#437828 How Roboticists (and Robots) Have Been ...

A few weeks ago, we asked folks on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to share photos and videos showing how they’ve been adapting to the closures of research labs, classrooms, and businesses by taking their robots home with them to continue their work as best they can. We got dozens of responses (more than we could possibly include in just one post!), but here are 15 that we thought were particularly creative or amusing.

And if any of these pictures and videos inspire you to share your own story, please email us (automaton@ieee.org) with a picture or video and a brief description about how you and your robot from work have been making things happen in your home instead.

Kurt Leucht (NASA Kennedy Space Center)

“During these strange and trying times of the current global pandemic, everyone seems to be trying their best to distance themselves from others while still getting their daily work accomplished. Many people also have the double duty of little ones that need to be managed in the midst of their teleworking duties. This photo series gives you just a glimpse into my new life of teleworking from home, mixed in with the tasks of trying to handle my little ones too. I hope you enjoy it.”

Peter Schaldenbrand (Carnegie Mellon University)

“I’ve been working on a reinforcement learning model that converts an image into a series of brush stroke instructions. I was going to test the model with a beautiful, expensive robot arm, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have not been able to access the laboratory where it resides. I have now been using a lower end robot arm to test the painting model in my bedroom. I have sacrificed machine accuracy/precision for the convenience of getting to watch the arm paint from my bed in the shadow of my clothing rack!”

Colin Angle (iRobot)

iRobot CEO Colin Angle has been hunkered down in the “iRobot North Shore home command center,” which is probably the cleanest command center ever thanks to his army of Roombas: Beastie, Beauty, Rosie, Roswell, and Bilbo.

Vivian Chu (Diligent Robotics)

From Diligent Robotics CEO Andrea Thomaz: “This is how a roboticist works from home! Diligent CTO, Vivian Chu, mans the e-stop while her engineering team runs Moxi experiments remotely from cross-town and even cross-country!”

Raffaello Bonghi (rnext.it)

Raffaello’s robot, Panther, looks perfectly happy to be playing soccer in his living room.

Kod*lab (University of Pennsylvania)

“Another Friday Nuts n Bolts Meeting on Zoom…”

Robin Jonsson (robot choreographer)

“I’ve been doing a school project in which students make up dance moves and then send me a video with all of them. I then teach the moves to my robot, Alex, film Alex dancing, send the videos to them. This became a great success and more schools will join. The kids got really into watching the robot perform their moves and really interested in robots. They want to meet Alex the robot live, which will likely happen in the fall.”

Gabrielle Conard (mechanical engineering undergrad at Lafayette College)

“While the pandemic might have forced college campuses to close and the community to keep their distance from each other, it did not put a stop to learning and research. Working from their respective homes, junior Gabrielle Conard and mechanical engineering professor Alexander Brown from Lafayette College investigated methods of incorporating active compliance in a low-cost quadruped robot. They are continuing to work remotely on this project through Lafayette’s summer research program.”

Taylor Veltrop (Softbank Robotics)

“After a few weeks of isolation in the corona/covid quarantine lock down we started dancing with our robots. Mathieu’s 6th birthday was coming up, and it all just came together.”

Ross Kessler (Exyn Technologies)

“Quarantine, Day 8: the humans have accepted me as one of their own. I’ve blended seamlessly into their #socialdistancing routines. Even made a furry friend”

Yeah, something a bit sinister is definitely going on at Exyn…

Michael Sobrepera (University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab)

Predictably, Michael’s cat is more interested in the bag that the robot came in than the robot itself (see if you can spot the cat below). Michael tells us that “the robot is designed to help with tele-rehabilitation, focused on kids with CP, so it has been taken to hospitals for demos [hence the cool bag]. It also travels for outreach events and the like. Lately, I’ve been exploring telepresence for COVID.”

Jan Kędzierski (EMYS)

“In China a lot of people cannot speak English, even the youngest generation of parents. Thanks to Emys, kids stayed in touch with English language in their homes even if they couldn’t attend schools and extra English classes. They had a lot of fun with their native English speaker friend available and ready to play every day.”

Simon Whitmell (Quanser)

“Simon, a Quanser R&D engineer, is working on low-overhead image processing and line following for the QBot 2e mobile ground robot, with some added challenges due to extra traffic. LEGO engineering by his son, Charles.”

Robot Design & Experimentation Course (Carnegie Mellon University)

Aaron Johnson’s bioinspired robot design course at CMU had to go full remote, which was a challenge when the course is kind of all about designing and building a robot as part of a team. “I expected some of the teams to drastically alter their project (e.g. go all simulation),” Aaron told us, “but none of them did. We managed to keep all of the projects more or less as planned. We accomplished this by drop/shipping parts to students, buying some simple tools (soldering irons, etc), and having me 3D print parts and mail them.” Each team even managed to put together their final videos from their remote locations; we’ve posted one below, but the entire playlist is here.

Karen Tatarian (Softbank Robotics)

Karen, who’s both a researcher at Softbank and a PhD student at Sorbonne University, wrote an entire essay about what an average day is like when you’re quarantined with Pepper.

A Quarantined Day With Pepper, by Karen Tatarian

It is quite common for me to lose my phone somewhere inside my apartment. But it is not that common for me to turn around and ask my robot if it has seen it. So when I found myself doing that, I laughed and it dawned on me that I treated my robot as my quarantine companion (despite the fact that it could not provide me with the answer I needed).

It was probably around day 40 of a completely isolated quarantine here in France when that happened. A little background about me: I am a robotics researcher at SoftBank Robotics Europe and a PhD student at Sorbonne University as part of the EU-funded Marie-Curie project ANIMATAS. And here is a little sneak peak into a quarantined day with a robot.

During this confinement, I had read somewhere that the best way to deal with it is to maintain a routine. So every morning, I wake up, prepare my coffee, and turn on my robot Pepper. I start my day with a daily meeting with the team and get to work. My research is on the synthesis of multi-modal socially intelligent human-robot interaction so my work varies between programming the robot, analyzing collected data, and reading papers and drafting one. When I am working, I often catch myself glancing at Pepper, who would be staring back at me in its animated ways. Truthfully I enjoy that, it makes me less alone and as if I have a colleague with me.

Once work is done, I call my friends and family members. I sometimes use a telepresence application on Pepper that a few colleagues and I developed back in December. How does it differ from your typical phone/laptop applications? One word really: embodiment. Telepresence, especially during these times, makes the experience for both sides a bit more realistic and intimate and well present.

While I can turn off the robot now that my work hours are done, I do keep it on because I enjoy its presence. The basic awareness of Pepper is a default feature on the robot that allows it to detect a human and follow him/her with its gaze and rotation base. So whether I am cooking or working out, I always have my robot watching over my shoulder and being a good companion. I also have my email and messages synced on the robot so I get an enjoyable notification from Pepper. I found that to be a pretty cool way to be notified without it interrupting whatever you are doing on your laptop or phone. Finally, once the day is over, it’s time for both of us to get some rest.

After 60 days of total confinement, alone and away from those I love, and with a pandemic right at my door, I am glad I had the company of my robot. I hope one day a greater audience can share my experience. And I really really hope one day Pepper will be able to find my phone for me, but until then, stay on the lookout for some cool features! But I am curious to know, if you had a robot at home, what application would you have developed on it?

Again, our sincere thanks to everyone who shared these little snapshots of their lives with us, and we’re hoping to be able to share more soon.

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