Tag Archives: meets
#439479 Video Friday: Spot Meets BTS
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!):
RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 2021 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
I will never understand why video editors persist in adding extra noise to footage of actual robots that makes them sound like they are badly designed and/or are broken.
11 million people now think that's what Spot actually sounds like.
[ Hyundai ]
For one brief exciting moment this looks like a Spot with five arms.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Researchers from Baidu Research and the University of Maryland have developed a robotic excavator system that integrates perception, planning, and control capabilities to enable material loading over a long duration with no human intervention.
[ Baidu ]
The Robotics and Perception Group and the University of Zurich present one of the world’s largest indoor drone-testing arenas. Equipped with a real-time motion-capture system consisting of 36 Vicon cameras, and with a flight space of over 30x30x8 meters (7,000 cubic meters), this large research infrastructure allows us to deploy our most advanced perception, learning, planning, and control algorithms to push vision-based agile drones to speeds over 60 km/h and accelerations over 5g.
[ RPG ]
Jump navigation for Mini Cheetah from UC Berkeley.
[ UC Berkeley ]
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a historic group selfie with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on April 6, 2021. But how was the selfie taken? Vandi Verma, Perseverance’s chief engineer for robotic operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California breaks down the process in this video.
[ NASA ]
I am like 95% sure that Heineken's cooler robot is mostly just a cut down Segway Ninebot.
[ Heineken ]
Wing has a new airspace safety and authorization app called OpenSky. It is not good in the same way that all of these airspace safety and authorization apps are not good: they only provide airspace information, and do not provide any guidance on other regulations that may impact your ability to fly a drone, while simultaneously making explicit suggestions about how all you need to fly is a green checkmark in the app, which is a lie.
At least it's free, I guess.
[ OpenSky ]
Interesting approach to conveyors from Berkshire Grey.
Where do I get one of them flower cows?
[ OpenSky ]
The idea behind RoboCup has always been to challenge humans at some point, and one of the first steps towards that is being able to recognize humans and what they're doing on the field.
[ Tech United Eindhoven ]
Sawyer is still very much around, but very much in Germany.
[ Rethink Robotics ]
The VoloDrone, Volocopter's heavy-lift and versatile cargo drone, is fully electric, can transport a 200 kg payload up to 40 km, and has 18 rotors and motors powering the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. This innovative urban air mobility solution for intracity logistics will operate within Volocopter's UAM ecosystem for cities.
[ Volocopter ]
Our technology can be used for remote maintenance tasks—perfect for when you can’t get on-site either because it’s too far, too dangerous or inaccessible. The system increases your speed of response to faults and failures which saves time, money and reputation. In this clip, our engineer is controlling the robot hands from a distance to plug in and take out a USB from its port.
In this clip, our engineer is controlling the robot hands from a distance to plug in and take out a USB from its port. How much extra for a robotic system that can insert a USB plug the correct way every time?
[ Shadow ]
Takenaka Corporation is one of five major general contractors in Japan. The company is welding structural columns in skyscrapers. Fraunhofer IPA developed a prototype and software for autonomous robotic welding on construction sites. The included robot programming system is based on ROS for collision-avoidance, laser-scanner based column localization and tool-changer handling.
[ Fraunhofer ]
Thanks, Jennifer!
In the near future, mixed traffic consisting of manual and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be common. Questions surrounding how vulnerable road users such as pedestrians in wheelchairs (PWs) will make crossing decisions in these new situations are underexplored. We conducted a remote co-design study with one of the researchers of this work who has the lived experience as a powered wheelchair user and applied inclusive design practices.
[ Paper ]
The IEEE RAS Women in Engineering (WIE) Committee recently completed a several year study of gender representation in conference leading roles at RAS-supported conferences. Individuals who hold these roles select organizing committees, choose speakers, and make final decisions on paper acceptances. The authors lead a discussion about the findings and the story behind the study. In addition to presenting detailed data and releasing anonymized datasets for further study, the authors provided suggestions on changes to help ensure a more diverse and representative robotics community where anyone can thrive.
[ WIE ]
Service robots are entering all kinds of business areas, and the outbreak of COVID-19 speeds up their application. Many studies have shown that robots with matching gender-occupational roles receive larger acceptance. However, this can also enlarge the gender bias in society. In this paper, we identified gender norms embedded in service robots by iteratively coding 67 humanoid robot images collected from the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba.
[ Paper ]
Systems with legs and arms are becoming increasingly useful and applicable in real world scenarios. So far, in particular for locomotion, most control approaches have focused on using simplified models for online motion and foothold generation. This approach has its limits when dealing with complex robots that are capable of locomotion and manipulation. In this presentation I will show how we apply MPC for locomotion and manipulation with different variants of our quadrupedal robot ANYmal.
[ CMU ]
Thanks, Fan!
Pieter Abbeel's CVPR 2021 Keynote: Towards a General Solution for Robotics.
[ Pieter Abbeel ]
In this Weekly Robotics Meetup, Achille Verheye explains how he stumbled upon a very niche class of robots called cuspidal robots, capable of making singularity-avoiding moves while creating motion planning algorithms.
[ Weekly Robotics ]
Thanks, Mat! Continue reading
#439389 Video Friday: Spot Meets BTS
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!):
RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 2021 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
I will never understand why video editors persist in adding extra noise to footage of actual robots that makes them sound like they are badly designed and/or are broken.
11 million people now think that's what Spot actually sounds like.
[ Hyundai ]
For one brief exciting moment this looks like a Spot with five arms.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Researchers from Baidu Research and the University of Maryland have developed a robotic excavator system that integrates perception, planning, and control capabilities to enable material loading over a long duration with no human intervention.
[ Baidu ]
The Robotics and Perception Group and the University of Zurich present one of the world’s largest indoor drone-testing arenas. Equipped with a real-time motion-capture system consisting of 36 Vicon cameras, and with a flight space of over 30x30x8 meters (7,000 cubic meters), this large research infrastructure allows us to deploy our most advanced perception, learning, planning, and control algorithms to push vision-based agile drones to speeds over 60 km/h and accelerations over 5g.
[ RPG ]
Jump navigation for Mini Cheetah from UC Berkeley.
[ UC Berkeley ]
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured a historic group selfie with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on April 6, 2021. But how was the selfie taken? Vandi Verma, Perseverance’s chief engineer for robotic operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California breaks down the process in this video.
[ NASA ]
I am like 95% sure that Heineken's cooler robot is mostly just a cut down Segway Ninebot.
[ Heineken ]
Wing has a new airspace safety and authorization app called OpenSky. It is not good in the same way that all of these airspace safety and authorization apps are not good: they only provide airspace information, and do not provide any guidance on other regulations that may impact your ability to fly a drone, while simultaneously making explicit suggestions about how all you need to fly is a green checkmark in the app, which is a lie.
At least it's free, I guess.
[ OpenSky ]
Interesting approach to conveyors from Berkshire Grey.
Where do I get one of them flower cows?
[ OpenSky ]
The idea behind RoboCup has always been to challenge humans at some point, and one of the first steps towards that is being able to recognize humans and what they're doing on the field.
[ Tech United Eindhoven ]
Sawyer is still very much around, but very much in Germany.
[ Rethink Robotics ]
The VoloDrone, Volocopter's heavy-lift and versatile cargo drone, is fully electric, can transport a 200 kg payload up to 40 km, and has 18 rotors and motors powering the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. This innovative urban air mobility solution for intracity logistics will operate within Volocopter's UAM ecosystem for cities.
[ Volocopter ]
Our technology can be used for remote maintenance tasks—perfect for when you can’t get on-site either because it’s too far, too dangerous or inaccessible. The system increases your speed of response to faults and failures which saves time, money and reputation. In this clip, our engineer is controlling the robot hands from a distance to plug in and take out a USB from its port.
In this clip, our engineer is controlling the robot hands from a distance to plug in and take out a USB from its port. How much extra for a robotic system that can insert a USB plug the correct way every time?
[ Shadow ]
Takenaka Corporation is one of five major general contractors in Japan. The company is welding structural columns in skyscrapers. Fraunhofer IPA developed a prototype and software for autonomous robotic welding on construction sites. The included robot programming system is based on ROS for collision-avoidance, laser-scanner based column localization and tool-changer handling.
[ Fraunhofer ]
Thanks, Jennifer!
In the near future, mixed traffic consisting of manual and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be common. Questions surrounding how vulnerable road users such as pedestrians in wheelchairs (PWs) will make crossing decisions in these new situations are underexplored. We conducted a remote co-design study with one of the researchers of this work who has the lived experience as a powered wheelchair user and applied inclusive design practices.
[ Paper ]
The IEEE RAS Women in Engineering (WIE) Committee recently completed a several year study of gender representation in conference leading roles at RAS-supported conferences. Individuals who hold these roles select organizing committees, choose speakers, and make final decisions on paper acceptances. The authors lead a discussion about the findings and the story behind the study. In addition to presenting detailed data and releasing anonymized datasets for further study, the authors provided suggestions on changes to help ensure a more diverse and representative robotics community where anyone can thrive.
[ WIE ]
Service robots are entering all kinds of business areas, and the outbreak of COVID-19 speeds up their application. Many studies have shown that robots with matching gender-occupational roles receive larger acceptance. However, this can also enlarge the gender bias in society. In this paper, we identified gender norms embedded in service robots by iteratively coding 67 humanoid robot images collected from the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba.
[ Paper ]
Systems with legs and arms are becoming increasingly useful and applicable in real world scenarios. So far, in particular for locomotion, most control approaches have focused on using simplified models for online motion and foothold generation. This approach has its limits when dealing with complex robots that are capable of locomotion and manipulation. In this presentation I will show how we apply MPC for locomotion and manipulation with different variants of our quadrupedal robot ANYmal.
[ CMU ]
Thanks, Fan!
Pieter Abbeel's CVPR 2021 Keynote: Towards a General Solution for Robotics.
[ Pieter Abbeel ]
In this Weekly Robotics Meetup, Achille Verheye explains how he stumbled upon a very niche class of robots called cuspidal robots, capable of making singularity-avoiding moves while creating motion planning algorithms.
[ Weekly Robotics ]
Thanks, Mat! Continue reading
#437758 Remotely Operated Robot Takes Straight ...
Roboticists love hard problems. Challenges like the DRC and SubT have helped (and are still helping) to catalyze major advances in robotics, but not all hard problems require a massive amount of DARPA funding—sometimes, a hard problem can just be something very specific that’s really hard for a robot to do, especially relative to the ease with which a moderately trained human might be able to do it. Catching a ball. Putting a peg in a hole. Or using a straight razor to shave someone’s face without Sweeney Todd-izing them.
This particular roboticist who sees straight-razor face shaving as a hard problem that robots should be solving is John Peter Whitney, who we first met back at IROS 2014 in Chicago when (working at Disney Research) he introduced an elegant fluidic actuator system. These actuators use tubes containing a fluid (like air or water) to transmit forces from a primary robot to a secondary robot in a very efficient way that also allows for either compliance or very high fidelity force feedback, depending on the compressibility of the fluid.
Photo: John Peter Whitney/Northeastern University
Barber meets robot: Boston based barber Jesse Cabbage [top, right] observes the machine created by roboticist John Peter Whitney. Before testing the robot on Whitney’s face, they used his arm for a quick practice [bottom].
Whitney is now at Northeastern University, in Boston, and he recently gave a talk at the RSS workshop on “Reacting to Contact,” where he suggested that straight razor shaving would be an interesting and valuable problem for robotics to work toward, due to its difficulty and requirement for an extremely high level of both performance and reliability.
Now, a straight razor is sort of like a safety razor, except with the safety part removed, which in fact does make it significantly less safe for humans, much less robots. Also not ideal for those worried about safety is that as part of the process the razor ends up in distressingly close proximity to things like the artery that is busily delivering your brain’s entire supply of blood, which is very close to the top of the list of things that most people want to keep blades very far away from. But that didn’t stop Whitney from putting his whiskers where his mouth is and letting his robotic system mediate the ministrations of a professional barber. It’s not an autonomous robotic straight-razor shave (because Whitney is not totally crazy), but it’s a step in that direction, and requires that the hardware Whitney developed be dead reliable.
Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. But, rest assured that Whitney lived long enough to answer our questions after. Here’s the video; it’s part of a longer talk, but it should start in the right spot, at about 23:30.
If Whitney looked a little bit nervous to you, that’s because he was. “This was the first time I’d ever been shaved by someone (something?!) else with a straight razor,” he told us, and while having a professional barber at the helm was some comfort, “the lack of feeling and control on my part was somewhat unsettling.” Whitney says that the barber, Jesse Cabbage of Dentes Barbershop in Somerville, Mass., was surprised by how well he could feel the tactile sensations being transmitted from the razor. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to make this video,” Whitney says. “I can’t show someone how something feels, so the next best thing is to show a delicate task that either from experience or intuition makes it clear to the viewer that the system must have these properties—otherwise the task wouldn’t be possible.”
And as for when Whitney might be comfortable getting shaved by a robotic system without a human in the loop? It’s going to take a lot of work, as do most other hard problems in robotics. “There are two parts to this,” he explains. “One is fault-tolerance of the components themselves (software, electronics, etc.) and the second is the quality of the perception and planning algorithms.”
He offers a comparison to self-driving cars, in which similar (or greater) risks are incurred: “To learn how to perceive, interpret, and adapt, we need a very high-fidelity model of the problem, or a wealth of data and experience, or both” he says. “But in the case of shaving we are greatly lacking in both!” He continues with the analogy: “I think there is a natural progression—the community started with autonomous driving of toy cars on closed courses and worked up to real cars carrying human passengers; in robotic manipulation we are beginning to move out of the ‘toy car’ stage and so I think it’s good to target high-consequence hard problems to help drive progress.”
The ultimate goal is much more general than the creation of a dedicated straight razor shaving robot. This particular hardware system is actually a testbed for exploring MRI-compatible remote needle biopsy.
Of course, the ultimate goal here is much more general than the creation of a dedicated straight razor shaving robot; it’s a challenge that includes a host of sub-goals that will benefit robotics more generally. This particular hardware system Whitney is developing is actually a testbed for exploring MRI-compatible remote needle biopsy, and he and his students are collaborating with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on adapting this technology to prostate biopsy and ablation procedures. They’re also exploring how delicate touch can be used as a way to map an environment and localize within it, especially where using vision may not be a good option. “These traits and behaviors are especially interesting for applications where we must interact with delicate and uncertain environments,” says Whitney. “Medical robots, assistive and rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, and shared-autonomy teleoperation for delicate tasks.”
A paper with more details on this robotic system, “Series Elastic Force Control for Soft Robotic Fluid Actuators,” is available on arXiv. Continue reading