Tag Archives: hands

#436155 This MIT Robot Wants to Use Your ...

MIT researchers have demonstrated a new kind of teleoperation system that allows a two-legged robot to “borrow” a human operator’s physical skills to move with greater agility. The system works a bit like those haptic suits from the Spielberg movie “Ready Player One.” But while the suits in the film were used to connect humans to their VR avatars, the MIT suit connects the operator to a real robot.

The robot is called Little HERMES, and it’s currently just a pair of little legs, about a third the size of an average adult. It can step and jump in place or walk a short distance while supported by a gantry. While that in itself is not very impressive, the researchers say their approach could help bring capable disaster robots closer to reality. They explain that, despite recent advances, building fully autonomous robots with motor and decision-making skills comparable to those of humans remains a challenge. That’s where a more advanced teleoperation system could help.

The researchers, João Ramos, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Sangbae Kim, director of MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab, describe the project in this week’s issue of Science Robotics. In the paper, they argue that existing teleoperation systems often can’t effectively match the operator’s motions to that of a robot. In addition, conventional systems provide no physical feedback to the human teleoperator about what the robot is doing. Their new approach addresses these two limitations, and to see how it would work in practice, they built Little HERMES.

Image: Science Robotics

The main components of MIT’s bipedal robot Little HERMES: (A) Custom actuators designed to withstand impact and capable of producing high torque. (B) Lightweight limbs with low inertia and fast leg swing. (C) Impact-robust and lightweight foot sensors with three-axis contact force sensor. (D) Ruggedized IMU to estimates the robot’s torso posture, angular rate, and linear acceleration. (E) Real-time computer sbRIO 9606 from National Instruments for robot control. (F) Two three-cell lithium-polymer batteries in series. (G) Rigid and lightweight frame to minimize the robot mass.

Early this year, the MIT researchers wrote an in-depth article for IEEE Spectrum about the project, which includes Little HERMES and also its big brother, HERMES (for Highly Efficient Robotic Mechanisms and Electromechanical System). In that article, they describe the two main components of the system:

[…] We are building a telerobotic system that has two parts: a humanoid capable of nimble, dynamic behaviors, and a new kind of two-way human-machine interface that sends your motions to the robot and the robot’s motions to you. So if the robot steps on debris and starts to lose its balance, the operator feels the same instability and instinctively reacts to avoid falling. We then capture that physical response and send it back to the robot, which helps it avoid falling, too. Through this human-robot link, the robot can harness the operator’s innate motor skills and split-second reflexes to keep its footing.

You could say we’re putting a human brain inside the machine.

Image: Science Robotics

The human-machine interface built by the MIT researchers for controlling Little HERMES is different from conventional ones in that it relies on the operator’s reflexes to improve the robot’s stability. The researchers call it the balance-feedback interface, or BFI. The main modules of the BFI include: (A) Custom interface attachments for torso and feet designed to capture human motion data at high speed (1 kHz). (B) Two underactuated modules to track the position and orientation of the torso and apply forces to the operator. (C) Each actuation module has three DoFs, one of which is a push/pull rod actuated by a DC brushless motor. (D) A series of linkages with passive joints connected to the operator’s feet and track their spatial translation. (E) Real-time controller cRIO 9082 from National Instruments to close the BFI control loop. (F) Force plate to estimated the operator’s center of pressure position and measure the shear and normal components of the operator’s net contact force.

Here’s more footage of the experiments, showing Little HERMES stepping and jumping in place, walking a few steps forward and backward, and balancing. Watch until the end to see a compilation of unsuccessful stepping experiments. Poor Little HERMES!

In the new Science Robotics paper, the MIT researchers explain how they solved one of the key challenges in making their teleoperation system effective:

The challenge of this strategy lies in properly mapping human body motion to the machine while simultaneously informing the operator how closely the robot is reproducing the movement. Therefore, we propose a solution for this bilateral feedback policy to control a bipedal robot to take steps, jump, and walk in synchrony with a human operator. Such dynamic synchronization was achieved by (i) scaling the core components of human locomotion data to robot proportions in real time and (ii) applying feedback forces to the operator that are proportional to the relative velocity between human and robot.

Little HERMES is now taking its first steps, quite literally, but the researchers say they hope to use robotic legs with similar design as part of a more advanced humanoid. One possibility they’ve envisioned is a fast-moving quadruped robot that could run through various kinds of terrain and then transform into a bipedal robot that would use its hands to perform dexterous manipulations. This could involve merging some of the robots the MIT researchers have built in their lab, possibly creating hybrids between Cheetah and HERMES, or Mini Cheetah and Little HERMES. We can’t wait to see what the resulting robots will look like.

[ Science Robotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436149 Blue Frog Robotics Answers (Some of) Our ...

In September of 2015, Buddy the social home robot closed its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign more than 600 percent over its funding goal. A thousand people pledged for a robot originally scheduled to be delivered in December of 2016. But nearly three years later, the future of Buddy is still unclear. Last May, Blue Frog Robotics asked for forgiveness from its backers and announced the launch of an “equity crowdfunding campaign” to try to raise the additional funding necessary to deliver the robot in April of 2020.

By the time the crowdfunding campaign launched in August, the delivery date had slipped again, to September 2020, even as Blue Frog attempted to draw investors by estimating that sales of Buddy would “increase from 2000 robots in 2020 to 20,000 in 2023.” Blue Frog’s most recent communication with backers, in September, mentions a new CTO and a North American office, but does little to reassure backers of Buddy that they’ll ever be receiving their robot.

Backers of the robot are understandably concerned about the future of Buddy, so we sent a series of questions to the founder and CEO of Blue Frog Robotics, Rodolphe Hasselvander.

We’ve edited this interview slightly for clarity, but we should also note that Hasselvander was unable to provide answers to every question. In particular, we asked for some basic information about Blue Frog’s near-term financial plans, on which the entire future of Buddy seems to depend. We’ve left those questions in the interview anyway, along with Hasselvander’s response.

1. At this point, how much additional funding is necessary to deliver Buddy to backers?
2. Assuming funding is successful, when can backers expect to receive Buddy?
3. What happens if the fundraising goal is not met?
4. You estimate that sales of Buddy will increase 10x over three years. What is this estimate based on?

Rodolphe Hasselvander: Regarding the questions 1-4, unfortunately, as we are fundraising in a Regulation D, we do not comment on prospect, customer data, sales forecasts, or figures. Please refer to our press release here to have information about the fundraising.

5. Do you feel that you are currently being transparent enough about this process to satisfy backers?
6. Buddy’s launch date has moved from April 2020 to September 2020 over the last four months. Why should backers remain confident about Buddy’s schedule?

Since the last newsletter, we haven’t changed our communication, the backers will be the first to receive their Buddy, and we plan an official launch in September 2020.

7. What is the goal of My Buddy World?

At Blue Frog, we think that matching a great product with a big market can only happen through continual experimentation, iteration and incorporation of customer feedback. That’s why we created the forum My Buddy World. It has been designed for our Buddy Community to join us, discuss the world’s first emotional robot, and create with us. The objective is to deepen our conversation with Buddy’s fans and users, stay agile in testing our hypothesis and validate our product-market fit. We trust the value of collaboration. Behind Buddy, there is a team of roboticists, engineers, and programmers that are eager to know more about our consumers’ needs and are excited to work with them to create the perfect human/robot experience.

8. How is the current version of Buddy different from the 2015 version that backers pledged for during the successful crowdfunding campaign, in both hardware and software?

We have completely revised some parts of Buddy as well as replaced and/or added more accurate and reliable components to ensure we fully satisfy our customers’ requirements for a mature and high-quality robot from day one. We sourced more innovative components to make sure that Buddy has the most up-to-date technologies such as adding four microphones, a high def thermal matrix, a 3D camera, an 8-megapixel RGB camera, time-of-flight sensors, and touch sensors.
If you want more info, we just posted an article about what is Buddy here.

9. Will the version of Buddy that ships to backers in 2020 do everything that that was shown in the original crowdfunding video?

Concerning the capabilities of Buddy regarding the video published on YouTube, I confirm that Buddy will be able to do everything you can see, like patrol autonomously and secure your home, telepresence, mathematics applications, interactive stories for children, IoT/smart home management, face recognition, alarm clock, reminder, message/photo sharing, music, hands free call, people following, games like hide and seek (and more). In addition, everyone will be able to create their own apps thanks to the “BuddyLab” application.

10. What makes you confident that Buddy will be successful when Jibo, Kuri, and other social robots have not?

Consumer robotics is a new market. Some people think it is a tough one. But we, at Blue Frog Robotics, believe it is a path of learning, understanding, and finding new ways to serve consumers. Here are the five key factors that will make Buddy successful.

1) A market-fit robot

Blue Frog Robotics is a consumer-centric company. We know that a successful business model and a compelling fit to market Buddy must come up from solving consumers’ frustrations and problems in a way that’s new and exciting. We started from there.

By leveraged existing research and syndicated consumer data sets to understand our customers’ needs and aspirations, we get that creating a robot is not about the best tech innovation and features, but always about how well technology becomes a service to one’s basic human needs and assets: convenience, connection, security, fun, self-improvement, and time. To answer to these consumers’ needs and wants, we designed an all-in-one robot with four vital capabilities: intelligence, emotionality, mobility, and customization.

With his multi-purpose brain, he addresses a broad range of needs in modern-day life, from securing homes to carrying out his owners’ daily activities, from helping people with disabilities to educating children, from entertaining to just becoming a robot friend.

Buddy is a disruptive innovative robot that is about to transform the way we live, learn, utilize information, play, and even care about our health.
2) Endless possibilities

One of the major advantages of Buddy is his adaptability. Beyond to be adorable, playful, talkative, and to accompany anyone in their daily life at home whether you are comfortable with technology or not, he offers via his platform applications to engage his owners in a wide range of activities. From fitness to cooking, from health monitoring to education, from games to meditation, the combination of intelligence, sensors, mobility, multi-touch panel opens endless possibilities for consumers and organizations to adapt their Buddy to their own needs.
3) An affordable price

Buddy will be the first robot combining smart, social, and mobile capabilities and a developed platform with a personality to enter the U.S. market at affordable price.

Our competitors are social or assistant robots but rarely both. Competitors differentiate themselves by features: mobile, non-mobile; by shapes: humanoid or not; by skills: social versus smart; targeting a specific domain like entertainment, retail assistant, eldercare, or education for children; and by price. Regarding our six competitors: Moorebot, Elli-Q, and Olly are not mobile; Lynx and Nao are in toy category; Pepper is above $10k targeting B2B market; and finally, Temi can’t be considered an emotional robot.
Buddy remains highly differentiated as an all-in-one, best of his class experience, covering the needs for social interactions and assistance of his owners at each stage of their life at an affordable price.

The price range of Buddy will be between US $1700 and $2000.

4) A winning business model

Buddy’s great business model combines hardware, software, and services, and provides game-changing convenience for consumers, organizations, and developers.

Buddy offers a multi-sided value proposition focused on three vertical markets: direct consumers, corporations (healthcare, education, hospitality), and developers. The model creates engagement and sustained usage and produces stable and diverse cash flow.
5) A Passion for people and technology

From day one, we have always believed in the power of our dream: To bring the services and the fun of an emotional robot in every house, every hospital, in every care house. Each day, we refuse to think that we are stuck or limited; we work hard to make Buddy a reality that will help people all over the world and make them smile.

While we certainly appreciate Hasselvander’s consistent optimism and obvious enthusiasm, we’re obligated to point out that some of our most important questions were not directly answered. We haven’t learned anything that makes us all that much more confident that Blue Frog will be able to successfully deliver Buddy this time. Hasselvander also didn’t address our specific question about whether he feels like Blue Frog’s communication strategy with backers has been adequate, which is particularly relevant considering that over the four months between the last two newsletters, Buddy’s launch date slipped by six months.

At this point, all we can do is hope that the strategy Blue Frog has chosen will be successful. We’ll let you know if as soon as we learn more.

[ Buddy ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436140 Let’s Build Robots That Are as Smart ...

Illustration: Nicholas Little

Let’s face it: Robots are dumb. At best they are idiot savants, capable of doing one thing really well. In general, even those robots require specialized environments in which to do their one thing really well. This is why autonomous cars or robots for home health care are so difficult to build. They’ll need to react to an uncountable number of situations, and they’ll need a generalized understanding of the world in order to navigate them all.

Babies as young as two months already understand that an unsupported object will fall, while five-month-old babies know materials like sand and water will pour from a container rather than plop out as a single chunk. Robots lack these understandings, which hinders them as they try to navigate the world without a prescribed task and movement.

But we could see robots with a generalized understanding of the world (and the processing power required to wield it) thanks to the video-game industry. Researchers are bringing physics engines—the software that provides real-time physical interactions in complex video-game worlds—to robotics. The goal is to develop robots’ understanding in order to learn about the world in the same way babies do.

Giving robots a baby’s sense of physics helps them navigate the real world and can even save on computing power, according to Lochlainn Wilson, the CEO of SE4, a Japanese company building robots that could operate on Mars. SE4 plans to avoid the problems of latency caused by distance from Earth to Mars by building robots that can operate independently for a few hours before receiving more instructions from Earth.

Wilson says that his company uses simple physics engines such as PhysX to help build more-independent robots. He adds that if you can tie a physics engine to a coprocessor on the robot, the real-time basic physics intuitions won’t take compute cycles away from the robot’s primary processor, which will often be focused on a more complicated task.

Wilson’s firm occasionally still turns to a traditional graphics engine, such as Unity or the Unreal Engine, to handle the demands of a robot’s movement. In certain cases, however, such as a robot accounting for friction or understanding force, you really need a robust physics engine, Wilson says, not a graphics engine that simply simulates a virtual environment. For his projects, he often turns to the open-source Bullet Physics engine built by Erwin Coumans, who is now an employee at Google.

Bullet is a popular physics-engine option, but it isn’t the only one out there. Nvidia Corp., for example, has realized that its gaming and physics engines are well-placed to handle the computing demands required by robots. In a lab in Seattle, Nvidia is working with teams from the University of Washington to build kitchen robots, fully articulated robot hands and more, all equipped with Nvidia’s tech.

When I visited the lab, I watched a robot arm move boxes of food from counters to cabinets. That’s fairly straightforward, but that same robot arm could avoid my body if I got in its way, and it could adapt if I moved a box of food or dropped it onto the floor.

The robot could also understand that less pressure is needed to grasp something like a cardboard box of Cheez-It crackers versus something more durable like an aluminum can of tomato soup.

Nvidia’s silicon has already helped advance the fields of artificial intelligence and computer vision by making it possible to process multiple decisions in parallel. It’s possible that the company’s new focus on virtual worlds will help advance the field of robotics and teach robots to think like babies.

This article appears in the November 2019 print issue as “Robots as Smart as Babies.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436042 Video Friday: Caltech’s Drone With ...

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!):

ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Caltech has been making progress on LEONARDO (LEg ON Aerial Robotic DrOne), their leggy thruster powered humanoid-thing. It can now balance and walk, which is quite impressive to see.

We’ll circle back again when they’ve got it jumping and floating around.

[ Caltech ]

Turn the subtitles on to learn how robots became experts at slicing bubbly, melty, delicious cheese.

These robots learned how to do the traditional Swiss raclette from demonstration. The Robot Learning & Interaction group at the Idiap Research Institute has developed an imitation learning technique allowing the robot to acquire new skills by considering position and force information, with an automatic adaptation to new situations. The range of applications is wide, including industrial robots, service robots, and assistive robots.

[ Idiap ]

Thanks Sylvain!

Some amazing news this week from Skydio, with the announcement of their better in every single way Skydio 2 autonomous drone. Read our full article for details, but here’s a getting started video that gives you an overview of what the drone can do.

The first batch sold out in 36 hours, but you can put down a $100 deposit to reserve the $999 drone for 2020 delivery.

[ Skydio ]

UBTECH is introducing a couple new robot kits for the holidays: ChampBot and FireBot.

$130 each, available on October 20.

[ Ubtech ]

NASA’s InSight lander on Mars is trying to use its robotic arm to get the mission’s heat flow probe, or mole, digging again. InSight team engineer Ashitey Trebbi-Ollennu, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, explains what has been attempted and the game plan for the coming weeks. The next tactic they’ll try will be “pinning” the mole against the hole it’s in.

[ NASA ]

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and provide physical affordances. ShapeBots is a concept prototype of shape-changing swarm robots. Each robot can change its shape by leveraging small linear actuators that are thin (2.5 cm) and highly extendable (up to 20cm) in both horizontal and vertical directions.

[ Ryo Suzuki ]

Robot abuse!

Vision 60 legged robot managing unstructured terrain without vision or force sensors in its legs. Using only high-transparency actuators and 2kHz algorithmic stability control… 4-limbs and 12-motors with only a velocity command.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

We asked real people to bring in real products they needed picked for their application. In MINUTES, we assembled the right tool.

This is a cool idea, but for a real challenge they should try it outside a supermarket. Or a pet store.

[ Soft Robotics ]

Good water quality is important to humans and to nature. In a country with as much water as the Netherlands has, ensuring water quality is a very labour-intensive undertaking. To address this issue, researchers from TU Delft have developed a ‘pelican drone’: a drone capable of taking water samples quickly, in combination with a measuring instrument that immediately analyses the water quality. The drone was tested this week at the new Marker Wadden nature area ‘Living Lab’.

[ MAVLab ]

In an international collaboration led by scientists in Switzerland, three amputees merge with their bionic prosthetic legs as they climb over various obstacles without having to look. The amputees report using and feeling their bionic leg as part of their own body, thanks to sensory feedback from the prosthetic leg that is delivered to nerves in the leg’s stump.

[ EPFL ]

It’s a little hard to see, but this is one way of testing out asteroid imaging spacecraft without actually going into space: a fake asteroid and a 2D microgravity simulator.

[ Caltech ]

Drones can help filmmakers do the kinds of shots that would be otherwise impossible.

[ DJI ]

Two long interviews this week from Lex Fridman’s AI Podcast, and both of them are worth watching: Gary Marcus, and Peter Norvig.

[ AI Podcast ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Tucker Hermans at the University of Utah, on “Improving Multi-fingered Robot Manipulation by Unifying Learning and Planning.”

Multi-fingered hands offer autonomous robots increased dexterity, versatility, and stability over simple two-fingered grippers. Naturally, this increased ability comes with increased complexity in planning and executing manipulation actions. As such, I propose combining model-based planning with learned components to improve over purely data-driven or purely-model based approaches to manipulation. This talk examines multi-fingered autonomous manipulation when the robot has only partial knowledge of the object of interest. I will first present results on planning multi-fingered grasps for novel objects using a learned neural network. I will then present our approach to planning in-hand manipulation tasks when dynamic properties of objects are not known. I will conclude with a discussion of our ongoing and future research to further unify these two approaches.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#435828 Video Friday: Boston Dynamics’ ...

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!):

RoboBusiness 2019 – October 1-3, 2019 – Santa Clara, Calif., USA
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

You’ve almost certainly seen the new Spot and Atlas videos from Boston Dynamics, if for no other reason than we posted about Spot’s commercial availability earlier this week. But what, are we supposed to NOT include them in Video Friday anyway? Psh! Here you go:

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Eight deadly-looking robots. One Giant Nut trophy. Tonight is the BattleBots season finale, airing on Discovery, 8 p.m. ET, or check your local channels.

[ BattleBots ]

Thanks Trey!

Speaking of battling robots… Having giant robots fight each other is one of those things that sounds really great in theory, but doesn’t work out so well in reality. And sadly, MegaBots is having to deal with reality, which means putting their giant fighting robot up on eBay.

As of Friday afternoon, the current bid is just over $100,000 with a week to go.

[ MegaBots ]

Michigan Engineering has figured out the secret formula to getting 150,000 views on YouTube: drone plus nail gun.

[ Michigan Engineering ]

Michael Burke from the University of Edinburgh writes:

We’ve been learning to scoop grapefruit segments using a PR2, by “feeling” the difference between peel and pulp. We use joint torque measurements to predict the probability that the knife is in the peel or pulp, and use this to apply feedback control to a nominal cutting trajectory learned from human demonstration, so that we remain in a position of maximum uncertainty about which medium we’re cutting. This means we slice along the boundary between the two mediums. It works pretty well!

[ Paper ] via [ Robust Autonomy and Decisions Group ]

Thanks Michael!

Hey look, it’s Jan with eight EMYS robot heads. Hi, Jan! Hi, EMYSes!

[ EMYS ]

We’re putting the KRAKEN Arm through its paces, demonstrating that it can unfold from an Express Rack locker on the International Space Station and access neighboring lockers in NASA’s FabLab system to enable transfer of materials and parts between manufacturing, inspection, and storage stations. The KRAKEN arm will be able to change between multiple ’end effector’ tools such as grippers and inspection sensors – those are in development so they’re not shown in this video.

[ Tethers Unlimited ]

UBTECH’s Alpha Mini Robot with Smart Robot’s “Maatje” software is offering healthcare service to children at Praktijk Intraverte Multidisciplinary Institution in Netherlands.

This institution is using Alpha Mini in counseling children’s behavior. Alpha Mini can move and talk to children and offers games and activities to stimulate and interact with them. Alpha Mini talks, helps and motivates children thereby becoming more flexible in society.

[ UBTECH ]

Some impressive work here from Anusha Nagabandi, Kurt Konoglie, Sergey Levine, Vikash Kumar at Google Brain, training a dexterous multi-fingered hand to do that thing with two balls that I’m really bad at.

Dexterous multi-fingered hands can provide robots with the ability to flexibly perform a wide range of manipulation skills. However, many of the more complex behaviors are also notoriously difficult to control: Performing in-hand object manipulation, executing finger gaits to move objects, and exhibiting precise fine motor skills such as writing, all require finely balancing contact forces, breaking and reestablishing contacts repeatedly, and maintaining control of unactuated objects. In this work, we demonstrate that our method of online planning with deep dynamics models (PDDM) addresses both of these limitations; we show that improvements in learned dynamics models, together with improvements in online model-predictive control, can indeed enable efficient and effective learning of flexible contact-rich dexterous manipulation skills — and that too, on a 24-DoF anthropomorphic hand in the real world, using just 2-4 hours of purely real-world data to learn to simultaneously coordinate multiple free-floating objects.

[ PDDM ]

Thanks Vikash!

CMU’s Ballbot has a deceptively light touch that’s ideal for leading people around.

A paper on this has been submitted to IROS 2019.

[ CMU ]

The Autonomous Robots Lab at the University of Nevada is sharing some of the work they’ve done on path planning and exploration for aerial robots during the DARPA SubT Challenge.

[ Autonomous Robots Lab ]

More proof that anything can be a drone if you staple some motors to it. Even 32 feet of styrofoam insulation.

[ YouTube ]

Whatever you think of military drones, we can all agree that they look cool.

[ Boeing ]

I appreciate the fact that iCub has eyelids, I really do, but sometimes, it ends up looking kinda sleepy in research videos.

[ EPFL LASA ]

Video shows autonomous flight of a lightweight aerial vehicle outdoors and indoors on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. The vehicle is equipped with limited onboard sensing from a front-facing camera and a proximity sensor. The aerial autonomy is enabled by utilizing a 3D prior map built in Step 1.

[ CMU ]

The Stanford Space Robotics Facility allows researchers to test innovative guidance and navigation algorithms on a realistic frictionless, underactuated system.

[ Stanford ASL ]

In this video, Ian and CP discuss Misty’s many capabilities including robust locomotion, obstacle avoidance, 3D mapping/SLAM, face detection and recognition, sound localization, hardware extensibility, photo and video capture, and programmable personality. They also talk about some of the skills he’s built using these capabilities (and others) and how those skills can be expanded upon by you.

[ Misty Robotics ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Aaron Parness at Caltech and NASA JPL, on “Robotic Grippers for Planetary Applications.”

The previous generation of NASA missions to the outer solar system discovered salt water oceans on Europa and Enceladus, each with more liquid water than Earth – compelling targets to look for extraterrestrial life. Closer to home, JAXA and NASA have imaged sky-light entrances to lava tube caves on the Moon more than 100 m in diameter and ESA has characterized the incredibly varied and complex terrain of Comet 67P. While JPL has successfully landed and operated four rovers on the surface of Mars using a 6-wheeled rocker-bogie architecture, future missions will require new mobility architectures for these extreme environments. Unfortunately, the highest value science targets often lie in the terrain that is hardest to access. This talk will explore robotic grippers that enable missions to these extreme terrains through their ability to grip a wide variety of surfaces (shapes, sizes, and geotechnical properties). To prepare for use in space where repair or replacement is not possible, we field-test these grippers and robots in analog extreme terrain on Earth. Many of these systems are enabled by advances in autonomy. The talk will present a rapid overview of my work and a detailed case study of an underactuated rock gripper for deflecting asteroids.

[ CMU ]

Rod Brooks gives some of the best robotics talks ever. He gave this one earlier this week at UC Berkeley, on “Steps Toward Super Intelligence and the Search for a New Path.”

[ UC Berkeley ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots