Tag Archives: production

#439376 Japan’s SoftBank suspends ...

Japan's SoftBank has suspended production of its humanoid robot Pepper, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday, seven years after the conglomerate unveiled the signature chatty white android to much fanfare. 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

#438014 Meet Blueswarm, a Smart School of ...

Anyone who’s seen an undersea nature documentary has marveled at the complex choreography that schooling fish display, a darting, synchronized ballet with a cast of thousands.

Those instinctive movements have inspired researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The results could improve the performance and dependability of not just underwater robots, but other vehicles that require decentralized locomotion and organization, such as self-driving cars and robotic space exploration.

The fish collective called Blueswarm was created by a team led by Radhika Nagpal, whose lab is a pioneer in self-organizing systems. The oddly adorable robots can sync their movements like biological fish, taking cues from their plastic-bodied neighbors with no external controls required. Nagpal told IEEE Spectrum that this marks a milestone, demonstrating complex 3D behaviors with implicit coordination in underwater robots.

“Insights from this research will help us develop future miniature underwater swarms that can perform environmental monitoring and search in visually-rich but fragile environments like coral reefs,” Nagpal said. “This research also paves a way to better understand fish schools, by synthetically recreating their behavior.”

The research is published in Science Robotics, with Florian Berlinger as first author. Berlinger said the “Bluedot” robots integrate a trio of blue LED lights, a lithium-polymer battery, a pair of cameras, a Raspberry Pi computer and four controllable fins within a 3D-printed hull. The fish-lens cameras detect LED’s of their fellow swimmers, and apply a custom algorithm to calculate distance, direction and heading.

Based on that simple production and detection of LED light, the team proved that Blueswarm could self-organize behaviors, including aggregation, dispersal and circle formation—basically, swimming in a clockwise synchronization. Researchers also simulated a successful search mission, an autonomous Finding Nemo. Using their dispersion algorithm, the robot school spread out until one could detect a red light in the tank. Its blue LEDs then flashed, triggering the aggregation algorithm to gather the school around it. Such a robot swarm might prove valuable in search-and-rescue missions at sea, covering miles of open water and reporting back to its mates.

“Each Bluebot implicitly reacts to its neighbors’ positions,” Berlinger said. The fish—RoboCod, perhaps?—also integrate a Wifi module to allow uploading new behaviors remotely. The lab’s previous efforts include a 1,000-strong army of “Kilobots,” and a robotic construction crew inspired by termites. Both projects operated in two-dimensional space. But a 3D environment like air or water posed a tougher challenge for sensing and movement.

In nature, Berlinger notes, there’s no scaly CEO to direct the school’s movements. Nor do fish communicate their intentions. Instead, so-called “implicit coordination” guides the school’s collective behavior, with individual members executing high-speed moves based on what they see their neighbors doing. That decentralized, autonomous organization has long fascinated scientists, including in robotics.

“In these situations, it really benefits you to have a highly autonomous robot swarm that is self-sufficient. By using implicit rules and 3D visual perception, we were able to create a system with a high degree of autonomy and flexibility underwater where things like GPS and WiFi are not accessible.”

Berlinger adds the research could one day translate to anything that requires decentralized robots, from self-driving cars and Amazon warehouse vehicles to exploration of faraway planets, where poor latency makes it impossible to transmit commands quickly. Today’s semi-autonomous cars face their own technical hurdles in reliably sensing and responding to their complex environments, including when foul weather obscures onboard sensors or road markers, or when they can’t fix position via GPS. An entire subset of autonomous-car research involves vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications that could give cars a hive mind to guide individual or collective decisions— avoiding snarled traffic, driving safely in tight convoys, or taking group evasive action during a crash that’s beyond their sensory range.

“Once we have millions of cars on the road, there can’t be one computer orchestrating all the traffic, making decisions that work for all the cars,” Berlinger said.

The miniature robots could also work long hours in places that are inaccessible to humans and divers, or even large tethered robots. Nagpal said the synthetic swimmers could monitor and collect data on reefs or underwater infrastructure 24/7, and work into tiny places without disturbing fragile equipment or ecosystems.

“If we could be as good as fish in that environment, we could collect information and be non-invasive, in cluttered environments where everything is an obstacle,” Nagpal said. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438001 How an Israeli Startup Is Using AI to ...

The first baby conceived using in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was born in the UK in 1978. Over 40 years later, the technique has become commonplace, but its success rate is still fairly low at around 22 to 30 percent. A female-founded Israeli startup called Embryonics is setting out to change this by using artificial intelligence to screen embryos.

IVF consists of fertilizing a woman’s egg with her partner’s or a donor’s sperm outside of her body, creating an embryo that’s then implanted in the uterus. It’s not an easy process in any sense of the word—physically, emotionally, or financially. Insurance rarely covers IVF, and the costs run anywhere from $12,000 to $25,000 per cycle (a cycle takes about a month and includes stimulating a woman’s ovaries to produce eggs, extracting the eggs, inseminating them outside the body, and implanting an embryo).

Women have to give themselves daily hormone shots to stimulate egg production, and these can cause uncomfortable side effects. After so much stress and expense, it’s disheartening to think that the odds of a successful pregnancy are, at best, one in three.

A crucial factor in whether or not an IVF cycle works—that is, whether the embryo implants in the uterus and begins to develop into a healthy fetus—is the quality of the embryo. Doctors examine embryos through a microscope to determine how many cells they contain and whether they appear healthy, and choose the one that looks most viable.

But the human eye can only see so much, even with the help of a microscope; despite embryologists’ efforts to select the “best” embryo, success rates are still relatively low. “Many decisions are based on gut feeling or personal experience,” said Embryonics founder and CEO Yael Gold-Zamir. “Even if you go to the same IVF center, two experts can give you different opinions on the same embryo.”

This is where Embryonics’ technology comes in. They used 8,789 time-lapse videos of developing embryos to train an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of successful embryo implantation. A little less than half of the embryos from the dataset were graded by embryologists, and implantation data was integrated when it was available (as a binary “successful” or “failed” metric).

The algorithm uses geometric deep learning, a technique that takes a traditional convolutional neural network—which filters input data to create maps of its features, and is most commonly used for image recognition—and applies it to more complex data like 3D objects and graphs. Within days after fertilization, the embryo is still at the blastocyst stage, essentially a microscopic clump of just 200-300 cells; the algorithm uses this deep learning technique to spot and identify patterns in embryo development that human embryologists either wouldn’t see at all, or would require massive collation of data to validate.

On top of the embryo videos, Embryonics’ team incorporated patient data and environmental data from the lab into its algorithm, with encouraging results: the company reports that using its algorithm resulted in a 12 percent increase in positive predictive value (identifying embryos that would lead to implantation and healthy pregnancy) and a 29 percent increase in negative predictive value (identifying embyros that would not result in successful pregnancy) when compared to an external panel of embryologists.

TechCrunch reported last week that in a pilot of 11 women who used Embryonics’ algorithm to select their embryos, 6 are enjoying successful pregnancies, while 5 are still awaiting results.

Embryonics wasn’t the first group to think of using AI to screen embryos; a similar algorithm developed in 2019 by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine was able to classify the quality of a set of embryo images with 97 percent accuracy. But Embryonics will be one of the first to bring this sort of technology to market. The company is waiting to receive approval from European regulatory bodies to be able to sell the software to fertility clinics in Europe.

Its timing is ripe: as more and more women delay having kids due to lifestyle and career-related factors, demand for IVF is growing, and will likely accelerate in coming years.

The company ultimately hopes to bring its product to the US, as well as to expand its work to include using data to improve hormonal stimulation.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437971 Video Friday: Teleport Yourself Into ...

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]
RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Samsung announced some new prototype robots at CES this week. It's a fancy video, but my guess is that the actual autonomy here is minimal at best.

[ Samsung ]

Some very impressive reactive agility from Ghost Robotics' little quadruped.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is researching how to bring together the instinctive reflexes of professional drivers and automated driving technology that uses the calculated foresight of a supercomputer. Using a Toyota GR Supra, TRI will learn from some of the most skilled drivers in the world to develop sophisticated vehicle control algorithms. The project’s goal is to design a new level of active safety technology for the Toyota Guardian™ approach of amplifying human driving abilities and helping keep people safe.

[ TRI ]

The end of this video features one of the most satisfying-sounding drone outtakes I've ever heard,

[ ASL ]

Reachy can now run the first humanoid VR teleoperation app available on the market. This app allows you to place yourself in the body of a humanoid robot, in VR, wherever you are in the world, to remotely operate it and carry out complex tasks. With this new functionality, Reachy is able to learn from the demonstration of the humans who control it, which makes application development even easier.

[ Pollen Robotics ]

Thanks Elsa!

Boston Dynamics has inspired some dancing robot videos recently, including this from Marco Tempest.

[ Marco Tempest ]

MOFLIN is an AI Pet created from a totally new concept. It possesses emotional capabilities that evolve like living animals. With its warm soft fur, cute sounds, and adorable movement, you’d want to love it forever. We took a nature inspired approach and developed a unique algorithm that allows MOFLIN to learn and grow by constantly using its interactions to determine patterns and evaluate its surroundings from its sensors. MOFLIN will choose from an infinite number of mobile and sound pattern combinations to respond and express its feelings. To put it in simple terms, it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet.

I like the minimalist approach. I dislike the “it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet” bit.

[ Kickstarter ]

There's a short gif of these warehouse robots going around, but here's the full video.

[ BionicHIVE ]

Vstone's Robovie-Z proves that you don't need fancy hardware for effective teleworking.

[ Vstone ]

All dual-arm robots are required, at some point, to play pool.

[ ABB ]

Volkswagen Group Components gives us a first glimpse of the real prototypes. This is one of the visionary charging concepts that Volkswagen hopes will expand the charging infrastructure over the next few years. Its task: fully autonomous charging of vehicles in restricted parking areas, like underground car parks.

To charge several vehicles at the same time, the mobile robot moves a trailer, essentially a mobile energy storage unit, to the vehicle, connects it up and then uses this energy storage unit to charge the battery of the electric vehicle. The energy storage unit stays with the vehicle during the charging process. In the meantime, the robot charges other electric vehicles.

[ Volkswagen ]

I've got a lot of questions about Moley Robotics' kitchen. But I would immediately point out that the system appears to do no prep work, which (at least for me) is the time-consuming and stressful part of cooking.

[ Moley Robotics ]

Blueswarm is a collective of fish-inspired miniature underwater robots that can achieve a wide variety of 3D collective behaviors – synchrony, aggregation/dispersion, milling, search – using only implicit communication mediated through the production and sensing of blue light. We envision this platform for investigating collective AI, underwater coordination, and fish-inspired locomotion and sensing.

[ Science Robotics ]

A team of Malaysian researchers are transforming pineapple leaves into strong materials that can be used to build frames for unmanned aircraft or drones.

[ Reuters ]

The future of facility disinfecting is here, protect your customers, and create peace of mind. Our drone sanitization spraying technology is up to 100% more efficient and effective than conventional manual spray sterilization processes.

[ Draganfly ]

Robots are no long a future technology, as small robots can be purchased today to be utilized for educational purposes. See what goes into making a modern robot come to life.

[ Huggbees ]

How does a robot dog learn how to dance? Adam and the Tested team examine and dive into Boston Dynamics' Choreographer software that was behind Spot's recent viral dancing video.

[ Tested ]

For years, engineers have had to deal with “the tyranny of the fairing,” that anything you want to send into space has to fit into the protective nosecone on top of the rocket. A field of advanced design has been looking for new ways to improve our engineering, using the centuries-old artform to dream bigger.

[ JPL ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots