Tag Archives: five
#435748 Video Friday: This Robot Is Like a ...
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 2019 – June 22-26, 2019 – Freiburg, Germany
Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 23-26, 2019 – London, U.K.
ETH Robotics Summer School – June 27-1, 2019 – Zurich, Switzerland
MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
It’s been a while since we last spoke to Joe Jones, the inventor of Roomba, about his solar-powered, weed-killing robot, called Tertill, which he was launching as a Kickstarter project. Tertill is now available for purchase (US $300) and is shipping right now.
[ Tertill ]
Usually, we don’t post videos that involve drone use that looks to be either illegal or unsafe. These flights over the protests in Hong Kong are almost certainly both. However, it’s also a unique perspective on the scale of these protests.
[ Team BlackSheep ]
ICYMI: iRobot announced this week that it has acquired Root Robotics.
[ iRobot ]
This Boston Dynamics parody video went viral this week.
The CGI is good but the gratuitous violence—even if it’s against a fake robot—is a bit too much?
This is still our favorite Boston Dynamics parody video:
[ Corridor ]
Biomedical Engineering Department Head Bin He and his team have developed the first-ever successful non-invasive mind-controlled robotic arm to continuously track a computer cursor.
[ CMU ]
Organic chemists, prepare to meet your replacement:
Automated chemical synthesis carries great promises of safety, efficiency and reproducibility for both research and industry laboratories. Current approaches are based on specifically-designed automation systems, which present two major drawbacks: (i) existing apparatus must be modified to be integrated into the automation systems; (ii) such systems are not flexible and would require substantial re-design to handle new reactions or procedures. In this paper, we propose a system based on a robot arm which, by mimicking the motions of human chemists, is able to perform complex chemical reactions without any modifications to the existing setup used by humans. The system is capable of precise liquid handling, mixing, filtering, and is flexible: new skills and procedures could be added with minimum effort. We show that the robot is able to perform a Michael reaction, reaching a yield of 34%, which is comparable to that obtained by a junior chemist (undergraduate student in Chemistry).
[ arXiv ] via [ NTU ]
So yeah, ICRA 2019 was huge and awesome. Here are some brief highlights.
[ Montreal Gazette ]
For about US $5, this drone will deliver raw meat and beer to you if you live on an uninhabited island in Tokyo Bay.
[ Nikkei ]
The Smart Microsystems Lab at Michigan State University has a new version of their Autonomous Surface Craft. It’s autonomous, open source, and awfully hard to sink.
[ SML ]
As drone shows go, this one is pretty good.
[ CCTV ]
Here’s a remote controlled robot shooting stuff with a very large gun.
[ HDT ]
Over a period of three quarters (September 2018 thru May 2019), we’ve had the opportunity to work with five graduating University of Denver students as they brought their idea for a Misty II arm extension to life.
[ Misty Robotics ]
If you wonder how it looks to inspect burners and superheaters of a boiler with an Elios 2, here you are! This inspection was performed by Svenska Elektrod in a peat-fired boiler for Vattenfall in Sweden. Enjoy!
[ Flyability ]
The newest Soft Robotics technology, mGrip mini fingers, made for tight spaces, small packaging, and delicate items, giving limitless opportunities for your applications.
[ Soft Robotics ]
What if legged robots were able to generate dynamic motions in real-time while interacting with a complex environment? Such technology would represent a significant step forward the deployment of legged systems in real world scenarios. This means being able to replace humans in the execution of dangerous tasks and to collaborate with them in industrial applications.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers from all the relevant communities in legged locomotion such as: numerical optimization, machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC) and computational geometry in order to chart the most promising methods to address the above-mentioned scientific challenges.
[ Num Opt Wkshp ]
Army researchers teamed with the U.S. Marine Corps to fly and test 3-D printed quadcopter prototypes a the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California recently.
[ CCDC ARL ]
Lex Fridman’s Artificial Intelligence podcast featuring Rosalind Picard.
[ AI Podcast ]
In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, per speaks with Christian Guttmann, executive director of the Nordic AI Artificial Intelligence Institute.
Christian Guttmann talks about AI and wanting to understand intelligence enough to recreate it. Christian has be focusing on AI in healthcare and has recently started to communicate the opportunities and challenges in artificial intelligence to the general public. This is something that the host Per Sjöborg is also very passionate about. We also get to hear about the Nordic AI institute and the work it does to inform all parts of society about AI.
[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading
#435722 Stochastic Robots Use Randomness to ...
The idea behind swarm robots is to replace discrete, expensive, breakable uni-tasking components with a whole bunch of much simpler, cheaper, and replaceable robots that can work together to do the same sorts of tasks. Unfortunately, all of those swarm robots end up needing their own computing and communications and stuff if you want to get them to do what you want them to do.
A different approach to swarm robotics is to use a swarm of much cheaper robots that are far less intelligent. In fact, they may not have to be intelligent at all, if you can rely on their physical characteristics to drive them instead. These swarms are “stochastic,” meaning that their motions are randomly determined, but if you’re clever and careful, you can still get them to do specific things.
Georgia Tech has developed some little swarm robots called “smarticles” that can’t really do much at all on their own, but once you put them together into a jumble, their randomness can actually accomplish something.
Honestly, calling these particle robots “smart” might be giving them a bit too much credit, because they’re actually kind of dumb and strictly speaking not capable of all that much on their own. A single smarticle weighs 35 grams, and consists of some little 3D-printed flappy bits attached to servos, plus an Arduino Pro Mini, a battery, and a light or sound sensor. When its little flappy bits are activated, each smarticle can move slightly, but a single one mostly just moves around in a square and then will gradually drift in a mostly random direction over time.
It gets more interesting when you throw a whole bunch of smarticles into a constrained area. A small collection of five or 10 smarticles constrained together form a “supersmarticle,” but besides being in close proximity to one another, the smarticles within the supersmarticle aren’t communicating or anything like that. As far as each smarticle is concerned, they’re independent, but weirdly, a bumble of them can work together without working together.
“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The researchers noticed that if one small robot stopped moving, perhaps because its battery died, the group of smarticles would begin moving in the direction of that stalled robot. Graduate student Ross Warkentin learned he could control the movement by adding photo sensors to the robots that halt the arm flapping when a strong beam of light hits one of them.
“If you angle the flashlight just right, you can highlight the robot you want to be inactive, and that causes the ring to lurch toward or away from it, even though no robots are programmed to move toward the light,” Goldman said. “That allowed steering of the ensemble in a very rudimentary, stochastic way.”
It turns out that it’s possible to model this behavior, and control a supersmarticle with enough fidelity to steer it through a maze. And while these particular smarticles aren’t all that small, strictly speaking, the idea is to develop techniques that will work when robots are scaled way way down to the point where you can't physically fit useful computing in there at all.
The researchers are also working on some other concepts, like these:
Image: Science Robotics
The Georgia Tech researchers envision stochastic robot swarms that don’t have a perfectly defined shape or delineation but are capable of self-propulsion, relying on the ensemble-level behaviors that lead to collective locomotion. In such a robot, the researchers say, groups of largely generic agents may be able to achieve complex goals, as observed in biological collectives.
Er, yeah. I’m…not sure I really want there to be a bipedal humanoid robot built out of a bunch of tiny robots. Like, that seems creepy somehow, you know? I’m totally okay with slugs, but let’s not get crazy.
“A robot made of robots: Emergent transport and control of a smarticle ensemble, by William Savoie, Thomas A. Berrueta, Zachary Jackson, Ana Pervan, Ross Warkentin, Shengkai Li, Todd D. Murphey, Kurt Wiesenfeld, and Daniel I. Goldman” from the Georgia Institute of Technology, appears in the current issue of Science Robotics. Continue reading