Tag Archives: korea

#439051 ‘Neutrobots’ smuggle drugs ...

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Android

A team of researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology along with partners at the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, both in China, has developed a tiny robot that can ferry cancer drugs through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) without setting off an immune reaction. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their robot and tests with mice. Junsun Hwang and Hongsoo Choi, with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have published a Focus piece in the same journal issue on the work done by the team in China. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437845 Video Friday: Harmonic Bionics ...

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

ICRA 2020 – May 31-August 31, 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.

Designed to protect employees and passengers from both harmful pathogens and cleaning agents, Breezy One can quickly, safely and effectively decontaminate spaces over 100,000 square feet in 1.5 hours with a patented, environmentally safe disinfectant. Breezy One was co-developed with the City of Albuquerque’s Aviation Department, where it autonomously sanitizes the Sunport’s facilities every night in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.

[ Fetch Robotics ]

Harmonic Bionics is redefining upper extremity neurorehabilitation with intelligent robotic technology designed to maximize patient recovery. Harmony SHR, our flagship product, works with a patient’s scapulohumeral rhythm (SHR) to enable natural, comprehensive therapy for both arms. When combined with Harmony’s Weight Support mode, this unique shoulder design may allow for earlier initiation of post-stroke therapy as Harmony can support a partial dislocation or subluxation of the shoulder prior to initiating traditional therapy exercises.

Harmony's Preprogrammed Exercises promotes functional treatment through patient-specific movements that can enable an increased number of repetitions per session without placing a larger physical burden on therapists or their resources. As the only rehabilitation exoskeleton with Bilateral Sync Therapy (BST), Harmony enables intent-based therapy by registering healthy arm movements and synchronizing that motion onto the stroke-affected side to help reestablish neural pathways.

[ Harmonic Bionics ]

Thanks Mok!

Some impressive work here from IHMC and IIT getting Atlas to take steps upward in a way that’s much more human-like than robot-like, which ends up reducing maximum torque requirements by 20 percent.

[ Paper ]

GITAI’s G1 is the space dedicated general-purpose robot. G1 robot will enable automation of various tasks internally & externally on space stations and for lunar base development.

[ GITAI ]

Malloy Aeronautics, which now makes drones rather than hoverbikes, has been working with the Royal Navy in New Zealand to figure out how to get cargo drones to land on ships.

The challenge was to test autonomous landing of heavy lift UAVs on a moving ship, however, due to the Covid19 lockdown no ship trails were possible. The moving deck was simulated by driving a vehicle and trailer across an airfield while carrying out multiple landing and take-offs. The autonomous system partner was Planck Aerosystems and autolanding was triggered by a camera on the UAV reading a QR code on the trailer.

[ Malloy Aeronautics ]

Thanks Paul!

Tertill looks to be relentlessly effective.

[ Franklin Robotics ]

A Swedish company, TikiSafety has experienced a record amount of orders for their protective masks. At ABB, we are grateful for the opportunity to help Tiki Safety to speed up their manufacturing process from 6 minutes to 40 seconds.

[ Tiki Safety ]

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is not messing around with ARMstrong, their robot for nuclear and radiation emergency response.

[ KAERI ]

OMOY is a robot that communicates with its users via internal weight shifting.

[ Paper ]

Now this, this is some weird stuff.

[ Segway ]

CaTARo is a Care Training Assistant Robot from the AIS Lab at Ritsumeikan University.

[ AIS Lab ]

Originally launched in 2015 to assist workers in lightweight assembly tasks, ABB’s collaborative YuMi robot has gone on to blaze a trail in a raft of diverse applications and industries, opening new opportunities and helping to fire people’s imaginations about what can be achieved with robotic automation.

[ ABB ]

This music video features COMAN+, from the Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Lab at IIT, doing what you’d call dance moves if you dance like I do.

[ Alex Braga ] via [ IIT ]

The NVIDIA Isaac Software Development Kit (SDK) enables accelerated AI robot development workflows. Stacked with new tools and application support, Isaac SDK 2020.1 is an end-to-end solution supporting each step of robot fleet deployment, from design collaboration and training to the ongoing maintenance of AI applications.

[ NVIDIA ]

Robot Spy Komodo Dragon and Spy Pig film “a tender moment” between Komodo dragons but will they both survive the encounter?

[ BBC ] via [ Laughing Squid ]

This is part one of a mostly excellent five-part documentary about ROS produced by Red Hat. I say mostly only because they put ME in it for some reason, but fortunately, they talked with many of the core team that developed ROS back at Willow Garage back in the day, and it’s definitely worth watching.

[ Red Hat Open Source Stories ]

It’s been a while, but here’s an update on SRI’s Abacus Drive, from Alexander Kernbaum.

[ SRI ]

This Robots For Infectious Diseases interview features IEEE Fellow Antonio Bicchi, professor of robotics at the University of Pisa, talking about how Italy has been using technology to help manage COVID-19.

[ R4ID ]

Two more interviews this week of celebrity roboticists from MassRobotics: Helen Greiner and Marc Raibert. I’d introduce them, but you know who they are already!

[ MassRobotics ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437741 CaseCrawler Adds Tiny Robotic Legs to ...

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Android

Most of us have a fairly rational expectation that if we put our cellphone down somewhere, it will stay in that place until we pick it up again. Normally, this is exactly what you’d want, but there are exceptions, like when you put your phone down in not quite the right spot on a wireless charging pad without noticing, or when you’re lying on the couch and your phone is juuust out of reach no matter how much you stretch.

Roboticists from the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University in South Korea have solved both of these problems, and many more besides, by developing a cellphone case with little robotic legs, endowing your phone with the ability to skitter around autonomously. And unlike most of the phone-robot hybrids we’ve seen in the past, this one actually does look like a legit case for your phone.

CaseCrawler is much chunkier than a form-fitting case, but it’s not offensively bigger than one of those chunky battery cases. It’s only 24 millimeters thick (excluding the motor housing), and the total weight is just under 82 grams. Keep in mind that this case is in fact an entire robot, and also not at all optimized for being an actual phone case, so it’s easy to imagine how it could get a lot more svelte—for example, it currently includes a small battery that would be unnecessary if it instead tapped into the phone for power.

The technology inside is pretty amazing, since it involves legs that can retract all the way flat while also supporting a significant amount of weight. The legs work sort of like your legs do, in that there’s a knee joint that can only bend one way. To move the robot forward, a linkage (attached to a motor through a gearbox) pushes the leg back against the ground, as the knee joint keeps the leg straight. On the return stroke, the joint allows the leg to fold, making it compliant so that it doesn’t exert force on the ground. The transmission that sends power from the gearbox to the legs is just 1.5-millimeter thick, but this incredibly thin and lightweight mechanical structure is quite powerful. A non-phone case version of the robot, weighing about 23 g, is able to crawl at 21 centimeters per second while carrying a payload of just over 300 g. That’s more than 13 times its body weight.

The researchers plan on exploring how robots like these could make other objects movable that would otherwise not be. They’d also like to add some autonomy, which (at least for the phone case version) could be as straightforward as leveraging the existing sensors on the phone. And as to when you might be able to buy one of these—we’ll keep you updated, but the good news is that it seems to be fundamentally inexpensive enough that it may actually crawl out of the lab one day.

“CaseCrawler: A Lightweight and Low-Profile Crawling Phone Case Robot,” by Jongeun Lee, Gwang-Pil Jung, Sang-Min Baek, Soo-Hwan Chae, Sojung Yim, Woongbae Kim, and Kyu-Jin Cho from Seoul National University, appears in the October issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437735 Robotic Chameleon Tongue Snatches Nearby ...

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Android

Chameleons may be slow-moving lizards, but their tongues can accelerate at astounding speeds, snatching insects before they have any chance of fleeing. Inspired by this remarkable skill, researchers in South Korea have developed a robotic tongue that springs forth quickly to snatch up nearby items.

They envision the tool, called Snatcher, being used by drones and robots that need to collect items without getting too close to them. “For example, a quadrotor with this manipulator will be able to snatch distant targets, instead of hovering and picking up,” explains Gwang-Pil Jung, a researcher at Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech) who co-designed the new device.

There has been other research into robotic chameleon tongues, but what’s unique about Snatcher is that it packs chameleon-tongue fast snatching performance into a form factor that’s portable—the total size is 12 x 8.5 x 8.5 centimeters and it weighs under 120 grams. Still, it’s able to fast snatch up to 30 grams from 80 centimeters away in under 600 milliseconds.

Image: SeoulTech

The fast snatching deployable arm is powered by a wind-up spring attached to a motor (a series elastic actuator) combined with an active clutch. The clutch is what allows the single spring to drive both the shooting and the retracting.

To create Snatcher, Jung and a colleague at SeoulTech, Dong-Jun Lee, set about developing a spring-like device that’s controlled by an active clutch combined with a single series elastic actuator. Powered by a wind-up spring, a steel tapeline—analogous to a chameleon’s tongue—passes through two geared feeders. The clutch is what allows the single spring unwinding in one direction to drive both the shooting and the retracting, by switching a geared wheel between driving the forward feeder or the backward feeder.

The end result is a lightweight snatching device that can retrieve an object 0.8 meters away within 600 milliseconds. Jung notes that some other, existing devices designed for retrieval are capable of accomplishing the task quicker, at about 300 milliseconds, but these designs tend to be bulky. A more detailed description of Snatcher was published July 21 in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Photo: Dong-Jun Lee and Gwang-Pil Jung/SeoulTech

Snatcher’s relative small size means that it can be installed on a DJI Phantom drone. The researchers want to find out if their system can help make package delivery or retrieval faster and safer.

“Our final goal is to install the Snatcher to a commercial drone and achieve meaningful work, such as grasping packages,” says Jung. One of the challenges they still need to address is how to power the actuation system more efficiently. “To solve this issue, we are finding materials having high energy density.” Another improvement is designing a chameleon tongue-like gripper, replacing the simple hook that’s currently used to pick up objects. “We are planning to make a bi-stable gripper to passively grasp a target object as soon as the gripper contacts the object,” says Jung.

< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437671 Video Friday: Researchers 3D Print ...

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

The Giant Gundam in Yokohama is actually way cooler than I thought it was going to be.

[ Gundam Factory ] via [ YouTube ]

A new 3D-printing method will make it easier to manufacture and control the shape of soft robots, artificial muscles and wearable devices. Researchers at UC San Diego show that by controlling the printing temperature of liquid crystal elastomer, or LCE, they can control the material’s degree of stiffness and ability to contract—also known as degree of actuation. What’s more, they are able to change the stiffness of different areas in the same material by exposing it to heat.

[ UCSD ]

Thanks Ioana!

This is the first successful reactive stepping test on our new torque-controlled biped robot named Bolt. The robot has 3 active degrees of freedom per leg and one passive joint in ankle. Since there is no active joint in ankle, the robot only relies on step location and timing adaptation to stabilize its motion. Not only can the robot perform stepping without active ankles, but it is also capable of rejecting external disturbances as we showed in this video.

[ ODRI ]

The curling robot “Curly” is the first AI-based robot to demonstrate competitive curling skills in an icy real environment with its high uncertainties. Scientists from seven different Korean research institutions including Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller, head of the machine-learning group at TU Berlin and guest professor at Korea University, have developed an AI-based curling robot.

[ TU Berlin ]

MoonRanger, a small robotic rover being developed by Carnegie Mellon University and its spinoff Astrobotic, has completed its preliminary design review in preparation for a 2022 mission to search for signs of water at the moon’s south pole. Red Whittaker explains why the new MoonRanger Lunar Explorer design is innovative and different from prior planetary rovers.

[ CMU ]

Cobalt’s security robot can now navigate unmodified elevators, which is an impressive feat.

Also, EXTERMINATE!

[ Cobalt ]

OrionStar, the robotics company invested in by Cheetah Mobile, announced the Robotic Coffee Master. Incorporating 3,000 hours of AI learning, 30,000 hours of robotic arm testing and machine vision training, the Robotic Coffee Master can perform complex brewing techniques, such as curves and spirals, with millimeter-level stability and accuracy (reset error ≤ 0.1mm).

[ Cheetah Mobile ]

DARPA OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) researchers recently tested swarms of autonomous air and ground vehicles at the Leschi Town Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (CACTF), located at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington. The Leschi Town field experiment is the fourth of six planned experiments for the OFFSET program, which seeks to develop large-scale teams of collaborative autonomous systems capable of supporting ground forces operating in urban environments.

[ DARPA ]

Here are some highlights from Team Explorer’s SubT Urban competition back in February.

[ Team Explorer ]

Researchers with the Skoltech Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory have developed a system that allows easy interaction with a micro-quadcopter with LEDs that can be used for light-painting. The researchers used a 92x92x29 mm Crazyflie 2.0 quadrotor that weighs just 27 grams, equipped with a light reflector and an array of controllable RGB LEDs. The control system consists of a glove equipped with an inertial measurement unit (IMU; an electronic device that tracks the movement of a user’s hand), and a base station that runs a machine learning algorithm.

[ Skoltech ]

“DeKonBot” is the prototype of a cleaning and disinfection robot for potentially contaminated surfaces in buildings such as door handles, light switches or elevator buttons. While other cleaning robots often spray the cleaning agents over a large area, DeKonBot autonomously identifies the surface to be cleaned.

[ Fraunhofer IPA ]

On Oct. 20, the OSIRIS-REx mission will perform the first attempt of its Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event. Not only will the spacecraft navigate to the surface using innovative navigation techniques, but it could also collect the largest sample since the Apollo missions.

[ NASA ]

With all the robotics research that seems to happen in places where snow is more of an occasional novelty or annoyance, it’s good to see NORLAB taking things more seriously

[ NORLAB ]

Telexistence’s Model-T robot works very slowly, but very safely, restocking shelves.

[ Telexistence ] via [ YouTube ]

Roboy 3.0 will be unveiled next month!

[ Roboy ]

KUKA ready2_educate is your training cell for hands-on education in robotics. It is especially aimed at schools, universities and company training facilities. The training cell is a complete starter package and your perfect partner for entry into robotics.

[ KUKA ]

A UPenn GRASP Lab Special Seminar on Data Driven Perception for Autonomy, presented by Dapo Afolabi from UC Berkeley.

Perception systems form a crucial part of autonomous and artificial intelligence systems since they convert data about the relationship between an autonomous system and its environment into meaningful information. Perception systems can be difficult to build since they may involve modeling complex physical systems or other autonomous agents. In such scenarios, data driven models may be used to augment physics based models for perception. In this talk, I will present work making use of data driven models for perception tasks, highlighting the benefit of such approaches for autonomous systems.

[ GRASP Lab ]

A Maryland Robotics Center Special Robotics Seminar on Underwater Autonomy, presented by Ioannis Rekleitis from the University of South Carolina.

This talk presents an overview of algorithmic problems related to marine robotics, with a particular focus on increasing the autonomy of robotic systems in challenging environments. I will talk about vision-based state estimation and mapping of underwater caves. An application of monitoring coral reefs is going to be discussed. I will also talk about several vehicles used at the University of South Carolina such as drifters, underwater, and surface vehicles. In addition, a short overview of the current projects will be discussed. The work that I will present has a strong algorithmic flavour, while it is validated in real hardware. Experimental results from several testing campaigns will be presented.

[ MRC ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Scott Niekum at UT Austin, on Scaling Probabilistically Safe Learning to Robotics.

Before learning robots can be deployed in the real world, it is critical that probabilistic guarantees can be made about the safety and performance of such systems. This talk focuses on new developments in three key areas for scaling safe learning to robotics: (1) a theory of safe imitation learning; (2) scalable reward inference in the absence of models; (3) efficient off-policy policy evaluation. The proposed algorithms offer a blend of safety and practicality, making a significant step towards safe robot learning with modest amounts of real-world data.

[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots