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

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Android

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

#439004 Video Friday: A Walking, Wheeling ...

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Android

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
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

This is a pretty terrible video, I think because it was harvested from WeChat, which is where Tencent decided to premiere its new quadruped robot.

Not bad, right? Its name is Max, it has a top speed of 25 kph thanks to its elbow wheels, and we know almost nothing else about it.

[ Tencent ]

Thanks Fan!

Can't bring yourself to mask-shame others? Build a robot to do it for you instead!

[ GitHub ]

Researchers at Georgia Tech have recently developed an entirely soft, long-stroke electromagnetic actuator using liquid metal, compliant magnetic composites, and silicone polymers. The robot was inspired by the motion of the Xenia coral, which pulses its polyps to circulate oxygen under water to promote photosynthesis.

In this work, power applied to soft coils generates an electromagnetic field, which causes the internal compliant magnet to move upward. This forces the squishy silicone linkages to convert linear to the rotational motion with an arclength of up to 42 mm with a bandwidth up to 30 Hz. This highly deformable, fast, and long-stroke actuator topology can be utilized for a variety of applications from biomimicry to fully-soft grasping to wearables applications.

[ Paper ] via [ Georgia Tech ]

Thanks Noah!

Jueying Mini Lite may look a little like a Boston Dynamics Spot, but according to DeepRobotics, its coloring is based on Bruce Lee's Kung Fu clothes.

[ DeepRobotics ]

Henrique writes, “I would like to share with you the supplementary video of our recent work accepted to ICRA 2021. The video features a quadruped and a full-size humanoid performing dynamic jumps, after a brief animated intro of what direct transcription is. Me and my colleagues have put a lot of hard work into this, and I am very proud of the results.”

Making big robots jump is definitely something to be proud of!

[ SLMC Edinburgh ]

Thanks Henrique!

The finals of the Powered Exoskeleton Race for Cybathlon Global 2020.

[ Cybathlon ]

Thanks Fan!

It's nice that every once in a while, the world can get excited about science and robots.

[ NASA ]

Playing the Imperial March over footage of an army of black quadrupeds may not be sending quite the right message.

[ Unitree ]

Kod*lab PhD students Abriana Stewart-Height, Diego Caporale and Wei-Hsi Chen, with former Kod*lab student Garrett Wenger were on set in the summer of 2019 to operate RHex for the filming of Lapsis, a first feature film by director and screenwriter Noah Hutton.

[ Kod*lab ]

In class 2.008, Design and Manufacturing II, mechanical engineering students at MIT learn the fundamental principles of manufacturing at scale by designing and producing their own yo-yos. Instructors stress the importance of sustainable practices in the global supply chain.

[ MIT ]

A short history of robotics, from ABB.

[ ABB ]

In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. This is demonstrated in a set of real hardware experiments done in free-motion, such as base or end-effector pose tracking, and while pushing/pulling a heavy resistive door. Robustness against model mismatches and external disturbances is also verified during these test cases.

[ Paper ]

This paper presents PANTHER, a real-time perception-aware (PA) trajectory planner in dynamic environments. PANTHER plans trajectories that avoid dynamic obstacles while also keeping them in the sensor field of view (FOV) and minimizing the blur to aid in object tracking.

Extensive hardware experiments in unknown dynamic environments with all the computation running onboard are presented, with velocities of up to 5.8 m/s, and with relative velocities (with respect to the obstacles) of up to 6.3 m/s. The only sensors used are an IMU, a forward-facing depth camera, and a downward-facing monocular camera.

[ MIT ]

With our SaaS solution, we enable robots to inspect industrial facilities. One of the robots our software supports, is the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. In this video we demonstrate how autonomous industrial inspection with the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot is performed with our teach and repeat solution.

[ Energy Robotics ]

In this week’s episode of Tech on Deck, learn about our first technology demonstration sent to Station: The Robotic Refueling Mission. This tech demo helped us develop the tools and techniques needed to robotically refuel a satellite in space, an important capability for space exploration.

[ NASA ]

At Covariant we are committed to research and development that will bring AI Robotics to the real world. As a part of this, we believe it's important to educate individuals on how these exciting innovations will make a positive, fundamental and global impact for years to come. In this presentation, our co-founder Pieter Abbeel breaks down his thoughts on the current state of play for AI robotics.

[ Covariant ]

How do you fly a helicopter on Mars? It takes Ingenuity and Perseverance. During this technology demo, Farah Alibay and Tim Canham will get into the details of how these craft will manage this incredible task.

[ NASA ]

Complex real-world environments continue to present significant challenges for fielding robotic teams, which often face expansive spatial scales, difficult and dynamic terrain, degraded environmental conditions, and severe communication constraints. Breakthrough technologies call for integrated solutions across autonomy, perception, networking, mobility, and human teaming thrusts. As such, the DARPA OFFSET program and the DARPA Subterranean Challenge seek novel approaches and new insights for discovering and demonstrating these innovative technologies, to help close critical gaps for robotic operations in complex urban and underground environments.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438785 Video Friday: A Blimp For Your Cat

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Android

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.

Shiny robotic cat toy blimp!

I am pretty sure this is Google Translate getting things wrong, but the About page mentions that the blimp will “take you to your destination after appearing in the death of God.”

[ NTT DoCoMo ] via [ RobotStart ]

If you have yet to see this real-time video of Perseverance landing on Mars, drop everything and watch it.

During the press conference, someone commented that this is the first time anyone on the team who designed and built this system has ever seen it in operation, since it could only be tested at the component scale on Earth. This landing system has blown my mind since Curiosity.

Here's a better look at where Percy ended up:

[ NASA ]

The fact that Digit can just walk up and down wet, slippery, muddy hills without breaking a sweat is (still) astonishing.

[ Agility Robotics ]

SkyMul wants drones to take over the task of tying rebar, which looks like just the sort of thing we'd rather robots be doing so that we don't have to:

The tech certainly looks promising, and SkyMul says that they're looking for some additional support to bring things to the pilot stage.

[ SkyMul ]

Thanks Eohan!

Flatcat is a pet-like, playful robot that reacts to touch. Flatcat feels everything exactly: Cuddle with it, romp around with it, or just watch it do weird things of its own accord. We are sure that flatcat will amaze you, like us, and caress your soul.

I don't totally understand it, but I want it anyway.

[ Flatcat ]

Thanks Oswald!

This is how I would have a romantic dinner date if I couldn't get together in person. Herman the UR3 and an OptiTrack system let me remotely make a romantic meal!

[ Dave's Armoury ]

Here, we propose a novel design of deformable propellers inspired by dragonfly wings. The structure of these propellers includes a flexible segment similar to the nodus on a dragonfly wing. This flexible segment can bend, twist and even fold upon collision, absorbing force upon impact and protecting the propeller from damage.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Van!

In the 1970s, The CIA​ created the world's first miniaturized unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, which was intended to be a clandestine listening device. The Insectothopter was never deployed operationally, but was still revolutionary for its time.

It may never have been deployed (not that they'll admit to, anyway), but it was definitely operational and could fly controllably.

[ CIA ]

Research labs are starting to get Digits, which means we're going to get a much better idea of what its limitations are.

[ Ohio State ]

This video shows the latest achievements for LOLA walking on undetected uneven terrain. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain.

[ TUM ]

We define “robotic contact juggling” to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or “hand.” While specific examples of robotic contact juggling have been studied before, in this paper we provide the first general formulation and solution method for the case of an arbitrary smooth object in single-point rolling contact on an arbitrary smooth hand.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Fan!

A couple of new cobots from ABB, designed to work safely around humans.

[ ABB ]

Thanks Fan!

It's worth watching at least a little bit of Adam Savage testing Spot's new arm, because we get to see Spot try, fail, and eventually succeed at an autonomous door-opening behavior at the 10 minute mark.

[ Tested ]

SVR discusses diversity with guest speakers Dr. Michelle Johnson from the GRASP Lab at UPenn; Dr Ariel Anders from Women in Robotics and first technical hire at Robust.ai; Alka Roy from The Responsible Innovation Project; and Kenechukwu C. Mbanesi and Kenya Andrews from Black in Robotics. The discussion here is moderated by Dr. Ken Goldberg—artist, roboticist and Director of the CITRIS People and Robots Lab—and Andra Keay from Silicon Valley Robotics.

[ SVR ]

RAS presents a Soft Robotics Debate on Bioinspired vs. Biohybrid Design.

In this debate, we will bring together experts in Bioinspiration and Biohybrid design to discuss the necessary steps to make more competent soft robots. We will try to answer whether bioinspired research should focus more on developing new bioinspired material and structures or on the integration of living and artificial structures in biohybrid designs.

[ RAS SoRo ]

IFRR presents a Colloquium on Human Robot Interaction.

Across many application domains, robots are expected to work in human environments, side by side with people. The users will vary substantially in background, training, physical and cognitive abilities, and readiness to adopt technology. Robotic products are expected to not only be intuitive, easy to use, and responsive to the needs and states of their users, but they must also be designed with these differences in mind, making human-robot interaction (HRI) a key area of research.

[ IFRR ]

Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean and Professor at Penn Engineering, gives an introduction to ENIAC day and David Patterson, Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, speaks about the legacy of the ENIAC and its impact on computer architecture today. This video is comprised of lectures one and two of nine total lectures in the ENIAC Day series.

There are more interesting ENIAC videos at the link below, but we'll highlight this particular one, about the women of the ENIAC, also known as the First Programmers.

[ ENIAC Day ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438738 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A New Artificial Intelligence Makes Mistakes—on Purpose
Will Knight | Wired
“It took about 50 years for computers to eviscerate humans in the venerable game of chess. A standard smartphone can now play the kind of moves that make a grandmaster’s head spin. But one artificial intelligence program is taking a few steps backward, to appreciate how average humans play—blunders and all.”

CRYPTOCURRENCY
Bitcoin’s Price Rises to $50,000 as Mainstream Institutions Hop On
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“Bitcoin’s price is now far above the previous peak of $19,500 reached in December 2017. Bitcoin’s value has risen by almost 70 percent since the start of 2021. No single factor seems to be driving the cryptocurrency’s rise. Instead, the price is rising as more and more mainstream organizations are deciding to treat it as an ordinary investment asset.”

SCIENCE
Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth Contain Oldest DNA Ever Found
Jeanne Timmons | Gizmodo
“An international team of scientists has sequenced DNA from mammoth teeth that is at least a million years old, if not older. This research, published today in Nature, not only provides exciting new insight into mammoth evolutionary history, it reveals an entirely unknown lineage of ancient mammoth.”

SCIENCE
Scientists Accidentally Discover Strange Creatures Under a Half Mile of Ice
Matt Simon | Wired
“i‘It’s like, bloody hell!’ Smith says. ‘It’s just one big boulder in the middle of a relatively flat seafloor. It’s not as if the seafloor is littered with these things.’ Just his luck to drill in the only wrong place. Wrong place for collecting seafloor muck, but the absolute right place for a one-in-a-million shot at finding life in an environment that scientists didn’t reckon could support much of it.”

BIOTECH
Highest-Resolution Images of DNA Reveal It’s Surprisingly Jiggly
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
“Scientists have captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of DNA, revealing previously unseen twisting and squirming behaviors. …These hidden movements were revealed by computer simulations fed with the highest-resolution images ever taken of a single molecule of DNA. The new study is exposing previously unseen behaviors in the self-replicating molecule, and this research could eventually lead to the development of powerful new genetic therapies.”

TRANSPORTATION
The First Battery-Powered Tanker Is Coming to Tokyo
Maria Gallucci | IEEE Spectrum
“The Japanese tanker is Corvus’s first fully-electric coastal freighter project; the company hopes the e5 will be the first of hundreds more just like it. ‘We see it [as] a beachhead for the coastal shipping market globally,’ Puchalski said. ‘There are many other coastal freighter types that are similar in size and energy demand.’ The number of battery-powered ships has ballooned from virtually zero a decade ago to hundreds worldwide.”

SPACE
Report: NASA’s Only Realistic Path for Humans on Mars Is Nuclear Propulsion
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Conducted at the request of NASA, a broad-based committee of experts assessed the viability of two means of propulsion—nuclear thermal and nuclear electric—for a human mission launching to Mars in 2039. ‘One of the primary takeaways of the report is that if we want to send humans to Mars, and we want to do so repeatedly and in a sustainable way, nuclear space propulsion is on the path,’ said [JPL’s] Bobby Braun.”

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars
Joey Roulette | The Verge
“Perseverance hit Mars’ atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the “seven minutes of terror.” With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions.”

ENVIRONMENT
A First-of-Its-Kind Geoengineering Experiment Is About to Take Its First Step
James Temple | MIT Technology Review
“When I visited Frank Keutsch in the fall of 2019, he walked me down to the lab, where the tube, wrapped in gray insulation, ran the length of a bench in the back corner. By filling it with the right combination of gases, at particular temperatures and pressures, Keutsch and his colleagues had simulated the conditions some 20 kilometers above Earth’s surface. In testing how various chemicals react in this rarefied air, the team hoped to conduct a crude test of a controversial scheme known as solar geoengineering.”

Image Credit: Garcia / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438731 Video Friday: Perseverance Lands on Mars

Posted on February 20, 2021 by Android

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.

Hmm, did anything interesting happen in robotics yesterday week?

Obviously, we're going to have tons more on the Mars Rover and Mars Helicopter over the next days, weeks, months, years, and (if JPL's track record has anything to say about it) decades. Meantime, here's what's going to happen over the next day or two:

[ Mars 2020 ]

PLEN hopes you had a happy Valentine's Day!

[ PLEN ]

Unitree dressed up a whole bunch of Laikago quadrupeds to take part in the 2021 Spring Festival Gala in China.

[ Unitree ]

Thanks Xingxing!

Marine iguanas compete for the best nesting sites on the Galapagos Islands. Meanwhile RoboSpy Iguana gets involved in a snot sneezing competition after the marine iguanas return from the sea.

[ Spy in the Wild ]

Tails, it turns out, are useful for almost everything.

[ DART Lab ]

Partnered with MD-TEC, this video demonstrates use of teleoperated robotic arms and virtual reality interface to perform closed suction for self-ventilating tracheostomy patients during COVID -19 outbreak. Use of closed suction is recommended to minimise aerosol generated during this procedure. This robotic method avoids staff exposure to virus to further protect NHS.

[ Extend Robotics ]

Fotokite is a safe, practical way to do local surveillance with a drone.

I just wish they still had a consumer version 🙁

[ Fotokite ]

How to confuse fish.

[ Harvard ]

Army researchers recently expanded their research area for robotics to a site just north of Baltimore. Earlier this year, Army researchers performed the first fully-autonomous tests onsite using an unmanned ground vehicle test bed platform, which serves as the standard baseline configuration for multiple programmatic efforts within the laboratory. As a means to transition from simulation-based testing, the primary purpose of this test event was to capture relevant data in a live, operationally-relevant environment.

[ Army ]

Flexiv's new RIZON 10 robot hopes you had a happy Valentine's Day!

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks Yunfan!

An inchworm-inspired crawling robot (iCrawl) is a 5 DOF robot with two legs; each with an electromagnetic foot to crawl on the metal pipe surfaces. The robot uses a passive foot-cap underneath an electromagnetic foot, enabling it to be a versatile pipe-crawler. The robot has the ability to crawl on the metal pipes of various curvatures in horizontal and vertical directions. The robot can be used as a new robotic solution to assist close inspection outside the pipelines, thus minimizing downtime in the oil and gas industry.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

A short film about Robot Wars from Blender Magazine in 1995.

[ YouTube ]

While modern cameras provide machines with a very well-developed sense of vision, robots still lack such a comprehensive solution for their sense of touch. The talk will present examples of why the sense of touch can prove crucial for a wide range of robotic applications, and a tech demo will introduce a novel sensing technology targeting the next generation of soft robotic skins. The prototype of the tactile sensor developed at ETH Zurich exploits the advances in camera technology to reconstruct the forces applied to a soft membrane. This technology has the potential to revolutionize robotic manipulation, human-robot interaction, and prosthetics.

[ ETHZ ]

Thanks Markus!

Quadrupedal robotics has reached a level of performance and maturity that enables some of the most advanced real-world applications with autonomous mobile robots. Driven by excellent research in academia and industry all around the world, a growing number of platforms with different skills target different applications and markets. We have invited a selection of experts with long-standing experience in this vibrant research area

[ IFRR ]

Thanks Fan!

Since January 2020, more than 300 different robots in over 40 countries have been used to cope with some aspect of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on society. The majority of these robots have been used to support clinical care and public safety, allowing responders to work safely and to handle the surge in infections. This panel will discuss how robots have been successfully used and what is needed, both in terms of fundamental research and policy, for robotics to be prepared for the future emergencies.

[ IFRR ]

At Skydio, we ship autonomous robots that are flown at scale in complex, unknown environments every day. We’ve invested six years of R&D into handling extreme visual scenarios not typically considered by academia nor encountered by cars, ground robots, or AR applications. Drones are commonly in scenes with few or no semantic priors on the environment and must deftly navigate thin objects, extreme lighting, camera artifacts, motion blur, textureless surfaces, vibrations, dirt, smudges, and fog. These challenges are daunting for classical vision, because photometric signals are simply inconsistent. And yet, there is no ground truth for direct supervision of deep networks. We’ll take a detailed look at these issues and how we’ve tackled them to push the state of the art in visual inertial navigation, obstacle avoidance, rapid trajectory planning. We will also cover the new capabilities on top of our core navigation engine to autonomously map complex scenes and capture all surfaces, by performing real-time 3D reconstruction across multiple flights.

[ UPenn ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots