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#439743 Video Friday: Preparing for the SubT ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USAWeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – [Online Event]IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]Robo Boston – October 1-2, 2021 – Boston, MA, USAWearRAcon Europe 2021 – October 5-7, 2021 – [Online Event]ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Silicon Valley Robot Block Party – October 23, 2021 – Oakland, CA, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Team Explorer, the SubT Challenge entry from CMU and Oregon State University, is in the last stage of preparation for the competition this month inside the Mega Caverns cave complex in Louisville, Kentucky.
[ Explorer ]
Team CERBERUS is looking good for the SubT Final next week, too.
Autonomous subterranean exploration with the ANYmal C Robot inside the Hagerbach underground mine
[ ARL ]
I'm still as skeptical as I ever was about a big and almost certainly expensive two-armed robot that can do whatever you can program it to do (have fun with that) and seems to rely on an app store for functionality.
[ Unlimited Robotics ]
Project Mineral is using breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics to find ways to grow more food, more sustainably.
[ Mineral ]
Not having a torso or anything presumably makes this easier.
Next up, Digit limbo!
[ Hybrid Robotics ]
Paric completed layout of a 500 unit apartment complex utilizing the Dusty FieldPrinter solution. Autonomous layout on the plywood deck saved weeks worth of schedule, allowing the panelized walls to be placed sooner.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
Spot performs inspection in the Kidd Creek Mine, enabling operators to keep their distance from hazards.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Digit's engineered to be a multipurpose machine. Meaning, it needs to be able to perform a collection of tasks in practically any environment. We do this by first ensuring the robot's physically capable. Then we help the robot perceive its surroundings, understand its surroundings, then reason a best course of action to navigate its environment and accomplish its task. This is where software comes into play. This is early AI in action.
[ Agility Robotics ]
This work proposes a compact robotic limb, AugLimb, that can augment our body functions and support the daily activities. The proposed device can be mounted on the user's upper arm, and transform into compact state without obstruction to wearers.
[ AugLimb ]
Ahold Delhaize and AIRLab need the help of academics who have knowledge of human-robot interactions, mobility, manipulation, programming, and sensors to accelerate the introduction of robotics in retail. In the AIRLab Stacking challenge, teams will work on algorithms that focus on smart retail applications, for example, automated product stacking.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Leica, not at all well known for making robots, is getting into the robotic reality capture business with a payload for Spot and a new drone.
Introducing BLK2FLY: Autonomous Flying Laser Scanner
[ Leica BLK ]
As much as I like Soft Robotics, I'm maybe not quite as optimistic as they are about the potential for robots to take over quite this much from humans in the near term.
[ Soft Robotics ]
Over the course of this video, the robot gets longer and longer and longer.
[ Transcend Robotics ]
This is a good challenge: attach a spool of electrical tape to your drone, which can unpredictably unspool itself and make sure it doesn't totally screw you up.
[ UZH ]
Two interesting short seminars from NCCR Robotics, including one on autonomous racing drones and “neophobic” mobile robots.
Dario Mantegazza: Neophobic Mobile Robots Avoid Potential Hazards
[ NCCR ]
This panel on Synergies between Automation and Robotics comes from ICRA 2021, and once you see the participant list, I bet you'll agree that it's worth a watch.
[ ICRA 2021 ]
CMU RI Seminars are back! This week we hear from Andrew E. Johnson, a Principal Robotics Systems Engineer in the Guidance and Control Section of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on “The Search for Ancient Life on Mars Began with a Safe Landing.”
Prior mars rover missions have all landed in flat and smooth regions, but for the Mars 2020 mission, which is seeking signs of ancient life, this was no longer acceptable. Terrain relief that is ideal for the science obviously poses significant risks for landing, so a new landing capability called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) was added to the mission. This talk will describe the scientific goals of the mission, the Terrain Relative Navigation system design and the successful results from landing on February 18th, 2021.[ CMU RI Seminar ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439708 Soft components for the next generation ...
Soft robots driven by pressurized fluids could explore new frontiers and interact with delicate objects in ways that traditional rigid robots can't. But building entirely soft robots remains a challenge because many of the components required to power these devices are, themselves, rigid. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439574 A theoretical approach for designing a ...
Swarm robotics is a relatively new and highly promising research field, which entails the development of multi-robot teams that can move and complete tasks together. Robot swarms could have numerous valuable applications. For instance, they could support humans during search and rescue missions or allow them to monitor geographical areas that are difficult to access. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439541 A tactile sensing mechanism for soft ...
In recent years, numerous roboticists worldwide have been trying to develop robotic systems that can artificially replicate the human sense of touch. In addition, they have been trying to create increasingly realistic and advanced bionic limbs and humanoid robots, using soft materials instead of rigid structures. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439527 It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to ...
Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.
In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge.
PR2’s job here is to prepare breakfast by bringing a bowl, a spoon, a cup, a milk box, and a box of cereal to a dining table. After breakfast, the PR2 then has to place washable objects into the dishwasher, put the cereal box back into its storage location, toss the milk box into the trash. The objects vary in shape and appearance, and the robot is only given symbolic descriptions of object locations (in the fridge, on the counter). It’s a very realistic but also very challenging scenario, which probably explains why it takes the poor PR2 90 minutes to complete it.
First off, kudos to that PR2 for still doing solid robotics research, right? And this research is definitely solid—the fact that all of this stuff works as well as it does, perception, motion planning, grasping, high level strategizing, is incredibly impressive. Remember, this is 90 minutes of full autonomy doing tasks that are relatively complex in an environment that’s only semi-structured and somewhat, but not overly, robot-optimized. In fact, over five trials, the robot succeeded in the table setting task five times. It wasn’t flawless, and the PR2 did have particular trouble with grasping tricky objects like the spoon, but the framework that the researchers developed was able to successfully recover from every single failure by tweaking parameters and retrying the failed action. Arguably, failing a lot but also being able to recover a lot is even more useful than not failing at all, if you think long term.
The clean up task was more difficult for the PR2, and it suffered unrecoverable failures during two of the five trials. The paper describes what happened:
Cleaning the table was more challenging than table setting, due to the use of the dishwasher and the difficulty of sideways grasping objects located far away from the edge of the table. In two out of the five runs we encountered an unrecoverable failure. In one of the runs, due to the instability of the grasping trajectory and the robot not tracking it perfectly, the fingers of the robot ended up pushing the milk away during grasping, which resulted in a very unstable grasp. As a result, the box fell to the ground in the carrying phase. Although during the table setting the robot was able to pick up a toppled over cup and successfully bring it to the table, picking up the milk box from the ground was impossible for the PR2. The other unrecoverable failure was the dishwasher grid getting stuck in PR2’s finger. Another major failure happened when placing the cereal box into its vertical drawer, which was difficult because the robot had to reach very high and approach its joint limits. When the gripper opened, the box fell on a side in the shelf, which resulted in it being crushed when the drawer was closed.
Failure cases including unstably grasping the milk, getting stuck in the dishwasher, and crushing the cereal.
Photos: EASE
While we’re focusing a little bit on the failures here, that’s really just to illustrate the exceptionally challenging edge cases that the robot encountered. Again, I want to emphasize that while the PR2 was not successful all the time, its performance over 90 minutes of fully autonomous operation is still very impressive. And I really appreciate that the researchers committed to an experiment like this, putting their robot into a practical(ish) environment doing practical(ish) tasks under full autonomy over a long(ish) period of time. We often see lots of incremental research headed in this general direction, but it’ll take a lot more work like we’re seeing here for robots to get real-world useful enough to reliably handle those critical breakfast tasks.
The Robot Household Marathon Experiment, by Gayane Kazhoyan, Simon Stelter, Franklin Kenghagho Kenfack, Sebastian Koralewski and Michael Beetz from the CRC EASE at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Germany, was presented at ICRA 2021. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots