Tag Archives: dog

#439946 Video Friday: Your Robot Dog

Posted on November 11, 2021 by Android

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!):

ICRA 2022 – May 23-27, 2022 – Philadelphia, PA, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
I don't know how much this little quadruped from DeepRobotics costs, but the video makes it look scarily close to a consumer product.

Jueying Lite2 is an intelligent quadruped robot independently developed by DeepRobotics. Based on advanced control algorithms, it has multiple motion modes such as walking, sliding, jumping, running, and back somersault. It has freely superimposed intelligent modules, capable of autonomous positioning and navigation, real-time obstacle avoidance, and visual recognition. It has a user-oriented design concept, with new functions such as voice interaction, sound source positioning, and safety and collision avoidance, giving users a better interactive experience and safety assurance.[ DeepRobotics ]
We hope that this video can assist the community in explaining what ROS is, who uses it, and why it is important to those unfamiliar with ROS.https://vimeo.com/639235111/9aa251fdb6
[ ROS.org ]

Boston Dynamics should know better than to post new videos on Fridays (as opposed to Thursday nights, when I put this post together every week), but if you missed this last week, here you go.

Robot choreography by Boston Dynamics and Monica Thomas.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
DeKonBot 2: for when you want things really, really, really, slowly clean.

[ Fraunhofer ]
Who needs Digit when Cassie is still hard at work!

[ Michigan Robotics ]
I am not making any sort of joke about sausage handling.

[ Soft Robotics ]
A squad of mini rovers traversed the simulated lunar soils of NASA Glenn's SLOPE (Simulated Lunar Operations) lab recently. The shoebox-sized rovers were tested to see if they could navigate the conditions of hard-to-reach places such as craters and caves on the Moon.
[ NASA Glenn ]
This little cyclocopter is cute, but I'm more excited for the teaser at the end of the video.

[ TAMU ]
Fourteen years ago, a team of engineering experts and Virginia Tech students competed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge and propelled Torc to success. We look forward to many more milestones as we work to commercialize autonomous trucks.
[ Torc ]
Blarg not more of this…

Show me the robot prepping those eggs and doing the plating, please.
[ Moley Robotics ]
ETH Zurich's unique non-profit project continues! From 25 to 27 October 2024, the third edition of the CYBATHLON will take place in a global format. To the original six disciplines, two more are added: a race using smart visual assistive technologies and a race using assistive robots. As a platform, CYBATHLON challenges teams from around the world to develop everyday assistive technologies for, and in collaboration with, people with disabilities.
[ Cybathlon ]
Will drone deliveries be a practical part of our future? We visit the test facilities of Wing to check out how their engineers and aircraft designers have developed a drone and drone fleet control system that is actually in operation today in parts of the world.
[ Tested ]
In our third Self-Driven Women event, Waymo engineering leads Allison Thackston, Shilpa Gulati, and Congcong Li talk about some of the toughest and most interesting problems in ML and robotics and how it enables building a scalable driving autonomous driving tech stack. They also discuss their respective career journeys, and answer live questions from the virtual audience.
[ Waymo ]
The Robotics and Automation Society Student Activities Committee (RAS SAC) is proud to present “Transition to a Career in Academia,” a panel with robotics thought leaders. This panel is intended for robotics students and engineers interested in learning more about careers in academia after earning their degree. The panel will be moderated by RAS SAC Co-Chair, Marwa ElDinwiny.
[ IEEE RAS ]
This week's CMU RI Seminar is from Siddharth Srivastava at Arizona State, on The Unusual Effectiveness of Abstractions for Assistive AI.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439920 Video Friday: Your Robot Dog

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Android

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!):

ICRA 2022 – May 23-27, 2022 – Philadelphia, PA, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
I don't know how much this little quadruped from DeepRobotics costs, but the video makes it look scarily close to a consumer product.

Jueying Lite2 is an intelligent quadruped robot independently developed by DeepRobotics. Based on advanced control algorithms, it has multiple motion modes such as walking, sliding, jumping, running, and back somersault. It has freely superimposed intelligent modules, capable of autonomous positioning and navigation, real-time obstacle avoidance, and visual recognition. It has a user-oriented design concept, with new functions such as voice interaction, sound source positioning, and safety and collision avoidance, giving users a better interactive experience and safety assurance.[ DeepRobotics ]
We hope that this video can assist the community in explaining what ROS is, who uses it, and why it is important to those unfamiliar with ROS.https://vimeo.com/639235111/9aa251fdb6
[ ROS.org ]

Boston Dynamics should know better than to post new videos on Fridays (as opposed to Thursday nights, when I put this post together every week), but if you missed this last week, here you go.

Robot choreography by Boston Dynamics and Monica Thomas.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
DeKonBot 2: for when you want things really, really, really, slowly clean.

[ Fraunhofer ]
Who needs Digit when Cassie is still hard at work!

[ Michigan Robotics ]
I am not making any sort of joke about sausage handling.

[ Soft Robotics ]
A squad of mini rovers traversed the simulated lunar soils of NASA Glenn's SLOPE (Simulated Lunar Operations) lab recently. The shoebox-sized rovers were tested to see if they could navigate the conditions of hard-to-reach places such as craters and caves on the Moon.
[ NASA Glenn ]
This little cyclocopter is cute, but I'm more excited for the teaser at the end of the video.

[ TAMU ]
Fourteen years ago, a team of engineering experts and Virginia Tech students competed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge and propelled Torc to success. We look forward to many more milestones as we work to commercialize autonomous trucks.
[ Torc ]
Blarg not more of this…

Show me the robot prepping those eggs and doing the plating, please.
[ Moley Robotics ]
ETH Zurich's unique non-profit project continues! From 25 to 27 October 2024, the third edition of the CYBATHLON will take place in a global format. To the original six disciplines, two more are added: a race using smart visual assistive technologies and a race using assistive robots. As a platform, CYBATHLON challenges teams from around the world to develop everyday assistive technologies for, and in collaboration with, people with disabilities.
[ Cybathlon ]
Will drone deliveries be a practical part of our future? We visit the test facilities of Wing to check out how their engineers and aircraft designers have developed a drone and drone fleet control system that is actually in operation today in parts of the world.
[ Tested ]
In our third Self-Driven Women event, Waymo engineering leads Allison Thackston, Shilpa Gulati, and Congcong Li talk about some of the toughest and most interesting problems in ML and robotics and how it enables building a scalable driving autonomous driving tech stack. They also discuss their respective career journeys, and answer live questions from the virtual audience.
[ Waymo ]
The Robotics and Automation Society Student Activities Committee (RAS SAC) is proud to present “Transition to a Career in Academia,” a panel with robotics thought leaders. This panel is intended for robotics students and engineers interested in learning more about careers in academia after earning their degree. The panel will be moderated by RAS SAC Co-Chair, Marwa ElDinwiny.
[ IEEE RAS ]
This week's CMU RI Seminar is from Siddharth Srivastava at Arizona State, on The Unusual Effectiveness of Abstractions for Assistive AI.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439555 Unitree’s Go1 Robot Dog Looks Pretty ...

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Android

In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of “making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones.” Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics’ $74,000 Spot), Unitree’s quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn’t quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they’ve just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700.

Not bad, right? Speedy, good looking gait, robust, and a nifty combination of autonomous human following and obstacle avoidance. As with any product video, it’s important to take everything you see here with a grain of salt, but based on Unitree’s track record we have no particular reason to suspect that there’s much in the way of video trickery going on.

There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu. This looks to be the sort of Goldilocks pricing model, where most people are likely to spring for the middle version Go1, which includes better sensing and compute as well as 50% more battery life an an extra m/s of speed (up to 3.5m/s) for a modest premium in cost. The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access. More detailed specs are here, although if you’re someone who actually cares about detailed robot specs, what you’ll find on Unitree’s website at the moment will probably be a little bit disappointing.

We’ve reached out to Unitree to ask them about some of the specs that aren’t directly addressed on the website. Battery life is a big question—the video seems to suggest that the Go1 is capable of a three-kilometer, 20-minute jog, and then some grocery shopping and a picnic, all while doing obstacle avoidance and person following and with an occasional payload. If all of that is without any battery swaps, that’s pretty good. We’re also wondering exactly what the “Super Sensory System” is, what kinds of tracking and obstacle avoidance and map making skills the Go1 has, and exactly what capabilities you’ll be required to spring for the fancier (and more expensive) versions of the Go1 to enjoy.

Honestly, though, we’re not sure what Unitree could realistically tell us about the Go1 where we’d be like, “hmm okay maybe this isn’t that great of a deal after all.” Of course the real test will be when some non-Unitree folks get a hold of a Go1 to see what it can actually do (Unitree, please contact me for my mailing address), but even at $3500 for the midrange model, this seems like an impressively cost effective little robot.

Update: we contacted Unitree for more details, and they’ve also updated the Go1 website to include the following:

The battery life of the robot while jogging is about 1 hour
It weighs 12kg
The Super Sensory System includes five wide-angle stereo depth cameras, hypersonic distance sensors, and an integrated processing system
It’s running at 16 core CPU and a 1.5 tflop GPU

We also asked Wang Xingxing, Unitree’s CEO, about how they were able to make Go1 so affordable, and here’s what he told us:

Unitree Go1 can be regarded as a product that we have achieved after 6-7 years of iteration at the hardware level, only to achieve the goals of ultra-low cost, high reliability and high performance. Our company actually spent more manpower and money than software on the hardware level such as machinery. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439294 Unitree’s Go1 Robot Dog Looks Pretty ...

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Android

In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of “making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones.” Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics’ $74,000 Spot), Unitree’s quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn’t quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they’ve just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700.

Not bad, right? Speedy, good looking gait, robust, and a nifty combination of autonomous human following and obstacle avoidance. As with any product video, it’s important to take everything you see here with a grain of salt, but based on Unitree’s track record we have no particular reason to suspect that there’s much in the way of video trickery going on.

There are three versions of the Go1: the $2700 base model Go1 Air, the $3500 Go1, and the $8500 Go1 Edu. This looks to be the sort of Goldilocks pricing model, where most people are likely to spring for the middle version Go1, which includes better sensing and compute as well as 50% more battery life an an extra m/s of speed (up to 3.5m/s) for a modest premium in cost. The top of the line Edu model offers higher end computing, 2kg more payload (up to 5kg), as well as foot-force sensors, lidar, and a hardware extension interface and API access. More detailed specs are here, although if you’re someone who actually cares about detailed robot specs, what you’ll find on Unitree’s website at the moment will probably be a little bit disappointing.

We’ve reached out to Unitree to ask them about some of the specs that aren’t directly addressed on the website. Battery life is a big question—the video seems to suggest that the Go1 is capable of a three-kilometer, 20-minute jog, and then some grocery shopping and a picnic, all while doing obstacle avoidance and person following and with an occasional payload. If all of that is without any battery swaps, that’s pretty good. We’re also wondering exactly what the “Super Sensory System” is, what kinds of tracking and obstacle avoidance and map making skills the Go1 has, and exactly what capabilities you’ll be required to spring for the fancier (and more expensive) versions of the Go1 to enjoy.

Honestly, though, we’re not sure what Unitree could realistically tell us about the Go1 where we’d be like, “hmm okay maybe this isn’t that great of a deal after all.” Of course the real test will be when some non-Unitree folks get a hold of a Go1 to see what it can actually do (Unitree, please contact me for my mailing address), but even at $3500 for the midrange model, this seems like an impressively cost effective little robot. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439066 Video Friday: Festo’s BionicSwift

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Android

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!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Festo's Bionic Learning Network for 2021 presents a flock of BionicSwifts.

To execute the flight maneuvers as true to life as possible, the wings are modeled on the plumage of birds. The individual lamellae are made of an ultralight, flexible but very robust foam and lie on top of each other like shingles. Connected to a carbon quill, they are attached to the actual hand and arm wings as in the natural model.

During the wing upstroke, the individual lamellae fan out so that air can flow through the wing. This means that the birds need less force to pull the wing up. During the downstroke, the lamellae close up so that the birds can generate more power to fly. Due to this close-to-nature replica of the wings, the BionicSwifts have a better flight profile than previous wing-beating drives.

[ Festo ]

While we've seen a wide variety of COVID-motivated disinfecting robots, they're usually using either ultraviolet light or a chemical fog. This isn't the way that humans clean—we wipe stuff down, which gets rid of surface dirt and disinfects at the same time. Fraunhofer has been working on a mobile manipulator that can clean in the same ways that we do.

It's quite the technical challenge, but it has the potential to be both more efficient and more effective.

[ Fraunhofer ]

In recent years, robots have gained artificial vision, touch, and even smell. “Researchers have been giving robots human-like perception,” says MIT Associate Professor Fadel Adib. In a new paper, Adib’s team is pushing the technology a step further. “We’re trying to give robots superhuman perception,” he says. The researchers have developed a robot that uses radio waves, which can pass through walls, to sense occluded objects. The robot, called RF-Grasp, combines this powerful sensing with more traditional computer vision to locate and grasp items that might otherwise be blocked from view.

[ MIT ]

Ingenuity is now scheduled to fly on April 11.

[ JPL ]

The legendary Zenta is back after a two year YouTube hiatus with “a kind of freaky furry hexapod bunny creature.”

[ Zenta ]

It is with great pride and excitement that the South Australia Police announce a new expansion to their kennel by introducing three new Police Dog (PD) recruits. These dogs have been purposely targeted to bring a whole new range of dog operational capabilities known as the ‘small area urban search and guided evacuation’ dogs. Police have been working closely with specialist vets and dog trainers to ascertain if the lightweight dogs could be transported safely by drones and released into hard-to-access areas where at the moment the larger PDs just simply cannot get in due to their size.

[ SA Police ]

SoftBank may not have Spot cheerleading robots for their baseball team anymore, but they've more than made up for it with a full century of Peppers. And one dude doing the robot.

[ SoftBank ]

MAB Robotics is a Polish company developing walking robots for inspection, and here's a prototype they've been working on.

[ MAB Robotics ]

Thanks Jakub!

DoraNose: Smell your way to a better tomorrow.

[ Dorabot ]

Our robots need to learn how to cope with their new neighbors, and we have just the solution for this, the egg detector! Using cutting-edge AI, it provides incredible precision in detecting a vast variety of eggs. We have deployed this new feature on Boston Dynamics Spot, one of our fleet's robots. It can now detect eggs with its cameras and avoid them on his autonomous missions.

[ Energy Robotics ]

When dropping a squishy robot from an airplane 1,000 feet up, make sure that you land as close to people's cars as you can.

Now do it from orbit!

[ Squishy Robotics ]

An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms limit these prior approaches from operating in narrow and cluttered environments. We propose a method that introduces a quadrupedal robot with a leash to enable the robot-guiding-human system to change its intrinsic dimension (by letting the leash go slack) in order to fit into narrow spaces.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

How to prove that your drone is waterproof.

[ UNL ]

Well this ought to be pretty good once it gets out of simulation.

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

MIDAS is Aurora’s AI-enabled, multi-rotor sUAV outfitted with optical sensors and a customized payload that can defeat multiple small UAVs per flight with low-collateral effects.

[ Aurora ]

The robots​ of the DFKI have the advantage of being able to reach extreme environments: they can be used for decontamination purposes in high-risk areas or inspect and maintain underwater​ structures, for which they are tested in the North Sea near Heligoland​.

[ DFKI ]

After years of trying, 60 Minutes cameras finally get a peek inside the workshop at Boston Dynamics, where robots move in ways once only thought possible in movies. Anderson Cooper reports.

[ 60 Minutes ]

In 2007, Noel Sharky stated that “we are sleepwalking into a brave new world where robots decide who, where and when to kill.” Since then thousands of AI and robotics researchers have joined his calls to regulate “killer robots.” But sometime this year, Turkey will deploy fully autonomous home-built kamikaze drones on its border with Syria. What are the ethical choices we need to consider? Will we end up in an episode of Black Mirror? Or is the UN listening to calls and starting the process of regulating this space? Prof. Toby Walsh will discuss this important issue, consider where we are at and where we need to go.

[ ICRA 2020 ]

In the second session of HAI's spring conference, artists and technologists discussed how technology can enhance creativity, reimagine meaning, and support racial and social justice. The conference, called “Intelligence Augmentation: AI Empowering People to Solve Global Challenges,” took place on 25 March 2021.

[ Stanford HAI ]

This spring 2021 GRASP SFI comes from Monroe Kennedy III at Stanford University, on “Considerations for Human-Robot Collaboration.”

The field of robotics has evolved over the past few decades. We’ve seen robots progress from the automation of repetitive tasks in manufacturing to the autonomy of mobilizing in unstructured environments to the cooperation of swarm robots that are centralized or decentralized. These abilities have required advances in robotic hardware, modeling, and artificial intelligence. The next frontier is robots collaborating in complex tasks with human teammates, in environments traditionally configured for humans. While solutions to this challenge must utilize all the advances of robotics, the human element adds a unique aspect that must be addressed. Collaborating with a human teammate means that the robot must have a contextual understanding of the task as well as all participant’s roles. We will discuss what constitutes an effective teammate and how we can capture this behavior in a robotic collaborator.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots