Tag Archives: walker

#439404 Walker X by UBTECH

Posted on December 9, 2021 by Android

Walker X, is the latest version by UBTECH Robotics of its groundbreaking bipedal humanoid robot.

Posted in Human Robots

#439475 Video Friday: Walker X

Posted on July 30, 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!):

RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 2021 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

UBTECH Robotics, a global leader in intelligent humanoid robotics and AI technologies, today unveiled Walker X, the latest version of its groundbreaking bipedal humanoid robot. With significant improvement in physical performance, autonomous intelligence and human to robot interactions, Walker X took another step closer to becoming the gold standard in humanoid robotics.

This looks like a solid upgrade, with a 3 km/h top speed, “complex terrain navigation,” 3 kg of payload per hand, and UBTECH’s promise that the robot is compliant and safe to be around. But we’re not entirely sure what it actually, um, does, you know?

[ UBTECH ]

Everyone should be able to get into the game. Luna’s story inspired us to build: CHAMP. A robot that will bring kids who otherwise could not participate onto the field with US Soccer players all year.

The robot is based on OhmniLabs' platform (which we reviewed a while back), in partnership with Volkswagen.

[ US Soccer ]

Thanks, Joseph!

This tail-less gecko robot from IBSS, NUAA in China dynamically adjusts its climbing gait depending on how steep of a slope it’s trying to climb up.

It can avoid obstacles while climbing, too:

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Poramate!

GE Research’s Robotics team successfully demonstrated the feasibility of its bio-inspired soft robot design for rapid and efficient tunnel digging through a year and a half, $2.5 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Underminer program. The team built and demonstrated a prototype that autonomously and continuously tunneled underground at GE’s Research campus in Niskayuna NY at a comparable distance to existing, commercially available trenchless technologies.

[ GE Research ]

Personally I wouldn't have chosen tree trimming as an ideal example of the kinds of intricate and dangerous tasks that the Sarcos Guardian XT is good for, but here it is anyway.

[ Sarcos ]

This summer, students from ETH Zurich will test various technologies on the river Limmat for the automatic removal of waste. The Autonomous River Cleanup project is starting with rivers to tackle the global problem of marine pollution.

[ ETH Zurich ]

Thanks, Fan!

The robotic arm on the China Space Station (CSS) is designed to help astronauts perform extravehicular activities. The space station arm is attached to the Tianhe core module, the first and main component of the CSS.

[ CMS ]

Thanks, Fan!

Tencent is working on some stylish gaits for a simulated quadruped.

Looks like this'll be an IROS paper in the fall.

[ Tencent ]

Thanks, Fan!

Dipper is an aerial-aquatic hybrid vehicle, capable of controlled motion in air and underwater. Dipper is a lightweight fixed-wind UAV with actively swept wings that achieves dynamic transitions between the two media. The vehicle has only one main propulsion motor, and uses a novel clutch system to engage either the front tractor propeller for flight in air, or the rear ship's screw propeller for underwater propulsion.

[ Dipper ]

For when you need to pipette something suuuper toxic, I guess?

[ Shadow ]

Some robotics companies look for ways to integrate autonomous systems into warehouses with a minimal amount of infrastructure. Ocado is not one of those companies.

I’m not sure that the question of whether this is one robot or many robots is all that relevant, to be honest. It’s a robotic system, and you can define robotic systems to be whatever you feel like, more or less.

[ Ocado ]

The European Robotic Arm (ERA) will be launched to the International Space Station together with the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module, called “Nauka.” ERA is the first robot able to “walk” around the Russian segment of the Space Station.

[ ESA ]

Fotokite Sigma provides public safety teams with mission-critical situational awareness from elevated perspectives. Fotokite’s actively tethered UAS (unmanned aerial system) saves team resources by launching, flying, and landing with the single push of a button; no piloting necessary. Fotokite Sigma is authorized and recognized by aviation authorities as a safer alternative to traditional tethered drone and free-flying public safety drone systems.

[ Fotokite ]

I know this is jut an end effector for making gloves on a Kuka arm, but if you were designing a robot to slap people in the face, this is exactly what it would look like.

[ Kuka ]

Vector 2.0 is still in the works at Digital Dream Labs, the new owners of Anki.

[ Vector ]

Pepper may not be in production anymore, but it’s still in active use, is supported, and is available for purchase.

[ RobotLab ]

Black in Robotics advocates for more diversity and inclusion in robotics, and helps to boost the voices of under-represented minorities in our field. If you missed this series of three videos that were part of the IROS program, they’re now on YouTube, and we’ve got them here for you.

[ Black in Robotics ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439394 Video Friday: Walker X

Posted on July 9, 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!):

RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]
ROSCon 2021 – October 21-23, 2021 – New Orleans, LA, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

UBTECH Robotics, a global leader in intelligent humanoid robotics and AI technologies, today unveiled Walker X, the latest version of its groundbreaking bipedal humanoid robot. With significant improvement in physical performance, autonomous intelligence and human to robot interactions, Walker X took another step closer to becoming the gold standard in humanoid robotics.

This looks like a solid upgrade, with a 3 km/h top speed, “complex terrain navigation,” 3 kg of payload per hand, and UBTECH’s promise that the robot is compliant and safe to be around. But we’re not entirely sure what it actually, um, does, you know?

[ UBTECH ]

Everyone should be able to get into the game. Luna’s story inspired us to build: CHAMP. A robot that will bring kids who otherwise could not participate onto the field with US Soccer players all year.

The robot is based on Ohmnilabs' platform (which we reviewed a while back), in partnership with Volkswagen.

[ US Soccer ]

Thanks, Joseph!

This tail-less gecko robot from VISTEC in Thailand dynamically adjusts its climbing gait depending on how steep of a slope it’s trying to climb up.

It can avoid obstacles while climbing, too:

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Poramate!

GE Research’s Robotics team successfully demonstrated the feasibility of its bio-inspired soft robot design for rapid and efficient tunnel digging through a year and a half, $2.5 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Underminer program. The team built and demonstrated a prototype that autonomously and continuously tunneled underground at GE’s Research campus in Niskayuna NY at a comparable distance to existing, commercially available trenchless technologies.

[ GE Research ]

Personally I wouldn't have chosen tree trimming as an ideal example of the kinds of intricate and dangerous tasks that the Sarcos Guardian XT is good for, but here it is anyway.

[ Sarcos ]

This summer, students from ETH Zurich will test various technologies on the river Limmat for the automatic removal of waste. The Autonomous River Cleanup project is starting with rivers to tackle the global problem of marine pollution.

[ ETH Zurich ]

Thanks, Fan!

The robotic arm on the China Space Station (CSS) is designed to help astronauts perform extravehicular activities. The space station arm is attached to the Tianhe core module, the first and main component of the CSS.

[ CMS ]

Thanks, Fan!

Tencent is working on some stylish gaits for a simulated quadruped.

Looks like this'll be an IROS paper in the fall.

[ Tencent ]

Thanks, Fan!

Dipper is an aerial-aquatic hybrid vehicle, capable of controlled motion in air and underwater. Dipper is a lightweight fixed-wind UAV with actively swept wings that achieves dynamic transitions between the two media. The vehicle has only one main propulsion motor, and uses a novel clutch system to engage either the front tractor propeller for flight in air, or the rear ship's screw propeller for underwater propulsion.

[ Dipper ]

For when you need to pipette something suuuper toxic, I guess?

[ Shadow ]

Some robotics companies look for ways to integrate autonomous systems into warehouses with a minimal amount of infrastructure. Ocado is not one of those companies.

I’m not sure that the question of whether this is one robot or many robots is all that relevant, to be honest. It’s a robotic system, and you can define robotic systems to be whatever you feel like, more or less.

[ Ocado ]

The European Robotic Arm (ERA) will be launched to the International Space Station together with the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module, called “Nauka.” ERA is the first robot able to “walk” around the Russian segment of the Space Station.

[ ESA ]

Fotokite Sigma provides public safety teams with mission-critical situational awareness from elevated perspectives. Fotokite’s actively tethered UAS (unmanned aerial system) saves team resources by launching, flying, and landing with the single push of a button; no piloting necessary. Fotokite Sigma is authorized and recognized by aviation authorities as a safer alternative to traditional tethered drone and free-flying public safety drone systems.

[ Fotokite ]

I know this is jut an end effector for making gloves on a Kuka arm, but if you were designing a robot to slap people in the face, this is exactly what it would look like.

[ Kuka ]

Vector 2.0 is still in the works at Digital Dream Labs, the new owners of Anki.

[ Vector ]

Pepper may not be in production anymore, but it’s still in active use, is supported, and is available for purchase.

[ RobotLab ]

Black in Robotics advocates for more diversity and inclusion in robotics, and helps to boost the voices of under-represented minorities in our field. If you missed this series of three videos that were part of the IROS program, they’re now on YouTube, and we’ve got them here for you.

[ Black in Robotics ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#439036 Video Friday: Shadow Plays Jenga, and ...

Posted on March 27, 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
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USA
WeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – Coral Gables, FL, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

The Shadow Robot team couldn't resist! Our Operator, Joanna, is using the Shadow Teleoperation System which, fun and games aside, can help those in difficult, dangerous and distant jobs.

Shadow could challenge this MIT Jenga-playing robot, but I bet they wouldn't win:

[ Shadow Robot ]

Digit is gradually stomping the Agility Robotics logo into a big grassy field fully autonomously.

[ Agility Robotics ]

This is a pretty great and very short robotic magic show.

[ Mario the Magician ]

A research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a modular solution for drone delivery of larger packages without the need for a complex fleet of drones of varying sizes. By allowing teams of small drones to collaboratively lift objects using an adaptive control algorithm, the strategy could allow a wide range of packages to be delivered using a combination of several standard-sized vehicles.

[ GA Tech ]

I've seen this done using vision before, but Flexiv's Rizon 4s can keep a ball moving along a specific trajectory using only force sensing and control.

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks Yunfan!

This combination of a 3D aerial projection system and a sensing interface can be used as an interactive and intuitive control system for things like robot arms, but in this case, it's being used to make simulated pottery. Much less messy than the traditional way of doing it.

More details on Takafumi Matsumaru's work at the Bio-Robotics & Human-Mechatronics Laboratory at Waseda University at the link below.

[ BLHM ]

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called astronauts Shannon Walker and Kate Rubins on the ISS, and they brought up Astrobee, at which point Shannon reaches over and rips Honey right off of her charging dock to get her on camera.

[ NASA ]

Here's a quick three minute update on Perseverance and Ingenuity from JPL.

[ Mars 2020 ]

Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents “dynamic grasping,” where the drone attempts to grasp an object while moving. On the other hand, biological systems (e.g. birds) rely on compliant and soft parts to dampen contact forces and compensate for grasping inaccuracy, enabling impressive feats. This paper presents the first prototype of a soft drone—a quadrotor where traditional (i.e. rigid) landing gears are replaced with a soft tendon-actuated gripper to enable aggressive grasping.

[ MIT ]

In this video we present results from a field deployment inside the Løkken Mine underground pyrite mine in Norway. The Løkken mine was operative from 1654 to 1987 and contains narrow but long corridors, alongside vast rooms and challenging vertical stopes. In this field study we evaluated selected autonomous exploration and visual search capabilities of a subset of the aerial robots of Team CERBERUS towards the goal of complete subterranean autonomy.

[ Team CERBERUS ]

What you can do with a 1,000 FPS projector with a high speed tracking system.

[ Ishikawa Group ]

ANYbotics’ collaboration with BASF, one of the largest global chemical manufacturers, displays the efficiency, quality, and scalability of robotic inspection and data-collection capabilities in complex industrial environments.

[ ANYbotics ]

Does your robot arm need a stylish jacket?

[ Fraunhofer ]

Trossen Robotics unboxes a Unitree A1, and it's actually an unboxing where they have to figure out everything from scratch.

[ Trossen ]

Robots have learned to drive cars, assist in surgeries―and vacuum our floors. But can they navigate the unwritten rules of a busy sidewalk? Until they can, robotics experts Leila Takayama and Chris Nicholson believe, robots won’t be able to fulfill their immense potential. In this conversation, Chris and Leila explore the future of robotics and the role open source will play in it.

[ Red Hat ]

Christoph Bartneck's keynote at the 6th Joint UAE Symposium on Social Robotics, focusing on what roles robots can play during the Covid crisis and why so many social robots fail in the market.

[ HIT Lab ]

Decision-making based on arbitrary criteria is legal in some contexts, such as employment, and not in others, such as criminal sentencing. As algorithms replace human deciders, HAI-EIS fellow Kathleen Creel argues arbitrariness at scale is morally and legally problematic. In this HAI seminar, she explains how the heart of this moral issue relates to domination and a lack of sufficient opportunity for autonomy. It relates in interesting ways to the moral wrong of discrimination. She proposes technically informed solutions that can lessen the impact of algorithms at scale and so mitigate or avoid the moral harm identified.

[ Stanford HAI ]

Sawyer B. Fuller speaks on Autonomous Insect-Sized Robots at the UC Berkeley EECS Colloquium series.

Sub-gram (insect-sized) robots have enormous potential that is largely untapped. From a research perspective, their extreme size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints also forces us to reimagine everything from how they compute their control laws to how they are fabricated. These questions are the focus of the Autonomous Insect Robotics Laboratory at the University of Washington. I will discuss potential applications for insect robots and recent advances from our group. These include the first wireless flights of a sub-gram flapping-wing robot that weighs barely more than a toothpick. I will describe efforts to expand its capabilities, including the first multimodal ground-flight locomotion, the first demonstration of steering control, and how to find chemical plume sources by integrating the smelling apparatus of a live moth. I will also describe a backpack for live beetles with a steerable camera and conceptual design of robots that could scale all the way down to the “gnat robots” first envisioned by Flynn & Brooks in the ‘80s.

[ UC Berkeley ]

Thanks Fan!

Joshua Vander Hook, Computer Scientist, NIAC Fellow, and Technical Group Supervisor at NASA JPL, presents an overview of the AI Group(s) at JPL, and recent work on single and multi-agent autonomous systems supporting space exploration, Earth science, NASA technology development, and national defense programs.

[ UMD ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#436760 Intelligent Humanoid Service Robot

Posted on February 6, 2021 by Android

UBTECH Robotics has created Walker, a humanoid service robot with a full range of sensors including force, vision, audio, and spatial perception.

Posted in Human Robots