Tag Archives: taking

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

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Android

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

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

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Android

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

#437778 A Bug-Sized Camera for Bug-Sized Robots ...

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Android

As if it’s not hard enough to make very small mobile robots, once you’ve gotten the power and autonomy all figured out (good luck with that), your robot isn’t going to be all that useful unless it can carry some payload. And the payload that everybody wants robots to carry is a camera, which is of course a relatively big, heavy, power hungry payload. Great, just great.

This whole thing is frustrating because tiny, lightweight, power efficient vision systems are all around us. Literally, all around us right this second, stuffed into the heads of insects. We can’t make anything quite that brilliant (yet), but roboticists from the University of Washington, in Seattle, have gotten us a bit closer, with the smallest wireless, steerable video camera we’ve ever seen—small enough to fit on the back of a microbot, or even a live bug.

To make a camera this small, the UW researchers, led by Shyam Gollakota, a professor of computer science and engineering, had to start nearly from scratch, primarily because existing systems aren’t nearly so constrained by power availability. Even things like swallowable pill cameras require batteries that weigh more than a gram, but only power the camera for under half an hour. With a focus on small size and efficiency, they started with an off-the-shelf ultra low-power image sensor that’s 2.3 mm wide and weighs 6.7 mg. They stuck on a Bluetooth 5.0 chip (3 mm wide, 6.8 mg), and had a fun time connecting those two things together without any intermediary hardware to broadcast the camera output. A functional wireless camera also requires a lens (20 mg) and an antenna, which is just 5 mm of wire. An accelerometer is useful so that insect motion can be used to trigger the camera, minimizing the redundant frames that you’d get from a robot or an insect taking a nap.

Photo: University of Washington

The microcamera developed by the UW researchers can stream monochrome video at up to 5 frames per second to a cellphone 120 meters away.

The last bit to make up this system is a mechanically steerable “head,” weighing 35 mg and bringing the total weight of the wireless camera system to 84 mg. If the look of the little piezoelectric actuator seems familiar, you have very good eyes because it’s tiny, and also, it’s the same kind of piezoelectric actuator that the folks at UW use to power their itty bitty flying robots. It’s got a 60-degree panning range, but also requires a 96 mg boost converter to function, which is a huge investment in size and weight just to be able to point the camera a little bit. But overall, the researchers say that this pays off, because not having to turn the entire robot (or insect) when you want to look around reduces the energy consumption of the system as a whole by a factor of up to 84 (!).

Photo: University of Washington

Insects are very mobile platforms for outdoor use, but they’re also not easy to steer, so the researchers also built a little insect-scale robot that they could remotely control while watching the camera feed. As it turns out, this seems to be the smallest, power-autonomous terrestrial robot with a camera ever made.

This efficiency means that the wireless camera system can stream video frames (160×120 pixels monochrome) to a cell phone up to 120 meters away for up to 6 hours when powered by a 0.5-g, 10-mAh battery. A live, first-bug view can be streamed at up to 5 frames per second. The system was successfully tested on a pair of darkling beetles that were allowed to roam freely outdoors, and the researchers noted that they could also mount it on spiders or moths, or anything else that could handle the payload. (The researchers removed the electronics from the insects after the experiments and observed no noticeable adverse effects on their behavior.)

The researchers are already thinking about what it might take to put a wireless camera system on something that flies, and it’s not going to be easy—a bumblebee can only carry between 100 and 200 mg. The power system is the primary limitation here, but it might be possible to use a solar cell to cut down on battery requirements. And the camera itself could be scaled down as well, by using a completely custom sensor and a different type of lens. The other thing to consider is that with a long-range wireless link and a vision system, it’s possible to add sophisticated vision-based autonomy to tiny robots by doing the computation remotely. So, next time you see something scuttling across the ground, give it another look, because it might be looking right back at you.

“Wireless steerable vision for live insects and insect-scale robots,” by Vikram Iyer, Ali Najafi, Johannes James, Sawyer Fuller, and Shyamnath Gollakota from the University of Washington, is published in Science Robotics. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437753 iRobot’s New Education Robot Makes ...

Posted on November 28, 2020 by Android

iRobot has been on a major push into education robots recently. They acquired Root Robotics in 2019, and earlier this year, launched an online simulator and associated curriculum designed to work in tandem with physical Root robots. The original Root was intended to be a classroom robot, with one of its key features being the ability to stick to (and operate on) magnetic virtual surfaces, like whiteboards. And as a classroom robot, at $200, it’s relatively affordable, if you can buy one or two and have groups of kids share them.

For kids who are more focused on learning at home, though, $200 is a lot for a robot that doesn't even keep your floors clean. And as nice as it is to have a free simulator, any kid will tell you that it’s way cooler to have a real robot to mess around with. Today, iRobot is announcing a new version of Root that’s been redesigned for home use, with a $129 price that makes it significantly more accessible to folks outside of the classroom.

The Root rt0 is a second version of the Root robot—the more expensive, education-grade Root rt1 is still available. To bring the cost down, the rt0 is missing some features that you can still find in the rt1. Specifically, you don’t get the internal magnets to stick the robot to vertical surfaces, there are no cliff sensors, and you don’t get a color scanner or an eraser. But for home use, the internal magnets are probably not necessary anyway, and the rest of that stuff seems like a fair compromise for a cost reduction of 30 percent.

Photo: iRobot

One of the new accessories for the iRobot Root rt0 is a “Brick Top” that snaps onto the upper face the robot via magnets. The accessory can be used with LEGOs and other LEGO-compatible bricks, opening up an enormous amount of customization.

It’s not all just taking away, though. There’s also a new $20 accessory, a LEGO-ish “Brick Top” that snaps onto the upper face of Root (either version) via magnets. The plate can be used with LEGO bricks and other LEGO-compatible things. This opens up an enormous amount of customization, and it’s for more than just decoration, since Root rt0 has the ability to interact with whatever’s on top of it via its actuated marker. Root can move the marker up and down, the idea being that you can programmatically turn lines on and off. By replacing the marker with a plastic thingy that sticks up through the body of the robot, the marker up/down command can be used to actuate something on the brick top. In the video, that’s what triggers the catapult.

Photo: iRobot

By attaching a marker, you can program Root to draw. The robot has a motor that can move the marker up and down.

This less expensive version of Root still has access to the online simulator, as well as the multi-level coding interface that allows kids to seamlessly transition through multiple levels of coding complexity, from graphical to text. There’s a new Android app coming out today, and you can access everything through web-based apps on Chrome OS, Windows and macOS, as well as on iOS. iRobot tells us that they’ve also recently expanded their online learning library full of Root-based educational activities. In particular, they’ve added a new category on “Social Emotional Learning,” the goal of which is to help kids develop things like social awareness, self-management, decision making, and relationship skills. We’re not quite sure how you teach those things with a little hexagonal robot, but we like that iRobot is giving it a try.

Root coding robots are designed for kids age 6 and up, ships for free, and is available now.

[ iRobot Root ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437716 Robotic Tank Is Designed to Crawl ...

Posted on November 26, 2020 by Android

Let’s talk about bowels! Most of us have them, most of us use them a lot, and like anything that gets used a lot, they eventually need to get checked out to help make sure that everything will keep working the way it should for as long as you need it to. Generally, this means a colonoscopy, and while there are other ways of investigating what’s going on in your gut, a camera on a flexible tube is still “the gold-standard method of diagnosis and intervention,” according to some robotics researchers who want to change that up a bit.

The University of Colorado’s Advanced Medical Technologies Lab has been working on a tank robot called Endoculus that’s able to actively drive itself through your intestines, rather than being shoved. The good news is that it’s very small, and the bad news is that it’s probably not as small as you’d like it to be.

The reason why a robot like Endoculus is necessary (or at least a good idea) is that trying to stuff a semi-rigid endoscopy tube into the semi-floppy tube that is your intestine doesn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes, the tip of the endoscopy tube can get stuck, and as more tube is fed in, it causes the intestine to distend, which best case is painful and worst case can cause serious internal injuries. One way of solving this is with swallowable camera pills, but those don’t help you with tasks like taking tissue samples. A self-propelled system like Endoculus could reduce risk while also making the procedure faster and cheaper.

Image: Advanced Medical Technologies Lab/University of Colorado

The researchers say that while the width of Endoculus is larger than a traditional endoscope, the device would require “minimal distention during use” and would “not cause pain or harm to the patient.” Future versions of the robot, they add, will “yield a smaller footprint.”

Endoculus gets around with four sets of treads, angled to provide better traction against the curved walls of your gut. The treads are micropillared, or covered with small nubs, which helps them deal with all your “slippery colon mucosa.” Designing the robot was particularly tricky because of the severe constraints on the overall size of the device, which is just 3 centimeters wide and 2.3 cm high. In order to cram the two motors required for full control, they had to be arranged parallel to the treads, resulting in a fairly complex system of 3D-printed worm gears. And to make the robot actually useful, it includes a camera, LED lights, tubes for injecting air and water, and a tool port that can accommodate endoscopy instruments like forceps and snares to retrieve tissue samples.

So far, Endoculus has spent some time inside of a live pig, although it wasn’t able to get that far since pig intestines are smaller than human intestines, and because apparently the pig intestine is spiraled somehow. The pig (and the robot) both came out fine. A (presumably different) pig then provided some intestine that was expanded to human-intestine size, inside of which Endoculus did much better, and was able to zip along at up to 40 millimeters per second without causing any damage. Personally, I’m not sure I’d want a robot to explore my intestine at a speed much higher than that.

The next step with Endoculus is to add some autonomy, which means figuring out how to do localization and mapping using the robot’s onboard camera and IMU. And then of course someone has to be the first human to experience Endoculus directly, which I’d totally volunteer for except the research team is in Colorado and I’m not. Sorry!

“Novel Optimization-Based Design and Surgical Evaluation of a Treaded Robotic Capsule Colonoscope,” by Gregory A. Formosa, J. Micah Prendergast, Steven A. Edmundowicz, and Mark E. Rentschler, from the University of Colorado, was presented at ICRA 2020.

< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots