Category Archives: Human Robots
#439233 Robotics group announces an ...
Agility Robotics, a branch of Oregon State University, has just revealed a new bipedal robot called Cassie. Unlike the many four-legged and four-wheeled robots currently in existence, Cassie will walk much more like a human. This kind of movement allows for far easier travel across diverse types of terrain while delivering packages or even contributing to disaster relief efforts. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439230 Using a virtual linkage representation ...
A team of researchers at Yale University has developed a new kind of algorithm to improve the functionally of a robot hand. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their algorithm and then demonstrate, via videos, how it can be used. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439224 Mobile dexterous robots: a key element ...
Kinova robotic arms, from left to right: Gen2, Gen3 lite, Gen3
Multiple companies turned to Kinova® robotic arms to create mobile platforms with manipulation capabilities to tackle many aspects of the sanitary crisis. The addition of a dexterous manipulator to mobile platforms opens the door to applications such as patient care disinfection and cleaning — critical to the fight against the virus.
Ever since the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, it became clear that the human resources available to address all the different fronts in the fight against the virus would be thinly stretched — especially considering the fact that these people are subject to falling ill. Mobile robots with manipulation capabilities were quickly identified as a solution to alleviate this problem by freeing skilled people from menial tasks and by allowing remote or automated work which keeps exposure to the virus to a minimum.
Multiple companies turned to Kinova robotic arms for an off-the-shelf manipulation solution suitable for mobile platforms. The history Kinova has with the assistive market is now at the core of the technology — assistive products such as motorized wheelchair-mounted robots like Jaco® were designed from the beginning to be extremely safe, user-friendly, ultra-lightweight, and power-efficient. This experience has transpired into more recent products as well. All these features do not come at the expense of performance, in fact, Kinova robots boast some of the highest payload-to-weight ratios in the industry. It does make sense that robots like these are ideal for applications involving mobile platforms and integration into products that are meant to be interacted with in non-industrial settings.
One of the companies that successfully made such an integration is Diligent, who developed a patient care robot called Moxi by integrating a Kinova Gen2 robot to a mobile platform powered by cloud-based software and artificial intelligence. Moxi is designed to help clinical staff with menial tasks that do not involve the patients, like fetching supplies, delivering samples, and distributing equipment, thus freeing skilled staff like nurses to perform more value-added tasks. Its rounded design and friendly face make interactions with it feel more natural for both the public and the hospital staff who otherwise may not be used to interacting with robots. In the current pandemic, one can easily understand how a robot such as Moxi can find its uses to alleviate the workload of healthcare workers and prove to quickly provide a return on investment for healthcare institutions.
Another type of menial task that became surprisingly important in the context of the sanitary crisis is that of cleaning. Prior to the crisis, Peanut Robotics, a startup from California that raised $2 million in 2019 was already developing a mobile platform carrying a Kinova Gen3 for cleaning commercial spaces such as restaurants, offices, hotels, and even airports. By coupling the 7 degrees of freedom robot to a vertical rail, their system can reach even the most inconvenient places. Rather than using specialized robot end-effectors to work, they take advantage of the flexibility of the robot gripper to grab tools similar to what a human would use, thus making it possible to clean an entire room with a single system, including spraying disinfectant, scrubbing, and wiping — and all that autonomously! With the current context where more surfaces need more frequent cleaning and where being in contact with objects comes with a higher risk of infection, surely we will see this kind of robot increasingly frequently.
However, not all environments are suitable for such a deep cleaning. Common areas in malls or airports for example are simply too large and possibly too crowded for such operations. It is these kinds of cases that A&K Robotics are tackling with their Autonomous Mobile Robotic UV Disinfector (Amrud) — a project selected for funding by Canada’s Advanced Manufacturing Supercluster. They combined their expertise in navigation and mobile platforms with the capabilities of a Kinova Gen3 lite robot. The compact and extremely light (less than 6 kg) robot is carried around wielding a UV light source to disinfect surfaces. Its 6 degrees of freedom allow for more than enough flexibility to waive the light source around even the most complex surfaces. A&K already made the news a few times in 2020 by deploying their solution to assist in the disinfection of floors and high-touch surfaces. Whereas when they started the project back in 2017 they did not get much traction, it is clear that the recent needs got them much deserved attention.
As the pandemic settles, an always-increasing number of applications for robots are found. Be it traditionally non-industrialized industries looking to be more resilient to staff shortages or due to the democratization of working from home, robots are becoming more commonplace than ever. Kinova, with its wide range of robot type offers, is there to assist developers and integrators accomplish their tasks and contribute to the growth of the collaboration of robots in our daily lives.
To learn more about Kinova click here. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439222 MOBLOT: A theoretical model that ...
Research focusing on swarm robotics typically uses theoretical approaches to describe robotic systems in an abstract way. A theoretical model that is often used in robotics studies is OBLOT, an approach that represents robots as simple systems, all identical, without a memory and unable to communicate with each other. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#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