Archive 08.06.2020

An autonomous mobility system that works like a wheelchair without anyone pushing it is scuttling around a Tokyo airport to help with social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

After a weak 2019, we originally expected the 2020 robot market to recover strongly, but COVID-19 changed the market revenue growth forecast from 4.8% to -3.6%. In the long run, the pandemic will accelerate existing trends for industrial automation

The development of systems for robot-assisted surgery is difficult, with the need to meet stringent clinical requirements, get regulator approvals, and keep costs under control. Today, Titan Medical Inc. announced an agreement with Medtronic PLC to advance the design and development of surgical robots. The onetime rivals also signed a licensing agreement regarding some of Titan’s intellectual property.

Under the agreement, both companies can develop robot-assisted surgical systems in their respective businesses, while Titan will receive a series of payments that reach $31 million in return for Medtronic’s license for the technologies. The payments will arrive as milestones are completed and verified.

Milestones include fundraising

A steering committee including representatives from Toronto-based Titan Medical and Dublin, Ireland-based Medtronic will oversee work toward achievement of the milestones. One of them is for Titan to raise an additional $18 million in capital within four months of the development start date, which is expected to occur this month.

Titan has also received from Medtronic a senior secured loan of $1.5 million that will be increased increased by an amount equal to certain legal expenses related to transactions and intellectual property with an interest rate of 8% per annum. The loan is repayable on June 4, 2023, or upon the earlier completion of the last milestone.

Until the loan is repaid, Medtronic may have one non-voting observer on Titan’s board of directors. Charles Federico, who has served as the company’s chairman since May 2019, and John Schellhorn, who has served as a director since June 2017, have decided to retire from Titan’s board. The board will consist of three members, including David McNally; John Barker, an independent director; and Stephen Randall, Titan’s chief financial officer, while a search for additional independent directors is conducted.

Titan Medical pays $10M for Medtronic surgical robot licenses

Under the terms of the separate agreement, Medtronic has licensed certain robot-assisted surgical technologies from Titan for an upfront payment of $10 million. Titan said it retains the rights to continue to develop and commercialize those technologies for its own business.

“These agreements with Medtronic will allow Titan to continue to develop its single-port robotic surgical technologies while sharing our expertise and technologies with Medtronic,” stated David McNally, president and CEO of Titan Medical. “We are very excited about the opportunity to continue Titan’s pioneering work to bring new single-port surgical options to the market.”

These agreements are between Medtronic and Titan Medical, which is not affiliated with Titan Spine, which Medtronic acquired in 2019. They are another step in Medtronic’s effort to break into the robot-assisted surgery space, which remains dominated by Intuitive Surgical and its da Vinci SP.

Medtronic completed a $1.7 billion purchase of Mazor Robotics in December 2018. A month later, the company launched its Mazor X Stealth robotic-assisted spinal surgical platform in the U.S. In September 2019, Medtronic unveiled its new Hugo system that is set to rival the da Vinci SP.

Editor’s note: For more about this and other medical device deals, visit our sibling site, MassDevice.

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Pick-by-Vision adds to smart technology because smart glasses learn manufacturers’ parts; they memorize the visual appearance including robots and bin locations. Pick-by-Vision predicts and prevents mis-picks and decides the best part to pick next.

A scurrying robot dog named K9 dispenses hand sanitizer to curious children and wary shoppers—one of the more unexpected measures Thai malls are taking as the kingdom relaxes virus restrictions.

This itsy-bitsy robot can't climb up the waterspout yet but it can run, jump, carry heavy payloads and turn on a dime. Dubbed HAMR-JR, this microrobot developed by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is a half-scale version of the cockroach-inspired Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot or HAMR.

Researchers at Seoul National University have recently developed a compact and lightweight origami structure inspired by ladybird beetles. In a paper published in Science Robotics they show how this structure can be used to build a winged jump-gliding robot. Jump-gliding is a specific locomotion style that combines gliding and jumping movements.

Autonomous and semi-autonomous trucks promise to help an industry facing a shortage of drivers and increasing e-commerce demand, but they need to demonstrate efficiency for logistics adoption. Einride AB, which has been developing electric and autonomous trucks, today launched its Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform. The system is intended to help logistics fleet managers and drivers plan routes and loads, track shipments, and monitor energy efficiency.

In February, Einride began recruiting the first remote operators for its trucks. The Stockholm-based startup also announced the beta of the Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform. In April, Einride demonstrated remote control of multiple vehicles at once.

The global market for semi-autonomous trucks will grow from 948,000 units to 3.2 million units by 2025, predicted Research and Markets. “Autonomous last-mile delivery trucks can help companies save 40% of the total cost,” and the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating development of such technologies, said the Dublin-based firm. It also said that North America will be the largest market for autonomous trucks and Asia-Pacific will be the fastest-growing market.

Apps offer live insights for maximum efficiency

Einride said its Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform is designed to provide real-time data on loads, location data, energy usage, emissions, and more. It can provide shippers with daily freight planning through a dedicated app, intelligent routing for transport networks, and data for environmental impact auditing.

“The benefits are clear: Electric road-freight solutions account for over 90% fewer CO2 emissions and other harmful airborne pollutants, while autonomous transport is safer, more efficient, and more cost-effective,” stated Robert Falck, founder and CEO of Einride. “However, autonomous electric transport will not reach its full potential without intelligent planning and optimized vehicle networks. Our platform sets the foundation upon which the freight solutions of the future are built.”

The platform can provide specific recommendations on how to improve cost-effectiveness and sustainability with electric vehicles, according to Einride. It uses machine learning to offer implementation insights, such as how to best use existing charging infrastructure or plan new stations. The system can also make recommendations for how to optimize charging, loading, and driving schedules for maximum efficiency, said Einride.

In addition, the Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform includes an app to give drivers and operators route updates; emissions and efficiency data; and vehicle information such as charge level, range, and battery status.

“Without intelligent planning, electric and autonomous vehicles will be a patchwork solution,” said Falck. “The transport networks of the future cannot reach maximum cost and energy efficiency without recommendations on where electrification and automation will make the most impact, and how exactly to get there. That’s what our platform does for every shipment in your network.”

Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform works with all vehicles

The Intelligent Freight Mobility Platform can work with existing trucks, but it is optimized to work with electric and autonomous vehicles, noted Einride.

“While the platform is optimized to work with electric and autonomous vehicles outfitted with Einride-specified telematics, it is able to track, gather, and report data on any type of vehicle — diesel, electric, and/or autonomous,” a company spokeswoman told The Robot Report. “So while users will get more insights and more accurate recommendations from Einride-sourced vehicles, any future autonomous vehicle should be able to interface with our system.”

The company said trucks incorporating its system will be available from certain manufacturers, and customers such as logistics providers Lidl and Oatly will be the first to use it in Sweden.

“We are pleased with the progress our Pod has made in testing at customer sites such as with DB Schenker, and we are continuing to expand both its autonomous and remote-drive capabilities at our test sites in southern Sweden,” said the spokeswoman. “Later this year, we will have more news about our plans for the Pod.”

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Matt Wicks, Chief Robotics Solutions Architect at Honeywell Intelligrated shares with us his thoughts on how Honeywell Intelligrated is managing through the pandemic as well as insights into what the future of Robotics and Automation may be.

A robotic vacuum cleaner is easy to trust. We really need a lot more confidence in a robot that might be performing vital surgery on our body.

One of the hottest topics in robotics is the field of soft robots, which utilizes squishy and flexible materials rather than traditional rigid materials. But soft robots have been limited due to their lack of good sensing. A good robotic gripper needs to feel what it is touching (tactile sensing), and it needs to sense the positions of its fingers (proprioception). Such sensing has been missing from most soft robots.

In a new pair of papers, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with new tools to let robots better perceive what they’re interacting with: the ability to see and classify items, and a softer, delicate touch.

“We wish to enable seeing the world by feeling the world. Soft robot hands have sensorized skins that allow them to pick up a range of objects, from delicate, such as potato chips, to heavy, such as milk bottles,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the deputy dean of research for the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

One paper builds off last year’s research from MIT and Harvard University, where a team developed a strong and soft robotic gripper in the form of a cone-shaped origami structure. It collapses in on objects much like a Venus’ flytrap, to pick up items that are as much as 100 times its weight.

To get that newfound versatility and adaptability even closer to that of a human hand, a new team came up with a sensible addition: tactile sensors, made from latex “bladders” (balloons) connected to pressure transducers. The new sensors let the soft robotic gripper not only pick up objects as delicate as potato chips, but it also classifies them — letting the robot better understand what it’s picking up, while also exhibiting that light touch.

When classifying objects, the sensors correctly identified 10 objects with over 90 percent accuracy, even when an object slipped out of grip.

“Unlike many other soft tactile sensors, ours can be rapidly fabricated, retrofitted into grippers, and show sensitivity and reliability,” says MIT postdoc Josie Hughes, the lead author on a new paper about the sensors. “We hope they provide a new method of soft sensing that can be applied to a wide range of different applications in manufacturing settings, like packing and lifting.”

In a second paper, a group of researchers created a soft robotic finger called “GelFlex” that uses embedded cameras and deep learning to enable high-resolution tactile sensing and “proprioception” (awareness of positions and movements of the body).

The gripper, which looks much like a two-finger cup gripper you might see at a soda station, uses a tendon-driven mechanism to actuate the fingers. When tested on metal objects of various shapes, the system had over 96 percent recognition accuracy.

“Our soft finger can provide high accuracy on proprioception and accurately predict grasped objects, and also withstand considerable impact without harming the interacted environment and itself,” says Yu She, lead author on a new paper on GelFlex. “By constraining soft fingers with a flexible exoskeleton, and performing high-resolution sensing with embedded cameras, we open up a large range of capabilities for soft manipulators.”

Magic ball senses

The magic ball gripper is made from a soft origami structure, encased by a soft balloon. When a vacuum is applied to the balloon, the origami structure closes around the object, and the gripper deforms to its structure.

While this motion lets the gripper grasp a much wider range of objects than ever before, such as soup cans, hammers, wine glasses, drones, and even a single broccoli floret, the greater intricacies of delicacy and understanding were still out of reach — until they added the sensors.

When the sensors experience force or strain, the internal pressure changes, and the team can measure this change in pressure to identify when it will feel that again.

In addition to the latex sensor, the team also developed an algorithm which uses feedback to let the gripper possess a human-like duality of being both strong and precise — and 80 percent of the tested objects were successfully grasped without damage.

The team tested the gripper-sensors on a variety of household items, ranging from heavy bottles to small, delicate objects, including cans, apples, a toothbrush, a water bottle, and a bag of cookies.

Going forward, the team hopes to make the methodology scalable, using computational design and reconstruction methods to improve the resolution and coverage using this new sensor technology. Eventually, they imagine using the new sensors to create a fluidic sensing skin that shows scalability and sensitivity.

Hughes co-wrote the new paper with Rus, which they will present virtually at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

GelFlex

In the second paper, a CSAIL team looked at giving a soft robotic gripper more nuanced, human-like senses. Soft fingers allow a wide range of deformations, but to be used in a controlled way there must be rich tactile and proprioceptive sensing. The team used embedded cameras with wide-angle “fisheye” lenses that capture the finger’s deformations in great detail.

To create GelFlex, the team used silicone material to fabricate the soft and transparent finger, and put one camera near the fingertip and the other in the middle of the finger. Then, they painted reflective ink on the front and side surface of the finger, and added LED lights on the back. This allows the internal fish-eye camera to observe the status of the front and side surface of the finger.

The team trained neural networks to extract key information from the internal cameras for feedback. One neural net was trained to predict the bending angle of GelFlex, and the other was trained to estimate the shape and size of the objects being grabbed. The soft robotic gripper could then pick up a variety of items such as a Rubik’s cube, a DVD case, or a block of aluminum.

During testing, the average positional error while gripping was less than 0.77 millimeter, which is better than that of a human finger. In a second set of tests, the soft robotic gripper was challenged with grasping and recognizing cylinders and boxes of various sizes. Out of 80 trials, only three were classified incorrectly.

In the future, the team hopes to improve the proprioception and tactile sensing algorithms, and utilize vision-based sensors to estimate more complex finger configurations, such as twisting or lateral bending, which are challenging for common sensors, but should be attainable with embedded cameras.

Yu She co-wrote the GelFlex paper with MIT graduate student Sandra Q. Liu, Peiyu Yu of Tsinghua University, and MIT Professor Edward Adelson. They will present the paper virtually at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Editor’s Note: This article was reprinted with permission from MIT News.

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Researchers are working with a mobile robotic platform called Husky A200 that could be used for autonomous logistic tasks on construction sites. This mobile robot is one of many projects pursued by the Fraunhofer Italia Innovation Engineering Center to advance the cause of digitalization in construction and bridge the gap between robotics and the building industry. Researchers at this center based in Bolzano, Italy, are developing a software interface that will enable mobile robots to find their way around in construction sites.

June 2020 is off to a hot start for developers of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Yesterday, OTTO Motors announced a $29 million Series C, and today Locus Robotics closed $40 million in Series D funding.

The Series D brings Locus‘ total amount of funding raised to $105 million. Locus’ latest round was led by Zebra Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Zebra Technologies. Existing investors such as Scale Venture Partners also participated in the round. Locus raised its $26 million Series C in April 2019.

The new funding will be used for R&D purposes, but it will also accelerate the company’s expansion into new markets. Locus is now planning to open its European headquarters in Amsterdam in either the third or fourth quarter of 2020. A Locus spokesperson told The Robot Report “Amsterdam allows us to be centrally located and close to many of the key fulfillment and distribution centers that serve the European markets.”

Denis Niezgoda, who joined Locus in September 2019 as the Director of Business Development for the European Union, will lead the new headquarters. Prior to joining Locus, Niezgoda served as Robotics Accelerator Lead at DHL Customer Solutions and Innovation. He was responsible for identifying and implementing new technologies to drive innovation.

Locus also has multiple positions open in Cologne, Germany, including a Sales Executive. “We source our talent from all over the EU and offer remote work options to minimize the need for relocation or extensive travel,” the Locus spokesperson said. “The Cologne area is currently a key location based on some of our customer support needs.”

Many experts are saying the COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the shift to online shopping as the new normal across the globe. In the U.S. and Canada, for example, there’s been a 129% year-over-year growth of e-commerce orders as of April 21. AMRs from Locus and others are stepping up to help companies fulfill this surge in demand.

The LocusBot AMRs navigate autonomously within a warehouse to locate and transport pick items to associates. LocusBots can be flexibly deployed to support a range of picking strategies, helping to reduce time spent on routine or physically demanding tasks, reducing manual errors and increase productivity for customers.

“We have recently seen a dramatic disruption of retail with e-commerce growth as high as 400% year-over-year in some categories. And others were severely limited as the bulk of their inventory was in stores that they could not get into due to lockdowns. It’s critical that retailers are prepared for direct fulfillment from the warehouse,” said Greg Buzek, President of IHL Group, a global research and advisory firm for the retail and hospitality industries. “This announcement underscores the need for companies to prepare for today’s new labor challenges that will be impacted by the significant volume increases that are already occurring. Companies investing now in warehouse automation, particularly AMRs, will be better positioned for success in the post-pandemic economy as they can support sales from any channel.”

Locus and DHL Supply Chain recently expanded their partnership with new deployments of LocusBots throughout 2020. DHL Supply Chain, part of the Deutsche Post DHL Group, will deploy 1,000 LocusBots to support 12 DHL sites in North America.

“Locus Robotics is thrilled to announce this new round of funding amid our most transformative year yet,” . “The new funding allows Locus to accelerate expansion into global markets, enabling us to strengthen our support of retail, industrial, healthcare, and 3PL businesses around the world as they navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that they come out stronger on the other side.”

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Patent protection is best suited for inventions that are at risk of being publicly detected or independently developed. Innovation that will likely not become publicly available or would require significant work to recreate may be a good candidate for trade secret protection.

A Malaysian university is considering using robots dressed in gowns and mortarboards to act as stand-ins at graduation ceremonies to prevent coronavirus infections—but students have blown a fuse at the idea.