Tag Archives: motors

#437716 Robotic Tank Is Designed to Crawl ...

Let’s talk about bowels! Most of us have them, most of us use them a lot, and like anything that gets used a lot, they eventually need to get checked out to help make sure that everything will keep working the way it should for as long as you need it to. Generally, this means a colonoscopy, and while there are other ways of investigating what’s going on in your gut, a camera on a flexible tube is still “the gold-standard method of diagnosis and intervention,” according to some robotics researchers who want to change that up a bit.

The University of Colorado’s Advanced Medical Technologies Lab has been working on a tank robot called Endoculus that’s able to actively drive itself through your intestines, rather than being shoved. The good news is that it’s very small, and the bad news is that it’s probably not as small as you’d like it to be.

The reason why a robot like Endoculus is necessary (or at least a good idea) is that trying to stuff a semi-rigid endoscopy tube into the semi-floppy tube that is your intestine doesn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes, the tip of the endoscopy tube can get stuck, and as more tube is fed in, it causes the intestine to distend, which best case is painful and worst case can cause serious internal injuries. One way of solving this is with swallowable camera pills, but those don’t help you with tasks like taking tissue samples. A self-propelled system like Endoculus could reduce risk while also making the procedure faster and cheaper.

Image: Advanced Medical Technologies Lab/University of Colorado

The researchers say that while the width of Endoculus is larger than a traditional endoscope, the device would require “minimal distention during use” and would “not cause pain or harm to the patient.” Future versions of the robot, they add, will “yield a smaller footprint.”

Endoculus gets around with four sets of treads, angled to provide better traction against the curved walls of your gut. The treads are micropillared, or covered with small nubs, which helps them deal with all your “slippery colon mucosa.” Designing the robot was particularly tricky because of the severe constraints on the overall size of the device, which is just 3 centimeters wide and 2.3 cm high. In order to cram the two motors required for full control, they had to be arranged parallel to the treads, resulting in a fairly complex system of 3D-printed worm gears. And to make the robot actually useful, it includes a camera, LED lights, tubes for injecting air and water, and a tool port that can accommodate endoscopy instruments like forceps and snares to retrieve tissue samples.

So far, Endoculus has spent some time inside of a live pig, although it wasn’t able to get that far since pig intestines are smaller than human intestines, and because apparently the pig intestine is spiraled somehow. The pig (and the robot) both came out fine. A (presumably different) pig then provided some intestine that was expanded to human-intestine size, inside of which Endoculus did much better, and was able to zip along at up to 40 millimeters per second without causing any damage. Personally, I’m not sure I’d want a robot to explore my intestine at a speed much higher than that.

The next step with Endoculus is to add some autonomy, which means figuring out how to do localization and mapping using the robot’s onboard camera and IMU. And then of course someone has to be the first human to experience Endoculus directly, which I’d totally volunteer for except the research team is in Colorado and I’m not. Sorry!

“Novel Optimization-Based Design and Surgical Evaluation of a Treaded Robotic Capsule Colonoscope,” by Gregory A. Formosa, J. Micah Prendergast, Steven A. Edmundowicz, and Mark E. Rentschler, from the University of Colorado, was presented at ICRA 2020.

< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437695 Video Friday: Even Robots Know That You ...

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 – [Online Conference]
Other Than Human – September 3-10, 2020 – Stockholm, Sweden
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.

From the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH comes Flightmare, a simulation environment for drones that combines a slick rendering engine with a robust physics engine that can run as fast as your system can handle.

Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run independently from each other. Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i) a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) an integration with a virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. Flightmare can be used for various applications, including path-planning, reinforcement learning, visual-inertial odometry, deep learning, human-robot interaction, etc.

[ Flightmare ]

Quadruped robots yelling at people to maintain social distancing is really starting to become a thing, for better or worse.

We introduce a fully autonomous surveillance robot based on a quadruped platform that can promote social distancing in complex urban environments. Specifically, to achieve autonomy, we mount multiple cameras and a 3D LiDAR on the legged robot. The robot then uses an onboard real-time social distancing detection system to track nearby pedestrian groups. Next, the robot uses a crowd-aware navigation algorithm to move freely in highly dynamic scenarios. The robot finally uses a crowd aware routing algorithm to effectively promote social distancing by using human-friendly verbal cues to send suggestions to overcrowded pedestrians.

[ Project ]

Thanks Fan!

The Personal Robotics Group at Oregon State University is looking at UV germicidal irradiation for surface disinfection with a Fetch Manipulator Robot.

Fetch Robot disinfecting dance party woo!

[ Oregon State ]

How could you not take a mask from this robot?

[ Reachy ]

This work presents the design, development and autonomous navigation of the alpha-version of our Resilient Micro Flyer, a new type of collision-tolerant small aerial robot tailored to traversing and searching within highly confined environments including manhole-sized tubes. The robot is particularly lightweight and agile, while it implements a rigid collision-tolerant design which renders it resilient during forcible interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the design of the system is enhanced through passive flaps ensuring smoother and more compliant collision which was identified to be especially useful in very confined settings.

[ ARL ]

Pepper can make maps and autonomously navigate, which is interesting, but not as interesting as its posture when it's wandering around.

Dat backing into the charging dock tho.

[ Pepper ]

RatChair a strategy for displacing big objects by attaching relatively small vibration sources. After learning how several random bursts of vibration affect its pose, an optimization algorithm discovers the optimal sequence of vibration patterns required to (slowly but surely) move the object to a specified position.

This is from 2015, why isn't all of my furniture autonomous yet?!

[ KAIST ]

The new SeaDrone Pro is designed to be the underwater equivalent of a quadrotor. This video is a rendering, but we've been assured that it does actually exist.

[ SeaDrone ]

Thanks Eduardo!

Porous Loops is a lightweight composite facade panel that shows the potential of 3D printing of mineral foams for building scale applications.

[ ETH ]

Thanks Fan!

Here's an interesting idea for a robotic gripper- it's what appears to be a snap bracelet coupled to a pneumatic actuator that allows the snap bracelet to be reset.

[ Georgia Tech ]

Graze is developing a commercial robotic lawnmower. They're also doing a sort of crowdfunded investment thing, which probably explains the painfully overproduced nature of the following video:

A couple things about this: the hard part, which the video skips over almost entirely, is the mapping, localization, and understanding where to mow and where not to mow. The pitch deck seems to suggest that this is mostly done through computer vision, a thing that's perhaps easy to do under controlled ideal conditions, but difficult to apply to a world full lawns that are all different. The commercial aspect is interesting because golf courses are likely as standardized as you can get, but the emphasis here on how much money they can make without really addressing any of the technical stuff makes me raise an eyebrow or two.

[ Graze ]

The record & playback X-series arm demo allows the user to record the arm's movements while motors are torqued off. Then, the user may torque the motor's on and watch the movements they just made playback!

[ Interbotix ]

Shadow Robot has a new teleop system for its hand. I'm guessing that it's even trickier to use than it looks.

[ Shadow Robot ]

Quanser Interactive Labs is a collection of virtual hardware-based laboratory activities that supplement traditional or online courses. Same as working with physical systems in the lab, students work with virtual twins of Quanser's most popular plants, develop their mathematical models, implement and simulate the dynamic behavior of these systems, design controllers, and validate them on a high-fidelity 3D real-time virtual models. The virtual systems not only look like the real ones, they also behave, can be manipulated, measured, and controlled like real devices. And finally, when students go to the lab, they can deploy their virtually-validated designs on actual physical equipment.

[ Quanser ]

This video shows robot-assisted heart surgery. It's amazing to watch if you haven't seen this sort of thing before, but be aware that there is a lot of blood.

This video demonstrates a fascinating case of robotic left atrial myxoma excision, narrated by Joel Dunning, Middlesbrough, UK. The Robotic platform provides superior visualisation and enhanced dexterity, through keyhole incisions. Robotic surgery is an integral part of our Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery Program.

[ Tristan D. Yan ]

Thanks Fan!

In this talk, we present our work on learning control policies directly in simulation that are deployed onto real drones without any fine tuning. The presentation covers autonomous drone racing, drone acrobatics, and uncertainty estimation in deep networks.

[ RPG ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437603 Throwable Robot Car Always Lands on Four ...

Throwable or droppable robots seem like a great idea for a bunch of applications, including exploration and search and rescue. But such robots do come with some constraints—namely, if you’re going to throw or drop a robot, you should be prepared for that robot to not land the way you want it to land. While we’ve seen some creative approaches to this problem, or more straightforward self-righting devices, usually you’re in for significant trade-offs in complexity, mobility, and mass.

What would be ideal is a robot that can be relied upon to just always land the right way up. A robotic cat, of sorts. And while we’ve seen this with a tail, for wheeled vehicles, it turns out that a tail isn’t necessary: All it takes is some wheel spin.

The reason that AGRO (Agile Ground RObot), developed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, can do this is because each of its wheels is both independently driven and steerable. The wheels are essentially reaction wheels, which are a pretty common way to generate forces on all kinds of different robots, but typically you see such reaction wheels kludged onto these robots as sort of an afterthought—using the existing wheels of a wheeled robot is a more elegant way to do it.

Four steerable wheels with in-hub motors provide control in all three axes (yaw, pitch, and roll). You’ll notice that when the robot is tossed, the wheels all toe inwards (or outwards, I guess) by 45 degrees, positioning them orthogonal to the body of the robot. The front left and rear right wheels are spun together, as are the front right and rear left wheels. When one pair of wheels spins in the same direction, the body of the robot twists in the opposite way along an axis between those wheels, in a combination of pitch and roll. By combining different twisting torques from both pairs of wheels, pitch and roll along each axis can be adjusted independently. When the same pair of wheels spin in directions opposite to each other, the robot yaws, although yaw can also be derived by adjusting the ratio between pitch authority and roll authority. And lastly, if you want to sacrifice pitch control for more roll control (or vice versa) the wheel toe-in angle can be changed. Put all this together, and you get an enormous amount of mid-air control over your robot.

Image: Robotics Research Center/West Point

The AGRO robot features four steerable wheels with in-hub motors, which provide control in all three axes (yaw, pitch, and roll).

According to a paper that the West Point group will present at the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), the overall objective here is for the robot to reach a state of zero pitch or roll by the time the robot impacts with the ground, to distribute the impact as much as possible. AGRO doesn’t yet have a suspension to make falling actually safe, so in the short term, it lands on a foam pad, but the mid-air adjustments it’s currently able to make result in a 20 percent reduction of impact force and a 100 percent reduction in being sideways or upside-down.

The toss that you see in the video isn’t the most aggressive, but lead author Daniel J. Gonzalez tells us that AGRO can do much better, theoretically stabilizing from an initial condition of 22.5 degrees pitch and 22.5 degrees roll in a mere 250 milliseconds, with room for improvement beyond that through optimizing the angles of individual wheels in real time. The limiting factor is really the amount of time that AGRO has between the point at which it’s released and the point at which it hits the ground, since more time in the air gives the robot more time to change its orientation.

Given enough height, the current generation of AGRO can recover from any initial orientation as long as it’s spinning at 66 rpm or less. And the only reason this is a limitation at all is because of the maximum rotation speed of the in-wheel hub motors, which can be boosted by increasing the battery voltage, as Gonzalez and his colleagues, Mark C. Lesak, Andres H. Rodriguez, Joseph A. Cymerman, and Christopher M. Korpela from the Robotics Research Center at West Point, describe in the IROS paper, “Dynamics and Aerial Attitude Control for Rapid Emergency Deployment of the Agile Ground Robot AGRO.”

Image: Robotics Research Center/West Point

AGRO 2 will include a new hybrid wheel-leg and non-pneumatic tire design that will allow it to hop up stairs and curbs.

While these particular experiments focus on a robot that’s being thrown, the concept is potentially effective (and useful) on any wheeled robot that’s likely to find itself in mid-air. You can imagine it improving the performance of robots doing all sorts of stunts, from driving off ramps or ledges to being dropped out of aircraft. And as it turns out, being able to self-stabilize during an airdrop is an important skill that some Humvees could use to keep themselves from getting tangled in their own parachute lines and avoid mishaps.

Before they move on to Humvees, though, the researchers are working on the next version of AGRO named AGRO 2. AGRO 2 will include a new hybrid wheel-leg and non-pneumatic tire design that will allow it to hop up stairs and curbs, which sounds like a lot of fun to us. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437598 Video Friday: Sarcos Is Developing a New ...

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 25-29, 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.

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm Oct. 20, 2020, and in a first for the agency, briefly touched an asteroid to collect dust and pebbles from the surface for delivery to Earth in 2023.

[ NASA ]

New from David Zarrouk’s lab at BGU is AmphiSTAR, which Zarrouk describes as “a kind of a ground-water drone inspired by the cockroaches (sprawling) and by the Basilisk lizard (running over water). The robot hovers due to the collision of its propellers with the water (hydrodynamics not aerodynamics). The robot can crawl and swim at high and low speeds and smoothly transition between the two. It can reach 3.5 m/s on ground and 1.5m/s in water.”

AmphiSTAR will be presented at IROS, starting next week!

[ BGU ]

This is unfortunately not a great video of a video that was taken at a SoftBank Hawks baseball game in Japan last week, but it’s showing an Atlas robot doing an honestly kind of impressive dance routine to support the team.

ロボット応援団に人型ロボット『ATLAS』がアメリカからリモートで緊急参戦!!!
ホークスビジョンの映像をお楽しみ下さい♪#sbhawks #Pepper #spot pic.twitter.com/6aTYn8GGli
— 福岡ソフトバンクホークス(公式) (@HAWKS_official)
October 16, 2020

Editor’s Note: The tweet embed above is not working for some reason—see the video here.

[ SoftBank Hawks ]

Thanks Thomas!

Sarcos is working on a new robot, which looks to be the torso of their powered exoskeleton with the human relocated somewhere else.

[ Sarcos ]

The biggest holiday of the year, International Sloth Day, was on Tuesday! To celebrate, here’s Slothbot!

[ NSF ]

This is one of those simple-seeming tasks that are really difficult for robots.

I love self-resetting training environments.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

The Chiel lab collaborates with engineers at the Center for Biologically Inspired Robotics Research at Case Western Reserve University to design novel worm-like robots that have potential applications in search-and-rescue missions, endoscopic medicine, or other scenarios requiring navigation through narrow spaces.

[ Case Western ]

ANYbotics partnered with Losinger Marazzi to explore ANYmal’s potential of patrolling construction sites to identify and report safety issues. With such a complex environment, only a robot designed to navigate difficult terrain is able to bring digitalization to such a physically demanding industry.

[ ANYbotics ]

Happy 2018 Halloween from Clearpath Robotics!

[ Clearpath ]

Overcoming illumination variance is a critical factor in vision-based navigation. Existing methods tackled this radical illumination variance issue by proposing camera control or high dynamic range (HDR) image fusion. Despite these efforts, we have found that the vision-based approaches still suffer from overcoming darkness. This paper presents real-time image synthesizing from carefully controlled seed low dynamic range (LDR) image, to enable visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in an extremely dark environment (less than 10 lux).

[ KAIST ]

What can MoveIt do? Who knows! Let's find out!

[ MoveIt ]

Thanks Dave!

Here we pick a cube from a starting point, manipulate it within the hand, and then put it back. To explore the capabilities of the hand, no sensors were used in this demonstration. The RBO Hand 3 uses soft pneumatic actuators made of silicone. The softness imparts considerable robustness against variations in object pose and size. This lets us design manipulation funnels that work reliably without needing sensor feedback. We take advantage of this reliability to chain these funnels into more complex multi-step manipulation plans.

[ TU Berlin ]

If this was a real solar array, King Louie would have totally cleaned it. Mostly.

[ BYU ]

Autonomous exploration is a fundamental problem for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). Existing methods, however, were demonstrated to have low efficiency, due to the lack of optimality consideration, conservative motion plans and low decision frequencies. In this paper, we propose FUEL, a hierarchical framework that can support Fast UAV ExpLoration in complex unknown environments.

[ HKUST ]

Countless precise repetitions? This is the perfect task for a robot, thought researchers at the University of Liverpool in the Department of Chemistry, and without further ado they developed an automation solution that can carry out and monitor research tasks, making autonomous decisions about what to do next.

[ Kuka ]

This video shows a demonstration of central results of the SecondHands project. In the context of maintenance and repair tasks, in warehouse environments, the collaborative humanoid robot ARMAR-6 demonstrates a number of cognitive and sensorimotor abilities such as 1) recognition of the need of help based on speech, force, haptics and visual scene and action interpretation, 2) collaborative bimanual manipulation of large objects, 3) compliant mobile manipulation, 4) grasping known and unknown objects and tools, 5) human-robot interaction (object and tool handover) 6) natural dialog and 7) force predictive control.

[ SecondHands ]

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, Silicon Valley Robotics hosted a panel of Women in Robotics.

[ Robohub ]

As part of the upcoming virtual IROS conference, HEBI robotics is putting together a tutorial on robotics actuation. While I’m sure HEBI would like you to take a long look at their own actuators, we’ve been assured that no matter what kind of actuators you use, this tutorial will still be informative and useful.

[ YouTube ] via [ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Dave!

This week’s UMD Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar comes from Julie Shah at MIT, on “Enhancing Human Capability with Intelligent Machine Teammates.”

Every team has top performers- people who excel at working in a team to find the right solutions in complex, difficult situations. These top performers include nurses who run hospital floors, emergency response teams, air traffic controllers, and factory line supervisors. While they may outperform the most sophisticated optimization and scheduling algorithms, they cannot often tell us how they do it. Similarly, even when a machine can do the job better than most of us, it can’t explain how. In this talk I share recent work investigating effective ways to blend the unique decision-making strengths of humans and machines. I discuss the development of computational models that enable machines to efficiently infer the mental state of human teammates and thereby collaborate with people in richer, more flexible ways.

[ UMD ]

Matthew Piccoli gives a talk to the UPenn GRASP Lab on “Trading Complexities: Smart Motors and Dumb Vehicles.”

We will discuss my research journey through Penn making the world's smallest, simplest flying vehicles, and in parallel making the most complex brushless motors. What do they have in common? We'll touch on why the quadrotor went from an obscure type of helicopter to the current ubiquitous drone. Finally, we'll get into my life after Penn and what tools I'm creating to further drone and robot designs of the future.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437575 AI-Directed Robotic Hand Learns How to ...

Reaching for a nearby object seems like a mindless task, but the action requires a sophisticated neural network that took humans millions of years to evolve. Now, robots are acquiring that same ability using artificial neural networks. In a recent study, a robotic hand “learns” to pick up objects of different shapes and hardness using three different grasping motions.

The key to this development is something called a spiking neuron. Like real neurons in the brain, artificial neurons in a spiking neural network (SNN) fire together to encode and process temporal information. Researchers study SNNs because this approach may yield insights into how biological neural networks function, including our own.

“The programming of humanoid or bio-inspired robots is complex,” says Juan Camilo Vasquez Tieck, a research scientist at FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik in Karlsruhe, Germany. “And classical robotics programming methods are not always suitable to take advantage of their capabilities.”

Conventional robotic systems must perform extensive calculations, Tieck says, to track trajectories and grasp objects. But a robotic system like Tieck’s, which relies on a SNN, first trains its neural net to better model system and object motions. After which it grasps items more autonomously—by adapting to the motion in real-time.

The new robotic system by Tieck and his colleagues uses an existing robotic hand, called a Schunk SVH 5-finger hand, which has the same number of fingers and joints as a human hand.

The researchers incorporated a SNN into their system, which is divided into several sub-networks. One sub-network controls each finger individually, either flexing or extending the finger. Another concerns each type of grasping movement, for example whether the robotic hand will need to do a pinching, spherical or cylindrical movement.

For each finger, a neural circuit detects contact with an object using the currents of the motors and the velocity of the joints. When contact with an object is detected, a controller is activated to regulate how much force the finger exerts.

“This way, the movements of generic grasping motions are adapted to objects with different shapes, stiffness and sizes,” says Tieck. The system can also adapt its grasping motion quickly if the object moves or deforms.

The robotic grasping system is described in a study published October 24 in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. The researchers’ robotic hand used its three different grasping motions on objects without knowing their properties. Target objects included a plastic bottle, a soft ball, a tennis ball, a sponge, a rubber duck, different balloons, a pen, and a tissue pack. The researchers found, for one, that pinching motions required more precision than cylindrical or spherical grasping motions.

“For this approach, the next step is to incorporate visual information from event-based cameras and integrate arm motion with SNNs,” says Tieck. “Additionally, we would like to extend the hand with haptic sensors.”

The long-term goal, he says, is to develop “a system that can perform grasping similar to humans, without intensive planning for contact points or intense stability analysis, and [that is] able to adapt to different objects using visual and haptic feedback.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots