Tag Archives: runs

#439095 DARPA Prepares for the Subterranean ...

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event is scheduled to take place at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky, from September 21 to 23. We’ve followed SubT teams as they’ve explored their way through abandoned mines, unfinished nuclear reactors, and a variety of caves, and now everything comes together in one final course where the winner of the Systems Track will take home the $2 million first prize.

It’s a fitting reward for teams that have been solving some of the hardest problems in robotics, but winning isn’t going to be easy, and we’ll talk with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung about what we have to look forward to.

Since we haven’t talked about SubT in a little while (what with the unfortunate covid-related cancellation of the Systems Track Cave Circuit), here’s a quick refresher of where we are: the teams have made it through the Tunnel Circuit, the Urban Circuit, and a virtual version of the Cave Circuit, and some of them have been testing in caves of their own. The Final Event will include all of these environments, and the teams of robots will have 60 minutes to autonomously map the course, locating artifacts to score points. Since I’m not sure where on Earth there’s an underground location that combines tunnels and caves with urban structures, DARPA is going to have to get creative, and the location in which they’ve chosen to do that is Louisville, Kentucky.

The Louisville Mega Cavern is a former limestone mine, most of which is under the Louisville Zoo. It’s not all that deep, mostly less than 30 meters under the surface, but it’s enormous: with 370,000 square meters of rooms and passages, the cavern currently hosts (among other things) a business park, a zipline course, and mountain bike trails, because why not. While DARPA is keeping pretty quiet on the details, I’m guessing that they’ll be taking over a chunk of the cavern and filling it with features representing as many of the environmental challenges as they can.

To learn more about how the SubT Final Event is going to go, we spoke with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung. But first, we talked about Tim’s perspective on the success of the Urban Circuit, and how teams have been managing without an in-person Cave Circuit.

IEEE Spectrum: How did the SubT Urban Circuit go?

Tim Chung: On a couple fronts, Urban Circuit was really exciting. We were in this unfinished nuclear power plant—I’d be surprised if any of the competitors had prior experience in such a facility, or anything like it. I think that was illuminating both from an experiential point of view for the competitors, but also from a technology point of view, too.

One thing that I thought was really interesting was that we, DARPA, didn't need to make the venue more challenging. The real world is really that hard. There are places that were just really heinous for these robots to have to navigate through in order to look in every nook and cranny for artifacts. There were corners and doorways and small corridors and all these kind of things that really forced the teams to have to work hard, and the feedback was, why did DARPA have to make it so hard? But we didn’t, and in fact there were places that for the safety of the robots and personnel, we had to ensure the robots couldn’t go.

It sounds like some teams thought this course was on the more difficult side—do you think you tuned it to just the right amount of DARPA-hard?

Our calibration worked quite well. We were able to tease out and help refine and better understand what technologies are both useful and critical and also those technologies that might not necessarily get you the leap ahead capability. So as an example, the Urban Circuit really emphasized verticality, where you have to be able to sense, understand, and maneuver in three dimensions. Being able to capitalize on their robot technologies to address that verticality really stratified the teams, and showed how critical those capabilities are.

We saw teams that brought a lot of those capabilities do very well, and teams that brought baseline capabilities do what they could on the single floor that they were able to operate on. And so I think we got the Goldilocks solution for Urban Circuit that combined both difficulty and ambition.

Photos: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

Two SubT Teams embedded networking equipment in balls that they could throw onto the course.

One of the things that I found interesting was that two teams independently came up with throwable network nodes. What was DARPA’s reaction to this? Is any solution a good solution, or was it more like the teams were trying to game the system?

You mean, do we want teams to game the rules in any way so as to get a competitive advantage? I don't think that's what the teams were doing. I think they were operating not only within the bounds of the rules, which permitted such a thing as throwable sensors where you could stand at the line and see how far you could chuck these things—not only was that acceptable by the rules, but anticipated. Behind the scenes, we tried to do exactly what these teams are doing and think through different approaches, so we explicitly didn't forbid such things in our rules because we thought it's important to have as wide an aperture as possible.

With these comms nodes specifically, I think they’re pretty clever. They were in some cases hacked together with a variety of different sports paraphernalia to see what would provide the best cushioning. You know, a lot of that happens in the field, and what it captured was that sometimes you just need to be up at two in the morning and thinking about things in a slightly different way, and that's when some nuggets of innovation can arise, and we see this all the time with operators in the field as well. They might only have duct tape or Styrofoam or whatever the case may be and that's when they come up with different ways to solve these problems. I think from DARPA’s perspective, and certainly from my perspective, wherever innovation can strike, we want to try to encourage and inspire those opportunities. I thought it was great, and it’s all part of the challenge.

Is there anything you can tell us about what your original plan had been for the Cave Circuit?

I can say that we’ve had the opportunity to go through a number of these caves scattered all throughout the country, and engage with caving communities—cavers clubs, speleologists that conduct research, and then of course the cave rescue community. The single biggest takeaway
is that every cave, and there are tens of thousands of them in the US alone, every cave has its own personality, and a lot of that personality is quite hidden from humans, because we can’t explore or access all of the cave. This led us to a number of different caves that were intriguing from a DARPA perspective but also inspirational for our Cave Circuit Virtual Competition.

How do you feel like the tuning was for the Virtual Cave Circuit?

The Virtual Competition, as you well know, was exciting in the sense that we could basically combine eight worlds into one competition, whereas the systems track competition really didn’t give us that opportunity. Even if we were able have held the Cave Circuit Systems Competition in person, it would have been at one site, and it would have been challenging to represent the level of diversity that we could with the Virtual Competition. So I think from that perspective, it’s clearly an advantage in terms of calibration—diversity gets you the ability to aggregate results to capture those that excel across all worlds as well as those that do well in one world or some worlds and not the others. I think the calibration was great in the sense that we were able to see the gamut of performance. Those that did well, did quite well, and those that have room to grow showed where those opportunities are for them as well.

We had to find ways to capture that diversity and that representativeness, and I think one of the fun ways we did that was with the different cave world tiles that we were able to combine in a variety of different ways. We also made use of a real world data set that we were able to take from a laser scan. Across the board, we had a really great chance to illustrate why virtual testing and simulation still plays such a dominant role in robotics technology development, and why I think it will continue to play an increasing role for developing these types of autonomy solutions.

Photo: Team CSIRO Data 61

How can systems track teams learn from their testing in whatever cave is local to them and effectively apply that to whatever cave environment is part of the final considering what the diversity of caves is?

I think that hits the nail on the head for what we as technologists are trying to discover—what are the transferable generalizable insights and how does that inform our technology development? As roboticists we want to optimize our systems to perform well at the tasks that they were designed to do, and oftentimes that means specialization because we get increased performance at the expense of being a generalist robot. I think in the case of SubT, we want to have our cake and eat it too—we want robots that perform well and reliably, but we want them to do so not just in one environment, which is how we tend to think about robot performance, but we want them to operate well in many environments, many of which have yet to be faced.

And I think that's kind of the nuance here, that we want robot systems to be generalists for the sake of being able to handle the unknown, namely the real world, but still achieve a high level of performance and perhaps they do that to their combined use of different technologies or advances in autonomy or perception approaches or novel mechanisms or mobility, but somehow they're still able, at least in aggregate, to achieve high performance.

We know these teams eagerly await any type of clue that DARPA can provide like about the SubT environments. From the environment previews for Tunnel, Urban, and even Cave, the teams were pivoting around and thinking a little bit differently. The takeaway, however, was that they didn't go to a clean sheet design—their systems were flexible enough that they could incorporate some of those specialist trends while still maintaining the notion of a generalist framework.

Looking ahead to the SubT Final, what can you tell us about the Louisville Mega Cavern?

As always, I’ll keep you in suspense until we get you there, but I can say that from the beginning of the SubT Challenge we had always envisioned teams of robots that are able to address not only the uncertainty of what's right in front of them, but also the uncertainty of what comes next. So I think the teams will be advantaged by thinking through subdomain awareness, or domain awareness if you want to generalize it, whether that means tuning multi-purpose robots, or deploying different robots, or employing your team of robots differently. Knowing which subdomain you are in is likely to be helpful, because then you can take advantage of those unique lessons learned through all those previous experiences then capitalize on that.

As far as specifics, I think the Mega Cavern offers many of the features important to what it means to be underground, while giving DARPA a pretty blank canvas to realize our vision of the SubT Challenge.

The SubT Final will be different from the earlier circuits in that there’s just one 60-minute run, rather than two. This is going to make things a lot more stressful for teams who have experienced bad robot days—why do it this way?

The preliminary round has two 30-minute runs, and those two runs are very similar to how we have done it during the circuits, of a single run per configuration per course. Teams will have the opportunity to show that their systems can face the obstacles in the final course, and it's the sum of those scores much like we did during the circuits, to help mitigate some of the concerns that you mentioned of having one robot somehow ruin their chances at a prize.

The prize round does give DARPA as well as the community a chance to focus on the top six teams from the preliminary round, and allows us to understand how they came to be at the top of the pack while emphasizing their technological contributions. The prize round will be one and done, but all of these teams we anticipate will be putting their best robot forward and will show the world why they deserve to win the SubT Challenge.

We’ve always thought that when called upon these robots need to operate in really challenging environments, and in the context of real world operations, there is no second chance. I don't think it's actually that much of a departure from our interests and insistence on bringing reliable technologies to the field, and those teams that might have something break here and there, that's all part of the challenge, of being resilient. Many teams struggled with robots that were debilitated on the course, and they still found ways to succeed and overcome that in the field, so maybe the rules emphasize that desire for showing up and working on game day which is consistent, I think, with how we've always envisioned it. This isn’t to say that these systems have to work perfectly, they just have to work in a way such that the team is resilient enough to tackle anything that they face.

It’s not too late for teams to enter for both the Virtual Track and the Systems Track to compete in the SubT Final, right?

Yes, that's absolutely right. Qualifications are still open, we are eager to welcome new teams to join in along with our existing competitors. I think any dark horse competitors coming into the Finals may be able to bring something that we haven't seen before, and that would be really exciting. I think it'll really make for an incredibly vibrant and illuminating final event.

The final event qualification deadline for the Systems Competition is April 21, and the qualification deadline for the Virtual Competition is June 29. More details here. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439010 Video Friday: Nanotube-Powered Insect ...

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!):

HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.

Chen’s actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. “You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Chen. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.” And it weighs in at just 0.6 grams, approximately the mass of a large bumble bee. The drone looks a bit like a tiny cassette tape with wings, though Chen is working on a new prototype shaped like a dragonfly.

[ MIT ]

National Robotics Week is April 3-11, 2021!

[ NRW ]

This is in a motion capture environment, but still, super impressive!

[ Paper ]

Thanks Fan!

Why wait for Boston Dynamics to add an arm to your Spot if you can just do it yourself?

[ ETHZ ]

This video shows the deep-sea free swimming of soft robot in the South China Sea. The soft robot was grasped by a robotic arm on ‘HAIMA’ ROV and reached the bottom of the South China Sea (depth of 3,224 m). After the releasing, the soft robot was actuated with an on-board AC voltage of 8 kV at 1 Hz and demonstrated free swimming locomotion with its flapping fins.

Um, did they bring it back?

[ Nature ]

Quadruped Yuki Mini is 12 DOF robot equipped with a Raspberry Pi that runs ROS. Also, BUNNIES!

[ Lingkang Zhang ]

Thanks Lingkang!

Deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. The vswarm package enables decentralized vision-based control of drone swarms without relying on inter-agent communication or visual fiducial markers. The results show that the drones can safely navigate in an outdoor environment despite substantial background clutter and difficult lighting conditions.

[ Vswarm ]

A conventional adopted method for operating a waiter robot is based on the static position control, where pre-defined goal positions are marked on a map. However, this solution is not optimal in a dynamic setting, such as in a coffee shop or an outdoor catering event, because the customers often change their positions. We explore an alternative human-robot interface design where a human operator communicates the identity of the customer to the robot instead. Inspired by how [a] human communicates, we propose a framework for communicating a visual goal to the robot, through interactive two-way communications.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

In this video, LOLA reacts to undetected ground height changes, including a drop and leg-in-hole experiment. Further tests show the robustness to vertical disturbances using a seesaw. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain.

[ TUM ]

RaiSim is a cross-platform multi-body physics engine for robotics and AI. It fully supports Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.

[ RaiSim ]

Thanks Fan!

The next generation of LoCoBot is here. The LoCoBot is an ROS research rover for mapping, navigation and manipulation (optional) that enables researchers, educators and students alike to focus on high level code development instead of hardware and building out lower level code. Development on the LoCoBot is simplified with open source software, full ROS-mapping and navigation packages and modular opensource Python API that allows users to move the platform as well as (optional) manipulator in as few as 10 lines of code.

[ Trossen ]

MIT Media Lab Research Specialist Dr. Kate Darling looks at how robots are portrayed in popular film and TV shows.

Kate's book, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots can be pre-ordered now and comes out next month.

[ Kate Darling ]

The current autonomous mobility systems for planetary exploration are wheeled rovers, limited to flat, gently-sloping terrains and agglomerate regolith. These vehicles cannot tolerate instability and operate within a low-risk envelope (i.e., low-incline driving to avoid toppling). Here, we present ‘Mars Dogs’ (MD), four-legged robotic dogs, the next evolution of extreme planetary exploration.

[ Team CoSTAR ]

In 2020, first-year PhD students at the MIT Media Lab were tasked with a special project—to reimagine the Lab and write sci-fi stories about the MIT Media Lab in the year 2050. “But, we are researchers. We don't only write fiction, we also do science! So, we did what scientists do! We used a secret time machine under the MIT dome to go to the year 2050 and see what’s going on there! Luckily, the Media Lab still exists and we met someone…really cool!” Enjoy this interview of Cyber Joe, AI Mentor for MIT Media Lab Students of 2050.

[ MIT ]

In this talk, we will give an overview of the diverse research we do at CSIRO’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group and delve into some specific technologies we have developed including SLAM and Legged robotics. We will also give insights into CSIRO’s participation in the current DARPA Subterranean Challenge where we are deploying a fleet of heterogeneous robots into GPS-denied unknown underground environments.

[ GRASP Seminar ]

Marco Hutter (ETH) and Hae-Won Park (KAIST) talk about “Robotics Inspired by Nature.”

[ Swiss-Korean Science Club ]

Thanks Fan!

In this keynote, Guy Hoffman Assistant Professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, discusses “The Social Uncanny of Robotic Companions.”

[ Designerly HRI ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438755 Soft Legged Robot Uses Pneumatic ...

Soft robots are inherently safe, highly resilient, and potentially very cheap, making them promising for a wide array of applications. But development on them has been a bit slow relative to other areas of robotics, at least partially because soft robots can’t directly benefit from the massive increase in computing power and sensor and actuator availability that we’ve seen over the last few decades. Instead, roboticists have had to get creative to find ways of achieving the functionality of conventional robotics components using soft materials and compatible power sources.

In the current issue of Science Robotics, researchers from UC San Diego demonstrate a soft walking robot with four legs that moves with a turtle-like gait controlled by a pneumatic circuit system made from tubes and valves. This air-powered nervous system can actuate multiple degrees of freedom in sequence from a single source of pressurized air, offering a huge reduction in complexity and bringing a very basic form of decision making onto the robot itself.

Generally, when people talk about soft robots, the robots are only mostly soft. There are some components that are very difficult to make soft, including pressure sources and the necessary electronics to direct that pressure between different soft actuators in a way that can be used for propulsion. What’s really cool about this robot is that researchers have managed to take a pressure source (either a single tether or an onboard CO2 cartridge) and direct it to four different legs, each with three different air chambers, using an oscillating three valve circuit made entirely of soft materials.

Photo: UCSD

The pneumatic circuit that powers and controls the soft quadruped.

The inspiration for this can be found in biology—natural organisms, including quadrupeds, use nervous system components called central pattern generators (CPGs) to prompt repetitive motions with limbs that are used for walking, flying, and swimming. This is obviously more complicated in some organisms than in others, and is typically mediated by sensory feedback, but the underlying structure of a CPG is basically just a repeating circuit that drives muscles in sequence to produce a stable, continuous gait. In this case, we’ve got pneumatic muscles being driven in opposing pairs, resulting in a diagonal couplet gait, where diagonally opposed limbs rotate forwards and backwards at the same time.

Diagram: Science Robotics

(J) Pneumatic logic circuit for rhythmic leg motion. A constant positive pressure source (P+) applied to three inverter components causes a high-pressure state to propagate around the circuit, with a delay at each inverter. While the input to one inverter is high, the attached actuator (i.e., A1, A2, or A3) is inflated. This sequence of high-pressure states causes each pair of legs of the robot to rotate in a direction determined by the pneumatic connections. (K) By reversing the sequence of activation of the pneumatic oscillator circuit, the attached actuators inflate in a new sequence (A1, A3, and A2), causing (L) the legs of the robot to rotate in reverse. (M) Schematic bottom view of the robot with the directions of leg motions indicated for forward walking.

Diagram: Science Robotics

Each of the valves acts as an inverter by switching the normally closed half (top) to open and the normally open half (bottom) to closed.

The circuit itself is made up of three bistable pneumatic valves connected by tubing that acts as a delay by providing resistance to the gas moving through it that can be adjusted by altering the tube’s length and inner diameter. Within the circuit, the movement of the pressurized gas acts as both a source of energy and as a signal, since wherever the pressure is in the circuit is where the legs are moving. The simplest circuit uses only three valves, and can keep the robot walking in one single direction, but more valves can add more complex leg control options. For example, the researchers were able to use seven valves to tune the phase offset of the gait, and even just one additional valve (albeit of a slightly more complex design) could enable reversal of the system, causing the robot to walk backwards in response to input from a soft sensor. And with another complex valve, a manual (tethered) controller could be used for omnidirectional movement.

This work has some similarities to the rover that JPL is developing to explore Venus—that rover isn’t a soft robot, of course, but it operates under similar constraints in that it can’t rely on conventional electronic systems for autonomous navigation or control. It turns out that there are plenty of clever ways to use mechanical (or in this case, pneumatic) intelligence to make robots with relatively complex autonomous behaviors, meaning that in the future, soft (or soft-ish) robots could find valuable roles in situations where using a non-compliant system is not a good option.

For more on why we should be so excited about soft robots and just how soft a soft robot needs to be, we spoke with Michael Tolley, who runs the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at UCSD, and Dylan Drotman, the paper’s first author.

IEEE Spectrum: What can soft robots do for us that more rigid robotic designs can’t?

Michael Tolley: At the very highest level, one of the fundamental assumptions of robotics is that you have rigid bodies connected at joints, and all your motion happens at these joints. That's a really nice approach because it makes the math easy, frankly, and it simplifies control. But when you look around us in nature, even though animals do have bones and joints, the way we interact with the world is much more complicated than that simple story. I’m interested in where we can take advantage of material properties in robotics. If you look at robots that have to operate in very unknown environments, I think you can build in some of the intelligence for how to deal with those environments into the body of the robot itself. And that’s the category this work really falls under—it's about navigating the world.

Dylan Drotman: Walking through confined spaces is a good example. With the rigid legged robot, you would have to completely change the way that the legs move to walk through a confined space, while if you have flexible legs, like the robot in our paper, you can use relatively simple control strategies to squeeze through an area you wouldn’t be able to get through with a rigid system.

How smart can a soft robot get?

Drotman: Right now we have a sensor on the front that's connected through a fluidic transmission to a bistable valve that causes the robot to reverse. We could add other sensors around the robot to allow it to change direction whenever it runs into an obstacle to effectively make an electronics-free version of a Roomba.

Tolley: Stepping back a little bit from that, one could make an argument that we’re using basic memory elements to generate very basic signals. There’s nothing in principle that would stop someone from making a pneumatic computer—it’s just very complicated to make something that complex. I think you could build on this and do more intelligent decision making, but using this specific design and the components we’re using, it’s likely to be things that are more direct responses to the environment.

How well would robots like these scale down?

Drotman: At the moment we’re manufacturing these components by hand, so the idea would be to make something more like a printed circuit board instead, and looking at how the channel sizes and the valve design would affect the actuation properties. We’ll also be coming up with new circuits, and different designs for the circuits themselves.

Tolley: Down to centimeter or millimeter scale, I don’t think you’d have fundamental fluid flow problems. I think you’re going to be limited more by system design constraints. You’ll have to be able to locomote while carrying around your pressure source, and possibly some other components that are also still rigid. When you start to talk about really small scales, though, it's not as clear to me that you really need an intrinsically soft robot. If you think about insects, their structural geometry can make them behave like they’re soft, but they’re not intrinsically soft.

Should we be thinking about soft robots and compliant robots in the same way, or are they fundamentally different?

Tolley: There’s certainly a connection between the two. You could have a compliant robot that behaves in a very similar way to an intrinsically soft robot, or a robot made of intrinsically soft materials. At that point, it comes down to design and manufacturing and practical limitations on what you can make. I think when you get down to small scales, the two sort of get connected.

There was some interesting work several years ago on using explosions to power soft robots. Is that still a thing?

Tolley: One of the opportunities with soft robots is that with material compliance, you have the potential to store energy. I think there’s exciting potential there for rapid motion with a soft body. Combustion is one way of doing that with power coming from a chemical source all at once, but you could also use a relatively weak muscle that over time stores up energy in a soft body and then releases it.

Is it realistic to expect complete softness from soft robots, or will they likely always have rigid components because they have to store or generate and move pressurized gas somehow?

Tolley: If you look in nature, you do have soft pumps like the heart, but although it’s soft, it’s still relatively stiff. Like, if you grab a heart, it’s not totally squishy. I haven’t done it, but I’d imagine. If you have a container that you’re pressurizing, it has to be stiff enough to not just blow up like a balloon. Certainly pneumatics or hydraulics are not the only way to go for soft actuators; there has been some really nice work on smart muscles and smart materials like hydraulic electrostatic (HASEL) actuators. They seem promising, but all of these actuators have challenges. We’ve chosen to stick with pressurized pneumatics in the near term; longer term, I think you’ll start to see more of these smart material actuators become more practical.

Personally, I don’t have any problem with soft robots having some rigid components. Most animals on land have some rigid components, but they can still take advantage of being soft, so it’s probably going to be a combination. But I do also like the vision of making an entirely soft, squishy thing. 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

#437783 Ex-Googler’s Startup Comes Out of ...

Over the last 10 years, the PR2 has helped roboticists make an enormous amount of progress in mobile manipulation over a relatively short time. I mean, it’s been a decade already, but still—robots are hard, and giving a bunch of smart people access to a capable platform where they didn’t have to worry about hardware and could instead focus on doing interesting and useful things helped to establish a precedent for robotics research going forward.

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford an enormous US $400,000 robot, and even if they could, PR2s are getting very close to the end of their lives. There are other mobile manipulators out there taking the place of the PR2, but so far, size and cost have largely restricted them to research labs. Lots of good research is being done, but it’s getting to the point where folks want to take the next step: making mobile manipulators real-world useful.

Today, a company called Hello Robot is announcing a new mobile manipulator called the Stretch RE1. With offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Atlanta, Ga., Hello Robot is led by Aaron Edsinger and Charlie Kemp, and by combining decades of experience in industry and academia they’ve managed to come up with a robot that’s small, lightweight, capable, and affordable, all at the same time. For now, it’s a research platform, but eventually, its creators hope that it will be able to come into our homes and take care of us when we need it to.

A fresh look at mobile manipulators
To understand the concept behind Stretch, it’s worth taking a brief look back at what Edsinger and Kemp have been up to for the past 10 years. Edsinger co-founded Meka Robotics in 2007, which built expensive, high performance humanoid arms, torsos, and heads for the research market. Meka was notable for being the first robotics company (as far as we know) to sell robot arms that used series elastic actuators, and the company worked extensively with Georgia Tech researchers. In 2011, Edsinger was one of the co-founders of Redwood Robotics (along with folks from SRI and Willow Garage), which was going to develop some kind of secret and amazing new robot arm before Google swallowed it in late 2013. At the same time, Google also acquired Meka and a bunch of other robotics companies, and Edsinger ended up at Google as one of the directors of its robotics program, until he left to co-found Hello Robot in 2017.

Meanwhile, since 2007 Kemp has been a robotics professor at Georgia Tech, where he runs the Healthcare Robotics Lab. Kemp’s lab was one of the 11 PR2 beta sites, giving him early experience with a ginormous mobile manipulator. Much of the research that Kemp has spent the last decade on involves robots providing assistance to untrained users, often through direct physical contact, and frequently either in their own homes or in a home environment. We should mention that the Georgia Tech PR2 is still going, most recently doing some clever material classification work in a paper for IROS later this year.

Photo: Hello Robot

Hello Robot co-founder and CEO Aaron Edsinger says that, although Stretch is currently a research platform, he hopes to see the robot deployed in home environments, adding that the “impact we want to have is through robots that are helpful to people in society.”

So with all that in mind, where’d Hello Robot come from? As it turns out, both Edsinger and Kemp were in Rodney Brooks’ group at MIT, so it’s perhaps not surprising that they share some of the same philosophies about what robots should be and what they should be used for. After collaborating on a variety of projects over the years, in 2017 Edsinger was thinking about his next step after Google when Kemp stopped by to show off some video of a new robot prototype that he’d been working on—the prototype for Stretch. “As soon as I saw it, I knew that was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be working on,” Edsinger told us. “I’d become frustrated with the complexity of the robots being built to do manipulation in home environments and around people, and it solved a lot of problems in an elegant way.”

For Kemp, Stretch is an attempt to get everything he’s been teaching his robots out of his lab at Georgia Tech and into the world where it can actually be helpful to people. “Right from the beginning, we were trying to take our robots out to real homes and interact with real people,” says Kemp. Georgia Tech’s PR2, for example, worked extensively with Henry and Jane Evans, helping Henry (a quadriplegic) regain some of the bodily autonomy he had lost. With the assistance of the PR2, Henry was able to keep himself comfortable for hours without needing a human caregiver to be constantly with him. “I felt like I was making a commitment in some ways to some of the people I was working with,” Kemp told us. “But 10 years later, I was like, where are these things? I found that incredibly frustrating. Stretch is an effort to try to push things forward.”

A robot you can put in the backseat of a car
One way to put Stretch in context is to think of it almost as a reaction to the kitchen sink philosophy of the PR2. Where the PR2 was designed to be all the robot anyone could ever need (plus plenty of robot that nobody really needed) embodied in a piece of hardware that weighs 225 kilograms and cost nearly half a million dollars, Stretch is completely focused on being just the robot that is actually necessary in a form factor that’s both much smaller and affordable. The entire robot weighs a mere 23 kg in a footprint that’s just a 34 cm square. As you can see from the video, it’s small enough (and safe enough) that it can be moved by a child. The cost? At $17,950 apiece—or a bit less if you buy a bunch at once—Stretch costs a fraction of what other mobile manipulators sell for.

It might not seem like size or weight should be that big of an issue, but it very much is, explains Maya Cakmak, a robotics professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Cakmak worked with PR2 and Henry Evans when she was at Willow Garage, and currently has access to both a PR2 and a Fetch research robot. “When I think about my long term research vision, I want to deploy service robots in real homes,” Cakmak told us. Unfortunately, it’s the robots themselves that have been preventing her from doing this—both the Fetch and the PR2 are large enough that moving them anywhere requires a truck and a lift, which also limits the home that they can be used in. “For me, I felt immediately that Stretch is very different, and it makes a lot of sense,” she says. “It’s safe and lightweight, you can probably put it in the backseat of a car.” For Cakmak, Stretch’s size is the difference between being able to easily take a robot to the places she wants to do research in, and not. And cost is a factor as well, since a cheaper robot means more access for her students. “I got my refurbished PR2 for $180,000,” Cakmak says. “For that, with Stretch I could have 10!”

“I felt immediately that Stretch is very different. It’s safe and lightweight, you can probably put it in the backseat of a car. I got my refurbished PR2 for $180,000. For that, with Stretch I could have 10!”
—Maya Cakmak, University of Washington

Of course, a portable robot doesn’t do you any good if the robot itself isn’t sophisticated enough to do what you need it to do. Stretch is certainly a compromise in functionality in the interest of small size and low cost, but it’s a compromise that’s been carefully thought out, based on the experience that Edsinger has building robots and the experience that Kemp has operating robots in homes. For example, most mobile manipulators are essentially multi-degrees-of-freedom arms on mobile bases. Stretch instead leverages its wheeled base to move its arm in the horizontal plane, which (most of the time) works just as well as an extra DoF or two on the arm while saving substantially on weight and cost. Similarly, Stretch relies almost entirely on one sensor, an Intel RealSense D435i on a pan-tilt head that gives it a huge range of motion. The RealSense serves as a navigation camera, manipulation camera, a 3D mapping system, and more. It’s not going to be quite as good for a task that might involve fine manipulation, but most of the time it’s totally workable and you’re saving on cost and complexity.

Stretch has been relentlessly optimized to be the absolutely minimum robot to do mobile manipulation in a home or workplace environment. In practice, this meant figuring out exactly what it was absolutely necessary for Stretch to be able to do. With an emphasis on manipulation, that meant defining the workspace of the robot, or what areas it’s able to usefully reach. “That was one thing we really had to push hard on,” says Edsinger. “Reachability.” He explains that reachability and a small mobile base tend not to go together, because robot arms (which tend to weigh a lot) can cause a small base to tip, especially if they’re moving while holding a payload. At the same time, Stretch needed to be able to access both countertops and the floor, while being able to reach out far enough to hand people things without having to be right next to them. To come up with something that could meet all those requirements, Edsinger and Kemp set out to reinvent the robot arm.

Stretch’s key innovation: a stretchable arm
The design they came up with is rather ingenious in its simplicity and how well it works. Edsinger explains that the arm consists of five telescoping links: one fixed and four moving. They are constructed of custom carbon fiber, and are driven by a single motor, which is attached to the robot’s vertical pole. The strong, lightweight structure allows the arm to extend over half a meter and hold up to 1.5 kg. Although the company has a patent pending for the design, Edsinger declined to say whether the links are driven by a belt, cables, or gears. “We don’t want to disclose too much of the secret sauce [with regard to] the drive mechanism.” He added that the arm was “one of the most significant engineering challenges on the robot in terms of getting the desired reach, compactness, precision, smoothness, force sensitivity, and low cost to all happily coexist.”

Photo: Hello Robot

Stretch’s arm consists of five telescoping links constructed of custom carbon fiber, and are driven by a single motor, which is attached to the robot’s vertical pole, minimizing weight and inertia. The arm has a reach of over half a meter and can hold up to 1.5 kg.

Another interesting features of Stretch is its interface with the world—its gripper. There are countless different gripper designs out there, each and every one of which is the best at gripping some particular subset of things. But making a generalized gripper for all of the stuff that you’d find in a home is exceptionally difficult. Ideally, you’d want some sort of massive experimental test program where thousands and thousands of people test out different gripper designs in their homes for long periods of time and then tell you which ones work best. Obviously, that’s impractical for a robotics startup, but Kemp realized that someone else was already running the study for him: Amazon.

“I had this idea that there are these assistive grabbers that people with disabilities use to grasp objects in the real world,” he told us. Kemp went on Amazon’s website and looked at the top 10 grabbers and the reviews from thousands of users. He then bought a bunch of different ones and started testing them. “This one [Stretch’s gripper], I almost didn’t order it, it was such a weird looking thing,” he says. “But it had great reviews on Amazon, and oh my gosh, it just blew away the other grabbers. And I was like, that’s it. It just works.”

Stretch’s teleoperated and autonomous capabilities
As with any robot intended to be useful outside of a structured environment, hardware is only part of the story, and arguably not even the most important part. In order for Stretch to be able to operate out from under the supervision of a skilled roboticist, it has to be either easy to control, or autonomous. Ideally, it’s both, and that’s what Hello Robot is working towards, although things didn’t start out that way, Kemp explains. “From a minimalist standpoint, we began with the notion that this would be a teleoperated robot. But in the end, you just don’t get the real power of the robot that way, because you’re tied to a person doing stuff. As much as we fought it, autonomy really is a big part of the future for this kind of system.”

Here’s a look at some of Stretch’s teleoperated capabilities. We’re told that Stretch is very easy to get going right out of the box, although this teleoperation video from Hello Robot looks like it’s got a skilled and experienced user in the loop:

For such a low-cost platform, the autonomy (even at this early stage) is particularly impressive:

Since it’s not entirely clear from the video exactly what’s autonomous, here’s a brief summary of a couple of the more complex behaviors that Kemp sent us:

Object grasping: Stretch uses its 3D camera to find the nearest flat surface using a virtual overhead view. It then segments significant blobs on top of the surface. It selects the largest blob in this virtual overhead view and fits an ellipse to it. It then generates a grasp plan that makes use of the center of the ellipse and the major and minor axes. Once it has a plan, Stretch orients its gripper, moves to the pre-grasp pose, moves to the grasp pose, closes its gripper based on the estimated object width, lifts up, and retracts.
Mapping, navigating, and reaching to a 3D point: These demonstrations all use FUNMAP (Fast Unified Navigation, Manipulation and Planning). It’s all novel custom Python code. Even a single head scan performed by panning the 3D camera around can result in a very nice 3D representation of Stretch’s surroundings that includes the nearby floor. This is surprisingly unusual for robots, which often have their cameras too low to see many interesting things in a human environment. While mapping, Stretch selects where to scan next in a non-trivial way that considers factors such as the quality of previous observations, expected new observations, and navigation distance. The plan that Stretch uses to reach the target 3D point has been optimized for navigation and manipulation. For example, it finds a final robot pose that provides a large manipulation workspace for Stretch, which must consider nearby obstacles, including obstacles on the ground.
Object handover: This is a simple demonstration of object handovers. Stretch performs Cartesian motions to move its gripper to a body-relative position using a good motion heuristic, which is to extend the arm as the last step. These simple motions work well due to the design of Stretch. It still surprises me how well it moves the object to comfortable places near my body, and how unobtrusive it is. The goal point is specified relative to a 3D frame attached to the person’s mouth estimated using deep learning models (shown in the RViz visualization video). Specifically, Stretch targets handoff at a 3D point that is 20 cm below the estimated position of the mouth and 25 cm away along the direction of reaching.

Much of these autonomous capabilities come directly from Kemp’s lab, and the demo code is available for anyone to use. (Hello Robot says all of Stretch’s software is open source.)

Photo: Hello Robot

Hello Robot co-founder and CEO Aaron Edsinger says Stretch is designed to work with people in homes and workplaces and can be teleoperated to do a variety of tasks, including picking up toys, removing laundry from a dryer, and playing games with kids.

As of right now, Stretch is very much a research platform. You’re going to see it in research labs doing research things, and hopefully in homes and commercial spaces as well, but still under the supervision of professional roboticists. As you may have guessed, though, Hello Robot’s vision is a bit broader than that. “The impact we want to have is through robots that are helpful to people in society,” Edsinger says. “We think primarily in the home context, but it could be in healthcare, or in other places. But we really want to have our robots be impactful, and useful. To us, useful is exciting.” Adds Kemp: “I have a personal bias, but we’d really like this technology to benefit older adults and caregivers. Rather than creating a specialized assistive device, we want to eventually create an inexpensive consumer device for everyone that does lots of things.”

Neither Edsinger nor Kemp would say much more on this for now, and they were very explicit about why—they’re being deliberately cautious about raising expectations, having seen what’s happened to some other robotics companies over the past few years. Without VC funding (Hello Robot is currently bootstrapping itself into existence), Stretch is being sold entirely on its own merits. So far, it seems to be working. Stretch robots are already in a half dozen research labs, and we expect that with today’s announcement, we’ll start seeing them much more frequently.

This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “A Robot That Keeps It Simple.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots