Tag Archives: vehicle

#437745 Video Friday: Japan’s Giant Gundam ...

Posted on November 27, 2020 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!):

AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 2020 – [Online Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
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
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Co., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

It’s coming together—literally! Japan’s giant Gundam appears nearly finished and ready for its first steps. In a recent video, Gundam Factory Yokohama, which is constructing the 18-meter-tall, 25-ton walking robot, provided an update on the project. The video shows the Gundam getting its head attached—after being blessed by Shinto priests.

In the video update, they say the project is “steadily progressing” and further details will be announced around the end of September.

[ Gundam Factory Yokohama ]

Creating robots with emotional personalities will transform the usability of robots in the real-world. As previous emotive social robots are mostly based on statically stable robots whose mobility is limited, this work develops an animation to real-world pipeline that enables dynamic bipedal robots that can twist, wiggle, and walk to behave with emotions.

So that’s where Cassie’s eyes go.

[ Berkeley ]

Now that the DARPA SubT Cave Circuit is all virtual, here’s a good reminder of how it’ll work.

[ SubT ]

Since July 20, anyone 11+ years of age must wear a mask in closed public places in France. This measure also is highly recommended in many European, African and Persian Gulf countries. To support businesses and public places, SoftBank Robotics Europe unveils a new feature with Pepper: AI Face Mask Detection.

[ Softbank ]

University of Michigan researchers are developing new origami inspired methods for designing, fabricating and actuating micro-robots using heat.These improvements will expand the mechanical capabilities of the tiny bots, allowing them to fold into more complex shapes.

[ University of Michigan ]

Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech has created various types of IPMC robots. Those robots are fabricated by novel 3D fabrication methods.

[ Suzimori Endo Lab ]

The most explode-y of drones manages not to explode this time.

[ SpaceX ]

At Amazon, we’re constantly innovating to support our employees, customers, and communities as effectively as possible. As our fulfillment and delivery teams have been hard at work supplying customers with items during the pandemic, Amazon’s robotics team has been working behind the scenes to re-engineer bots and processes to increase safety in our fulfillment centers.

While some folks are able to do their jobs at home with just a laptop and internet connection, it’s not that simple for other employees at Amazon, including those who spend their days building and testing robots. Some engineers have turned their homes into R&D labs to continue building these new technologies to better serve our customers and employees. Their creativity and resourcefulness to keep our important programs going is inspiring.

[ Amazon ]

Australian Army soldiers from 2nd/14th Light Horse Regiment (Queensland Mounted Infantry) demonstrated the PD-100 Black Hornet Nano unmanned aircraft vehicle during a training exercise at Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, on 4 May 2018.

This robot has been around for a long time—maybe 10 years or more? It makes you wonder what the next generation will look like, and if they can manage to make it even smaller.

[ FLIR ]

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors whose pixels work independently from each other and respond asynchronously to brightness changes, with microsecond resolution. Their advantages make it possible to tackle challenging scenarios in robotics, such as high-speed and high dynamic range scenes. We present a solution to the problem of visual odometry from the data acquired by a stereo event-based camera rig.

[ Paper ] via [ HKUST ]

Emys can help keep kindergarteners sitting still for a long time, which is not small feat!

[ Emys ]

Introducing the RoboMaster EP Core, an advanced educational robot that was built to take learning to the next level and provides an all-in-one solution for STEAM-based classrooms everywhere, offering AI and programming projects for students of all ages and experience levels.

[ DJI ]

This Dutch food company Heemskerk uses ABB robots to automate their order picking. Their new solution reduces the amount of time the fresh produce spends in the supply chain, extending its shelf life, minimizing wastage, and creating a more sustainable solution for the fresh food industry.

[ ABB ]

This week’s episode of Pass the Torque features NASA’s Satellite Servicing Projects Division (NExIS) Robotics Engineer, Zakiya Tomlinson.

[ NASA ]

Massachusetts has been challenging Silicon Valley as the robotics capital of the United States. They’re not winning, yet. But they’re catching up.

[ MassTech ]

San Francisco-based Formant is letting anyone remotely take its Spot robot for a walk. Watch The Robot Report editors, based in Boston, take Spot for a walk around Golden Gate Park.

You can apply for this experience through Formant at the link below.

[ Formant ] via [ TRR ]

Thanks Steve!

An Institute for Advanced Study Seminar on “Theoretical Machine Learning,” featuring Peter Stone from UT Austin.

For autonomous robots to operate in the open, dynamically changing world, they will need to be able to learn a robust set of skills from relatively little experience. This talk begins by introducing Grounded Simulation Learning as a way to bridge the so-called reality gap between simulators and the real world in order to enable transfer learning from simulation to a real robot. It then introduces two new algorithms for imitation learning from observation that enable a robot to mimic demonstrated skills from state-only trajectories, without any knowledge of the actions selected by the demonstrator. Connections to theoretical advances in off-policy reinforcement learning will be highlighted throughout.

[ IAS ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437733 Video Friday: MIT Media Lab Developing ...

Posted on November 26, 2020 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!):

AWS Cloud Robotics Summit – August 18-19, 2020 – [Online Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Online Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
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
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Very impressive local obstacle avoidance at a fairly high speed on a small drone, both indoors and outdoors.

[ FAST Lab ]

Matt Carney writes:

My PhD at MIT Media Lab has been the design and build of a next generation powered prosthesis. The bionic ankle, named TF8, was designed to provide biologically equivalent power and range of motion for plantarflexion-dorsiflexion. This video shows the process of going from a blank sheet of paper to people walking on it. Shown are three different people wearing the robot. About a dozen people have since been able to test the hardware.

[ MIT ]

Thanks Matt!

Exciting changes are coming to the iRobot® Home App. Get ready for new personalized experiences, improved features, and an easy-to-use interface. The update is rolling out over the next few weeks!

[ iRobot ]

MOFLIN is an AI Pet created from a totally new concept. It possesses emotional capabilities that evolve like living animals. With its warm soft fur, cute sounds, and adorable movement, you’d want to love it forever. We took a nature inspired approach and developed a unique algorithm that allows MOFLIN to learn and grow by constantly using its interactions to determine patterns and evaluate its surroundings from its sensors. MOFLIN will choose from an infinite number of mobile and sound pattern combinations to respond and express its feelings. To put it in simple terms, it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet.

You lost me at “it’s like you’re interacting with a living pet.”

[ Kickstarter ] via [ Gizmodo ]

This video is only robotics-adjacent, but it has applications for robotic insects. With a high-speed tracking system, we can now follow insects as they jump and fly, and watch how clumsy (but effective) they are at it.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Sawyer!

Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech has developed self-excited pneumatic actuators that can be integrally molded by a 3D printer. These actuators use the “automatic flow path switching mechanism” we have devised.

[ Suzimori Endo Lab ]

Quadrupeds are getting so much better at deciding where to step rather than just stepping where they like and trying not to fall over.

[ RSL ]

Omnidirectional micro aerial vehicles are a growing field of research, with demonstrated advantages for aerial interaction and uninhibited observation. While systems with complete pose omnidirectionality and high hover efficiency have been developed independently, a robust system that combines the two has not been demonstrated to date. This paper presents the design and optimal control of a novel omnidirectional vehicle that can exert a wrench in any orientation while maintaining efficient flight configurations.

[ ASL ]

The latest in smooth humanoid walking from Dr. Guero.

[ YouTube ]

Will robots replace humans one day? When it comes to space exploration, robots are our precursors, gathering data to prepare humans for deep space. ESA robotics engineer Martin Azkarate discusses some of the upcoming missions involving robots and the unique science they will perform in this episode of Meet the Experts.

[ ESA ]

The Multi-robot Systems Group at FEE-CTU in Prague is working on an autonomous drone that detects fires and the shoots an extinguisher capsule at them.

[ MRS ]

This experiment with HEAP (Hydraulic Excavator for Autonomous Purposes) demonstrates our latest research in on-site and mobile digital fabrication with found materials. The embankment prototype in natural granular material was achieved using state of the art design and construction processes in mapping, modelling, planning and control. The entire process of building the embankment was fully autonomous. An operator was only present in the cabin for safety purposes.

[ RSL ]

The Simulation, Systems Optimization and Robotics Group (SIM) of Technische Universität Darmstadt’s Department of Computer Science conducts research on cooperating autonomous mobile robots, biologically inspired robots and numerical optimization and control methods.

[ SIM ]

Starting January 1, 2021, your drone platform of choice may be severely limited by the European Union’s new drone regulations. In this short video, senseFly’s Brock Ryder explains what that means for drone programs and operators and where senseFly drones fit in the EU’s new regulatory framework.

[ SenseFly ]

Nearly every company across every industry is looking for new ways to minimize human contact, cut costs and address the labor crunch in repetitive and dangerous jobs. WSJ explores why many are looking to robots as the solution for all three.

[ WSJ ]

You’ll need to prepare yourself emotionally for this video on “Examining Users’ Attitude Towards Robot Punishment.”

[ ACM ]

In this episode of the AI Podcast, Lex interviews Russ Tedrake (MIT and TRI) about biped locomotion, the DRC, home robots, and more.

[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437693 Video Friday: Drone Helps Explore ...

Posted on November 24, 2020 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 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.

Clearpath Robotics and Boston Dynamics were obviously destined to partner up with Spot, because Spot 100 percent stole its color scheme from Clearpath, which has a monopoly on yellow and black robots. But seriously, the news here is that thanks to Clearpath, Spot now works seamlessly with ROS.

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

A new video created by Swisscom Ventures highlights a research expedition sponsored by Moncler to explore the deepest ice caves in the world using Flyability’s Elios drone. […] The expedition was sponsored by apparel company Moncler and took place over two weeks in 2018 on the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest body of ice in the world after Antarctica. Research focused on an area about 80 kilometers east of Kangerlussuaq, where scientists wanted to study the movement of water deep underground to better understand the effects of climate change on the melting ice.

[ Flyability ]

Shane Wighton of the “Stuff Made Here” YouTube channel, whose terrifying haircut machine we featured a few months ago, has improved on his robotic basketball hoop. It’s actually more than an improvement: It’s a complete redesign that nearly drove Wighton insane. But the result is pretty cool. It’s fun to watch him building a highly complicated system while always seeking simple and elegant designs for its components.

[ Stuff Made Here ]

SpaceX rockets are really just giant, explosion-powered drones that go into space sometimes. So let's watch more videos of them! This one is sped up, and puts a flight into just a couple of minutes.

[ SpaceX ]

Neato Robotics makes some solid autonomous vacuums, and these incremental upgrades feature improved battery life and better air filters.

[ Neato Robotics ]

A full-scale engineering model of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover now resides in a garage facing the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

This vehicle system test bed rover (VSTB) is also known as OPTIMISM, which stands for Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars. OPTIMISM was built in a warehouselike assembly room near the Mars Yard – an area that simulates the Red Planet's rocky surface. The rover helps the mission test hardware and software before it’s transmitted to the real rover on Mars. OPTIMISM will share the space with the Curiosity rover's twin MAGGIE.

[ JPL ]

Heavy asset industries like shipping, oil and gas, and manufacturing are grounded in repetitive tasks like locating items on large industrial sites — a tedious task that can take as long 45 minutes to find critical items like a forklift in an area that spans the size of multiple football fields. Not only is this work boring, it’s dangerous and inefficient. Robots like Spot, however, love this sort of work.

Spot can provide real-time updates on the location of assets and complete other mundane tasks. In this case, Spot is using software from Cognite to roam the vast shipyard to locate and manage more than 100,000 assets stored across the facility. What used to take humans hours can be managed on an ongoing basis by Spot — leaving employees to focus on more strategic tasks.

[ Cognite ]

The KNEXT Barista system helps high volume premium coffee providers who want to offer artisan coffee specialities in consistent quality.

[ Kuka ]

In this paper, we study this idea of generality in the locomotion domain. We develop a learning framework that can learn sophisticated locomotion behavior for a wide spectrum of legged robots, such as bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds and hexapods, including wheeled variants. Our learning framework relies on a data-efficient, off-policy multi-task RL algorithm and a small set of reward functions that are semantically identical across robots.

[ DeepMind ]

Thanks Dave!

Even though it seems like the real risk of COVID is catching it from another person, robotics companies are doing what they can with UVC disinfecting systems.

[ BlueBotics ]

Aeditive develop robotic 3D printing solutions for the production of concrete components. At the heart of their production plant are two large robots that cooperate to manufacture the component. The automation technology they build on is a robotic shotcrete process. During this process, they apply concrete layer by layer and thus manufacture complete components. This means that their customers no longer dependent on formwork, which is expensive and time-consuming to create. Instead, their customers can manufacture components directly on a steel pallet without these moulds.

[ Aeditive ]

Something BIG is coming next month from Robotiq!

My guess: an elephant.

[ Robotiq ]

TurtleBot3 is a great little home robot, as long as you have a TurtleBot3-sized home.

[ Robotis ]

How do you calculate the coordinated movements of two robot arms so they can accurately guide a highly flexible tool? ETH researchers have integrated all aspects of the optimisation calculations into an algorithm. The hot-​wire cutter will be used, among other things, to develop building blocks for a mortar-​free structure.

[ ETH Zurich ]

And now, this.

[ RobotStart ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437645 How Robots Became Essential Workers in ...

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Android

Photo: Sivaram V/Reuters

A robot, developed by Asimov Robotics to spread awareness about the coronavirus, holds a tray with face masks and sanitizer.

As the coronavirus emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Many saw a surge in orders. Robots don’t need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don’t get sick.

An army of automatons has since been deployed all over the world to help with the crisis: They are monitoring patients, sanitizing hospitals, making deliveries, and helping frontline medical workers reduce their exposure to the virus. Not all robots operate autonomously—many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they’ve gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable. These photos illustrate how robots are helping us fight this pandemic—and how they might be able to assist with the next one.

DROID TEAM

Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters

A squad of robots serves as the first line of defense against person-to-person transmission at a medical center in Kigali, Rwanda. Patients walking into the facility get their temperature checked by the machines, which are equipped with thermal cameras atop their heads. Developed by UBTech Robotics, in China, the robots also use their distinctive appearance—they resemble characters out of a Star Wars movie—to get people’s attention and remind them to wash their hands and wear masks.

Photo: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters

SAY “AAH”
To speed up COVID-19 testing, a team of Danish doctors and engineers at the University of Southern Denmark and at Lifeline Robotics is developing a fully automated swab robot. It uses computer vision and machine learning to identify the perfect target spot inside the person’s throat; then a robotic arm with a long swab reaches in to collect the sample—all done with a swiftness and consistency that humans can’t match. In this photo, one of the creators, Esben Østergaard, puts his neck on the line to demonstrate that the robot is safe.

Photo: University of Southern Denmark

GERM ZAPPER
After six of its doctors became infected with the coronavirus, the Sassarese hospital in Sardinia, Italy, tightened its safety measures. It also brought in the robots. The machines, developed by UVD Robots, use lidar to navigate autonomously. Each bot carries an array of powerful short-wavelength ultraviolet-C lights that destroy the genetic material of viruses and other pathogens after a few minutes of exposure. Now there is a spike in demand for UV-disinfection robots as hospitals worldwide deploy them to sterilize intensive care units and operating theaters.

Photo: UVD Robots

RUNNING ERRANDS

In medical facilities, an ideal role for robots is taking over repetitive chores so that nurses and physicians can spend their time doing more important tasks. At Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital, in China, a robot called Aimbot drives down the hallways, enforcing face-mask and social-distancing rules and spraying disinfectant. At a hospital near Austin, Texas, a humanoid robot developed by Diligent Robotics fetches supplies and brings them to patients’ rooms. It repeats this task day and night, tirelessly, allowing the hospital staff to spend more time interacting with patients.

Photos, left: Diligent Robotics; Right: UBTech Robotics

THE DOCTOR IS IN
Nurses and doctors at Circolo Hospital in Varese, in northern Italy—the country’s hardest-hit region—use robots as their avatars, enabling them to check on their patients around the clock while minimizing exposure and conserving protective equipment. The robots, developed by Chinese firm Sanbot, are equipped with cameras and microphones and can also access patient data like blood oxygen levels. Telepresence robots, originally designed for offices, are becoming an invaluable tool for medical workers treating highly infectious diseases like COVID-19, reducing the risk that they’ll contract the pathogen they’re fighting against.

Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

HELP FROM ABOVE

Photo: Zipline

Authorities in several countries attempted to use drones to enforce lockdowns and social-distancing rules, but the effectiveness of such measures remains unclear. A better use of drones was for making deliveries. In the United States, startup Zipline deployed its fixed-wing autonomous aircraft to connect two medical facilities 17 kilometers apart. For the staff at the Huntersville Medical Center, in North Carolina, masks, gowns, and gloves literally fell from the skies. The hope is that drones like Zipline’s will one day be able to deliver other kinds of critical materials, transport test samples, and distribute drugs and vaccines.

Photos: Zipline

SPECIAL DELIVERY
It’s not quite a robot takeover, but the streets and sidewalks of dozens of cities around the world have seen a proliferation of hurrying wheeled machines. Delivery robots are now in high demand as online orders continue to skyrocket.

In Hamburg, the six-wheeled robots developed by Starship Technologies navigate using cameras, GPS, and radar to bring groceries to customers.

Photo: Christian Charisius/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

In Medellín, Colombia, a startup called Rappi deployed a fleet of robots, built by Kiwibot, to deliver takeout to people in lockdown.

Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images

China’s JD.com, one of the country’s largest e-commerce companies, is using 20 robots to transport goods in Changsha, Hunan province; each vehicle has 22 separate compartments, which customers unlock using face authentication.

Photos: TPG/Getty Images

LIFE THROUGH ROBOTS
Robots can’t replace real human interaction, of course, but they can help people feel more connected at a time when meetings and other social activities are mostly on hold.

In Ostend, Belgium, ZoraBots brought one of its waist-high robots, equipped with cameras, microphones, and a screen, to a nursing home, allowing residents like Jozef Gouwy to virtually communicate with loved ones despite a ban on in-person visits.

Photo: Yves Herman/Reuters

In Manila, nearly 200 high school students took turns “teleporting” into a tall wheeled robot, developed by the school’s robotics club, to walk on stage during their graduation ceremony.

Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

And while Japan’s Chiba Zoological Park was temporarily closed due to the pandemic, the zoo used an autonomous robotic vehicle called RakuRo, equipped with 360-degree cameras, to offer virtual tours to children quarantined at home.

Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

SENTRY ROBOTS
Offices, stores, and medical centers are adopting robots as enforcers of a new coronavirus code.

At Fortis Hospital in Bangalore, India, a robot called Mitra uses a thermal camera to perform a preliminary screening of patients.

Photo: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

In Tunisia, the police use a tanklike robot to patrol the streets of its capital city, Tunis, verifying that citizens have permission to go out during curfew hours.

Photo: Khaled Nasraoui/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

And in Singapore, the Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park unleashed a Spot robot dog, developed by Boston Dynamics, to search for social-distancing violators. Spot won’t bark at them but will rather play a recorded message reminding park-goers to keep their distance.

Photo: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images

This article appears in the October 2020 print issue as “How Robots Became Essential Workers.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437614 Video Friday: Poimo Is a Portable ...

Posted on November 21, 2020 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!):

IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – [Online]
ROS World 2020 – November 12, 2020 – [Online]
CYBATHLON 2020 – November 13-14, 2020 – [Online]
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colo., USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid-like robot that can swim untethered, propelling itself by generating jets of water. The robot carries its own power source inside its body. It can also carry a sensor, such as a camera, for underwater exploration.

[ UCSD ]

Thanks Ioana!

Shark Robotics, French and European leader in Unmanned Ground Vehicles, is announcing today a disinfection add-on for Boston Dynamics Spot robot, designed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The Spot robot with Shark’s purpose-built disinfection payload can decontaminate up to 2,000 m2 in 15 minutes, in any space that needs to be sanitized – such as hospitals, metro stations, offices, warehouses or facilities.

[ Shark Robotics ]

Here’s an update on the Poimo portable inflatable mobility project we wrote about a little while ago; while not strictly robotics, it seems like it holds some promise for rapidly developing different soft structures that robotics might find useful.

[ University of Tokyo ]

Thanks Ryuma!

Pretty cool that you can do useful force feedback teleop while video chatting through a “regular broadband Internet connection.” Although, what “regular” means to you is a bit subjective, right?

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Dave!

While NASA's Mars rover Perseverance travels through space toward the Red Planet, its nearly identical rover twin is hard at work on Earth. The vehicle system test bed (VSTB) rover named OPTIMISM is a full-scale engineering version of the Mars-bound rover. It is used to test hardware and software before the commands are sent up to the Perseverance rover.

[ NASA ]

Jacquard takes ordinary, familiar objects and enhances them with new digital abilities and experiences, while remaining true to their original purpose — like being your favorite jacket, backpack or a pair of shoes that you love to wear.

Our ambition is simple: to make life easier. By staying connected to your digital world, your things can do so much more. Skip a song by brushing your sleeve. Take a picture by tapping on a shoulder strap. Get reminded about the phone you left behind with a blink of light or a haptic buzz on your cuff.

[ Google ATAP ]

Should you attend the IROS 2020 workshop on “Planetary Exploration Robots: Challenges and Opportunities”? Of course you should!

[ Workshop ]

Kuka makes a lot of these videos where I can’t help but think that if they put as much effort into programming the robot as they did into producing the video, the result would be much more impressive.

[ Kuka ]

The Colorado School of Mines is one of the first customers to buy a Spot robot from Boston Dynamics to help with robotics research. Watch as scientists take Spot into the school's mine for the first time.

[ HCR ] via [ CNET ]

A very interesting soft(ish) actuator from Ayato Kanada at Kyushu University's Control Engineering Lab.

A flexible ultrasonic motor (FUSM), which generates linear motion as a novel soft actuator. This motor consists of a single metal cube stator with a hole and an elastic elongated coil spring inserted into the hole. When voltages are applied to piezoelectric plates on the stator, the coil spring moves back and forward as a linear slider. In the FUSM that uses the friction drive as the principle, the most important parameter for optimizing its output is the preload between the stator and slider. The coil spring has a slightly larger diameter than the stator hole and generates the preload by expanding in a radial direction. The coil springs act not only as a flexible slider but also as a resistive positional sensor. Changes in the resistance between the stator and the coil spring end are converted to a voltage and used for position detection.

[ Control Engineering Lab ]

Thanks Ayato!

We show how to use the limbs of a quadruped robot to identify fine-grained soil, representative for Martian regolith.

[ Paper ] via [ ANYmal Research ]

PR2 is serving breakfast and cleaning up afterwards. It’s slow, but all you have to do is eat and leave.

That poor PR2 is a little more naked than it's probably comfortable with.

[ EASE ]

NVIDIA researchers present a hierarchical framework that combines model-based control and reinforcement learning (RL) to synthesize robust controllers for a quadruped robot (the Unitree Laikago).

[ NVIDIA ]

What's interesting about this assembly task is that the robot is using its arm only for positioning, and doing the actual assembly with just fingers.

[ RC2L ]

In this electronics assembly application, Kawasaki's cobot duAro2 uses a tool changing station to tackle a multitude of tasks and assemble different CPU models.

Okay but can it apply thermal paste to a CPU in the right way? Personally, I find that impossible.

[ Kawasaki ]

You only need to watch this video long enough to appreciate the concept of putting a robot on a robot.

[ Impress ]

In this lecture, we’ll hear from the man behind one of the biggest robotics companies in the world, Boston Dynamics, whose robotic dog, Spot, has been used to encourage social distancing in Singapore and is now getting ready for FDA approval to be able to measure patients’ vital signs in hospitals.

[ Alan Turing Institute ]

Greg Kahn from UC Berkeley wrote in to share his recent dissertation talk on “Mobile Robot Learning.”

In order to create mobile robots that can autonomously navigate real-world environments, we need generalizable perception and control systems that can reason about the outcomes of navigational decisions. Learning-based methods, in which the robot learns to navigate by observing the outcomes of navigational decisions in the real world, offer considerable promise for obtaining these intelligent navigation systems. However, there are many challenges impeding mobile robots from autonomously learning to act in the real-world, in particular (1) sample-efficiency–how to learn using a limited amount of data? (2) supervision–how to tell the robot what to do? and (3) safety–how to ensure the robot and environment are not damaged or destroyed during learning? In this talk, I will present deep reinforcement learning methods for addressing these real world mobile robot learning challenges and show results which enable ground and aerial robots to navigate in complex indoor and outdoor environments.

[ UC Berkeley ]

Thanks Greg!

Leila Takayama from UC Santa Cruz (and previously Google X and Willow Garage) gives a talk entitled “Toward a more human-centered future of robotics.”

Robots are no longer only in outer space, in factory cages, or in our imaginations. We interact with robotic agents when withdrawing cash from bank ATMs, driving cars with adaptive cruise control, and tuning our smart home thermostats. In the moment of those interactions with robotic agents, we behave in ways that do not necessarily align with the rational belief that robots are just plain machines. Through a combination of controlled experiments and field studies, we use theories and concepts from the social sciences to explore ways that human and robotic agents come together, including how people interact with personal robots and how people interact through telepresence robots. Together, we will explore topics and raise questions about the psychology of human-robot interaction and how we could invent a future of a more human-centered robotics that we actually want to live in.

[ Leila Takayama ]

Roboticist and stand-up comedian Naomi Fitter from Oregon State University gives a talk on “Everything I Know about Telepresence.”

Telepresence robots hold promise to connect people by providing videoconferencing and navigation abilities in far-away environments. At the same time, the impacts of current commercial telepresence robots are not well understood, and circumstances of robot use including internet connection stability, odd personalizations, and interpersonal relationship between a robot operator and people co-located with the robot can overshadow the benefit of the robot itself. And although the idea of telepresence robots has been around for over two decades, available nonverbal expressive abilities through telepresence robots are limited, and suitable operator user interfaces for the robot (for example, controls that allow for the operator to hold a conversation and move the robot simultaneously) remain elusive. So where should we be using telepresence robots? Are there any pitfalls to watch out for? What do we know about potential robot expressivity and user interfaces? This talk will cover my attempts to address these questions and ways in which the robotics research community can build off of this work

[ Talking Robotics ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots