Tag Archives: series

#435662 Video Friday: This 3D-Printed ...

Posted on September 15, 2019 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!):

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

#435626 Video Friday: Watch Robots Make a Crepe ...

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. Every week, we also post a calendar of upcoming robotics events; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

Robotronica – August 18, 2019 – Brisbane, Australia
CLAWAR 2019 – August 26-28, 2019 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
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
Humanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto
ARSO 2019 – October 31-November 2, 2019 – Beijing
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-November 1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Team CoSTAR (JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU) has one of the more diverse teams of robots that we’ve seen:

[ Team CoSTAR ]

A team from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University is sending ground and aerial autonomous robots into a Pittsburgh-area mine to prepare for this month’s DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

“Look at that fire extinguisher, what a beauty!” Expect to hear a lot more of that kind of weirdness during SubT.

[ CMU ]

Unitree Robotics is starting to batch-manufacture Laikago Pro quadrupeds, and if you buy four of them, they can carry you around in a chair!

I’m also really liking these videos from companies that are like, “We have a whole bunch of robot dogs now—what weird stuff can we do with them?”

[ Unitree Robotics ]

Why take a handful of pills every day for all the stuff that's wrong with you, when you could take one custom pill instead? Because custom pills are time-consuming to make, that’s why. But robots don’t care!

Multiply Labs’ factory is designed to operate in parallel. All the filling robots and all the quality-control robots are operating at the same time. The robotic arm, in the meanwhile, shuttles dozens of trays up and down the production floor, making sure that each capsule is filled with the right drugs. The manufacturing cell shown in this article can produce 10,000 personalized capsules in an 8-hour shift. A single cell occupies just 128 square feet (12 square meters) on the production floor. This means that a regular production facility (~10,000 square feet, or 929 m2 ) can house 78 cells, for an overall output of 780,000 capsules per shift. This exceeds the output of most traditional manufacturers—while producing unique personalized capsules!

[ Multiply Labs ]

Thanks Fred!

If you’re getting tired of all those annoying drones that sound like giant bees, just have a listen to this turbine-powered one:

[ Malloy Aeronautics ]

In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that nobody has bothered to put a functional robotic dog head on a quadruped robot before this, right?

Equipped with sensors, high-tech radar imaging, cameras and a directional microphone, this 100-pound (45-kilogram) super-robot is still a “puppy-in-training.” Just like a regular dog, he responds to commands such as “sit,” “stand,” and “lie down.” Eventually, he will be able to understand and respond to hand signals, detect different colors, comprehend many languages, coordinate his efforts with drones, distinguish human faces, and even recognize other dogs.

As an information scout, Astro’s key missions will include detecting guns, explosives and gun residue to assist police, the military, and security personnel. This robodog’s talents won’t just end there, he also can be programmed to assist as a service dog for the visually impaired or to provide medical diagnostic monitoring. The MPCR team also is training Astro to serve as a first responder for search-and-rescue missions such as hurricane reconnaissance as well as military maneuvers.

[ FAU ]

And now this amazing video, “The Coke Thief,” from ICRA 2005 (!):

[ Paper ]

CYBATHLON Series put the focus on one or two of the six disciplines and are organized in cooperation with international universities and partners. The CYBATHLON Arm and Leg Prosthesis Series took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 16 to 18 May and was organized in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the trade fair REHAB Karlsruhe.

The CYBATHLON Wheelchair Series took place in Kawasaki, Japan on 5 May 2019 and was organized in cooperation with the CYBATHLON Wheelchair Series Japan Organizing Committee and supported by the Swiss Embassy.

[ Cybathlon ]

Rainbow crepe robot!

There’s also this other robot, which I assume does something besides what's in the video, because otherwise it appears to be a massively overengineered way of shaping cooked rice into a chubby triangle.

[ PC Watch ]

The Weaponized Plastic Fighting League at Fetch Robotics has had another season of shardation, deintegration, explodification, and other -tions. Here are a couple fan favorite match videos:

[ Fetch Robotics ]

This video is in German, but it’s worth watching for the three seconds of extremely satisfying footage showing a robot twisting dough into pretzels.

[ Festo ]

Putting brains into farming equipment is a no-brainer, since it’s a semi-structured environment that's generally clear of wayward humans driving other vehicles.

[ Lovol ]

Thanks Fan!

Watch some robots assemble suspiciously Lego-like (but definitely not actually Lego) minifigs.

[ DevLinks ]

The Robotics Innovation Facility (RIFBristol) helps businesses, entrepreneurs, researchers and public sector bodies to embrace the concept of ‘Industry 4.0'. From training your staff in robotics, and demonstrating how automation can improve your manufacturing processes, to prototyping and validating your new innovations—we can provide the support you need.

[ RIF ]

Ryan Gariepy from Clearpath Robotics (and a bunch of other stuff) gave a talk at ICRA with the title of “Move Fast and (Don’t) Break Things: Commercializing Robotics at the Speed of Venture Capital,” which is more interesting when you know that this year’s theme was “Notable Failures.”

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Michael Nielsen, a computer vision researcher at the Danish Technological Institute.

Michael worked with a fusion of sensors like stereo vision, thermography, radar, lidar and high-frame-rate cameras, merging multiple images for high dynamic range. All this, to be able to navigate the tricky situation in a farm field where you need to navigate close to or even in what is grown. Multibaseline cameras were also used to provide range detection over a wide range of distances.

We also learn about how he expanded his work into sorting recycling, a very challenging problem. We also hear about the problems faced when using time of flight and sheet of light cameras. He then shares some good results using stereo vision, especially combined with blue light random dot projectors.

[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435619 Video Friday: Watch This Robot Dog ...

Posted on September 13, 2019 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!):

IEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, Ghana
RoboBusiness 2019 – October 1-3, 2019 – Santa Clara, CA, USA
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
ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China
ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Team PLUTO (University of Pennsylvania, Ghost Robotics, and Exyn Technologies) put together this video giving us a robot’s-eye-view (or whatever they happen to be using for eyes) of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge tunnel circuits.

[ PLUTO ]

Zhifeng Huang has been improving his jet-stepping humanoid robot, which features new hardware and the ability to take larger and more complex steps.

This video reported the last progress of an ongoing project utilizing ducted-fan propulsion system to improve humanoid robot’s ability in stepping over large ditches. The landing point of the robot’s swing foot can be not only forward but also side direction. With keeping quasi-static balance, the robot was able to step over a ditch with 450mm in width (up to 97% of the robot’s leg’s length) in 3D stepping.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Zhifeng!

These underacuated hands from Matei Ciocarlie’s lab at Columbia are magically able to reconfigure themselves to grasp different object types with just one or two motors.

[ Paper ] via [ ROAM Lab ]

This is one reason we should pursue not “autonomous cars” but “fully autonomous cars” that never require humans to take over. We can’t be trusted.

During our early days as the Google self-driving car project, we invited some employees to test our vehicles on their commutes and weekend trips. What we were testing at the time was similar to the highway driver assist features that are now available on cars today, where the car takes over the boring parts of the driving, but if something outside its ability occurs, the driver has to take over immediately.

What we saw was that our testers put too much trust in that technology. They were doing things like texting, applying makeup, and even falling asleep that made it clear they would not be ready to take over driving if the vehicle asked them to. This is why we believe that nothing short of full autonomy will do.

[ Waymo ]

Buddy is a DIY and fetchingly minimalist social robot (of sorts) that will be coming to Kickstarter this month.

We have created a new arduino kit. His name is Buddy. He is a DIY social robot to serve as a replacement for Jibo, Cozmo, or any of the other bots that are no longer available. Fully 3D printed and supported he adds much more to our series of Arduino STEM robotics kits.

Buddy is able to look around and map his surroundings and react to changes within them. He can be surprised and he will always have a unique reaction to changes. The kit can be built very easily in less than an hour. It is even robust enough to take the abuse that kids can give it in a classroom.

[ Littlebots ]

The android Mindar, based on the Buddhist deity of mercy, preaches sermons at Kodaiji temple in Kyoto, and its human colleagues predict that with artificial intelligence it could one day acquire unlimited wisdom. Developed at a cost of almost $1 million (¥106 million) in a joint project between the Zen temple and robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, the robot teaches about compassion and the dangers of desire, anger and ego.

[ Japan Times ]

I’m not sure whether it’s the sound or what, but this thing scares me for some reason.

[ BIRL ]

This gripper uses magnets as a sort of adjustable spring for dynamic stiffness control, which seems pretty clever.

[ Buffalo ]

What a package of medicine sees while being flown by drone from a hospital to a remote clinic in the Dominican Republic. The drone flew 11 km horizontally and 800 meters vertically, and I can’t even imagine what it would take to make that drive.

[ WeRobotics ]

My first ride in a fully autonomous car was at Stanford in 2009. I vividly remember getting in the back seat of a descendant of Junior, and watching the steering wheel turn by itself as the car executed a perfect parking maneuver. Ten years later, it’s still fun to watch other people have that experience.

[ Waymo ]

Flirtey, the pioneer of the commercial drone delivery industry, has unveiled the much-anticipated first video of its next-generation delivery drone, the Flirtey Eagle. The aircraft designer and manufacturer also unveiled the Flirtey Portal, a sophisticated take off and landing platform that enables scalable store-to-door operations; and an autonomous software platform that enables drones to deliver safely to homes.

[ Flirtey ]

EPFL scientists are developing new approaches for improved control of robotic hands – in particular for amputees – that combines individual finger control and automation for improved grasping and manipulation. This interdisciplinary proof-of-concept between neuroengineering and robotics was successfully tested on three amputees and seven healthy subjects.

[ EPFL ]

This video is a few years old, but we’ll take any excuse to watch the majestic sage-grouse be majestic in all their majesticness.

[ UC Davis ]

I like the idea of a game of soccer (or, football to you weirdos in the rest of the world) where the ball has a mind of its own.

[ Sphero ]

Looks like the whole delivery glider idea is really taking off! Or, you know, not taking off.

Weird that they didn’t show the landing, because it sure looked like it was going to plow into the side of the hill at full speed.

[ Yates ] via [ sUAS News ]

This video is from a 2018 paper, but it’s not like we ever get tired of seeing quadrupeds do stuff, right?

[ MIT ]

Founder and Head of Product, Ian Bernstein, and Head of Engineering, Morgan Bell, have been involved in the Misty project for years and they have learned a thing or two about building robots. Hear how and why Misty evolved into a robot development platform, learn what some of the earliest prototypes did (and why they didn’t work for what we envision), and take a deep dive into the technology decisions that form the Misty II platform.

[ Misty Robotics ]

Lex Fridman interviews Vijay Kumar on the Artifiical Intelligence Podcast.

[ AI Podcast ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar is from Ross Knepper at Cornell, on Formalizing Teamwork in Human-Robot Interaction.

Robots out in the world today work for people but not with people. Before robots can work closely with ordinary people as part of a human-robot team in a home or office setting, robots need the ability to acquire a new mix of functional and social skills. Working with people requires a shared understanding of the task, capabilities, intentions, and background knowledge. For robots to act jointly as part of a team with people, they must engage in collaborative planning, which involves forming a consensus through an exchange of information about goals, capabilities, and partial plans. Often, much of this information is conveyed through implicit communication. In this talk, I formalize components of teamwork involving collaboration, communication, and representation. I illustrate how these concepts interact in the application of social navigation, which I argue is a first-class example of teamwork. In this setting, participants must avoid collision by legibly conveying intended passing sides via nonverbal cues like path shape. A topological representation using the braid groups enables the robot to reason about a small enumerable set of passing outcomes. I show how implicit communication of topological group plans achieves rapid covergence to a group consensus, and how a robot in the group can deliberately influence the ultimate outcome to maximize joint performance, yielding pedestrian comfort with the robot.

[ CMU RI ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Julien Bourgeois about Claytronics, a project from Carnegie Mellon and Intel to develop “programmable matter.”

Julien started out as a computer scientist. He was always interested in robotics privately but then had the opportunity to get into micro robots when his lab was merged into the FEMTO-ST Institute. He later worked with Seth Copen Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon on the Claytronics project.

Julien shows an enlarged mock-up of the small robots that make up programmable matter, catoms, and speaks about how they are designed. Currently he is working on a unit that is one centimeter in diameter and he shows us the very small CPU that goes into that model.

[ Robots in Depth ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435535 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

Posted on August 24, 2019 by Android

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
To Power AI, This Startup Built a Really, Really Big Chip
Tom Simonite | Wired
“The silicon monster is almost 22 centimeters—roughly 9 inches—on each side, making it likely the largest computer chip ever, and a monument to the tech industry’s hopes for artificial intelligence.”

COMPUTING
You Won’t See the Quantum Internet Coming
Ryan F. Mandelbaum | Gizmodo
“The quantum internet is coming sooner than you think—even sooner than quantum computing itself. When things change over, you might not even notice. But when they do, new rules will protect your data against attacks from computers that don’t even exist yet.”

LONGEVITY
What If Aging Weren’t Inevitable, But a Curable Disease
David Adam | MIT Technology Review
“…a growing number of scientists are questioning our basic conception of aging. What if you could challenge your death—or even prevent it altogether? What if the panoply of diseases that strike us in old age are symptoms, not causes? What would change if we classified aging itself as the disease?”

ROBOTICS
Thousands of Autonomous Delivery Robots Are About to Descend on College Campuses
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“The quintessential college experience of getting pizza delivered to your dorm room is about to get a high-tech upgrade. On Tuesday, Starship Technologies announced its plan to deploy thousands of its autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots on college campuses around the country over the next two years, after raising $40 million in Series A funding.”

TRANSPORTATION
Volocopter Reveals Its First Commercial Autonomous Flying Taxi
Christine Fisher | Endgadget
“It’s a race to the skies in terms of which company actually deploys an on-demand air taxi service based around electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. For its part, German startup Volocopter is taking another key step with the revelation of its first aircraft designed for actual commercial use, the VoloCity.”

Image Credit: Colin Carter / Unsplash Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#435462 Where Death Ends and Cyborgs Begin, With ...

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Android

Transhumanism is a growing movement but also one of the most controversial. Though there are many varying offshoots within the movement, the general core idea is the same: evolve and enhance human beings by integrating biology with technology.

We recently sat down with one of the most influential and vocal transhumanists, author and futurist Zoltan Istvan, on the latest episode of Singularity University Radio’s podcast series: The Feedback Loop, to discuss his ideas on technological implants, religion, transhumanism, and death.

Although Zoltan’s origin story is rooted deeply in his time as a reporter for National Geographic, much of his rise to prominence has been a result of his contributions to a variety of media outlets, including an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Additionally, many of you may know him from his novel, The Transhumanist Wager, and his 2016 presidential campaign, where he drove around the United States in a bus that had been remodeled into the shape of a coffin.

Although Zoltan had no illusions about actually winning the presidency, he had hoped that the “immortality bus” and his campaign might help inject more science, technology, and longevity research into the political discourse, or at the very least spark a more serious conversation around the future of our species.

Only time will tell if his efforts paid off, but in the meantime, you can hear Zoltan discuss religion, transhumanism, implants, the existential motivation of death, and the need for new governmental policies in Episode 7 of The Feedback Loop. To listen in each week you can find us on your favorite podcasting platforms, such as Spotify, Apple, or Google, and you can find links to other podcasting platforms and Singularity Hub’s text-to-speech articles here. You can also find our past episodes with other thought leaders like Douglas Rushkoff and Annaka Harris below.

Image Credit: VAlex / Shutterstock.com Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots