Tag Archives: project

#436100 Labrador Systems Developing Affordable ...

Developing robots for the home is still a challenge, especially if you want those robots to interact with people and help them do practical, useful things. However, the potential markets for home robots are huge, and one of the most compelling markets is for home robots that can assist humans who need them. Today, Labrador Systems, a startup based in California, is announcing a pre-seed funding round of $2 million (led by SOSV’s hardware accelerator HAX with participation from Amazon’s Alexa Fund and iRobot Ventures, among others) with the goal of expanding development and conducting pilot studies of “a new [assistive robot] platform for supporting home health.”

Labrador was founded two years ago by Mike Dooley and Nikolai Romanov. Both Mike and Nikolai have backgrounds in consumer robotics at Evolution Robotics and iRobot, but as an ’80s gamer, Mike’s bio (or at least the parts of his bio on LinkedIn) caught my attention: From 1995 to 1997, Mike worked at Brøderbund Software, helping to manage play testing for games like Myst and Riven and the Where in the World is Carmen San Diego series. He then spent three years at Lego as the product manager for MindStorms. After doing some marginally less interesting things, Mike was the VP of product development at Evolution Robotics from 2006 to 2012, where he led the team that developed the Mint floor sweeping robot. Evolution was acquired by iRobot in 2012, and Mike ended up as the VP of product development over there until 2017, when he co-founded Labrador.

I was pretty much sold at Where in the World is Carmen San Diego (the original version of which I played from a 5.25” floppy on my dad’s Apple IIe)*, but as you can see from all that other stuff, Mike knows what he’s doing in robotics as well.

And according to Labrador’s press release, what they’re doing is this:

Labrador Systems is an early stage technology company developing a new generation of assistive robots to help people live more independently. The company’s core focus is creating affordable solutions that address practical and physical needs at a fraction of the cost of commercial robots. … Labrador’s technology platform offers an affordable solution to improve the quality of care while promoting independence and successful aging.

Labrador’s personal robot, the company’s first offering, will enter pilot studies in 2020.

That’s about as light on detail as a press release gets, but there’s a bit more on Labrador’s website, including:

Our core focus is creating affordable solutions that address practical and physical needs. (we are not a social robot company)
By affordable, we mean products and technologies that will be available at less than 1/10th the cost of commercial robots.
We achieve those low costs by fusing the latest technologies coming out of augmented reality with robotics to move things in the real world.

The only hardware we’ve actually seen from Labrador at this point is a demo that they put together for Amazon’s re:MARS conference, which took place a few months ago, showing a “demonstration project” called Smart Walker:

This isn’t the home assistance robot that Labrador got its funding for, but rather a demonstration of some of their technology. So of course, the question is, what’s Labrador working on, then? It’s still a secret, but Mike Dooley was able to give us a few more details.

IEEE Spectrum: Your website shows a smart walker concept—how is that related to the assistive robot that you’re working on?

Mike Dooley: The smart walker was a request from a major senior living organization to have our robot (which is really good at navigation) guide residents from place to place within their communities. To test the idea with residents, it turned out to be much quicker to take the navigation system from the robot and put it on an existing rollator walker. So when you see the clips of the technology in the smart walker video on our website, that’s actually the robot’s navigation system localizing in real time and path planning in an environment.

“Assistive robot” can cover a huge range of designs and capabilities—can you give us any more detail about your robot, and what it’ll be able to do?

One of the core features of our robot is to help people move things where they have difficulty moving themselves, particularly in the home setting. That may sound trivial, but to someone who has impaired mobility, it can be a major daily challenge and negatively impact their life and health in a number of ways. Some examples we repeatedly hear are people not staying hydrated or taking their medication on time simply because there is a distance between where they are and the items they need. Once we have those base capabilities, i.e. the ability to navigate around a home and move things within it, then the robot becomes a platform for a wider variety of applications.

What made you decide to develop assistive robots, and why are robots a good solution for seniors who want to live independently?

Supporting independent living has been seen as a massive opportunity in robotics for some time, but also as something off in the future. The turning point for me was watching my mother enter that stage in her life and seeing her transition to using a cane, then a walker, and eventually to a wheelchair. That made the problems very real for me. It also made things much clearer about how we could start addressing specific needs with the tools that are becoming available now.

In terms of why robots can be a good solution, the basic answer is the level of need is so overwhelming that even helping with “basic” tasks can make an appreciable difference in the quality of someone’s daily life. It’s also very much about giving individuals a degree of control back over their environment. That applies to seniors as well as others whose world starts getting more complex to manage as their abilities become more impaired.

What are the particular challenges of developing assistive robots, and how are you addressing them? Why do you think there aren’t more robotics startups in this space?

The setting (operating in homes and personal spaces) and the core purpose of the product (aiding a wide variety of individuals) bring a lot of complexity to any capability you want to build into an assistive robot. Our approach is to put as much structure as we can into the system to make it functional, affordable, understandable and reliable.

I think one of the reasons you don’t see more startups in the space is that a lot of roboticists want to skip ahead and do the fancy stuff, such as taking on human-level capabilities around things like manipulation. Those are very interesting research topics, but we think those are also very far away from being practical solutions you can productize for people to use in their homes.

How do you think assistive robots and human caregivers should work together?

The ideal scenario is allowing caregivers to focus more of their time on the high-touch, personal side of care. The robot can offload the more basic support tasks as well as extend the impact of the caregiver for the long hours of the day they can’t be with someone at their home. We see that applying to both paid care providers as well as the 40 million unpaid family members and friends that provide assistance.

The robot is really there as a tool, both for individuals in need and the people that help them. What’s promising in the research discussions we’ve had so far, is that even when a caregiver is present, giving control back to the individual for simple things can mean a lot in the relationship between them and the caregiver.

What should we look forward to from Labrador in 2020?

Our big goal in 2020 is to start placing the next version of the robot with individuals with different types of needs to let them experience it naturally in their own homes and provide feedback on what they like, what don’t like and how we can make it better. We are currently reaching out to companies in the healthcare and home health fields to participate in those studies and test specific applications related to their services. We plan to share more detail about those studies and the robot itself as we get further into 2020.

If you’re an organization (or individual) who wants to possibly try out Labrador’s prototype, the company encourages you to connect with them through their website. And as we learn more about what Labrador is up to, we’ll have updates for you, presumably in 2020.

[ Labrador Systems ]

* I just lost an hour of my life after finding out that you can play Where in the World is Carmen San Diego in your browser for free. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436079 Video Friday: This Humanoid 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!):

Northeast Robotics Colloquium – October 12, 2019 – Philadelphia, Pa., USA
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

What’s better than a robotics paper with “dynamic” in the title? A robotics paper with “highly dynamic” in the title. From Sangbae Kim’s lab at MIT, the latest exploits of Mini Cheetah:

Yes I’d very much like one please. Full paper at the link below.

[ Paper ] via [ MIT ]

A humanoid robot serving you ice cream—on his own ice cream bike: What a delicious vision!

[ Roboy ]

The Roomba “i” series and “s” series vacuums have just gotten an update that lets you set “keep out” zones, which is super useful. Tell your robot where not to go!

I feel bad, that Roomba was probably just hungry 🙁

[ iRobot ]

We wrote about Voliro’s tilt-rotor hexcopter a couple years ago, and now it’s off doing practical things, like spray painting a building pretty much the same color that it was before.

[ Voliro ]

Thanks Mina!

Here’s a clever approach for bin-picking problematic objects, like shiny things: Just grab a whole bunch, and then sort out what you need on a nice robot-friendly table.

It might take a little bit longer, but what do you care, you’re probably off sipping a cocktail with a little umbrella in it on a beach somewhere.

[ Harada Lab ]

A unique combination of the IRB 1200 and YuMi industrial robots that use vision, AI and deep learning to recognize and categorize trash for recycling.

[ ABB ]

Measuring glacial movements in-situ is a challenging, but necessary task to model glaciers and predict their future evolution. However, installing GPS stations on ice can be dangerous and expensive when not impossible in the presence of large crevasses. In this project, the ASL develops UAVs for dropping and recovering lightweight GPS stations over inaccessible glaciers to record the ice flow motion. This video shows the results of first tests performed at Gorner glacier, Switzerland, in July 2019.

[ EPFL ]

Turns out Tertills actually do a pretty great job fighting weeds.

Plus, they leave all those cute lil’ Tertill tracks.

[ Franklin Robotics ]

The online autonomous navigation and semantic mapping experiment presented [below] is conducted with the Cassie Blue bipedal robot at the University of Michigan. The sensors attached to the robot include an IMU, a 32-beam LiDAR and an RGB-D camera. The whole online process runs in real-time on a Jetson Xavier and a laptop with an i7 processor.

The resulting map is so precise that it looks like we are doing real-time SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). In fact, the map is based on dead-reckoning via the InvEKF.

[ GTSAM ] via [ University of Michigan ]

UBTECH has announced an upgraded version of its Meebot, which is 30 percent bigger and comes with more sensors and programmable eyes.

[ UBTECH ]

ABB’s research team will be working with medical staff, scientist and engineers to develop non-surgical medical robotics systems, including logistics and next-generation automated laboratory technologies. The team will develop robotics solutions that will help eliminate bottlenecks in laboratory work and address the global shortage of skilled medical staff.

[ ABB ]

In this video, Ian and Chris go through Misty’s SDK, discussing the languages we’ve included, the tools that make it easy for you to get started quickly, a quick rundown of how to run the skills you build, plus what’s ahead on the Misty SDK roadmap.

[ Misty Robotics ]

My guess is that this was not one of iRobot’s testing environments for the Roomba.

You know, that’s actually super impressive. And maybe if they threw one of the self-emptying Roombas in there, it would be a viable solution to the entire problem.

[ How Farms Work ]

Part of WeRobotics’ Flying Labs network, Panama Flying Labs is a local knowledge hub catalyzing social good and empowering local experts. Through training and workshops, demonstrations and missions, the Panama Flying Labs team leverages the power of drones, data, and AI to promote entrepreneurship, build local capacity, and confront the pressing social challenges faced by communities in Panama and across Central America.

[ Panama Flying Labs ]

Go on a virtual flythrough of the NIOSH Experimental Mine, one of two courses used in the recent DARPA Subterranean Challenge Tunnel Circuit Event held 15-22 August, 2019. The data used for this partial flythrough tour were collected using 3D LIDAR sensors similar to the sensors commonly used on autonomous mobile robots.

[ SubT ]

Special thanks to PBS, Mark Knobil, Joe Seamans and Stan Brandorff and many others who produced this program in 1991.

It features Reid Simmons (and his 1 year old son), David Wettergreen, Red Whittaker, Mac Macdonald, Omead Amidi, and other Field Robotics Center alumni building the planetary walker prototype called Ambler. The team gets ready for an important demo for NASA.

[ CMU RI ]

As art and technology merge, roboticist Madeline Gannon explores the frontiers of human-robot interaction across the arts, sciences and society, and explores what this could mean for the future.

[ Sonar+D ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436005 NASA Hiring Engineers to Develop “Next ...

It’s been nearly six years since NASA unveiled Valkyrie, a state-of-the-art full-size humanoid robot. After the DARPA Robotics Challenge, NASA has continued to work with Valkyrie at Johnson Space Center, and has also provided Valkyrie robots to several different universities. Although it’s not a new platform anymore (six years is a long time in robotics), Valkyrie is still very capable, with plenty of potential for robotics research.

With that in mind, we were caught by surprise when over the last several months, Jacobs, a Dallas-based engineering company that appears to provide a wide variety of technical services to anyone who wants them, has posted several open jobs in need of roboticists in the Houston, Texas, area who are interested in working with NASA on “the next generation of humanoid robot.”

Here are the relevant bullet points from the one of the job descriptions (which you can view at this link):

Work directly with NASA Johnson Space Center in designing the next generation of humanoid robot.

Join the Valkyrie humanoid robot team in NASA’s Robotic Systems Technology Branch.

Build on the success of the existing Valkyrie and Robonaut 2 humanoid robots and advance NASA’s ability to project a remote human presence and dexterous manipulation capability into challenging, dangerous, and distant environments both in space and here on earth.

The question is, why is NASA developing its own humanoid robot (again) when it could instead save a whole bunch of time and money by using a platform that already exists, whether it’s Atlas, Digit, Valkyrie itself, or one of the small handful of other humanoids that are more or less available? The only answer that I can come up with is that no existing platforms meet NASA’s requirements, whatever those may be. And if that’s the case, what kind of requirements are we talking about? The obvious one would be the ability to work in the kinds of environments that NASA specializes in—space, the Moon, and Mars.

Image: NASA

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot working on the surface of Mars.

NASA’s existing humanoid robots, including Robonaut 2 and Valkyrie, were designed to operate on Earth. Robonaut 2 ended up going to space anyway (it’s recently returned to Earth for repairs), but its hardware was certainly never intended to function outside of the International Space Station. Working in a vacuum involves designing for a much more rigorous set of environmental challenges, and things get even worse on the Moon or on Mars, where highly abrasive dust gets everywhere.

We know that it’s possible to design robots for long term operation in these kinds of environments because we’ve done it before. But if you’re not actually going to send your robot off-world, there’s very little reason to bother making sure that it can operate through (say) 300° Celsius temperature swings like you’d find on the Moon. In the past, NASA has quite sensibly focused on designing robots that can be used as platforms for the development of software and techniques that could one day be applied to off-world operations, without over-engineering those specific robots to operate in places that they would almost certainly never go. As NASA increasingly focuses on a return to the Moon, though, maybe it’s time to start thinking about a humanoid robot that could actually do useful stuff on the lunar surface.

Image: NASA

Artist’s concept of the Gateway moon-orbiting space station (seen on the right) with an Orion crew vehicle approaching.

The other possibility that I can think of, and perhaps the more likely one, is that this next humanoid robot will be a direct successor to Robonaut 2, intended for NASA’s Gateway space station orbiting the Moon. Some of the robotics folks at NASA that we’ve talked to recently have emphasized how important robotics will be for Gateway:

Trey Smith, NASA Ames: Everybody at NASA is really excited about work on the Gateway space station that would be in near lunar space. We don’t have definite plans for what would happen on the Gateway yet, but there’s a general recognition that intra-vehicular robots are important for space stations. And so, it would not be surprising to see a mobile manipulator like Robonaut, and a free flyer like Astrobee, on the Gateway.

If you have an un-crewed cargo vehicle that shows up stuffed to the rafters with cargo bags and it docks with the Gateway when there’s no crew there, it would be very useful to have intra-vehicular robots that can pull all those cargo bags out, unpack them, stow all the items, and then even allow the cargo vehicle to detach before the crew show up so that the crew don’t have to waste their time with that.

Julia Badger, NASA JSC: One of the systems on board Gateway is going to be intravehicular robots. They’re not going to necessarily look like Robonaut, but they’ll have some of the same functionality as Robonaut—being mobile, being able to carry payloads from one part of the module to another, doing some dexterous manipulation tasks, inspecting behind panels, those sorts of things.

Image: NASA

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot working inside a spacecraft.

Since Gateway won’t be crewed by humans all of the time, it’ll be important to have a permanent robotic presence to keep things running while nobody is home while saving on resources by virtue of the fact that robots aren’t always eating food, drinking water, consuming oxygen, demanding that the temperature stays just so, and producing a variety of disgusting kinds of waste. Obviously, the robot won’t be as capable as humans, but if they can manage to do even basic continuing maintenance tasks (most likely through at least partial teleoperation), that would be very useful.

Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

NASA’s Robonaut team plans to perform a variety of mobility and motion-planning experiments using the robot’s new legs, which can grab handrails on the International Space Station.

As for whether robots designed for Gateway would really fall into the “humanoid” category, it’s worth considering that Gateway is designed for humans, implying that an effective robotic system on Gateway would need to be able to interact with the station in similar ways to how a human astronaut would. So, you’d expect to see arms with end-effectors that can grip things as well as push buttons, and some kind of mobility system—the legged version of Robonaut 2 seems like a likely template, but redesigned from the ground up to work in space, incorporating all the advances in robotics hardware and computing that have taken place over the last decade.

We’ve been pestering NASA about this for a little bit now, and they’re not ready to comment on this project, or even to confirm it. And again, everything in this article (besides the job post, which you should totally check out and consider applying for) is just speculation on our part, and we could be wrong about absolutely all of it. As soon as we hear more, we’ll definitely let you know. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#435822 The Internet Is Coming to the Rest of ...

People surf it. Spiders crawl it. Gophers navigate it.

Now, a leading group of cognitive biologists and computer scientists want to make the tools of the Internet accessible to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Dubbed the Interspecies Internet, the project aims to provide intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, magpies, and great apes with a means to communicate among each other and with people online.

And through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other digital technologies, researchers hope to crack the code of all the chirps, yips, growls, and whistles that underpin animal communication.

Oh, and musician Peter Gabriel is involved.

“We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control,” the former Genesis frontman, dressed in his signature Nehru-style collar shirt and loose, open waistcoat, told IEEE Spectrum at the inaugural Interspecies Internet Workshop, held Monday in Cambridge, Mass. “This will be integral to changing our relationship with the natural world.”

The workshop was a long time in the making.

Eighteen years ago, Gabriel visited a primate research center in Atlanta, Georgia, where he jammed with two bonobos, a male named Kanzi and his half-sister Panbanisha. It was the first time either bonobo had sat at a piano before, and both displayed an exquisite sense of musical timing and melody.

Gabriel seemed to be speaking to the great apes through his synthesizer. It was a shock to the man who once sang “Shock the Monkey.”

“It blew me away,” he says.

Add in the bonobos’ ability to communicate by pointing to abstract symbols, Gabriel notes, and “you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and very blind not to notice language being used.”

Gabriel eventually teamed up with Internet protocol co-inventor Vint Cerf, cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, and IoT pioneer Neil Gershenfeld to propose building an Interspecies Internet. Presented in a 2013 TED Talk as an “idea in progress,” the concept proved to be ahead of the technology.

“It wasn’t ready,” says Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. “It needed to incubate.”

So, for the past six years, the architects of the Dolittlesque initiative embarked on two small pilot projects, one for dolphins and one for chimpanzees.

At her Hunter College lab in New York City, Reiss developed what she calls the D-Pad—a touchpad for dolphins.

Reiss had been trying for years to create an underwater touchscreen with which to probe the cognition and communication skills of bottlenose dolphins. But “it was a nightmare coming up with something that was dolphin-safe and would work,” she says.

Her first attempt emitted too much heat. A Wii-like system of gesture recognition proved too difficult to install in the dolphin tanks.

Eventually, she joined forces with Rockefeller University biophysicist Marcelo Magnasco and invented an optical detection system in which images and infrared sensors are projected through an underwater viewing window onto a glass panel, allowing the dolphins to play specially designed apps, including one dubbed Whack-a-Fish.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Gabriel worked with Alison Cronin, director of the ape rescue center Monkey World, to test the feasibility of using FaceTime with chimpanzees.

The chimps engaged with the technology, Cronin reported at this week’s workshop. However, our hominid cousins proved as adept at videotelephonic discourse as my three-year-old son is at video chatting with his grandparents—which is to say, there was a lot of pass-the-banana-through-the-screen and other silly games, and not much meaningful conversation.

“We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control.”
—Peter Gabriel

The buggy, rudimentary attempt at interspecies online communication—what Cronin calls her “Max Headroom experiment”—shows that building the Interspecies Internet will not be as simple as giving out Skype-enabled tablets to smart animals.

“There are all sorts of problems with creating a human-centered experience for another animal,” says Gabriel Miller, director of research and development at the San Diego Zoo.

Miller has been working on animal-focused sensory tools such as an “Elephone” (for elephants) and a “Joybranch” (for birds), but it’s not easy to design efficient interactive systems for other creatures—and for the Interspecies Internet to be successful, Miller points out, “that will be super-foundational.”

Researchers are making progress on natural language processing of animal tongues. Through a non-profit organization called the Earth Species Project, former Firefox designer Aza Raskin and early Twitter engineer Britt Selvitelle are applying deep learning algorithms developed for unsupervised machine translation of human languages to fashion a Rosetta Stone–like tool capable of interpreting the vocalizations of whales, primates, and other animals.

Inspired by the scientists who first documented the complex sonic arrangements of humpback whales in the 1960s—a discovery that ushered in the modern marine conservation movement—Selvitelle hopes that an AI-powered animal translator can have a similar effect on environmentalism today.

“A lot of shifts happen when someone who doesn’t have a voice gains a voice,” he says.

A challenge with this sort of AI software remains verification and validation. Normally, machine-learning algorithms are benchmarked against a human expert, but who is to say if a cybernetic translation of a sperm whale’s clicks is accurate or not?

One could back-translate an English expression into sperm whale-ese and then into English again. But with the great apes, there might be a better option.

According to primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, expertly trained bonobos could serve as bilingual interpreters, translating the argot of apes into the parlance of people, and vice versa.

Not just any trained ape will do, though. They have to grow up in a mixed Pan/Homo environment, as Kanzi and Panbanisha were.

“If I can have a chat with a cow, maybe I can have more compassion for it.”
—Jeremy Coller

Those bonobos were raised effectively from birth both by Savage-Rumbaugh, who taught the animals to understand spoken English and to communicate via hundreds of different pictographic “lexigrams,” and a bonobo mother named Matata that had lived for six years in the Congolese rainforests before her capture.

Unlike all other research primates—which are brought into captivity as infants, reared by human caretakers, and have limited exposure to their natural cultures or languages—those apes thus grew up fluent in both bonobo and human.

Panbanisha died in 2012, but Kanzi, aged 38, is still going strong, living at an ape sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. Researchers continue to study his cognitive abilities—Francine Dolins, a primatologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, is running one study in which Kanzi and other apes hunt rabbits and forage for fruit through avatars on a touchscreen. Kanzi could, in theory, be recruited to check the accuracy of any Google Translate–like app for bonobo hoots, barks, grunts, and cries.

Alternatively, Kanzi could simply provide Internet-based interpreting services for our two species. He’s already proficient at video chatting with humans, notes Emily Walco, a PhD student at Harvard University who has personally Skyped with Kanzi. “He was super into it,” Walco says.

And if wild bonobos in Central Africa can be coaxed to gather around a computer screen, Savage-Rumbaugh is confident Kanzi could communicate with them that way. “It can all be put together,” she says. “We can have an Interspecies Internet.”

“Both the technology and the knowledge had to advance,” Savage-Rumbaugh notes. However, now, “the techniques that we learned could really be extended to a cow or a pig.”

That’s music to the ears of Jeremy Coller, a private equity specialist whose foundation partially funded the Interspecies Internet Workshop. Coller is passionate about animal welfare and has devoted much of his philanthropic efforts toward the goal of ending factory farming.

At the workshop, his foundation announced the creation of the Coller Doolittle Prize, a US $100,000 award to help fund further research related to the Interspecies Internet. (A working group also formed to synthesize plans for the emerging field, to facilitate future event planning, and to guide testing of shared technology platforms.)

Why would a multi-millionaire with no background in digital communication systems or cognitive psychology research want to back the initiative? For Coller, the motivation boils to interspecies empathy.

“If I can have a chat with a cow,” he says, “maybe I can have more compassion for it.”

An abridged version of this post appears in the September 2019 print issue as “Elephants, Dolphins, and Chimps Need the Internet, Too.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#435773 Video Friday: Roller-Skating Quadruped ...

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!):

IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
RoboBusiness 2019 – October 1-3, 2019 – Santa Clara, CA, USA
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

We got a sneak peek of a new version of ANYmal equipped with actuated wheels for feet at the DARPA SubT Challenge, where it did surprisingly well at quickly and (mostly) robustly navigating some very tricky terrain. And when you're not expecting it to travel through a muddy, rocky, and dark tunnel, it looks even more capable:

[ Paper ]

Thanks Marko!

In Langley’s makerspace lab, researchers are developing a series of soft robot actuators to investigate the viability of soft robotics in space exploration and assembly. By design, the actuator has chambers, or air bladders, that expand and compress based on the amount of air in them.

[ NASA ]

I’m not normally a fan of the AdultSize RoboCup soccer competition, but NimbRo had a very impressive season.

I don’t know how it managed to not fall over at 45 seconds, but damn.

[ NimbRo ]

This is more AI than robotics, but that’s okay, because it’s totally cool.

I’m wondering whether the hiders ever tried another possibly effective strategy: trapping the seekers in a locked shelter right at the start.

[ OpenAI ]

We haven’t heard much from Piaggio Fast Forward in a while, but evidently they’ve still got a Gita robot going on, designed to be your personal autonomous caddy for absolutely anything that can fit into something the size of a portable cooler.

Available this fall, I guess?

[ Gita ]

This passively triggered robotic hand is startlingly fast, and seems almost predatory when it grabs stuff, especially once they fit it onto a drone.

[ New Dexterity ]

Thanks Fan!

Autonomous vehicles seem like a recent thing, but CMU has been working on them since the mid 1980s.

CMU was also working on drones back before drones were even really a thing:

[ CMU NavLab ] and [ CMU ]

Welcome to the most complicated and expensive robotic ice cream deployment system ever created.

[ Niska ]

Some impressive dexterity from a robot hand equipped with magnetic gears.

[ Ishikawa Senoo Lab ]

The Buddy Arduino social robot kit is now live on Kickstarter, and you can pledge for one of these little dudes for 49 bucks.

[ Kickstarter ]

Thanks Jenny!

Mobile manipulation robots have high potential to support rescue forces in disaster-response missions. Despite the difficulties imposed by real-world scenarios, robots are promising to perform mission tasks from a safe distance. In the CENTAURO project, we developed a disaster-response system which consists of the highly flexible Centauro robot and suitable control interfaces including an immersive telepresence suit and support-operator controls on different levels of autonomy.

[ CENTAURO ]

Thanks Sven!

Determined robots are the cutest robots.

[ Paper ]

The goal of the Dronument project is to create an aerial platform enabling interior and exterior documentation of heritage sites.

It’s got a base station that helps with localization, but still, flying that close to a chandelier in a UNESCO world heritage site makes me nervous.

[ Dronument ]

Thanks Fan!

Avast ye! No hornswaggling, lick-spittlering, or run-rigging over here – Only serious tech for devs. All hands hoay to check out Misty's capabilities and to build your own skills with plenty of heave ho! ARRRRRRRRGH…

International Talk Like a Pirate Day was yesterday, but I'm sure nobody will look at you funny if you keep at it today too.

[ Misty Robotics ]

This video presents an unobtrusive bimanual teleoperation setup with very low weight, consisting of two Vive visual motion trackers and two Myo surface electromyography bracelets. The video demonstrates complex, dexterous teleoperated bimanual daily-living tasks performed by the torque-controlled humanoid robot TORO.

[ DLR RMC ]

Lex Fridman interviews iRobot’s Colin Angle on the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

Colin Angle is the CEO and co-founder of iRobot, a robotics company that for 29 years has been creating robots that operate successfully in the real world, not as a demo or on a scale of dozens, but on a scale of thousands and millions. As of this year, iRobot has sold more than 25 million robots to consumers, including the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, the Braava floor mopping robot, and soon the Terra lawn mowing robot. 25 million robots successfully operating autonomously in people's homes to me is an incredible accomplishment of science, engineering, logistics, and all kinds of entrepreneurial innovation.

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This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from CMU’s own Sarah Bergbreiter, on Microsystems-Inspired Robotics.

The ability to manufacture micro-scale sensors and actuators has inspired the robotics community for over 30 years. There have been huge success stories; MEMS inertial sensors have enabled an entire market of low-cost, small UAVs. However, the promise of ant-scale robots has largely failed. Ants can move high speeds on surfaces from picnic tables to front lawns, but the few legged microrobots that have walked have done so at slow speeds (< 1 body length/sec) on smooth silicon wafers. In addition, the vision of large numbers of microfabricated sensors interacting directly with the environment has suffered in part due to the brittle materials used in micro-fabrication. This talk will present our progress in the design of sensors, mechanisms, and actuators that utilize new microfabrication processes to incorporate materials with widely varying moduli and functionality to achieve more robustness, dynamic range, and complexity in smaller packages.

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Posted in Human Robots