Tag Archives: ICRA
#437596 IROS Robotics Conference Is Online Now ...
The 2020 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) was originally going to be held in Las Vegas this week. Like ICRA last spring, IROS has transitioned to a completely online conference, which is wonderful news: Now everyone everywhere can participate in IROS without having to spend a dime on travel.
IROS officially opened yesterday, and the best news is that registration is entirely free! We’ll take a quick look at what IROS has on offer this year, which includes some stuff that’s brand news to IROS.
Registration for IROS is super easy, and did we mention that it’s free? To register, just go here and fill out a quick and easy form. You don’t even have to be an IEEE Member or anything like that, although in our unbiased opinion, an IEEE membership is well worth it. Once you get the confirmation email, go to https://www.iros2020.org/ondemand/, put in the email address you used to register, and that’s it, you’ve got IROS!
Here are some highlights:
Plenaries and Keynotes
Without the normal space and time constraints, you won’t have to pick and choose between any of the three plenaries or 10 keynotes. Some of them are fancier than others, but we’re used to that sort of thing by now. It’s worth noting that all three plenaries (and three of the 10 keynotes) are given by extraordinarily talented women, which is excellent to see.
Technical Tracks
There are over 1,400 technical talks, divided up into 12 categories of 20 sessions each. Note that each of the 12 categories that you see on the main page can be scrolled through to show all 20 of the sessions; if there’s a bright red arrow pointing left or right you can scroll, and if the arrow is transparent, you’ve reached the end.
On the session page, you’ll see an autoplaying advertisement (that you can mute but not stop), below which each talk has a preview slide, a link to a ~15 minute presentation video, and another link to a PDF of the paper. No supplementary videos are available, which is a bit disappointing. While you can leave a comment on the video, there’s no way of interacting with the author(s) directly through the IROS site, so you’ll have to check the paper for an email address if you want to ask a question.
Award Finalists
IROS has thoughtfully grouped all of the paper award finalists together into nine sessions. These are some truly outstanding papers, and it’s worth watching these sessions even if you’re not interested in specific subject matter.
Workshops and Tutorials
This stuff is a little more impacted by asynchronicity and on-demandedness, and some of the workshops and tutorials have already taken place. But IROS has done a good job at collecting videos of everything and making them easy to access, and the dedicated websites for the workshops and tutorials themselves sometimes have more detailed info. If you’re having trouble finding where the workshops and tutorial section is, try the “Entrance” drop-down menu up at the top.
IROS Original Series
In place of social events and lab tours, IROS this year has come up with the “IROS Original Series,” which “hosts unique content that would be difficult to see at in-person events.” Right now, there are some interviews with a diverse group of interesting roboticists, and hopefully more will show up later on.
Enjoy!
Everything on the IROS On-Demand site should be available for at least the next month, so there’s no need to try and watch a thousand presentations over three days (which is what we normally have to do). So, relax, and enjoy yourself a bit by browsing all the options. And additional content will be made available over the next several weeks, so make sure to check back often to see what’s new.
[ IROS 2020 ] Continue reading
#436165 Video Friday: DJI’s Mavic Mini Is ...
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 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
DJI’s new Mavic Mini looks like a pretty great drone for US $400 ($500 for a combo with more accessories): It’s tiny, flies for 30 minutes, and will do what you need as far as pictures and video (although not a whole lot more).
DJI seems to have put a bunch of effort into making the drone 249 grams, 1 gram under what’s required for FAA registration. That means you save $5 and a few minutes of your time, but that does not mean you don’t have to follow the FAA’s rules and regulations governing drone use.
[ DJI ]
Don’t panic, but Clearpath and HEBI Robotics have armed the Jackal:
After locking eyes across a crowded room at ICRA 2019, Clearpath Robotics and HEBI Robotics basked in that warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with starting a new and exciting relationship. Over a conference hall coffee, they learned that the two companies have many overlapping interests. The most compelling was the realization that customers across a variety of industries are hunting for an elusive true love of their own – a robust but compact robotic platform combined with a long reach manipulator for remote inspection tasks.
After ICRA concluded, Arron Griffiths, Application Engineer at Clearpath, and Matthew Tesch, Software Engineer at HEBI, kept in touch and decided there had been enough magic in the air to warrant further exploration. A couple of months later, Matthew arrived at Clearpath to formally introduce the HEBI’s X-Series Arm to Clearpath’s Jackal UGV. It was love.
[ Clearpath ]
Thanks Dave!
I’m really not a fan of the people-carrying drones, but heavy lift cargo drones seem like a more okay idea.
Volocopter, the pioneer in Urban Air Mobility, presented the demonstrator of its VoloDrone. This marks Volocopters expansion into the logistics, agriculture, infrastructure and public services industry. The VoloDrone is an unmanned, fully electric, heavy-lift utility drone capable of carrying a payload of 200 kg (440 lbs) up to 40 km (25 miles). With a standardized payload attachment, VoloDrone can serve a great variety of purposes from transporting boxes, to liquids, to equipment and beyond. It can be remotely piloted or flown in automated mode on pre-set routes.
[ Volocopter ]
JAY is a mobile service robot that projects a display on the floor and plays sound with its speaker. By playing sounds and videos, it provides visual and audio entertainment in various places such as exhibition halls, airports, hotels, department stores and more.
[ Rainbow Robotics ]
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Tunnel Circuit concluded this week—it was the same idea as the physical challenge that took place in August, just with a lot less IRL dirt.
The awards ceremony and team presentations are in this next video, and we’ll have more on this once we get back from IROS.
[ DARPA SubT ]
NASA is sending a mobile robot to the south pole of the Moon to get a close-up view of the location and concentration of water ice in the region and for the first time ever, actually sample the water ice at the same pole where the first woman and next man will land in 2024 under the Artemis program.
About the size of a golf cart, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, will roam several miles, using its four science instruments — including a 1-meter drill — to sample various soil environments. Planned for delivery in December 2022, VIPER will collect about 100 days of data that will be used to inform development of the first global water resource maps of the Moon.
[ NASA ]
Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!
[ HEBI ]
Happy Halloween from Soft Robotics!
[ Soft Robotics ]
Halloween must be really, really confusing for autonomous cars.
[ Waymo ]
Once a year at Halloween, hardworking JPL engineers put their skills to the test in a highly competitive pumpkin carving contest. The result: A pumpkin gently landed on the Moon, its retrorockets smoldering, while across the room a Nemo-inspired pumpkin explored the sub-surface ocean of Jupiter moon Europa. Suffice to say that when the scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory compete in a pumpkin-carving contest, the solar system’s the limit. Take a look at some of the masterpieces from 2019.
Now in its ninth year, the contest gives teams only one hour to carve and decorate their pumpkin though they can prepare non-pumpkin materials – like backgrounds, sound effects and motorized parts – ahead of time.
[ JPL ]
The online autonomous navigation and semantic mapping experiment presented [below] is conducted with the Cassie Blue bipedal robot at the University of Michigan. The sensors attached to the robot include an IMU, a 32-beam LiDAR and an RGB-D camera. The whole online process runs in real-time on a Jetson Xavier and a laptop with an i7 processor.
[ BPL ]
Misty II is now available to anyone who wants one, and she’s on sale for a mere $2900.
[ Misty ]
We leveraged LIDAR-based slam, in conjunction with our specialized relative localization sensor UVDAR to perform a de-centralized, communication-free swarm flight without the units knowing their absolute locations. The swarming and obstacle avoidance control is based on a modified Boids-like algorithm, while the whole swarm is controlled by directing a selected leader unit.
[ MRS ]
The MallARD robot is an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), designed for the monitoring and inspection of wet storage facilities for example spent fuel pools or wet silos. The MallARD is holonomic, uses a LiDAR for localisation and features a robust trajectory tracking controller.
The University of Manchester’s researcher Dr Keir Groves designed and built the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) for the challenge which came in the top three of the second round in Nov 2017. The MallARD went on to compete in a final 3rd round where it was deployed in a spent fuel pond at a nuclear power plant in Finland by the IAEA, along with two other entries. The MallARD came second overall, in November 2018.
[ RNE ]
Thanks Jennifer!
I sometimes get the sense that in the robotic grasping and manipulation world, suction cups are kinda seen as cheating at times. But, their nature allows you to do some pretty interesting things.
More clever octopus footage please.
[ CMU ]
A Personal, At-Home Teacher For Playful Learning: From academic topics to child-friendly news bulletins, fun facts and more, Miko 2 is packed with relevant and freshly updated content specially designed by educationists and child-specialists. Your little one won’t even realize they’re learning.
As we point out pretty much every time we post a video like this, keep in mind that you’re seeing a heavily edited version of a hypothetical best case scenario for how this robot can function. And things like “creating a relationship that they can then learn how to form with their peers” is almost certainly overselling things. But at $300 (shipping included), this may be a decent robot as long as your expectations are appropriately calibrated.
[ Miko ]
ICRA 2018 plenary talk by Rodney Brooks: “Robots and People: the Research Challenge.”
[ IEEE RAS ]
ICRA-X 2018 talk by Ron Arkin: “Lethal Autonomous Robots and the Plight of the Noncombatant.”
[ IEEE RAS ]
On the most recent episode of the AI Podcast, Lex Fridman interviews Garry Kasparov.
[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading
#435748 Video Friday: This Robot Is Like a ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
RSS 2019 – June 22-26, 2019 – Freiburg, Germany
Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 23-26, 2019 – London, U.K.
ETH Robotics Summer School – June 27-1, 2019 – Zurich, Switzerland
MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
It’s been a while since we last spoke to Joe Jones, the inventor of Roomba, about his solar-powered, weed-killing robot, called Tertill, which he was launching as a Kickstarter project. Tertill is now available for purchase (US $300) and is shipping right now.
[ Tertill ]
Usually, we don’t post videos that involve drone use that looks to be either illegal or unsafe. These flights over the protests in Hong Kong are almost certainly both. However, it’s also a unique perspective on the scale of these protests.
[ Team BlackSheep ]
ICYMI: iRobot announced this week that it has acquired Root Robotics.
[ iRobot ]
This Boston Dynamics parody video went viral this week.
The CGI is good but the gratuitous violence—even if it’s against a fake robot—is a bit too much?
This is still our favorite Boston Dynamics parody video:
[ Corridor ]
Biomedical Engineering Department Head Bin He and his team have developed the first-ever successful non-invasive mind-controlled robotic arm to continuously track a computer cursor.
[ CMU ]
Organic chemists, prepare to meet your replacement:
Automated chemical synthesis carries great promises of safety, efficiency and reproducibility for both research and industry laboratories. Current approaches are based on specifically-designed automation systems, which present two major drawbacks: (i) existing apparatus must be modified to be integrated into the automation systems; (ii) such systems are not flexible and would require substantial re-design to handle new reactions or procedures. In this paper, we propose a system based on a robot arm which, by mimicking the motions of human chemists, is able to perform complex chemical reactions without any modifications to the existing setup used by humans. The system is capable of precise liquid handling, mixing, filtering, and is flexible: new skills and procedures could be added with minimum effort. We show that the robot is able to perform a Michael reaction, reaching a yield of 34%, which is comparable to that obtained by a junior chemist (undergraduate student in Chemistry).
[ arXiv ] via [ NTU ]
So yeah, ICRA 2019 was huge and awesome. Here are some brief highlights.
[ Montreal Gazette ]
For about US $5, this drone will deliver raw meat and beer to you if you live on an uninhabited island in Tokyo Bay.
[ Nikkei ]
The Smart Microsystems Lab at Michigan State University has a new version of their Autonomous Surface Craft. It’s autonomous, open source, and awfully hard to sink.
[ SML ]
As drone shows go, this one is pretty good.
[ CCTV ]
Here’s a remote controlled robot shooting stuff with a very large gun.
[ HDT ]
Over a period of three quarters (September 2018 thru May 2019), we’ve had the opportunity to work with five graduating University of Denver students as they brought their idea for a Misty II arm extension to life.
[ Misty Robotics ]
If you wonder how it looks to inspect burners and superheaters of a boiler with an Elios 2, here you are! This inspection was performed by Svenska Elektrod in a peat-fired boiler for Vattenfall in Sweden. Enjoy!
[ Flyability ]
The newest Soft Robotics technology, mGrip mini fingers, made for tight spaces, small packaging, and delicate items, giving limitless opportunities for your applications.
[ Soft Robotics ]
What if legged robots were able to generate dynamic motions in real-time while interacting with a complex environment? Such technology would represent a significant step forward the deployment of legged systems in real world scenarios. This means being able to replace humans in the execution of dangerous tasks and to collaborate with them in industrial applications.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers from all the relevant communities in legged locomotion such as: numerical optimization, machine learning (ML), model predictive control (MPC) and computational geometry in order to chart the most promising methods to address the above-mentioned scientific challenges.
[ Num Opt Wkshp ]
Army researchers teamed with the U.S. Marine Corps to fly and test 3-D printed quadcopter prototypes a the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California recently.
[ CCDC ARL ]
Lex Fridman’s Artificial Intelligence podcast featuring Rosalind Picard.
[ AI Podcast ]
In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, per speaks with Christian Guttmann, executive director of the Nordic AI Artificial Intelligence Institute.
Christian Guttmann talks about AI and wanting to understand intelligence enough to recreate it. Christian has be focusing on AI in healthcare and has recently started to communicate the opportunities and challenges in artificial intelligence to the general public. This is something that the host Per Sjöborg is also very passionate about. We also get to hear about the Nordic AI institute and the work it does to inform all parts of society about AI.
[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading