Tag Archives: household
#439527 It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to ...
Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.
In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge.
PR2’s job here is to prepare breakfast by bringing a bowl, a spoon, a cup, a milk box, and a box of cereal to a dining table. After breakfast, the PR2 then has to place washable objects into the dishwasher, put the cereal box back into its storage location, toss the milk box into the trash. The objects vary in shape and appearance, and the robot is only given symbolic descriptions of object locations (in the fridge, on the counter). It’s a very realistic but also very challenging scenario, which probably explains why it takes the poor PR2 90 minutes to complete it.
First off, kudos to that PR2 for still doing solid robotics research, right? And this research is definitely solid—the fact that all of this stuff works as well as it does, perception, motion planning, grasping, high level strategizing, is incredibly impressive. Remember, this is 90 minutes of full autonomy doing tasks that are relatively complex in an environment that’s only semi-structured and somewhat, but not overly, robot-optimized. In fact, over five trials, the robot succeeded in the table setting task five times. It wasn’t flawless, and the PR2 did have particular trouble with grasping tricky objects like the spoon, but the framework that the researchers developed was able to successfully recover from every single failure by tweaking parameters and retrying the failed action. Arguably, failing a lot but also being able to recover a lot is even more useful than not failing at all, if you think long term.
The clean up task was more difficult for the PR2, and it suffered unrecoverable failures during two of the five trials. The paper describes what happened:
Cleaning the table was more challenging than table setting, due to the use of the dishwasher and the difficulty of sideways grasping objects located far away from the edge of the table. In two out of the five runs we encountered an unrecoverable failure. In one of the runs, due to the instability of the grasping trajectory and the robot not tracking it perfectly, the fingers of the robot ended up pushing the milk away during grasping, which resulted in a very unstable grasp. As a result, the box fell to the ground in the carrying phase. Although during the table setting the robot was able to pick up a toppled over cup and successfully bring it to the table, picking up the milk box from the ground was impossible for the PR2. The other unrecoverable failure was the dishwasher grid getting stuck in PR2’s finger. Another major failure happened when placing the cereal box into its vertical drawer, which was difficult because the robot had to reach very high and approach its joint limits. When the gripper opened, the box fell on a side in the shelf, which resulted in it being crushed when the drawer was closed.
Failure cases including unstably grasping the milk, getting stuck in the dishwasher, and crushing the cereal.
Photos: EASE
While we’re focusing a little bit on the failures here, that’s really just to illustrate the exceptionally challenging edge cases that the robot encountered. Again, I want to emphasize that while the PR2 was not successful all the time, its performance over 90 minutes of fully autonomous operation is still very impressive. And I really appreciate that the researchers committed to an experiment like this, putting their robot into a practical(ish) environment doing practical(ish) tasks under full autonomy over a long(ish) period of time. We often see lots of incremental research headed in this general direction, but it’ll take a lot more work like we’re seeing here for robots to get real-world useful enough to reliably handle those critical breakfast tasks.
The Robot Household Marathon Experiment, by Gayane Kazhoyan, Simon Stelter, Franklin Kenghagho Kenfack, Sebastian Koralewski and Michael Beetz from the CRC EASE at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Germany, was presented at ICRA 2021. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439505 Video Friday: Household Skills
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!):
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) unveiled new robotics capabilities aimed at solving complex tasks in home environments. Specifically, TRI roboticists were able to train robots to understand and operate in complicated situations that confuse most other robots, including recognizing and responding to transparent and reflective surfaces in a variety of circumstances.
[ TRI ]
The FAA now requires all recreational drone pilots to complete an online test, and this video from Pilot Institute explains what the deal is.
Pilot Institute also offers the official test on their website at the link below.
[ Pilot Institute ]
Thanks, Greg!
Hyundai's acquisition of Boston Dynamics is now complete, so they put out this weird video to celebrate.
I am mildly concerned that some of the robots in this video are CGI. It always bugs me when CGI robots are shown doing what the actual robot can do, because why would you do that?
[ Hyundai ]
Making a gripper that can pick flat things up off of a flat surface is tricky, but here's an innovative design that makes it work.
[ Paper ] via [ HMI Lab ]
Thanks, Fan!
Well, this is one of the most ambitious concepts I've seen in a while: Using massive drones to help launch rockets.
Rammaxx’s RAD concept is a powerful octocopter designed for vertical flight via a streamlined hull and guidance fins. It is projected to be able to accelerate with a rocket to around ~ 300mph / 500kph up to an altitude of ~ 15,000ft / 5,000m. We envision one RAD carrying one or two small rockets for small payloads, e.g. micro satellites, and a swarm of RADs working together to carry a rocket designed for larger payloads.
[ Rammaxx ] via [ PetaPixel ]
Deep Robotics’ Jueying quadruped has your coffee, conveniently waiting for you on the ground.
[ Deep Robotics ]
Chao Cao, from CMU's SubT team, talks about autonomous exploration in complex, three-dimensional (3D) environments. A paper on this will be presented at RSS 2021 next month.
[ Paper ] via [ CMU ]
Thanks, Fan!
3D printing in carbon steel with a robot arm.
[ USC Viterbi ]
The VoloDrone is here to change the way we move things. The heavy-lift drone is equipped to carry a payload of up to 200 kilograms; and with its 40 km range, it can fly within a large radius from the take-off point.
[ Volocopter ]
A video on decentralized trajectory planning for multicopter swarms with some lovely visualizations.
[ Paper ] via [ FAST Lab ]
Thanks, Fan!
It's all coming together (Cozmo 2.0, that is)! Share in our excitement when you watch one of our technicians show off how easy it is to reassemble Cozmo 2.0 with its new battery compartment.
[ DDL ]
We introduce a multi-functional robotic gripper equipped with a set of actions required for disassembly of electromechanical devices. The system enables manipulation in 7 degrees of freedom (DoF) and offers the ability to reposition objects in hand and to perform tasks that usually require bimanual systems.
[ Paper ]
Automated test procedure for carrying out a stress test of an airplane seat folding table performed with a KUKA IIWA robot. The test was performed for 50,000 cycles and contributed to the improvement of the original design in several aspects.
[ PRISMA Lab ]
This introduces Bruce, the CSIRO Dynamic Hexapod Robot capable of autonomous, dynamic locomotion over difficult terrain. This robot is built around Apptronik linear series elastic actuators, and went from design to deployment in under a year by using approximately 80 percent 3D-printed structural (joints and link) parts. The robot is designed to move at up to 1.0 m/s on flat ground with appropriate control, and was deployed into the the DARPA SubT Challenge Tunnel circuit event in August 2019.
[ Paper ] via [ CSIRO Data61 ]
In this paper, we present a method for grasp planning and object manipulation that enables the world’s first autonomous assembly of a large-scale stone wall with an unmanned hydraulic excavator system.
[ Paper ] via [ RSL ]
Discover MACBA, the museum of contemporary and modern art of Barcelona with a kind help from Pepper!
[ SoftBank ]
On April 19, 2021, NASA made history with the deployment on Mars of Ingenuity, the first powered aircraft conceived by humans to fly on another planet. With four flights to date—from its initial brief foray at three meters elevation to its longer subsequent flights covering up to a football field’s distance at velocities of about two meters per second—Ingenuity has opened a new world to planetary flight and discovery. In this colloquium, Teddy Tzanetos, JPL’s assembly, test, operations lead and ground support designer will present the project’s inception, its operational goals and capabilities, and what its success may mean for space exploration.
[ IFRR ]
Advances in robotics and automation offer new solutions to humanity’s oldest problems of clean water, food and shelter. The 2021 ICRA Industrial Forum focused on the challenges in today’s construction industry, with potential new solutions coming out of research labs around the world.
[ RAS ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439364 Video Friday: Household Skills
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!):
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) unveiled new robotics capabilities aimed at solving complex tasks in home environments. Specifically, TRI roboticists were able to train robots to understand and operate in complicated situations that confuse most other robots, including recognizing and responding to transparent and reflective surfaces in a variety of circumstances.
[ TRI ]
The FAA now requires all recreational drone pilots to complete an online test, and this video from Pilot Institute explains what the deal is.
Pilot Institute also offers the official test on their website at the link below.
[ Pilot Institute ]
Thanks, Greg!
Hyundai's acquisition of Boston Dynamics is now complete, so they put out this weird video to celebrate.
I am mildly concerned that some of the robots in this video are CGI. It always bugs me when CGI robots are shown doing what the actual robot can do, because why would you do that?
[ Hyundai ]
Making a gripper that can pick flat things up off of a flat surface is tricky, but here's an innovative design that makes it work.
[ Paper ] via [ HMI Lab ]
Thanks, Fan!
Well, this is one of the most ambitious concepts I've seen in a while: Using massive drones to help launch rockets.
Rammaxx’s RAD concept is a powerful octocopter designed for vertical flight via a streamlined hull and guidance fins. It is projected to be able to accelerate with a rocket to around ~ 300mph / 500kph up to an altitude of ~ 15,000ft / 5,000m. We envision one RAD carrying one or two small rockets for small payloads, e.g. micro satellites, and a swarm of RADs working together to carry a rocket designed for larger payloads.
[ Rammaxx ] via [ PetaPixel ]
Deep Robotics’ Jueying quadruped has your coffee, conveniently waiting for you on the ground.
[ Deep Robotics ]
Chao Cao, from CMU's SubT team, talks about autonomous exploration in complex, three-dimensional (3D) environments. A paper on this will be presented at RSS 2021 next month.
[ Paper ] via [ CMU ]
Thanks, Fan!
3D printing in carbon steel with a robot arm.
[ USC Viterbi ]
The VoloDrone is here to change the way we move things. The heavy-lift drone is equipped to carry a payload of up to 200 kilograms; and with its 40 km range, it can fly within a large radius from the take-off point.
[ Volocopter ]
A video on decentralized trajectory planning for multicopter swarms with some lovely visualizations.
[ Paper ] via [ FAST Lab ]
Thanks, Fan!
It's all coming together (Cozmo 2.0, that is)! Share in our excitement when you watch one of our technicians show off how easy it is to reassemble Cozmo 2.0 with its new battery compartment.
[ DDL ]
We introduce a multi-functional robotic gripper equipped with a set of actions required for disassembly of electromechanical devices. The system enables manipulation in 7 degrees of freedom (DoF) and offers the ability to reposition objects in hand and to perform tasks that usually require bimanual systems.
[ Paper ]
Automated test procedure for carrying out a stress test of an airplane seat folding table performed with a KUKA IIWA robot. The test was performed for 50,000 cycles and contributed to the improvement of the original design in several aspects.
[ PRISMA Lab ]
This introduces Bruce, the CSIRO Dynamic Hexapod Robot capable of autonomous, dynamic locomotion over difficult terrain. This robot is built around Apptronik linear series elastic actuators, and went from design to deployment in under a year by using approximately 80 percent 3D-printed structural (joints and link) parts. The robot is designed to move at up to 1.0 m/s on flat ground with appropriate control, and was deployed into the the DARPA SubT Challenge Tunnel circuit event in August 2019.
[ Paper ] via [ CSIRO Data61 ]
In this paper, we present a method for grasp planning and object manipulation that enables the world’s first autonomous assembly of a large-scale stone wall with an unmanned hydraulic excavator system.
[ Paper ] via [ RSL ]
Discover MACBA, the museum of contemporary and modern art of Barcelona with a kind help from Pepper!
[ SoftBank ]
On April 19, 2021, NASA made history with the deployment on Mars of Ingenuity, the first powered aircraft conceived by humans to fly on another planet. With four flights to date—from its initial brief foray at three meters elevation to its longer subsequent flights covering up to a football field’s distance at velocities of about two meters per second—Ingenuity has opened a new world to planetary flight and discovery. In this colloquium, Teddy Tzanetos, JPL’s assembly, test, operations lead and ground support designer will present the project’s inception, its operational goals and capabilities, and what its success may mean for space exploration.
[ IFRR ]
Advances in robotics and automation offer new solutions to humanity’s oldest problems of clean water, food and shelter. The 2021 ICRA Industrial Forum focused on the challenges in today’s construction industry, with potential new solutions coming out of research labs around the world.
[ RAS ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439327 It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to ...
Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.
In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge.
PR2’s job here is to prepare breakfast by bringing a bowl, a spoon, a cup, a milk box, and a box of cereal to a dining table. After breakfast, the PR2 then has to place washable objects into the dishwasher, put the cereal box back into its storage location, toss the milk box into the trash. The objects vary in shape and appearance, and the robot is only given symbolic descriptions of object locations (in the fridge, on the counter). It’s a very realistic but also very challenging scenario, which probably explains why it takes the poor PR2 90 minutes to complete it.
First off, kudos to that PR2 for still doing solid robotics research, right? And this research is definitely solid—the fact that all of this stuff works as well as it does, perception, motion planning, grasping, high level strategizing, is incredibly impressive. Remember, this is 90 minutes of full autonomy doing tasks that are relatively complex in an environment that’s only semi-structured and somewhat, but not overly, robot-optimized. In fact, over five trials, the robot succeeded in the table setting task five times. It wasn’t flawless, and the PR2 did have particular trouble with grasping tricky objects like the spoon, but the framework that the researchers developed was able to successfully recover from every single failure by tweaking parameters and retrying the failed action. Arguably, failing a lot but also being able to recover a lot is even more useful than not failing at all, if you think long term.
The clean up task was more difficult for the PR2, and it suffered unrecoverable failures during two of the five trials. The paper describes what happened:
Cleaning the table was more challenging than table setting, due to the use of the dishwasher and the difficulty of sideways grasping objects located far away from the edge of the table. In two out of the five runs we encountered an unrecoverable failure. In one of the runs, due to the instability of the grasping trajectory and the robot not tracking it perfectly, the fingers of the robot ended up pushing the milk away during grasping, which resulted in a very unstable grasp. As a result, the box fell to the ground in the carrying phase. Although during the table setting the robot was able to pick up a toppled over cup and successfully bring it to the table, picking up the milk box from the ground was impossible for the PR2. The other unrecoverable failure was the dishwasher grid getting stuck in PR2’s finger. Another major failure happened when placing the cereal box into its vertical drawer, which was difficult because the robot had to reach very high and approach its joint limits. When the gripper opened, the box fell on a side in the shelf, which resulted in it being crushed when the drawer was closed.
Photos: EASE
Failure cases including unstably grasping the milk, getting stuck in the dishwasher, and crushing the cereal.
While we’re focusing a little bit on the failures here, that’s really just to illustrate the exceptionally challenging edge cases that the robot encountered. Again, I want to emphasize that while the PR2 was not successful all the time, its performance over 90 minutes of fully autonomous operation is still very impressive. And I really appreciate that the researchers committed to an experiment like this, putting their robot into a practical(ish) environment doing practical(ish) tasks under full autonomy over a long(ish) period of time. We often see lots of incremental research headed in this general direction, but it’ll take a lot more work like we’re seeing here for robots to get real-world useful enough to reliably handle those critical breakfast tasks.
The Robot Household Marathon Experiment, by Gayane Kazhoyan, Simon Stelter, Franklin Kenghagho Kenfack, Sebastian Koralewski and Michael Beetz from the CRC EASE at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Germany, was presented at ICRA 2021. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439012 Video Friday: Man-Machine Synergy ...
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!):
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Man-Machine Synergy Effectors, Inc. is a Japanese company working on an absolutely massive “human machine synergistic effect device,” which is a huge robot controlled by a nearby human using a haptic rig.
From the look of things, the next generation will be able to move around. Whoa.
[ MMSE ]
This method of loading and unloading AMRs without having them ever stop moving is so obvious that there must be some equally obvious reason why I've never seen it done in practice.
The LoadRunner is able to transport and sort parcels weighing up to 30 kilograms. This makes it the perfect luggage carrier for airports. These AI-driven go-carts can also work in concert as larger collectives to carry large, heavy and bulky objects. Every LoadRunner can also haul up to four passive trailers. Powered by four electric motors, the LoadRunner sharply brakes at just the right moment right in front of its destination and the payload slides from the robot onto the delivery platform.
[ Fraunhofer ] via [ Gizmodo ]
Ayato Kanada at Kyushu University wrote in to share this clever “dislocatable joint,” a way of combining continuum and rigid robots.
[ Paper ]
Thanks Ayato!
The DodgeDrone challenge revisits the popular dodgeball game in the context of autonomous drones. Specifically, participants will have to code navigation policies to fly drones between waypoints while avoiding dynamic obstacles. Drones are fast but fragile systems: as soon as something hits them, they will crash! Since objects will move towards the drone with different speeds and acceleration, smart algorithms are required to avoid them!
This could totally happen in real life, and we need to be prepared for it!
[ DodgeDrone Challenge ]
In addition to winning the Best Student Design Competition CREATIVITY Award at HRI 2021, this paper would also have won the Best Paper Title award, if that award existed.
[ Paper ]
Robots are traditionally bound by a fixed morphology during their operational lifetime, which is limited to adapting only their control strategies. Here we present the first quadrupedal robot that can morphologically adapt to different environmental conditions in outdoor, unstructured environments.
We show that the robot exploits its training to effectively transition between different morphological configurations, exhibiting substantial performance improvements over a non-adaptive approach. The demonstrated benefits of real-world morphological adaptation demonstrate the potential for a new embodied way of incorporating adaptation into future robotic designs.
[ Nature ]
A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it “adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema.” One IEEE Spectrum editor said “hey that's pretty cool.”
[ Bryant Lake Bowl ]
It doesn't take a robot to convince me to buy candy, but I think if I buy candy from Relay it's a business expense, right?
[ RIS ]
DARPA is making progress on its AI dogfighting program, with physical flight tests expected this year.
[ DARPA ACE ]
Unitree Robotics has realized that the Empire needs to be overthrown!
[ Unitree ]
Windhover Labs, an emerging leader in open and reliable flight software and hardware, announces the upcoming availability of its first hardware product, a low cost modular flight computer for commercial drones and small satellites.
[ Windhover ]
As robots and autonomous systems are poised to become part of our everyday lives, the University of Michigan and Ford are opening a one-of-a-kind facility where they’ll develop robots and roboticists that help make lives better, keep people safer and build a more equitable society.
[ U Michigan ]
The adaptive robot Rizon combined with a new hybrid electrostatic and gecko-inspired gripping pad developed by Stanford BDML can manipulate bulky, non-smooth items in the most effort-saving way, which broadens the applications in retail and household environments.
[ Flexiv ]
Thanks Yunfan!
I don't know why anyone would want things to get MORE icy, but if you do for some reason, you can make it happen with a Husky.
Is winter over yet?
[ Clearpath ]
Skip ahead to about 1:20 to see a pair of Gita robots following a Spot following a human like a chain of lil’ robot duckings.
[ PFF ]
Here are a couple of retro robotics videos, one showing teleoperated humanoids from 2000, and the other showing a robotic guide dog from 1976 (!)
[ Tachi Lab ]
Thanks Fan!
If you missed Chad Jenkins' talk “That Ain’t Right: AI Mistakes and Black Lives” last time, here's another opportunity to watch from Robotics Today, and it includes a top notch panel discussion at the end.
[ Robotics Today ]
Since its founding in 1979, the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been leading the world in robotics research and education. In the mid 1990s, RI created NREC as the applied R&D center within the Institute with a specific mission to apply robotics technology in an impactful way on real-world applications. In this talk, I will go over numerous R&D programs that I have led at NREC in the past 25 years.
[ CMU ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots