actors.
The folks at Aigency have put together a compilation reel of clips they’ve put on TikTok, which is nice of them, because some of us don’t know how to TikTok because we’re old and boring.
Do googly eyes violate the terms and conditions?
[ Aigency ]
Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, who you might remember from that robotic basketball hoop, has a new invention: A haircut robot. This is not the the first barber bot, but previous designs typically used hair clippers. Shane wanted his robot to use scissors. Hilarious and terrifying at once.
[ Stuff Made Here ]
Starting in October of 2016, Prof. Charlie Kemp and Henry M. Clever invented a new kind of robot. They named the prototype NewRo. In March of 2017, Prof. Kemp filmed this video of Henry operating NewRo to perform a number of assistive tasks. While visiting the Bay Area for a AAAI Symposium workshop at Stanford, Prof. Kemp showed this video to a select group of people to get advice, including Dr. Aaron Edsinger. In August of 2017, Dr. Edsinger and Dr. Kemp founded Hello Robot Inc. to commercialize this patent pending assistive technology. Hello Robot Inc. licensed the intellectual property (IP) from Georgia Tech. After three years of stealthy effort, Hello Robot Inc. revealed Stretch, a new kind of robot!
[ Georgia Tech ]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will make history's first attempt at powered flight on another planet next spring. It is riding with the agency's next mission to Mars (the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover) as it launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station later this summer. Perseverance, with Ingenuity attached to its belly, will land on Mars February 18, 2021.
[ JPL ]
For humans, it can be challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects like ropes, wires, or cables. But if these problems are hard for humans, they are nearly impossible for robots. As a cable slides between the fingers, its shape is constantly changing, and the robot’s fingers must be constantly sensing and adjusting the cable’s position and motion. A group of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering pursued the task from a different angle, in a manner that more closely mimics us humans. The team’s new system uses a pair of soft robotic grippers with high-resolution tactile sensors (and no added mechanical constraints) to successfully manipulate freely moving cables.
The team observed that it was difficult to pull the cable back when it reached the edge of the finger, because of the convex surface of the GelSight sensor. Therefore, they hope to improve the finger-sensor shape to enhance the overall performance. In the future, they plan to study more complex cable manipulation tasks such as cable routing and cable inserting through obstacles, and they want to eventually explore autonomous cable manipulation tasks in the auto industry.
[ MIT ]
Gripping robots typically have troubles grabbing transparent or shiny objects. A new technique by Carnegie Mellon University relies on color camera system and machine learning to recognize shapes based on color.
[ CMU ]
A new robotic prosthetic leg prototype offers a more natural, comfortable gait while also being quieter and more energy efficient than other designs. The key is the use of new small and powerful motors with fewer gears, borrowed from the space industry. This streamlined technology enables a free-swinging knee and regenerative braking, which charges the battery during use with energy that would typically be dissipated when the foot hits the ground. This feature enables the leg to more than double a typical prosthetic user's walking needs with one charge per day.
[ University of Michigan ]
Thanks Kate!
This year’s Wonder League teams have been put to the test not only with the challenges set forth by Wonder Workshop and Cartoon Network as they look to help the creek kids from Craig of the Creek solve the greatest mystery of all – the quest for the Lost Realm but due to forces outside their control. With a global pandemic displacing many teams from one another due to lockdowns and quarantines, these teams continued to push themselves to find new ways to work together, solve problems, communicate more effectively, and push themselves to complete a journey that they started and refused to give up on. We at Wonder Workshop are humbled and in awe of all these teams have accomplished.
[ Wonder Workshop ]
Thanks Nicole!
Meet Colin Creager, a mechanical engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. Colin is focusing on developing tires that can be used on other worlds. These tires use coil springs made of a special shape memory alloy that will let rovers move across sharp jagged rocks or through soft sand on the Moon or Mars.
[ NASA ]
To be presented at IROS this year, “the first on robot collision detection system using low cost microphones.”
[ Rutgers ]
Robot and mechanism designs inspired by the art of Origami have the potential to generate compact, deployable, lightweight morphing structures, as seen in nature, for potential applications in search-and-rescue, aerospace systems, and medical devices. However, it is challenging to obtain actuation that is easily patternable, reversible, and made with a scalable manufacturing process for origami-inspired self-folding machines. In this work, we describe an approach to design reversible self-folding machines using liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), that contracts when heated, as an artificial muscle.
[ UCSD ]
Just in case you need some extra home entertainment, and you’d like cleaner floors at the same time.
[ iRobot ]
Sure, toss it from a drone. Or from orbit. Whatever, it’s squishy!
[ Squishy Robotics ]
The [virtual] RSS conference this week featured an excellent lineup of speakers and panels, and the best part about it being virtual is that you can watch them all at your leisure! Here’s what’s been posted so far:
[ RSS 2020 ]
Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Toward autonomous flying insect-sized robots: recent results in fabrication, design, power systems, control, and sensing with Sawyer Fuller.
[ UMD ]
In this episode of the AI Podcast, Lex interviews Sergey Levine.
[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437765 Video Friday: Massive Robot Joins ...
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!):
AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 2020 – [Online 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.
Here are some professional circus artists messing around with an industrial robot for fun, like you do.
The acrobats are part of Östgötateatern, a Swedish theatre group, and the chair bit got turned into its own act, called “The Last Fish.” But apparently the Swedish Work Environment Authority didn’t like that an industrial robot—a large ABB robotic arm—was being used in an artistic performance, arguing that the same safety measures that apply in a factory setting would apply on stage. In other words, the robot had to operate inside a protective cage and humans could not physically interact with it.
When told that their robot had to be removed, the acrobats went to court. And won! At least that’s what we understand from this Swedish press release. The court in Linköping, in southern Sweden, ruled that the safety measures taken by the theater had been sufficient. The group had worked with a local robotics firm, Dyno Robotics, to program the manipulator and learn how to interact with it as safely as possible. The robot—which the acrobats say is the eighth member of their troupe—will now be allowed to return.
[ Östgötateatern ]
Houston Mechathronics’ Aquanaut continues to be awesome, even in the middle of a pandemic. It’s taken the big step (big swim?) out of NASA’s swimming pool and into open water.
[ HMI ]
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook AI Research have created a navigation system for robots powered by common sense. The technique uses machine learning to teach robots how to recognize objects and understand where they’re likely to be found in house. The result allows the machines to search more strategically.
[ CMU ]
Cassie manages 2.1 m/s, which is uncomfortably fast in a couple of different ways.
Next, untethered. After that, running!
[ Michigan Robotics ]
Engineers at Caltech have designed a new data-driven method to control the movement of multiple robots through cluttered, unmapped spaces, so they do not run into one another.
Multi-robot motion coordination is a fundamental robotics problem with wide-ranging applications that range from urban search and rescue to the control of fleets of self-driving cars to formation-flying in cluttered environments. Two key challenges make multi-robot coordination difficult: first, robots moving in new environments must make split-second decisions about their trajectories despite having incomplete data about their future path; second, the presence of larger numbers of robots in an environment makes their interactions increasingly complex (and more prone to collisions).
To overcome these challenges, Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace, and Yisong Yue, professor of computing and mathematical sciences, along with Caltech graduate student Benjamin Rivière (MS ’18), postdoctoral scholar Wolfgang Hönig, and graduate student Guanya Shi, developed a multi-robot motion-planning algorithm called “Global-to-Local Safe Autonomy Synthesis,” or GLAS, which imitates a complete-information planner with only local information, and “Neural-Swarm,” a swarm-tracking controller augmented to learn complex aerodynamic interactions in close-proximity flight.
[ Caltech ]
Fetch Robotics’ Freight robot is now hauling around pulsed xenon UV lamps to autonomously disinfect spaces with UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C, all at the same time.
[ SmartGuard UV ]
When you’re a vertically symmetrical quadruped robot, there is no upside-down.
[ Ghost Robotics ]
In the virtual world, the objects you pick up do not exist: you can see that cup or pen, but it does not feel like you’re touching them. That presented a challenge to EPFL professor Herbert Shea. Drawing on his extensive experience with silicone-based muscles and motors, Shea wanted to find a way to make virtual objects feel real. “With my team, we’ve created very small, thin and fast actuators,” explains Shea. “They are millimeter-sized capsules that use electrostatic energy to inflate and deflate.” The capsules have an outer insulating membrane made of silicone enclosing an inner pocket filled with oil. Each bubble is surrounded by four electrodes, that can close like a zipper. When a voltage is applied, the electrodes are pulled together, causing the center of the capsule to swell like a blister. It is an ingenious system because the capsules, known as HAXELs, can move not only up and down, but also side to side and around in a circle. “When they are placed under your fingers, it feels as though you are touching a range of different objects,” says Shea.
[ EPFL ]
Through the simple trick of reversing motors on impact, a quadrotor can land much more reliably on slopes.
[ Sherbrooke ]
Turtlebot delivers candy at Harvard.
I <3 Turtlebot SO MUCH
[ Harvard ]
Traditional drone controllers are a little bit counterintuitive, because there’s one stick that’s forwards and backwards and another stick that’s up and down but they’re both moving on the same axis. How does that make sense?! Here’s a remote that gives you actual z-axis control instead.
[ Fenics ]
Thanks Ashley!
Lio is a mobile robot platform with a multifunctional arm explicitly designed for human-robot interaction and personal care assistant tasks. The robot has already been deployed in several health care facilities, where it is functioning autonomously, assisting staff and patients on an everyday basis.
[ F&P Robotics ]
Video shows a ground vehicle autonomously exploring and mapping a multi-storage garage building and a connected patio on Carnegie Mellon University campus. The vehicle runs onboard state estimation and mapping leveraging range, vision, and inertial sensing, local planning for collision avoidance, and terrain analysis. All processing is real-time and no post-processing involved. The vehicle drives at 2m/s through the exploration run. This work is dedicated to DARPA Subterranean Challange.
[ CMU ]
Raytheon UK’s flagship STEM programme, the Quadcopter Challenge, gives 14-15 year olds the chance to participate in a hands-on, STEM-based engineering challenge to build a fully operational quadcopter. Each team is provided with an identical kit of parts, tools and instructions to build and customise their quadcopter, whilst Raytheon UK STEM Ambassadors provide mentoring, technical support and deliver bite-size learning modules to support the build.
[ Raytheon ]
A video on some of the research work that is being carried out at The Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney.
[ University of Sydney ]
Jeannette Bohg, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, gave one of the Early Career Award Keynotes at RSS 2020.
[ RSS 2020 ]
Adam Savage remembers Grant Imahara.
[ Tested ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437749 Video Friday: NASA Launches Its Most ...
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!):
AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 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
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
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.
Yesterday was a big day for what was quite possibly the most expensive robot on Earth up until it wasn’t on Earth anymore.
Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter are expected to arrive on Mars early next year.
[ JPL ]
ICYMI, our most popular post this week featured Northeastern University roboticist John Peter Whitney literally putting his neck on the line for science! He was testing a remotely operated straight razor shaving robotic system powered by fluidic actuators. The cutting-edge (sorry!) device transmits forces from a primary stage, operated by a barber, to a secondary stage, with the razor attached.
[ John Peter Whitney ]
Together with Boston Dynamics, Ford is introducing a pilot program into our Van Dyke Transmission Plant. Say hello to Fluffy the Robot Dog, who creates fast and accurate 3D scans that helps Ford engineers when we’re retooling our plants.
Not shown in the video: “At times, Fluffy sits on its robotic haunches and rides on the back of a small, round Autonomous Mobile Robot, known informally as Scouter. Scouter glides smoothly up and down the aisles of the plant, allowing Fluffy to conserve battery power until it’s time to get to work. Scouter can autonomously navigate facilities while scanning and capturing 3-D point clouds to generate a CAD of the facility. If an area is too tight for Scouter, Fluffy comes to the rescue.”
[ Ford ]
There is a thing that happens at 0:28 in this video that I have questions about.
[ Ghost Robotics ]
Pepper is far more polite about touching than most humans.
[ Paper ]
We don’t usually post pure simulation videos unless they give us something to get really, really excited about. So here’s a pure simulation video.
[ Hybrid Robotics ]
University of Michigan researchers are developing new origami inspired methods for designing, fabricating and actuating micro-robots using heat.These improvements will expand the mechanical capabilities of the tiny bots, allowing them to fold into more complex shapes.
[ DRSL ]
HMI is making beastly electric arms work underwater, even if they’re not stapled to a robotic submarine.
[ HMI ]
Here’s some interesting work in progress from MIT’s Biomimetics Robotics Lab. The limb is acting as a “virtual magnet” using a bimodal force and direction sensor.
Thanks Peter!
[ MIT Biomimetics Lab ]
This is adorable but as a former rabbit custodian I can assure you that approximately 3 seconds after this video ended, all of the wires on that robot were chewed to bits.
[ Lingkang Zhang ]
During the ARCHE 2020 integration week, TNO and the ETH Robot System Lab (RSL) collaborated to integrate their research and development process using the Articulated Locomotion and MAnipulation (ALMA) robot. Next to the integration of software, we tested software to confirm proper implementation and development. We also captured visual and auditory data for future software development. This all resulted in the creation of multiple demo’s to show the capabilities of the teleoperation framework using the ALMA robot.
[ RSL ]
When we talk about practical applications quadrupedal robots with foot wheels, we don’t usually think about them on this scale, although we should.
[ RSL ]
Juan wrote in to share a DIY quadruped that he’s been working on, named CHAMP.
Juan says that the demo robot can be built in less than US $1000 with easily accessible parts. “I hope that my project can provide a more accessible platform for students, researchers, and enthusiasts who are interested to learn more about quadrupedal robot development and its underlying technology.”
[ CHAMP ]
Thanks Juan!
Here’s a New Zealand TV report about a study on robot abuse from Christoph Bartneck at the University of Canterbury.
[ Paper ]
Our Robotics Studio is a hands on class exposing students to practical aspects of the design, fabrication, and programming of physical robotic systems. So what happens when the class goes virtual due to the covid-19 virus? Things get physical — all @ home.
[ Columbia ]
A few videos from the Supernumerary Robotic Devices Workshop, held online earlier this month.
“Handheld Robots: Bridging the Gap between Fully External and Wearable Robots,” presented by Walterio Mayol-Cuevas, University of Bristol.
“Playing the Piano with 11 Fingers: The Neurobehavioural Constraints of Human Robot Augmentation,” presented by Aldo Faisal, Imperial College London.
[ Workshop ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots