Tag Archives: history

#437630 How Toyota Research Envisions the Future ...

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Android

Yesterday, the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) showed off some of the projects that it’s been working on recently, including a ceiling-mounted robot that could one day help us with household chores. That system is just one example of how TRI envisions the future of robotics and artificial intelligence. As TRI CEO Gill Pratt told us, the company is focusing on robotics and AI technology for “amplifying, rather than replacing, human beings.” In other words, Toyota wants to develop robots not for convenience or to do our jobs for us, but rather to allow people to continue to live and work independently even as we age.

To better understand Toyota’s vision of robotics 15 to 20 years from now, it’s worth watching the 20-minute video below, which depicts various scenarios “where the application of robotic capabilities is enabling members of an aging society to live full and independent lives in spite of the challenges that getting older brings.” It’s a long video, but it helps explains TRI’s perspective on how robots will collaborate with humans in our daily lives over the next couple of decades.

Those are some interesting conceptual telepresence-controlled bipeds they’ve got running around in that video, right?

For more details, we sent TRI some questions on how it plans to go from concepts like the ones shown in the video to real products that can be deployed in human environments. Below are answers from TRI CEO Gill Pratt, who is also chief scientist for Toyota Motor Corp.; Steffi Paepcke, senior UX designer at TRI; and Max Bajracharya, VP of robotics at TRI.

IEEE Spectrum: TRI seems to have a more explicit focus on eventual commercialization than most of the robotics research that we cover. At what point TRI starts to think about things like reliability and cost?

Photo: TRI

Toyota is exploring robots capable of manipulating dishes in a sink and a dishwasher, performing experiments and simulations to make sure that the robots can handle a wide range of conditions.

Gill Pratt: It’s a really interesting question, because the normal way to think about this would be to say, well, both reliability and cost are product development tasks. But actually, we need to think about it at the earliest possible stage with research as well. The hardware that we use in the laboratory for doing experiments, we don’t worry about cost there, or not nearly as much as you’d worry about for a product. However, in terms of what research we do, we very much have to think about, is it possible (if the research is successful) for it to end up in a product that has a reasonable cost. Because if a customer can’t afford what we come up with, maybe it has some academic value but it’s not actually going to make a difference in their quality of life in the real world. So we think about cost very much from the beginning.

The same is true with reliability. Right now, we’re working very hard to make our control techniques robust to wide variations in the environment. For instance, in work that Russ Tedrake is doing with manipulating dishes in a sink and a dishwasher, both in physical testing and in simulation, we’re doing thousands and now millions of different experiments to make sure that we can handle the edge cases and it works over a very wide range of conditions.

A tremendous amount of work that we do is trying to bring robotics out of the age of doing demonstrations. There’s been a history of robotics where for some time, things have not been reliable, so we’d catch the robot succeeding just once and then show that video to the world, and people would get the mis-impression that it worked all of the time. Some researchers have been very good about showing the blooper reel too, to show that some of the time, robots don’t work.

“A tremendous amount of work that we do is trying to bring robotics out of the age of doing demonstrations. There’s been a history of robotics where for some time, things have not been reliable, so we’d catch the robot succeeding just once and then show that video to the world, and people would get the mis-impression that it worked all of the time.”
—Gill Pratt, TRI

In the spirit of sharing things that didn’t work, can you tell us a bit about some of the robots that TRI has had under development that didn’t make it into the demo yesterday because they were abandoned along the way?

Steffi Paepcke: We’re really looking at how we can connect people; it can be hard to stay in touch and see our loved ones as much as we would like to. There have been a few prototypes that we’ve worked on that had to be put on the shelf, at least for the time being. We were exploring how to use light so that people could be ambiently aware of one another across distances. I was very excited about that—the internal name was “glowing orb.” For a variety of reasons, it didn’t work out, but it was really fascinating to investigate different modalities for keeping in touch.

Another prototype we worked on—we found through our research that grocery shopping is obviously an important part of life, and for a lot of older adults, it’s not necessarily the right answer to always have groceries delivered. Getting up and getting out of the house keeps you physically active, and a lot of people prefer to continue doing it themselves. But it can be challenging, especially if you’re purchasing heavy items that you need to transport. We had a prototype that assisted with grocery shopping, but when we pivoted our focus to Japan, we found that the inside of a Japanese home really needs to stay inside, and the outside needs to stay outside, so a robot that traverses both domains is probably not the right fit for a Japanese audience, and those were some really valuable lessons for us.

Photo: TRI

Toyota recently demonstrated a gantry robot that would hang from the ceiling to perform tasks like wiping surfaces and clearing clutter.

I love that TRI is exploring things like the gantry robot both in terms of near-term research and as part of its long-term vision, but is a robot like this actually worth pursuing? Or more generally, what’s the right way to compromise between making an environment robot friendly, and asking humans to make changes to their homes?

Max Bajracharya: We think a lot about the problems that we’re trying to address in a holistic way. We don’t want to just give people a robot, and assume that they’re not going to change anything about their lifestyle. We have a lot of evidence from people who use automated vacuum cleaners that people will adapt to the tools you give them, and they’ll change their lifestyle. So we want to think about what is that trade between changing the environment, and giving people robotic assistance and tools.

We certainly think that there are ways to make the gantry system plausible. The one you saw today is obviously a prototype and does require significant infrastructure. If we’re going to retrofit a home, that isn’t going to be the way to do it. But we still feel like we’re very much in the prototype phase, where we’re trying to understand whether this is worth it to be able to bypass navigation challenges, and coming up with the pros and cons of the gantry system. We’re evaluating whether we think this is the right approach to solving the problem.

To what extent do you think humans should be either directly or indirectly in the loop with home and service robots?

Bajracharya: Our goal is to amplify people, so achieving this is going to require robots to be in a loop with people in some form. One thing we have learned is that using people in a slow loop with robots, such as teaching them or helping them when they make mistakes, gives a robot an important advantage over one that has to do everything perfectly 100 percent of the time. In unstructured human environments, robots are going to encounter corner cases, and are going to need to learn to adapt. People will likely play an important role in helping the robots learn. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437620 The Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just ...

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Android

The history of computer chips is a thrilling tale of extreme miniaturization.

The smaller, the better is a trend that’s given birth to the digital world as we know it. So, why on earth would you want to reverse course and make chips a lot bigger? Well, while there’s no particularly good reason to have a chip the size of an iPad in an iPad, such a chip may prove to be genius for more specific uses, like artificial intelligence or simulations of the physical world.

At least, that’s what Cerebras, the maker of the biggest computer chip in the world, is hoping.

The Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine is massive any way you slice it. The chip is 8.5 inches to a side and houses 1.2 trillion transistors. The next biggest chip, NVIDIA’s A100 GPU, measures an inch to a side and has a mere 54 billion transistors. The former is new, largely untested and, so far, one-of-a-kind. The latter is well-loved, mass-produced, and has taken over the world of AI and supercomputing in the last decade.

So can Goliath flip the script on David? Cerebras is on a mission to find out.

Big Chips Beyond AI
When Cerebras first came out of stealth last year, the company said it could significantly speed up the training of deep learning models.

Since then, the WSE has made its way into a handful of supercomputing labs, where the company’s customers are putting it through its paces. One of those labs, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, is looking to see what it can do beyond AI.

So, in a recent trial, researchers pitted the chip—which is housed in an all-in-one system about the size of a dorm room mini-fridge called the CS-1—against a supercomputer in a fluid dynamics simulation. Simulating the movement of fluids is a common supercomputer application useful for solving complex problems like weather forecasting and airplane wing design.

The trial was described in a preprint paper written by a team led by Cerebras’s Michael James and NETL’s Dirk Van Essendelft and presented at the supercomputing conference SC20 this week. The team said the CS-1 completed a simulation of combustion in a power plant roughly 200 times faster than it took the Joule 2.0 supercomputer to do a similar task.

The CS-1 was actually faster-than-real-time. As Cerebrus wrote in a blog post, “It can tell you what is going to happen in the future faster than the laws of physics produce the same result.”

The researchers said the CS-1’s performance couldn’t be matched by any number of CPUs and GPUs. And CEO and cofounder Andrew Feldman told VentureBeat that would be true “no matter how large the supercomputer is.” At a point, scaling a supercomputer like Joule no longer produces better results in this kind of problem. That’s why Joule’s simulation speed peaked at 16,384 cores, a fraction of its total 86,400 cores.

A comparison of the two machines drives the point home. Joule is the 81st fastest supercomputer in the world, takes up dozens of server racks, consumes up to 450 kilowatts of power, and required tens of millions of dollars to build. The CS-1, by comparison, fits in a third of a server rack, consumes 20 kilowatts of power, and sells for a few million dollars.

While the task is niche (but useful) and the problem well-suited to the CS-1, it’s still a pretty stunning result. So how’d they pull it off? It’s all in the design.

Cut the Commute
Computer chips begin life on a big piece of silicon called a wafer. Multiple chips are etched onto the same wafer and then the wafer is cut into individual chips. While the WSE is also etched onto a silicon wafer, the wafer is left intact as a single, operating unit. This wafer-scale chip contains almost 400,000 processing cores. Each core is connected to its own dedicated memory and its four neighboring cores.

Putting that many cores on a single chip and giving them their own memory is why the WSE is bigger; it’s also why, in this case, it’s better.

Most large-scale computing tasks depend on massively parallel processing. Researchers distribute the task among hundreds or thousands of chips. The chips need to work in concert, so they’re in constant communication, shuttling information back and forth. A similar process takes place within each chip, as information moves between processor cores, which are doing the calculations, and shared memory to store the results.

It’s a little like an old-timey company that does all its business on paper.

The company uses couriers to send and collect documents from other branches and archives across town. The couriers know the best routes through the city, but the trips take some minimum amount of time determined by the distance between the branches and archives, the courier’s top speed, and how many other couriers are on the road. In short, distance and traffic slow things down.

Now, imagine the company builds a brand new gleaming skyscraper. Every branch is moved into the new building and every worker gets a small filing cabinet in their office to store documents. Now any document they need can be stored and retrieved in the time it takes to step across the office or down the hall to their neighbor’s office. The information commute has all but disappeared. Everything’s in the same house.

Cerebras’s megachip is a bit like that skyscraper. The way it shuttles information—aided further by its specially tailored compiling software—is far more efficient compared to a traditional supercomputer that needs to network a ton of traditional chips.

Simulating the World as It Unfolds
It’s worth noting the chip can only handle problems small enough to fit on the wafer. But such problems may have quite practical applications because of the machine’s ability to do high-fidelity simulation in real-time. The authors note, for example, the machine should in theory be able to accurately simulate the air flow around a helicopter trying to land on a flight deck and semi-automate the process—something not possible with traditional chips.

Another opportunity, they note, would be to use a simulation as input to train a neural network also residing on the chip. In an intriguing and related example, a Caltech machine learning technique recently proved to be 1,000 times faster at solving the same kind of partial differential equations at play here to simulate fluid dynamics.

They also note that improvements in the chip (and others like it, should they arrive) will push back the limits of what can be accomplished. Already, Cerebras has teased the release of its next-generation chip, which will have 2.6 trillion transistors, 850,00 cores, and more than double the memory.

Of course, it still remains to be seen whether wafer-scale computing really takes off. The idea has been around for decades, but Cerebras is the first to pursue it seriously. Clearly, they believe they’ve solved the problem in a way that’s useful and economical.

Other new architectures are also being pursued in the lab. Memristor-based neuromorphic chips, for example, mimic the brain by putting processing and memory into individual transistor-like components. And of course, quantum computers are in a separate lane, but tackle similar problems.

It could be that one of these technologies eventually rises to rule them all. Or, and this seems just as likely, computing may splinter into a bizarre quilt of radical chips, all stitched together to make the most of each depending on the situation.

Image credit: Cerebras Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437608 Video Friday: Agility Robotics Raises ...

Posted on November 21, 2020 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!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Digit is now in full commercial production and we’re excited to announce a $20M funding rounding round co-led by DCVC and Playground Global!

Digits for everyone!

[ Agility Robotics ]

A flexible rover that has both ability to travel long distances and rappel down hard-to-reach areas of scientific interest has undergone a field test in the Mojave Desert in California to showcase its versatility. Composed of two Axel robots, DuAxel is designed to explore crater walls, pits, scarps, vents and other extreme terrain on the moon, Mars and beyond.

This technology demonstration developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California showcases the robot’s ability to split in two and send one of its halves — a two-wheeled Axle robot — over an otherwise inaccessible slope, using a tether as support and to supply power.

The rappelling Axel can then autonomously seek out areas to study, safely overcome slopes and rocky obstacles, and then return to dock with its other half before driving to another destination. Although the rover doesn’t yet have a mission, key technologies are being developed that might, one day, help us explore the rocky planets and moons throughout the solar system.

[ JPL ]

A rectangular robot as tiny as a few human hairs can travel throughout a colon by doing back flips, Purdue University engineers have demonstrated in live animal models. Why the back flips? Because the goal is to use these robots to transport drugs in humans, whose colons and other organs have rough terrain. Side flips work, too. Why a back-flipping robot to transport drugs? Getting a drug directly to its target site could remove side effects, such as hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way.

[ Purdue ]

This video shows the latest results in the whole-body locomotion control of the humanoid robot iCub achieved by the Dynamic Interaction Control line at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova (Italy). In particular, the iCub now keeps the balance while walking and receiving pushes from an external user. The implemented control algorithms also ensure the robot to remain compliant during locomotion and human-robot interaction, a fundamental property to lower the possibility to harm humans that share the robot surrounding environment.

This is super impressive, considering that iCub was only able to crawl and was still tethered not too long ago. Also, it seems to be blinking properly now, so it doesn’t look like it’s always sleepy.

[ IIT ]

This video shows a set of new tests we performed on Bolt. We conducted tests on 5 different scenarios, 1) walking forward/backward 2) uneven surface 3) soft surface 4) push recovery 5) slippage recovery. Thanks to our feedback control based on Model Predictive Control, the robot can perform walking in the presence of all these uncertainties. We will open-source all the codes in a near future.

[ ODRI ]

The title of this video is “Can you throw your robot into a lake?” The title of this video should be, “Can you throw your robot into a lake and drive it out again?”

[ Norlab ]

AeroVironment Successfully Completes Sunglider Solar HAPS Stratospheric Test Flight, Surpassing 60,000 Feet Altitude and Demonstrating Broadband Mobile Connectivity.

[ AeroVironment ]

We present CoVR, a novel robotic interface providing strong kinesthetic feedback (100 N) in a room-scale VR arena. It consists of a physical column mounted on a 2D Cartesian ceiling robot (XY displacements) with the capacity of (1) resisting to body-scaled users actions such as pushing or leaning; (2) acting on the users by pulling or transporting them as well as (3) carrying multiple potentially heavy objects (up to 80kg) that users can freely manipulate or make interact with each other.

[ DeepAI ]

In a new video, personnel from Swiss energy supply company Kraftwerke Oberhasli AG (KWO) explain how they were able to keep employees out of harm’s way by using Flyability’s Elios 2 to collect visual data while building a new dam.

[ Flyability ]

Enjoy our Ascento robot fail compilation! With every failure we experience, we learn more and we can improve our robot for its next iteration, which will come soon… Stay tuned for more!

FYI posting a robot fails video will pretty much guarantee you a spot in Video Friday!

[ Ascento ]

Humans are remarkably good at using chopsticks. The Guinness World Record witnessed a person using chopsticks to pick up 65 M&Ms in just a minute. We aim to collect demonstrations from humans and to teach robot to use chopsticks.

[ UW Personal Robotics Lab ]

A surprising amount of personality from these Yaskawa assembly robots.

[ Yaskawa ]

This paper presents the system design, modeling, and control of the Aerial Robotic Chain Manipulator. This new robot design offers the potential to exert strong forces and moments to the environment, carry and lift significant payloads, and simultaneously navigate through narrow corridors. The presented experimental studies include a valve rotation task, a pick-and-release task, and the verification of load oscillation suppression to demonstrate the stability and performance of the system.

[ ARL ]

Whether animals or plants, whether in the water, on land or in the air, nature provides the model for many technical innovations and inventions. This is summed up in the term bionics, which is a combination of the words ‘biology‘ and ‘electronics’. At Festo, learning from nature has a long history, as our Bionic Learning Network is based on using nature as the source for future technologies like robots, assistance systems or drive solutions.

[ Festo ]

Dogs! Selfies! Thousands of LEGO bricks! This video has it all.

[ LEGO ]

An IROS workshop talk on “Cassie and Mini Cheetah Autonomy” by Maani Ghaffari and Jessy Grizzle from the University of Michigan.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

David Schaefer’s Cozmo robots are back with this mind-blowing dance-off!

What you just saw represents hundreds of hours of work, David tells us: “I wrote over 10,000 lines of code to create the dance performance as I had to translate the beats per minute of the song into motor rotations in order to get the right precision needed to make the moves look sharp. The most challenging move was the SpongeBob SquareDance as any misstep would send the Cozmos crashing into each other. LOL! Fortunately for me, Cozmo robots are pretty resilient.”

[ Life with Cozmo ]

Thanks David!

This week’s GRASP on Robotics seminar is by Sangbae Kim from MIT, on “Robots with Physical Intelligence.”

While industrial robots are effective in repetitive, precise kinematic tasks in factories, the design and control of these robots are not suited for physically interactive performance that humans do easily. These tasks require ‘physical intelligence’ through complex dynamic interactions with environments whereas conventional robots are designed primarily for position control. In order to develop a robot with ‘physical intelligence’, we first need a new type of machines that allow dynamic interactions. This talk will discuss how the new design paradigm allows dynamic interactive tasks. As an embodiment of such a robot design paradigm, the latest version of the MIT Cheetah robots and force-feedback teleoperation arms will be presented.

[ GRASP ]

This week’s CMU Ri Seminar is by Kevin Lynch from Northwestern, on “Robotics and Biosystems.”

Research at the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University encompasses bio-inspiration, neuromechanics, human-machine systems, and swarm robotics, among other topics. In this talk I will give an overview of some of our recent work on in-hand manipulation, robot locomotion on yielding ground, and human-robot systems.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437267 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

Posted on July 26, 2020 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI’s New Language Generator GPT-3 Is Shockingly Good—and Completely Mindless
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“‘Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,’ Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI.”

ROBOTICS
The Star of This $70 Million Sci-Fi Film Is a Robot
Sarah Bahr | The New York Times
“Erica was created by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a roboticist at Osaka University in Japan, to be ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’—he modeled her after images of Miss Universe pageant finalists—and the most humanlike robot in existence. But she’s more than just a pretty face: Though ‘b’ is still in preproduction, when she makes her debut, producers believe it will be the first time a film has relied on a fully autonomous artificially intelligent actor.”

VIRTUAL REALITY
My Glitchy, Glorious Day at a Conference for Virtual Beings
Emma Grey Ellis | Wired
“Spectators spent much of the time debating who was real and who was fake. …[Lars Buttler’s] eyes seemed awake and alive in a way that the faces of the other participants in the Zoom call—venture capitalist, a tech founder, and an activist, all of them puppeted by artificial intelligence—were not. ‘Pretty sure Lars is human,’ a (real-person) spectator typed in the in-meeting chat room. ‘I’m starting to think Lars is AI,’ wrote another.”

FUTURE OF FOOD
KFC Is Working With a Russian 3D Bioprinting Firm to Try to Make Lab-Produced Chicken Nuggets
Kim Lyons | The Verge
“The chicken restaurant chain will work with Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to develop bioprinting technology that will ‘print’ chicken meat, using chicken cells and plant material. KFC plans to provide the bioprinting firm with ingredients like breading and spices ‘to achieve the signature KFC taste’ and will seek to replicate the taste and texture of genuine chicken.”

BIOTECH
A CRISPR Cow Is Born. It’s Definitely a Boy
Megan Molteni | Wired
“After nearly five years of research, at least half a million dollars, dozens of failed pregnancies, and countless scientific setbacks, Van Eenennaam’s pioneering attempt to create a line of Crispr’d cattle tailored to the needs of the beef industry all came down to this one calf. Who, as luck seemed sure to have it, was about to enter the world in the middle of a global pandemic.”

GOVERNANCE
Is the Pandemic Finally the Moment for a Universal Basic Income?
Brooks Rainwater and Clay Dillow | Fast Company
“Since February, governments around the globe—including in the US—have intervened in their citizens’ individual financial lives, distributing direct cash payments to backstop workers sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are considering keeping such direct assistance in place indefinitely, or at least until the economic shocks subside.”

SCIENCE
How Gödel’s Proof Works
Natalie Wolchover | Wired
“In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel pulled off arguably one of the most stunning intellectual achievements in history. Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent—never leading to contradictions—and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths. But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream.”

Image credit: Pierre Châtel-Innocenti / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437230 How Drones and Aerial Vehicles Could ...

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Android

Drones, personal flying vehicles, and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery, and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

An Aerial Age
Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high-resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms, and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.

These vehicles are familiar to sci-fi fans. The late Syd Mead’s illustrations of the Spinner VTOL craft in the film Blade Runner captured the popular imagination, and the screens for the Spinners in Blade Runner 2049 created by Territory Studio provided a careful design fiction of the experience of piloting these types of vehicle.

Now, though, these flying vehicles are reality. A number of companies are developing eVTOL with electric multi-rotor jets, and a whole new motorsport is being established around them.

These aircraft have the potential to change our cities. However, they need to be tested extensively in urban airspace. A study conducted by Airbus found that public concerns about VTOL use focused on the safety of those on the ground and noise emissions.

New Cities
The widespread adoption of drones and VTOL will lead to new architecture and infrastructure. Existing buildings will require adaptations: landing pads, solar photovoltaic panels for energy efficiency, charging points for delivery drones, and landscaping to mitigate noise emissions.

A number of companies are already trialing drone delivery services. Existing buildings will need to be adapted to accommodate these new networks, and new design principles will have to be implemented in future ones.

The architect Saúl Ajuria Fernández has developed a design for a delivery drone port hub. This drone port acts like a beehive where drones recharge and collect parcels for distribution. Architectural firm Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2, a design for a modular apartment building of the future, includes a cantilevered drone port for delivery services.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a drone port for delivery of medical supplies and other items for rural communities in Rwanda. The structure is also intended to function as a space for the public to congregate, as well as to receive training in robotics.

Drones may also help the urban environment become more sustainable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed a re-configurable architectural roof canopy system deployed by drones. By adjusting to follow the direction of the sun, the canopy provides shade and reduces reliance on ventilation systems.

Demand for air taxis and personal flying vehicles will develop where failures in other transport systems take place. The Airbus research found that of the cities surveyed, highest demand for VTOLs was in Los Angeles and Mexico City, urban areas famous for traffic pollution. To accommodate these aerial vehicles, urban space will need to transform to include landing pads, airport-like infrastructure, and recharge points.

Furthermore, this whole logistics system in lower airspace (below 500 feet), or what I term “hover space,” will need an urban traffic management system. One great example of how this hover space could work can be seen in a speculative project from design studio Superflux in their Drone Aviary project. A number of drones with different functions move around an urban area in a network, following different paths at varying heights.

We are at a critical period in urban history, faced by climatic breakdown and pandemic. Drones and aerial vehicles can be part of a profound rethink of the urban environment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: NASA Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots