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#439691 Researchers develop bionic arm that ...
Cleveland Clinic researchers have engineered a first-of-its-kind bionic arm for patients with upper-limb amputations that allows wearers to think, behave and function like a person without an amputation, according to new findings published in Science Robotics. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439499 Why Robots Can’t Be Counted On to Find ...
On Thursday, a portion of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside, Florida (just outside of Miami) suffered a catastrophic partial collapse. As of Saturday morning, according to the Miami Herald, 159 people are still missing, and rescuers are removing debris with careful urgency while using dogs and microphones to search for survivors still trapped within a massive pile of tangled rubble.
It seems like robots should be ready to help with something like this. But they aren’t.
A Miami-Dade Fire Rescue official and a K-9 continue the search and rescue operations in the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on June 24, 2021 in Surfside, Florida.
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
The picture above shows what the site of the collapse in Florida looks like. It’s highly unstructured, and would pose a challenge for most legged robots to traverse, although you could see a tracked robot being able to manage it. But there are already humans and dogs working there, and as long as the environment is safe to move over, it’s not necessary or practical to duplicate that functionality with a robot, especially when time is critical.
What is desperately needed right now is a way of not just locating people underneath all of that rubble, but also getting an understanding of the structure of the rubble around a person, and what exactly is between that person and the surface. For that, we don’t need robots that can get over rubble: we need robots that can get into rubble. And we don’t have them.
To understand why, we talked with Robin Murphy at Texas A&M, who directs the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory, formerly the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), which is now a non-profit. Murphy has been involved in applying robotic technology to disasters worldwide, including 9/11, Fukushima, and Hurricane Harvey. The work she’s doing isn’t abstract research—CRASAR deploys teams of trained professionals with proven robotic technology to assist (when asked) with disasters around the world, and then uses those experiences as the foundation of a data-driven approach to improve disaster robotics technology and training.
According to Murphy, using robots to explore rubble of collapsed buildings is, for the moment, not possible in any kind of way that could be realistically used on a disaster site. Rubble, generally, is a wildly unstructured and unpredictable environment. Most robots are simply too big to fit through rubble, and the environment isn’t friendly to very small robots either, since there’s frequently water from ruptured plumbing making everything muddy and slippery, among many other physical hazards. Wireless communication or localization is often impossible, so tethers are required, which solves the comms and power problems but can easily get caught or tangled on obstacles.
Even if you can build a robot small enough and durable enough to be able to physically fit through the kinds of voids that you’d find in the rubble of a collapsed building (like these snake robots were able to do in Mexico in 2017), useful mobility is about more than just following existing passages. Many disaster scenarios in robotics research assume that objectives are accessible if you just follow the right path, but real disasters aren’t like that, and large voids may require some amount of forced entry, if entry is even possible at all. An ability to forcefully burrow, which doesn’t really exist yet in this context but is an active topic of research, is critical for a robot to be able to move around in rubble where there may not be any tunnels or voids leading it where it wants to go.
And even if you can build a robot that can successfully burrow its way through rubble, there’s the question of what value it’s able to provide once it gets where it needs to be. Robotic sensing systems are in general not designed for extreme close quarters, and visual sensors like cameras can rapidly get damaged or get so much dirt on them that they become useless. Murphy explains that ideally, a rubble-exploring robot would be able to do more than just locate victims, but would also be able to use its sensors to assist in their rescue. “Trained rescuers need to see the internal structure of the rubble, not just the state of the victim. Imagine a surgeon who needs to find a bullet in a shooting victim, but does not have any idea of the layout of the victims organs; if the surgeon just cuts straight down, they may make matters worse. Same thing with collapses, it’s like the game of pick-up sticks. But if a structural specialist can see inside the pile of pick-up sticks, they can extract the victim faster and safer with less risk of a secondary collapse.”
Besides these technical challenges, the other huge part to all of this is that any system that you’d hope to use in the context of rescuing people must be fully mature. It’s obviously unethical to take a research-grade robot into a situation like the Florida building collapse and spend time and resources trying to prove that it works. “Robots that get used for disasters are typically used every day for similar tasks,” explains Murphy. For example, it wouldn’t be surprising to see drones being used to survey the parts of the building in Florida that are still standing to make sure that it’s safe for people to work nearby, because drones are a mature and widely adopted technology that has already proven itself. Until a disaster robot has achieved a similar level of maturity, we’re not likely to see it take place in an active rescue.
Keeping in mind that there are no existing robots that fulfill all of the above criteria for actual use, we asked Murphy to describe her ideal disaster robot for us. “It would look like a very long, miniature ferret,” she says. “A long, flexible, snake-like body, with small legs and paws that can grab and push and shove.” The robo-ferret would be able to burrow, to wiggle and squish and squeeze its way through tight twists and turns, and would be equipped with functional eyelids to protect and clean its sensors. But since there are no robo-ferrets, what existing robot would Murphy like to see in Florida right now? “I’m not there in Miami,” Murphy tells us, “but my first thought when I saw this was I really hope that one day we’re able to commercialize Japan’s Active Scope Camera.”
The Active Scope Camera was developed at Tohoku University by Satoshi Tadokoro about 15 years ago. It operates kind of like a long, skinny, radially symmetrical bristlebot with the ability to push itself forward:
The hose is covered by inclined cilia. Motors with eccentric mass are installed in the cable and excite vibration and cause an up-and-down motion of the cable. The tips of the cilia stick on the floor when the cable moves down and propel the body. Meanwhile, the tips slip against the floor, and the body does not move back when it moves up. A repetition of this process showed that the cable can slowly move in a narrow space of rubble piles.
“It's quirky, but the idea of being able to get into those small spaces and go about 30 feet in and look around is a big deal,” Murphy says. But the last publication we can find about this system is nearly a decade old—if it works so well, we asked Murphy, why isn’t it more widely available to be used after a building collapses? “When a disaster happens, there’s a little bit of interest, and some funding. But then that funding goes away until the next disaster. And after a certain point, there’s just no financial incentive to create an actual product that’s reliable in hardware and software and sensors, because fortunately events like this building collapse are rare.”
Dr. Satoshi Tadokoro inserting the Active Scope Camera robot at the 2007 Berkman Plaza II (Jacksonville, FL) parking garage collapse.
Photo: Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue
The fortunate rarity of disasters like these complicates the development cycle of disaster robots as well, says Murphy. That’s part of the reason why CRASAR exists in the first place—it’s a way for robotics researchers to understand what first responders need from robots, and to test those robots in realistic disaster scenarios to determine best practices. “I think this is a case where policy and government can actually help,” Murphy tells us. “They can help by saying, we do actually need this, and we’re going to support the development of useful disaster robots.”
Robots should be able to help out in the situation happening right now in Florida, and we should be spending more time and effort on research in that direction that could potentially be saving lives. We’re close, but as with so many aspects of practical robotics, it feels like we’ve been close for years. There are systems out there with a lot of potential, they just need all help necessary to cross the gap from research project to a practical, useful system that can be deployed when needed. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439495 Legged Robots Do Surprisingly Well in ...
Here on Earth, we’re getting good enough at legged robots that we’re starting to see a transition from wheels to legs for challenging environments, especially environments with some uncertainty as to exactly what kind of terrain your robot might encounter. Beyond Earth, we’re still heavily reliant on wheeled vehicles, but even that might be starting to change. While wheels do pretty well on the Moon and on Mars, there are lots of other places to explore, like smaller moons and asteroids. And there, it’s not just terrain that’s a challenge: it’s gravity.
In low gravity environments, any robot moving over rough terrain risks entering a flight phase. Perhaps an extended flight phase, depending on how low the gravity is, which can be dangerous to robots that aren’t prepared for it. Researchers at the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich have been doing some experiments with the SpaceBok quadruped, and they’ve published a paper in IEEE T-RO showing that it’s possible to teach SpaceBok to effectively bok around in low gravity environments while using its legs to reorient itself during flight, exhibiting “cat-like jumping and landing” behaviors through vigorous leg-wiggling.
Also, while I’m fairly certain that “bok” is not a verb that means “to move dynamically in low gravity using legs,” I feel like that’s what it should mean. Sort of like pronk, except in space. Let’s make it so!
Just look at that robot bok!
This reorientation technique was developed using deep reinforcement learning, and then transferred from simulation to a real SpaceBok robot, albeit in two degrees of freedom rather than three. The real challenge with this method is just how complicated things get when you start wiggling multiple limbs in the air trying to get to a specific configuration, since the dynamics here are (as the paper puts it) “highly non-linear,” and it proved somewhat difficult to even simulate everything well enough. What you see in the simulation, incidentally, is an environment similar to Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, which has a surface gravity of 0.03g.
Although SpaceBok has “space” right in the name, it’s not especially optimized for this particular kind of motion. As the video shows, having an actuated hip joint could make the difference between a reliable soft landing and, uh, not. Not landing softly is a big deal, because an uncontrolled bounce could send the robot flying huge distances, which is what happened to the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko back in 2014.
For more details on SpaceBok’s space booking, we spoke with the paper’s first author, Nikita Rudin, via email.
IEEE Spectrum: Why are legs ideal for mobility in low gravity environments?
Rudin: In low gravity environments, rolling on wheels becomes more difficult because of reduced traction. However, legs can exploit the low gravity and use high jumps to move efficiently. With high jumps, you can also clear large obstacles along the way, which is harder to do in higher gravity.
Were there unique challenges to training your controller in 2D and 3D relative to training controllers for terrestrial legged robot motion?
The main challenge is the long flight phase, which is not present in terrestrial locomotion. In earth gravity, robots (and animals) use reaction forces from the ground to balance. During a jump, they don't usually need to re-orient themselves. In the case of low gravity, we have extended flight phases (multiple seconds) and only short contacts with the ground. The robot needs to be able to re-orient / balance in the air. Otherwise, a small disturbance at the moment of the jump will slowly flip the robot. In short, in low gravity, there is a new control problem that can be neglected on Earth.
Besides the addition of a hip joint, what other modifications would you like to make to the robot to enhance its capabilities? Would a tail be useful, for example? Or very heavy shoes?
A tail is a very interesting idea and heavy shoes would definitely help, however, they increase the total weight, which is costly in space. We actually add some minor weight to feet already (in the paper we analyze the effect of these weights). Another interesting addition would be a joint in the center of the robot allowing it to do cat-like backbone torsion.
How does the difficulty of this problem change as the gravity changes?
With changing gravity you change the importance of mid-air re-orientation compared to ground contacts. For locomotion, low-gravity is harder from the reasoning above. However, if the robot is dropped and needs to perform a flip before landing, higher gravity is harder because you have less time for the whole process.
What are you working on next?
We have a few ideas for the next projects including a legged robot specifically designed and certified for space and exploring cat-like re-orientation on earth with smaller/faster robots. We would also like to simulate a zero-g environment on earth by dropping the robot from a few dozens of meters into a safety net, and of course, a parabolic flight is still very much one of our objectives. However, we will probably need a smaller robot there as well.
Cat-Like Jumping and Landing of Legged Robots in Low Gravity Using Deep Reinforcement Learning, by Nikita Rudin, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Vassilios Tsounis, and Marco Hutter from ETH Zurich, is published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439487 SoftBank Stops Making Pepper Robots, ...
Reuters is reporting that SoftBank stopped manufacturing Pepper robots at some point last year due to low demand, and by September, will cut about half of the 330 positions at SoftBank Robotics Europe in France. Most of the positions will be in Q&A, sales, and service, which hopefully leaves SoftBank Robotics’ research and development group mostly intact. But the cuts reflect poor long-term sales, with SoftBank Robotics Europe having lost over 100 million Euros in the past three years, according to French business news site JDN. Speaking with Nikkei, SoftBank said that this doesn’t actually mean a permanent end for Pepper, and that they “plan to resume production if demand recovers.” But things aren’t looking good.
Reuters says that “only” 27,000 Peppers were produced, but that sure seems like a lot of Peppers to me. Perhaps too many—a huge number of Peppers were used by SoftBank itself in its retail stores, and a hundred at once were turned into a cheerleading squad for the SoftBank Hawks baseball team because of the pandemic. There’s nothing wrong with either of those things, but it’s hard to use them to gauge how successful Pepper has actually been.
I won’t try to argue that Pepper would necessarily have been commercially viable in the long(er) term, since it’s a very capable robot in some ways, but not very capable in others. For example, Pepper has arms and hands with individually articulated fingers, but the robot can’t actually do much in the way of useful grasping or manipulation. SoftBank positioned Pepper as a robot that can attract attention and provide useful, socially interactive information in public places. Besides SoftBank’s own stores, Peppers have been used in banks, malls, airports, and other places of that nature. A lot of what Pepper seems to have uniquely offered was novelty, though, which ultimately may not be sustainable for a commercial robot, because at some point, the novelty just wears off and you’re basically left with a very cool looking (but expensive) kiosk.
Having said all that, the sheer number of Peppers that SoftBank put out in the world could be one of the most significant impacts that the robot has had. The fact that Pepper was able to successfully operate for long enough, and in enough places, that it even had a chance to stop becoming novel and instead become normal is an enormous achievement for Pepper specifically as well as for social robots more broadly. Angelica Lim, who worked with Pepper at SoftBank Robotics Europe for three years before founding the Rosie Lab at SFU, shared some perspective with us on this:
There has never been a robot with the ambition of Pepper. Its mission was huge—be adaptable and robust to different purposes and locations: loud sushi shops, quiet banks, and hospitals that change from hour to hour. Compare that with Alexa which has a pretty stable and quiet environment—the home. On top of that, the robot needed to respond to different ages, cultures, countries and languages. The only thing I can think of that comes close is the smartphone, and the expectation for it is much lower compared to the humanoid Pepper. Ten years ago, it was unthinkable that we could leave a robot on “in the wild” for days, weeks, months and years, and yet Pepper did it thanks to the team at SoftBank Robotics.
Peppers are still being used in education today, from elementary schools and high schools to research labs in North America, Asia and Europe. The next generation will grow up programming these, like they did with the Apple personal computer. I’m confident it’s just the next step to technology that adapts to us as humans rather than the other way around.
Pepper has been an amazing platform for HRI research as well as for STEM education more broadly, and our hope is that Pepper will continue to be impactful in those ways, whether or not any more of these robots are ever made. We also hope that SoftBank does whatever is necessary to make sure that Peppers remain useful and accessible well into the future in both software and hardware. But perhaps we’re being too pessimistic here—this is certainly not good news, but despite how it looks we don’t know for sure that it’s catastrophic for Pepper. All we can do is wait and see what happens at SoftBank Robotics Europe over the next six months, and hope that Pepper continues to get the support that it deserves. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439431 What Will Education be Like in the ...
Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay The field of education is changing under the influence of technology and artificial intelligence. Old educational methods are already being transformed today and may lose their relevance in the future. In a few years, your teacher may be a computer program. And in the distant future, education will be like …
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Posted in Human Robots