Tag Archives: parts
#435731 Video Friday: NASA Is Sending This ...
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!):
MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, UK
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
The big news today is that NASA is sending a robot to Saturn’s moon Titan. A flying robot. The Dragonfly mission will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034, but you knew that already, because last January, we posted a detailed article about the concept from the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. And now it’s not a concept anymore, yay!
Again, read all the details plus an interview in 2018 article.
[ NASA ]
A robotic gripping arm that uses engineered bacteria to “taste” for a specific chemical has been developed by engineers at the University of California, Davis, and Carnegie Mellon University. The gripper is a proof-of-concept for biologically-based soft robotics.
The new device uses a biosensing module based on E. coli bacteria engineered to respond to the chemical IPTG by producing a fluorescent protein. The bacterial cells reside in wells with a flexible, porous membrane that allows chemicals to enter but keeps the cells inside. This biosensing module is built into the surface of a flexible gripper on a robotic arm, so the gripper can “taste” the environment through its fingers.
When IPTG crosses the membrane into the chamber, the cells fluoresce and electronic circuits inside the module detect the light. The electrical signal travels to the gripper’s control unit, which can decide whether to pick something up or release it.
[ UC Davis ]
The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is taking on the hard problems in manipulation research toward making human-assist robots reliable and robust. Dr. Russ Tedrake, TRI Vice President of Robotics Research, explains how we are exploring the challenges and addressing the reliability gap by using a robot loading dishes in a dishwasher as an example task.
[ TRI ]
The Tactile Telerobot is the world’s first haptic telerobotic system that transmits realistic touch feedback to an operator located anywhere in the world. It is the product of joint collaboration between Shadow Robot Company, HaptX, and SynTouch. All Nippon Airways funded the project’s initial research and development.
What’s really unique about this is the HaptX tactile feedback system, which is something we’ve been following for several years now. It’s one of the most magical tech experiences I’ve ever had, and you can read about it here and here.
[ HaptX ]
Thanks Andrew!
I love how snake robots can emulate some of the fanciest moves of real snakes, and then also do bonkers things that real snakes never do.
[ Matsuno Lab ]
Here are a couple interesting videos from the Human-Robot Interaction Lab at Tufts.
A robot is instructed to perform an action and cannot do it due to lack of sensors. But when another robot is placed nearby, it can execute the instruction by tacitly tapping into the other robot’s mind and using that robot’s sensors for its own actions. Yes, it’s automatic, and yes, it’s the BORG!
Two Nao robots are instructed to perform a dance and are able to do it right after instruction. Moreover, they can switch roles immediately, and even a third different PR2 robot can perform the dance right away, demonstrating the ability of our DIARC architecture to learn quickly and share the knowledge with any type of robot running the architecture.
Compared to Nao, PR2 just sounds… depressed.
[ HRI Lab ]
This work explores the problem of robot tool construction – creating tools from parts available in the environment. We advance the state-of-the-art in robotic tool construction by introducing an approach that enables the robot to construct a wider range of tools with greater computational efficiency. Specifically, given an action that the robot wishes to accomplish and a set of building parts available to the robot, our approach reasons about the shape of the parts and potential ways of attaching them, generating a ranking of part combinations that the robot then uses to construct and test the target tool. We validate our approach on the construction of five tools using a physical 7-DOF robot arm.
[ RAIL Lab ] via [ RSS ]
We like Magazino’s approach to warehouse picking- constrain the problem to something you can reliably solve, like shoeboxes.
Magazino has announced a new pricing model for their robots. You pay 55k euros for the robot itself, and then after that, all you pay to keep the robot working is 6 cents per pick, so the robot is only costing you money for the work that it actually does.
[ Magazino ]
Thanks Florin!
Human-Robot Collaborations are happening across factories worldwide, yet very few are using it for smaller businesses, due to high costs or the difficulty of customization. Elephant Robotics, a new player from Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of Asia, has set its sight on helping smaller businesses gain access to smart robotics. They created a Catbot (a collaborative robotic arm) that will offer high efficiency and flexibility to various industries.
The Catbot is set to help from education projects, photography, massaging, to being a personal barista or co-playing a table game. The customizations are endless. To increase the flexibility of usage, the Catbot is extremely easy to program from a high precision task up to covering hefty ground projects.
[ Elephant Robotics ]
Thanks Johnson!
Dronistics, an EPFL spin-off, has been testing out their enclosed delivery drone in the Dominican Republic through a partnership with WeRobotics.
[ WeRobotics ]
QTrobot is an expressive humanoid robot designed to help children with autism spectrum disorder and children with special educational needs in learning new skills. QTrobot uses simple and exaggerated facial expressions combined by interactive games and stories, to help children improve their emotional skills. QTrobot helps children to learn about and better understand the emotions and teach them strategies to handle their emotions more effectively.
[ LuxAI ]
Here’s a typical day in the life of a Tertill solar-powered autonomous weed-destroying robot.
$300, now shipping from Franklin Robotics.
[ Tertill ]
PAL Robotics is excited to announce a new TIAGo with two arms, TIAGo++! After carefully listening to the robotics community needs, we used TIAGo’s modularity to integrate two 7-DoF arms to our mobile manipulator. TIAGo++ can help you swiftly accomplish your research goals, opening endless possibilities in mobile manipulation.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Thanks Jack!
You’ve definitely already met the Cobalt security robot, but Toyota AI Ventures just threw a pile of money at them and would therefore like you to experience this re-introduction:
[ Cobalt Robotics ] via [ Toyota AI ]
ROSIE is a mobile manipulator kit from HEBI Robotics. And if you don’t like ROSIE, the modular nature of HEBI’s hardware means that you can take her apart and make something more interesting.
[ HEBI Robotics ]
Learn about Kawasaki Robotics’ second addition to their line of duAro dual-arm collaborative robots, duAro2. This model offers an extended vertical reach (550 mm) and an increased payload capacity (3 kg/arm).
[ Kawasaki Robotics ]
Drone Delivery Canada has partnered with Peel Region Paramedics to pilot its proprietary drone delivery platform to enable rapid first responder technology via drone with the goal to reduce response time and potentially save lives.
[ Drone Delivery Canada ]
In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Harri Ketamo, from Headai.
Harri Ketamo talks about AI and how he aims to mimic human decision making with algorithms. Harri has done a lot of AI for computer games to create opponents that are entertaining to play against. It is easy to develop a very bad or a very good opponent, but designing an opponent that behaves like a human, is entertaining to play against and that you can beat is quite hard. He talks about how AI in computer games is a very important story telling tool and an important part of making a game entertaining to play.
This work led him into other parts of the AI field. Harri thinks that we sometimes have a problem separating what is real from what is the type of story telling he knows from gaming AI. He calls for critical analysis of AI and says that data has to be used to verify AI decisions and results.
[ Robots in Depth ]
Thanks Per! Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435681 Video Friday: This NASA Robot Uses ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Robots can land on the Moon and drive on Mars, but what about the places they can’t reach? Designed by engineers as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a four-limbed robot named LEMUR (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot) can scale rock walls, gripping with hundreds of tiny fishhooks in each of its 16 fingers and using artificial intelligence to find its way around obstacles. In its last field test in Death Valley, California, in early 2019, LEMUR chose a route up a cliff, scanning the rock for ancient fossils from the sea that once filled the area.
The LEMUR project has since concluded, but it helped lead to a new generation of walking, climbing and crawling robots. In future missions to Mars or icy moons, robots with AI and climbing technology derived from LEMUR could discover similar signs of life. Those robots are being developed now, honing technology that may one day be part of future missions to distant worlds.
[ NASA ]
This video demonstrates the autonomous footstep planning developed by IHMC. Robots in this video are the Atlas humanoid robot (DRC version) and the NASA Valkyrie. The operator specifies a goal location in the world, which is modeled as planar regions using the robot’s perception sensors. The planner then automatically computes the necessary steps to reach the goal using a Weighted A* algorithm. The algorithm does not reject footholds that have a certain amount of support, but instead modifies them after the plan is found to try and increase that support area.
Currently, narrow terrain has a success rate of about 50%, rough terrain is about 90%, whereas flat ground is near 100%. We plan on increasing planner speed and the ability to plan through mazes and to unseen goals by including a body-path planner as the first step. Control, Perception, and Planning algorithms by IHMC Robotics.
[ IHMC ]
I’ve never really been able to get into watching people play poker, but throw an AI from CMU and Facebook into a game of no-limit Texas hold’em with five humans, and I’m there.
[ Facebook ]
In this video, Cassie Blue is navigating autonomously. Right now, her world is very small, the Wavefield at the University of Michigan, where she is told to turn left at intersections. You’re right, that is not a lot of independence, but it’s a first step away from a human and an RC controller!
Using a RealSense RGBD Camera, an IMU, and our version of an InEKF with contact factors, Cassie Blue is building a 3D semantic map in real time that identifies sidewalks, grass, poles, bicycles, and buildings. From the semantic map, occupancy and cost maps are built with the sidewalk identified as walk-able area and everything else considered as an obstacle. A planner then sets a goal to stay approximately 50 cm to the right of the sidewalk’s left edge and plans a path around obstacles and corners using D*. The path is translated into way-points that are achieved via Cassie Blue’s gait controller.
[ University of Michigan ]
Thanks Jesse!
Dave from HEBI Robotics wrote in to share some new actuators that are designed to get all kinds of dirty: “The R-Series takes HEBI’s X-Series to the next level, providing a sealed robotics solution for rugged, industrial applications and laying the groundwork for industrial users to address challenges that are not well met by traditional robotics. To prove it, we shot some video right in the Allegheny River here in Pittsburgh. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon :-)”
The R-Series Actuator is a full-featured robotic component as opposed to a simple servo motor. The output rotates continuously, requires no calibration or homing on boot-up, and contains a thru-bore for easy daisy-chaining of wiring. Modular in nature, R-Series Actuators can be used in everything from wheeled robots to collaborative robotic arms. They are sealed to IP67 and designed with a lightweight form factor for challenging field applications, and they’re packed with sensors that enable simultaneous control of position, velocity, and torque.
[ HEBI Robotics ]
Thanks Dave!
If your robot hands out karate chops on purpose, that’s great. If it hands out karate chops accidentally, maybe you should fix that.
COVR is short for “being safe around collaborative and versatile robots in shared spaces”. Our mission is to significantly reduce the complexity in safety certifying cobots. Increasing safety for collaborative robots enables new innovative applications, thus increasing production and job creation for companies utilizing the technology. Whether you’re an established company seeking to deploy cobots or an innovative startup with a prototype of a cobot related product, COVR will help you analyze, test and validate the safety for that application.
[ COVR ]
Thanks Anna!
EPFL startup Flybotix has developed a novel drone with just two propellers and an advanced stabilization system that allow it to fly for twice as long as conventional models. That fact, together with its small size, makes it perfect for inspecting hard-to-reach parts of industrial facilities such as ducts.
[ Flybotix ]
SpaceBok is a quadruped robot designed and built by a Swiss student team from ETH Zurich and ZHAW Zurich, currently being tested using Automation and Robotics Laboratories (ARL) facilities at our technical centre in the Netherlands. The robot is being used to investigate the potential of ‘dynamic walking’ and jumping to get around in low gravity environments.
SpaceBok could potentially go up to 2 m high in lunar gravity, although such a height poses new challenges. Once it comes off the ground the legged robot needs to stabilise itself to come down again safely – like a mini-spacecraft. So, like a spacecraft. SpaceBok uses a reaction wheel to control its orientation.
[ ESA ]
A new video from GITAI showing progress on their immersive telepresence robot for space.
[ GITAI ]
Tech United’s HERO robot (a Toyota HSR) competed in the RoboCup@Home competition, and it had a couple of garbage-related hiccups.
[ Tech United ]
Even small drones are getting better at autonomous obstacle avoidance in cluttered environments at useful speeds, as this work from the HKUST Aerial Robotics Group shows.
[ HKUST ]
DelFly Nimbles now come in swarms.
[ DelFly Nimble ]
This is a very short video, but it’s a fairly impressive look at a Baxter robot collaboratively helping someone put a shirt on, a useful task for folks with disabilities.
[ Shibata Lab ]
ANYmal can inspect the concrete in sewers for deterioration by sliding its feet along the ground.
[ ETH Zurich ]
HUG is a haptic user interface for teleoperating advanced robotic systems as the humanoid robot Justin or the assistive robotic system EDAN. With its lightweight robot arms, HUG can measure human movements and simultaneously display forces from the distant environment. In addition to such teleoperation applications, HUG serves as a research platform for virtual assembly simulations, rehabilitation, and training.
[ DLR ]
This video about “image understanding” from CMU in 1979 (!) is amazing, and even though it’s long, you won’t regret watching until 3:30. Or maybe you will.
[ ARGOS (pdf) ]
Will Burrard-Lucas’ BeetleCam turned 10 this month, and in this video, he recounts the history of his little robotic camera.
[ BeetleCam ]
In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Gabriel Skantze from Furhat Robotics.
Gabriel Skantze is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Furhat Robotics and Professor in speech technology at KTH with a specialization in conversational systems. He has a background in research into how humans use spoken communication to interact.
In this interview, Gabriel talks about how the social robot revolution makes it necessary to communicate with humans in a human ways through speech and facial expressions. This is necessary as we expand the number of people that interact with robots as well as the types of interaction. Gabriel gives us more insight into the many challenges of implementing spoken communication for co-bots, where robots and humans work closely together. They need to communicate about the world, the objects in it and how to handle them. We also get to hear how having an embodied system using the Furhat robot head helps the interaction between humans and the system.
[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435662 Video Friday: This 3D-Printed ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
We’re used to seeing bristle bots about the size of a toothbrush head (which is not a coincidence), but Georgia Tech has downsized them, with some interesting benefits.
Researchers have created a new type of tiny 3D-printed robot that moves by harnessing vibration from piezoelectric actuators, ultrasound sources or even tiny speakers. Swarms of these “micro-bristle-bots” might work together to sense environmental changes, move materials – or perhaps one day repair injuries inside the human body.
The prototype robots respond to different vibration frequencies depending on their configurations, allowing researchers to control individual bots by adjusting the vibration. Approximately two millimeters long – about the size of the world’s smallest ant – the bots can cover four times their own length in a second despite the physical limitations of their small size.
“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” said Azadeh Ansari, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”
[ Georgia Tech ]
Most consumer drones are “multi-copters,” meaning that they have a series of rotors or propellers that allow them to hover like helicopters. But having rotors severely limits their energy efficiency, which means that they can’t easily carry heavy payloads or fly for long periods of time. To get the best of both worlds, drone designers have tried to develop “hybrid” fixed-wing drones that can fly as efficiently as airplanes, while still taking off and landing vertically like multi-copters.
These drones are extremely hard to control because of the complexity of dealing with their flight dynamics, but a team from MIT CSAIL aims to make the customization process easier, with a new system that allows users to design drones of different sizes and shapes that can nimbly switch between hovering and gliding – all by using a single controller.
In future work, the team plans to try to further increase the drone’s maneuverability by improving its design. The model doesn’t yet fully take into account complex aerodynamic effects between the propeller’s airflow and the wings. And lastly, their method trained the copter with “yaw velocity” set at zero, which means that it cannot currently perform sharp turns.
[ Paper ] via [ MIT ]
We’re not quite at the point where we can 3D print entire robots, but UCSD is getting us closer.
The UC San Diego researchers’ insight was twofold. They turned to a commercially available printer for the job, (the Stratasys Objet350 Connex3—a workhorse in many robotics labs). In addition, they realized one of the materials used by the 3D printer is made of carbon particles that can conduct power to sensors when connected to a power source. So roboticists used the black resin to manufacture complex sensors embedded within robotic parts made of clear polymer. They designed and manufactured several prototypes, including a gripper.
When stretched, the sensors failed at approximately the same strain as human skin. But the polymers the 3D printer uses are not designed to conduct electricity, so their performance is not optimal. The 3D printed robots also require a lot of post-processing before they can be functional, including careful washing to clean up impurities and drying.
However, researchers remain optimistic that in the future, materials will improve and make 3D printed robots equipped with embedded sensors much easier to manufacture.
[ UCSD ]
Congrats to Team Homer from the University of Koblenz-Landau, who won the RoboCup@Home world championship in Sydney!
[ Team Homer ]
When you’ve got a robot with both wheels and legs, motion planning is complicated. IIT has developed a new planner for CENTAURO that takes advantage of the different ways that the robot is able to get past obstacles.
[ Centauro ]
Thanks Dimitrios!
If you constrain a problem tightly enough, you can solve it even with a relatively simple robot. Here’s an example of an experimental breakfast robot named “Loraine” that can cook eggs, bacon, and potatoes using what looks to be zero sensing at all, just moving to different positions and actuating its gripper.
There’s likely to be enough human work required in the prep here to make the value that the robot adds questionable at best, but it’s a good example of how you can make a relatively complex task robot-compatible as long as you set it up in just the right way.
[ Connected Robotics ] via [ RobotStart ]
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a ball bot, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen one with a manipulator on it.
[ ETH Zurich RSL ]
Soft Robotics’ new mini fingers are able to pick up taco shells without shattering them, which as far as I can tell is 100 percent impossible for humans to do.
[ Soft Robotics ]
Yes, Starship’s wheeled robots can climb curbs, and indeed they have a pretty neat way of doing it.
[ Starship ]
Last year we posted a long interview with Christoph Bartneck about his research into robots and racism, and here’s a nice video summary of the work.
[ Christoph Bartneck ]
Canada’s contribution to the Lunar Gateway will be a smart robotic system which includes a next-generation robotic arm known as Canadarm3, as well as equipment, and specialized tools. Using cutting-edge software and advances in artificial intelligence, this highly-autonomous system will be able to maintain, repair and inspect the Gateway, capture visiting vehicles, relocate Gateway modules, help astronauts during spacewalks, and enable science both in lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon.
[ CSA ]
An interesting demo of how Misty can integrate sound localization with other services.
[ Misty Robotics ]
The third and last period of H2020 AEROARMS project has brought the final developments in industrial inspection and maintenance tasks, such as the crawler retrieval and deployment (DLR) or the industrial validation in stages like a refinery or a cement factory.
[ Aeroarms ]
The Guardian S remote visual inspection and surveillance robot navigates a disaster training site to demonstrate its advanced maneuverability, long-range wireless communications and extended run times.
[ Sarcos ]
This appears to be a cake frosting robot and I wish I had like 3 more hours of this to share:
Also here is a robot that picks fried chicken using a curiously successful technique:
[ Kazumichi Moriyama ]
This isn’t strictly robots, but professor Hiroshi Ishii, associate director of the MIT Media Lab, gave a fascinating SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Talk that’s absolutely worth your time.
[ Tangible Media Group ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435658 Video Friday: A Two-Armed Robot That ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA
IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
ISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, Vietnam
Ro-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, India
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, Canada
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
I’m sure you’ve seen this video already because you read this blog every day, but if you somehow missed it because you were skiing across Antarctica (the only valid excuse we’re accepting today), here’s our video introducing HMI’s Aquanaut transforming robot submarine.
And after you recover from all that frostbite, make sure and read our in-depth feature article here.
[ Aquanaut ]
Last week we complained about not having seen a ballbot with a manipulator, so Roberto from CMU shared a new video of their ballbot, featuring a pair of 7-DoF arms.
We should learn more at Humanoids 2019.
[ CMU ]
Thanks Roberto!
The FAA is making it easier for recreational drone pilots to get near-realtime approval to fly in lightly controlled airspace.
[ LAANC ]
Self-reconfigurable modular robots are usually composed of multiple modules with uniform docking interfaces that can be transformed into different configurations by themselves. The reconfiguration planning problem is finding what sequence of reconfiguration actions are required for one arrangement of modules to transform into another. We present a novel reconfiguration planning algorithm for modular robots. The algorithm compares the initial configuration with the goal configuration efficiently. The reconfiguration actions can be executed in a distributed manner so that each module can efficiently finish its reconfiguration task which results in a global reconfiguration for the system. In the end, the algorithm is demonstrated on real modular robots and some example reconfiguration tasks are provided.
[ CKbot ]
A nice design of a gripper that uses a passive thumb of sorts to pick up flat objects from flat surfaces.
[ Paper ] via [ Laval University ]
I like this video of a palletizing robot from Kawasaki because in the background you can see a human doing the exact same job and obviously not enjoying it.
[ Kawasaki ]
This robot cleans and “brings joy and laughter.” What else do we need?
I do appreciate that all the robots are named Leo, and that they’re also all female.
[ LionsBot ]
This is less of a dishwashing robot and more of a dishsorting robot, but we’ll forgive it because it doesn’t drop a single dish.
[ TechMagic ]
Thanks Ryosuke!
A slight warning here that the robot in the following video (which costs something like $180,000) appears “naked” in some scenes, none of which are strictly objectionable, we hope.
Beautifully slim and delicate motion life-size motion figures are ideal avatars for expressing emotions to customers in various arts, content and businesses. We can provide a system that integrates not only motion figures but all moving devices.
[ Speecys ]
The best way to operate a Husky with a pair of manipulators on it is to become the robot.
[ UT Austin ]
The FlyJacket drone control system from EPFL has been upgraded so that it can yank you around a little bit.
In several fields of human-machine interaction, haptic guidance has proven to be an effective training tool for enhancing user performance. This work presents the results of psychophysical and motor learning studies that were carried out with human participant to assess the effect of cable-driven haptic guidance for a task involving aerial robotic teleoperation. The guidance system was integrated into an exosuit, called the FlyJacket, that was developed to control drones with torso movements. Results for the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) and from the Stevens Power Law suggest that the perception of force on the users’ torso scales linearly with the amplitude of the force exerted through the cables and the perceived force is close to the magnitude of the stimulus. Motor learning studies reveal that this form of haptic guidance improves user performance in training, but this improvement is not retained when participants are evaluated without guidance.
[ EPFL ]
The SAND Challenge is an opportunity for small businesses to compete in an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) competition to help NASA address safety-critical risks associated with flying UAVs in the national airspace. Set in a post-natural disaster scenario, SAND will push the envelope of aviation.
[ NASA ]
Legged robots have the potential to traverse diverse and rugged terrain. To find a safe and efficient navigation path and to carefully select individual footholds, it is useful to predict properties of the terrain ahead of the robot. In this work, we propose a method to collect data from robot-terrain interaction and associate it to images, to then train a neural network to predict terrain properties from images.
[ RSL ]
Misty wants to be your new receptionist.
[ Misty Robotics ]
For years, we’ve been pointing out that while new Roombas have lots of great features, older Roombas still do a totally decent job of cleaning your floors. This video is a performance comparison between the newest Roomba (the S9+) and the original 2002 Roomba (!), and the results will surprise you. Or maybe they won’t.
[ Vacuum Wars ]
Lex Fridman from MIT interviews Chris Urmson, who was involved in some of the earliest autonomous vehicle projects, Google’s original self-driving car among them, and is currently CEO of Aurora Innovation.
Chris Urmson was the CTO of the Google Self-Driving Car team, a key engineer and leader behind the Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle entries in the DARPA grand challenges and the winner of the DARPA urban challenge. Today he is the CEO of Aurora Innovation, an autonomous vehicle software company he started with Sterling Anderson, who was the former director of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, Uber’s former autonomy and perception lead.
[ AI Podcast ]
In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Lael Odhner from RightHand Robotics.
Lael Odhner is a co-founder of RightHand Robotics, that is developing a gripper based on the combination of control and soft, compliant parts to get better grasping of objects. Their work focuses on grasping and manipulating everyday human objects in everyday environments.This mimics how human hands combine control and flexibility to grasp objects with great dexterity.
The combination of control and compliance makes the RightHand robotics gripper very light-weight and affordable. The compliance makes it easier to grasp objects of unknown shape and differs from the way industrial robots usually grip. The compliance also helps in a more unstructured environment where contact with the object and its surroundings cannot be exactly predicted.
[ RightHand Robotics ] via [ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435648 Surprisingly Speedy Soft Robot Survives ...
Soft robots are getting more and more popular for some very good reasons. Their relative simplicity is one. Their relative low cost is another. And for their simplicity and low cost, they’re generally able to perform very impressively, leveraging the unique features inherent to their design and construction to move themselves and interact with their environment. The other significant reason why soft robots are so appealing is that they’re durable. Without the constraints of rigid parts, they can withstand the sort of abuse that would make any roboticist cringe.
In the current issue of Science Robotics, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University in China and University of California, Berkeley, present a new kind of soft robot that’s both higher performance and much more robust than just about anything we’ve seen before. The deceptively simple robot looks like a bent strip of paper, but it’s able to move at 20 body lengths per second and survive being stomped on by a human wearing tennis shoes. Take that, cockroaches.
This prototype robot measures just 3 centimeters by 1.5 cm. It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of—a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot’s back to flex and the little “foot” to shuffle. A complete step cycle takes just 50 milliseconds, yielding a 200 hertz gait. And technically, the robot “runs,” since it does have a brief aerial phase.
Image: Science Robotics
Photos from a high-speed camera show the robot’s gait (A to D) as it contracts and expands its body.
To put the robot’s top speed of 20 body lengths per second in perspective, have a look at this nifty chart, which shows where other animals relative running speeds of some animals and robots versus body mass:
Image: Science Robotics
This chart shows the relative running speeds of some mammals (purple area), arthropods (orange area), and soft robots (blue area) versus body mass. For both mammals and arthropods, relative speeds show a strong negative scaling law with respect to the body mass: speeds increase as body masses decrease. However, for soft robots, the relationship appears to be the opposite: speeds decrease as the body mass decrease. For the little soft robots created by the researchers from Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley (red stars), the scaling law is similar to that of living animals: Higher speed was attained as the body mass decreased.
If you were wondering, like we were, just what that number 39 is on that chart (top left corner), it’s a species of tiny mite that was discovered underneath a rock in California in 1916. The mite is just under 1 mm in size, but it can run at 0.8 kilometer per hour, which is 322 body lengths per second, making it by far (like, by a factor of two at least) the fastest land animal on Earth relative to size. If a human was to run that fast relative to our size, we’d be traveling at a little bit over 2,000 kilometers per hour. It’s not a coincidence that pretty much everything in the upper left of the chart is an insect—speed scales favorably with decreasing mass, since actuators have a proportionally larger effect.
Other notable robots on the chart with impressive speed to mass ratios are number 27, which is this magnetically driven quadruped robot from UMD, and number 86, UC Berkeley’s X2-VelociRoACH.
Anyway, back to this robot. Some other cool things about it:
You can step on it, squishing it flat with a load about 1 million times its own body weight, and it’ll keep on crawling, albeit only half as fast.
Even climbing a slope of 15 degrees, it can still manage to move at 1 body length per second.
It carries peanuts! With a payload of six times its own weight, it moves a sixth as fast, but still, it’s not like you need your peanuts delivered all that quickly anyway, do you?
Image: Science Robotics
The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for “environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief,” which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon.
“Insect-scale Fast Moving and Ultrarobust Soft Robot,” by Yichuan Wu, Justin K. Yim, Jiaming Liang, Zhichun Shao, Mingjing Qi, Junwen Zhong, Zihao Luo, Xiaojun Yan, Min Zhang, Xiaohao Wang, Ronald S. Fearing, Robert J. Full, and Liwei Lin from Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley, is published in Science Robotics. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots