Tag Archives: seen
#437747 High Performance Ornithopter Drone Is ...
The vast majority of drones are rotary-wing systems (like quadrotors), and for good reason: They’re cheap, they’re easy, they scale up and down well, and we’re getting quite good at controlling them, even in very challenging environments. For most applications, though, drones lose out to birds and their flapping wings in almost every way—flapping wings are very efficient, enable astonishing agility, and are much safer, able to make compliant contact with surfaces rather than shredding them like a rotor system does. But flapping wing have their challenges too: Making flapping-wing robots is so much more difficult than just duct taping spinning motors to a frame that, with a few exceptions, we haven’t seen nearly as much improvement as we have in more conventional drones.
In Science Robotics last week, a group of roboticists from Singapore, Australia, China, and Taiwan described a new design for a flapping-wing robot that offers enough thrust and control authority to make stable transitions between aggressive flight modes—like flipping and diving—while also being able to efficiently glide and gently land. While still more complex than a quadrotor in both hardware and software, this ornithopter’s advantages might make it worthwhile.
One reason that making a flapping-wing robot is difficult is because the wings have to move back and forth at high speed while electric motors spin around and around at high speed. This requires a relatively complex transmission system, which (if you don’t do it carefully), leads to weight penalties and a significant loss of efficiency. One particular challenge is that the reciprocating mass of the wings tends to cause the entire robot to flex back and forth, which alternately binds and disengages elements in the transmission system.
The researchers’ new ornithopter design mitigates the flexing problem using hinges and bearings in pairs. Elastic elements also help improve efficiency, and the ornithopter is in fact more efficient with its flapping wings than it would be with a rotary propeller-based propulsion system. Its thrust exceeds its 26-gram mass by 40 percent, which is where much of the aerobatic capability comes from. And one of the most surprising findings of this paper was that flapping-wing robots can actually be more efficient than propeller-based aircraft.
One of the most surprising findings of this paper was that flapping-wing robots can actually be more efficient than propeller-based aircraft
It’s not just thrust that’s a challenge for ornithopters: Control is much more complex as well. Like birds, ornithopters have tails, but unlike birds, they have to rely almost entirely on tail control authority, not having that bird-level of control over fine wing movements. To make an acrobatic level of control possible, the tail control surfaces on this ornithopter are huge—the tail plane area is 35 percent of the wing area. The wings can also provide some assistance in specific circumstances, as by combining tail control inputs with a deliberate stall of the things to allow the ornithopter to execute rapid flips.
With the ability to take off, hover, glide, land softly, maneuver acrobatically, fly quietly, and interact with its environment in a way that’s not (immediately) catastrophic, flapping-wing drones easily offer enough advantages to keep them interesting. Now that ornithopters been shown to be even more efficient than rotorcraft, the researchers plan to focus on autonomy with the goal of moving their robot toward real-world usefulness.
“Efficient flapping wing drone arrests high-speed flight using post-stall soaring,” by Yao-Wei Chin, Jia Ming Kok, Yong-Qiang Zhu, Woei-Leong Chan, Javaan S. Chahl, Boo Cheong Khoo, and Gih-Keong Lau from from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, National University of Singapore, Defence Science and Technology Group in Canberra, Australia, Qingdao University of Technology in Shandong, China, University of South Australia in Mawson Lakes, and National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, was published in Science Robotics. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#437741 CaseCrawler Adds Tiny Robotic Legs to ...
Most of us have a fairly rational expectation that if we put our cellphone down somewhere, it will stay in that place until we pick it up again. Normally, this is exactly what you’d want, but there are exceptions, like when you put your phone down in not quite the right spot on a wireless charging pad without noticing, or when you’re lying on the couch and your phone is juuust out of reach no matter how much you stretch.
Roboticists from the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University in South Korea have solved both of these problems, and many more besides, by developing a cellphone case with little robotic legs, endowing your phone with the ability to skitter around autonomously. And unlike most of the phone-robot hybrids we’ve seen in the past, this one actually does look like a legit case for your phone.
CaseCrawler is much chunkier than a form-fitting case, but it’s not offensively bigger than one of those chunky battery cases. It’s only 24 millimeters thick (excluding the motor housing), and the total weight is just under 82 grams. Keep in mind that this case is in fact an entire robot, and also not at all optimized for being an actual phone case, so it’s easy to imagine how it could get a lot more svelte—for example, it currently includes a small battery that would be unnecessary if it instead tapped into the phone for power.
The technology inside is pretty amazing, since it involves legs that can retract all the way flat while also supporting a significant amount of weight. The legs work sort of like your legs do, in that there’s a knee joint that can only bend one way. To move the robot forward, a linkage (attached to a motor through a gearbox) pushes the leg back against the ground, as the knee joint keeps the leg straight. On the return stroke, the joint allows the leg to fold, making it compliant so that it doesn’t exert force on the ground. The transmission that sends power from the gearbox to the legs is just 1.5-millimeter thick, but this incredibly thin and lightweight mechanical structure is quite powerful. A non-phone case version of the robot, weighing about 23 g, is able to crawl at 21 centimeters per second while carrying a payload of just over 300 g. That’s more than 13 times its body weight.
The researchers plan on exploring how robots like these could make other objects movable that would otherwise not be. They’d also like to add some autonomy, which (at least for the phone case version) could be as straightforward as leveraging the existing sensors on the phone. And as to when you might be able to buy one of these—we’ll keep you updated, but the good news is that it seems to be fundamentally inexpensive enough that it may actually crawl out of the lab one day.
“CaseCrawler: A Lightweight and Low-Profile Crawling Phone Case Robot,” by Jongeun Lee, Gwang-Pil Jung, Sang-Min Baek, Soo-Hwan Chae, Sojung Yim, Woongbae Kim, and Kyu-Jin Cho from Seoul National University, appears in the October issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
< Back to IEEE Journal Watch Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#437695 Video Friday: Even Robots Know That You ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Online Conference]
Other Than Human – September 3-10, 2020 – Stockholm, Sweden
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
AUVSI EXPONENTIAL 2020 – October 5-8, 2020 – [Online Conference]
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nev., USA
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online Event]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
From the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH comes Flightmare, a simulation environment for drones that combines a slick rendering engine with a robust physics engine that can run as fast as your system can handle.
Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run independently from each other. Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i) a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) an integration with a virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. Flightmare can be used for various applications, including path-planning, reinforcement learning, visual-inertial odometry, deep learning, human-robot interaction, etc.
[ Flightmare ]
Quadruped robots yelling at people to maintain social distancing is really starting to become a thing, for better or worse.
We introduce a fully autonomous surveillance robot based on a quadruped platform that can promote social distancing in complex urban environments. Specifically, to achieve autonomy, we mount multiple cameras and a 3D LiDAR on the legged robot. The robot then uses an onboard real-time social distancing detection system to track nearby pedestrian groups. Next, the robot uses a crowd-aware navigation algorithm to move freely in highly dynamic scenarios. The robot finally uses a crowd aware routing algorithm to effectively promote social distancing by using human-friendly verbal cues to send suggestions to overcrowded pedestrians.
[ Project ]
Thanks Fan!
The Personal Robotics Group at Oregon State University is looking at UV germicidal irradiation for surface disinfection with a Fetch Manipulator Robot.
Fetch Robot disinfecting dance party woo!
[ Oregon State ]
How could you not take a mask from this robot?
[ Reachy ]
This work presents the design, development and autonomous navigation of the alpha-version of our Resilient Micro Flyer, a new type of collision-tolerant small aerial robot tailored to traversing and searching within highly confined environments including manhole-sized tubes. The robot is particularly lightweight and agile, while it implements a rigid collision-tolerant design which renders it resilient during forcible interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the design of the system is enhanced through passive flaps ensuring smoother and more compliant collision which was identified to be especially useful in very confined settings.
[ ARL ]
Pepper can make maps and autonomously navigate, which is interesting, but not as interesting as its posture when it's wandering around.
Dat backing into the charging dock tho.
[ Pepper ]
RatChair a strategy for displacing big objects by attaching relatively small vibration sources. After learning how several random bursts of vibration affect its pose, an optimization algorithm discovers the optimal sequence of vibration patterns required to (slowly but surely) move the object to a specified position.
This is from 2015, why isn't all of my furniture autonomous yet?!
[ KAIST ]
The new SeaDrone Pro is designed to be the underwater equivalent of a quadrotor. This video is a rendering, but we've been assured that it does actually exist.
[ SeaDrone ]
Thanks Eduardo!
Porous Loops is a lightweight composite facade panel that shows the potential of 3D printing of mineral foams for building scale applications.
[ ETH ]
Thanks Fan!
Here's an interesting idea for a robotic gripper- it's what appears to be a snap bracelet coupled to a pneumatic actuator that allows the snap bracelet to be reset.
[ Georgia Tech ]
Graze is developing a commercial robotic lawnmower. They're also doing a sort of crowdfunded investment thing, which probably explains the painfully overproduced nature of the following video:
A couple things about this: the hard part, which the video skips over almost entirely, is the mapping, localization, and understanding where to mow and where not to mow. The pitch deck seems to suggest that this is mostly done through computer vision, a thing that's perhaps easy to do under controlled ideal conditions, but difficult to apply to a world full lawns that are all different. The commercial aspect is interesting because golf courses are likely as standardized as you can get, but the emphasis here on how much money they can make without really addressing any of the technical stuff makes me raise an eyebrow or two.
[ Graze ]
The record & playback X-series arm demo allows the user to record the arm's movements while motors are torqued off. Then, the user may torque the motor's on and watch the movements they just made playback!
[ Interbotix ]
Shadow Robot has a new teleop system for its hand. I'm guessing that it's even trickier to use than it looks.
[ Shadow Robot ]
Quanser Interactive Labs is a collection of virtual hardware-based laboratory activities that supplement traditional or online courses. Same as working with physical systems in the lab, students work with virtual twins of Quanser's most popular plants, develop their mathematical models, implement and simulate the dynamic behavior of these systems, design controllers, and validate them on a high-fidelity 3D real-time virtual models. The virtual systems not only look like the real ones, they also behave, can be manipulated, measured, and controlled like real devices. And finally, when students go to the lab, they can deploy their virtually-validated designs on actual physical equipment.
[ Quanser ]
This video shows robot-assisted heart surgery. It's amazing to watch if you haven't seen this sort of thing before, but be aware that there is a lot of blood.
This video demonstrates a fascinating case of robotic left atrial myxoma excision, narrated by Joel Dunning, Middlesbrough, UK. The Robotic platform provides superior visualisation and enhanced dexterity, through keyhole incisions. Robotic surgery is an integral part of our Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery Program.
[ Tristan D. Yan ]
Thanks Fan!
In this talk, we present our work on learning control policies directly in simulation that are deployed onto real drones without any fine tuning. The presentation covers autonomous drone racing, drone acrobatics, and uncertainty estimation in deep networks.
[ RPG ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots