Tag Archives: motion

#437571 Video Friday: Snugglebot Is What We All ...

Posted on November 18, 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!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-25, 2020 – [Online]
Robotica 2020 – November 10-14, 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
Bay Area Robotics Symposium – November 20, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Snugglebot is what we all need right now.

[ Snugglebot ]

In his video message on his prayer intention for November, Pope Francis emphasizes that progress in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) be oriented “towards respecting the dignity of the person and of Creation”.

[ Vatican News ]

KaPOW!

Apparently it's supposed to do that—the disruptor flies off backwards to reduce recoil on the robot, and has its own parachute to keep it from going too far.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Animals have many muscles, receptors, and neurons which compose feedback loops. In this study, we designed artificial muscles, receptors, and neurons without any microprocessors, or software-based controllers. We imitate the reflexive rule observed in walking experiments of cats, as a result, the Pneumatic Brainless Robot II emerged running motion (a leg trajectory and a gait pattern) through the interaction between the body, the ground, and the artificial reflexes. We envision that the simple reflex circuit we discovered will be a candidate for a minimal model for describing the principles of animal locomotion.

Find the paper, “Brainless Running: A Quasi-quadruped Robot with Decentralized Spinal Reflexes by Solely Mechanical Devices,” on IROS On-Demand.

[ IROS ]

Thanks Yoichi!

I have no idea what these guys are saying, but they're talking about robots that serve chocolate!

The world of experience of the Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur of managing director Josef Zotter counts more than 270,000 visitors annually. Since March 2019, this world of chocolate in Bergl near Riegersburg in Austria has been enriched by a new attraction: the world's first chocolate and praline robot from KUKA delights young and old alike and serves up chocolate and pralines to guests according to their personal taste.

[ Zotter ]

This paper proposes a systematic solution that uses an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to aggressively and safely track an agile target. The solution properly handles the challenging situations where the intent of the target and the dense environments are unknown to the UAV. The proposed solution is integrated into an onboard quadrotor system. We fully test the system in challenging real-world tracking missions. Moreover, benchmark comparisons validate that the proposed method surpasses the cutting-edge methods on time efficiency and tracking effectiveness.

[ FAST Lab ]

Southwest Research Institute developed a cable management system for collaborative robotics, or “cobots.” Dress packs used on cobots can create problems when cables are too tight (e-stops) or loose (tangling). SwRI developed ADDRESS, or the Adaptive DRESing System, to provide smarter cobot dress packs that address e-stops and tangling.

[ SWRI ]

A quick demonstration of the acoustic contact sensor in the RBO Hand 2. An embedded microphone records the sound inside of the pneumatic finger. Depending on which part of the finger makes contact, the sound is a little bit different. We create a sensor that recognizes these small changes and predicts the contact location from the sound. The visualization on the left shows the recorded sound (top) and which of the nine contact classes the sensor is currently predicting (bottom).

[ TU Berlin ]

The MAVLab won the prize for the “most innovative design” in the IMAV 2018 indoor competition, in which drones had to fly through windows, gates, and follow a predetermined flight path. The prize was awarded for the demonstration of a fully autonomous version of the “DelFly Nimble”, a tailless flapping wing drone.

In order to fly by itself, the DelFly Nimble was equipped with a single, small camera and a small processor allowing onboard vision processing and control. The jury of international experts in the field praised the agility and autonomous flight capabilities of the DelFly Nimble.

[ MAVLab ]

A reactive walking controller for the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative's skinny quadruped.

[ ODRI ]

Mobile service robots are already able to recognize people and objects while navigating autonomously through their operating environments. But what is the ideal position of the robot to interact with a user? To solve this problem, Fraunhofer IPA developed an approach that connects navigation, 3D environment modeling, and person detection to find the optimal goal pose for HRI.

[ Fraunhofer ]

Yaskawa has been in robotics for a very, very long time.

[ Yaskawa ]

Black in Robotics IROS launch event, featuring Carlotta Berry.

[ Black in Robotics ]

What is AI? I have no idea! But these folks have some opinions.

[ MIT ]

Aerial-based Observations of Volcanic Emissions (ABOVE) is an international collaborative project that is changing the way we sample volcanic gas emissions. Harnessing recent advances in drone technology, unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) in the ABOVE fleet are able to acquire aerial measurements of volcanic gases directly from within previously inaccessible volcanic plumes. In May 2019, a team of 30 researchers undertook an ambitious field deployment to two volcanoes – Tavurvur (Rabaul) and Manam in Papua New Guinea – both amongst the most prodigious emitters of sulphur dioxide on Earth, and yet lacking any measurements of how much carbon they emit to the atmosphere.

[ ABOVE ]

A talk from IHMC's Robert Griffin for ICCAS 2020, including a few updates on their Nadia humanoid.

[ IHMC ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437471 How Giving Robots a Hybrid, Human-Like ...

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Android

Squeezing a lot of computing power into robots without using up too much space or energy is a constant battle for their designers. But a new approach that mimics the structure of the human brain could provide a workaround.

The capabilities of most of today’s mobile robots are fairly rudimentary, but giving them the smarts to do their jobs is still a serious challenge. Controlling a body in a dynamic environment takes a surprising amount of processing power, which requires both real estate for chips and considerable amounts of energy to power them.

As robots get more complex and capable, those demands are only going to increase. Today’s most powerful AI systems run in massive data centers across far more chips than can realistically fit inside a machine on the move. And the slow death of Moore’s Law suggests we can’t rely on conventional processors getting significantly more efficient or compact anytime soon.

That prompted a team from the University of Southern California to resurrect an idea from more than 40 years ago: mimicking the human brain’s division of labor between two complimentary structures. While the cerebrum is responsible for higher cognitive functions like vision, hearing, and thinking, the cerebellum integrates sensory data and governs movement, balance, and posture.

When the idea was first proposed the technology didn’t exist to make it a reality, but in a paper recently published in Science Robotics, the researchers describe a hybrid system that combines analog circuits that control motion and digital circuits that govern perception and decision-making in an inverted pendulum robot.

“Through this cooperation of the cerebrum and the cerebellum, the robot can conduct multiple tasks simultaneously with a much shorter latency and lower power consumption,” write the researchers.

The type of robot the researchers were experimenting with looks essentially like a pole balancing on a pair of wheels. They have a broad range of applications, from hoverboards to warehouse logistics—Boston Dynamics’ recently-unveiled Handle robot operates on the same principles. Keeping them stable is notoriously tough, but the new approach managed to significantly improve all digital control approaches by radically improving the speed and efficiency of computations.

Key to bringing the idea alive was the recent emergence of memristors—electrical components whose resistance relies on previous input, which allows them to combine computing and memory in one place in a way similar to how biological neurons operate.

The researchers used memristors to build an analog circuit that runs an algorithm responsible for integrating data from the robot’s accelerometer and gyroscope, which is crucial for detecting the angle and velocity of its body, and another that controls its motion. One key advantage of this setup is that the signals from the sensors are analog, so it does away with the need for extra circuitry to convert them into digital signals, saving both space and power.

More importantly, though, the analog system is an order of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient than a standard all-digital system, the authors report. This not only lets them slash the power requirements, but also lets them cut the processing loop from 3,000 microseconds to just 6. That significantly improves the robot’s stability, with it taking just one second to settle into a steady state compared to more than three seconds using the digital-only platform.

At the minute this is just a proof of concept. The robot the researchers have built is small and rudimentary, and the algorithms being run on the analog circuit are fairly basic. But the principle is a promising one, and there is currently a huge amount of R&D going into neuromorphic and memristor-based analog computing hardware.

As often turns out to be the case, it seems like we can’t go too far wrong by mimicking the best model of computation we have found so far: our own brains.

Image Credit: Photos Hobby / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437136 Researchers develop real-time physics ...

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Android

Motion picture animation and video games are impressively lifelike nowadays, capturing a wisp of hair falling across a heroine's eyes or a canvas sail snapping crisply in the wind. Collaborators from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Carnegie Mellon University have adapted this sophisticated computer graphics technology to simulate the movements of soft, limbed robots for the first time. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436530 How Smart Roads Will Make Driving ...

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Android

Roads criss-cross the landscape, but while they provide vital transport links, in many ways they represent a huge amount of wasted space. Advances in “smart road” technology could change that, creating roads that can harvest energy from cars, detect speeding, automatically weigh vehicles, and even communicate with smart cars.

“Smart city” projects are popping up in countries across the world thanks to advances in wireless communication, cloud computing, data analytics, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence. Transportation is a crucial element of most of these plans, but while much of the focus is on public transport solutions, smart roads are increasingly being seen as a crucial feature of these programs.

New technology is making it possible to tackle a host of issues including traffic congestion, accidents, and pollution, say the authors of a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A. And they’ve outlined ten of the most promising advances under development or in planning stages that could feature on tomorrow’s roads.

Energy harvesting

A variety of energy harvesting technologies integrated into roads have been proposed as ways to power street lights and traffic signals or provide a boost to the grid. Photovoltaic panels could be built into the road surface to capture sunlight, or piezoelectric materials installed beneath the asphalt could generate current when deformed by vehicles passing overhead.

Musical roads

Countries like Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and South Korea have built roads that play music as cars pass by. By varying the spacing of rumble strips, it’s possible to produce a series of different notes as vehicles drive over them. The aim is generally to warn of hazards or help drivers keep to the speed limit.

Automatic weighing

Weight-in-motion technology that measures vehicles’ loads as they drive slowly through a designated lane has been around since the 1970s, but more recently high speed weight-in-motion tech has made it possible to measure vehicles as they travel at regular highway speeds. The latest advance has been integration with automatic licence plate reading and wireless communication to allow continuous remote monitoring both to enforce weight restrictions and monitor wear on roads.

Vehicle charging

The growing popularity of electric vehicles has spurred the development of technology to charge cars and buses as they drive. The most promising of these approaches is magnetic induction, which involves burying cables beneath the road to generate electromagnetic fields that a receiver device in the car then transforms into electrical power to charge batteries.

Smart traffic signs

Traffic signs aren’t always as visible as they should be, and it can often be hard to remember what all of them mean. So there are now proposals for “smart signs” that wirelessly beam a sign’s content to oncoming cars fitted with receivers, which can then alert the driver verbally or on the car’s display. The approach isn’t affected by poor weather and lighting, can be reprogrammed easily, and could do away with the need for complex sign recognition technology in future self-driving cars.

Traffic violation detection and notification

Sensors and cameras can be combined with these same smart signs to detect and automatically notify drivers of traffic violations. The automatic transmission of traffic signals means drivers won’t be able to deny they’ve seen the warnings or been notified of any fines, as a record will be stored on their car’s black box.

Talking cars

Car-to-car communication technology and V2X, which lets cars share information with any other connected device, are becoming increasingly common. Inter-car communication can be used to propagate accidents or traffic jam alerts to prevent congestion, while letting vehicles communicate with infrastructure can help signals dynamically manage timers to keep traffic flowing or automatically collect tolls.

Smart intersections

Combing sensors and cameras with object recognition systems that can detect vehicles and other road users can help increase safety and efficiency at intersections. It can be used to extend green lights for slower road users like pedestrians and cyclists, sense jaywalkers, give priority to emergency vehicles, and dynamically adjust light timers to optimize traffic flow. Information can even be broadcast to oncoming vehicles to highlight blind spots and potential hazards.

Automatic crash detection

There’s a “golden hour” after an accident in which the chance of saving lives is greatly increased. Vehicle communication technology can ensure that notification of a crash reaches the emergency services rapidly, and can also provide vital information about the number and type of vehicles involved, which can help emergency response planning. It can also be used to alert other drivers to slow down or stop to prevent further accidents.

Smart street lights

Street lights are increasingly being embedded with sensors, wireless connectivity, and micro-controllers to enable a variety of smart functions. These include motion activation to save energy, providing wireless access points, air quality monitoring, or parking and litter monitoring. This can also be used to send automatic maintenance requests if a light is faulty, and can even allow neighboring lights to be automatically brightened to compensate.

Image Credit: Image by David Mark from Pixabay Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436526 Not Bot, Not Beast: Scientists Create ...

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Android

A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots.”

This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them.

One of the researchers described the creation as “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal,” but a “new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Xenobots are less than 1 millimeter long and made of 500-1,000 living cells. They have various simple shapes, including some with squat “legs.” They can propel themselves in linear or circular directions, join together to act collectively, and move small objects. Using their own cellular energy, they can live up to 10 days.

While these “reconfigurable biomachines” could vastly improve human, animal, and environmental health, they raise legal and ethical concerns.

Strange New ‘Creature’
To make xenobots, the research team used a supercomputer to test thousands of random designs of simple living things that could perform certain tasks.

The computer was programmed with an AI “evolutionary algorithm” to predict which organisms would likely display useful tasks, such as moving towards a target.

After the selection of the most promising designs, the scientists attempted to replicate the virtual models with frog skin or heart cells, which were manually joined using microsurgery tools. The heart cells in these bespoke assemblies contract and relax, giving the organisms motion.

The creation of xenobots is groundbreaking. Despite being described as “programmable living robots,” they are actually completely organic and made of living tissue. The term “robot” has been used because xenobots can be configured into different forms and shapes, and “programmed” to target certain objects, which they then unwittingly seek. They can also repair themselves after being damaged.

Possible Applications
Xenobots may have great value. Some speculate they could be used to clean our polluted oceans by collecting microplastics. Similarly, they may be used to enter confined or dangerous areas to scavenge toxins or radioactive materials. Xenobots designed with carefully shaped “pouches” might be able to carry drugs into human bodies.

Future versions may be built from a patient’s own cells to repair tissue or target cancers. Being biodegradable, xenobots would have an edge on technologies made of plastic or metal.

Further development of biological “robots” could accelerate our understanding of living and robotic systems. Life is incredibly complex, so manipulating living things could reveal some of life’s mysteries—and improve our use of AI.

Legal and Ethical Questions
Conversely, xenobots raise legal and ethical concerns. In the same way they could help target cancers, they could also be used to hijack life functions for malevolent purposes.

Some argue artificially making living things is unnatural, hubristic, or involves “playing God.” A more compelling concern is that of unintended or malicious use, as we have seen with technologies in fields including nuclear physics, chemistry, biology and AI. For instance, xenobots might be used for hostile biological purposes prohibited under international law.

More advanced future xenobots, especially ones that live longer and reproduce, could potentially “malfunction” and go rogue, and out-compete other species.

For complex tasks, xenobots may need sensory and nervous systems, possibly resulting in their sentience. A sentient programmed organism would raise additional ethical questions. Last year, the revival of a disembodied pig brain elicited concerns about different species’ suffering.

Managing Risks
The xenobot’s creators have rightly acknowledged the need for discussion around the ethics of their creation. The 2018 scandal over using CRISPR (which allows the introduction of genes into an organism) may provide an instructive lesson here. While the experiment’s goal was to reduce the susceptibility of twin baby girls to HIV-AIDS, associated risks caused ethical dismay. The scientist in question is in prison.

When CRISPR became widely available, some experts called for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. Others argued the benefits outweighed the risks.

While each new technology should be considered impartially and based on its merits, giving life to xenobots raises certain significant questions:

Should xenobots have biological kill-switches in case they go rogue?
Who should decide who can access and control them?
What if “homemade” xenobots become possible? Should there be a moratorium until regulatory frameworks are established? How much regulation is required?

Lessons learned in the past from advances in other areas of science could help manage future risks, while reaping the possible benefits.

Long Road Here, Long Road Ahead
The creation of xenobots had various biological and robotic precedents. Genetic engineering has created genetically modified mice that become fluorescent in UV light.

Designer microbes can produce drugs and food ingredients that may eventually replace animal agriculture. In 2012, scientists created an artificial jellyfish called a “medusoid” from rat cells.

Robotics is also flourishing. Nanobots can monitor people’s blood sugar levels and may eventually be able to clear clogged arteries. Robots can incorporate living matter, which we witnessed when engineers and biologists created a sting-ray robot powered by light-activated cells.

In the coming years, we are sure to see more creations like xenobots that evoke both wonder and due concern. And when we do, it is important we remain both open-minded and critical.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots