Tag Archives: manufacturing

#437791 Is the Pandemic Spurring a Robot ...

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Android

“Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?” This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of the experts interviewed was Siddhartha Srinivasa, at the time professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and currently director of Robotics and AI for Amazon. He said, “I’d love to make robots unsexy. It’s weird to say this, but when something becomes unsexy, it means that it works so well that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t stare at your dishwasher as it washes your dishes in fascination, because you know it’s gonna work every time… I want to get robots to that stage of reliability.”

Have we managed to get there over the last four years? Are robots unsexy yet? And how has the pandemic changed the trajectory of automation across industries?

The Covid Effect
The pandemic has had a massive economic impact all over the world, and one of the problems faced by many companies has been keeping their businesses running without putting employees at risk of infection. Many organizations are seeking to remain operational in the short term by automating tasks that would otherwise be carried out by humans. According to Digital Trends, since the start of the pandemic we have seen a significant increase in automation efforts in manufacturing, meat packing, grocery stores and more. In a June survey, 44 percent of corporate financial officers said they were considering more automation in response to coronavirus.

MIT economist David Autor described the economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic as “an event that forces automation.” But he added that Covid-19 created a kind of disruption that has forced automation in sectors and activities with a shortage of workers, while at the same time there has been no reduction in demand. This hasn’t taken place in hospitality, where demand has practically disappeared, but it is still present in agriculture and distribution. The latter is being altered by the rapid growth of e-commerce, with more efficient and automated warehouses that can provide better service.

China Leads the Way
China is currently in a unique position to lead the world’s automation economy. Although the country boasts a huge workforce, labor costs have multiplied by 10 over the past 20 years. As the world’s factory, China has a strong incentive to automate its manufacturing sector, which enjoys a solid leadership in high quality products. China is currently the largest and fastest-growing market in the world for industrial robotics, with a 21 percent increase up to $5.4 billion in 2019. This represents one third of global sales. As a result, Chinese companies are developing a significant advantage in terms of learning to work with metallic colleagues.

The reasons behind this Asian dominance are evident: the population has a greater capacity and need for tech adoption. A large percentage of the population will soon be of retirement age, without an equivalent younger demographic to replace it, leading to a pressing need to adopt automation in the short term.

China is well ahead of other countries in restaurant automation. As reported in Bloomberg, in early 2020 UBS Group AG conducted a survey of over 13,000 consumers in different countries and found that 64 percent of Chinese participants had ordered meals through their phones at least once a week, compared to a mere 17 percent in the US. As digital ordering gains ground, robot waiters and chefs are likely not far behind. The West harbors a mistrust towards non-humans that the East does not.

The Robot Evolution
The pandemic was a perfect excuse for robots to replace us. But despite the hype around this idea, robots have mostly disappointed during the pandemic.

Just over 66 different kinds of “social” robots have been piloted in hospitals, health centers, airports, office buildings, and other public and private spaces in response to the pandemic, according to a study from researchers at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). Their survey looked at 195 robot deployments across 35 countries including China, the US, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

But if the “robot revolution” is a movement in which automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence proliferate through the value chain of various industries, bringing a paradigm shift in how we produce, consume, and distribute products—it hasn’t happened yet.

But there’s a more nuanced answer: rather than a revolution, we’re seeing an incremental robot evolution. It’s a trend that will likely accelerate over the next five years, particularly when 5G takes center stage and robotics as a field leaves behind imitation and evolves independently.

Automation Anxiety
Why don’t we finally welcome the long-promised robotic takeover? Despite progress in AI and increased adoption of industrial robots, consumer-facing robotic products are not nearly as ubiquitous as popular culture predicted decades ago. As Amara’s Law says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It seems we are living through the Gartner hype cycle.

People have a complicated relationship with robots, torn between admiring them, fearing them, rejecting them, and even boycotting them, as has happened in the automobile industry.

Retail robot in a Walmart store. Credit: Bossa Nova Robotics
Walmart terminated its contract with Bossa Nova and withdrew its 1,000 inventory robots from its stores because the company was concerned about how shoppers were reacting to seeing the six-foot robots in the aisles.

With road blocks like this, will the World Economic Forum’s prediction of almost half of tasks being carried out by machines by 2025 come to pass?

At the rate we’re going, it seems unlikely, even with the boost in automation caused by the pandemic. Robotics will continue to advance its capabilities, and will take over more human jobs as it does so, but it’s unlikely we’ll hit a dramatic inflection point that could be described as a “revolution.” Instead, the robot evolution will happen the way most societal change does: incrementally, with time for people to adapt both practically and psychologically.

For now though, robots are still pretty sexy.

Image Credit: charles taylor / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437776 Video Friday: This Terrifying Robot Will ...

Posted on November 29, 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!):

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

#437728 A Battery That’s Tough Enough To ...

Posted on November 26, 2020 by Android

Batteries can add considerable mass to any design, and they have to be supported using a sufficiently strong structure, which can add significant mass of its own. Now researchers at the University of Michigan have designed a structural zinc-air battery, one that integrates directly into the machine that it powers and serves as a load-bearing part.

That feature saves weight and thus increases effective storage capacity, adding to the already hefty energy density of the zinc-air chemistry. And the very elements that make the battery physically strong help contain the chemistry’s longstanding tendency to degrade over many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles.

The research is being published today in Science Robotics.

Nicholas Kotov, a professor of chemical engineer, is the leader of the project. He would not say how many watt-hours his prototype stores per gram, but he did note that zinc air—because it draw on ambient air for its electricity-producing reactions—is inherently about three times as energy-dense as lithium-ion cells. And, because using the battery as a structural part means dispensing with an interior battery pack, you could free up perhaps 20 percent of a machine’s interior. Along with other factors the new battery could in principle provide as much as 72 times the energy per unit of volume (not of mass) as today’s lithium-ion workhorses.

Illustration: Alice Kitterman/Science Robotics

“It’s not as if we invented something that was there before us,” Kotov says. ”I look in the mirror and I see my layer of fat—that’s for the storage of energy, but it also serves other purposes,” like keeping you warm in the wintertime. (A similar advance occurred in rocketry when designers learned how to make some liquid propellant tanks load bearing, eliminating the mass penalty of having separate external hull and internal tank walls.)

Others have spoken of putting batteries, including the lithium-ion kind, into load-bearing parts in vehicles. Ford, BMW, and Airbus, for instance, have expressed interest in the idea. The main problem to overcome is the tradeoff in load-bearing batteries between electrochemical performance and mechanical strength.

Image: Kotov Lab/University of Michigan

Key to the battery's physical toughness and to its long life cycle is the nanofiber membrane, made of Kevlar.

The Michigan group get both qualities by using a solid electrolyte (which can’t leak under stress) and by covering the electrodes with a membrane whose nanostructure of fibers is derived from Kevlar. That makes the membrane tough enough to suppress the growth of dendrites—branching fibers of metal that tend to form on an electrode with every charge-discharge cycle and which degrade the battery.

The Kevlar need not be purchased new but can be salvaged from discarded body armor. Other manufacturing steps should be easy, too, Kotov says. He has only just begun to talk to potential commercial partners, but he says there’s no reason why his battery couldn’t hit the market in the next three or four years.

Drones and other autonomous robots might be the most logical first application because their range is so severely chained to their battery capacity. Also, because such robots don’t carry people about, they face less of a hurdle from safety regulators leery of a fundamentally new battery type.

“And it’s not just about the big Amazon robots but also very small ones,” Kotov says. “Energy storage is a very significant issue for small and flexible soft robots.”

Here’s a video showing how Kotov’s lab has used batteries to form the “exoskeleton” of robots that scuttle like worms or scorpions. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437697 These Underwater Drones Use Water ...

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Android

Yi Chao likes to describe himself as an “armchair oceanographer” because he got incredibly seasick the one time he spent a week aboard a ship. So it’s maybe not surprising that the former NASA scientist has a vision for promoting remote study of the ocean on a grand scale by enabling underwater drones to recharge on the go using his company’s energy-harvesting technology.

Many of the robotic gliders and floating sensor stations currently monitoring the world’s oceans are effectively treated as disposable devices because the research community has a limited number of both ships and funding to retrieve drones after they’ve accomplished their mission of beaming data back home. That’s not only a waste of money, but may also contribute to a growing assortment of abandoned lithium-ion batteries polluting the ocean with their leaking toxic materials—a decidedly unsustainable approach to studying the secrets of the underwater world.

“Our goal is to deploy our energy harvesting system to use renewable energy to power those robots,” says Chao, president and CEO of the startup Seatrec. “We're going to save one battery at a time, so hopefully we're going to not to dispose more toxic batteries in the ocean.”

Chao’s California-based startup claims that its SL1 Thermal Energy Harvesting System can already help save researchers money equivalent to an order of magnitude reduction in the cost of using robotic probes for oceanographic data collection. The startup is working on adapting its system to work with autonomous underwater gliders. And it has partnered with defense giant Northrop Grumman to develop an underwater recharging station for oceangoing drones that incorporates Northrop Grumman’s self-insulating electrical connector capable of operating while the powered electrical contacts are submerged.

Seatrec’s energy-harvesting system works by taking advantage of how certain substances transition from solid-to-liquid phase and liquid-to-gas phase when they heat up. The company’s technology harnesses the pressure changes that result from such phase changes in order to generate electricity.

Image: Seatrec

To make the phase changes happen, Seatrec’s solution taps the temperature differences between warmer water at the ocean surface and colder water at the ocean depths. Even a relatively simple robotic probe can generate additional electricity by changing its buoyancy to either float at the surface or sink down into the colder depths.

By attaching an external energy-harvesting module, Seatrec has already begun transforming robotic probes into assets that can be recharged and reused more affordably than sending out a ship each time to retrieve the probes. This renewable energy approach could keep such drones going almost indefinitely barring electrical or mechanical failures. “We just attach the backpack to the robots, we give them a cable providing power, and they go into the ocean,” Chao explains.

The early buyers of Seatrec’s products are primarily academic researchers who use underwater drones to collect oceanographic data. But the startup has also attracted military and government interest. It has already received small business innovation research contracts from both the U.S. Office of Naval Research and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Seatrec has also won two $10,000 prizes under the Powering the Blue Economy: Ocean Observing Prize administered by the U.S. Department of Energy and NOAA. The prizes awarded during the DISCOVER Competition phase back in March 2020 included one prize split with Northrop Grumman for the joint Mission Unlimited UUV Station concept. The startup and defense giant are currently looking for a robotics company to partner with for the DEVELOP Competition phase of the Ocean Observing Prize that will offer a total of $3 million in prizes.

In the long run, Seatrec hopes its energy-harvesting technology can support commercial ventures such as the aquaculture industry that operates vast underwater farms. The technology could also support underwater drones carrying out seabed surveys that pave the way for deep sea mining ventures, although those are not without controversy because of their projected environmental impacts.

Among all the possible applications Chao seems especially enthusiastic about the prospect of Seatrec’s renewable power technology enabling underwater drones and floaters to collect oceanographic data for much longer periods of time. He spent the better part of two decades working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where he helped develop a satellite designed for monitoring the Earth’s oceans. But he and the JPL engineering team that developed Seatrec’s core technology believe that swarms of underwater drones can provide a continuous monitoring network to truly begin understanding the oceans in depth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed production and delivery of Seatrec’s products somewhat given local shutdowns and supply chain disruptions. Still, the startup has been able to continue operating in part because it’s considered to be a defense contractor that is operating an essential manufacturing facility. Seatrec’s engineers and other staff members are working in shifts to practice social distancing.

“Rather than building one or two for the government, we want to scale up to build thousands, hundreds of thousands, hopefully millions, so we can improve our understanding and provide that data to the community,” Chao says. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437693 Video Friday: Drone Helps Explore ...

Posted on November 24, 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 Conference]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nev., USA
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online Event]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Clearpath Robotics and Boston Dynamics were obviously destined to partner up with Spot, because Spot 100 percent stole its color scheme from Clearpath, which has a monopoly on yellow and black robots. But seriously, the news here is that thanks to Clearpath, Spot now works seamlessly with ROS.

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

A new video created by Swisscom Ventures highlights a research expedition sponsored by Moncler to explore the deepest ice caves in the world using Flyability’s Elios drone. […] The expedition was sponsored by apparel company Moncler and took place over two weeks in 2018 on the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest body of ice in the world after Antarctica. Research focused on an area about 80 kilometers east of Kangerlussuaq, where scientists wanted to study the movement of water deep underground to better understand the effects of climate change on the melting ice.

[ Flyability ]

Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, whose terrifying haircut machine we featured a few months ago, has improved on his robotic basketball hoop. It’s actually more than an improvement: It’s a complete redesign that nearly drove Wighton insane. But the result is pretty cool. It’s fun to watch him building a highly complicated system while always seeking simple and elegant designs for its components.

[ Stuff Made Here ]

SpaceX rockets are really just giant, explosion-powered drones that go into space sometimes. So let's watch more videos of them! This one is sped up, and puts a flight into just a couple of minutes.

[ SpaceX ]

Neato Robotics makes some solid autonomous vacuums, and these incremental upgrades feature improved battery life and better air filters.

[ Neato Robotics ]

A full-scale engineering model of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover now resides in a garage facing the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

This vehicle system test bed rover (VSTB) is also known as OPTIMISM, which stands for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars. OPTIMISM was built in a warehouselike assembly room near the Mars Yard – an area that simulates the Red Planet's rocky surface. The rover helps the mission test hardware and software before it’s transmitted to the real rover on Mars. OPTIMISM will share the space with the Curiosity rover's twin MAGGIE.

[ JPL ]

Heavy asset industries like shipping, oil and gas, and manufacturing are grounded in repetitive tasks like locating items on large industrial sites — a tedious task that can take as long 45 minutes to find critical items like a forklift in an area that spans the size of multiple football fields. Not only is this work boring, it’s dangerous and inefficient. Robots like Spot, however, love this sort of work.

Spot can provide real-time updates on the location of assets and complete other mundane tasks. In this case, Spot is using software from Cognite to roam the vast shipyard to locate and manage more than 100,000 assets stored across the facility. What used to take humans hours can be managed on an ongoing basis by Spot — leaving employees to focus on more strategic tasks.

[ Cognite ]

The KNEXT Barista system helps high volume premium coffee providers who want to offer artisan coffee specialities in consistent quality.

[ Kuka ]

In this paper, we study this idea of generality in the locomotion domain. We develop a learning framework that can learn sophisticated locomotion behavior for a wide spectrum of legged robots, such as bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds and hexapods, including wheeled variants. Our learning framework relies on a data-efficient, off-policy multi-task RL algorithm and a small set of reward functions that are semantically identical across robots.

[ DeepMind ]

Thanks Dave!

Even though it seems like the real risk of COVID is catching it from another person, robotics companies are doing what they can with UVC disinfecting systems.

[ BlueBotics ]

Aeditive develop robotic 3D printing solutions for the production of concrete components. At the heart of their production plant are two large robots that cooperate to manufacture the component. The automation technology they build on is a robotic shotcrete process. During this process, they apply concrete layer by layer and thus manufacture complete components. This means that their customers no longer dependent on formwork, which is expensive and time-consuming to create. Instead, their customers can manufacture components directly on a steel pallet without these moulds.

[ Aeditive ]

Something BIG is coming next month from Robotiq!

My guess: an elephant.

[ Robotiq ]

TurtleBot3 is a great little home robot, as long as you have a TurtleBot3-sized home.

[ Robotis ]

How do you calculate the coordinated movements of two robot arms so they can accurately guide a highly flexible tool? ETH researchers have integrated all aspects of the optimisation calculations into an algorithm. The hot-​wire cutter will be used, among other things, to develop building blocks for a mortar-​free structure.

[ ETH Zurich ]

And now, this.

[ RobotStart ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots