Tag Archives: lunar
#437643 Video Friday: Matternet Launches Urban ...
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 2020 – October 25-25, 2020 – [Online]
Bay Area Robotics Symposium – November 20, 2020 – [Online]
ACRA 2020 – December 8-10, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Sixteen teams chose their roster of virtual robots and sensor payloads, some based on real-life subterranean robots, and submitted autonomy and mapping algorithms that SubT Challenge officials then tested across eight cave courses in the cloud-based SubT Simulator. Their robots traversed the cave environments autonomously, without any input or adjustments from human operators. The Cave Circuit Virtual Competition teams earned points by correctly finding, identifying, and localizing up to 20 artifacts hidden in the cave courses within five-meter accuracy.
[ SubT ]
This year, the KUKA Innovation Award’s international jury of experts received a total of more than 40 ideas. The five finalist teams had time until November to implement their ideas. A KUKA LBR Med lightweight robot – the first robotic component to be certified for integration into a medical device – has been made available to them for this purpose. Beyond this, the teams have received a training for the hardware and coaching from KUKA experts throughout the competition. At virtual.MEDICA from 16-19.11.2020, the finalists presented their concepts to an international audience of experts and to the Innovation Award jury.
The winner of the KUKA Innovation Award 2020, worth 20,000 euros, is Team HIFUSK from the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy.
[ KUKA Innovation Award ]
Like everything else the in-person Cybathlon event was cancelled, but the competition itself took place, just a little more distributed than it would have been otherwise.
[ Cybathlon ]
Matternet, developer of the world's leading urban drone logistics platform, today announced the launch of operations at Labor Berlin Charité Vivantes in Germany. The program kicked-off November 17, 2020 with permanent operations expected to take flight next year, creating the first urban BVLOS [Beyond Visual Line of Sight] medical drone delivery network in the European Union. The drone network expects to significantly improve the timeliness and efficiency of Labor Berlin’s diagnostics services by providing an option to avoid roadway delays, which will improve patient experience with potentially life-saving benefits and lower costs.
Routine BVLOS over an urban area? Impressive.
[ Matternet ]
Robots playing diabolo!
Thanks Thilo!
[ OMRON Sinic X]
Anki's tech has been repackaged into this robot that serves butter:
[ Butter Robot ]
Berkshire Grey just announced our Picking With Purpose Program in which we’ve partnered our robotic automation solutions with food rescue organizations City Harvest and The Greater Boston Food Bank to pick, pack, and distribute food to families in need in time for Thanksgiving. Berkshire Grey donated about 40,000 pounds of food, used one of our robotic automation systems to pick and pack that food into meal boxes for families in need, and our team members volunteered to run the system. City Harvest and The Greater Boston Food Bank are distributing the 4,000 meal boxes we produced. This is just the beginning. We are building a sponsorship program to make Picking With Purpose an ongoing initiative.
[ Berkshire Grey ]
Thanks Peter!
We posted a video previously of Cassie learning to skip, but here's a much more detailed look (accompanying an ICRA submission) that includes some very impressive stair descending.
[ DRL ]
From garage inventors to university students and entrepreneurs, NASA is looking for ideas on how to excavate the Moon’s icy regolith, or dirt, and deliver it to a hypothetical processing plant at the lunar South Pole. The NASA Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, a NASA Centennial Challenge, is now open for registration. The competition will take place over two phases and will reward new ideas and approaches for a system architecture capable of excavating and moving icy regolith and water on the lunar surface.
[ NASA ]
Adaptation to various scene configurations and object properties, stability and dexterity in robotic grasping manipulation is far from explored. This work presents an origami-based shape morphing fingertip design to actively tackle the grasping stability and dexterity problems. The proposed fingertip utilizes origami as its skeleton providing degrees of freedom at desired positions and motor-driven four-bar-linkages as its transmission components to achieve a compact size of the fingertip.
[ Paper ]
“If Roboy crashes… you die.”
[ Roboy ]
Traditionally lunar landers, as well as other large space exploration vehicles, are powered by solar arrays or small nuclear reactors. Rovers and small robots, however, are not big enough to carry their own dedicated power supplies and must be tethered to their larger counterparts via electrical cables. Tethering severely restricts mobility, and cables are prone to failure due to lunar dust (regolith) interfering with electrical contact points. Additionally, as robots become smaller and more complex, they are fitted with additional sensors that require more power, further exacerbating the problem. Lastly, solar arrays are not viable for charging during the lunar night. WiBotic is developing rapid charging systems and energy monitoring base stations for lunar robots, including the CubeRover – a shoebox-sized robot designed by Astrobotic – that will operate autonomously and charge wirelessly on the Moon.
[ WiBotic ]
Watching pick and place robots is my therapy.
[ Soft Robotics ]
It's really, really hard to beat liquid fuel for energy storage, as Quaternium demonstrates with their hybrid drone.
[ Quaternium ]
Thanks Gregorio!
State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare.
[ Flightmare ]
Drones that chuck fire-fighting balls into burning buildings, sure!
[ LARICS ]
If you missed ROS World, that's okay, because all of the talks are now online. Here's the opening keynote from Vivian Chu and Diligent robotics, along with a couple fun lightning talks.
[ ROS World 2020 ]
This week's CMU RI Seminar is by Chelsea Finn from Stanford University, on Data Scalability for Robot Learning.
Recent progress in robot learning has demonstrated how robots can acquire complex manipulation skills from perceptual inputs through trial and error, particularly with the use of deep neural networks. Despite these successes, the generalization and versatility of robots across environment conditions, tasks, and objects remains a major challenge. And, unfortunately, our existing algorithms and training set-ups are not prepared to tackle such challenges, which demand large and diverse sets of tasks and experiences. In this talk, I will discuss two central challenges that pertain to data scalability: first, acquiring large datasets of diverse and useful interactions with the world, and second, developing algorithms that can learn from such datasets. Then, I will describe multiple approaches that we might take to rethink our algorithms and data pipelines to serve these goals. This will include algorithms that allow a real robot to explore its environment in a targeted manner with minimal supervision, approaches that can perform robot reinforcement learning with videos of human trial-and-error experience, and visual model-based RL approaches that are not bottlenecked by their capacity to model everything about the world.
[ CMU RI ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#436005 NASA Hiring Engineers to Develop “Next ...
It’s been nearly six years since NASA unveiled Valkyrie, a state-of-the-art full-size humanoid robot. After the DARPA Robotics Challenge, NASA has continued to work with Valkyrie at Johnson Space Center, and has also provided Valkyrie robots to several different universities. Although it’s not a new platform anymore (six years is a long time in robotics), Valkyrie is still very capable, with plenty of potential for robotics research.
With that in mind, we were caught by surprise when over the last several months, Jacobs, a Dallas-based engineering company that appears to provide a wide variety of technical services to anyone who wants them, has posted several open jobs in need of roboticists in the Houston, Texas, area who are interested in working with NASA on “the next generation of humanoid robot.”
Here are the relevant bullet points from the one of the job descriptions (which you can view at this link):
Work directly with NASA Johnson Space Center in designing the next generation of humanoid robot.
Join the Valkyrie humanoid robot team in NASA’s Robotic Systems Technology Branch.
Build on the success of the existing Valkyrie and Robonaut 2 humanoid robots and advance NASA’s ability to project a remote human presence and dexterous manipulation capability into challenging, dangerous, and distant environments both in space and here on earth.
The question is, why is NASA developing its own humanoid robot (again) when it could instead save a whole bunch of time and money by using a platform that already exists, whether it’s Atlas, Digit, Valkyrie itself, or one of the small handful of other humanoids that are more or less available? The only answer that I can come up with is that no existing platforms meet NASA’s requirements, whatever those may be. And if that’s the case, what kind of requirements are we talking about? The obvious one would be the ability to work in the kinds of environments that NASA specializes in—space, the Moon, and Mars.
Image: NASA
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot working on the surface of Mars.
NASA’s existing humanoid robots, including Robonaut 2 and Valkyrie, were designed to operate on Earth. Robonaut 2 ended up going to space anyway (it’s recently returned to Earth for repairs), but its hardware was certainly never intended to function outside of the International Space Station. Working in a vacuum involves designing for a much more rigorous set of environmental challenges, and things get even worse on the Moon or on Mars, where highly abrasive dust gets everywhere.
We know that it’s possible to design robots for long term operation in these kinds of environments because we’ve done it before. But if you’re not actually going to send your robot off-world, there’s very little reason to bother making sure that it can operate through (say) 300° Celsius temperature swings like you’d find on the Moon. In the past, NASA has quite sensibly focused on designing robots that can be used as platforms for the development of software and techniques that could one day be applied to off-world operations, without over-engineering those specific robots to operate in places that they would almost certainly never go. As NASA increasingly focuses on a return to the Moon, though, maybe it’s time to start thinking about a humanoid robot that could actually do useful stuff on the lunar surface.
Image: NASA
Artist’s concept of the Gateway moon-orbiting space station (seen on the right) with an Orion crew vehicle approaching.
The other possibility that I can think of, and perhaps the more likely one, is that this next humanoid robot will be a direct successor to Robonaut 2, intended for NASA’s Gateway space station orbiting the Moon. Some of the robotics folks at NASA that we’ve talked to recently have emphasized how important robotics will be for Gateway:
Trey Smith, NASA Ames: Everybody at NASA is really excited about work on the Gateway space station that would be in near lunar space. We don’t have definite plans for what would happen on the Gateway yet, but there’s a general recognition that intra-vehicular robots are important for space stations. And so, it would not be surprising to see a mobile manipulator like Robonaut, and a free flyer like Astrobee, on the Gateway.
If you have an un-crewed cargo vehicle that shows up stuffed to the rafters with cargo bags and it docks with the Gateway when there’s no crew there, it would be very useful to have intra-vehicular robots that can pull all those cargo bags out, unpack them, stow all the items, and then even allow the cargo vehicle to detach before the crew show up so that the crew don’t have to waste their time with that.
Julia Badger, NASA JSC: One of the systems on board Gateway is going to be intravehicular robots. They’re not going to necessarily look like Robonaut, but they’ll have some of the same functionality as Robonaut—being mobile, being able to carry payloads from one part of the module to another, doing some dexterous manipulation tasks, inspecting behind panels, those sorts of things.
Image: NASA
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot working inside a spacecraft.
Since Gateway won’t be crewed by humans all of the time, it’ll be important to have a permanent robotic presence to keep things running while nobody is home while saving on resources by virtue of the fact that robots aren’t always eating food, drinking water, consuming oxygen, demanding that the temperature stays just so, and producing a variety of disgusting kinds of waste. Obviously, the robot won’t be as capable as humans, but if they can manage to do even basic continuing maintenance tasks (most likely through at least partial teleoperation), that would be very useful.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
NASA’s Robonaut team plans to perform a variety of mobility and motion-planning experiments using the robot’s new legs, which can grab handrails on the International Space Station.
As for whether robots designed for Gateway would really fall into the “humanoid” category, it’s worth considering that Gateway is designed for humans, implying that an effective robotic system on Gateway would need to be able to interact with the station in similar ways to how a human astronaut would. So, you’d expect to see arms with end-effectors that can grip things as well as push buttons, and some kind of mobility system—the legged version of Robonaut 2 seems like a likely template, but redesigned from the ground up to work in space, incorporating all the advances in robotics hardware and computing that have taken place over the last decade.
We’ve been pestering NASA about this for a little bit now, and they’re not ready to comment on this project, or even to confirm it. And again, everything in this article (besides the job post, which you should totally check out and consider applying for) is just speculation on our part, and we could be wrong about absolutely all of it. As soon as we hear more, we’ll definitely let you know. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#435691 Squeezing Rocket Fuel From Moon Rocks
Illustration: John MacNeill
Engineers and Architects Are Already Designing Lunar Habitats
Squeezing Rocket Fuel From Moon Rocks
Robots Will Navigate the Moon With Maps They Make Themselves
Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind
The most valuable natural resource on the moon may be water. In addition to sustaining lunar colonists, it could also be broken down into its constituent elements—hydrogen and oxygen—and used to make rocket propellant.
Although the ancients called the dark areas on the moon maria (Latin for “seas”), it has long been clear that liquid water can’t exist on the lunar surface, where it would swiftly evaporate. Since the 1960s, though, scientists have hypothesized that the moon indeed harbors water, in the form of ice. Because the moon has a very small axial tilt—just 1.5 degrees—the floors of many polar craters remain in perpetual darkness. Water could thus condense and survive in such polar “cold traps,” where it might one day be mined.
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Water Water Everywhere: Finding rich deposits of ice and extracting it should be possible but will be technically challenging for lunar settlers. Illustration: John MacNeill
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Mapping the Moon: Several lunar missions have produced strong evidence of water ice. A NASA instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) found indications of water ice on the permanently shadowed floors of some polar craters. However, the measurements suggest that only a small fraction of cold traps contain ice [colored areas], and that the ice is probably mixed with lunar regolith. Data source.
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Rover-Mounted Drill: The most straightforward strategy for extracting water from polar ice deposits uses a rover-mounted drill. Honeybee Robotics has designed a Planetary Volatiles Extractor with a heated auger, which would cause any water ice in the drilled regolith to vaporize. That vapor would then move through a tube to a condenser unit, where it would turn back into ice. Illustration: John MacNeill
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Thermal Mining: A more ambitious scheme for extracting water from the moon is “thermal mining.” Researchers at the Colorado School of Mines have proposed redirecting the sun’s rays , using heliostats mounted on a crater rim. Water trapped in the regolith would turn into vapor that would be collected in a large tent, then vented into refrigerated cold traps, where it would condense as pure water ice. Illustration: John MacNeill
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Compressed-Gas Transport: To produce rocket fuel from water ice would require an electrolyzer to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen, which would then be compressed and stored for later use. In situ production would also require vehicles to transport the processed fuel to rocket pads. Illustration: John MacNeill
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Posted in Human Robots