Tag Archives: fan
#437805 Video Friday: Quadruped Robot HyQ ...
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!):
RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual 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
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Four-legged HyQ balancing on two legs. Nice results from the team at IIT’s Dynamic Legged Systems Lab. And we can’t wait to see the “ninja walk,” currently shown in simulation, implemented with the real robot!
The development of balance controllers for legged robots with point feet remains a challenge when they have to traverse extremely constrained environments. We present a balance controller that has the potential to achieve line walking for quadruped robots. Our initial experiments show the 90-kg robot HyQ balancing on two feet and recovering from external pushes, as well as some changes in posture achieved without losing balance.
[ IIT ]
Thanks Victor!
Ava Robotics’ telepresence robot has been beheaded by MIT, and it now sports a coronavirus-destroying UV array.
UV-C light has proven to be effective at killing viruses and bacteria on surfaces and aerosols, but it’s unsafe for humans to be exposed. Fortunately, Ava’s telepresence robot doesn’t require any human supervision. Instead of the telepresence top, the team subbed in a UV-C array for disinfecting surfaces. Specifically, the array uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light to kill microorganisms and disrupt their DNA in a process called ultraviolet germicidal irradiation. The complete robot system is capable of mapping the space — in this case, GBFB’s warehouse — and navigating between waypoints and other specified areas. In testing the system, the team used a UV-C dosimeter, which confirmed that the robot was delivering the expected dosage of UV-C light predicted by the model.
[ MIT ]
While it’s hard enough to get quadrupedal robots to walk in complex environments, this work from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich shows some impressive whole body planning that allows ANYmal to squeeze its body through small or weirdly shaped spaces.
[ RSL ]
Engineering researchers at North Carolina State University and Temple University have developed soft robots inspired by jellyfish that can outswim their real-life counterparts. More practically, the new jellyfish-bots highlight a technique that uses pre-stressed polymers to make soft robots more powerful.
The researchers also used the technique to make a fast-moving robot that resembles a larval insect curling its body, then jumping forward as it quickly releases its stored energy. Lastly, the researchers created a three-pronged gripping robot – with a twist. Most grippers hang open when “relaxed,” and require energy to hold on to their cargo as it is lifted and moved from point A to point B. But this claw’s default position is clenched shut. Energy is required to open the grippers, but once they’re in position, the grippers return to their “resting” mode – holding their cargo tight.
[ NC State ]
As control skills increase, we are more and more impressed by what a Cassie bipedal robot can do. Those who have been following our channel, know that we always show the limitations of our work. So while there is still much to do, you gotta like the direction things are going. Later this year, you will see this controller integrated with our real-time planner and perception system. Autonomy with agility! Watch out for us!
[ University of Michigan ]
GITAI’s S1 arm is a little less exciting than their humanoid torso, but it looks like this one might actually be going to the ISS next year.
Here’s how the humanoid would handle a similar task:
[ GITAI ]
Thanks Fan!
If you need a robot that can lift 250 kg at 10 m/s across a workspace of a thousand cubic meters, here’s your answer.
[ Fraunhofer ]
Penn engineers with funding from the National Science Foundation, have nanocardboard plates able to levitate when bright light is shone on them. This fleet of tiny aircraft could someday explore the skies of other worlds, including Mars. The thinner atmosphere there would give the flyers a boost, enabling them to carry payloads ten times as massive as they are, making them an efficient, light-weight alternative to the Mars helicopter.
[ UPenn ]
Erin Sparks, assistant professor in Plant and Soil Sciences, dreamed of a robot she could use in her research. A perfect partnership was formed when Adam Stager, then a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student, reached out about a robot he had a gut feeling might be useful in agriculture. The pair moved forward with their research with corn at the UD Farm, using the robot to capture dynamic phenotyping information of brace roots over time.
[ Sparks Lab ]
This is a video about robot spy turtles but OMG that bird drone landing gear.
[ PBS ]
If you have a DJI Mavic, you now have something new to worry about.
[ DroGone ]
I was able to spot just one single person in the warehouse footage in this video.
[ Berkshire Grey ]
Flyability has partnered with the ROBINS Project to help fill gaps in the technology used in ship inspections. Watch this video to learn more about the ROBINS project and how Flyability’s drones for confined spaces are helping make inspections on ships safer, cheaper, and more efficient.
[ Flyability ]
In this video, a mission of the Alpha Aerial Scout of Team CERBERUS during the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit event is presented. The Alpha Robot operates inside the Satsop Abandoned Power Plant and performs autonomous exploration. This deployment took place during the 3rd field trial of team CERBERUS during the Urban Circuit event of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
[ ARL ]
More excellent talks from the remote Legged Robots ICRA workshop- we’ve posted three here, but there are several other good talks this week as well.
[ ICRA 2020 Legged Robots Workshop ] Continue reading
#437695 Video Friday: Even Robots Know That 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!):
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Online Conference]
Other Than Human – September 3-10, 2020 – Stockholm, Sweden
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.
From the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH comes Flightmare, a simulation environment for drones that combines a slick rendering engine with a robust physics engine that can run as fast as your system can handle.
Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run independently from each other. Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i) a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) an integration with a virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. Flightmare can be used for various applications, including path-planning, reinforcement learning, visual-inertial odometry, deep learning, human-robot interaction, etc.
[ Flightmare ]
Quadruped robots yelling at people to maintain social distancing is really starting to become a thing, for better or worse.
We introduce a fully autonomous surveillance robot based on a quadruped platform that can promote social distancing in complex urban environments. Specifically, to achieve autonomy, we mount multiple cameras and a 3D LiDAR on the legged robot. The robot then uses an onboard real-time social distancing detection system to track nearby pedestrian groups. Next, the robot uses a crowd-aware navigation algorithm to move freely in highly dynamic scenarios. The robot finally uses a crowd aware routing algorithm to effectively promote social distancing by using human-friendly verbal cues to send suggestions to overcrowded pedestrians.
[ Project ]
Thanks Fan!
The Personal Robotics Group at Oregon State University is looking at UV germicidal irradiation for surface disinfection with a Fetch Manipulator Robot.
Fetch Robot disinfecting dance party woo!
[ Oregon State ]
How could you not take a mask from this robot?
[ Reachy ]
This work presents the design, development and autonomous navigation of the alpha-version of our Resilient Micro Flyer, a new type of collision-tolerant small aerial robot tailored to traversing and searching within highly confined environments including manhole-sized tubes. The robot is particularly lightweight and agile, while it implements a rigid collision-tolerant design which renders it resilient during forcible interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the design of the system is enhanced through passive flaps ensuring smoother and more compliant collision which was identified to be especially useful in very confined settings.
[ ARL ]
Pepper can make maps and autonomously navigate, which is interesting, but not as interesting as its posture when it's wandering around.
Dat backing into the charging dock tho.
[ Pepper ]
RatChair a strategy for displacing big objects by attaching relatively small vibration sources. After learning how several random bursts of vibration affect its pose, an optimization algorithm discovers the optimal sequence of vibration patterns required to (slowly but surely) move the object to a specified position.
This is from 2015, why isn't all of my furniture autonomous yet?!
[ KAIST ]
The new SeaDrone Pro is designed to be the underwater equivalent of a quadrotor. This video is a rendering, but we've been assured that it does actually exist.
[ SeaDrone ]
Thanks Eduardo!
Porous Loops is a lightweight composite facade panel that shows the potential of 3D printing of mineral foams for building scale applications.
[ ETH ]
Thanks Fan!
Here's an interesting idea for a robotic gripper- it's what appears to be a snap bracelet coupled to a pneumatic actuator that allows the snap bracelet to be reset.
[ Georgia Tech ]
Graze is developing a commercial robotic lawnmower. They're also doing a sort of crowdfunded investment thing, which probably explains the painfully overproduced nature of the following video:
A couple things about this: the hard part, which the video skips over almost entirely, is the mapping, localization, and understanding where to mow and where not to mow. The pitch deck seems to suggest that this is mostly done through computer vision, a thing that's perhaps easy to do under controlled ideal conditions, but difficult to apply to a world full lawns that are all different. The commercial aspect is interesting because golf courses are likely as standardized as you can get, but the emphasis here on how much money they can make without really addressing any of the technical stuff makes me raise an eyebrow or two.
[ Graze ]
The record & playback X-series arm demo allows the user to record the arm's movements while motors are torqued off. Then, the user may torque the motor's on and watch the movements they just made playback!
[ Interbotix ]
Shadow Robot has a new teleop system for its hand. I'm guessing that it's even trickier to use than it looks.
[ Shadow Robot ]
Quanser Interactive Labs is a collection of virtual hardware-based laboratory activities that supplement traditional or online courses. Same as working with physical systems in the lab, students work with virtual twins of Quanser's most popular plants, develop their mathematical models, implement and simulate the dynamic behavior of these systems, design controllers, and validate them on a high-fidelity 3D real-time virtual models. The virtual systems not only look like the real ones, they also behave, can be manipulated, measured, and controlled like real devices. And finally, when students go to the lab, they can deploy their virtually-validated designs on actual physical equipment.
[ Quanser ]
This video shows robot-assisted heart surgery. It's amazing to watch if you haven't seen this sort of thing before, but be aware that there is a lot of blood.
This video demonstrates a fascinating case of robotic left atrial myxoma excision, narrated by Joel Dunning, Middlesbrough, UK. The Robotic platform provides superior visualisation and enhanced dexterity, through keyhole incisions. Robotic surgery is an integral part of our Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery Program.
[ Tristan D. Yan ]
Thanks Fan!
In this talk, we present our work on learning control policies directly in simulation that are deployed onto real drones without any fine tuning. The presentation covers autonomous drone racing, drone acrobatics, and uncertainty estimation in deep networks.
[ RPG ] Continue reading
#437265 This Russian Firm’s Star Designer Is ...
Imagine discovering a new artist or designer—whether visual art, fashion, music, or even writing—and becoming a big fan of her work. You follow her on social media, eagerly anticipate new releases, and chat about her talent with your friends. It’s not long before you want to know more about this creative, inspiring person, so you start doing some research. It’s strange, but there doesn’t seem to be any information about the artist’s past online; you can’t find out where she went to school or who her mentors were.
After some more digging, you find out something totally unexpected: your beloved artist is actually not a person at all—she’s an AI.
Would you be amused? Annoyed? Baffled? Impressed? Probably some combination of all these. If you wanted to ask someone who’s had this experience, you could talk to clients of the biggest multidisciplinary design company in Russia, Art.Lebedev Studio (I know, the period confused me at first too). The studio passed off an AI designer as human for more than a year, and no one caught on.
They gave the AI a human-sounding name—Nikolay Ironov—and it participated in more than 20 different projects that included designing brand logos and building brand identities. According to the studio’s website, several of the logos the AI made attracted “considerable public interest, media attention, and discussion in online communities” due to their unique style.
So how did an AI learn to create such buzz-worthy designs? It was trained using hand-drawn vector images each associated with one or more themes. To start a new design, someone enters a few words describing the client, such as what kind of goods or services they offer. The AI uses those words to find associated images and generate various starter designs, which then go through another series of algorithms that “touch them up.” A human designer then selects the best options to present to the client.
“These systems combined together provide users with the experience of instantly converting a client’s text brief into a corporate identity design pack archive. Within seconds,” said Sergey Kulinkovich, the studio’s art director. He added that clients liked Nikolay Ironov’s work before finding out he was an AI (and liked the media attention their brands got after Ironov’s identity was revealed even more).
Ironov joins a growing group of AI “artists” that are starting to raise questions about the nature of art and creativity. Where do creative ideas come from? What makes a work of art truly great? And when more than one person is involved in making art, who should own the copyright?
Art.Lebedev is far from the first design studio to employ artificial intelligence; Mailchimp is using AI to let businesses design multi-channel marketing campaigns without human designers, and Adobe is marketing its new Sensei product as an AI design assistant.
While art made by algorithms can be unique and impressive, though, there’s one caveat that’s important to keep in mind when we worry about human creativity being rendered obsolete. Here’s the thing: AIs still depend on people to not only program them, but feed them a set of training data on which their intelligence and output are based. Depending on the size and nature of an AI’s input data, its output will look pretty different from that of a similar system, and a big part of the difference will be due to the people that created and trained the AIs.
Admittedly, Nikolay Ironov does outshine his human counterparts in a handful of ways; as the studio’s website points out, he can handle real commercial tasks effectively, he doesn’t sleep, get sick, or have “crippling creative blocks,” and he can complete tasks in a matter of seconds.
Given these superhuman capabilities, then, why even keep human designers on staff? As detailed above, it will be a while before creative firms really need to consider this question on a large scale; for now, it still takes a hard-working creative human to make a fast-producing creative AI.
Image Credit: Art.Lebedev Continue reading