#436114 Video Friday: Transferring Human Motion ...

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!):

ARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, China

ROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Macau

IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

We are very sad to say that MIT professor emeritus Woodie Flowers has passed away. Flowers will be remembered for (among many other things, like co-founding FIRST) the MIT 2.007 course that he began teaching in the mid-1970s, famous for its student competitions.

These competitions got a bunch of well-deserved publicity over the years; here’s one from 1985:

And the 2.007 competitions are still going strong—this year’s theme was Moonshot, and you can watch a replay of the event here.

[ MIT ]

Looks like Aibo is getting wireless integration with Hitachi appliances, which turns out to be pretty cute:

What is this magical box where you push a button and 60 seconds later fluffy pancakes come out?!

[ Aibo ]

LiftTiles are a “modular and reconfigurable room-scale shape display” that can turn your floor and walls into on-demand structures.

[ LiftTiles ]

Ben Katz, a grad student in MIT’s Biomimetics Robotics Lab, has been working on these beautiful desktop-sized Furuta pendulums:

That’s a crowdfunding project I’d pay way too much for.

[ Ben Katz ]

A clever bit of cable manipulation from MIT, using GelSight tactile sensors.

[ Paper ]

A useful display of industrial autonomy on ANYmal from the Oxford Robotics Group.

This video is of a demonstration for the ORCA Robotics Hub showing the ANYbotics ANYmal robot carrying out industrial inspection using autonomy software from Oxford Robotics Institute.

[ ORCA Hub ] via [ DRS ]

Thanks Maurice!

Meet Katie Hamilton, a software engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who got into robotics because she wanted to help people with daily life. Katie writes code for robots, like Astrobee, who are assisting astronauts with routine tasks on the International Space Station.

[ NASA Astrobee ]

Transferring human motion to a mobile robotic manipulator and ensuring safe physical human-robot interaction are crucial steps towards automating complex manipulation tasks in human-shared environments. In this work we present a robot whole-body teleoperation framework for human motion transfer. We validate our approach through several experiments using the TIAGo robot, showing this could be an easy way for a non-expert to teach a rough manipulation skill to an assistive robot.

[ Paper ]

This is pretty cool looking for an autonomous boat, but we’ll see if they can build a real one by 2020 since at the moment it’s just an average rendering.

[ ProMare ]

I had no idea that asparagus grows like this. But, sure does make it easy for a robot to harvest.

[ Inaho ]

Skip to 2:30 in this Pepper unboxing video to hear the noise it makes when tickled.

[ HIT Lab NZ ]

In this interview, Jean Paul Laumond discusses his movement from mathematics to robotics and his career contributions to the field, especially in regards to motion planning and anthropomorphic motion. Describing his involvement at CNRS and in other robotics projects, such as HILARE, he comments on the distinction in perception between the robotics approach and a mathematics one.

[ IEEE RAS History ]

Here’s a couple of videos from the CMU Robotics Institute archives, showing some of the work that took place over the last few decades.

[ CMU RI ]

In this episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, Lex Fridman speaks with David Ferrucci from IBM about Watson and (you guessed it) artificial intelligence.

David Ferrucci led the team that built Watson, the IBM question-answering system that beat the top humans in the world at the game of Jeopardy. He is also the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Elemental Cognition, a company working engineer AI systems that understand the world the way people do. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

[ AI Podcast ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar is by Pieter Abbeel from UC Berkeley, on “Deep Learning for Robotics.”

Programming robots remains notoriously difficult. Equipping robots with the ability to learn would by-pass the need for what otherwise often ends up being time-consuming task specific programming. This talk will describe recent progress in deep reinforcement learning (robots learning through their own trial and error), in apprenticeship learning (robots learning from observing people), and in meta-learning for action (robots learning to learn). This work has led to new robotic capabilities in manipulation, locomotion, and flight, with the same approach underlying advances in each of these domains.

[ CMU RI ]

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