Tag Archives: intelligence

#437892 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

ENVIRONMENT
Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth
Stephanie Pappas | Scientific American
“Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on Earth. Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet.”

SPACE
So, It Turns Out SpaceX Is Pretty Good at Rocketing
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“As the Sun sank toward the South Texas horizon, a fantastical-looking spaceship rose into the reddening sky. It was, in a word, epic. …This was one heck of a test-flight that addressed a number of unknowns about Starship, which is the upper stage of SpaceX’s new launch system and may one day land humans on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Tiny Four-Bit Computers Are All You Need to Train AI
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“The work…could increase the speed and cut the energy costs needed to train deep learning by more than sevenfold. It could also make training powerful AI models possible on smartphones and other small devices, which would improve privacy by helping to keep personal data on a local device. And it would make the process more accessible to researchers outside big, resource-rich tech companies.”

ENERGY
Did Quantum Scape Just Solve a 40-Year-Old Battery Problem?
Daniel Oberhaus | Wired
“[The properties of solid state batteries] would send…energy density through the roof, enable ultra-fast charging, and would eliminate the risk of battery fires. But for the past 40 years, no one has been able to make a solid-state battery that delivers on this promise—until earlier this year, when a secretive startup called QuantumScape claimed to have solved the problem. Now it has the data to prove it.”

ROBOTICS
Hyundai Buys Boston Dynamics for Nearly $1 Billion. Now What?
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“I hope that Boston Dynamics is unique enough that the kinds of rules that normally apply to robotics companies (or companies in general) can be set aside, at least somewhat, but I also worry that what made Boston Dynamics great was the explicit funding for the kinds of radical ideas that eventually resulted in robots like Atlas and Spot. Can Hyundai continue giving Boston Dynamics the support and freedom that they need to keep doing the kinds of things that have made them legendary? I certainly hope so.”

BIOTECH
CRISPR and Another Genetic Strategy Fix Cell Defects in Two Common Blood Disorders
Jocelyn Kaiser | Science
“It is a double milestone: new evidence that cures are possible for many people born with sickle cell disease and another serious blood disorder, beta-thalassemia, and a first for the genome editor CRISPR. Today, in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and tomorrow at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting, teams report that two strategies for directly fixing malfunctioning blood cells have dramatically improved the health of a handful of people with these genetic diseases.”

ETHICS
The Dark Side of Big Tech’s Funding for AI Research
Tom Simonite | Wired
“Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google is a powerful reminder of how thoroughly companies dominate the field, with the biggest computers and the most resources. …[Meredith] Whittaker of AI Now says properly probing the societal effects of AI is fundamentally incompatible with corporate labs. ‘That kind of research that looks at the power and politics of AI is and must be inherently adversarial to the firms that are profiting from this technology.’i”

Image credit: Karsten Winegeart / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437884 Hyundai Buys Boston Dynamics for Nearly ...

This morning just after 3 a.m. ET, Boston Dynamics sent out a media release confirming that Hyundai Motor Group has acquired a controlling interest in the company that values Boston Dynamics at US $1.1 billion:

Under the agreement, Hyundai Motor Group will hold an approximately 80 percent stake in Boston Dynamics and SoftBank, through one of its affiliates, will retain an approximately 20 percent stake in Boston Dynamics after the closing of the transaction.

The release is very long, but does have some interesting bits—we’ll go through them, and talk about what this might mean for both Boston Dynamics and Hyundai.

We’ve asked Boston Dynamics for comment, but they’ve been unusually quiet for the last few days (I wonder why!). So at this point just keep in mind that the only things we know for sure are the ones in the release. If (when?) we hear anything from either Boston Dynamics or Hyundai, we’ll update this post.

The first thing to be clear on is that the acquisition is split between Hyundai Motor Group’s affiliates, including Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Mobis, and Hyundai Glovis. Hyundai Motor makes cars, Hyundai Mobis makes car parts and seems to be doing some autonomous stuff as well, and Hyundai Glovis does logistics. There are many other groups that share the Hyundai name, but they’re separate entities, at least on paper. For example, there’s a Hyundai Robotics, but that’s part of Hyundai Heavy Industries, a different company than Hyundai Motor Group. But for this article, when we say “Hyundai,” we’re talking about Hyundai Motor Group.

What’s in it for Hyundai?
Let’s get into the press release, which is filled with press release-y terms like “synergies” and “working together”—you can view the whole thing here—but still has some parts that convey useful info.

By establishing a leading presence in the field of robotics, the acquisition will mark another major step for Hyundai Motor Group toward its strategic transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider. To propel this transformation, Hyundai Motor Group has invested substantially in development of future technologies, including in fields such as autonomous driving technology, connectivity, eco-friendly vehicles, smart factories, advanced materials, artificial intelligence (AI), and robots.

If Hyundai wants to be a “Smart Mobility Solution Provider” with a focus on vehicles, it really seems like there’s a whole bunch of other ways they could have spent most of a billion dollars that would get them there quicker. Will Boston Dynamics’ expertise help them develop autonomous driving technology? Sure, I guess, but why not just buy an autonomous car startup instead? Boston Dynamics is more about “robots,” which happens to be dead last on the list above.

There was some speculation a couple of weeks ago that Hyundai was going to try and leverage Boston Dynamics to make a real version of this hybrid wheeled/legged concept car, so if that’s what Hyundai means by “Smart Mobility Solution Provider,” then I suppose the Boston Dynamics acquisition makes more sense. Still, I think that’s unlikely, because it’s just a concept car, after all.

In addition to “smart mobility,” which seems like a longer-term goal for Hyundai, the company also mentions other, more immediate benefits from the acquisition:

Advanced robotics offer opportunities for rapid growth with the potential to positively impact society in multiple ways. Boston Dynamics is the established leader in developing agile, mobile robots that have been successfully integrated into various business operations. The deal is also expected to allow Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics to leverage each other’s respective strengths in manufacturing, logistics, construction and automation.

“Successfully integrated” might be a little optimistic here. They’re talking about Spot, of course, but I think the best you could say at this point is that Spot is in the middle of some promising pilot projects. Whether it’ll be successfully integrated in the sense that it’ll have long-term commercial usefulness and value remains to be seen. I’m optimistic about this as well, but Spot is definitely not there yet.

What does probably hold a lot of value for Hyundai is getting Spot, Pick, and perhaps even Handle into that “manufacturing, logistics, construction” stuff. This is the bread and butter for robots right now, and Boston Dynamics has plenty of valuable technology to offer in those spaces.

Photo: Bob O’Connor

Boston Dynamics is selling Spot for $74,500, shipping included.

Betting on Spot and Pick
With Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert’s transition to Chairman of the company, the CEO position is now occupied by Robert Playter, the long-time VP of engineering and more recently COO at Boston Dynamics. Here’s his statement from the release:

“Boston Dynamics’ commercial business has grown rapidly as we’ve brought to market the first robot that can automate repetitive and dangerous tasks in workplaces designed for human-level mobility. We and Hyundai share a view of the transformational power of mobility and look forward to working together to accelerate our plans to enable the world with cutting edge automation, and to continue to solve the world’s hardest robotics challenges for our customers.”

Whether Spot is in fact “the first robot that can automate repetitive and dangerous tasks in workplaces designed for human-level mobility” on the market is perhaps something that could be argued against, although I won’t. Whether or not it was the first robot that can do these kinds of things, it’s definitely not the only robot that do these kinds of things, and going forward, it’s going to be increasingly challenging for Spot to maintain its uniqueness.

For a long time, Boston Dynamics totally owned the quadruped space. Now, they’re one company among many—ANYbotics and Unitree are just two examples of other quadrupeds that are being successfully commercialized. Spot is certainly very capable and easy to use, and we shouldn’t underestimate the effort required to create a robot as complex as Spot that can be commercially used and supported. But it’s not clear how long they’ll maintain that advantage, with much more affordable platforms coming out of Asia, and other companies offering some unique new capabilities.

Photo: Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics’ Handle is an all-electric robot featuring a leg-wheel hybrid mobility system, a manipulator arm with a vacuum gripper, and a counterbalancing tail.

Boston Dynamics’ picking system, which stemmed from their 2019 acquisition of Kinema Systems, faces the same kinds of challenges—it’s very good, but it’s not totally unique.

Boston Dynamics produces highly capable mobile robots with advanced mobility, dexterity and intelligence, enabling automation in difficult, dangerous, or unstructured environments. The company launched sales of its first commercial robot, Spot in June of 2020 and has since sold hundreds of robots in a variety of industries, such as power utilities, construction, manufacturing, oil and gas, and mining. Boston Dynamics plans to expand the Spot product line early next year with an enterprise version of the robot with greater levels of autonomy and remote inspection capabilities, and the release of a robotic arm, which will be a breakthrough in mobile manipulation.

Boston Dynamics is also entering the logistics automation market with the industry leading Pick, a computer vision-based depalletizing solution, and will introduce a mobile robot for warehouses in 2021.

Huh. We’ll be trying to figure out what “greater levels of autonomy” means, as well as whether the “mobile robot for warehouses” is Handle, or something more like an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) platform. I’d honestly be surprised if Handle was ready for work outside of Boston Dynamics next year, and it’s hard to imagine how Boston Dynamics could leverage their expertise into the AMR space with something that wouldn’t just seem… Dull, compared to what they usually do. I hope to be surprised, though!

A new deep-pocketed benefactor

Hyundai Motor Group’s decision to acquire Boston Dynamics is based on its growth potential and wide range of capabilities.

“Wide range of capabilities” we get, but that other phrase, “growth potential,” has a heck of a lot wrapped up in it. At the moment, Boston Dynamics is nowhere near profitable, as far as we know. SoftBank acquired Boston Dynamics in 2017 for between one hundred and two hundred million, and over the last three years they’ve poured hundreds of millions more into Boston Dynamics.

Hyundai’s 80 percent stake just means that they’ll need to take over the majority of that support, and perhaps even increase it if Boston Dynamics’ growth is one of their primary goals. Hyundai can’t have a reasonable expectation that Boston Dynamics will be profitable any time soon; they’re selling Spots now, but it’s an open question whether Spot will manage to find a scalable niche in which it’ll be useful in the sort of volume that will make it a sustainable commercial success. And even if it does become a success, it seems unlikely that Spot by itself will make a significant dent in Boston Dynamics’ burn rate anytime soon. Boston Dynamics will have more products of course, but it’s going to take a while, and Hyundai will need to support them in the interim.

Depending on whether Hyundai views Boston Dynamics as a company that does research or a company that makes robots that are useful and profitable, it may be difficult for Boston Dynamics to justify the cost to develop the
next Atlas, when the
current one still seems so far from commercialization

It’s become clear that to sustain itself, Boston Dynamics needs a benefactor with very deep pockets and a long time horizon. Initially, Boston Dynamics’ business model (or whatever you want to call it) was to do bespoke projects for defense-ish folks like DARPA, but from what we understand Boston Dynamics stopped that sort of work after Google acquired them back in 2013. From one perspective, that government funding did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was to fund the development of legged robots through low TRLs (technology readiness levels) to the point where they could start to explore commercialization.

The question now, though, is whether Hyundai is willing to let Boston Dynamics undertake the kinds of low-TRL, high-risk projects that led from BigDog to LS3 to Spot, and from PETMAN to DRC Atlas to the current Atlas. So will Hyundai be cool about the whole thing and be the sort of benefactor that’s willing to give Boston Dynamics the resources that they need to keep doing what they’re doing, without having to answer too many awkward questions about things like practicality and profitability? Hyundai can certainly afford to do this, but so could SoftBank, and Google—the question is whether Hyundai will want to, over the length of time that’s required for the development of the kind of ultra-sophisticated robotics hardware that Boston Dynamics specializes in.

To put it another way: Depending whether Hyundai’s perspective on Boston Dynamics is as a company that does research or a company that makes robots that are useful and profitable, it may be difficult for Boston Dynamics to justify the cost to develop the next Atlas, when the current one still seems so far from commercialization.

Google, SoftBank, now Hyundai

Boston Dynamics possesses multiple key technologies for high-performance robots equipped with perception, navigation, and intelligence.

Hyundai Motor Group’s AI and Human Robot Interaction (HRI) expertise is highly synergistic with Boston Dynamics’s 3D vision, manipulation, and bipedal/quadruped expertise.

As it turns out, Hyundai Motors does have its own robotics lab, called Hyundai Motors Robotics Lab. Their website is not all that great, but here’s a video from last year:

I’m not entirely clear on what Hyundai means when they use the word “synergistic” when they talk about their robotics lab and Boston Dynamics, but it’s a little bit concerning. Usually, when a big company buys a little company that specializes in something that the big company is interested in, the idea is that the little company, to some extent, will be absorbed into the big company to give them some expertise in that area. Historically, however, Boston Dynamics has been highly resistant to this, maintaining its post-acquisition independence and appearing to be very reluctant to do anything besides what it wants to do, at whatever pace it wants to do it, and as by itself as possible.

From what we understand, Boston Dynamics didn’t integrate particularly well with Google’s robotics push in 2013, and we haven’t seen much evidence that SoftBank’s experience was much different. The most direct benefit to SoftBank (or at least the most visible one) was the addition of a fleet of Spot robots to the SoftBank Hawks baseball team cheerleading squad, along with a single (that we know about) choreographed gymnastics routine from an Atlas robot that was only shown on video.

And honestly, if you were a big manufacturing company with a bunch of money and you wanted to build up your own robotics program quickly, you’d probably have much better luck picking up some smaller robotics companies who were a bit less individualistic and would probably be more amenable to integration and would cost way less than a billion dollars-ish. And if integration is ultimately Hyundai’s goal, we’ll be very sad, because it’ll likely signal the end of Boston Dynamics doing the unfettered crazy stuff that we’ve grown to love.

Photo: Bob O’Connor

Possibly the most agile humanoid robot ever built, Atlas can run, climb, jump over obstacles, and even get up after a fall.

Boston Dynamics contemplates its future

The release ends by saying that the transaction is “subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions” and “is expected to close by June of 2021.” Again, you can read the whole thing here.

My initial reaction is that, despite the “synergies” described by Hyundai, it’s certainly not immediately obvious why the company wants to own 80 percent of Boston Dynamics. I’d also like a better understanding of how they arrived at the $1.1 billion valuation. I’m not saying this because I don’t believe in what Boston Dynamics is doing or in the inherent value of the company, because I absolutely do, albeit perhaps in a slightly less tangible sense. But when you start tossing around numbers like these, a big pile of expectations inevitably comes along with them. I hope that Boston Dynamics is unique enough that the kinds of rules that normally apply to robotics companies (or companies in general) can be set aside, at least somewhat, but I also worry that what made Boston Dynamics great was the explicit funding for the kinds of radical ideas that eventually resulted in robots like Atlas and Spot.

Can Hyundai continue giving Boston Dynamics the support and freedom that they need to keep doing the kinds of things that have made them legendary? I certainly hope so. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437872 AlphaFold Proves That AI Can Crack ...

Any successful implementation of artificial intelligence hinges on asking the right questions in the right way. That’s what the British AI company DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet) accomplished when it used its neural network to tackle one of biology’s grand challenges, the protein-folding problem. Its neural net, known as AlphaFold, was able to predict the 3D structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequences with unprecedented accuracy.

AlphaFold’s predictions at the 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14) were accurate to within an atom’s width for most of the proteins. The competition consisted of blindly predicting the structure of proteins that have only recently been experimentally determined—with some still awaiting determination.

Called the building blocks of life, proteins consist of 20 different amino acids in various combinations and sequences. A protein's biological function is tied to its 3D structure. Therefore, knowledge of the final folded shape is essential to understanding how a specific protein works—such as how they interact with other biomolecules, how they may be controlled or modified, and so on. “Being able to predict structure from sequence is the first real step towards protein design,” says Janet M. Thornton, director emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute. It also has enormous benefits in understanding disease-causing pathogens. For instance, at the moment only about 18 of the 26 proteins in the SARS-CoV-2 virus are known.

Predicting a protein’s 3D structure is a computational nightmare. In 1969 Cyrus Levinthal estimated that there are 10300 possible conformational combinations for a single protein, which would take longer than the age of the known universe to evaluate by brute force calculation. AlphaFold can do it in a few days.

As scientific breakthroughs go, AlphaFold’s discovery is right up there with the likes of James Watson and Francis Crick’s DNA double-helix model, or, more recently, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technique.

How did a team that just a few years ago was teaching an AI to master a 3,000-year-old game end up training one to answer a question plaguing biologists for five decades? That, says Briana Brownell, data scientist and founder of the AI company PureStrategy, is the beauty of artificial intelligence: The same kind of algorithm can be used for very different things.

“Whenever you have a problem that you want to solve with AI,” she says, “you need to figure out how to get the right data into the model—and then the right sort of output that you can translate back into the real world.”

DeepMind’s success, she says, wasn’t so much a function of picking the right neural nets but rather “how they set up the problem in a sophisticated enough way that the neural network-based modeling [could] actually answer the question.”

AlphaFold showed promise in 2018, when DeepMind introduced a previous iteration of their AI at CASP13, achieving the highest accuracy among all participants. The team had trained its to model target shapes from scratch, without using previously solved proteins as templates.

For 2020 they deployed new deep learning architectures into the AI, using an attention-based model that was trained end-to-end. Attention in a deep learning network refers to a component that manages and quantifies the interdependence between the input and output elements, as well as between the input elements themselves.

The system was trained on public datasets of the approximately 170,000 known experimental protein structures in addition to databases with protein sequences of unknown structures.

“If you look at the difference between their entry two years ago and this one, the structure of the AI system was different,” says Brownell. “This time, they’ve figured out how to translate the real world into data … [and] created an output that could be translated back into the real world.”

Like any AI system, AlphaFold may need to contend with biases in the training data. For instance, Brownell says, AlphaFold is using available information about protein structure that has been measured in other ways. However, there are also many proteins with as yet unknown 3D structures. Therefore, she says, a bias could conceivably creep in toward those kinds of proteins that we have more structural data for.

Thornton says it’s difficult to predict how long it will take for AlphaFold’s breakthrough to translate into real-world applications.

“We only have experimental structures for about 10 per cent of the 20,000 proteins [in] the human body,” she says. “A powerful AI model could unveil the structures of the other 90 per cent.”

Apart from increasing our understanding of human biology and health, she adds, “it is the first real step toward… building proteins that fulfill a specific function. From protein therapeutics to biofuels or enzymes that eat plastic, the possibilities are endless.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437864 Video Friday: Jet-Powered Flying ...

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!):

ICRA 2020 – June 1-15, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

ICRA 2020, the world’s best, biggest, longest virtual robotics conference ever, kicked off last Sunday with an all-star panel on a critical topic: “COVID-19: How Can Roboticists Help?”

Watch other ICRA keynotes on IEEE.tv.

We’re getting closer! Well, kinda. iRonCub, the jet-powered flying humanoid, is still a simulation for now, but not only are the simulations getting better—the researchers have begun testing real jet engines!

This video shows the latest results on Aerial Humanoid Robotics obtained by the Dynamic Interaction Control Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology. The video simulates robot and jet dynamics, where the latter uses the results obtained in the paper “Modeling, Identification and Control of Model Jet Engines for Jet Powered Robotics” published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

This video presents the paper entitled “Modeling, Identification and Control of Model Jet Engines for Jet Powered Robotics” published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (Volume: 5 , Issue: 2 , April 2020 ) Page(s): 2070 – 2077. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.13296.pdf.​

[ IIT ]

In a new pair of papers, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with new tools to let robots better perceive what they’re interacting with: the ability to see and classify items, and a softer, delicate touch.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

UBTECH’s anti-epidemic solutions greatly relieve the workload of front-line medical staff and cut the consumption of personal protective equipment (PPE).

[ UBTECH ]

We demonstrate a method to assess the concrete deterioration in sewers by performing a tactile inspection motion with a sensorized foot of a legged robot.

[ THING ] via [ ANYmal Research ]

Get a closer look at the Virtual competition of the Urban Circuit and how teams can use the simulated environments to better prepare for the physical courses of the Subterranean Challenge.

[ SubT ]

Roboticists at the University of California San Diego have developed flexible feet that can help robots walk up to 40 percent faster on uneven terrain, such as pebbles and wood chips. The work has applications for search-and-rescue missions as well as space exploration.

[ UCSD ]

Thanks Ioana!

Tsuki is a ROS-enabled, highly dynamic quadruped robot developed by Lingkang Zhang.

And as far as we know, Lingkang is still chasing it.

[ Quadruped Tsuki ]

Thanks Lingkang!

Watch this.

This video shows an impressive demo of how YuMi’s superior precision, using precise servo gripper fingers and vacuum suction tool to pick up extremely small parts inside a mechanical watch. The video is not a final application used in production, it is a demo of how such an application can be implemented.

[ ABB ]

Meet Presso, the “5-minute dry cleaning robot.” Can you really call this a robot? We’re not sure. The company says it uses “soft robotics to hold the garment correctly, then clean, sanitize, press and dry under 5 minutes.” The machine was initially designed for use in the hospitality industry, but after adding a disinfectant function for COVID-19, it is now being used on movie and TV sets.

[ Presso ]

The next Mars rover launches next month (!), and here’s a look at some of the instruments on board.

[ JPL ]

Embodied Lead Engineer, Peter Teel, describes why we chose to build Moxie’s computing system from scratch and what makes it so unique.

[ Embodied ]

I did not know that this is where Pepper’s e-stop is. Nice design!

[ Softbank Robotics ]

State of the art in the field of swarm robotics lacks systems capable of absolute decentralization and is hence unable to mimic complex biological swarm systems consisting of simple units. Our research interconnects fields of swarm robotics and computer vision, and introduces novel use of a vision-based method UVDAR for mutual localization in swarm systems, allowing for absolute decentralization found among biological swarm systems. The developed methodology allows us to deploy real-world aerial swarming systems with robots directly localizing each other instead of communicating their states via a communication network, which is a typical bottleneck of current state of the art systems.

[ CVUT ]

I’m almost positive I could not do this task.

It’s easy to pick up objects using YuMi’s integrated vacuum functionality, it also supports ABB Robot’s Conveyor Tracking and Pickmaster 3 functionality, enabling it to track a moving conveyor and pick up objects using vision. Perfect for consumer products handling applications.

[ ABB ]

Cycling safety gestures, such as hand signals and shoulder checks, are an essential part of safe manoeuvring on the road. Child cyclists, in particular, might have difficulties performing safety gestures on the road or even forget about them, given the lack of cycling experience, road distractions and differences in motor and perceptual-motor abilities compared with adults. To support them, we designed two methods to remind about safety gestures while cycling. The first method employs an icon-based reminder in heads-up display (HUD) glasses and the second combines vibration on the handlebar and ambient light in the helmet. We investigated the performance of both methods in a controlled test-track experiment with 18 children using a mid-size tricycle, augmented with a set of sensors to recognize children’s behavior in real time. We found that both systems are successful in reminding children about safety gestures and have their unique advantages and disadvantages.

[ Paper ]

Nathan Sam and Robert “Red” Jensen fabricate and fly a Prandtl-M aircraft at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. The aircraft is the second of three prototypes of varying sizes to provide scientists with options to fly sensors in the Martian atmosphere to collect weather and landing site information for future human exploration of Mars.

[ NASA ]

This is clever: In order to minimize time spent labeling datasets, you can use radar to identify other vehicles, not because the radar can actually recognize other vehicles, but because the radar can recognize other stuff that’s big and moving, which turns out to be almost as good.

[ ICRA Paper ]

Happy 10th birthday to the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield.

[ NRL ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437824 Video Friday: These Giant Robots Are ...

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!):

ACRA 2020 – December 8-10, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

“Who doesn’t love giant robots?”

Luma, is a towering 8 metre snail which transforms spaces with its otherworldly presence. Another piece, Triffid, stands at 6 metres and its flexible end sweeps high over audiences’ heads like an enchanted plant. The movement of the creatures is inspired by the flexible, wiggling and contorting motions of the animal kingdom and is designed to provoke instinctive reactions and emotions from the people that meet them. Air Giants is a new creative robotic studio founded in 2020. They are based in Bristol, UK, and comprise a small team of artists, roboticists and software engineers. The studio is passionate about creating emotionally effective motion at a scale which is thought-provoking and transporting, as well as expanding the notion of what large robots can be used for.

Here’s a behind the scenes and more on how the creatures work.

[ Air Giants ]

Thanks Emma!

If the idea of submerging a very expensive sensor payload being submerged in a lake makes you as uncomfortable as it makes me, this is not the video for you.

[ ANYbotics ]

As the pandemic continues on, the measures due to this health crisis are increasingly stringent, and working from home continues to be promoted and solicited by many companies, Pepper will allow you to keep in touch with your relatives or even your colleagues.

[ Softbank ]

Fairly impressive footwork from Tencent Robotics.

Although, LittleDog was doing that like a decade ago:

[ Tencent ]

It's been long enough since I've been able to go out for boba tea that a robotic boba tea kiosk seems like a reasonable thing to get for my living room.

[ Bobacino ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Road construction and maintenance is challenging and dangerous work. Pioneer Industrial Systems has spent over twenty years designing custom robotic systems for industrial manufacturers around the world. These robotic systems greatly improve safety and increase efficiency. Now they’re taking that expertise on the road, with the Robotic Maintenance Vehicle. This base unit can be mounted on a truck or trailer, and utilizes various modules to perform a variety of road maintenance tasks.

[ Pioneer ]

Extend Robotics arm uses cloud-based teleoperation software, featuring human-like dexterity and intelligence, with multiple applications in healthcare, utilities and energy

[ Extend Robotics ]

ARC, short for “AI, Robot, Cloud,” includes the latest algorithms and high precision data required for human-robot coexistence. Now with ultra-low latency networks, many robots can simultaneously become smarter, just by connecting to ARC. “ARC Eye” serves as the eyes for all robots, accurately determining the current location and route even indoors where there is no GPS access. “ARC Brain” is the computing system shared simultaneously by all robots, which plans and processes movement, localization, and task performance for the robot.

[ Naver Labs ]

How can we re-imagine urban infrastructures with cutting-edge technologies? Listen to this webinar from Ger Baron, Amsterdam’s CTO, and Senseable City Lab’s researchers, on how MIT and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) are reimagining Amsterdam’s canals with the first fleet of autonomous boats.

[ MIT ]

Join Guy Burroughes in this webinar recording to hear about Spot, the robot dog created by Boston Dynamics, and how RACE plan to use it in nuclear decommissioning and beyond.

[ UKAEA ]

This GRASP on Robotics seminar comes from Marco Pavone at Stanford University, “On Safe and Efficient Human-robot interactions via Multimodal Intent Modeling and Reachability-based Safety Assurance.”

In this talk I will present a decision-making and control stack for human-robot interactions by using autonomous driving as a motivating example. Specifically, I will first discuss a data-driven approach for learning multimodal interaction dynamics between robot-driven and human-driven vehicles based on recent advances in deep generative modeling. Then, I will discuss how to incorporate such a learned interaction model into a real-time, interaction-aware decision-making framework. The framework is designed to be minimally interventional; in particular, by leveraging backward reachability analysis, it ensures safety even when other cars defy the robot's expectations without unduly sacrificing performance. I will present recent results from experiments on a full-scale steer-by-wire platform, validating the framework and providing practical insights. I will conclude the talk by providing an overview of related efforts from my group on infusing safety assurances in robot autonomy stacks equipped with learning-based components, with an emphasis on adding structure within robot learning via control-theoretical and formal methods.

[ UPenn ]

Autonomous Systems Failures: Who is Legally and Morally Responsible? Sponsored by Northwestern University’s Law and Technology Initiative and AI@NU, the event was moderated by Dan Linna and included Northwestern Engineering's Todd Murphey, University of Washington Law Professor Ryan Calo, and Google Senior Research Scientist Madeleine Clare Elish.

[ Northwestern ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots