Tag Archives: open source

#439105 This Robot Taught Itself to Walk in a ...

Recently, in a Berkeley lab, a robot called Cassie taught itself to walk, a little like a toddler might. Through trial and error, it learned to move in a simulated world. Then its handlers sent it strolling through a minefield of real-world tests to see how it’d fare.

And, as it turns out, it fared pretty damn well. With no further fine-tuning, the robot—which is basically just a pair of legs—was able to walk in all directions, squat down while walking, right itself when pushed off balance, and adjust to different kinds of surfaces.

It’s the first time a machine learning approach known as reinforcement learning has been so successfully applied in two-legged robots.

This likely isn’t the first robot video you’ve seen, nor the most polished.

For years, the internet has been enthralled by videos of robots doing far more than walking and regaining their balance. All that is table stakes these days. Boston Dynamics, the heavyweight champ of robot videos, regularly releases mind-blowing footage of robots doing parkour, back flips, and complex dance routines. At times, it can seem the world of iRobot is just around the corner.

This sense of awe is well-earned. Boston Dynamics is one of the world’s top makers of advanced robots.

But they still have to meticulously hand program and choreograph the movements of the robots in their videos. This is a powerful approach, and the Boston Dynamics team has done incredible things with it.

In real-world situations, however, robots need to be robust and resilient. They need to regularly deal with the unexpected, and no amount of choreography will do. Which is how, it’s hoped, machine learning can help.

Reinforcement learning has been most famously exploited by Alphabet’s DeepMind to train algorithms that thrash humans at some the most difficult games. Simplistically, it’s modeled on the way we learn. Touch the stove, get burned, don’t touch the damn thing again; say please, get a jelly bean, politely ask for another.

In Cassie’s case, the Berkeley team used reinforcement learning to train an algorithm to walk in a simulation. It’s not the first AI to learn to walk in this manner. But going from simulation to the real world doesn’t always translate.

Subtle differences between the two can (literally) trip up a fledgling robot as it tries out its sim skills for the first time.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers used two simulations instead of one. The first simulation, an open source training environment called MuJoCo, was where the algorithm drew upon a large library of possible movements and, through trial and error, learned to apply them. The second simulation, called Matlab SimMechanics, served as a low-stakes testing ground that more precisely matched real-world conditions.

Once the algorithm was good enough, it graduated to Cassie.

And amazingly, it didn’t need further polishing. Said another way, when it was born into the physical world—it knew how to walk just fine. In addition, it was also quite robust. The researchers write that two motors in Cassie’s knee malfunctioned during the experiment, but the robot was able to adjust and keep on trucking.

Other labs have been hard at work applying machine learning to robotics.

Last year Google used reinforcement learning to train a (simpler) four-legged robot. And OpenAI has used it with robotic arms. Boston Dynamics, too, will likely explore ways to augment their robots with machine learning. New approaches—like this one aimed at training multi-skilled robots or this one offering continuous learning beyond training—may also move the dial. It’s early yet, however, and there’s no telling when machine learning will exceed more traditional methods.

And in the meantime, Boston Dynamics bots are testing the commercial waters.

Still, robotics researchers, who were not part of the Berkeley team, think the approach is promising. Edward Johns, head of Imperial College London’s Robot Learning Lab, told MIT Technology Review, “This is one of the most successful examples I have seen.”

The Berkeley team hopes to build on that success by trying out “more dynamic and agile behaviors.” So, might a self-taught parkour-Cassie be headed our way? We’ll see.

Image Credit: University of California Berkeley Hybrid Robotics via YouTube Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439100 Video Friday: Robotic Eyeball Camera

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!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

What if seeing devices looked like us? Eyecam is a prototype exploring the potential future design of sensing devices. Eyecam is a webcam shaped like a human eye that can see, blink, look around and observe us.

And it's open source, so you can build your own!

[ Eyecam ]

Looks like Festo will be turning some of its bionic robots into educational kits, which is a pretty cool idea.

[ Bionics4Education ]

Underwater soft robots are challenging to model and control because of their high degrees of freedom and their intricate coupling with water. In this paper, we present a method that leverages the recent development in differentiable simulation coupled with a differentiable, analytical hydrodynamic model to assist with the modeling and control of an underwater soft robot. We apply this method to Starfish, a customized soft robot design that is easy to fabricate and intuitive to manipulate.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

Rainbow Robotics, the company who made HUBO, has a new collaborative robot arm.

[ Rainbow Robotics ]

Thanks Fan!

We develop an integrated robotic platform for advanced collaborative robots and demonstrates an application of multiple robots collaboratively transporting an object to different positions in a factory environment. The proposed platform integrates a drone, a mobile manipulator robot, and a dual-arm robot to work autonomously, while also collaborating with a human worker. The platform also demonstrates the potential of a novel manufacturing process, which incorporates adaptive and collaborative intelligence to improve the efficiency of mass customization for the factory of the future.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

In Sevastopol State University the team of the Laboratory of Underwater Robotics and Control Systems and Research and Production Association “Android Technika” performed tests of an underwater anropomorphic manipulator robot.

[ Sevastopol State ]

Thanks Fan!

Taiwanese company TCI Gene created a COVID test system based on their fully automated and enclosed gene testing machine QVS-96S. The system includes two ABB robots and carries out 1800 tests per day, operating 24/7. Every hour 96 virus samples tests are made with an accuracy of 99.99%.

[ ABB ]

A short video showing how a Halodi Robotics can be used in a commercial guarding application.

[ Halodi ]

During the past five years, under the NASA Early Space Innovations program, we have been developing new design optimization methods for underactuated robot hands, aiming to achieve versatile manipulation in highly constrained environments. We have prototyped hands for NASA’s Astrobee robot, an in-orbit assistive free flyer for the International Space Station.

[ ROAM Lab ]

The new, improved OTTO 1500 is a workhorse AMR designed to move heavy payloads through demanding environments faster than any other AMR on the market, with zero compromise to safety.

[ ROAM Lab ]

Very, very high performance sensing and actuation to pull this off.

[ Ishikawa Group ]

We introduce a conversational social robot designed for long-term in-home use to help with loneliness. We present a novel robot behavior design to have simple self-reflection conversations with people to improve wellness, while still being feasible, deployable, and safe.

[ HCI Lab ]

We are one of the 5 winners of the Start-up Challenge. This video illustrates what we achieved during the Swisscom 5G exploration week. Our proof-of-concept tele-excavation system is composed of a Menzi Muck M545 walking excavator automated & customized by Robotic Systems Lab and IBEX motion platform as the operator station. The operator and remote machine are connected for the first time via a 5G network infrastructure which was brought to our test field by Swisscom.

[ RSL ]

This video shows LOLA balancing on different terrain when being pushed in different directions. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain (hard ground is assumed).

[ TUM ]

Autonomous driving when you cannot see the road at all because it's buried in snow is some serious autonomous driving.

[ Norlab ]

A hierarchical and robust framework for learning bipedal locomotion is presented and successfully implemented on the 3D biped robot Digit. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by successfully transferring the learned policy in simulation to the Digit robot hardware, realizing sustained walking gaits under external force disturbances and challenging terrains not included during the training process.

[ OSU ]

This is a video summary of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue's deployments under the direction of emergency response agencies to more than 30 disasters in five countries from 2001 (9/11 World Trade Center) to 2018 (Hurricane Michael). It includes the first use of ground robots for a disaster (WTC, 2001), the first use of small unmanned aerial systems (Hurricane Katrina 2005), and the first use of water surface vehicles (Hurricane Wilma, 2005).

[ CRASAR ]

In March, a team from the Oxford Robotics Institute collected a week of epic off-road driving data, as part of the Sense-Assess-eXplain (SAX) project.

[ Oxford Robotics ]

As a part of the AAAI 2021 Spring Symposium Series, HEBI Robotics was invited to present an Industry Talk on the symposium's topic: Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild. Included in this presentation was a short case study on one of our upcoming mobile robots that is being designed to successfully navigate unstructured environments where today's robots struggle.

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Hardik!

This Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar is from Chad Jenkins at the University of Michigan, on “Semantic Robot Programming… and Maybe Making the World a Better Place.”

I will present our efforts towards accessible and general methods of robot programming from the demonstrations of human users. Our recent work has focused on Semantic Robot Programming (SRP), a declarative paradigm for robot programming by demonstration that builds on semantic mapping. In contrast to procedural methods for motion imitation in configuration space, SRP is suited to generalize user demonstrations of goal scenes in workspace, such as for manipulation in cluttered environments. SRP extends our efforts to crowdsource robot learning from demonstration at scale through messaging protocols suited to web/cloud robotics. With such scaling of robotics in mind, prospects for cultivating both equal opportunity and technological excellence will be discussed in the context of broadening and strengthening Title IX and Title VI.

[ UMD ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439036 Video Friday: Shadow Plays Jenga, and ...

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!):

RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

The Shadow Robot team couldn't resist! Our Operator, Joanna, is using the Shadow Teleoperation System which, fun and games aside, can help those in difficult, dangerous and distant jobs.

Shadow could challenge this MIT Jenga-playing robot, but I bet they wouldn't win:

[ Shadow Robot ]

Digit is gradually stomping the Agility Robotics logo into a big grassy field fully autonomously.

[ Agility Robotics ]

This is a pretty great and very short robotic magic show.

[ Mario the Magician ]

A research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a modular solution for drone delivery of larger packages without the need for a complex fleet of drones of varying sizes. By allowing teams of small drones to collaboratively lift objects using an adaptive control algorithm, the strategy could allow a wide range of packages to be delivered using a combination of several standard-sized vehicles.

[ GA Tech ]

I've seen this done using vision before, but Flexiv's Rizon 4s can keep a ball moving along a specific trajectory using only force sensing and control.

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks Yunfan!

This combination of a 3D aerial projection system and a sensing interface can be used as an interactive and intuitive control system for things like robot arms, but in this case, it's being used to make simulated pottery. Much less messy than the traditional way of doing it.

More details on Takafumi Matsumaru's work at the Bio-Robotics & Human-Mechatronics Laboratory at Waseda University at the link below.

[ BLHM ]

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called astronauts Shannon Walker and Kate Rubins on the ISS, and they brought up Astrobee, at which point Shannon reaches over and rips Honey right off of her charging dock to get her on camera.

[ NASA ]

Here's a quick three minute update on Perseverance and Ingenuity from JPL.

[ Mars 2020 ]

Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents “dynamic grasping,” where the drone attempts to grasp an object while moving. On the other hand, biological systems (e.g. birds) rely on compliant and soft parts to dampen contact forces and compensate for grasping inaccuracy, enabling impressive feats. This paper presents the first prototype of a soft drone—a quadrotor where traditional (i.e. rigid) landing gears are replaced with a soft tendon-actuated gripper to enable aggressive grasping.

[ MIT ]

In this video we present results from a field deployment inside the Løkken Mine underground pyrite mine in Norway. The Løkken mine was operative from 1654 to 1987 and contains narrow but long corridors, alongside vast rooms and challenging vertical stopes. In this field study we evaluated selected autonomous exploration and visual search capabilities of a subset of the aerial robots of Team CERBERUS towards the goal of complete subterranean autonomy.

[ Team CERBERUS ]

What you can do with a 1,000 FPS projector with a high speed tracking system.

[ Ishikawa Group ]

ANYbotics’ collaboration with BASF, one of the largest global chemical manufacturers, displays the efficiency, quality, and scalability of robotic inspection and data-collection capabilities in complex industrial environments.

[ ANYbotics ]

Does your robot arm need a stylish jacket?

[ Fraunhofer ]

Trossen Robotics unboxes a Unitree A1, and it's actually an unboxing where they have to figure out everything from scratch.

[ Trossen ]

Robots have learned to drive cars, assist in surgeries―and vacuum our floors. But can they navigate the unwritten rules of a busy sidewalk? Until they can, robotics experts Leila Takayama and Chris Nicholson believe, robots won’t be able to fulfill their immense potential. In this conversation, Chris and Leila explore the future of robotics and the role open source will play in it.

[ Red Hat ]

Christoph Bartneck's keynote at the 6th Joint UAE Symposium on Social Robotics, focusing on what roles robots can play during the Covid crisis and why so many social robots fail in the market.

[ HIT Lab ]

Decision-making based on arbitrary criteria is legal in some contexts, such as employment, and not in others, such as criminal sentencing. As algorithms replace human deciders, HAI-EIS fellow Kathleen Creel argues arbitrariness at scale is morally and legally problematic. In this HAI seminar, she explains how the heart of this moral issue relates to domination and a lack of sufficient opportunity for autonomy. It relates in interesting ways to the moral wrong of discrimination. She proposes technically informed solutions that can lessen the impact of algorithms at scale and so mitigate or avoid the moral harm identified.

[ Stanford HAI ]

Sawyer B. Fuller speaks on Autonomous Insect-Sized Robots at the UC Berkeley EECS Colloquium series.

Sub-gram (insect-sized) robots have enormous potential that is largely untapped. From a research perspective, their extreme size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints also forces us to reimagine everything from how they compute their control laws to how they are fabricated. These questions are the focus of the Autonomous Insect Robotics Laboratory at the University of Washington. I will discuss potential applications for insect robots and recent advances from our group. These include the first wireless flights of a sub-gram flapping-wing robot that weighs barely more than a toothpick. I will describe efforts to expand its capabilities, including the first multimodal ground-flight locomotion, the first demonstration of steering control, and how to find chemical plume sources by integrating the smelling apparatus of a live moth. I will also describe a backpack for live beetles with a steerable camera and conceptual design of robots that could scale all the way down to the “gnat robots” first envisioned by Flynn & Brooks in the ‘80s.

[ UC Berkeley ]

Thanks Fan!

Joshua Vander Hook, Computer Scientist, NIAC Fellow, and Technical Group Supervisor at NASA JPL, presents an overview of the AI Group(s) at JPL, and recent work on single and multi-agent autonomous systems supporting space exploration, Earth science, NASA technology development, and national defense programs.

[ UMD ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439010 Video Friday: Nanotube-Powered Insect ...

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!):

HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online Conference]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online Conference]
ICRA 2021 – May 30-5, 2021 – Xi'an, China
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.

Chen’s actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. “You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Chen. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.” And it weighs in at just 0.6 grams, approximately the mass of a large bumble bee. The drone looks a bit like a tiny cassette tape with wings, though Chen is working on a new prototype shaped like a dragonfly.

[ MIT ]

National Robotics Week is April 3-11, 2021!

[ NRW ]

This is in a motion capture environment, but still, super impressive!

[ Paper ]

Thanks Fan!

Why wait for Boston Dynamics to add an arm to your Spot if you can just do it yourself?

[ ETHZ ]

This video shows the deep-sea free swimming of soft robot in the South China Sea. The soft robot was grasped by a robotic arm on ‘HAIMA’ ROV and reached the bottom of the South China Sea (depth of 3,224 m). After the releasing, the soft robot was actuated with an on-board AC voltage of 8 kV at 1 Hz and demonstrated free swimming locomotion with its flapping fins.

Um, did they bring it back?

[ Nature ]

Quadruped Yuki Mini is 12 DOF robot equipped with a Raspberry Pi that runs ROS. Also, BUNNIES!

[ Lingkang Zhang ]

Thanks Lingkang!

Deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. The vswarm package enables decentralized vision-based control of drone swarms without relying on inter-agent communication or visual fiducial markers. The results show that the drones can safely navigate in an outdoor environment despite substantial background clutter and difficult lighting conditions.

[ Vswarm ]

A conventional adopted method for operating a waiter robot is based on the static position control, where pre-defined goal positions are marked on a map. However, this solution is not optimal in a dynamic setting, such as in a coffee shop or an outdoor catering event, because the customers often change their positions. We explore an alternative human-robot interface design where a human operator communicates the identity of the customer to the robot instead. Inspired by how [a] human communicates, we propose a framework for communicating a visual goal to the robot, through interactive two-way communications.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

In this video, LOLA reacts to undetected ground height changes, including a drop and leg-in-hole experiment. Further tests show the robustness to vertical disturbances using a seesaw. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain.

[ TUM ]

RaiSim is a cross-platform multi-body physics engine for robotics and AI. It fully supports Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.

[ RaiSim ]

Thanks Fan!

The next generation of LoCoBot is here. The LoCoBot is an ROS research rover for mapping, navigation and manipulation (optional) that enables researchers, educators and students alike to focus on high level code development instead of hardware and building out lower level code. Development on the LoCoBot is simplified with open source software, full ROS-mapping and navigation packages and modular opensource Python API that allows users to move the platform as well as (optional) manipulator in as few as 10 lines of code.

[ Trossen ]

MIT Media Lab Research Specialist Dr. Kate Darling looks at how robots are portrayed in popular film and TV shows.

Kate's book, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots can be pre-ordered now and comes out next month.

[ Kate Darling ]

The current autonomous mobility systems for planetary exploration are wheeled rovers, limited to flat, gently-sloping terrains and agglomerate regolith. These vehicles cannot tolerate instability and operate within a low-risk envelope (i.e., low-incline driving to avoid toppling). Here, we present ‘Mars Dogs’ (MD), four-legged robotic dogs, the next evolution of extreme planetary exploration.

[ Team CoSTAR ]

In 2020, first-year PhD students at the MIT Media Lab were tasked with a special project—to reimagine the Lab and write sci-fi stories about the MIT Media Lab in the year 2050. “But, we are researchers. We don't only write fiction, we also do science! So, we did what scientists do! We used a secret time machine under the MIT dome to go to the year 2050 and see what’s going on there! Luckily, the Media Lab still exists and we met someone…really cool!” Enjoy this interview of Cyber Joe, AI Mentor for MIT Media Lab Students of 2050.

[ MIT ]

In this talk, we will give an overview of the diverse research we do at CSIRO’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group and delve into some specific technologies we have developed including SLAM and Legged robotics. We will also give insights into CSIRO’s participation in the current DARPA Subterranean Challenge where we are deploying a fleet of heterogeneous robots into GPS-denied unknown underground environments.

[ GRASP Seminar ]

Marco Hutter (ETH) and Hae-Won Park (KAIST) talk about “Robotics Inspired by Nature.”

[ Swiss-Korean Science Club ]

Thanks Fan!

In this keynote, Guy Hoffman Assistant Professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, discusses “The Social Uncanny of Robotic Companions.”

[ Designerly HRI ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437193 TyroBot: DIY Humanoid Robot

“TyroBot” is a novice-friendly (but high-tech) 3D-printable open source kit that can be assembled in a few hours, and is very easy to program. It’s great way to teach yourself robotics and programming! Read more, or back them on Kickstarter.

Posted in Human Robots