Tag Archives: Cute
#437918 Video Friday: These Robots Wish You ...
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!):
ICCR 2020 – December 26-29, 2020 – [Online]
HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Look who’s baaaack: Jibo! After being sold (twice?), this pioneering social home robot (it was first announced back in 2014!) now belongs to NTT Disruption, which was described to us as the “disruptive company of NTT Group.” We are all for disruption, so this looks like a great new home for Jibo.
[ NTT Disruption ]
Thanks Ana!
FZI's Christmas Party was a bit of a challenge this year; good thing robots are totally competent to have a part on their own.
[ FZI ]
Thanks Arne!
Do you have a lonely dog that just wants a friend to watch cat videos on YouTube with? The Danish Technological Institute has a gift idea for you.
[ DTI ]
Thanks Samuel!
Once upon a time, not so far away, there was an elf who received a very special gift. Watch this heartwarming story. Happy Holidays from the Robotiq family to yours!
Of course, these elves are not now unemployed, they've instead moved over to toy design full time!
[ Robotiq ]
An elegant Christmas video from the Dynamics System Lab, make sure and watch through the very end for a little extra cheer.
[ Dynamic Systems Lab ]
Thanks Angela!
Usually I complain when robotics companies make holiday videos without any real robots in them, but this is pretty darn cute from Yaskawa this year.
[ Yaskawa ]
Here's our little christmas gift to the fans of strange dynamic behavior. The gyro will follow any given shape as soon as the tip touches its edge and the rotation is fast enough. The friction between tip and shape generates a tangential force, creating a moment such that the gyroscopic reaction pushes the tip towards the shape. The resulting normal force produces a moment that guides the tip along the shape's edge.
[ TUM ]
Happy Holidays from Fanuc!
Okay but why does there have to be an assembly line elf just to put in those little cranks?
[ Fanuc ]
Astrobotic's cute little CubeRover is at NASA busy not getting stuck in places.
[ Astrobotic ]
Team CoSTAR is sharing more of their work on subterranean robotic exploration.
[ CoSTAR ]
Skydio Autonomy Enterprise Foundation (AEF), a new software product that delivers advanced AI-powered capabilities to assist the pilot during tactical situational awareness scenarios and detailed industrial asset inspections. Designed for professionals, it offers an enterprise-caliber flight experience through the new Skydio Enterprise application.
[ Skydio ]
GITAI's S1 autonomous robot will conduct two experiments: IVA (Intra-Vehicular Activity) tasks such as switch and cable operations, and assembly of structures and panels to demonstrate its capability for ISA (In-Space Assembly) tasks. This video was recorded in the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock mock-up facility @GITAI Tokyo office.
[ GITAI ]
It's no Atlas, but this is some impressive dynamic balancing from iCub.
[ IIT ]
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and I don't agree on a lot of things, and I don't agree with a lot of the assumptions made in this video, either. But, here you go!
[ CSKR ]
I don't know much about this robot, but I love it.
[ Columbia ]
Most cable-suspended robots have a very well defined workspace, but you can increase that workspace by swinging them around. Wheee!
[ Laval ]
How you know your robot's got some skill: “to evaluate the performance in climbing over the step, we compared the R.L. result to the results of 12 students who attempted to find the best planning. The RL outperformed all the group, in terms of effort and time, both in continuous (joystick) and partition planning.”
[ Zarrouk Lab ]
In the Spring 2021 semester, mechanical engineering students taking MIT class 2.007, Design and Manufacturing I, will be able to participate in the class’ iconic final robot competition from the comfort of their own home. Whether they take the class virtually or semi-virtually, students will be sent a massive kit of tools and materials to build their own unique robot along with a “Home Alone” inspired game board for the final global competition.
[ MIT ]
Well, this thing is still around!
[ Moley Robotics ]
Manuel Ahumada wrote in to share this robotic Baby Yoda that he put together with a little bit of help from Intel's OpenBot software.
[ YouTube ]
Thanks Manuel!
Here's what Zoox has been working on for the past half-decade.
[ Zoox ] Continue reading
#437807 Why We Need Robot Sloths
An inherent characteristic of a robot (I would argue) is embodied motion. We tend to focus on motion rather a lot with robots, and the most dynamic robots get the most attention. This isn’t to say that highly dynamic robots don’t deserve our attention, but there are other robotic philosophies that, while perhaps less visually exciting, are equally valuable under the right circumstances. Magnus Egerstedt, a robotics professor at Georgia Tech, was inspired by some sloths he met in Costa Rica to explore the idea of “slowness as a design paradigm” through an arboreal robot called SlothBot.
Since the robot moves so slowly, why use a robot at all? It may be very energy-efficient, but it’s definitely not more energy efficient than a static sensing system that’s just bolted to a tree or whatever. The robot moves, of course, but it’s also going to be much more expensive (and likely much less reliable) than a handful of static sensors that could cover a similar area. The problem with static sensors, though, is that they’re constrained by power availability, and in environments like under a dense tree canopy, you’re not going to be able to augment their lifetime with solar panels. If your goal is a long-duration study of a small area (over weeks or months or more), SlothBot is uniquely useful in this context because it can crawl out from beneath a tree to find some sun to recharge itself, sunbathe for a while, and then crawl right back again to resume collecting data.
SlothBot is such an interesting concept that we had to check in with Egerstedt with a few more questions.
IEEE Spectrum: Tell us what you find so amazing about sloths!
Magnus Egerstedt: Apart from being kind of cute, the amazing thing about sloths is that they have carved out a successful ecological niche for themselves where being slow is not only acceptable but actually beneficial. Despite their pretty extreme low-energy lifestyle, they exhibit a number of interesting and sometimes outright strange behaviors. And, behaviors having to do with territoriality, foraging, or mating look rather different when you are that slow.
Are you leveraging the slothiness of the design for this robot somehow?
Sadly, the sloth design serves no technical purpose. But we are also viewing the SlothBot as an outreach platform to get kids excited about robotics and/or conservation biology. And having the robot look like a sloth certainly cannot hurt.
“Slowness is ideal for use cases that require a long-term, persistent presence in an environment, like for monitoring tasks. I can imagine slow robots being out on farm fields for entire growing cycles, or suspended on the ocean floor keeping track of pollutants or temperature variations.”
—Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Tech
Can you talk more about slowness as a design paradigm?
The SlothBot is part of a broader design philosophy that I have started calling “Robot Ecology.” In ecology, the connections between individuals and their environments/habitats play a central role. And the same should hold true in robotics. The robot design must be understood in the environmental context in which it is to be deployed. And, if your task is to be present in a slowly varying environment over a long time scale, being slow seems like the right way to go. Slowness is ideal for use cases that require a long-term, persistent presence in an environment, like for monitoring tasks, where the environment itself is slowly varying. I can imagine slow robots being out on farm fields for entire growing cycles, or suspended on the ocean floor keeping track of pollutants or temperature variations.
How do sloths inspire SlothBot’s functionality?
Its motions are governed by what we call survival constraints. These constraints ensure that the SlothBot is always able to get to a sunny spot to recharge. The actual performance objective that we have given to the robot is to minimize energy consumption, i.e., to simply do nothing subject to the survival constraints. The majority of the time, the robot simply sits there under the trees, measuring various things, seemingly doing absolutely nothing and being rather sloth-like. Whenever the SlothBot does move, it does not move according to some fixed schedule. Instead, it moves because it has to in order to “survive.”
How would you like to improve SlothBot?
I have a few directions I would like to take the SlothBot. One is to make the sensor suites richer to make sure that it can become a versatile and useful science instrument. Another direction involves miniaturization – I would love to see a bunch of small SlothBots “living” among the trees somewhere in a rainforest for years, providing real-time data as to what is happening to the ecosystem. Continue reading
#437733 Video Friday: MIT Media Lab Developing ...
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 – [Online 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, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Very impressive local obstacle avoidance at a fairly high speed on a small drone, both indoors and outdoors.
[ FAST Lab ]
Matt Carney writes:
My PhD at MIT Media Lab has been the design and build of a next generation powered prosthesis. The bionic ankle, named TF8, was designed to provide biologically equivalent power and range of motion for plantarflexion-dorsiflexion. This video shows the process of going from a blank sheet of paper to people walking on it. Shown are three different people wearing the robot. About a dozen people have since been able to test the hardware.
[ MIT ]
Thanks Matt!
Exciting changes are coming to the iRobot® Home App. Get ready for new personalized experiences, improved features, and an easy-to-use interface. The update is rolling out over the next few weeks!
[ iRobot ]
MOFLIN is an AI Pet created from a totally new concept. It possesses emotional capabilities that evolve like living animals. With its warm soft fur, cute sounds, and adorable movement, you’d want to love it forever. We took a nature inspired approach and developed a unique algorithm that allows MOFLIN to learn and grow by constantly using its interactions to determine patterns and evaluate its surroundings from its sensors. MOFLIN will choose from an infinite number of mobile and sound pattern combinations to respond and express its feelings. To put it in simple terms, it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet.
You lost me at “it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet.”
[ Kickstarter ] via [ Gizmodo ]
This video is only robotics-adjacent, but it has applications for robotic insects. With a high-speed tracking system, we can now follow insects as they jump and fly, and watch how clumsy (but effective) they are at it.
[ Paper ]
Thanks Sawyer!
Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech has developed self-excited pneumatic actuators that can be integrally molded by a 3D printer. These actuators use the “automatic flow path switching mechanism” we have devised.
[ Suzimori Endo Lab ]
Quadrupeds are getting so much better at deciding where to step rather than just stepping where they like and trying not to fall over.
[ RSL ]
Omnidirectional micro aerial vehicles are a growing field of research, with demonstrated advantages for aerial interaction and uninhibited observation. While systems with complete pose omnidirectionality and high hover efficiency have been developed independently, a robust system that combines the two has not been demonstrated to date. This paper presents the design and optimal control of a novel omnidirectional vehicle that can exert a wrench in any orientation while maintaining efficient flight configurations.
[ ASL ]
The latest in smooth humanoid walking from Dr. Guero.
[ YouTube ]
Will robots replace humans one day? When it comes to space exploration, robots are our precursors, gathering data to prepare humans for deep space. ESA robotics engineer Martin Azkarate discusses some of the upcoming missions involving robots and the unique science they will perform in this episode of Meet the Experts.
[ ESA ]
The Multi-robot Systems Group at FEE-CTU in Prague is working on an autonomous drone that detects fires and the shoots an extinguisher capsule at them.
[ MRS ]
This experiment with HEAP (Hydraulic Excavator for Autonomous Purposes) demonstrates our latest research in on-site and mobile digital fabrication with found materials. The embankment prototype in natural granular material was achieved using state of the art design and construction processes in mapping, modelling, planning and control. The entire process of building the embankment was fully autonomous. An operator was only present in the cabin for safety purposes.
[ RSL ]
The Simulation, Systems Optimization and Robotics Group (SIM) of Technische Universität Darmstadt’s Department of Computer Science conducts research on cooperating autonomous mobile robots, biologically inspired robots and numerical optimization and control methods.
[ SIM ]
Starting January 1, 2021, your drone platform of choice may be severely limited by the European Union’s new drone regulations. In this short video, senseFly’s Brock Ryder explains what that means for drone programs and operators and where senseFly drones fit in the EU’s new regulatory framework.
[ SenseFly ]
Nearly every company across every industry is looking for new ways to minimize human contact, cut costs and address the labor crunch in repetitive and dangerous jobs. WSJ explores why many are looking to robots as the solution for all three.
[ WSJ ]
You’ll need to prepare yourself emotionally for this video on “Examining Users’ Attitude Towards Robot Punishment.”
[ ACM ]
In this episode of the AI Podcast, Lex interviews Russ Tedrake (MIT and TRI) about biped locomotion, the DRC, home robots, and more.
[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading