Tag Archives: machines
#437776 Video Friday: This Terrifying Robot Will ...
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!):
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
The Aigency, which created the FitBot launch video below, is “the world’s first talent management resource for robotic personalities.”
Robots will be playing a bigger role in our lives in the future. By learning to speak their language and work with them now, we can make this future better for everybody. If you’re a creator that’s producing content to entertain and educate people, robots can be a part of that. And we can help you. Robotic actors can show up alongside the rest of your actors.
The folks at Aigency have put together a compilation reel of clips they’ve put on TikTok, which is nice of them, because some of us don’t know how to TikTok because we’re old and boring.
Do googly eyes violate the terms and conditions?
[ Aigency ]
Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, who you might remember from that robotic basketball hoop, has a new invention: A haircut robot. This is not the the first barber bot, but previous designs typically used hair clippers. Shane wanted his robot to use scissors. Hilarious and terrifying at once.
[ Stuff Made Here ]
Starting in October of 2016, Prof. Charlie Kemp and Henry M. Clever invented a new kind of robot. They named the prototype NewRo. In March of 2017, Prof. Kemp filmed this video of Henry operating NewRo to perform a number of assistive tasks. While visiting the Bay Area for a AAAI Symposium workshop at Stanford, Prof. Kemp showed this video to a select group of people to get advice, including Dr. Aaron Edsinger. In August of 2017, Dr. Edsinger and Dr. Kemp founded Hello Robot Inc. to commercialize this patent pending assistive technology. Hello Robot Inc. licensed the intellectual property (IP) from Georgia Tech. After three years of stealthy effort, Hello Robot Inc. revealed Stretch, a new kind of robot!
[ Georgia Tech ]
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will make history's first attempt at powered flight on another planet next spring. It is riding with the agency's next mission to Mars (the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover) as it launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station later this summer. Perseverance, with Ingenuity attached to its belly, will land on Mars February 18, 2021.
[ JPL ]
For humans, it can be challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects like ropes, wires, or cables. But if these problems are hard for humans, they are nearly impossible for robots. As a cable slides between the fingers, its shape is constantly changing, and the robot’s fingers must be constantly sensing and adjusting the cable’s position and motion. A group of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering pursued the task from a different angle, in a manner that more closely mimics us humans. The team’s new system uses a pair of soft robotic grippers with high-resolution tactile sensors (and no added mechanical constraints) to successfully manipulate freely moving cables.
The team observed that it was difficult to pull the cable back when it reached the edge of the finger, because of the convex surface of the GelSight sensor. Therefore, they hope to improve the finger-sensor shape to enhance the overall performance. In the future, they plan to study more complex cable manipulation tasks such as cable routing and cable inserting through obstacles, and they want to eventually explore autonomous cable manipulation tasks in the auto industry.
[ MIT ]
Gripping robots typically have troubles grabbing transparent or shiny objects. A new technique by Carnegie Mellon University relies on color camera system and machine learning to recognize shapes based on color.
[ CMU ]
A new robotic prosthetic leg prototype offers a more natural, comfortable gait while also being quieter and more energy efficient than other designs. The key is the use of new small and powerful motors with fewer gears, borrowed from the space industry. This streamlined technology enables a free-swinging knee and regenerative braking, which charges the battery during use with energy that would typically be dissipated when the foot hits the ground. This feature enables the leg to more than double a typical prosthetic user's walking needs with one charge per day.
[ University of Michigan ]
Thanks Kate!
This year’s Wonder League teams have been put to the test not only with the challenges set forth by Wonder Workshop and Cartoon Network as they look to help the creek kids from Craig of the Creek solve the greatest mystery of all – the quest for the Lost Realm but due to forces outside their control. With a global pandemic displacing many teams from one another due to lockdowns and quarantines, these teams continued to push themselves to find new ways to work together, solve problems, communicate more effectively, and push themselves to complete a journey that they started and refused to give up on. We at Wonder Workshop are humbled and in awe of all these teams have accomplished.
[ Wonder Workshop ]
Thanks Nicole!
Meet Colin Creager, a mechanical engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. Colin is focusing on developing tires that can be used on other worlds. These tires use coil springs made of a special shape memory alloy that will let rovers move across sharp jagged rocks or through soft sand on the Moon or Mars.
[ NASA ]
To be presented at IROS this year, “the first on robot collision detection system using low cost microphones.”
[ Rutgers ]
Robot and mechanism designs inspired by the art of Origami have the potential to generate compact, deployable, lightweight morphing structures, as seen in nature, for potential applications in search-and-rescue, aerospace systems, and medical devices. However, it is challenging to obtain actuation that is easily patternable, reversible, and made with a scalable manufacturing process for origami-inspired self-folding machines. In this work, we describe an approach to design reversible self-folding machines using liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), that contracts when heated, as an artificial muscle.
[ UCSD ]
Just in case you need some extra home entertainment, and you’d like cleaner floors at the same time.
[ iRobot ]
Sure, toss it from a drone. Or from orbit. Whatever, it’s squishy!
[ Squishy Robotics ]
The [virtual] RSS conference this week featured an excellent lineup of speakers and panels, and the best part about it being virtual is that you can watch them all at your leisure! Here’s what’s been posted so far:
[ RSS 2020 ]
Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Toward autonomous flying insect-sized robots: recent results in fabrication, design, power systems, control, and sensing with Sawyer Fuller.
[ UMD ]
In this episode of the AI Podcast, Lex interviews Sergey Levine.
[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437765 Video Friday: Massive Robot Joins ...
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!):
AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 2020 – [Online 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
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Here are some professional circus artists messing around with an industrial robot for fun, like you do.
The acrobats are part of Östgötateatern, a Swedish theatre group, and the chair bit got turned into its own act, called “The Last Fish.” But apparently the Swedish Work Environment Authority didn’t like that an industrial robot—a large ABB robotic arm—was being used in an artistic performance, arguing that the same safety measures that apply in a factory setting would apply on stage. In other words, the robot had to operate inside a protective cage and humans could not physically interact with it.
When told that their robot had to be removed, the acrobats went to court. And won! At least that’s what we understand from this Swedish press release. The court in Linköping, in southern Sweden, ruled that the safety measures taken by the theater had been sufficient. The group had worked with a local robotics firm, Dyno Robotics, to program the manipulator and learn how to interact with it as safely as possible. The robot—which the acrobats say is the eighth member of their troupe—will now be allowed to return.
[ Östgötateatern ]
Houston Mechathronics’ Aquanaut continues to be awesome, even in the middle of a pandemic. It’s taken the big step (big swim?) out of NASA’s swimming pool and into open water.
[ HMI ]
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook AI Research have created a navigation system for robots powered by common sense. The technique uses machine learning to teach robots how to recognize objects and understand where they’re likely to be found in house. The result allows the machines to search more strategically.
[ CMU ]
Cassie manages 2.1 m/s, which is uncomfortably fast in a couple of different ways.
Next, untethered. After that, running!
[ Michigan Robotics ]
Engineers at Caltech have designed a new data-driven method to control the movement of multiple robots through cluttered, unmapped spaces, so they do not run into one another.
Multi-robot motion coordination is a fundamental robotics problem with wide-ranging applications that range from urban search and rescue to the control of fleets of self-driving cars to formation-flying in cluttered environments. Two key challenges make multi-robot coordination difficult: first, robots moving in new environments must make split-second decisions about their trajectories despite having incomplete data about their future path; second, the presence of larger numbers of robots in an environment makes their interactions increasingly complex (and more prone to collisions).
To overcome these challenges, Soon-Jo Chung, Bren Professor of Aerospace, and Yisong Yue, professor of computing and mathematical sciences, along with Caltech graduate student Benjamin Rivière (MS ’18), postdoctoral scholar Wolfgang Hönig, and graduate student Guanya Shi, developed a multi-robot motion-planning algorithm called “Global-to-Local Safe Autonomy Synthesis,” or GLAS, which imitates a complete-information planner with only local information, and “Neural-Swarm,” a swarm-tracking controller augmented to learn complex aerodynamic interactions in close-proximity flight.
[ Caltech ]
Fetch Robotics’ Freight robot is now hauling around pulsed xenon UV lamps to autonomously disinfect spaces with UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C, all at the same time.
[ SmartGuard UV ]
When you’re a vertically symmetrical quadruped robot, there is no upside-down.
[ Ghost Robotics ]
In the virtual world, the objects you pick up do not exist: you can see that cup or pen, but it does not feel like you’re touching them. That presented a challenge to EPFL professor Herbert Shea. Drawing on his extensive experience with silicone-based muscles and motors, Shea wanted to find a way to make virtual objects feel real. “With my team, we’ve created very small, thin and fast actuators,” explains Shea. “They are millimeter-sized capsules that use electrostatic energy to inflate and deflate.” The capsules have an outer insulating membrane made of silicone enclosing an inner pocket filled with oil. Each bubble is surrounded by four electrodes, that can close like a zipper. When a voltage is applied, the electrodes are pulled together, causing the center of the capsule to swell like a blister. It is an ingenious system because the capsules, known as HAXELs, can move not only up and down, but also side to side and around in a circle. “When they are placed under your fingers, it feels as though you are touching a range of different objects,” says Shea.
[ EPFL ]
Through the simple trick of reversing motors on impact, a quadrotor can land much more reliably on slopes.
[ Sherbrooke ]
Turtlebot delivers candy at Harvard.
I <3 Turtlebot SO MUCH
[ Harvard ]
Traditional drone controllers are a little bit counterintuitive, because there’s one stick that’s forwards and backwards and another stick that’s up and down but they’re both moving on the same axis. How does that make sense?! Here’s a remote that gives you actual z-axis control instead.
[ Fenics ]
Thanks Ashley!
Lio is a mobile robot platform with a multifunctional arm explicitly designed for human-robot interaction and personal care assistant tasks. The robot has already been deployed in several health care facilities, where it is functioning autonomously, assisting staff and patients on an everyday basis.
[ F&P Robotics ]
Video shows a ground vehicle autonomously exploring and mapping a multi-storage garage building and a connected patio on Carnegie Mellon University campus. The vehicle runs onboard state estimation and mapping leveraging range, vision, and inertial sensing, local planning for collision avoidance, and terrain analysis. All processing is real-time and no post-processing involved. The vehicle drives at 2m/s through the exploration run. This work is dedicated to DARPA Subterranean Challange.
[ CMU ]
Raytheon UK’s flagship STEM programme, the Quadcopter Challenge, gives 14-15 year olds the chance to participate in a hands-on, STEM-based engineering challenge to build a fully operational quadcopter. Each team is provided with an identical kit of parts, tools and instructions to build and customise their quadcopter, whilst Raytheon UK STEM Ambassadors provide mentoring, technical support and deliver bite-size learning modules to support the build.
[ Raytheon ]
A video on some of the research work that is being carried out at The Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney.
[ University of Sydney ]
Jeannette Bohg, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, gave one of the Early Career Award Keynotes at RSS 2020.
[ RSS 2020 ]
Adam Savage remembers Grant Imahara.
[ Tested ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437645 How Robots Became Essential Workers in ...
Photo: Sivaram V/Reuters
A robot, developed by Asimov Robotics to spread awareness about the coronavirus, holds a tray with face masks and sanitizer.
As the coronavirus emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Many saw a surge in orders. Robots don’t need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don’t get sick.
An army of automatons has since been deployed all over the world to help with the crisis: They are monitoring patients, sanitizing hospitals, making deliveries, and helping frontline medical workers reduce their exposure to the virus. Not all robots operate autonomously—many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they’ve gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable. These photos illustrate how robots are helping us fight this pandemic—and how they might be able to assist with the next one.
DROID TEAM
Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters
A squad of robots serves as the first line of defense against person-to-person transmission at a medical center in Kigali, Rwanda. Patients walking into the facility get their temperature checked by the machines, which are equipped with thermal cameras atop their heads. Developed by UBTech Robotics, in China, the robots also use their distinctive appearance—they resemble characters out of a Star Wars movie—to get people’s attention and remind them to wash their hands and wear masks.
Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters
SAY “AAH”
To speed up COVID-19 testing, a team of Danish doctors and engineers at the University of Southern Denmark and at Lifeline Robotics is developing a fully automated swab robot. It uses computer vision and machine learning to identify the perfect target spot inside the person’s throat; then a robotic arm with a long swab reaches in to collect the sample—all done with a swiftness and consistency that humans can’t match. In this photo, one of the creators, Esben Østergaard, puts his neck on the line to demonstrate that the robot is safe.
Photo: University of Southern Denmark
GERM ZAPPER
After six of its doctors became infected with the coronavirus, the Sassarese hospital in Sardinia, Italy, tightened its safety measures. It also brought in the robots. The machines, developed by UVD Robots, use lidar to navigate autonomously. Each bot carries an array of powerful short-wavelength ultraviolet-C lights that destroy the genetic material of viruses and other pathogens after a few minutes of exposure. Now there is a spike in demand for UV-disinfection robots as hospitals worldwide deploy them to sterilize intensive care units and operating theaters.
Photo: UVD Robots
RUNNING ERRANDS
In medical facilities, an ideal role for robots is taking over repetitive chores so that nurses and physicians can spend their time doing more important tasks. At Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital, in China, a robot called Aimbot drives down the hallways, enforcing face-mask and social-distancing rules and spraying disinfectant. At a hospital near Austin, Texas, a humanoid robot developed by Diligent Robotics fetches supplies and brings them to patients’ rooms. It repeats this task day and night, tirelessly, allowing the hospital staff to spend more time interacting with patients.
Photos, left: Diligent Robotics; Right: UBTech Robotics
THE DOCTOR IS IN
Nurses and doctors at Circolo Hospital in Varese, in northern Italy—the country’s hardest-hit region—use robots as their avatars, enabling them to check on their patients around the clock while minimizing exposure and conserving protective equipment. The robots, developed by Chinese firm Sanbot, are equipped with cameras and microphones and can also access patient data like blood oxygen levels. Telepresence robots, originally designed for offices, are becoming an invaluable tool for medical workers treating highly infectious diseases like COVID-19, reducing the risk that they’ll contract the pathogen they’re fighting against.
Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images
HELP FROM ABOVE
Photo: Zipline
Authorities in several countries attempted to use drones to enforce lockdowns and social-distancing rules, but the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear. A better use of drones was for making deliveries. In the United States, startup Zipline deployed its fixed-wing autonomous aircraft to connect two medical facilities 17 kilometers apart. For the staff at the Huntersville Medical Center, in North Carolina, masks, gowns, and gloves literally fell from the skies. The hope is that drones like Zipline’s will one day be able to deliver other kinds of critical materials, transport test samples, and distribute drugs and vaccines.
Photos: Zipline
SPECIAL DELIVERY
It’s not quite a robot takeover, but the streets and sidewalks of dozens of cities around the world have seen a proliferation of hurrying wheeled machines. Delivery robots are now in high demand as online orders continue to skyrocket.
In Hamburg, the six-wheeled robots developed by Starship Technologies navigate using cameras, GPS, and radar to bring groceries to customers.
Photo: Christian Charisius/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
In Medellín, Colombia, a startup called Rappi deployed a fleet of robots, built by Kiwibot, to deliver takeout to people in lockdown.
Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images
China’s JD.com, one of the country’s largest e-commerce companies, is using 20 robots to transport goods in Changsha, Hunan province; each vehicle has 22 separate compartments, which customers unlock using face authentication.
Photos: TPG/Getty Images
LIFE THROUGH ROBOTS
Robots can’t replace real human interaction, of course, but they can help people feel more connected at a time when meetings and other social activities are mostly on hold.
In Ostend, Belgium, ZoraBots brought one of its waist-high robots, equipped with cameras, microphones, and a screen, to a nursing home, allowing residents like Jozef Gouwy to virtually communicate with loved ones despite a ban on in-person visits.
Photo: Yves Herman/Reuters
In Manila, nearly 200 high school students took turns “teleporting” into a tall wheeled robot, developed by the school’s robotics club, to walk on stage during their graduation ceremony.
Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
And while Japan’s Chiba Zoological Park was temporarily closed due to the pandemic, the zoo used an autonomous robotic vehicle called RakuRo, equipped with 360-degree cameras, to offer virtual tours to children quarantined at home.
Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
SENTRY ROBOTS
Offices, stores, and medical centers are adopting robots as enforcers of a new coronavirus code.
At Fortis Hospital in Bangalore, India, a robot called Mitra uses a thermal camera to perform a preliminary screening of patients.
Photo: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
In Tunisia, the police use a tanklike robot to patrol the streets of its capital city, Tunis, verifying that citizens have permission to go out during curfew hours.
Photo: Khaled Nasraoui/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
And in Singapore, the Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park unleashed a Spot robot dog, developed by Boston Dynamics, to search for social-distancing violators. Spot won’t bark at them but will rather play a recorded message reminding park-goers to keep their distance.
Photo: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “How Robots Became Essential Workers.” Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437635 Toyota Research Demonstrates ...
Over the last several years, Toyota has been putting more muscle into forward-looking robotics research than just about anyone. In addition to the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), there’s that massive 175-acre robot-powered city of the future that Toyota still plans to build next to Mount Fuji. Even Toyota itself acknowledges that it might be crazy, but that’s just how they roll—as TRI CEO Gill Pratt told me a while back, when Toyota decides to do something, they really do go all-in on it.
TRI has been focusing heavily on home robots, which is reflective of the long-term nature of what TRI is trying to do, because home robots are both the place where we’ll need robots the most at the same time as they’re the place where it’s going to be hardest to deploy them. The unpredictable nature of homes, and the fact that homes tend to have squishy fragile people in them, are robot-unfriendly characteristics, but as the population continues to age (an increasingly acute problem in Japan), homes offer an enormous amount of potential for helping us maintain our independence.
Today, Toyota is showing off some of the research that it’s been working on recently, in the form of a virtual reality presentation in lieu of an in-person press event. For journalists, TRI pre-loaded the recording onto a VR headset, which was FedEx’ed to my house. You can watch the entire 40-minute presentation in 360 video on YouTube (or in VR if you have a headset of your own), but if you don’t watch the whole thing, you should at least check out the full-on GLaDOS (with arms) that TRI thinks belongs in your home.
The presentation features an introduction from Gill Pratt, who looks entirely too comfortable embedded inside of one of TRI’s telepresence robots. The event also covers a lot of territory, but the highlight is almost certainly the new hardware that TRI demonstrates.
Soft bubble gripper
Photo: TRI
This is a “soft bubble gripper,” under development at TRI’s Cambridge, Mass., branch. These passively-compliant, air-filled grippers make it easier to grasp many different kinds of objects safely, but the nifty thing is that they’ve got cameras inside of them watching a pattern of dots on the interior of the soft membrane.
When the outside of the bubble makes contact with an object, the bubble deforms, and the deformation of the dot pattern on the inside can be tracked by the camera to determine both directions and magnitudes of forces. This is a concept that we’ve seen elsewhere before, but TRI’s implementation is a clever way of making an inherently safe end effector that can still perform all the sensing you need it to do for relatively complex manipulation tasks.
The bubble gripper was presented at ICRA this year, and you can read the technical paper here.
Ceiling-mounted home robot
Photo: TRI
I don’t know whether robots dangling from the ceiling was somehow sinister pre-Portal, but it sure as heck is for me having played through that game a couple of times, and it’s since been reinforced by AUTO from WALL-E.
The reason that we generally see robots mounted on the floor or on tables or on mobile bases is that we’re bipeds, not bats, and giving a robot access to a human-like workspace is easiest to do if you also give that robot a human-like position and orientation. And if you want to be able to reach stuff high up, you do what TRI did with their previous generation of kitchen manipulator, and just give it the ability to make itself super tall. But TRI is convinced it’s a good place to put our future home robots:
One innovative concept is a “gantry robot” that would descend from an overhead framework to perform tasks such as loading the dishwasher, wiping surfaces, and clearing clutter. By traveling on the ceiling, the robot avoids the problems of navigating household floor clutter and navigating cramped spaces. When not in use, the robot would tuck itself up out of the way. To further investigate this idea, the team has built a laboratory prototype robot that can do all the same tasks as a floor-based mobile robot but with the innovative overhead mobility system.
Another obvious problem with the gantry robot is that you have to install all kinds of stuff in your ceiling for this to work, which makes it very impractical (if not totally impossible) to introduce a system like this into a home that wasn’t built specifically for it. If, however, you do build a home with a robot like this in mind, the animation below from TRI shows how it could be extra useful. Suddenly, stairs are a non-issue. Payload is presumably also a non-issue, since loads can be transferred to the ceiling. Batteries become unnecessary, so the whole robot can be much lighter weight, which in turn makes it safer. Sensors get a fantastic view, and obstacle avoidance becomes trivial.
Robots as “time machines”
Photo: TRI
TRI’s presentation covered more than what we’ve highlighted here—our focus has been on the hardware prototypes, but TRI had more to talk about, including learning through demonstration, scaling learning through simulation, and how TRI has been working with users to figure out what research directions should be explored. It’s all available right now on YouTube, and it’s well worth 40 minutes of your time.
“What we’re really focused on is this principle idea of amplifying, rather than replacing, human beings”
—Gill Pratt, TRI
It’s only been five years since Toyota announced the $1 billion investment that established TRI, and it feels like the progress that’s been made since then has been substantial. It’s not often that vision, resources, and long-term commitment come together like this, and TRI’s emphasis on making life better for people is one of the things that helps to keep us optimistic about the future of robotics.
“What we’re really focused on is this principle idea of amplifying, rather than replacing, human beings,” Gill Pratt told us. “And what it means to amplify a person, particularly as they’re aging—what we’re really trying to do is build a time machine. This may sound fanciful, and of course we can’t build a real time machine, but maybe we can build robotic assistants to make our lives as we age seem as if we are actually using a time machine.” He explains that it doesn’t mean building robots for convenience or to do our jobs for us. “It means building technology that enables us to continue to live and to work and to relate to each other as if we were younger,” he says. “And that’s really what our main goal is.” Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437628 Video Friday: An In-Depth Look at Mesmer ...
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!):
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.
Bear Robotics, a robotics and artificial intelligence company, and SoftBank Robotics Group, a leading robotics manufacturer and solutions provider, have collaborated to bring a new robot named Servi to the food service and hospitality field.
[ Bear Robotics ]
A literal in-depth look at Engineered Arts’ Mesmer android.
[ Engineered Arts ]
Is your robot running ROS? Is it connected to the Internet? Are you actually in control of it right now? Are you sure?
I appreciate how the researchers admitted to finding two of their own robots as part of the scan, a Baxter and a drone.
[ Brown ]
Smile Robotics describes this as “(possibly) world’s first full-autonomous clear-up-the-table robot.”
We’re not qualified to make a judgement on the world firstness, but personally I hate clearing tables, so this robot has my vote.
Smile Robotics founder and CEO Takashi Ogura, along with chief engineer Mitsutaka Kabasawa and engineer Kazuya Kobayashi, are former Google roboticists. Ogura also worked at SCHAFT. Smile says its robot uses ROS and is controlled by a framework written mainly in Rust, adding: “We are hiring Rustacean Roboticists!”
[ Smile Robotics ]
We’re not entirely sure why, but Panasonic has released plans for an Internet of Things system for hamsters.
We devised a recipe for a “small animal healthcare device” that can measure the weight and activity of small animals, the temperature and humidity of the breeding environment, and manage their health. This healthcare device visualizes the health status and breeding environment of small animals and manages their health to promote early detection of diseases. While imagining the scene where a healthcare device is actually used for an important small animal that we treat with affection, we hope to help overcome the current difficult situation through manufacturing.
[ Panasonic ] via [ RobotStart ]
Researchers at Yale have developed a robotic fabric, a breakthrough that could lead to such innovations as adaptive clothing, self-deploying shelters, or lightweight shape-changing machinery.
The researchers focused on processing functional materials into fiber-form so they could be integrated into fabrics while retaining its advantageous properties. For example, they made variable stiffness fibers out of an epoxy embedded with particles of Field’s metal, an alloy that liquifies at relatively low temperatures. When cool, the particles are solid metal and make the material stiffer; when warm, the particles melt into liquid and make the material softer.
[ Yale ]
In collaboration with Armasuisse and SBB, RSL demonstrated the use of a teleoperated Menzi Muck M545 to clean up a rock slide in Central Switzerland. The machine can be operated from a teloperation platform with visual and motion feedback. The walking excavator features an active chassis that can adapt to uneven terrain.
[ ETHZ RSL ]
An international team of JKU researchers is continuing to develop their vision for robots made out of soft materials. A new article in the journal “Communications Materials” demonstrates just how these kinds of soft machines react using weak magnetic fields to move very quickly. A triangle-shaped robot can roll itself in air at high speed and walk forward when exposed to an alternating in-plane square wave magnetic field (3.5 mT, 1.5 Hz). The diameter of the robot is 18 mm with a thickness of 80 µm. A six-arm robot can grab, transport, and release non-magnetic objects such as a polyurethane foam cube controlled by a permanent magnet.
Okay but tell me more about that cute sheep.
[ JKU ]
Interbotix has this “research level robotic crawler,” which both looks mean and runs ROS, a dangerous combination.
And here’s how it all came together:
[ Interbotix ]
I guess if you call them “loitering missile systems” rather than “drones that blow things up” people are less likely to get upset?
[ AeroVironment ]
In this video, we show a planner for a master dual-arm robot to manipulate tethered tools with an assistant dual-arm robot’s help. The assistant robot provides assistance to the master robot by manipulating the tool cable and avoiding collisions. The provided assistance allows the master robot to perform tool placements on the robot workspace table to regrasp the tool, which would typically fail since the tool cable tension may change the tool positions. It also allows the master robot to perform tool handovers, which would normally cause entanglements or collisions with the cable and the environment without the assistance.
[ Harada Lab ]
This video shows a flexible and robust robotic system for autonomous drawing on 3D surfaces. The system takes 2D drawing strokes and a 3D target surface (mesh or point clouds) as input. It maps the 2D strokes onto the 3D surface and generates a robot motion to draw the mapped strokes using visual recognition, grasp pose reasoning, and motion planning.
[ Harada Lab ]
Weekly mobility test. This time the Warthog takes on a fallen tree. Will it cross it? The answer is in the video!
And the answer is: kinda?
[ NORLAB ]
One of the advantages of walking machines is their ability to apply forces in all directions and of various magnitudes to the environment. Many of the multi-legged robots are equipped with point contact feet as these simplify the design and control of the robot. The iStruct project focuses on the development of a foot that allows extensive contact with the environment.
[ DFKI ]
An urgent medical transport was simulated in NASA’s second Systems Integration and Operationalization (SIO) demonstration Sept. 28 with partner Bell Textron Inc. Bell used the remotely-piloted APT 70 to conduct a flight representing an urgent medical transport mission. It is envisioned in the future that an operational APT 70 could provide rapid medical transport for blood, organs, and perishable medical supplies (payload up to 70 pounds). The APT 70 is estimated to move three times as fast as ground transportation.
Always a little suspicious when the video just shows the drone flying, and sitting on the ground, but not that tricky transition between those two states.
[ NASA ]
A Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar on “Socially Assistive Mobile Robots,” by Yi Guo from Stevens Institute of Technology.
The use of autonomous mobile robots in human environments is on the rise. Assistive robots have been seen in real-world environments, such as robot guides in airports, robot polices in public parks, and patrolling robots in supermarkets. In this talk, I will first present current research activities conducted in the Robotics and Automation Laboratory at Stevens. I’ll then focus on robot-assisted pedestrian regulation, where pedestrian flows are regulated and optimized through passive human-robot interaction.
[ UMD ]
This week’s CMU RI Seminar is by CMU’s Zachary Manchester, on “The World’s Tiniest Space Program.”
The aerospace industry has experienced a dramatic shift over the last decade: Flying a spacecraft has gone from something only national governments and large defense contractors could afford to something a small startup can accomplish on a shoestring budget. A virtuous cycle has developed where lower costs have led to more launches and the growth of new markets for space-based data. However, many barriers remain. This talk will focus on driving these trends to their ultimate limit by harnessing advances in electronics, planning, and control to build spacecraft that cost less than a new smartphone and can be deployed in large numbers.
[ CMU RI ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots