Tag Archives: extra

#437957 Meet Assembloids, Mini Human Brains With ...

It’s not often that a twitching, snowman-shaped blob of 3D human tissue makes someone’s day.

But when Dr. Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University witnessed the tiny movement, he knew his lab had achieved something special. You see, the blob was evolved from three lab-grown chunks of human tissue: a mini-brain, mini-spinal cord, and mini-muscle. Each individual component, churned to eerie humanoid perfection inside bubbling incubators, is already a work of scientific genius. But Pasca took the extra step, marinating the three components together inside a soup of nutrients.

The result was a bizarre, Lego-like human tissue that replicates the basic circuits behind how we decide to move. Without external prompting, when churned together like ice cream, the three ingredients physically linked up into a fully functional circuit. The 3D mini-brain, through the information highway formed by the artificial spinal cord, was able to make the lab-grown muscle twitch on demand.

In other words, if you think isolated mini-brains—known formally as brain organoids—floating in a jar is creepy, upgrade your nightmares. The next big thing in probing the brain is assembloids—free-floating brain circuits—that now combine brain tissue with an external output.

The end goal isn’t to freak people out. Rather, it’s to recapitulate our nervous system, from input to output, inside the controlled environment of a Petri dish. An autonomous, living brain-spinal cord-muscle entity is an invaluable model for figuring out how our own brains direct the intricate muscle movements that allow us stay upright, walk, or type on a keyboard.

It’s the nexus toward more dexterous brain-machine interfaces, and a model to understand when brain-muscle connections fail—as in devastating conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease or Parkinson’s, where people slowly lose muscle control due to the gradual death of neurons that control muscle function. Assembloids are a sort of “mini-me,” a workaround for testing potential treatments on a simple “replica” of a person rather than directly on a human.

From Organoids to Assembloids
The miniature snippet of the human nervous system has been a long time in the making.

It all started in 2014, when Dr. Madeleine Lancaster, then a post-doc at Stanford, grew a shockingly intricate 3D replica of human brain tissue inside a whirling incubator. Revolutionarily different than standard cell cultures, which grind up brain tissue to reconstruct as a flat network of cells, Lancaster’s 3D brain organoids were incredibly sophisticated in their recapitulation of the human brain during development. Subsequent studies further solidified their similarity to the developing brain of a fetus—not just in terms of neuron types, but also their connections and structure.

With the finding that these mini-brains sparked with electrical activity, bioethicists increasingly raised red flags that the blobs of human brain tissue—no larger than the size of a pea at most—could harbor the potential to develop a sense of awareness if further matured and with external input and output.

Despite these concerns, brain organoids became an instant hit. Because they’re made of human tissue—often taken from actual human patients and converted into stem-cell-like states—organoids harbor the same genetic makeup as their donors. This makes it possible to study perplexing conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, or other brain disorders in a dish. What’s more, because they’re grown in the lab, it’s possible to genetically edit the mini-brains to test potential genetic culprits in the search for a cure.

Yet mini-brains had an Achilles’ heel: not all were made the same. Rather, depending on the region of the brain that was reverse engineered, the cells had to be persuaded by different cocktails of chemical soups and maintained in isolation. It was a stark contrast to our own developing brains, where regions are connected through highways of neural networks and work in tandem.

Pasca faced the problem head-on. Betting on the brain’s self-assembling capacity, his team hypothesized that it might be possible to grow different mini-brains, each reflecting a different brain region, and have them fuse together into a synchronized band of neuron circuits to process information. Last year, his idea paid off.

In one mind-blowing study, his team grew two separate portions of the brain into blobs, one representing the cortex, the other a deeper part of the brain known to control reward and movement, called the striatum. Shockingly, when put together, the two blobs of human brain tissue fused into a functional couple, automatically establishing neural highways that resulted in one of the most sophisticated recapitulations of a human brain. Pasca crowned this tissue engineering crème-de-la-crème “assembloids,” a portmanteau between “assemble” and “organoids.”

“We have demonstrated that regionalized brain spheroids can be put together to form fused structures called brain assembloids,” said Pasca at the time.” [They] can then be used to investigate developmental processes that were previously inaccessible.”

And if that’s possible for wiring up a lab-grown brain, why wouldn’t it work for larger neural circuits?

Assembloids, Assemble
The new study is the fruition of that idea.

The team started with human skin cells, scraped off of eight healthy people, and transformed them into a stem-cell-like state, called iPSCs. These cells have long been touted as the breakthrough for personalized medical treatment, before each reflects the genetic makeup of its original host.

Using two separate cocktails, the team then generated mini-brains and mini-spinal cords using these iPSCs. The two components were placed together “in close proximity” for three days inside a lab incubator, gently floating around each other in an intricate dance. To the team’s surprise, under the microscope using tracers that glow in the dark, they saw highways of branches extending from one organoid to the other like arms in a tight embrace. When stimulated with electricity, the links fired up, suggesting that the connections weren’t just for show—they’re capable of transmitting information.

“We made the parts,” said Pasca, “but they knew how to put themselves together.”

Then came the ménage à trois. Once the mini-brain and spinal cord formed their double-decker ice cream scoop, the team overlaid them onto a layer of muscle cells—cultured separately into a human-like muscular structure. The end result was a somewhat bizarre and silly-looking snowman, made of three oddly-shaped spherical balls.

Yet against all odds, the brain-spinal cord assembly reached out to the lab-grown muscle. Using a variety of tools, including measuring muscle contraction, the team found that this utterly Frankenstein-like snowman was able to make the muscle component contract—in a way similar to how our muscles twitch when needed.

“Skeletal muscle doesn’t usually contract on its own,” said Pasca. “Seeing that first twitch in a lab dish immediately after cortical stimulation is something that’s not soon forgotten.”

When tested for longevity, the contraption lasted for up to 10 weeks without any sort of breakdown. Far from a one-shot wonder, the isolated circuit worked even better the longer each component was connected.

Pasca isn’t the first to give mini-brains an output channel. Last year, the queen of brain organoids, Lancaster, chopped up mature mini-brains into slices, which were then linked to muscle tissue through a cultured spinal cord. Assembloids are a step up, showing that it’s possible to automatically sew multiple nerve-linked structures together, such as brain and muscle, sans slicing.

The question is what happens when these assembloids become more sophisticated, edging ever closer to the inherent wiring that powers our movements. Pasca’s study targets outputs, but what about inputs? Can we wire input channels, such as retinal cells, to mini-brains that have a rudimentary visual cortex to process those examples? Learning, after all, depends on examples of our world, which are processed inside computational circuits and delivered as outputs—potentially, muscle contractions.

To be clear, few would argue that today’s mini-brains are capable of any sort of consciousness or awareness. But as mini-brains get increasingly more sophisticated, at what point can we consider them a sort of AI, capable of computation or even something that mimics thought? We don’t yet have an answer—but the debates are on.

Image Credit: christitzeimaging.com / Shutterstock.com Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437918 Video Friday: These Robots Wish You ...

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!):

ICCR 2020 – December 26-29, 2020 – [Online]
HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Look who’s baaaack: Jibo! After being sold (twice?), this pioneering social home robot (it was first announced back in 2014!) now belongs to NTT Disruption, which was described to us as the “disruptive company of NTT Group.” We are all for disruption, so this looks like a great new home for Jibo.

[ NTT Disruption ]

Thanks Ana!

FZI's Christmas Party was a bit of a challenge this year; good thing robots are totally competent to have a part on their own.

[ FZI ]

Thanks Arne!

Do you have a lonely dog that just wants a friend to watch cat videos on YouTube with? The Danish Technological Institute has a gift idea for you.

[ DTI ]

Thanks Samuel!

Once upon a time, not so far away, there was an elf who received a very special gift. Watch this heartwarming story. Happy Holidays from the Robotiq family to yours!

Of course, these elves are not now unemployed, they've instead moved over to toy design full time!

[ Robotiq ]

An elegant Christmas video from the Dynamics System Lab, make sure and watch through the very end for a little extra cheer.

[ Dynamic Systems Lab ]

Thanks Angela!

Usually I complain when robotics companies make holiday videos without any real robots in them, but this is pretty darn cute from Yaskawa this year.

[ Yaskawa ]

Here's our little christmas gift to the fans of strange dynamic behavior. The gyro will follow any given shape as soon as the tip touches its edge and the rotation is fast enough. The friction between tip and shape generates a tangential force, creating a moment such that the gyroscopic reaction pushes the tip towards the shape. The resulting normal force produces a moment that guides the tip along the shape's edge.

[ TUM ]

Happy Holidays from Fanuc!

Okay but why does there have to be an assembly line elf just to put in those little cranks?

[ Fanuc ]

Astrobotic's cute little CubeRover is at NASA busy not getting stuck in places.

[ Astrobotic ]

Team CoSTAR is sharing more of their work on subterranean robotic exploration.

[ CoSTAR ]

Skydio Autonomy Enterprise Foundation (AEF), a new software product that delivers advanced AI-powered capabilities to assist the pilot during tactical situational awareness scenarios and detailed industrial asset inspections. Designed for professionals, it offers an enterprise-caliber flight experience through the new Skydio Enterprise application.

[ Skydio ]

GITAI's S1 autonomous robot will conduct two experiments: IVA (Intra-Vehicular Activity) tasks such as switch and cable operations, and assembly of structures and panels to demonstrate its capability for ISA (In-Space Assembly) tasks. This video was recorded in the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock mock-up facility @GITAI Tokyo office.

[ GITAI ]

It's no Atlas, but this is some impressive dynamic balancing from iCub.

[ IIT ]

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I don't agree with a lot of the assumptions made in this video, either. But, here you go!

[ CSKR ]

I don't know much about this robot, but I love it.

[ Columbia ]

Most cable-suspended robots have a very well defined workspace, but you can increase that workspace by swinging them around. Wheee!

[ Laval ]

How you know your robot's got some skill: “to evaluate the performance in climbing over the step, we compared the R.L. result to the results of 12 students who attempted to find the best planning. The RL outperformed all the group, in terms of effort and time, both in continuous (joystick) and partition planning.”

[ Zarrouk Lab ]

In the Spring 2021 semester, mechanical engineering students taking MIT class 2.007, Design and Manufacturing I, will be able to participate in the class’ iconic final robot competition from the comfort of their own home. Whether they take the class virtually or semi-virtually, students will be sent a massive kit of tools and materials to build their own unique robot along with a “Home Alone” inspired game board for the final global competition.

[ MIT ]

Well, this thing is still around!

[ Moley Robotics ]

Manuel Ahumada wrote in to share this robotic Baby Yoda that he put together with a little bit of help from Intel's OpenBot software.

[ YouTube ]

Thanks Manuel!

Here's what Zoox has been working on for the past half-decade.

[ Zoox ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437869 Video Friday: Japan’s Gundam Robot ...

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!):

ACRA 2020 – December 8-10, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Another BIG step for Japan’s Gundam project.

[ Gundam Factory ]

We present an interactive design system that allows users to create sculpting styles and fabricate clay models using a standard 6-axis robot arm. Given a general mesh as input, the user iteratively selects sub-areas of the mesh through decomposition and embeds the design expression into an initial set of toolpaths by modifying key parameters that affect the visual appearance of the sculpted surface finish. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by designing and fabricating different sculpting styles over a wide range of clay models.

[ Disney Research ]

China’s Chang’e-5 completed the drilling, sampling and sealing of lunar soil at 04:53 BJT on Wednesday, marking the first automatic sampling on the Moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced Wednesday.

[ CCTV ]

Red Hat’s been putting together an excellent documentary on Willow Garage and ROS, and all five parts have just been released. We posted Part 1 a little while ago, so here’s Part 2 and Part 3.

Parts 4 and 5 are at the link below!

[ Red Hat ]

Congratulations to ANYbotics on a well-deserved raise!

ANYbotics has origins in the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, and ANYmal’s heritage can be traced back at least as far as StarlETH, which we first met at ICRA 2013.

[ ANYbotics ]

Most conventional robots are working with 0.05-0.1mm accuracy. Such accuracy requires high-end components like low-backlash gears, high-resolution encoders, complicated CNC parts, powerful motor drives, etc. Those in combination end up an expensive solution, which is either unaffordable or unnecessary for many applications. As a result, we found the Apicoo Robotics to provide our customers solutions with a much lower cost and higher stability.

[ Apicoo Robotics ]

The Skydio 2 is an incredible drone that can take incredible footage fully autonomously, but it definitely helps if you do incredible things in incredible places.

[ Skydio ]

Jueying is the first domestic sensitive quadruped robot for industry applications and scenarios. It can coordinate (replace) humans to reach any place that can be reached. It has superior environmental adaptability, excellent dynamic balance capabilities and precise Environmental perception capabilities. By carrying functional modules for different application scenarios in the safe load area, the mobile superiority of the quadruped robot can be organically integrated with the commercialization of functional modules, providing smart factories, smart parks, scene display and public safety application solutions.

[ DeepRobotics ]

We have developed semi-autonomous quadruped robot, called LASER-D (Legged-Agile-Smart-Efficient Robot for Disinfection) for performing disinfection in cluttered environments. The robot is equipped with a spray-based disinfection system and leverages the body motion to controlling the spray action without the need for an extra stabilization mechanism. The system includes an image processing capability to verify disinfected regions with high accuracy. This system allows the robot to successfully carry out effective disinfection tasks while safely traversing through cluttered environments, climb stairs/slopes, and navigate on slippery surfaces.

[ USC Viterbi ]

We propose the “multi-vision hand”, in which a number of small high-speed cameras are mounted on the robot hand of a common 7 degrees-of-freedom robot. Also, we propose visual-servoing control by using a multi-vision system that combines the multi-vision hand and external fixed high-speed cameras. The target task was ball catching motion, which requires high-speed operation. In the proposed catching control, the catch position of the ball, which is estimated by the external fixed high-speed cameras, is corrected by the multi-vision hand in real-time.

More details available through IROS on-demand.

[ Namiki Laboratory ]

Shunichi Kurumaya wrote in to share his work on PneuFinger, a pneumatically actuated compliant robotic gripping system.

[ Nakamura Lab ]

Thanks Shunichi!

Motivated by insights into the human teaching process, we introduce a method for incorporating unstructured natural language into imitation learning. At training time, the expert can provide demonstrations along with verbal descriptions in order to describe the underlying intent, e.g., “Go to the large green bowl’’. The training process, then, interrelates the different modalities to encode the correlations between language, perception, and motion. The resulting language-conditioned visuomotor policies can be conditioned at run time on new human commands and instructions, which allows for more fine-grained control over the trained policies while also reducing situational ambiguity.

[ ASU ]

Thanks Heni!

Gita is on sale for the holidays for only $2,000.

[ Gita ]

This video introduces a computational approach for routing thin artificial muscle actuators through hyperelastic soft robots, in order to achieve a desired deformation behavior. Provided with a robot design, and a set of example deformations, we continuously co-optimize the routing of actuators, and their actuation, to approximate example deformations as closely as possible.

[ Disney Research ]

Researchers and mountain rescuers in Switzerland are making huge progress in the field of autonomous drones as the technology becomes more in-demand for global search-and-rescue operations.

[ SWI ]

This short clip of the Ghost Robotics V60 features an interesting, if awkward looking, righting behavior at the end.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Europe’s Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has a younger ’sibling’, ExoMy. The blueprints and software for this mini-version of the full-size Mars explorer are available for free so that anyone can 3D print, assemble and program their own ExoMy.

[ ESA ]

The holiday season is here, and with the added impact of Covid-19 consumer demand is at an all-time high. Berkshire Grey is the partner that today’s leading organizations turn to when it comes to fulfillment automation.

[ Berkshire Grey ]

Until very recently, the vast majority of studies and reports on the use of cargo drones for public health were almost exclusively focused on the technology. The driving interest from was on the range that these drones could travel, how much they could carry and how they worked. Little to no attention was placed on the human side of these projects. Community perception, community engagement, consent and stakeholder feedback were rarely if ever addressed. This webinar presents the findings from a very recent study that finally sheds some light on the human side of drone delivery projects.

[ WeRobotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#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

#437828 How Roboticists (and Robots) Have Been ...

A few weeks ago, we asked folks on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to share photos and videos showing how they’ve been adapting to the closures of research labs, classrooms, and businesses by taking their robots home with them to continue their work as best they can. We got dozens of responses (more than we could possibly include in just one post!), but here are 15 that we thought were particularly creative or amusing.

And if any of these pictures and videos inspire you to share your own story, please email us (automaton@ieee.org) with a picture or video and a brief description about how you and your robot from work have been making things happen in your home instead.

Kurt Leucht (NASA Kennedy Space Center)

“During these strange and trying times of the current global pandemic, everyone seems to be trying their best to distance themselves from others while still getting their daily work accomplished. Many people also have the double duty of little ones that need to be managed in the midst of their teleworking duties. This photo series gives you just a glimpse into my new life of teleworking from home, mixed in with the tasks of trying to handle my little ones too. I hope you enjoy it.”

Photo: Kurt Leucht

“I heard a commotion from the next room. I ran into the kitchen to find this.”

Photo: Kurt Leucht

“This is the Swarmies most favorite bedtime story. Not sure why. Seems like an odd choice to me.”

Peter Schaldenbrand (Carnegie Mellon University)

“I’ve been working on a reinforcement learning model that converts an image into a series of brush stroke instructions. I was going to test the model with a beautiful, expensive robot arm, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have not been able to access the laboratory where it resides. I have now been using a lower end robot arm to test the painting model in my bedroom. I have sacrificed machine accuracy/precision for the convenience of getting to watch the arm paint from my bed in the shadow of my clothing rack!”

Photos: Peter Schaldenbrand

Colin Angle (iRobot)

iRobot CEO Colin Angle has been hunkered down in the “iRobot North Shore home command center,” which is probably the cleanest command center ever thanks to his army of Roombas: Beastie, Beauty, Rosie, Roswell, and Bilbo.

Photo: Colin Angle

Vivian Chu (Diligent Robotics)

From Diligent Robotics CEO Andrea Thomaz: “This is how a roboticist works from home! Diligent CTO, Vivian Chu, mans the e-stop while her engineering team runs Moxi experiments remotely from cross-town and even cross-country!”

Video: Diligent Robotics

Raffaello Bonghi (rnext.it)

Raffaello’s robot, Panther, looks perfectly happy to be playing soccer in his living room.

Photo: Raffaello Bonghi

Kod*lab (University of Pennsylvania)

“Another Friday Nuts n Bolts Meeting on Zoom…”

Image: Kodlab

Robin Jonsson (robot choreographer)

“I’ve been doing a school project in which students make up dance moves and then send me a video with all of them. I then teach the moves to my robot, Alex, film Alex dancing, send the videos to them. This became a great success and more schools will join. The kids got really into watching the robot perform their moves and really interested in robots. They want to meet Alex the robot live, which will likely happen in the fall.”

Photo: Robin Jonsson

Gabrielle Conard (mechanical engineering undergrad at Lafayette College)

“While the pandemic might have forced college campuses to close and the community to keep their distance from each other, it did not put a stop to learning and research. Working from their respective homes, junior Gabrielle Conard and mechanical engineering professor Alexander Brown from Lafayette College investigated methods of incorporating active compliance in a low-cost quadruped robot. They are continuing to work remotely on this project through Lafayette’s summer research program.”

Image: Gabrielle Conard

Taylor Veltrop (Softbank Robotics)

“After a few weeks of isolation in the corona/covid quarantine lock down we started dancing with our robots. Mathieu’s 6th birthday was coming up, and it all just came together.”

Video: Taylor Veltrop

Ross Kessler (Exyn Technologies)

“Quarantine, Day 8: the humans have accepted me as one of their own. I’ve blended seamlessly into their #socialdistancing routines. Even made a furry friend”

Photo: Ross Kessler

Yeah, something a bit sinister is definitely going on at Exyn…

Video: Exyn Technologies

Michael Sobrepera (University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab)

Predictably, Michael’s cat is more interested in the bag that the robot came in than the robot itself (see if you can spot the cat below). Michael tells us that “the robot is designed to help with tele-rehabilitation, focused on kids with CP, so it has been taken to hospitals for demos [hence the cool bag]. It also travels for outreach events and the like. Lately, I’ve been exploring telepresence for COVID.”

Photo: Michael Sobrepera

Jan Kędzierski (EMYS)

“In China a lot of people cannot speak English, even the youngest generation of parents. Thanks to Emys, kids stayed in touch with English language in their homes even if they couldn’t attend schools and extra English classes. They had a lot of fun with their native English speaker friend available and ready to play every day.”

Image: Jan Kędzierski

Simon Whitmell (Quanser)

“Simon, a Quanser R&D engineer, is working on low-overhead image processing and line following for the QBot 2e mobile ground robot, with some added challenges due to extra traffic. LEGO engineering by his son, Charles.”

Photo: Simon Whitmell

Robot Design & Experimentation Course (Carnegie Mellon University)

Aaron Johnson’s bioinspired robot design course at CMU had to go full remote, which was a challenge when the course is kind of all about designing and building a robot as part of a team. “I expected some of the teams to drastically alter their project (e.g. go all simulation),” Aaron told us, “but none of them did. We managed to keep all of the projects more or less as planned. We accomplished this by drop/shipping parts to students, buying some simple tools (soldering irons, etc), and having me 3D print parts and mail them.” Each team even managed to put together their final videos from their remote locations; we’ve posted one below, but the entire playlist is here.

Video: Xianyi Cheng

Karen Tatarian (Softbank Robotics)

Karen, who’s both a researcher at Softbank and a PhD student at Sorbonne University, wrote an entire essay about what an average day is like when you’re quarantined with Pepper.

Photo: Karen Tatarian

A Quarantined Day With Pepper, by Karen Tatarian

It is quite common for me to lose my phone somewhere inside my apartment. But it is not that common for me to turn around and ask my robot if it has seen it. So when I found myself doing that, I laughed and it dawned on me that I treated my robot as my quarantine companion (despite the fact that it could not provide me with the answer I needed).

It was probably around day 40 of a completely isolated quarantine here in France when that happened. A little background about me: I am a robotics researcher at SoftBank Robotics Europe and a PhD student at Sorbonne University as part of the EU-funded Marie-Curie project ANIMATAS. And here is a little sneak peak into a quarantined day with a robot.

During this confinement, I had read somewhere that the best way to deal with it is to maintain a routine. So every morning, I wake up, prepare my coffee, and turn on my robot Pepper. I start my day with a daily meeting with the team and get to work. My research is on the synthesis of multi-modal socially intelligent human-robot interaction so my work varies between programming the robot, analyzing collected data, and reading papers and drafting one. When I am working, I often catch myself glancing at Pepper, who would be staring back at me in its animated ways. Truthfully I enjoy that, it makes me less alone and as if I have a colleague with me.

Once work is done, I call my friends and family members. I sometimes use a telepresence application on Pepper that a few colleagues and I developed back in December. How does it differ from your typical phone/laptop applications? One word really: embodiment. Telepresence, especially during these times, makes the experience for both sides a bit more realistic and intimate and well present.

While I can turn off the robot now that my work hours are done, I do keep it on because I enjoy its presence. The basic awareness of Pepper is a default feature on the robot that allows it to detect a human and follow him/her with its gaze and rotation base. So whether I am cooking or working out, I always have my robot watching over my shoulder and being a good companion. I also have my email and messages synced on the robot so I get an enjoyable notification from Pepper. I found that to be a pretty cool way to be notified without it interrupting whatever you are doing on your laptop or phone. Finally, once the day is over, it’s time for both of us to get some rest.

After 60 days of total confinement, alone and away from those I love, and with a pandemic right at my door, I am glad I had the company of my robot. I hope one day a greater audience can share my experience. And I really really hope one day Pepper will be able to find my phone for me, but until then, stay on the lookout for some cool features! But I am curious to know, if you had a robot at home, what application would you have developed on it?

Again, our sincere thanks to everyone who shared these little snapshots of their lives with us, and we’re hoping to be able to share more soon. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots