Tag Archives: video
#439220 Video Friday: Virtual Cat Petting
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 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – [Online Event]
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 20201 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
The 2021 Computer-Human Interaction conference (CHI) took place this week, in amongst the stereo smelling and tooth control were some incredibly creative robotics projects, like this “HairTouch” system that uses robotic manipulation to achieve a variety of haptic sensations using hair.
We propose a pinbased handheld device, HairTouch, to provide stiffness differences, roughness differences, surface height differences and their combinations. HairTouch consists of two pins for the two finger segments close to the index fingertip, respectively. By controlling brush hairs’ length and bending direction to change the hairs’ elasticity and hair tip direction, each pin renders various stiffness and roughness, respectively.
[ NTU ]
Thanks Fan!
Here's another cool thing from CHI: a “Pneumatic Raspberry Pi for Soft Robotics.”
FlowIO is a miniature, modular, pneumatic development platform with a software toolkit for control, actuation, and sensing of soft robots and programmable materials. Five pneumatic ports and multiple fully-integrated modules to satisfy various pressure, flow, and size requirements make FlowIO suitable for most wearable and non-wearable pneumatic applications in HCI and soft robotics.
[ FlowIO ]
Thanks Fan!
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter completed its fifth flight with a one-way journey from Wright Brothers Field to a new airfield 423 feet (129 meters) to the south on May 7, 2021.
NASA has 3D-ified Ingenuity's third flight, so dig up your 3D glasses and check it out:
Also, audio!
[ NASA ]
Until we can find a good way of training cats, we'll have to make due with robots if we want to study their neuromuscular dynamics.
Toyoaki Tanikawa and his supervisors assistant professor Yoichi Masuda and Prof Masato Ishikawa developed a four-legged robot that enables the reproduction of motor control of animals using computers. This quadruped robot, which comprises highly back-drivable legs to reproduce the flexibility of animals and torque-controllable motors, can reproduce muscle characteristics of animals. Thus, it is possible to conduct various experiments using this robot instead of the animals themselves.
[ Osaka University ]
Thanks Yoichi!
Turner Topping is a PhD student and researcher with Kod*lab, a legged robotics group within the GRASP Lab at Penn Engineering. Through this video profile, one gains insight into Turner’s participation in the academic research environment, overcoming uncertainties and obstacles.
[ Kod*Lab ]
A team led by Assistant Professor Benjamin Tee from the National University of Singapore has developed a smart material known as AiFoam that could give machines human-like sense of touch, to better judge human intentions and respond to changes in the environment.
[ NUS ]
Boston University mechanical engineers have developed a unique way to use an ancient Japanese art form for a very 21st-century purpose. In a paper published this week in Science Robotics, Douglas Holmes and BU PhD student Yi Yang demonstrate how they were inspired by kirigami, the traditional Japanese art of paper cutting (cousin of origami paper-folding art), to design soft robotic grippers.
[ BU ]
Turns out, if you give robots voices and names and googly eyes and blogs (?), people will try to anthropomorphize them. Go figure!
[ NTNU ]
Domestic garbage management is an important aspect of a sustainable environment. This paper presents a novel garbage classification and localization system for grasping and placement in the correct recycling bin, integrated on a mobile manipulator. In particular, we first introduce and train a deep neural network (namely, GarbageNet) to detect different recyclable types of garbage in the wild. Secondly, we use a grasp localization method to identify the grasp poses of garbage that need to be collected from the ground. Finally, we perform grasping and sorting of the objects by the mobile robot through a whole-body control framework.
[ UCL ]
Thanks Dimitrios!
I am 100% here for telepresence robots with emotive antennas.
[ Pollen Robotics ]
We propose a novel robotic system that can improve its semantic perception during deployment. Our system tightly couples multi-sensor perception and localisation to continuously learn from self-supervised pseudo labels.
[ ASL ]
Vandi Verma is one of the people driving the Mars Perseverance rover, and CMU would like to remind you that that she graduated from CMU.
[ CMU ]
Pepper is here to offer a “phygital” experience to shoppers.
I had to look up “phygital,” and it's a combination of phyiscal and digital that is used exclusively in marketing, as far as I can tell, so let us never speak of it again.
[ CMU ]
Researchers conduct early mobility testing on an engineering model of NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, and fine-tune a newly installed OptiTrack motion tracking camera system at NASA Glenn’s Simulated Lunar Operations Lab.
[ NASA ]
Mmm, sorting is satisfying to watch.
[ Dorabot ]
iRobot seems to be hiring, although you’ll have to brave a pupper infestation.
Clean floors, though!
[ iRobot ]
Shadow Robot's bimanual teleoperation system is now commercially available for a price you almost certainly cannot afford!
Converge Robotics Group offers a haptic option, too.
[ Shadow ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#438882 Robotics in the entertainment industry
Mesmer Entertainment Robotics demonstrate some of their humanoid animatronics, as well as their humanoid robot, Owen.
Posted in Human Robots
#439198 Video Friday: A Robot to Brush Your Hair
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 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – [Online Event]
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 20201 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
With rapidly growing demands on health care systems, nurses typically spend 18 to 40 percent of their time performing direct patient care tasks, oftentimes for many patients and with little time to spare. Personal care robots that brush your hair could provide substantial help and relief.
While the hardware set-up looks futuristic and shiny, the underlying model of the hair fibers is what makes it tick. CSAIL postdoc Josie Hughes and her team’s approach examined entangled soft fiber bundles as sets of entwined double helices – think classic DNA strands. This level of granularity provided key insights into mathematical models and control systems for manipulating bundles of soft fibers, with a wide range of applications in the textile industry, animal care, and other fibrous systems.
[ MIT CSAIL ]
Sometimes CIA needs to get creative when collecting intelligence. Charlie, for instance, is a robotic catfish that collects water samples. While never used operationally, the unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) fish was created to study aquatic robot technology.
[ CIA ]
It's really just a giant drone, even if it happens to be powered by explosions.
[ SpaceX ]
Somatic's robot will clean your bathrooms for 40 hours a week and will cost you just $1,000 a month. It looks like it works quite well, as long as your bathrooms are the normal level of gross as opposed to, you know, super gross.
[ Somatic ]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter successfully completed a fourth, more challenging flight on the Red Planet on April 30, 2021. Flight Test No. 4 aimed for a longer flight time, longer distance, and more image capturing to begin to demonstrate its ability to serve as a scout on Mars. Ingenuity climbed to an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) before flying south and back for an 872-foot (266-meter) round trip. In total, Ingenuity was in the air for 117 seconds, another set of records for the helicopter.
[ Ingenuity ]
The Perseverance rover is all new and shiny, but let's not forget about Curiosity, still hard at work over in Gale crater.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took this 360-degree panorama while atop “Mont Mercou,” a rock formation that offered a view into Gale Crater below. The panorama is stitched together from 132 individual images taken on April 15, 2021, the 3,090th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The panorama has been white-balanced so that the colors of the rock materials resemble how they would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth. Images of the sky and rover hardware were not included in this terrain mosaic.
[ MSL ]
Happy Star Wars Day from Quanser!
[ Quanser ]
Thanks Arman!
Lingkang Zhang's 12 DOF Raspberry Pi-powered quadruped robot, Yuki Mini, is complete!
Adorable, right? It runs ROS and the hardware is open source as well.
[ Yuki Mini ]
Thanks Lingkang!
Honda and AutoX have been operating a fully autonomous, no safety driver taxi service in China for a couple of months now.
If you thought SF was hard, well, I feel like this is even harder.
[ AutoX ]
This is the kind of drone delivery that I can get behind.
[ WeRobotics ]
The Horizon 2020 EU-funded PRO-ACT project will aim to develop and demonstrate a cooperation and manipulation capabilities between three robots for assembling an in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) plant. PRO-ACT will show how robot working agents, or RWAs, can work together collaboratively to achieve a common goal.
[ Pro-Act ]
Thanks Fan!
This brief quadruped simulation video, from Jerry Pratt at IHMC, dates back to 2003 (!).
[ IHMC ]
Extend Robotics' vision is to extend human capability beyond physical presence. We build affordable robotic arms capable of remote operation from anywhere in the world, using cloud-based teleoperation software.
[ Extend Robotics ]
Meet Maria Vittoria Minniti, robotics engineer and PhD student at NCCR Digital Fabrication and ETH Zurich. Maria Vittoria makes it possible for simple robots to do complicated things.
[ NCCR Women ]
Thanks Fan!
iCub has been around for 10 years now, and it's almost like it hasn't gotten any taller! This IFRR Robotics Global Colloquium celebrates the past decade of iCub.
[ iCub ]
This CMU RI Seminar is by Cynthia Sung from UPenn, on Dynamical Robots via Origami-Inspired Design.
Origami-inspired engineering produces structures with high strength-to-weight ratios and simultaneously lower manufacturing complexity. This reliable, customizable, cheap fabrication and component assembly technology is ideal for robotics applications in remote, rapid deployment scenarios that require platforms to be quickly produced, reconfigured, and deployed. Unfortunately, most examples of folded robots are appropriate only for small-scale, low-load applications. In this talk, I will discuss efforts in my group to expand origami-inspired engineering to robots with the ability to withstand and exert large loads and to execute dynamic behaviors.
[ CMU RI ]
How can feminist methodologies and approaches be applied and be transformative when developing AI and ADM systems? How can AI innovation and social systems innovation be catalyzed concomitantly to create a positive movement for social change larger than the sum of the data science or social science parts? How can we produce actionable research that will lead to the profound changes needed—from scratch—in the processes to produce AI? In this seminar, 2020 CCSRE Race and Technology Practitioner Fellow Renata Avila discusses ideas and experiences from different disciplines that could help draft a blueprint for a better modeled digital future.
[ CMU RI ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#438921 Disney’s creepy humanoid ...
This video by Disney Research using a humanoid animatronic bust demonstrates a very realistic and interactive lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions, thus creating “the illusion of life”. Cool, but creepy as heck!
Posted in Human Robots
#439187 Video Friday: Good Robots for Bad Knees
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 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – [Online Event]
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 20201 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Ascend is a smart knee orthosis designed to improve mobility and relieve knee pain. The customized, lightweight, and comfortable design reduces burden on the knee and intuitively adjusts support as needed. Ascend provides a safe and non-surgical solution for patients with osteoarthritis, knee instability, and/or weak quadriceps.
Each one of these is custom-built, and you can pre-order one now.
[ Roam Robotics ]
Ingenuity’s third flight achieved a longer flight time and more sideways movement than previously attempted. During the 80-second flight, the helicopter climbed to 16 feet (5 meters) and flew 164 feet (50 meters) downrange and back, for a total distance of 328 feet (100 meters). The third flight test took place at “Wright Brothers Field” in Jezero Crater, Mars, on April 25, 2021.
[ NASA ]
This right here, the future of remote work.
The robot will run you about $3,000 USD.
[ VStone ] via [ Robotstart ]
Texas-based aerospace robotics company, Wilder Systems, enhanced their existing automation capabilities to aid in the fight against COVID-19. Their recent development of a robotic testing system is both increasing capacity for COVID-19 testing and delivering faster results to individuals. The system conducts saliva-based PCR tests, which is considered the gold standard for COVID testing. Based on a protocol developed by Yale and authorized by the FDA, the system does not need additional approvals. This flexible, modular system can run up to 2,000 test samples per day, and can be deployed anywhere where standard electric power is available.
[ ARM Institute ]
Tests show that people do not like being nearly hit by drones.
But seriously, this research has resulted in some useful potential lessons for deploying drones in areas where they have a chance of interacting with humans.
[ Paper ]
The Ingenuity helicopter made history on April 19, 2021, with the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. How do engineers talk to a helicopter all the way out on Mars? We’ll hear about it from Nacer Chahat of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who worked on the helicopter’s antenna and telecommunication system.
[ NASA ]
A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has developed a system with which they can fabricate miniature robots building block by building block, which function exactly as required.
[ Max Planck Institute ]
Well this was inevitable, wasn't it?
The pilot regained control and the drone was fine, though.
[ PetaPixel ]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter takes off and lands in this video captured on April 25, 2021, by Mastcam-Z, an imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. As expected, the helicopter flew out of its field of vision while completing a flight plan that took it 164 feet (50 meters) downrange of the landing spot. Keep watching, the helicopter will return to stick the landing. Top speed for today's flight was about 2 meters per second, or about 4.5 miles-per-hour.
[ NASA ]
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory engineers recently demonstrated Hybrid Tiger, an electric unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with multi-day endurance flight capability, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland.
[ NRL ]
This week's CMU RI Seminar is by Avik De from Ghost Robotics, on “Design and control of insect-scale bees and dog-scale quadrupeds.”
Did you watch the Q&A? If not, you should watch the Q&A.
[ CMU ]
Autonomous quadrotors will soon play a major role in search-and-rescue, delivery, and inspection missions, where a fast response is crucial. However, their speed and maneuverability are still far from those of birds and human pilots. What does it take to make drones navigate as good or even better than human pilots?
[ GRASP Lab ]
With the current pandemic accelerating the revolution of AI in healthcare, where is the industry heading in the next 5-10 years? What are the key challenges and most exciting opportunities? These questions will be answered by HAI’s Co-Director, Fei-Fei Li and the Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Andrew Ng in this fireside chat virtual event.
[ Stanford HAI ]
Autonomous robots have the potential to serve as versatile caregivers that improve quality of life for millions of people with disabilities worldwide. Yet, physical robotic assistance presents several challenges, including risks associated with physical human-robot interaction, difficulty sensing the human body, and a lack of tools for benchmarking and training physically assistive robots. In this talk, I will present techniques towards addressing each of these core challenges in robotic caregiving.
[ GRASP Lab ]
What does it take to empower persons with disabilities, and why is educating ourselves on this topic the first step towards better inclusion? Why is developing assistive technologies for people with disabilities important in order to contribute to their integration in society? How do we implement the policies and actions required to enable everyone to live their lives fully? ETH Zurich and the Global Shapers Zurich Hub invited to an online dialogue on the topic “For a World without Barriers-Removing Obstacles in Daily Life for People with Disabilities.”
[ Cybathlon ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots