Tag Archives: fighting
#437643 Video Friday: Matternet Launches Urban ...
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]
Bay Area Robotics Symposium – November 20, 2020 – [Online]
ACRA 2020 – December 8-10, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Sixteen teams chose their roster of virtual robots and sensor payloads, some based on real-life subterranean robots, and submitted autonomy and mapping algorithms that SubT Challenge officials then tested across eight cave courses in the cloud-based SubT Simulator. Their robots traversed the cave environments autonomously, without any input or adjustments from human operators. The Cave Circuit Virtual Competition teams earned points by correctly finding, identifying, and localizing up to 20 artifacts hidden in the cave courses within five-meter accuracy.
[ SubT ]
This year, the KUKA Innovation Award’s international jury of experts received a total of more than 40 ideas. The five finalist teams had time until November to implement their ideas. A KUKA LBR Med lightweight robot – the first robotic component to be certified for integration into a medical device – has been made available to them for this purpose. Beyond this, the teams have received a training for the hardware and coaching from KUKA experts throughout the competition. At virtual.MEDICA from 16-19.11.2020, the finalists presented their concepts to an international audience of experts and to the Innovation Award jury.
The winner of the KUKA Innovation Award 2020, worth 20,000 euros, is Team HIFUSK from the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy.
[ KUKA Innovation Award ]
Like everything else the in-person Cybathlon event was cancelled, but the competition itself took place, just a little more distributed than it would have been otherwise.
[ Cybathlon ]
Matternet, developer of the world's leading urban drone logistics platform, today announced the launch of operations at Labor Berlin Charité Vivantes in Germany. The program kicked-off November 17, 2020 with permanent operations expected to take flight next year, creating the first urban BVLOS [Beyond Visual Line of Sight] medical drone delivery network in the European Union. The drone network expects to significantly improve the timeliness and efficiency of Labor Berlin’s diagnostics services by providing an option to avoid roadway delays, which will improve patient experience with potentially life-saving benefits and lower costs.
Routine BVLOS over an urban area? Impressive.
[ Matternet ]
Robots playing diabolo!
Thanks Thilo!
[ OMRON Sinic X]
Anki's tech has been repackaged into this robot that serves butter:
[ Butter Robot ]
Berkshire Grey just announced our Picking With Purpose Program in which we’ve partnered our robotic automation solutions with food rescue organizations City Harvest and The Greater Boston Food Bank to pick, pack, and distribute food to families in need in time for Thanksgiving. Berkshire Grey donated about 40,000 pounds of food, used one of our robotic automation systems to pick and pack that food into meal boxes for families in need, and our team members volunteered to run the system. City Harvest and The Greater Boston Food Bank are distributing the 4,000 meal boxes we produced. This is just the beginning. We are building a sponsorship program to make Picking With Purpose an ongoing initiative.
[ Berkshire Grey ]
Thanks Peter!
We posted a video previously of Cassie learning to skip, but here's a much more detailed look (accompanying an ICRA submission) that includes some very impressive stair descending.
[ DRL ]
From garage inventors to university students and entrepreneurs, NASA is looking for ideas on how to excavate the Moon’s icy regolith, or dirt, and deliver it to a hypothetical processing plant at the lunar South Pole. The NASA Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, a NASA Centennial Challenge, is now open for registration. The competition will take place over two phases and will reward new ideas and approaches for a system architecture capable of excavating and moving icy regolith and water on the lunar surface.
[ NASA ]
Adaptation to various scene configurations and object properties, stability and dexterity in robotic grasping manipulation is far from explored. This work presents an origami-based shape morphing fingertip design to actively tackle the grasping stability and dexterity problems. The proposed fingertip utilizes origami as its skeleton providing degrees of freedom at desired positions and motor-driven four-bar-linkages as its transmission components to achieve a compact size of the fingertip.
[ Paper ]
“If Roboy crashes… you die.”
[ Roboy ]
Traditionally lunar landers, as well as other large space exploration vehicles, are powered by solar arrays or small nuclear reactors. Rovers and small robots, however, are not big enough to carry their own dedicated power supplies and must be tethered to their larger counterparts via electrical cables. Tethering severely restricts mobility, and cables are prone to failure due to lunar dust (regolith) interfering with electrical contact points. Additionally, as robots become smaller and more complex, they are fitted with additional sensors that require more power, further exacerbating the problem. Lastly, solar arrays are not viable for charging during the lunar night. WiBotic is developing rapid charging systems and energy monitoring base stations for lunar robots, including the CubeRover – a shoebox-sized robot designed by Astrobotic – that will operate autonomously and charge wirelessly on the Moon.
[ WiBotic ]
Watching pick and place robots is my therapy.
[ Soft Robotics ]
It's really, really hard to beat liquid fuel for energy storage, as Quaternium demonstrates with their hybrid drone.
[ Quaternium ]
Thanks Gregorio!
State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare.
[ Flightmare ]
Drones that chuck fire-fighting balls into burning buildings, sure!
[ LARICS ]
If you missed ROS World, that's okay, because all of the talks are now online. Here's the opening keynote from Vivian Chu and Diligent robotics, along with a couple fun lightning talks.
[ ROS World 2020 ]
This week's CMU RI Seminar is by Chelsea Finn from Stanford University, on Data Scalability for Robot Learning.
Recent progress in robot learning has demonstrated how robots can acquire complex manipulation skills from perceptual inputs through trial and error, particularly with the use of deep neural networks. Despite these successes, the generalization and versatility of robots across environment conditions, tasks, and objects remains a major challenge. And, unfortunately, our existing algorithms and training set-ups are not prepared to tackle such challenges, which demand large and diverse sets of tasks and experiences. In this talk, I will discuss two central challenges that pertain to data scalability: first, acquiring large datasets of diverse and useful interactions with the world, and second, developing algorithms that can learn from such datasets. Then, I will describe multiple approaches that we might take to rethink our algorithms and data pipelines to serve these goals. This will include algorithms that allow a real robot to explore its environment in a targeted manner with minimal supervision, approaches that can perform robot reinforcement learning with videos of human trial-and-error experience, and visual model-based RL approaches that are not bottlenecked by their capacity to model everything about the world.
[ CMU RI ] Continue reading
#437554 Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic
Photo: F.J. Jimenez/Getty Images
The approach of a new year is always a time to take stock and be hopeful. This year, though, reflection and hope are more than de rigueur—they’re rejuvenating. We’re coming off a year in which doctors, engineers, and scientists took on the most dire public threat in decades, and in the new year we’ll see the greatest results of those global efforts. COVID-19 vaccines are just months away, and biomedical testing is being revolutionized.
At IEEE Spectrum we focus on the high-tech solutions: Can artificial intelligence (AI) be used to diagnose COVID-19 using cough recordings? Can mathematical modeling determine whether preventive measures against COVID-19 work? Can big data and AI provide accurate pandemic forecasting?
Consider our story “AI Recognizes COVID-19 in the Sound of a Cough,” reported by Megan Scudellari in our Human OS blog. Using a cellphone-recorded cough, machine-learning models can now detect coronavirus with 90 percent accuracy, even in people with no symptoms. It’s a remarkable research milestone. This AI model sifts through hundreds of factors to distinguish the COVID-19 cough from those of bronchitis, whooping cough, and asthma.
But while such high-tech triumphs give us hope, the no-tech solutions are mostly what we have to work with. Soon, as our Numbers Don’t Lie columnist, Vaclav Smil, pointed out in a recent email, we will have near-instantaneous home testing, and we will have an ability to use big data to crunch every move and every outbreak. But we are nowhere near that yet. So let’s use, as he says, some old-fashioned kindergarten epidemiology, the no-tech measures, while we work to get there:
Masks: Wear them. If we all did so, we could cut transmission by two-thirds, perhaps even 80 percent.
Hands: Wash them.
Social distancing: If we could all stay home for two weeks, we could see enormous declines in COVID-19 transmission.
These are all time-tested solutions, proven effective ages ago in countless outbreaks of diseases including typhoid and cholera. They’re inexpensive and easy to prescribe, and the regimens are easy to follow.
The conflict between public health and individual rights and privacy, however, is less easy to resolve. Even during the pandemic of 1918–19, there was widespread resistance to mask wearing and social distancing. Fifty million people died—675,000 in the United States alone. Today, we are up to 240,000 deaths in the United States, and the end is not in sight. Antiflu measures were framed in 1918 as a way to protect the troops fighting in World War I, and people who refused to wear masks were called out as “dangerous slackers.” There was a world war, and yet it was still hard to convince people of the need for even such simple measures.
Personally, I have found the resistance to these easy fixes startling. I wouldn’t want maskless, gloveless doctors taking me through a surgical procedure. Or waltzing in from lunch without washing their hands. I’m sure you wouldn’t, either.
Science-based medicine has been one of the world’s greatest and most fundamental advances. In recent years, it has been turbocharged by breakthroughs in genetics technologies, advanced materials, high-tech diagnostics, and implants and other electronics-based interventions. Such leaps have already saved untold lives, but there’s much more to be done. And there will be many more pandemics ahead for humanity.
< Back to IEEE COVID-19 Resources Continue reading