Category Archives: Human Robots
#439714 Exosuit That Helps With the Heavy ...
New advances in robotics can help push the limits of the human body to make us faster or stronger. But now researchers from the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University (SNU) have designed an exosuit that corrects body posture. Their recent paper describes the Movement Reshaping (MR) Exosuit, which, rather than augmenting any part of the human body, couples the motion of one joint to lock or unlock the motion of another joint. It works passively, without any motors or batteries.
For instance, when attempting to lift a heavy object off the floor, most of us stoop from the waist, which is an injury-inviting posture. The SNU device hinders the stooping posture and helps correct it to a (safer) squatting one. “We call our methodology 'body-powered variable impedance',” says, Kyu-Jin Cho, a biorobotics engineer and one of the authors, “[as] we can change the impedance of a joint by moving another.”
Most lift-assist devices—such as Karl Zelik's HeroWear—are designed to reduce the wearer's fatigue by providing extra power and minimizing interference in their volitional movements, says co-author Jooeun Ahn. “On the other hand, our MR Exosuit is focusing on reshaping the wearer's lifting motion into a safe squatting form, as well as providing extra assistive force.”
Movement reshaping exo-suit for safe lifting
The MR suit has been designed to mitigate injuries for workers in factories and warehouses who undertake repetitive lifting work. “Many lift-related injuries are caused not only by muscle fatigue but also by improper lifting posture,” adds Keewon Kim, a rehabilitation medicine specialist at SNU College of Medicine, who also contributed to the study. Stooping is easier than squatting, and humans tend to choose the more comfortable strategy. “Because the deleterious effects of such comfortable but unsafe motion develop slowly, people do not perceive the risk in time, as in the case of disk degeneration.”
The researchers designed a mechanism to lock the hip flexion when a person tries to stoop and unlock it when they tried to squat. “We connected the top of the back to the foot with a unique tendon structure consisting of vertical brake cables and a horizontal rubber band,” graduate researcher and first author of the study, Sung-Sik Yoon, explains. “When the hip is flexed while the knee is not flexed, the hip flexion torque is delivered to the foot through the brake cable, causing strong resistance to the movement. However, if the knees are widened laterally for squatting, the angle of the tendons changes, and the hip flexion torque is switched to be supported by the rubber band.”
The device was tested on ten human participants, who were first-time users of the suit. Nine out of ten participants changed their motion pattern closer to the squatting form while wearing the exosuit. This, says Ahn, is a 35% improvement in the average postural index of 10 participants. They also noticed a 5.3% reduction in the average metabolic energy consumption of the participants. “We are now working on improving the MR Exosuit in order to test it in a real manual working place,” Ahn adds. “We are going to start a field test soon.”
“Wearable devices do not have to mimic the original anatomical structure of humans.”
The researchers plan to commercialize the device next year, but there are still some kinks to work out. While the effectiveness of the suit has been verified in their paper, the long-term effects of wearing have not. “In the future, we plan to conduct a longitudinal experiment in various fields that require lift posture training such as industrial settings, gyms, and rehabilitation centers,” says Cho.
They are also planning a follow-up study to expand the principle of body-powered variable impedance to sports applications. “Many sports that utilize the whole body, such as golf, swimming, and running, require proper movement training to improve safety and performance,” Cho continues. “As in this study, we will develop sportswear for motion training suitable for various sports activities using soft materials such as cables and rubber bands.”
This study shows that artificial tendons whose structure is different from that of humans can effectively assist humans by reshaping the motor pattern, says Ahn. The current version of the exosuit can also be used to prevent inappropriate lifting motions of patients with poor spinal conditions. He and his colleagues expect that their design will lead to changes in future research on wearable robotics: “We demonstrated that wearable devices do not have to mimic the original anatomical structure of humans.” Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439710 Video Friday: Robotic Gaze
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USAWeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – [Online Event]IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]Robo Boston – October 1-2, 2021 – Boston, MA, USAROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Gaze is an extremely powerful and important signal during human-human communication and interaction, conveying intentions and informing about other's decisions. What happens when a robot and a human interact looking at each other? Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) investigated whether a humanoid robot's gaze influences the way people reason in a social decision-making context.
[ Science Robotics ]
Reachy is here to help you make pancakes, for some value of “help.”
Mmm, extra crunchy!
[ Pollen Robotics ]
It's surprising that a physical prototype of this unicorn (?) robot for kids even exists, but there's no way they're going to get it to run.
And it's supposed to be rideable, which seems like a fun, terrible idea.
[ Xpeng ] via [ Engadget ]
Segway's got a new robot mower now, which appears to use GPS (maybe enhanced with a stationary beacon?) to accurately navigate your lawn.
[ Segway ]
AVITA is a new robotic avatar company founded by Hiroshi Ishiguro. They've raised about $5 million USD in funding to start making Ishiguro's dreams come true, which is money well spent, I'd say.
[ Impress ]
It's interesting how sophisticated legged robots from Japan often start out with a very obvious “we're only working on the legs” design, where the non-legged part of the robot is an unapologetic box. Asimo and Schaft both had robots like this, and here's another one, a single-leg hopping robot from Toyota Technological Institute.
[ TTI ] via [ New Scientist ]
Thanks, Fan!
How to make a robot walking over an obstacle course more fun: costumes and sound effects!
These same researchers have an IROS paper with an untethered version of their robot; you can see it walking at about 10:30 in this presentation video.
[ Tsinghua ]
Thanks, Fan!
Bilateral teleoperation provides humanoid robots with human planning intelligence while enabling the human to feel what the robot feels. It has the potential to transform physically capable humanoid robots into dynamically intelligent ones. However, dynamic bilateral locomotion teleoperation remains as a challenge due to the complex dynamics it involves. This work presents our initial step to tackle this challenge via the concept of wheeled humanoid robot locomotion teleoperation by body tilt.
[ RoboDesign Lab ]
This is an innovative design for a powered exoskeleton of sorts that can move on wheels but transform into legged mode to be able to climb stairs.
[ Atoun ]
Thanks, Fan!
I still have no idea why the Telexistence robot looks the way it does, but I love it.
[ Telexistence ]
In this video, we go over how SLAMcore's standard SDK can be integrated with the ROS1 Navigation Stack, enabling autonomous navigation of a kobuki robot with an Intel RealSense D435i depth camera.
[ SLAMcore ]
Thanks, Fan!
Normally, I wouldn't recommend a two hour long video with just talking heads. But when one of those talking heads is Rod Brooks, you know that the entire two hours will be worth it.
[ Lex Fridman ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439708 Soft components for the next generation ...
Soft robots driven by pressurized fluids could explore new frontiers and interact with delicate objects in ways that traditional rigid robots can't. But building entirely soft robots remains a challenge because many of the components required to power these devices are, themselves, rigid. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439700 Video Friday: Robot Gecko Smashes Face ...
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – [Online Event]
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
The incredible title of this paper is “Tails stabilize landing of gliding geckos crashing head-first into tree trunks.” No hype here at all: geckos really do glide, they really do crash head-first into tree trunks, and they really do rely on their tails for post-landing stabilization and look ridiculous while doing it.
Their gecko-inspired robot features a soft torso, where the tail can be taken off and put back on. When the front foot hits a surface, the robot is programmed to bend its tail just like the reflex that Jusufi discovered previously in climbing geckos. The information is processed via a microcontroller on the shoulder. This signal activates the motor to pull on a tendon and hence pushes the tail into the wall to slow the head over heels pitchback.
“Nature has many unexpected, elegant solutions to engineering problems—and this is wonderfully illustrated by the way geckos can use their tails to turn a head-first collision into a successful perching maneuver. Landing from flight is difficult, and we hope our findings will lead to new techniques for robot mobility—sometimes crashes are helpful,” Robert Siddall describes.[ Paper ] via [ UC Berkeley ]
Thanks, Robert!
The subterranean stage is being set for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event at Louisville's Mega Cavern. The event is the culmination of a vision to revolutionize search and rescue using robots in underground domains. Tune in Sept 21-24 on SubTV.
I'll be there!
[ SubT ]
Remote work has been solved thanks to Robovie-Z.
[ Vstone ]
The best part of this video is not the tube-launched net-firing drone-hunting drone, it's the logo of the giant chameleon perched on top of a Humvee firing its tongue at a bug while being attacked by bats for some reason.
[ Dynetics ]
I'm pretty sure this is an old video, but any robot named “Schmoobot” has a place in Video Friday.
LET ME TAKE YOU TO THE LOCATION OF JUICES
[ Ballbot ]
Some more recent videos on Ballbot, and we're very happy that it's still an active research platform!
The CMU ballbot using its whole body controller to maintain balance on top of its ball while also balancing a red cup with water on the right hand while tracking a circular motion and an empty water bottle on the left hand.[ Ballbot ]
On Aug. 18, 2021, the MQ25 T1 test asset refueled a U.S. Navy E-2D Hawkeye command-and-control aircraft. This is the unmanned aerial refueler's second refueling mission.
Not to throw shade here, but I think the robot plane landed a little bit better than the human piloted plane.
[ Boeing ]
We proposed a method to wirelessly drive multiple soft actuators by laser projection. Laser projection enables both wireless energy supply and the selection of target actuators. Thus, we do not need additional components such as electric circuits and batteries to achieve simple and scalable implementation of multiple soft actuators.
[ Takefumi Hiraki ]
Thanks, Fan!
In this video, we demonstrated the motion of our biped robot “Robovie-Z”, which we used to enter the “ROBO-ONE Ultimate Action” contest.
[ Robo-One ]
Some impressive performance here, but that poor drone is overstuffed.
[ RISLab ]
Proximity sensors and analog circuits are all it takes to make a fairly high performance manipulation.
[ Keisuke Koyama ]
Thanks, Fan!
This video showcases an LP control algorithm producing both gravitational load compensation and cuff force amplification capabilities via whole-body exoskeleton forces. Parts of this video contain an additional payload of 25lbs (a weight on the back).
[ UT Austin HCRL ]
An overview of Tertill the solar-powered weeding robot for home gardens. Watch Joe Jones, the inventor of Tertill (and Roomba!) talk about how the robot and how and where it works.
[ Tertill ]
One small step integrating our Extend AMAS VR software to operate Universal Robots UR5e. This VR application combines volumetric telepresence technology with interactive digital twin to provide intuitive interface for non-robotic expert to teleoperate or program the robot from remote location over the internet.
[ Extend Robotics ]
Enrollment is open for a pair of online courses taught by Christoph Bartneck that'll earn you a Professional Certificate in Human-Robot Interaction. While the website really wants you to think that it costs you $448.20, if you register, you can skip the fee and take the courses for free! The book is even free, too. I have no idea how they can afford to do this, but good on them, right?
[ edX ]
Thanks, Christoph! Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots