Tag Archives: humans

#435662 Video Friday: This 3D-Printed ...

Posted on September 15, 2019 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!):

ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
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
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

We’re used to seeing bristle bots about the size of a toothbrush head (which is not a coincidence), but Georgia Tech has downsized them, with some interesting benefits.

Researchers have created a new type of tiny 3D-printed robot that moves by harnessing vibration from piezoelectric actuators, ultrasound sources or even tiny speakers. Swarms of these “micro-bristle-bots” might work together to sense environmental changes, move materials – or perhaps one day repair injuries inside the human body.

The prototype robots respond to different vibration frequencies depending on their configurations, allowing researchers to control individual bots by adjusting the vibration. Approximately two millimeters long – about the size of the world’s smallest ant – the bots can cover four times their own length in a second despite the physical limitations of their small size.

“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” said Azadeh Ansari, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”

[ Georgia Tech ]

Most consumer drones are “multi-copters,” meaning that they have a series of rotors or propellers that allow them to hover like helicopters. But having rotors severely limits their energy efficiency, which means that they can’t easily carry heavy payloads or fly for long periods of time. To get the best of both worlds, drone designers have tried to develop “hybrid” fixed-wing drones that can fly as efficiently as airplanes, while still taking off and landing vertically like multi-copters.

These drones are extremely hard to control because of the complexity of dealing with their flight dynamics, but a team from MIT CSAIL aims to make the customization process easier, with a new system that allows users to design drones of different sizes and shapes that can nimbly switch between hovering and gliding – all by using a single controller.

In future work, the team plans to try to further increase the drone’s maneuverability by improving its design. The model doesn’t yet fully take into account complex aerodynamic effects between the propeller’s airflow and the wings. And lastly, their method trained the copter with “yaw velocity” set at zero, which means that it cannot currently perform sharp turns.

[ Paper ] via [ MIT ]

We’re not quite at the point where we can 3D print entire robots, but UCSD is getting us closer.

The UC San Diego researchers’ insight was twofold. They turned to a commercially available printer for the job, (the Stratasys Objet350 Connex3—a workhorse in many robotics labs). In addition, they realized one of the materials used by the 3D printer is made of carbon particles that can conduct power to sensors when connected to a power source. So roboticists used the black resin to manufacture complex sensors embedded within robotic parts made of clear polymer. They designed and manufactured several prototypes, including a gripper.

When stretched, the sensors failed at approximately the same strain as human skin. But the polymers the 3D printer uses are not designed to conduct electricity, so their performance is not optimal. The 3D printed robots also require a lot of post-processing before they can be functional, including careful washing to clean up impurities and drying.

However, researchers remain optimistic that in the future, materials will improve and make 3D printed robots equipped with embedded sensors much easier to manufacture.

[ UCSD ]

Congrats to Team Homer from the University of Koblenz-Landau, who won the RoboCup@Home world championship in Sydney!

[ Team Homer ]

When you’ve got a robot with both wheels and legs, motion planning is complicated. IIT has developed a new planner for CENTAURO that takes advantage of the different ways that the robot is able to get past obstacles.

[ Centauro ]

Thanks Dimitrios!

If you constrain a problem tightly enough, you can solve it even with a relatively simple robot. Here’s an example of an experimental breakfast robot named “Loraine” that can cook eggs, bacon, and potatoes using what looks to be zero sensing at all, just moving to different positions and actuating its gripper.

There’s likely to be enough human work required in the prep here to make the value that the robot adds questionable at best, but it’s a good example of how you can make a relatively complex task robot-compatible as long as you set it up in just the right way.

[ Connected Robotics ] via [ RobotStart ]

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a ball bot, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen one with a manipulator on it.

[ ETH Zurich RSL ]

Soft Robotics’ new mini fingers are able to pick up taco shells without shattering them, which as far as I can tell is 100 percent impossible for humans to do.

[ Soft Robotics ]

Yes, Starship’s wheeled robots can climb curbs, and indeed they have a pretty neat way of doing it.

[ Starship ]

Last year we posted a long interview with Christoph Bartneck about his research into robots and racism, and here’s a nice video summary of the work.

[ Christoph Bartneck ]

Canada’s contribution to the Lunar Gateway will be a smart robotic system which includes a next-generation robotic arm known as Canadarm3, as well as equipment, and specialized tools. Using cutting-edge software and advances in artificial intelligence, this highly-autonomous system will be able to maintain, repair and inspect the Gateway, capture visiting vehicles, relocate Gateway modules, help astronauts during spacewalks, and enable science both in lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon.

[ CSA ]

An interesting demo of how Misty can integrate sound localization with other services.

[ Misty Robotics ]

The third and last period of H2020 AEROARMS project has brought the final developments in industrial inspection and maintenance tasks, such as the crawler retrieval and deployment (DLR) or the industrial validation in stages like a refinery or a cement factory.

[ Aeroarms ]

The Guardian S remote visual inspection and surveillance robot navigates a disaster training site to demonstrate its advanced maneuverability, long-range wireless communications and extended run times.

[ Sarcos ]

This appears to be a cake frosting robot and I wish I had like 3 more hours of this to share:

Also here is a robot that picks fried chicken using a curiously successful technique:

[ Kazumichi Moriyama ]

This isn’t strictly robots, but professor Hiroshi Ishii, associate director of the MIT Media Lab, gave a fascinating SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Talk that’s absolutely worth your time.

[ Tangible Media Group ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435656 Will AI Be Fashion Forward—or a ...

Posted on September 15, 2019 by Android

The narrative that often accompanies most stories about artificial intelligence these days is how machines will disrupt any number of industries, from healthcare to transportation. It makes sense. After all, technology already drives many of the innovations in these sectors of the economy.

But sneakers and the red carpet? The definitively low-tech fashion industry would seem to be one of the last to turn over its creative direction to data scientists and machine learning algorithms.

However, big brands, e-commerce giants, and numerous startups are betting that AI can ingest data and spit out Chanel. Maybe it’s not surprising, given that fashion is partly about buzz and trends—and there’s nothing more buzzy and trendy in the world of tech today than AI.

In its annual survey of the $3 trillion fashion industry, consulting firm McKinsey predicted that while AI didn’t hit a “critical mass” in 2018, it would increasingly influence the business of everything from design to manufacturing.

“Fashion as an industry really has been so slow to understand its potential roles interwoven with technology. And, to be perfectly honest, the technology doesn’t take fashion seriously.” This comment comes from Zowie Broach, head of fashion at London’s Royal College of Arts, who as a self-described “old fashioned” designer has embraced the disruptive nature of technology—with some caveats.

Co-founder in the late 1990s of the avant-garde fashion label Boudicca, Broach has always seen tech as a tool for designers, even setting up a website for the company circa 1998, way before an online presence became, well, fashionable.

Broach told Singularity Hub that while she is generally optimistic about the future of technology in fashion—the designer has avidly been consuming old sci-fi novels over the last few years—there are still a lot of difficult questions to answer about the interface of algorithms, art, and apparel.

For instance, can AI do what the great designers of the past have done? Fashion was “about designing, it was about a narrative, it was about meaning, it was about expression,” according to Broach.

AI that designs products based on data gleaned from human behavior can potentially tap into the Pavlovian response in consumers in order to make money, Broach noted. But is that channeling creativity, or just digitally dabbling in basic human brain chemistry?

She is concerned about people retaining control of the process, whether we’re talking about their data or their designs. But being empowered with the insights machines could provide into, for example, the geographical nuances of fashion between Dubai, Moscow, and Toronto is thrilling.

“What is it that we want the future to be from a fashion, an identity, and design perspective?” she asked.

Off on the Right Foot
Silicon Valley and some of the biggest brands in the industry offer a few answers about where AI and fashion are headed (though not at the sort of depths that address Broach’s broader questions of aesthetics and ethics).

Take what is arguably the biggest brand in fashion, at least by market cap but probably not by the measure of appearances on Oscar night: Nike. The $100 billion shoe company just gobbled up an AI startup called Celect to bolster its data analytics and optimize its inventory. In other words, Nike hopes it will be able to figure out what’s hot and what’s not in a particular location to stock its stores more efficiently.

The company is going even further with Nike Fit, a foot-scanning platform using a smartphone camera that applies AI techniques from fields like computer vision and machine learning to find the best fit for each person’s foot. The algorithms then identify and recommend the appropriately sized and shaped shoe in different styles.

No doubt the next step will be to 3D print personalized and on-demand sneakers at any store.

San Francisco-based startup ThirdLove is trying to bring a similar approach to bra sizes. Its 20-member data team, Fortune reported, has developed the Fit Finder quiz that uses machine learning algorithms to help pick just the right garment for every body type.

Data scientists are also a big part of the team at Stitch Fix, a former San Francisco startup that went public in 2017 and today sports a market cap of more than $2 billion. The online “personal styling” company uses hundreds of algorithms to not only make recommendations to customers, but to help design new styles and even manage the subscription-based supply chain.

Future of Fashion
E-commerce giant Amazon has thrown its own considerable resources into developing AI applications for retail fashion—with mixed results.

One notable attempt involved a “styling assistant” that came with the company’s Echo Look camera that helped people catalog and manage their wardrobes, evening helping pick out each day’s attire. The company more recently revisited the direct consumer side of AI with an app called StyleSnap, which matches clothes and accessories uploaded to the site with the retailer’s vast inventory and recommends similar styles.

Behind the curtains, Amazon is going even further. A team of researchers in Israel have developed algorithms that can deduce whether a particular look is stylish based on a few labeled images. Another group at the company’s San Francisco research center was working on tech that could generate new designs of items based on images of a particular style the algorithms trained on.

“I will say that the accumulation of many new technologies across the industry could manifest in a highly specialized style assistant, far better than the examples we’ve seen today. However, the most likely thing is that the least sexy of the machine learning work will become the most impactful, and the public may never hear about it.”

That prediction is from an online interview with Leanne Luce, a fashion technology blogger and product manager at Google who recently wrote a book called, succinctly enough, Artificial Intelligence and Fashion.

Data Meets Design
Academics are also sticking their beakers into AI and fashion. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Adobe Research have previously demonstrated that neural networks, a type of AI designed to mimic some aspects of the human brain, can be trained to generate (i.e., design) new product images to match a buyer’s preference, much like the team at Amazon.

Meanwhile, scientists at Hong Kong Polytechnic University are working with China’s answer to Amazon, Alibaba, on developing a FashionAI Dataset to help machines better understand fashion. The effort will focus on how algorithms approach certain building blocks of design, what are called “key points” such as neckline and waistline, and “fashion attributes” like collar types and skirt styles.

The man largely behind the university’s research team is Calvin Wong, a professor and associate head of Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Institute of Textiles and Clothing. His group has also developed an “intelligent fabric defect detection system” called WiseEye for quality control, reducing the chance of producing substandard fabric by 90 percent.

Wong and company also recently inked an agreement with RCA to establish an AI-powered design laboratory, though the details of that venture have yet to be worked out, according to Broach.

One hope is that such collaborations will not just get at the technological challenges of using machines in creative endeavors like fashion, but will also address the more personal relationships humans have with their machines.

“I think who we are, and how we use AI in fashion, as our identity, is not a superficial skin. It’s very, very important for how we define our future,” Broach said.

Image Credit: Inspirationfeed / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435628 Soft Exosuit Makes Walking and Running ...

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Android

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have been testing a flexible, lightweight exosuit that can improve your metabolic efficiency by 4 to 10 percent while walking and running. This is very important because, according to a press release from Harvard, the suit can help you be faster and more efficient, whether you’re “walking at a leisurely pace,” or “running for your life.” Great!

Making humans better at running for their lives is something that we don’t put nearly enough research effort into, I think. The problem may not come up very often, but when it does, it’s super important (because, bears). So, sign me up for anything that we can do to make our desperate flights faster or more efficient—especially if it’s a lightweight, wearable exosuit that’s soft, flexible, and comfortable to wear.

This is the same sort of exosuit that was part of a DARPA program that we wrote about a few years ago, which was designed to make it easier for soldiers to carry heavy loads for long distances.

Photos: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

The system uses two waist-mounted electrical motors connected with cables to thigh straps that run down around your butt. The motors pull on the cables at the same time that your muscles actuate, helping them out and reducing the amount of work that your muscles put in without decreasing the amount of force they exert on your legs. The entire suit (batteries included) weighs 5 kilograms (11 pounds).

In order for the cables to actuate at the right time, the suit tracks your gait with two inertial measurement units (IMUs) on the thighs and one on the waist, and then adjusts its actuation profile accordingly. It works well, too, with measurable increases in performance:

We show that a portable exosuit that assists hip extension can reduce the metabolic rate of treadmill walking at 1.5 meters per second by 9.3 percent and that of running at 2.5 meters per second by 4.0 percent compared with locomotion without the exosuit. These reduction magnitudes are comparable to the effects of taking off 7.4 and 5.7 kilograms during walking and running, respectively, and are in a range that has shown meaningful athletic performance changes.

By increasing your efficiency, you can think of the suit as being able to make you walk or run faster, or farther, or carry a heavier load, all while spending the same amount of energy (or less), which could be just enough to outrun the bear that’s chasing you. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be uncomfortable to wear, and doesn’t require the user to do anything differently, which means that (unlike most robotics things) it’s maybe actually somewhat practical for real-world use—whether you’re indoors or outdoors, or walking or running, or being chased by a bear or not.

Sadly, I have no idea when you might be able to buy one of these things. But the researchers are looking for ways to make the suit even easier to use, while also reducing the weight and making the efficiency increase more pronounced. Harvard’s Conor Walsh says they’re “excited to continue to apply it to a range of applications, including assisting those with gait impairments, industry workers at risk of injury performing physically strenuous tasks, or recreational weekend warriors.” As a weekend warrior who is not entirely sure whether he can outrun a bear, I’m excited for this.

Reducing the metabolic rate of walking and running with a versatile, portable exosuit, by Jinsoo Kim, Giuk Lee, Roman Heimgartner, Dheepak Arumukhom Revi, Nikos Karavas, Danielle Nathanson, Ignacio Galiana, Asa Eckert-Erdheim, Patrick Murphy, David Perry, Nicolas Menard, Dabin Kim Choe, Philippe Malcolm, and Conor J. Walsh from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, appears in the current issue of Science. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435626 Video Friday: Watch Robots Make a Crepe ...

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. Every week, we also post a calendar of upcoming robotics events; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

Robotronica – August 18, 2019 – Brisbane, Australia
CLAWAR 2019 – August 26-28, 2019 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto
ARSO 2019 – October 31-November 2, 2019 – Beijing
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-November 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.

Team CoSTAR (JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU) has one of the more diverse teams of robots that we’ve seen:

[ Team CoSTAR ]

A team from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University is sending ground and aerial autonomous robots into a Pittsburgh-area mine to prepare for this month’s DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

“Look at that fire extinguisher, what a beauty!” Expect to hear a lot more of that kind of weirdness during SubT.

[ CMU ]

Unitree Robotics is starting to batch-manufacture Laikago Pro quadrupeds, and if you buy four of them, they can carry you around in a chair!

I’m also really liking these videos from companies that are like, “We have a whole bunch of robot dogs now—what weird stuff can we do with them?”

[ Unitree Robotics ]

Why take a handful of pills every day for all the stuff that's wrong with you, when you could take one custom pill instead? Because custom pills are time-consuming to make, that’s why. But robots don’t care!

Multiply Labs’ factory is designed to operate in parallel. All the filling robots and all the quality-control robots are operating at the same time. The robotic arm, in the meanwhile, shuttles dozens of trays up and down the production floor, making sure that each capsule is filled with the right drugs. The manufacturing cell shown in this article can produce 10,000 personalized capsules in an 8-hour shift. A single cell occupies just 128 square feet (12 square meters) on the production floor. This means that a regular production facility (~10,000 square feet, or 929 m2 ) can house 78 cells, for an overall output of 780,000 capsules per shift. This exceeds the output of most traditional manufacturers—while producing unique personalized capsules!

[ Multiply Labs ]

Thanks Fred!

If you’re getting tired of all those annoying drones that sound like giant bees, just have a listen to this turbine-powered one:

[ Malloy Aeronautics ]

In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that nobody has bothered to put a functional robotic dog head on a quadruped robot before this, right?

Equipped with sensors, high-tech radar imaging, cameras and a directional microphone, this 100-pound (45-kilogram) super-robot is still a “puppy-in-training.” Just like a regular dog, he responds to commands such as “sit,” “stand,” and “lie down.” Eventually, he will be able to understand and respond to hand signals, detect different colors, comprehend many languages, coordinate his efforts with drones, distinguish human faces, and even recognize other dogs.

As an information scout, Astro’s key missions will include detecting guns, explosives and gun residue to assist police, the military, and security personnel. This robodog’s talents won’t just end there, he also can be programmed to assist as a service dog for the visually impaired or to provide medical diagnostic monitoring. The MPCR team also is training Astro to serve as a first responder for search-and-rescue missions such as hurricane reconnaissance as well as military maneuvers.

[ FAU ]

And now this amazing video, “The Coke Thief,” from ICRA 2005 (!):

[ Paper ]

CYBATHLON Series put the focus on one or two of the six disciplines and are organized in cooperation with international universities and partners. The CYBATHLON Arm and Leg Prosthesis Series took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 16 to 18 May and was organized in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the trade fair REHAB Karlsruhe.

The CYBATHLON Wheelchair Series took place in Kawasaki, Japan on 5 May 2019 and was organized in cooperation with the CYBATHLON Wheelchair Series Japan Organizing Committee and supported by the Swiss Embassy.

[ Cybathlon ]

Rainbow crepe robot!

There’s also this other robot, which I assume does something besides what's in the video, because otherwise it appears to be a massively overengineered way of shaping cooked rice into a chubby triangle.

[ PC Watch ]

The Weaponized Plastic Fighting League at Fetch Robotics has had another season of shardation, deintegration, explodification, and other -tions. Here are a couple fan favorite match videos:

[ Fetch Robotics ]

This video is in German, but it’s worth watching for the three seconds of extremely satisfying footage showing a robot twisting dough into pretzels.

[ Festo ]

Putting brains into farming equipment is a no-brainer, since it’s a semi-structured environment that's generally clear of wayward humans driving other vehicles.

[ Lovol ]

Thanks Fan!

Watch some robots assemble suspiciously Lego-like (but definitely not actually Lego) minifigs.

[ DevLinks ]

The Robotics Innovation Facility (RIFBristol) helps businesses, entrepreneurs, researchers and public sector bodies to embrace the concept of ‘Industry 4.0'. From training your staff in robotics, and demonstrating how automation can improve your manufacturing processes, to prototyping and validating your new innovations—we can provide the support you need.

[ RIF ]

Ryan Gariepy from Clearpath Robotics (and a bunch of other stuff) gave a talk at ICRA with the title of “Move Fast and (Don’t) Break Things: Commercializing Robotics at the Speed of Venture Capital,” which is more interesting when you know that this year’s theme was “Notable Failures.”

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Michael Nielsen, a computer vision researcher at the Danish Technological Institute.

Michael worked with a fusion of sensors like stereo vision, thermography, radar, lidar and high-frame-rate cameras, merging multiple images for high dynamic range. All this, to be able to navigate the tricky situation in a farm field where you need to navigate close to or even in what is grown. Multibaseline cameras were also used to provide range detection over a wide range of distances.

We also learn about how he expanded his work into sorting recycling, a very challenging problem. We also hear about the problems faced when using time of flight and sheet of light cameras. He then shares some good results using stereo vision, especially combined with blue light random dot projectors.

[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435621 ANYbotics Introduces Sleek New ANYmal C ...

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Android

Quadrupedal robots are making significant advances lately, and just in the past few months we’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ Spot hauling a truck, IIT’s HyQReal pulling a plane, MIT’s MiniCheetah doing backflips, Unitree Robotics’ Laikago towing a van, and Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 exploring a mine. Robot makers are betting that their four-legged machines will prove useful in a variety of applications in construction, security, delivery, and even at home.

ANYbotics has been working on such applications for years, testing out their ANYmal robot in places where humans typically don’t want to go (like offshore platforms) as well as places where humans really don’t want to go (like sewers), and they have a better idea than most companies what can make quadruped robots successful.

This week, ANYbotics is announcing a completely new quadruped platform, ANYmal C, a major upgrade from the really quite research-y ANYmal B. The new quadruped has been optimized for ruggedness and reliability in industrial environments, with a streamlined body painted a color that lets you know it means business.

ANYmal C’s physical specs are pretty impressive for a production quadruped. It can move at 1 meter per second, manage 20-degree slopes and 45-degree stairs, cross 25-centimeter gaps, and squeeze through passages just 60 centimeters wide. It’s packed with cameras and 3D sensors, including a lidar for 3D mapping and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). All these sensors (along with the vast volume of gait research that’s been done with ANYmal) make this one of the most reliably autonomous quadrupeds out there, with real-time motion planning and obstacle avoidance.

Image: ANYbotics

ANYmal can autonomously attach itself to a cone-shaped docking station to recharge.

ANYmal C is also one of the ruggedest legged robots in existence. The 50-kilogram robot is IP67 rated, meaning that it’s completely impervious to dust and can withstand being submerged in a meter of water for an hour. If it’s submerged for longer than that, you’re absolutely doing something wrong. The robot will run for over 2 hours on battery power, and if that’s not enough endurance, don’t worry, because ANYmal can autonomously impale itself on a weird cone-shaped docking station to recharge.

Photo: ANYbotics

ANYmal C’s sensor payload includes cameras and a lidar for 3D mapping and SLAM.

As far as what ANYmal C is designed to actually do, it’s mostly remote inspection tasks where you need to move around through a relatively complex environment, but where for whatever reason you’d be better off not sending a human. ANYmal C has a sensor payload that gives it lots of visual options, like thermal imaging, and with the ability to handle a 10-kilogram payload, the robot can be adapted to many different environments.

Over the next few months, we’re hoping to see more examples of ANYmal C being deployed to do useful stuff in real-world environments, but for now, we do have a bit more detail from ANYbotics CTO Christian Gehring.

IEEE Spectrum: Can you tell us about the development process for ANYmal C?

Christian Gehring: We tested the previous generation of ANYmal (B) in a broad range of environments over the last few years and gained a lot of insights. Based on our learnings, it became clear that we would have to re-design the robot to meet the requirements of industrial customers in terms of safety, quality, reliability, and lifetime. There were different prototype stages both for the new drives and for single robot assemblies. Apart from electrical tests, we thoroughly tested the thermal control and ingress protection of various subsystems like the depth cameras and actuators.

What can ANYmal C do that the previous version of ANYmal can’t?

ANYmal C was redesigned with a focus on performance increase regarding actuation (new drives), computational power (new hexacore Intel i7 PCs), locomotion and navigation skills, and autonomy (new depth cameras). The new robot additionally features a docking system for autonomous recharging and an inspection payload as an option. The design of ANYmal C is far more integrated than its predecessor, which increases both performance and reliability.

How much of ANYmal C’s development and design was driven by your experience with commercial or industry customers?

Tests (such as the offshore installation with TenneT) and discussions with industry customers were important to get the necessary design input in terms of performance, safety, quality, reliability, and lifetime. Most customers ask for very similar inspection tasks that can be performed with our standard inspection payload and the required software packages. Some are looking for a robot that can also solve some simple manipulation tasks like pushing a button. Overall, most use cases customers have in mind are realistic and achievable, but some are really tough for the robot, like climbing 50° stairs in hot environments of 50°C.

Can you describe how much autonomy you expect ANYmal C to have in industrial or commercial operations?

ANYmal C is primarily developed to perform autonomous routine inspections in industrial environments. This autonomy especially adds value for operations that are difficult to access, as human operation is extremely costly. The robot can naturally also be operated via a remote control and we are working on long-distance remote operation as well.

Do you expect that researchers will be interested in ANYmal C? What research applications could it be useful for?

ANYmal C has been designed to also address the needs of the research community. The robot comes with two powerful hexacore Intel i7 computers and can additionally be equipped with an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier graphics card for learning-based applications. Payload interfaces enable users to easily install and test new sensors. By joining our established ANYmal Research community, researchers get access to simulation tools and software APIs, which boosts their research in various areas like control, machine learning, and navigation.

[ ANYmal C ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots