Tag Archives: safe

#437845 Video Friday: Harmonic Bionics ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

ICRA 2020 – May 31-August 31, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Designed to protect employees and passengers from both harmful pathogens and cleaning agents, Breezy One can quickly, safely and effectively decontaminate spaces over 100,000 square feet in 1.5 hours with a patented, environmentally safe disinfectant. Breezy One was co-developed with the City of Albuquerque’s Aviation Department, where it autonomously sanitizes the Sunport’s facilities every night in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.

[ Fetch Robotics ]

Harmonic Bionics is redefining upper extremity neurorehabilitation with intelligent robotic technology designed to maximize patient recovery. Harmony SHR, our flagship product, works with a patient’s scapulohumeral rhythm (SHR) to enable natural, comprehensive therapy for both arms. When combined with Harmony’s Weight Support mode, this unique shoulder design may allow for earlier initiation of post-stroke therapy as Harmony can support a partial dislocation or subluxation of the shoulder prior to initiating traditional therapy exercises.

Harmony's Preprogrammed Exercises promotes functional treatment through patient-specific movements that can enable an increased number of repetitions per session without placing a larger physical burden on therapists or their resources. As the only rehabilitation exoskeleton with Bilateral Sync Therapy (BST), Harmony enables intent-based therapy by registering healthy arm movements and synchronizing that motion onto the stroke-affected side to help reestablish neural pathways.

[ Harmonic Bionics ]

Thanks Mok!

Some impressive work here from IHMC and IIT getting Atlas to take steps upward in a way that’s much more human-like than robot-like, which ends up reducing maximum torque requirements by 20 percent.

[ Paper ]

GITAI’s G1 is the space dedicated general-purpose robot. G1 robot will enable automation of various tasks internally & externally on space stations and for lunar base development.

[ GITAI ]

Malloy Aeronautics, which now makes drones rather than hoverbikes, has been working with the Royal Navy in New Zealand to figure out how to get cargo drones to land on ships.

The challenge was to test autonomous landing of heavy lift UAVs on a moving ship, however, due to the Covid19 lockdown no ship trails were possible. The moving deck was simulated by driving a vehicle and trailer across an airfield while carrying out multiple landing and take-offs. The autonomous system partner was Planck Aerosystems and autolanding was triggered by a camera on the UAV reading a QR code on the trailer.

[ Malloy Aeronautics ]

Thanks Paul!

Tertill looks to be relentlessly effective.

[ Franklin Robotics ]

A Swedish company, TikiSafety has experienced a record amount of orders for their protective masks. At ABB, we are grateful for the opportunity to help Tiki Safety to speed up their manufacturing process from 6 minutes to 40 seconds.

[ Tiki Safety ]

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is not messing around with ARMstrong, their robot for nuclear and radiation emergency response.

[ KAERI ]

OMOY is a robot that communicates with its users via internal weight shifting.

[ Paper ]

Now this, this is some weird stuff.

[ Segway ]

CaTARo is a Care Training Assistant Robot from the AIS Lab at Ritsumeikan University.

[ AIS Lab ]

Originally launched in 2015 to assist workers in lightweight assembly tasks, ABB’s collaborative YuMi robot has gone on to blaze a trail in a raft of diverse applications and industries, opening new opportunities and helping to fire people’s imaginations about what can be achieved with robotic automation.

[ ABB ]

This music video features COMAN+, from the Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Lab at IIT, doing what you’d call dance moves if you dance like I do.

[ Alex Braga ] via [ IIT ]

The NVIDIA Isaac Software Development Kit (SDK) enables accelerated AI robot development workflows. Stacked with new tools and application support, Isaac SDK 2020.1 is an end-to-end solution supporting each step of robot fleet deployment, from design collaboration and training to the ongoing maintenance of AI applications.

[ NVIDIA ]

Robot Spy Komodo Dragon and Spy Pig film “a tender moment” between Komodo dragons but will they both survive the encounter?

[ BBC ] via [ Laughing Squid ]

This is part one of a mostly excellent five-part documentary about ROS produced by Red Hat. I say mostly only because they put ME in it for some reason, but fortunately, they talked with many of the core team that developed ROS back at Willow Garage back in the day, and it’s definitely worth watching.

[ Red Hat Open Source Stories ]

It’s been a while, but here’s an update on SRI’s Abacus Drive, from Alexander Kernbaum.

[ SRI ]

This Robots For Infectious Diseases interview features IEEE Fellow Antonio Bicchi, professor of robotics at the University of Pisa, talking about how Italy has been using technology to help manage COVID-19.

[ R4ID ]

Two more interviews this week of celebrity roboticists from MassRobotics: Helen Greiner and Marc Raibert. I’d introduce them, but you know who they are already!

[ MassRobotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437826 Video Friday: Skydio 2 Drone Is Back on ...

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!):

RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Skydio, which makes what we’re pretty sure is the most intelligent consumer drone (or maybe just drone period) in existence, has been dealing with COVID-19 just like the rest of us. Even so, they’ve managed to push out a major software update, and pre-orders for the Skydio 2 are now open again.

If you think you might want one, read our review, after which you’ll be sure you want one.

[ Skydio ]

Worried about people with COVID entering your workplace? Misty II has your front desk covered, in a way that’s quite a bit friendlier than many other options.

Misty II provides a dynamic and interactive screening experience that delivers a joyful experience in an otherwise depressing moment while also delivering state of the art thermal scanning and health screening. We have already found that employees, customers, and visitors appreciate the novelty of interacting with a clever and personable robot. Misty II engages dynamically, both visually and verbally. Companies appreciate using a solution with a blackbody-referenced thermal camera that provides high accuracy and a short screening process for efficiency. Putting a robot to work in this role shifts not only how people look at the screening process but also how robots can take on useful assignments in business, schools and homes.

[ Misty Robotics ]

Thanks Tim!

I’m definitely the one in the middle.

[ Agility Robotics ]

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is traveling to Mars attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover and must safely detach to begin the first attempt at powered flight on another planet. Tests done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Space show the sequence of events that will bring the helicopter down to the Martian surface.

[ JPL ]

Here’s a sequence of videos of Cassie Blue making it (or mostly making it) up a 22-degree slope.

My mood these days is Cassie at 1:09.

[ University of Michigan ]

Thanks Jesse!

This is somewhere on the line between home automation and robotics, but it’s a cool idea: A baby crib that “uses computer vision and machine learning to recognize subtle changes” in an infant’s movement, and proactively bounces them to keep them sleeping peacefully.

It costs $1000, but how much value do you put on 24 months of your own sleep?

[ Cradlewise ]

Thanks Ben!

As captive marine mammal shows have fallen from favor; and the catching, transporting and breeding of marine animals has become more restricted, the marine park industry as a viable business has become more challenging – yet the audience appetite for this type of entertainment and education has remained constant.

Real-time Animatronics provide a way to reinvent the marine entertainment industry with a sustainable, safe, and profitable future. Show venues include aquariums, marine parks, theme parks, fountain shows, cruise lines, resort hotels, shopping malls, museums, and more.

[ EdgeFX ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Robotic cabling is surprisingly complex and kinda cool to watch.

The video shows the sophisticated robot application “Automatic control cabinet cabling”, which Fraunhofer IPA implemented together with the company Rittal. The software pitasc, developed at Fraunhofer IPA, is used for force-controlled assembly processes. Two UR robot arms carry out the task together. The modular pitasc system enables the robot arms to move and rotate in parallel. They work hand in hand, with one robot holding the cable and the second bringing it to the starting position for the cabling. The robots can find, tighten, hold ready, lay, plug in, fix, move freely or immerse cables. They can also perform push-ins and pull tests.

[ Fraunhofer ]

This is from 2018, but the concept is still pretty neat.

We propose to perform a novel investigation into the ability of a propulsively hopping robot to reach targets of high science value on the icy, rugged terrains of Ocean Worlds. The employment of a multi-hop architecture allows for the rapid traverse of great distances, enabling a single mission to reach multiple geologic units within a timespan conducive to system survival in a harsh radiation environment. We further propose that the use of a propulsive hopping technique obviates the need for terrain topographic and strength assumptions and allows for complete terrain agnosticism; a key strength of this concept.

[ NASA ]

Aerial-aquatic robots possess the unique ability of operating in both air and water. However, this capability comes with tremendous challenges, such as communication incompati- bility, increased airborne mass, potentially inefficient operation in each of the environments and manufacturing difficulties. Such robots, therefore, typically have small payloads and a limited operational envelope, often making their field usage impractical. We propose a novel robotic water sampling approach that combines the robust technologies of multirotors and underwater micro-vehicles into a single integrated tool usable for field operations.

[ Imperial ]

Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors with microsecond latency resolution, much larger dynamic range and hundred times lower power consumption than standard cameras. This 20-minute talk gives a short tutorial on event cameras and show their applications on computer vision, drones, and cars.

[ UZH ]

We interviewed Paul Newman, Perla Maiolino and Lars Kunze, ORI academics, to hear what gets them excited about robots in the future and any advice they have for those interested in the field.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

Two projects from the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab at ETH Zurich, including a self-stabilizing wheelchair and a soft exoskeleton for grasping assistance.

[ ETH Zurich ]

Silicon Valley Robotics hosted an online conversation about robotics and racism. Moderated by Andra Keay, the panel featured Maynard Holliday, Tom Williams, Monroe Kennedy III, Jasmine Lawrence, Chad Jenkins, and Ken Goldberg.

[ SVR ]

The ICRA Legged Locomotion workshop has been taking place online, and while we’re not getting a robot mosh pit, there are still some great talks. We’ll post two here, but for more, follow the legged robots YouTube channel at the link below.

[ YouTube ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437824 Video Friday: These Giant Robots Are ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

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

“Who doesn’t love giant robots?”

Luma, is a towering 8 metre snail which transforms spaces with its otherworldly presence. Another piece, Triffid, stands at 6 metres and its flexible end sweeps high over audiences’ heads like an enchanted plant. The movement of the creatures is inspired by the flexible, wiggling and contorting motions of the animal kingdom and is designed to provoke instinctive reactions and emotions from the people that meet them. Air Giants is a new creative robotic studio founded in 2020. They are based in Bristol, UK, and comprise a small team of artists, roboticists and software engineers. The studio is passionate about creating emotionally effective motion at a scale which is thought-provoking and transporting, as well as expanding the notion of what large robots can be used for.

Here’s a behind the scenes and more on how the creatures work.

[ Air Giants ]

Thanks Emma!

If the idea of submerging a very expensive sensor payload being submerged in a lake makes you as uncomfortable as it makes me, this is not the video for you.

[ ANYbotics ]

As the pandemic continues on, the measures due to this health crisis are increasingly stringent, and working from home continues to be promoted and solicited by many companies, Pepper will allow you to keep in touch with your relatives or even your colleagues.

[ Softbank ]

Fairly impressive footwork from Tencent Robotics.

Although, LittleDog was doing that like a decade ago:

[ Tencent ]

It's been long enough since I've been able to go out for boba tea that a robotic boba tea kiosk seems like a reasonable thing to get for my living room.

[ Bobacino ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Road construction and maintenance is challenging and dangerous work. Pioneer Industrial Systems has spent over twenty years designing custom robotic systems for industrial manufacturers around the world. These robotic systems greatly improve safety and increase efficiency. Now they’re taking that expertise on the road, with the Robotic Maintenance Vehicle. This base unit can be mounted on a truck or trailer, and utilizes various modules to perform a variety of road maintenance tasks.

[ Pioneer ]

Extend Robotics arm uses cloud-based teleoperation software, featuring human-like dexterity and intelligence, with multiple applications in healthcare, utilities and energy

[ Extend Robotics ]

ARC, short for “AI, Robot, Cloud,” includes the latest algorithms and high precision data required for human-robot coexistence. Now with ultra-low latency networks, many robots can simultaneously become smarter, just by connecting to ARC. “ARC Eye” serves as the eyes for all robots, accurately determining the current location and route even indoors where there is no GPS access. “ARC Brain” is the computing system shared simultaneously by all robots, which plans and processes movement, localization, and task performance for the robot.

[ Naver Labs ]

How can we re-imagine urban infrastructures with cutting-edge technologies? Listen to this webinar from Ger Baron, Amsterdam’s CTO, and Senseable City Lab’s researchers, on how MIT and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) are reimagining Amsterdam’s canals with the first fleet of autonomous boats.

[ MIT ]

Join Guy Burroughes in this webinar recording to hear about Spot, the robot dog created by Boston Dynamics, and how RACE plan to use it in nuclear decommissioning and beyond.

[ UKAEA ]

This GRASP on Robotics seminar comes from Marco Pavone at Stanford University, “On Safe and Efficient Human-robot interactions via Multimodal Intent Modeling and Reachability-based Safety Assurance.”

In this talk I will present a decision-making and control stack for human-robot interactions by using autonomous driving as a motivating example. Specifically, I will first discuss a data-driven approach for learning multimodal interaction dynamics between robot-driven and human-driven vehicles based on recent advances in deep generative modeling. Then, I will discuss how to incorporate such a learned interaction model into a real-time, interaction-aware decision-making framework. The framework is designed to be minimally interventional; in particular, by leveraging backward reachability analysis, it ensures safety even when other cars defy the robot's expectations without unduly sacrificing performance. I will present recent results from experiments on a full-scale steer-by-wire platform, validating the framework and providing practical insights. I will conclude the talk by providing an overview of related efforts from my group on infusing safety assurances in robot autonomy stacks equipped with learning-based components, with an emphasis on adding structure within robot learning via control-theoretical and formal methods.

[ UPenn ]

Autonomous Systems Failures: Who is Legally and Morally Responsible? Sponsored by Northwestern University’s Law and Technology Initiative and AI@NU, the event was moderated by Dan Linna and included Northwestern Engineering's Todd Murphey, University of Washington Law Professor Ryan Calo, and Google Senior Research Scientist Madeleine Clare Elish.

[ Northwestern ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437789 Video Friday: Robotic Glove Features ...

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!):

RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Evidently, the folks at Unitree were paying attention to last week’s Video Friday.

[ Unitree ]

RoboSoft 2020 was a virtual conference this year (along with everything else), but they still held a soft robots contest, and here are four short vids—you can watch the rest of them here.

[ RoboSoft 2020 ]

If you were wondering why SoftBank bought Aldebaran Robotics and Boston Dynamics, here’s the answer.

I am now a Hawks fan. GO HAWKS!

[ Softbank Hawks ] via [ RobotStart ]

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a fully autonomous mobile robot to assist them in their research. Using a type of AI, the robot has been designed to work uninterrupted for weeks at a time, allowing it to analyse data and make decisions on what to do next. Using a flexible arm with customised gripper it can be calibrated to interact with most standard lab equipment and machinery as well as navigate safely around human co-workers and obstacles.

[ Nature ]

Oregon State’s Cassie has been on break for a couple of months, but it’s back in the lab and moving alarmingly quickly.

[ DRL ]

The current situation linked to COVID-19 sadly led to the postponing of this year RoboCup 2020 at Bordeaux. As an official sponsor of The RoboCup, SoftBank Robotics wanted to take this opportunity to thank all RoboCupers and The RoboCup Federation for their support these past 13 years. We invite you to take a look at NAO’s adventure at The RoboCup as the official robot of the Standard Platform League. See you in Bordeaux 2021!

[ RoboCup 2021 ]

Miniature SAW robot crawling inside the intestines of a pig. You’re welcome.

[ Zarrouk Lab ]

The video demonstrates fast autonomous flight experiments in cluttered unknown environments, with the support of a robust and perception-aware replanning framework called RAPTOR. The associated paper is submitted to TRO.

[ HKUST ]

Since we haven’t gotten autonomy quite right yet, there’s a lot of telepresence going on for robots that operate in public spaces. Usually, you’ve got one remote human managing multiple robots, so it would be nice to make that interface a little more friendly, right?

[ HCI Lab ]

Arguable whether or not this is a robot, but it’s cool enough to spend a minute watching.

[ Ishikawa Lab ]

Communication is critical to collaboration; however, too much of it can degrade performance. Motivated by the need for effective use of a robot’s communication modalities, in this work, we present a computational framework that decides if, when, and what to communicate during human-robot collaboration.

[ Interactive Robotics ]

Robotiq has released the next generation of the grippers for collaborative robots: the 2F-85 and 2F-140. Both models gain greater robustness, safety, and customizability while retaining the same key benefits that have inspired thousands of manufacturers to choose them since their launch 6 years ago.

[ Robotiq ]

ANYmal C, the autonomous legged robot designed for industrial challenging environments, provides the mobility, autonomy and inspection intelligence to enable safe and efficient inspection operations. In this virtual showcase, discover how ANYmal climbs stairs, recovers from a fall, performs an autonomous mission and avoids obstacles, docks to charge by itself, digitizes analogue sensors and monitors the environment.

[ ANYbotics ]

At Waymo, we are committed to addressing inequality, and we believe listening is a critical first step toward driving positive change. Earlier this year, five Waymonauts sat down to share their thoughts on equity at work, challenging the status quo, and more. This is what they had to say.

[ Waymo ]

Nice of ABB to take in old robots and upgrade them to turn them into new robots again. Robots forever!

[ ABB ]

It’s nice seeing the progress being made by GITAI, one of the teams competing in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Challenge, and also meet the humans behind the robots.

[ GITAI ] via [ XPRIZE ]

One more talk from the ICRA Legged Robotics Workshop: Jingyu Liu from DeepRobotics and Qiuguo Zhu from Zhejiang University.

[ Deep Robotics ] 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