Tag Archives: Zero

#439100 Video Friday: Robotic Eyeball Camera

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
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
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.

What if seeing devices looked like us? Eyecam is a prototype exploring the potential future design of sensing devices. Eyecam is a webcam shaped like a human eye that can see, blink, look around and observe us.

And it's open source, so you can build your own!

[ Eyecam ]

Looks like Festo will be turning some of its bionic robots into educational kits, which is a pretty cool idea.

[ Bionics4Education ]

Underwater soft robots are challenging to model and control because of their high degrees of freedom and their intricate coupling with water. In this paper, we present a method that leverages the recent development in differentiable simulation coupled with a differentiable, analytical hydrodynamic model to assist with the modeling and control of an underwater soft robot. We apply this method to Starfish, a customized soft robot design that is easy to fabricate and intuitive to manipulate.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

Rainbow Robotics, the company who made HUBO, has a new collaborative robot arm.

[ Rainbow Robotics ]

Thanks Fan!

We develop an integrated robotic platform for advanced collaborative robots and demonstrates an application of multiple robots collaboratively transporting an object to different positions in a factory environment. The proposed platform integrates a drone, a mobile manipulator robot, and a dual-arm robot to work autonomously, while also collaborating with a human worker. The platform also demonstrates the potential of a novel manufacturing process, which incorporates adaptive and collaborative intelligence to improve the efficiency of mass customization for the factory of the future.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Poramate!

In Sevastopol State University the team of the Laboratory of Underwater Robotics and Control Systems and Research and Production Association “Android Technika” performed tests of an underwater anropomorphic manipulator robot.

[ Sevastopol State ]

Thanks Fan!

Taiwanese company TCI Gene created a COVID test system based on their fully automated and enclosed gene testing machine QVS-96S. The system includes two ABB robots and carries out 1800 tests per day, operating 24/7. Every hour 96 virus samples tests are made with an accuracy of 99.99%.

[ ABB ]

A short video showing how a Halodi Robotics can be used in a commercial guarding application.

[ Halodi ]

During the past five years, under the NASA Early Space Innovations program, we have been developing new design optimization methods for underactuated robot hands, aiming to achieve versatile manipulation in highly constrained environments. We have prototyped hands for NASA’s Astrobee robot, an in-orbit assistive free flyer for the International Space Station.

[ ROAM Lab ]

The new, improved OTTO 1500 is a workhorse AMR designed to move heavy payloads through demanding environments faster than any other AMR on the market, with zero compromise to safety.

[ ROAM Lab ]

Very, very high performance sensing and actuation to pull this off.

[ Ishikawa Group ]

We introduce a conversational social robot designed for long-term in-home use to help with loneliness. We present a novel robot behavior design to have simple self-reflection conversations with people to improve wellness, while still being feasible, deployable, and safe.

[ HCI Lab ]

We are one of the 5 winners of the Start-up Challenge. This video illustrates what we achieved during the Swisscom 5G exploration week. Our proof-of-concept tele-excavation system is composed of a Menzi Muck M545 walking excavator automated & customized by Robotic Systems Lab and IBEX motion platform as the operator station. The operator and remote machine are connected for the first time via a 5G network infrastructure which was brought to our test field by Swisscom.

[ RSL ]

This video shows LOLA balancing on different terrain when being pushed in different directions. The robot is technically blind, not using any camera-based or prior information on the terrain (hard ground is assumed).

[ TUM ]

Autonomous driving when you cannot see the road at all because it's buried in snow is some serious autonomous driving.

[ Norlab ]

A hierarchical and robust framework for learning bipedal locomotion is presented and successfully implemented on the 3D biped robot Digit. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by successfully transferring the learned policy in simulation to the Digit robot hardware, realizing sustained walking gaits under external force disturbances and challenging terrains not included during the training process.

[ OSU ]

This is a video summary of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue's deployments under the direction of emergency response agencies to more than 30 disasters in five countries from 2001 (9/11 World Trade Center) to 2018 (Hurricane Michael). It includes the first use of ground robots for a disaster (WTC, 2001), the first use of small unmanned aerial systems (Hurricane Katrina 2005), and the first use of water surface vehicles (Hurricane Wilma, 2005).

[ CRASAR ]

In March, a team from the Oxford Robotics Institute collected a week of epic off-road driving data, as part of the Sense-Assess-eXplain (SAX) project.

[ Oxford Robotics ]

As a part of the AAAI 2021 Spring Symposium Series, HEBI Robotics was invited to present an Industry Talk on the symposium's topic: Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild. Included in this presentation was a short case study on one of our upcoming mobile robots that is being designed to successfully navigate unstructured environments where today's robots struggle.

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Hardik!

This Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar is from Chad Jenkins at the University of Michigan, on “Semantic Robot Programming… and Maybe Making the World a Better Place.”

I will present our efforts towards accessible and general methods of robot programming from the demonstrations of human users. Our recent work has focused on Semantic Robot Programming (SRP), a declarative paradigm for robot programming by demonstration that builds on semantic mapping. In contrast to procedural methods for motion imitation in configuration space, SRP is suited to generalize user demonstrations of goal scenes in workspace, such as for manipulation in cluttered environments. SRP extends our efforts to crowdsource robot learning from demonstration at scale through messaging protocols suited to web/cloud robotics. With such scaling of robotics in mind, prospects for cultivating both equal opportunity and technological excellence will be discussed in the context of broadening and strengthening Title IX and Title VI.

[ UMD ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438998 Foam Sword Fencing With a PR2 Is the ...

Most of what we cover in the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) space involves collaboration, because collaborative interactions tend to be productive, positive, and happy. Yay! But sometimes, collaboration is not what you want. Sometimes, you want competition.

Competition between humans and robots doesn’t have to be a bad thing, in the same way that competition between humans and humans doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are all kinds of scenarios in which humans respond favorably to competition, and exercise is an obvious example.

Studies have shown that humans can perform significantly better when they’re exercising competitively as opposed to when they’re exercising individually. And while researchers have looked at whether robots can be effective exercise coaches (they can be), there hasn’t been a lot of exploration of physical robots actually competing directly with humans. Roboticists from the University of Washington decided to put adversarial exercise robots to the test, and they did it by giving a PR2 a giant foam sword. Awesome.

This exercise game matches a PR2 with a human in a zero-sum competitive fencing game with foam swords. Expecting the PR2 to actually be a competitive fencer isn’t realistic because, like, it’s a PR2. Instead, the objective of the game is for the human to keep their foam sword within a target area near the PR2 while also avoiding the PR2’s low-key sword-waving. A VR system allows the user to see the target area, while also giving the system a way to track the user’s location and pose.

Looks like fun, right? It’s also exercise, at least in the sense that the user’s heart rate nearly doubled over their resting heart rate during the highest scoring game. This is super preliminary research, though, and there’s still a lot of work to do. It’ll be important to figure out how skilled a competitive robot should be in order to keep providing a reasonable challenge to a human who gradually improves over time, while also being careful to avoid generating any negative reactions. For example, the robot should probably not beat you over the head with its foam sword, even if that’s a highly effective strategy for getting your heart rate up.

Competitive Physical Human-Robot Game Play, by Boling Yang, Xiangyu Xie, Golnaz Habibi, and Joshua R. Smith from the University of Washington and MIT, was presented as a late-breaking report at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438925 Nanophotonics Could Be the ‘Dark ...

The race to build the first practical quantum computers looks like a two-horse contest between machines built from superconducting qubits and those that use trapped ions. But new research suggests a third contender—machines based on optical technology—could sneak up on the inside.

The most advanced quantum computers today are the ones built by Google and IBM, which rely on superconducting circuits to generate the qubits that form the basis of quantum calculations. They are now able to string together tens of qubits, and while controversial, Google claims its machines have achieved quantum supremacy—the ability to carry out a computation beyond normal computers.

Recently this approach has been challenged by a wave of companies looking to use trapped ion qubits, which are more stable and less error-prone than superconducting ones. While these devices are less developed, engineering giant Honeywell has already released a machine with 10 qubits, which it says is more powerful than a machine made of a greater number of superconducting qubits.

But despite this progress, both of these approaches have some major drawbacks. They require specialized fabrication methods, incredibly precise control mechanisms, and they need to be cooled to close to absolute zero to protect the qubits from any outside interference.

That’s why researchers at Canadian quantum computing hardware and software startup Xanadu are backing an alternative quantum computing approach based on optics, which was long discounted as impractical. In a paper published last week in Nature, they unveiled the first fully programmable and scalable optical chip that can run quantum algorithms. Not only does the system run at room temperature, but the company says it could scale to millions of qubits.

The idea isn’t exactly new. As Chris Lee notes in Ars Technica, people have been experimenting with optical approaches to quantum computing for decades, because encoding information in photons’ quantum states and manipulating those states is relatively easy. The biggest problem was that optical circuits were very large and not readily programmable, which meant you had to build a new computer for every new problem you wanted to solve.

That started to change thanks to the growing maturity of photonic integrated circuits. While early experiments with optical computing involved complex table-top arrangements of lasers, lenses, and detectors, today it’s possible to buy silicon chips not dissimilar to electronic ones that feature hundreds of tiny optical components.

In recent years, the reliability and performance of these devices has improved dramatically, and they’re now regularly used by the telecommunications industry. Some companies believe they could be the future of artificial intelligence too.

This allowed the Xanadu researchers to design a silicon chip that implements a complex optical network made up of beam splitters, waveguides, and devices called interferometers that cause light sources to interact with each other.

The chip can generate and manipulate up to eight qubits, but unlike conventional qubits, which can simultaneously be in two states, these qubits can be in any configuration of three states, which means they can carry more information.

Once the light has travelled through the network, it is then fed out to cutting-edge photon-counting detectors that provide the result. This is one of the potential limitations of the system, because currently these detectors need to be cryogenically cooled, although the rest of the chip does not.

But most importantly, the chip is easily re-programmable, which allows it to tackle a variety of problems. The computation can be controlled by adjusting the settings of these interferometers, but the researchers have also developed a software platform that hides the physical complexity from users and allows them to program it using fairly conventional code.

The company announced that its chips were available on the cloud in September of 2020, but the Nature paper is the first peer-reviewed test of their system. The researchers verified that the computations being done were genuinely quantum mechanical in nature, but they also implemented two more practical algorithms: one for simulating molecules and the other for judging how similar two graphs are, which has applications in a variety of pattern recognition problems.

In an accompanying opinion piece, Ulrik Andersen from the Technical University of Denmark says the quality of the qubits needs to be improved considerably and photon losses reduced if the technology is ever to scale to practical problems. But, he says, this breakthrough suggests optical approaches “could turn out to be the dark horse of quantum computing.”

Image Credit: Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Garcia / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#438006 Smellicopter Drone Uses Live Moth ...

Research into robotic sensing has, understandably I guess, been very human-centric. Most of us navigate and experience the world visually and in 3D, so robots tend to get covered with things like cameras and lidar. Touch is important to us, as is sound, so robots are getting pretty good with understanding tactile and auditory information, too. Smell, though? In most cases, smell doesn’t convey nearly as much information for us, so while it hasn’t exactly been ignored in robotics, it certainly isn’t the sensing modality of choice in most cases.

Part of the problem with smell sensing is that we just don’t have a good way of doing it, from a technical perspective. This has been a challenge for a long time, and it’s why we either bribe or trick animals like dogs, rats, vultures, and other animals to be our sensing systems for airborne chemicals. If only they’d do exactly what we wanted them to do all the time, this would be fine, but they don’t, so it’s not.

Until we get better at making chemical sensors, leveraging biology is the best we can do, and what would be ideal would be some sort of robot-animal hybrid cyborg thing. We’ve seen some attempts at remote controlled insects, but as it turns out, you can simplify things if you don’t use the entire insect, but instead just find a way to use its sensing system. Enter the Smellicopter.

There’s honestly not too much to say about the drone itself. It’s an open-source drone project called Crazyflie 2.0, with some additional off the shelf sensors for obstacle avoidance and stabilization. The interesting bits are a couple of passive fins that keep the drone pointed into the wind, and then the sensor, called an electroantennogram.

Image: UW

The drone’s sensor, called an electroantennogram, consists of a “single excised antenna” from a Manduca sexta hawkmoth and a custom signal processing circuit.

To make one of these sensors, you just, uh, “harvest” an antenna from a live hawkmoth. Obligingly, the moth antenna is hollow, meaning that you can stick electrodes up it. Whenever the olfactory neurons in the antenna (which is still technically alive even though it’s not attached to the moth anymore) encounter an odor that they’re looking for, they produce an electrical signal that the electrodes pick up. Plug the other ends of the electrodes into a voltage amplifier and filter, run it through an analog to digital converter, and you’ve got a chemical sensor that weighs just 1.5 gram and consumes only 2.7 mW of power. It’s significantly more sensitive than a conventional metal-oxide odor sensor, in a much smaller and more efficient form factor, making it ideal for drones.

To localize an odor, the Smellicopter uses a simple bioinspired approach called crosswind casting, which involves moving laterally left and right and then forward when an odor is detected. Here’s how it works:

The vehicle takes off to a height of 40 cm and then hovers for ten seconds to allow it time to orient upwind. The smellicopter starts casting left and right crosswind. When a volatile chemical is detected, the smellicopter will surge 25 cm upwind, and then resume casting. As long as the wind direction is fairly consistent, this strategy will bring the insect or robot increasingly closer to a singular source with each surge.

Since odors are airborne, they need a bit of a breeze to spread very far, and the Smellicopter won’t be able to detect them unless it’s downwind of the source. But, that’s just how odors work— even if you’re right next to the source, if the wind is blowing from you towards the source rather than the other way around, you might not catch a whiff of it.

Whenever the olfactory neurons in the antenna encounter an odor that they’re looking for, they produce an electrical signal that the electrodes pick up

There are a few other constraints to keep in mind with this sensor as well. First, rather than detecting something useful (like explosives), it’s going to detect the smells of pretty flowers, because moths like pretty flowers. Second, the antenna will literally go dead on you within a couple hours, since it only functions while its tissues are alive and metaphorically kicking. Interestingly, it may be possible to use CRISPR-based genetic modification to breed moths with antennae that do respond to useful smells, which would be a neat trick, and we asked the researchers—Melanie Anderson, a doctoral student of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle; Thomas Daniel, a UW professor of biology; and Sawyer Fuller, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering—about this, along with some other burning questions, via email.

IEEE Spectrum, asking the important questions first: So who came up with “Smellicopter”?

Melanie Anderson: Tom Daniel coined the term “Smellicopter”. Another runner up was “OdorRotor”!

In general, how much better are moths at odor localization than robots?

Melanie Anderson: Moths are excellent at odor detection and odor localization and need to be in order to find mates and food. Their antennae are much more sensitive and specialized than any portable man-made odor sensor. We can't ask the moths how exactly they search for odors so well, but being able to have the odor sensitivity of a moth on a flying platform is a big step in that direction.

Tom Daniel: Our best estimate is that they outperform robotic sensing by at least three orders of magnitude.

How does the localization behavior of the Smellicopter compare to that of a real moth?

Anderson: The cast-and-surge odor search strategy is a simplified version of what we believe the moth (and many other odor searching animals) are doing. It is a reactive strategy that relies on the knowledge that if you detect odor, you can assume that the source is somewhere up-wind of you. When you detect odor, you simply move upwind, and when you lose the odor signal you cast in a cross-wind direction until you regain the signal.

Can you elaborate on the potential for CRISPR to be able to engineer moths for the detection of specific chemicals?

Anderson: CRISPR is already currently being used to modify the odor detection pathways in moth species. It is one of our future efforts to specifically use this to make the antennae sensitive to other chemicals of interest, such as the chemical scent of explosives.

Sawyer Fuller: We think that one of the strengths of using a moth's antenna, in addition to its speed, is that it may provide a path to both high chemical specificity as well as high sensitivity. By expressing a preponderance of only one or a few chemosensors, we are anticipating that a moth antenna will give a strong response only to that chemical. There are several efforts underway in other research groups to make such specific, sensitive chemical detectors. Chemical sensing is an area where biology exceeds man-made systems in terms of efficiency, small size, and sensitivity. So that's why we think that the approach of trying to leverage biological machinery that already exists has some merit.

You mention that the antennae lifespan can be extended for a few days with ice- how feasible do you think this technology is outside of a research context?

Anderson: The antennae can be stored in tiny vials in a standard refrigerator or just with an ice pack to extend their life to about a week. Additionally, the process for attaching the antenna to the electrical circuit is a teachable skill. It is definitely feasible outside of a research context.

Considering the trajectory that sensor development is on, how long do you think that this biological sensor system will outperform conventional alternatives?

Anderson: It's hard to speak toward what will happen in the future, but currently, the moth antenna still stands out among any commercially-available portable sensors.

There have been some experiments with cybernetic insects; what are the advantages and disadvantages of your approach, as opposed to (say) putting some sort of tracking system on a live moth?

Daniel: I was part of a cyber insect team a number of years ago. The challenge of such research is that the animal has natural reactions to attempts to steer or control it.

Anderson: While moths are better at odor tracking than robots currently, the advantage of the drone platform is that we have control over it. We can tell it to constrain the search to a certain area, and return after it finishes searching.

What can you tell us about the health, happiness, and overall wellfare of the moths in your experiments?

Anderson: The moths are cold anesthetized before the antennae are removed. They are then frozen so that they can be used for teaching purposes or in other research efforts.

What are you working on next?

Daniel: The four big efforts are (1) CRISPR modification, (2) experiments aimed at improving the longevity of the antennal preparation, (3) improved measurements of antennal electrical responses to odors combined with machine learning to see if we can classify different odors, and (4) flight in outdoor environments.

Fuller: The moth's antenna sensor gives us a new ability to sense with a much shorter latency than was previously possible with similarly-sized sensors (e.g. semiconductor sensors). What exactly a robot agent should do to best take advantage of this is an open question. In particular, I think the speed may help it to zero in on plume sources in complex environments much more quickly. Think of places like indoor settings with flow down hallways that splits out at doorways, and in industrial settings festooned with pipes and equipment. We know that it is possible to search out and find odors in such scenarios, as anybody who has had to contend with an outbreak of fruit flies can attest. It is also known that these animals respond very quickly to sudden changes in odor that is present in such turbulent, patchy plumes. Since it is hard to reduce such plumes to a simple model, we think that machine learning may provide insights into how to best take advantage of the improved temporal plume information we now have available.

Tom Daniel also points out that the relative simplicity of this project (now that the UW researchers have it all figured out, that is) means that even high school students could potentially get involved in it, even if it’s on a ground robot rather than a drone. All the details are in the paper that was just published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots