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PITTSBURGH – A new interactive design tool developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute enables both novices and experts to build customized legged or wheeled robots using 3D-printed components and off-the-shelf actuators.
Using a familiar drag-and-drop interface, individuals can choose from a library of components and place them into the design. The tool suggests components that are compatible with each other, offers potential placements of actuators and can automatically generate structural components to connect those actuators.
Once the design is complete, the tool provides a physical simulation environment to test the robot before fabricating it, enabling users to iteratively adjust the design to achieve a desired look or motion.
“The process of creating new robotic systems today is notoriously challenging, time-consuming and resource-intensive,” said Stelian Coros, assistant professor of robotics. “In the not-so-distant future, however, robots will be part of the fabric of daily life and more people — not just roboticists — will want to customize robots. This type of interactive design tool would make this possible for just about anybody.”
Today, robotics Ph.D. student Ruta Desai will present a report on the design tool she developed with Coros and master’s student Ye Yuan at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2017) in Singapore.
Coros’ team designed a number of robots with the tool and verified its feasibility by fabricating two — a wheeled robot with a manipulator arm that can hold a pen for drawing, and a four-legged “puppy” robot that can walk forward or sideways.
“The system makes it easy to experiment with different body proportions and motor configurations, and see how these decisions affect the robot’s ability to do certain tasks,” said Desai. “For instance, we discovered in simulation that some of our preliminary designs for the puppy enabled it to only walk forward, not sideways. We corrected that for the final design. The motions of the robot we actually built matched the desired motion we demonstrated in simulation very well.”
The research team developed models of how actuators, off-the-shelf brackets and 3D-printable structural components can be combined to form complex robotic systems. The iterative design process enables users to experiment by changing the number and location of actuators and to adjust the physical dimensions of the robot. The tool includes an auto-completion feature that allows it to automatically generate assemblies of components by searching through possible arrangements.
“Our work aims to make robotics more accessible to casual users,” Coros said. “This is important because people who play an active role in creating robotic devices for their own use are more likely to have positive feelings and higher quality interactions with them. This could accelerate the adoption of robots in everyday life.”
The National Science Foundation supported this research.
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About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon (www.cmu.edu) is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 13,000 students in the university’s seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.
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The age of the cyborg may be closer than we think. Rapidly improving medical robotics, wearables, and implants means many humans are already part machine, and this trend is only likely to continue.
It is most noticeable in the field of medical prosthetics where high-performance titanium and carbon fiber replacements for limbs have become commonplace. The use of “blades” by Paralympians has even raised questions over whether they actually offer an advantage over biological limbs.
For decades, myoelectric prosthetics—powered artificial limbs that read electrical signals from the muscles to allow the user to control the device—have provided patients with mechanical replacements for lost hands.
Now, advances in robotics are resulting in prosthetic hands that are getting close to matching the originals in terms of dexterity. The Michelangelo prosthetic hand is fully articulated and precise enough to carry out tasks like cooking and ironing.
Researchers have even demonstrated robotic hands that have a sense of touch and can be controlled using the mind. And just last month another group showed that fitting a standard myoelectric arm with a camera and a computer vision system allowed it to “see” and grab objects without the user having to move a muscle.

Medical exoskeletons are already commercially available—most notably, ReWalk and Ekso Bionics devices designed to help those with spinal cord injuries stand and walk. Elsewhere, this technology is being used to rehabilitate people after strokes or other traumatic injuries by guiding their limbs through their full range of motion.
At present, these technologies are aimed solely at those who have been injured or incapacitated, but an editorial in Science Robotics last week warned that may not always be the case.
“There needs to be a debate on the future evolution of technologies as the pace of robotics and AI is accelerating,” the authors wrote.
“It seems certain that future assistive technologies will not only compensate for human disability but also drive human capacities beyond our innate physiological levels. The associated transformative influence will bring on broad social, political, and economic issues.”
This can already be seen with the development of military exoskeletons designed to boost soldiers’ endurance. More bizarrely, Japanese researchers have recently floated the idea of adding to our limbs rather than replacing them. The MetaLimbs project gives users two extra robotic arms that can be controlled using sensors on their legs and feet.

Last week’s issue of Science Robotics actually included a study demonstrating that a soft robotic exosuit was actually more effective at lightening the load on a runner when it didn’t follow a human’s natural running pattern and instead used computer simulations to decide what forces to apply.
This suggests there is considerable room for machines to not only augment the power of our muscles but even optimize the biomechanics of our movement. And as the authors of the editorial note, biomechanics is only one strand of research where scientists are trying to replicate and ultimately improve our abilities.
Devices like cochlear implants have been used to restore hearing in the deaf for decades and there are a number of experimental efforts to create bionic eyes to help the blind see again. Efforts to augment our intelligence with neural implants have been widely reported on in recent months.
Admittedly, there is still a long way to go before people start demanding to amputate their arm so they can get a shiny, new robotic one. And it’s likely the companies driving for consumer-grade neural interfaces are overestimating how many people will voluntarily undergo brain surgery.
But we’ve already taken the first steps towards merging our biological selves with machines.
You can argue smartphones are already essentially a prosthetic designed to boost communication and memory. And more overtly cyborg-like augmentations are likely to appear in many of our lifetimes.
What then does that mean for humankind? Natural evolution has long relied on mutation conferring minute but significant advantages to individuals that gradually spread throughout populations. If new prosthetic technologies start to confer these advantages overnight the effects could be very patchy.
The worry is that the latest augmentations are only available to the few who can afford them and in just a few generations you could end up with an elite who not only dwarf the rest of humanity financially but also physically and cognitively.
At the same time, these technologies hold huge promise to restore a decent standard of living to the countless people incapacitated by injury or disease. And if applied equitably, devices aimed at augmenting our abilities could better equip us to face the many challenges society faces.
But as the authors of the editorial note, the conversation on how best to guide us through this next stage of our evolution needs to start now. Because these devices have so far been focused on restoring functions that have been lost, we have largely missed the fact that they are now reaching the point where they can improve those functions or even enable new ones.
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Developed by Franklin Robotics, “Tertill” is a 100% solar-powered robot that lives in home gardens and weeds every day, rain or shine. The first wave of robots will be available this summer after Tertill’s crowdfunding campaign begins June 13. Upcoming Tertill models will be engineered with the ability to detect and repel pests, and relay info back to your smartphone as needed.
Previous version of Tertill. Photo Credit: Franklin RoboticsHow it works
Tertill maintains your garden by using its artificial intelligence to determine the best times to sniff out new weeds. The bot regularly whacks newly sprouted weeds with its string trimmer and scrubs out emerging cotyledons with its wheels.
Latest, kickstarter version of Tertill. Photo Credit: Franklin RoboticsUsing its onboard sensors, Tertill knows to stay in its lane, not squeeze in where it can’t fit, and not disturb your desirable plants. Tertill only trims plants under a certain height threshold, but if you have a short seedling that you don’t want whacked, Franklin Robotics offers protective collars that tell Tertill to steer clear. Other versions of collars double as slug repellents. A 3D-printable-design is available here. [http://www.franklinrobotics.com/slugtaze-download]

Solar-powered, chemical free organic gardening
Tertill’s mission is to eliminate the need for chemical weed treatments in the garden, while also offering a sustainable, 100% renewable solution for managing weeds.
Tertill takes advantage of the energy that it can gather from the sun in the most efficient way possible, and so it works hard to maximize the area that it covers each day. To keep weeds at bay it only needs to return to the same spot in the garden every few days. And since Tertill is fueled by the same solar energy that weeds are, it can patrol less often on cloudy days because the weeds are also less actively growing.

Future developments
Joe Jones, the developer of Tertill, and his team’s experience gardening (and struggling to get a good yield!) has shown them what a truly effective garden robot needs to provide. Beyond just weeding, future Tertill models will also include natural pest-repellent features to scare away rodents. Think of Tertill like a mobile scarecrow, except roughly the size of a frisbee.
These future Tertill models will also be able to collect data and analyze the soil quality, nutrients, and health, and send alerts back to the user with any important garden info.

Campaign Date
Franklin Robotics’ crowdsources fundraiser will be starting June 13. If you’d like to learn more, head to FranklinRobotics.com, and if you sign up for their newsletter, [http://www.franklinrobotics.com/slugtaze-download] you’ll receive a free download of Slugtaze, the 3D-printable slug-repellent collar.
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What images come to mind when you think of robots?
The lifelike replicas of Blade Runner? A favorite video game character or perhaps Aldebaran and SoftBank's quirky robot named Pepper?
Although researchers have made astounding advances in robotics, robots have yet to approach their fictionalized counterparts in many areas. The greatest of these is their ability to gain our trust.
Trust is a foundation of our society. Whether implicit or explicit, our trust in one another forms the very basis of how we live our lives. But how will that change with advanced robots and AI?
It's naturally hard to trust something foreign and inhuman with important tasks. So how can we come to trust robots more, and does their perceived humanity play any part in our feelings?
Bonding Through Observation
As all trends point towards robots playing a large part in our future lives, scientists are obviously concerned with breaking down the barriers. The service industry, for instance, already uses customer-facing robots in a few select areas. As their placement becomes more mainstream, we must figure out how to introduce them to society.
A joint study between the Ars Electronica Futurelab, the University of Wurzburg and the University of Koblenz-Landau aimed to determine how to soften our emotions toward robots.
Participants interacted with a robot in one of three ways: in real life, virtual reality, and on a plain screen. During the five-minute test, Roboy the Robot helped to organize appointments, search the web, and find a birthday gift.
Data analysis showed that participants who watched the robot through the screen or through virtual reality perceived it as more real. They also indicated that they saw it as more human. Those who viewed the interactions through a screen indicated a higher humanness rating than those who used virtual reality.
The researchers pointed out that many people will encounter robots in the service industry in the coming years, quite possibly in hotels or hospitals. Most people today only experience robots through TV or science fiction, giving them a skewed perspective and leading them to mistrust a perfectly capable bot. Research is important to minimize skepticism and provide proven design choices for future models.
Extreme Environments and Robotic Dependence
There are certain locations and professions where using robots simply makes sense, such as spaceflight, deep-sea exploration, and hostile military zones. We'll inevitably make robots in these positions smarter and smarter, but will our level of trust rise to the occasion?
Consider remote control vehicles (RCVs) that are used for dangerous tasks, such as bomb disposal. Most of us don't trust RCVs like another human, despite the fact that they save many lives each year.
Reports show that people who work with RCVs on a regular basis form a strong emotional bond with their robotic partners. Some soldiers using explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) bots in Iraq and Afghanistan became extremely attached to their robots and insisted on working with the same units every time. They even became upset at the thought of using a new robot, rather than repairing their old one.
How Human Is Too Human?
The key to warming the public up to robots may be exposure. Humans build trust with robots through real life exposure, but as we build robots to look more like humans, will trust backslide? In the 1970s, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed that people would only accept human-like robots to a point. As they begin to approach that point, people would withdraw. However, if the robots surpassed that point, people would trust them again.
This effect, dubbed the “uncanny valley,” refers mainly to the subtle discomfort produced when confronted with something that looks inhuman enough to break the illusion. A non-humanoid robot wouldn’t produce this feeling, as observers would never see it as a human form.
Surpassing the Uncanny Valley
Perhaps the best way to make humans more open to robots is to mirror more than appearance. The robots should have human mannerisms as well. During conversation, a robot should blink and hold eye contact—though not for too long. The average human blinks at a higher rate during conversation, and regularly moves their head and eyes to indicate thought processes and emotions.
When they speak, they should use the right tone of voice for their message. A sad message spoken with a happy tone pushes them into uncanny valley territory. Likewise, their sentences shouldn’t be completely direct. Most people use what’s called hedging—adding extra words like “you know,” “like,” and “um” to their sentences. These additions make a conversation feel much less contrived.
Finally, a robot needs less precise movement to look natural. When moving, they should have a short preparation phase—where they move back a bit—before going forward. Simply lurching in the intended direction is quite unnatural.
If they’re moving a limb, they should start with the bigger joints, and then move toward the smaller ones. Although it may seem easier to have the bot move whatever it uses for fingers, it’s an incredibly unhuman-like shortcut to take.
If your robot doesn’t have a face, make sure to compensate by having it express emotion in movement. Use small and slow movements to show sadness, jerky movements for fear and large movements for happiness. It may take a while to get them right, but the results will be worth the effort.
Humans and robots have a ways to go before complete trust is established. Through gradual exposure, we can increase our reliance on robots. Natural movements and actual day-to-day experience will increase trust. And the quicker we grow comfortable with robots, the better. After all, they’re poised to enter our workforce in unprecedented numbers.
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