Archive 29.09.2021

In this final video of our focus series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist, you’ll meet Dennis Hong speaking about the robots he and his team have created (locomotion and new ways of moving; an autonomous car for the visually impaired; disaster relief robots), Star Wars and cooking. All in all, ingredients from different worlds that Dennis is using to benefit society.

Dennis Hong is a Professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. If you’d like to find out more about how Star Wars influenced his professional career in robotics, how his experience taking a cooking assistant robot to MasterChef USA inspired a multi-million research project, and all the robots he is creating, check out his video below!

Amazon's new robot can hear, see and follow you around the the home, but its no Rosey the Robot.

The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM), an institute under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and ICT, has developed a flexible, stretchable battery that bends and stretches like a snake. This new battery could have a wide range of uses, such as in energy storage technology and disaster situations, with applications in various types of devices, from soft robots to wearable devices.

Today, 100 miles off the coast of Texas, a 10-foot-long yellow autonomous glider is riding waves as it patrols the perimeter above the NOAA Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.

The Smart Factory at Wichita (TSF@W) provides a risk-free environment for companies to explore the art of the possible and gain insight into the latest technologies through an immersive, hands-on experience.

To operate efficiently in urban environments, mobile robots and other autonomous systems should be able to move safely on sidewalks and avoid collisions with pedestrians or other obstacles. This is particularly true for delivery robots or systems that are specifically programmed to patrol urban environments.

How do humans become so skillful? Well, initially we are not, but from infancy, we discover and practice increasingly complex skills through self-supervised play. But this play is not random – the child development literature suggests that infants use their prior experience to conduct directed exploration of affordances like movability, suckability, graspability, and digestibility through interaction and sensory feedback. This type of affordance directed exploration allows infants to learn both what can be done in a given environment and how to do it. Can we instantiate an analogous strategy in a robotic learning system?

On the left we see videos from a prior dataset collected with a robot accomplishing various tasks such as drawer opening and closing, as well as grasping and relocating objects. On the right we have a lid that the robot has never seen before. The robot has been granted a short period of time to practice with the new object, after which it will be given a goal image and tasked with making the scene match this image. How can the robot rapidly learn to manipulate the environment and grasp this lid without any external supervision?

Read More

In this IEEE ICRA 2021 Plenary Panel aimed at the younger generation of roboticists and automation experts, panelists Seth Hutchinson, Maria Pia Fanti, Peter B. Luh, Pieter Abbeel, Kaneko Harada, Michael Y. Wang, Kevin Lynch, Chinwe Ekenna, Animesh Garg and Frank Park, under the moderation of Ken Goldberg, discussed about how to close the gap between both disciplines, which have many topics in common. The panel was organised by the Ad Hoc Committee to Explore Synergies in Automation and Robotics (CESAR).

As the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) explain, “robotics and automation have always been siblings. They are similar in many ways and have substantial overlap in topics and research communities, but there are also differences–many RAS members view them as disjoint and consider themselves purely in robotics or purely in automation. This committee’s goal is to reconsider these perceptions and think about ways we can bring these communities closer.”

It's famous for its roundabouts and statues of concrete cows. But the English town of Milton Keynes now has another claim to fame—a trundling army of shopping delivery robots.

Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia have recently developed an innovative system for human-swarm interactions that allows users to directly control the movements of a team of drones in complex environments. This system, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv is based on an interface that recognizes human gestures and adapts the drones' trajectories accordingly.

Another issue is the inability of some AGVs and AMRs to drive smoothly while operating slowly, an important consideration for scenarios where the AGV or AMR itself may perform part or component assembly.

Robotic body-weight support (BWS) devices can play a key role in helping people with neurological disorders to improve their walking. The team that developed the advanced body-weight support device RYSEN in 2018 has since gained more fundamental insight in BWS but also concludes that improvement in this field is necessary. They find that recommendations for the optimal therapy settings have to be customized to each device and that developers should be more aware of the interaction between patient and the device. The researchers have published the results of their evaluation in Science Robotics on Wednesday September 22.

Explore the most popular gnn architectures such as gcn, gat, mpnn, graphsage and temporal graph networks

In the future, socially interactive robots could help seniors age in place or assist residents of long-term care facilities with their activities of daily living. But will people actually accept advice or instructions from a robot? A new study from University of Toronto Engineering suggests that the answer hinges on how that robot behaves.

Researchers have designed a 4D-printed soft robot that self-assembles when heated and can take on challenging tasks like rolling uphill and navigating a bumpy and unpredictable landscape. The prototype, which is tube-shaped, appears September 22nd in the journal Matter.