Tag Archives: raspberry
#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
#435750 Video Friday: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ...
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):
RSS 2019 – June 22-26, 2019 – Freiburg, Germany
Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 23-26, 2019 – London, U.K.
ETH Robotics Summer School – June 27-1, 2019 – Zurich, Switzerland
MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland
ICRES 2019 – July 29-30, 2019 – London, U.K.
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Last week at the re:MARS conference, Amazon CEO and aspiring supervillain Jeff Bezos tried out this pair of dexterous robotic hands, which he described as “weirdly natural” to operate. The system combines Shadow Robot’s anthropomorphic robot hands with SynTouch’s biomimetic tactile sensors and HaptX’s haptic feedback gloves.
After playing with the robot, Bezos let out his trademark evil laugh.
[ Shadow Robot ]
The RoboMaster S1 is DJI’s advanced new educational robot that opens the door to limitless learning and entertainment. Develop programming skills, get familiar with AI technology, and enjoy thrilling FPV driving with games and competition. From young learners to tech enthusiasts, get ready to discover endless possibilities with the RoboMaster S1.
[ DJI ]
It’s very impressive to see DLR’s humanoid robot Toro dynamically balancing, even while being handed heavy objects, pushing things, and using multi-contact techniques to kick a fire extinguisher for some reason.
The paper is in RA-L, and you can find it at the link below.
[ RA-L ] via [ DLR ]
Thanks Maximo!
Is it just me, or does the Suzumori Endo Robotics Laboratory’s Super Dragon arm somehow just keep getting longer?
Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech developed a 10 m-long articulated manipulator for investigation inside the primary containment vessel of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants. We employed a coupled tendon-driven mechanism and a gravity compensation mechanism using synthetic fiber ropes to design a lightweight and slender articulated manipulator. This work was published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and Transactions of the JSME.
[ Suzumori Endo Lab ]
From what I can make out thanks to Google Translate, this cute little robot duck (developed by Nissan) helps minimize weeds in rice fields by stirring up the water.
[ Nippon.com ]
Confidence in your robot is when you can just casually throw it off of a balcony 15 meters up.
[ SUTD ]
You had me at “we’re going to completely submerge this apple in chocolate syrup.”
[ Soft Robotics Inc ]
In the mid 2020s, the European Space Agency is planning on sending a robotic sample return mission to the Moon. It’s called Heracles, after the noted snake-strangler of Greek mythology.
[ ESA ]
Rethink Robotics is still around, they’re just much more German than before. And Sawyer is still hard at work stealing jobs from humans.
[ Rethink Robotics ]
The reason to watch this new video of the Ghost Robotics Vision 60 quadruped is for the 3 seconds worth of barrel roll about 40 seconds in.
[ Ghost Robotics ]
This is a relatively low-altitude drop for Squishy Robotics’ tensegrity scout, but it still cool to watch a robot that’s resilient enough to be able to fall and just not worry about it.
[ Squishy Robotics ]
We control here the Apptronik DRACO bipedal robot for unsupported dynamic locomotion. DRACO consists of a 10 DoF lower body with liquid cooled viscoelastic actuators to reduce weight, increase payload, and achieve fast dynamic walking. Control and walking algorithms are designed by UT HCRL Laboratory.
I think all robot videos should be required to start with two “oops” clips followed by a “for real now” clip.
[ Apptronik ]
SAKE’s EZGripper manages to pick up a wrench, and also pick up a raspberry without turning it into instajam.
[ SAKE Robotics ]
And now: the robotic long-tongued piggy, courtesy Sony Toio.
[ Toio ]
In this video the ornithopter developed inside the ERC Advanced Grant GRIFFIN project performs its first flight. This projects aims to develop a flapping wing system with manipulation and human interaction capabilities.
A flapping-wing system with manipulation and human interaction capabilities, you say? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
[ GRVC ]
KITECH’s robotic hands and arms can manipulate, among other things, five boxes of Elmos. I’m not sure about the conversion of Elmos to Snuffleupaguses, although it turns out that one Snuffleupagus is exactly 1,000 pounds.
[ Ji-Hun Bae ]
The Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) has been working on agricultural robots for almost a decade, and this video sums up a bunch of the stuff that they’ve been doing, even if it’s more amusing than practical at times.
[ ACFR ]
ROS 2 is great for multi-robot coordination, like when you need your bubble level to stay really, really level.
[ Acutronic Robotics ]
We don’t hear iRobot CEO Colin Angle give a lot of talks, so this recent one (from Amazon’s re:MARS conference) is definitely worth a listen, especially considering how much innovation we’ve seen from iRobot recently.
Colin Angle, founder and CEO of iRobot, has unveil a series of breakthrough innovations in home robots from iRobot. For the first time on stage, he will discuss and demonstrate what it takes to build a truly intelligent system of robots that work together to accomplish more within the home – and enable that home, and the devices within it, to work together as one.
[ iRobot ]
In the latest episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Federico Pecora from the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems at Örebro University in Sweden.
Federico talks about working on AI and service robotics. In this area he has worked on planning, especially focusing on why a particular goal is the one that the robot should work on. To make robots as useful and user friendly as possible, he works on inferring the goal from the robot’s environment so that the user does not have to tell the robot everything.
Federico has also worked with AI robotics planning in industry to optimize results. Managing the relative importance of tasks is another challenging area there. In this context, he works on automating not only a single robot for its goal, but an entire fleet of robots for their collective goal. We get to hear about how these techniques are being used in warehouse operations, in mines and in agriculture.
[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading