Tag Archives: urban

#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

#439066 Video Friday: Festo’s BionicSwift

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!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Festo's Bionic Learning Network for 2021 presents a flock of BionicSwifts.

To execute the flight maneuvers as true to life as possible, the wings are modeled on the plumage of birds. The individual lamellae are made of an ultralight, flexible but very robust foam and lie on top of each other like shingles. Connected to a carbon quill, they are attached to the actual hand and arm wings as in the natural model.

During the wing upstroke, the individual lamellae fan out so that air can flow through the wing. This means that the birds need less force to pull the wing up. During the downstroke, the lamellae close up so that the birds can generate more power to fly. Due to this close-to-nature replica of the wings, the BionicSwifts have a better flight profile than previous wing-beating drives.

[ Festo ]

While we've seen a wide variety of COVID-motivated disinfecting robots, they're usually using either ultraviolet light or a chemical fog. This isn't the way that humans clean—we wipe stuff down, which gets rid of surface dirt and disinfects at the same time. Fraunhofer has been working on a mobile manipulator that can clean in the same ways that we do.

It's quite the technical challenge, but it has the potential to be both more efficient and more effective.

[ Fraunhofer ]

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib’s team is pushing the technology a step further. “We’re trying to give robots superhuman perception,” he says. The researchers have developed a robot that uses radio waves, which can pass through walls, to sense occluded objects. The robot, called RF-Grasp, combines this powerful sensing with more traditional computer vision to locate and grasp items that might otherwise be blocked from view.

[ MIT ]

Ingenuity is now scheduled to fly on April 11.

[ JPL ]

The legendary Zenta is back after a two year YouTube hiatus with “a kind of freaky furry hexapod bunny creature.”

[ Zenta ]

It is with great pride and excitement that the South Australia Police announce a new expansion to their kennel by introducing three new Police Dog (PD) recruits. These dogs have been purposely targeted to bring a whole new range of dog operational capabilities known as the ‘small area urban search and guided evacuation’ dogs. Police have been working closely with specialist vets and dog trainers to ascertain if the lightweight dogs could be transported safely by drones and released into hard-to-access areas where at the moment the larger PDs just simply cannot get in due to their size.

[ SA Police ]

SoftBank may not have Spot cheerleading robots for their baseball team anymore, but they've more than made up for it with a full century of Peppers. And one dude doing the robot.

[ SoftBank ]

MAB Robotics is a Polish company developing walking robots for inspection, and here's a prototype they've been working on.

[ MAB Robotics ]

Thanks Jakub!

DoraNose: Smell your way to a better tomorrow.

[ Dorabot ]

Our robots need to learn how to cope with their new neighbors, and we have just the solution for this, the egg detector! Using cutting-edge AI, it provides incredible precision in detecting a vast variety of eggs. We have deployed this new feature on Boston Dynamics Spot, one of our fleet's robots. It can now detect eggs with its cameras and avoid them on his autonomous missions.

[ Energy Robotics ]

When dropping a squishy robot from an airplane 1,000 feet up, make sure that you land as close to people's cars as you can.

Now do it from orbit!

[ Squishy Robotics ]

An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms limit these prior approaches from operating in narrow and cluttered environments. We propose a method that introduces a quadrupedal robot with a leash to enable the robot-guiding-human system to change its intrinsic dimension (by letting the leash go slack) in order to fit into narrow spaces.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

How to prove that your drone is waterproof.

[ UNL ]

Well this ought to be pretty good once it gets out of simulation.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

MIDAS is Aurora’s AI-enabled, multi-rotor sUAV outfitted with optical sensors and a customized payload that can defeat multiple small UAVs per flight with low-collateral effects.

[ Aurora ]

The robots​ of the DFKI have the advantage of being able to reach extreme environments: they can be used for decontamination purposes in high-risk areas or inspect and maintain underwater​ structures, for which they are tested in the North Sea near Heligoland​.

[ DFKI ]

After years of trying, 60 Minutes cameras finally get a peek inside the workshop at Boston Dynamics, where robots move in ways once only thought possible in movies. Anderson Cooper reports.

[ 60 Minutes ]

In 2007, Noel Sharky stated that “we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill.” Since then thousands of AI and robotics researchers have joined his calls to regulate “killer robots.” But sometime this year, Turkey will deploy fully autonomous home-built kamikaze drones on its border with Syria. What are the ethical choices we need to consider? Will we end up in an episode of Black Mirror? Or is the UN listening to calls and starting the process of regulating this space? Prof. Toby Walsh will discuss this important issue, consider where we are at and where we need to go.

[ ICRA 2020 ]

In the second session of HAI's spring conference, artists and technologists discussed how technology can enhance creativity, reimagine meaning, and support racial and social justice. The conference, called “Intelligence Augmentation: AI Empowering People to Solve Global Challenges,” took place on 25 March 2021.

[ Stanford HAI ]

This spring 2021 GRASP SFI comes from Monroe Kennedy III at Stanford University, on “Considerations for Human-Robot Collaboration.”

The field of robotics has evolved over the past few decades. We’ve seen robots progress from the automation of repetitive tasks in manufacturing to the autonomy of mobilizing in unstructured environments to the cooperation of swarm robots that are centralized or decentralized. These abilities have required advances in robotic hardware, modeling, and artificial intelligence. The next frontier is robots collaborating in complex tasks with human teammates, in environments traditionally configured for humans. While solutions to this challenge must utilize all the advances of robotics, the human element adds a unique aspect that must be addressed. Collaborating with a human teammate means that the robot must have a contextual understanding of the task as well as all participant’s roles. We will discuss what constitutes an effective teammate and how we can capture this behavior in a robotic collaborator.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439006 Low-Cost Drones Learn Precise Control ...

I’ll admit to having been somewhat skeptical about the strategy of dangling payloads on long tethers for drone delivery. I mean, I get why Wing does it— it keeps the drone and all of its spinny bits well away from untrained users while preserving the capability of making deliveries to very specific areas that may have nearby obstacles. But it also seems like you’re adding some risk as well, because once your payload is out on that long tether, it’s more or less out of your control in at least two axes. And you can forget about your drone doing anything while this is going on, because who the heck knows what’s going to happen to your payload if the drone starts moving around?

NYU roboticists, that’s who.

This research is by Guanrui Li, Alex Tunchez, and Giuseppe Loianno at the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (ARPL) at NYU. As you can see from the video, the drone makes keeping rock-solid control over that suspended payload look easy, but it’s very much not, especially considering that everything you see is running onboard the drone itself at 500Hz— all it takes is an IMU and a downward-facing monocular camera, along with the drone’s Snapdragon processor.

To get this to work, the drone has to be thinking about two things. First, there’s state estimation, which is the behavior of the drone itself along with its payload at the end of the tether. The drone figures this out by watching how the payload moves using its camera and tracking its own movement with its IMU. Second, there’s predicting what the payload is going to do next, and how that jibes (or not) with what the drone wants to do next. The researchers developed a model predictive control (MPC) system for this, with some added perception constraints to make sure that the behavior of the drone keeps the payload in view of the camera.

At the moment, the top speed of the system is 4 m/s, but it sounds like rather than increasing the speed of a single payload-swinging drone, the next steps will be to make the overall system more complicated by somehow using multiple drones to cooperatively manage tethered payloads that are too big or heavy for one drone to handle alone.

For more on this, we spoke with Giuseppe Loianno, head of the ARPL.

IEEE Spectrum: We've seen some examples of delivery drones delivering suspended loads. How will this work improve their capabilities?

Giuseppe Loianno: For the first time, we jointly design a perception-constrained model predictive control and state estimation approaches to enable the autonomy of a quadrotor with a cable suspended payload using onboard sensing and computation. The proposed control method guarantees the visibility of the payload in the robot camera as well as the respect of the system dynamics and actuator constraints. These are critical design aspects to guarantee safety and resilience for such a complex and delicate task involving transportation of objects.

The additional challenge involves the fact that we aim to solve the aforementioned problem using a minimal sensor suite for autonomous navigation made by a single camera and IMU. This is an ambitious goal since it concurrently involves estimating the load and the vehicle states. Previous approaches leverage GPS or motion capture systems for state estimation and do not consider the perception and physical constraints when solving the problem. We are confident that our solution will contribute to making a reality the autonomous delivery process in warehouses or in dense urban areas where the GPS signal is currently absent or shadowed.

Will it make a difference to delivery systems that use an actuated cable and only leave the load suspended for the delivery itself?

This is certainly an interesting question. We believe that adding an actuated cable will introduce more disadvantages than benefits. Certainly, an actuated cable can be leveraged to compensate for cable's swinging motions in windy conditions and/or increase the delivery precision. However, the introduction of additional actuated mechanisms and components come at the price of an increased system mass and inertia. This will reduce the overall flight time and the vehicle’s agility as well as the system resilience with respect to the transportation task. Finally, active mechanisms are also more difficult to design compared to passive ones.

What's challenging about doing all of this on-vehicle?

There are several challenges to solve on-board this problem. First, it is very difficult to concurrently run perception and action on such computationally constrained platforms in real-time. Second, the first aspect becomes even more challenging if we consider as in our case a perception-based constrained receding horizon control problem that aims to guarantee the visibility of the payload during the motion, while concurrently respecting all the system physical and sensing limitations. Finally, it has been challenging to run the entire system at a high rate to fully unleash the system’s agility. We are currently able to reach rates of 500 Hz.

Can your method adapt to loads of varying shapes, sizes, and masses? What about aerodynamics or flying in wind?

Technically, our approach can easily be adapted to varying objects sizes and masses. Our previous contributions have already shown the ability to estimate online changes in the vehicle/load configuration and can potentially be used to operate the proposed system in dynamic conditions, where the load’s characteristics are unknown and/or may vary across consecutive flights. This can be useful for both package delivery or warehouse operations, where different types of objects need to be transported or manipulated.

The aerodynamics problem is a great point. Overall, our past work has investigated the aerodynamics of wind disturbances for a single robot without a load. Formulating these problems for the proposed system is challenging and is still an open research question. We have some ideas to approach this problem combining Bayesian estimation techniques with more recent machine learning approaches and we will tackle it in the near future.

What are the limitations on the performance of the system? How fast and agile can it be with a suspended payload?

The limits of the performances are established by the actuating and sensing system. Our approach intrinsically considers both physical and sensing limitations of our system. From a sensing and computation perspective, we believe to be close to the limits with speeds of up to 4 m/s. Faster speeds can potentially introduce motion blur while decreasing the load tracking precision. Moreover, faster motions will increase as well aerodynamic disturbances that we have just mentioned. In the future, modeling these phenomena and their incorporation in the proposed solution can further push the agility.

Your paper talks about extending this approach to multiple vehicles cooperatively transporting a payload, can you tell us more about that?

We are currently working on a distributed perception and control approach for cooperative transportation. We already have some very exciting results that we will share with you very soon! Overall, we can employ a team of aerial robots to cooperatively transport a payload to increase the payload capacity and endow the system with additional resilience in case of vehicles’ failures. A cooperative cable suspended payload cooperative transportation system allows as well to concurrently and independently control the load’s position and orientation. This is not possible just using rigid connections. We believe that our approach will have a strong impact in real-world settings for delivery and constructions in warehouses and GPS-denied environments such as dense urban areas. Moreover, in post disaster scenarios, a team of physically interconnected aerial robots can deliver supplies and establish communication in areas where GPS signal is intermittent or unavailable.

PCMPC: Perception-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Quadrotors with Suspended Loads using a Single Camera and IMU, by Guanrui Li, Alex Tunchez, and Giuseppe Loianno from NYU, will be presented (virtually) at ICRA 2021.

<Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439004 Video Friday: A Walking, Wheeling ...

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!):

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.

This is a pretty terrible video, I think because it was harvested from WeChat, which is where Tencent decided to premiere its new quadruped robot.

Not bad, right? Its name is Max, it has a top speed of 25 kph thanks to its elbow wheels, and we know almost nothing else about it.

[ Tencent ]

Thanks Fan!

Can't bring yourself to mask-shame others? Build a robot to do it for you instead!

[ GitHub ]

Researchers at Georgia Tech have recently developed an entirely soft, long-stroke electromagnetic actuator using liquid metal, compliant magnetic composites, and silicone polymers. The robot was inspired by the motion of the Xenia coral, which pulses its polyps to circulate oxygen under water to promote photosynthesis.

In this work, power applied to soft coils generates an electromagnetic field, which causes the internal compliant magnet to move upward. This forces the squishy silicone linkages to convert linear to the rotational motion with an arclength of up to 42 mm with a bandwidth up to 30 Hz. This highly deformable, fast, and long-stroke actuator topology can be utilized for a variety of applications from biomimicry to fully-soft grasping to wearables applications.

[ Paper ] via [ Georgia Tech ]

Thanks Noah!

Jueying Mini Lite may look a little like a Boston Dynamics Spot, but according to DeepRobotics, its coloring is based on Bruce Lee's Kung Fu clothes.

[ DeepRobotics ]

Henrique writes, “I would like to share with you the supplementary video of our recent work accepted to ICRA 2021. The video features a quadruped and a full-size humanoid performing dynamic jumps, after a brief animated intro of what direct transcription is. Me and my colleagues have put a lot of hard work into this, and I am very proud of the results.”

Making big robots jump is definitely something to be proud of!

[ SLMC Edinburgh ]

Thanks Henrique!

The finals of the Powered Exoskeleton Race for Cybathlon Global 2020.

[ Cybathlon ]

Thanks Fan!

It's nice that every once in a while, the world can get excited about science and robots.

[ NASA ]

Playing the Imperial March over footage of an army of black quadrupeds may not be sending quite the right message.

[ Unitree ]

Kod*lab PhD students Abriana Stewart-Height, Diego Caporale and Wei-Hsi Chen, with former Kod*lab student Garrett Wenger were on set in the summer of 2019 to operate RHex for the filming of Lapsis, a first feature film by director and screenwriter Noah Hutton.

[ Kod*lab ]

In class 2.008, Design and Manufacturing II, mechanical engineering students at MIT learn the fundamental principles of manufacturing at scale by designing and producing their own yo-yos. Instructors stress the importance of sustainable practices in the global supply chain.

[ MIT ]

A short history of robotics, from ABB.

[ ABB ]

In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. This is demonstrated in a set of real hardware experiments done in free-motion, such as base or end-effector pose tracking, and while pushing/pulling a heavy resistive door. Robustness against model mismatches and external disturbances is also verified during these test cases.

[ Paper ]

This paper presents PANTHER, a real-time perception-aware (PA) trajectory planner in dynamic environments. PANTHER plans trajectories that avoid dynamic obstacles while also keeping them in the sensor field of view (FOV) and minimizing the blur to aid in object tracking.

Extensive hardware experiments in unknown dynamic environments with all the computation running onboard are presented, with velocities of up to 5.8 m/s, and with relative velocities (with respect to the obstacles) of up to 6.3 m/s. The only sensors used are an IMU, a forward-facing depth camera, and a downward-facing monocular camera.

[ MIT ]

With our SaaS solution, we enable robots to inspect industrial facilities. One of the robots our software supports, is the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. In this video we demonstrate how autonomous industrial inspection with the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot is performed with our teach and repeat solution.

[ Energy Robotics ]

In this week’s episode of Tech on Deck, learn about our first technology demonstration sent to Station: The Robotic Refueling Mission. This tech demo helped us develop the tools and techniques needed to robotically refuel a satellite in space, an important capability for space exploration.

[ NASA ]

At Covariant we are committed to research and development that will bring AI Robotics to the real world. As a part of this, we believe it's important to educate individuals on how these exciting innovations will make a positive, fundamental and global impact for years to come. In this presentation, our co-founder Pieter Abbeel breaks down his thoughts on the current state of play for AI robotics.

[ Covariant ]

How do you fly a helicopter on Mars? It takes Ingenuity and Perseverance. During this technology demo, Farah Alibay and Tim Canham will get into the details of how these craft will manage this incredible task.

[ NASA ]

Complex real-world environments continue to present significant challenges for fielding robotic teams, which often face expansive spatial scales, difficult and dynamic terrain, degraded environmental conditions, and severe communication constraints. Breakthrough technologies call for integrated solutions across autonomy, perception, networking, mobility, and human teaming thrusts. As such, the DARPA OFFSET program and the DARPA Subterranean Challenge seek novel approaches and new insights for discovering and demonstrating these innovative technologies, to help close critical gaps for robotic operations in complex urban and underground environments.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438613 Video Friday: Digit Takes a Hike

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.

It's winter in Oregon, so everything is damp, all the time. No problem for Digit!

Also the case for summer in Oregon.

[ Agility Robotics ]

While other organisms form collective flocks, schools, or swarms for such purposes as mating, predation, and protection, the Lumbriculus variegatus worms are unusual in their ability to braid themselves together to accomplish tasks that unconnected individuals cannot. A new study reported by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology describes how the worms self-organize to act as entangled “active matter,” creating surprising collective behaviors whose principles have been applied to help blobs of simple robots evolve their own locomotion.

No, this doesn't squick me out at all, why would it.

[ Georgia Tech ]

A few years ago, we wrote about Zhifeng Huang's jet-foot equipped bipedal robot, and he's been continuing to work on it to the point where it can now step over gaps that are an absolutely astonishing 147% of its leg length.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Zhifeng!

The Inception Drive is a novel, ultra-compact design for an Infinitely Variable Transmission (IVT) that uses nested-pulleys to adjust the gear ratio between input and output shafts. This video shows the first proof-of-concept prototype for a “Fully Balanced” design, where the spinning masses within the drive are completely balanced to reduce vibration, thereby allowing the drive to operate more efficiently and at higher speeds than achievable on an unbalanced design.

As shown in this video, the Inception Drive can change both the speed and direction of rotation of the output shaft while keeping the direction and speed of the input shaft constant. This ability to adjust speed and direction within such a compact package makes the Inception Drive a compelling choice for machine designers in a wide variety of fields, including robotics, automotive, and renewable-energy generation.

[ SRI ]

Robots with kinematic loops are known to have superior mechanical performance. However, due to these loops, their modeling and control is challenging, and prevents a more widespread use. In this paper, we describe a versatile Inverse Kinematics (IK) formulation for the retargeting of expressive motions onto mechanical systems with loops.

[ Disney Research ]

Watch Engineered Arts put together one of its Mesmer robots in a not at all uncanny way.

[ Engineered Arts ]

There's been a bunch of interesting research into vision-based tactile sensing recently; here's some from Van Ho at JAIST:

[ Paper ]

Thanks Van!

This is really more of an automated system than a robot, but these little levitating pucks are very very slick.

ACOPOS 6D is based on the principle of magnetic levitation: Shuttles with integrated permanent magnets float over the surface of electromagnetic motor segments. The modular motor segments are 240 x 240 millimeters in size and can be arranged freely in any shape. A variety of shuttle sizes carry payloads of 0.6 to 14 kilograms and reach speeds of up to 2 meters per second. They can move freely in two-dimensional space, rotate and tilt along three axes and offer precise control over the height of levitation. All together, that gives them six degrees of motion control freedom.

[ ACOPOS ]

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions are fundamentally dangerous. However, because many soft robots have bodies that are low-inertia and compliant, obstacle contact is inherently safe. We find that a planner that takes into account and capitalizes on environmental contact produces paths that are more robust to uncertainty than a planner that avoids all obstacle contact.

[ CHARM Lab ]

The quadrotor experts at UZH have been really cranking it up recently.

Aerodynamic forces render accurate high-speed trajectory tracking with quadrotors extremely challenging. These complex aerodynamic effects become a significant disturbance at high speeds, introducing large positional tracking errors, and are extremely difficult to model. To fly at high speeds, feedback control must be able to account for these aerodynamic effects in real-time. This necessitates a modelling procedure that is both accurate and efficient to evaluate. Therefore, we present an approach to model aerodynamic effects using Gaussian Processes, which we incorporate into a Model Predictive Controller to achieve efficient and precise real-time feedback control, leading to up to 70% reduction in trajectory tracking error at high speeds. We verify our method by extensive comparison to a state-of-the-art linear drag model in synthetic and real-world experiments at speeds of up to 14m/s and accelerations beyond 4g.

[ Paper ]

I have not heard much from Harvest Automation over the last couple years and their website was last updated in 2016, but I guess they're selling robots in France, so that's good?

[ Harvest Automation ]

Last year, Clearpath Robotics introduced a ROS package for Spot which enables robotics developers to leverage ROS capabilities out-of-the-box. Here at OTTO Motors, we thought it would be a compelling test case to see just how easy it would be to integrate Spot into our test fleet of OTTO materials handling robots.

[ OTTO Motors ]

Video showcasing recent robotics activities at PRISMA Lab, coordinated by Prof. Bruno Siciliano, at Università di Napoli Federico II.

[ PRISMA Lab ]

Thanks Fan!

State estimation framework developed by the team CoSTAR for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, where the team achieved 2nd and 1st places in the Tunnel and Urban circuits.

[ Paper ]

Highlights from the 2020 ROS Industrial conference.

[ ROS Industrial ]

Thanks Thilo!

Not robotics, but entertaining anyway. From the CHI 1995 Technical Video Program, “The Tablet Newspaper: a Vision for the Future.”

[ CHI 1995 ]

This week's GRASP on Robotics seminar comes from Allison Okamura at Stanford, on “Wearable Haptic Devices for Ubiquitous Communication.”

Haptic devices allow touch-based information transfer between humans and intelligent systems, enabling communication in a salient but private manner that frees other sensory channels. For such devices to become ubiquitous, their physical and computational aspects must be intuitive and unobtrusive. We explore the design of a wide array of haptic feedback mechanisms, ranging from devices that can be actively touched by the fingertips to multi-modal haptic actuation mounted on the arm. We demonstrate how these devices are effective in virtual reality, human-machine communication, and human-human communication.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots