Tag Archives: black

#437964 How Explainable Artificial Intelligence ...

The field of artificial intelligence has created computers that can drive cars, synthesize chemical compounds, fold proteins, and detect high-energy particles at a superhuman level.

However, these AI algorithms cannot explain the thought processes behind their decisions. A computer that masters protein folding and also tells researchers more about the rules of biology is much more useful than a computer that folds proteins without explanation.

Therefore, AI researchers like me are now turning our efforts toward developing AI algorithms that can explain themselves in a manner that humans can understand. If we can do this, I believe that AI will be able to uncover and teach people new facts about the world that have not yet been discovered, leading to new innovations.

Learning From Experience
One field of AI, called reinforcement learning, studies how computers can learn from their own experiences. In reinforcement learning, an AI explores the world, receiving positive or negative feedback based on its actions.

This approach has led to algorithms that have independently learned to play chess at a superhuman level and prove mathematical theorems without any human guidance. In my work as an AI researcher, I use reinforcement learning to create AI algorithms that learn how to solve puzzles such as the Rubik’s Cube.

Through reinforcement learning, AIs are independently learning to solve problems that even humans struggle to figure out. This has got me and many other researchers thinking less about what AI can learn and more about what humans can learn from AI. A computer that can solve the Rubik’s Cube should be able to teach people how to solve it, too.

Peering Into the Black Box
Unfortunately, the minds of superhuman AIs are currently out of reach to us humans. AIs make terrible teachers and are what we in the computer science world call “black boxes.”

AI simply spits out solutions without giving reasons for its solutions. Computer scientists have been trying for decades to open this black box, and recent research has shown that many AI algorithms actually do think in ways that are similar to humans. For example, a computer trained to recognize animals will learn about different types of eyes and ears and will put this information together to correctly identify the animal.

The effort to open up the black box is called explainable AI. My research group at the AI Institute at the University of South Carolina is interested in developing explainable AI. To accomplish this, we work heavily with the Rubik’s Cube.

The Rubik’s Cube is basically a pathfinding problem: Find a path from point A—a scrambled Rubik’s Cube—to point B—a solved Rubik’s Cube. Other pathfinding problems include navigation, theorem proving and chemical synthesis.

My lab has set up a website where anyone can see how our AI algorithm solves the Rubik’s Cube; however, a person would be hard-pressed to learn how to solve the cube from this website. This is because the computer cannot tell you the logic behind its solutions.

Solutions to the Rubik’s Cube can be broken down into a few generalized steps—the first step, for example, could be to form a cross while the second step could be to put the corner pieces in place. While the Rubik’s Cube itself has over 10 to the 19th power possible combinations, a generalized step-by-step guide is very easy to remember and is applicable in many different scenarios.

Approaching a problem by breaking it down into steps is often the default manner in which people explain things to one another. The Rubik’s Cube naturally fits into this step-by-step framework, which gives us the opportunity to open the black box of our algorithm more easily. Creating AI algorithms that have this ability could allow people to collaborate with AI and break down a wide variety of complex problems into easy-to-understand steps.

A step-by-step refinement approach can make it easier for humans to understand why AIs do the things they do. Forest Agostinelli, CC BY-ND

Collaboration Leads to Innovation
Our process starts with using one’s own intuition to define a step-by-step plan thought to potentially solve a complex problem. The algorithm then looks at each individual step and gives feedback about which steps are possible, which are impossible and ways the plan could be improved. The human then refines the initial plan using the advice from the AI, and the process repeats until the problem is solved. The hope is that the person and the AI will eventually converge to a kind of mutual understanding.

Currently, our algorithm is able to consider a human plan for solving the Rubik’s Cube, suggest improvements to the plan, recognize plans that do not work and find alternatives that do. In doing so, it gives feedback that leads to a step-by-step plan for solving the Rubik’s Cube that a person can understand. Our team’s next step is to build an intuitive interface that will allow our algorithm to teach people how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Our hope is to generalize this approach to a wide range of pathfinding problems.

People are intuitive in a way unmatched by any AI, but machines are far better in their computational power and algorithmic rigor. This back and forth between man and machine utilizes the strengths from both. I believe this type of collaboration will shed light on previously unsolved problems in everything from chemistry to mathematics, leading to new solutions, intuitions and innovations that may have, otherwise, been out of reach.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Serg Antonov / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437745 Video Friday: Japan’s Giant Gundam ...

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!):

AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 2020 – [Online Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online Conference]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nev., USA
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Co., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

It’s coming together—literally! Japan’s giant Gundam appears nearly finished and ready for its first steps. In a recent video, Gundam Factory Yokohama, which is constructing the 18-meter-tall, 25-ton walking robot, provided an update on the project. The video shows the Gundam getting its head attached—after being blessed by Shinto priests.

In the video update, they say the project is “steadily progressing” and further details will be announced around the end of September.

[ Gundam Factory Yokohama ]

Creating robots with emotional personalities will transform the usability of robots in the real-world. As previous emotive social robots are mostly based on statically stable robots whose mobility is limited, this work develops an animation to real-world pipeline that enables dynamic bipedal robots that can twist, wiggle, and walk to behave with emotions.

So that’s where Cassie’s eyes go.

[ Berkeley ]

Now that the DARPA SubT Cave Circuit is all virtual, here’s a good reminder of how it’ll work.

[ SubT ]

Since July 20, anyone 11+ years of age must wear a mask in closed public places in France. This measure also is highly recommended in many European, African and Persian Gulf countries. To support businesses and public places, SoftBank Robotics Europe unveils a new feature with Pepper: AI Face Mask Detection.

[ Softbank ]

University of Michigan researchers are developing new origami inspired methods for designing, fabricating and actuating micro-robots using heat.These improvements will expand the mechanical capabilities of the tiny bots, allowing them to fold into more complex shapes.

[ University of Michigan ]

Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech has created various types of IPMC robots. Those robots are fabricated by novel 3D fabrication methods.

[ Suzimori Endo Lab ]

The most explode-y of drones manages not to explode this time.

[ SpaceX ]

At Amazon, we’re constantly innovating to support our employees, customers, and communities as effectively as possible. As our fulfillment and delivery teams have been hard at work supplying customers with items during the pandemic, Amazon’s robotics team has been working behind the scenes to re-engineer bots and processes to increase safety in our fulfillment centers.

While some folks are able to do their jobs at home with just a laptop and internet connection, it’s not that simple for other employees at Amazon, including those who spend their days building and testing robots. Some engineers have turned their homes into R&D labs to continue building these new technologies to better serve our customers and employees. Their creativity and resourcefulness to keep our important programs going is inspiring.

[ Amazon ]

Australian Army soldiers from 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment (Queensland Mounted Infantry) demonstrated the PD-100 Black Hornet Nano unmanned aircraft vehicle during a training exercise at Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, on 4 May 2018.

This robot has been around for a long time—maybe 10 years or more? It makes you wonder what the next generation will look like, and if they can manage to make it even smaller.

[ FLIR ]

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors whose pixels work independently from each other and respond asynchronously to brightness changes, with microsecond resolution. Their advantages make it possible to tackle challenging scenarios in robotics, such as high-speed and high dynamic range scenes. We present a solution to the problem of visual odometry from the data acquired by a stereo event-based camera rig.

[ Paper ] via [ HKUST ]

Emys can help keep kindergarteners sitting still for a long time, which is not small feat!

[ Emys ]

Introducing the RoboMaster EP Core, an advanced educational robot that was built to take learning to the next level and provides an all-in-one solution for STEAM-based classrooms everywhere, offering AI and programming projects for students of all ages and experience levels.

[ DJI ]

This Dutch food company Heemskerk uses ABB robots to automate their order picking. Their new solution reduces the amount of time the fresh produce spends in the supply chain, extending its shelf life, minimizing wastage, and creating a more sustainable solution for the fresh food industry.

[ ABB ]

This week’s episode of Pass the Torque features NASA’s Satellite Servicing Projects Division (NExIS) Robotics Engineer, Zakiya Tomlinson.

[ NASA ]

Massachusetts has been challenging Silicon Valley as the robotics capital of the United States. They’re not winning, yet. But they’re catching up.

[ MassTech ]

San Francisco-based Formant is letting anyone remotely take its Spot robot for a walk. Watch The Robot Report editors, based in Boston, take Spot for a walk around Golden Gate Park.

You can apply for this experience through Formant at the link below.

[ Formant ] via [ TRR ]

Thanks Steve!

An Institute for Advanced Study Seminar on “Theoretical Machine Learning,” featuring Peter Stone from UT Austin.

For autonomous robots to operate in the open, dynamically changing world, they will need to be able to learn a robust set of skills from relatively little experience. This talk begins by introducing Grounded Simulation Learning as a way to bridge the so-called reality gap between simulators and the real world in order to enable transfer learning from simulation to a real robot. It then introduces two new algorithms for imitation learning from observation that enable a robot to mimic demonstrated skills from state-only trajectories, without any knowledge of the actions selected by the demonstrator. Connections to theoretical advances in off-policy reinforcement learning will be highlighted throughout.

[ IAS ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437693 Video Friday: Drone Helps Explore ...

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!):

ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online Conference]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nev., USA
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online Event]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Clearpath Robotics and Boston Dynamics were obviously destined to partner up with Spot, because Spot 100 percent stole its color scheme from Clearpath, which has a monopoly on yellow and black robots. But seriously, the news here is that thanks to Clearpath, Spot now works seamlessly with ROS.

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

A new video created by Swisscom Ventures highlights a research expedition sponsored by Moncler to explore the deepest ice caves in the world using Flyability’s Elios drone. […] The expedition was sponsored by apparel company Moncler and took place over two weeks in 2018 on the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest body of ice in the world after Antarctica. Research focused on an area about 80 kilometers east of Kangerlussuaq, where scientists wanted to study the movement of water deep underground to better understand the effects of climate change on the melting ice.

[ Flyability ]

Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, whose terrifying haircut machine we featured a few months ago, has improved on his robotic basketball hoop. It’s actually more than an improvement: It’s a complete redesign that nearly drove Wighton insane. But the result is pretty cool. It’s fun to watch him building a highly complicated system while always seeking simple and elegant designs for its components.

[ Stuff Made Here ]

SpaceX rockets are really just giant, explosion-powered drones that go into space sometimes. So let's watch more videos of them! This one is sped up, and puts a flight into just a couple of minutes.

[ SpaceX ]

Neato Robotics makes some solid autonomous vacuums, and these incremental upgrades feature improved battery life and better air filters.

[ Neato Robotics ]

A full-scale engineering model of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover now resides in a garage facing the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

This vehicle system test bed rover (VSTB) is also known as OPTIMISM, which stands for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars. OPTIMISM was built in a warehouselike assembly room near the Mars Yard – an area that simulates the Red Planet's rocky surface. The rover helps the mission test hardware and software before it’s transmitted to the real rover on Mars. OPTIMISM will share the space with the Curiosity rover's twin MAGGIE.

[ JPL ]

Heavy asset industries like shipping, oil and gas, and manufacturing are grounded in repetitive tasks like locating items on large industrial sites — a tedious task that can take as long 45 minutes to find critical items like a forklift in an area that spans the size of multiple football fields. Not only is this work boring, it’s dangerous and inefficient. Robots like Spot, however, love this sort of work.

Spot can provide real-time updates on the location of assets and complete other mundane tasks. In this case, Spot is using software from Cognite to roam the vast shipyard to locate and manage more than 100,000 assets stored across the facility. What used to take humans hours can be managed on an ongoing basis by Spot — leaving employees to focus on more strategic tasks.

[ Cognite ]

The KNEXT Barista system helps high volume premium coffee providers who want to offer artisan coffee specialities in consistent quality.

[ Kuka ]

In this paper, we study this idea of generality in the locomotion domain. We develop a learning framework that can learn sophisticated locomotion behavior for a wide spectrum of legged robots, such as bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds and hexapods, including wheeled variants. Our learning framework relies on a data-efficient, off-policy multi-task RL algorithm and a small set of reward functions that are semantically identical across robots.

[ DeepMind ]

Thanks Dave!

Even though it seems like the real risk of COVID is catching it from another person, robotics companies are doing what they can with UVC disinfecting systems.

[ BlueBotics ]

Aeditive develop robotic 3D printing solutions for the production of concrete components. At the heart of their production plant are two large robots that cooperate to manufacture the component. The automation technology they build on is a robotic shotcrete process. During this process, they apply concrete layer by layer and thus manufacture complete components. This means that their customers no longer dependent on formwork, which is expensive and time-consuming to create. Instead, their customers can manufacture components directly on a steel pallet without these moulds.

[ Aeditive ]

Something BIG is coming next month from Robotiq!

My guess: an elephant.

[ Robotiq ]

TurtleBot3 is a great little home robot, as long as you have a TurtleBot3-sized home.

[ Robotis ]

How do you calculate the coordinated movements of two robot arms so they can accurately guide a highly flexible tool? ETH researchers have integrated all aspects of the optimisation calculations into an algorithm. The hot-​wire cutter will be used, among other things, to develop building blocks for a mortar-​free structure.

[ ETH Zurich ]

And now, this.

[ RobotStart ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437583 Video Friday: Attack of the Hexapod ...

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!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-25, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!

Thanks Hardik!

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Happy Halloween from Berkshire Grey!

[ Berkshire Grey ]

These are some preliminary results of our lab’s new work on using reinforcement learning to train neural networks to imitate common bipedal gait behaviors, without using any motion capture data or reference trajectories. Our method is described in an upcoming submission to ICRA 2021. Work by Jonah Siekmann and Yesh Godse.

[ OSU DRL ]

The northern goshawk is a fast, powerful raptor that flies effortlessly through forests. This bird was the design inspiration for the next-generation drone developed by scientifics of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems of EPFL led by Dario Floreano. They carefully studied the shape of the bird’s wings and tail and its flight behavior, and used that information to develop a drone with similar characteristics.

The engineers already designed a bird-inspired drone with morphing wing back in 2016. In a step forward, their new model can adjust the shape of its wing and tail thanks to its artificial feathers. Flying this new type of drone isn’t easy, due to the large number of wing and tail configurations possible. To take full advantage of the drone’s flight capabilities, Floreano’s team plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into the drone’s flight system so that it can fly semi-automatically. The team’s research has been published in Science Robotics.

[ EPFL ]

Oopsie.

[ Roborace ]

We’ve covered MIT’s Roboats in the past, but now they’re big enough to keep a couple of people afloat.

Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the “half-scale” boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long. The third installment, which is under construction in Amsterdam and is considered to be “full scale,” is 4 meters long and aims to carry anywhere from four to six passengers.

[ MIT ]

With a training technique commonly used to teach dogs to sit and stay, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists showed a robot how to teach itself several new tricks, including stacking blocks. With the method, the robot, named Spot, was able to learn in days what typically takes a month.

[ JHU ]

Exyn, a pioneer in autonomous aerial robot systems for complex, GPS-denied industrial environments, today announced the first dog, Kody, to successfully fly a drone at Number 9 Coal Mine, in Lansford, PA. Selected to carry out this mission was the new autonomous aerial robot, the ExynAero.

Yes, this is obviously a publicity stunt, and Kody is only flying the drone in the sense that he’s pushing the launch button and then taking a nap. But that’s also the point— drone autonomy doesn’t get much fuller than this, despite the challenge of the environment.

[ Exyn ]

In this video object instance segmentation and shape completion are combined with classical regrasp planning to perform pick-place of novel objects. It is demonstrated with a UR5, Robotiq 85 parallel-jaw gripper, and Structure depth sensor with three rearrangement tasks: bin packing (minimize the height of the packing), placing bottles onto coasters, and arrange blocks from tallest to shortest (according to the longest edge). The system also accounts for uncertainty in the segmentation/completion by avoiding grasping or placing on parts of the object where perceptual uncertainty is predicted to be high.

[ Paper ] via [ Northeastern ]

Thanks Marcus!

U can’t touch this!

[ University of Tokyo ]

We introduce a way to enable more natural interaction between humans and robots through Mixed Reality, by using a shared coordinate system. Azure Spatial Anchors, which already supports colocalizing multiple HoloLens and smartphone devices in the same space, has now been extended to support robots equipped with cameras. This allows humans and robots sharing the same space to interact naturally: humans can see the plan and intention of the robot, while the robot can interpret commands given from the person’s perspective. We hope that this can be a building block in the future of humans and robots being collaborators and coworkers.

[ Microsoft ]

Some very high jumps from the skinniest quadruped ever.

[ ODRI ]

In this video we present recent efforts to make our humanoid robot LOLA ready for multi-contact locomotion, i.e. additional hand-environment support for extra stabilization during walking.

[ TUM ]

Classic bike moves from Dr. Guero.

[ Dr. Guero ]

For a robotics company, iRobot is OLD.

[ iRobot ]

The Canadian Space Agency presents Juno, a preliminary version of a rover that could one day be sent to the Moon or Mars. Juno can navigate autonomously or be operated remotely. The Lunar Exploration Analogue Deployment (LEAD) consisted in replicating scenarios of a lunar sample return mission.

[ CSA ]

How exactly does the Waymo Driver handle a cat cutting across its driving path? Jonathan N., a Product Manager on our Perception team, breaks it all down for us.

Now do kangaroos.

[ Waymo ]

Jibo is hard at work at MIT playing games with kids.

Children’s creativity plummets as they enter elementary school. Social interactions with peers and playful environments have been shown to foster creativity in children. Digital pedagogical tools often lack the creativity benefits of co-located social interaction with peers. In this work, we leverage a social embodied robot as a playful peer and designed Escape!Bot, a game involving child-robot co-play, where the robot is a social agent that scaffolds for creativity during gameplay.

[ Paper ]

It’s nice when convenience stores are convenient even for the folks who have to do the restocking.

Who’s moving the crates around, though?

[ Telexistence ]

Hi, fans ! Join the ROS World 2020, opening November 12th , and see the footage of ROBOTIS’ ROS platform robots 🙂

[ ROS World 2020 ]

ML/RL methods are often viewed as a magical black box, and while that’s not true, learned policies are nonetheless a valuable tool that can work in conjunction with the underlying physics of the robot. In this video, Agility CTO Jonathan Hurst – wearing his professor hat at Oregon State University – presents some recent student work on using learned policies as a control method for highly dynamic legged robots.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Here’s an ICRA Legged Robots workshop talk from Marco Hutter at ETH Zürich, on Autonomy for ANYmal.

Recent advances in legged robots and their locomotion skills has led to systems that are skilled and mature enough for real-world deployment. In particular, quadrupedal robots have reached a level of mobility to navigate complex environments, which enables them to take over inspection or surveillance jobs in place like offshore industrial plants, in underground areas, or on construction sites. In this talk, I will present our research work with the quadruped ANYmal and explain some of the underlying technologies for locomotion control, environment perception, and mission autonomy. I will show how these robots can learn and plan complex maneuvers, how they can navigate through unknown environments, and how they are able to conduct surveillance, inspection, or exploration scenarios.

[ RSL ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437571 Video Friday: Snugglebot Is What We All ...

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!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-25, 2020 – [Online]
Robotica 2020 – November 10-14, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Bay Area Robotics Symposium – November 20, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Snugglebot is what we all need right now.

[ Snugglebot ]

In his video message on his prayer intention for November, Pope Francis emphasizes that progress in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) be oriented “towards respecting the dignity of the person and of Creation”.

[ Vatican News ]

KaPOW!

Apparently it's supposed to do that—the disruptor flies off backwards to reduce recoil on the robot, and has its own parachute to keep it from going too far.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Animals have many muscles, receptors, and neurons which compose feedback loops. In this study, we designed artificial muscles, receptors, and neurons without any microprocessors, or software-based controllers. We imitate the reflexive rule observed in walking experiments of cats, as a result, the Pneumatic Brainless Robot II emerged running motion (a leg trajectory and a gait pattern) through the interaction between the body, the ground, and the artificial reflexes. We envision that the simple reflex circuit we discovered will be a candidate for a minimal model for describing the principles of animal locomotion.

Find the paper, “Brainless Running: A Quasi-quadruped Robot with Decentralized Spinal Reflexes by Solely Mechanical Devices,” on IROS On-Demand.

[ IROS ]

Thanks Yoichi!

I have no idea what these guys are saying, but they're talking about robots that serve chocolate!

The world of experience of the Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur of managing director Josef Zotter counts more than 270,000 visitors annually. Since March 2019, this world of chocolate in Bergl near Riegersburg in Austria has been enriched by a new attraction: the world's first chocolate and praline robot from KUKA delights young and old alike and serves up chocolate and pralines to guests according to their personal taste.

[ Zotter ]

This paper proposes a systematic solution that uses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to aggressively and safely track an agile target. The solution properly handles the challenging situations where the intent of the target and the dense environments are unknown to the UAV. The proposed solution is integrated into an onboard quadrotor system. We fully test the system in challenging real-world tracking missions. Moreover, benchmark comparisons validate that the proposed method surpasses the cutting-edge methods on time efficiency and tracking effectiveness.

[ FAST Lab ]

Southwest Research Institute developed a cable management system for collaborative robotics, or “cobots.” Dress packs used on cobots can create problems when cables are too tight (e-stops) or loose (tangling). SwRI developed ADDRESS, or the Adaptive DRESing System, to provide smarter cobot dress packs that address e-stops and tangling.

[ SWRI ]

A quick demonstration of the acoustic contact sensor in the RBO Hand 2. An embedded microphone records the sound inside of the pneumatic finger. Depending on which part of the finger makes contact, the sound is a little bit different. We create a sensor that recognizes these small changes and predicts the contact location from the sound. The visualization on the left shows the recorded sound (top) and which of the nine contact classes the sensor is currently predicting (bottom).

[ TU Berlin ]

The MAVLab won the prize for the “most innovative design” in the IMAV 2018 indoor competition, in which drones had to fly through windows, gates, and follow a predetermined flight path. The prize was awarded for the demonstration of a fully autonomous version of the “DelFly Nimble”, a tailless flapping wing drone.

In order to fly by itself, the DelFly Nimble was equipped with a single, small camera and a small processor allowing onboard vision processing and control. The jury of international experts in the field praised the agility and autonomous flight capabilities of the DelFly Nimble.

[ MAVLab ]

A reactive walking controller for the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative's skinny quadruped.

[ ODRI ]

Mobile service robots are already able to recognize people and objects while navigating autonomously through their operating environments. But what is the ideal position of the robot to interact with a user? To solve this problem, Fraunhofer IPA developed an approach that connects navigation, 3D environment modeling, and person detection to find the optimal goal pose for HRI.

[ Fraunhofer ]

Yaskawa has been in robotics for a very, very long time.

[ Yaskawa ]

Black in Robotics IROS launch event, featuring Carlotta Berry.

[ Black in Robotics ]

What is AI? I have no idea! But these folks have some opinions.

[ MIT ]

Aerial-based Observations of Volcanic Emissions (ABOVE) is an international collaborative project that is changing the way we sample volcanic gas emissions. Harnessing recent advances in drone technology, unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) in the ABOVE fleet are able to acquire aerial measurements of volcanic gases directly from within previously inaccessible volcanic plumes. In May 2019, a team of 30 researchers undertook an ambitious field deployment to two volcanoes – Tavurvur (Rabaul) and Manam in Papua New Guinea – both amongst the most prodigious emitters of sulphur dioxide on Earth, and yet lacking any measurements of how much carbon they emit to the atmosphere.

[ ABOVE ]

A talk from IHMC's Robert Griffin for ICCAS 2020, including a few updates on their Nadia humanoid.

[ IHMC ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots