Archive 03.02.2022

This new advance, published in the journal Science Robotics, could pave the way for smaller, lighter and more effective micro flying robots for environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and deployment in hazardous environments.

Until now, typical micro flying robots have used motors, gears and other complex transmission systems to achieve the up-and-down motion of the wings. This has added complexity, weight and undesired dynamic effects.

Taking inspiration from bees and other flying insects, researchers from Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering, led by Professor of Robotics Jonathan Rossiter, have successfully demonstrated a direct-drive artificial muscle system, called the Liquid-amplified Zipping Actuator (LAZA), that achieves wing motion using no rotating parts or gears.

The LAZA system greatly simplifies the flapping mechanism, enabling future miniaturization of flapping robots down to the size of insects.

In the paper, the team show how a pair of LAZA-powered flapping wings can provide more power compared with insect muscle of the same weight, enough to fly a robot across a room at 18 body lengths per second.

They also demonstrated how the LAZA can deliver consistent flapping over more than one million cycles, important for making flapping robots that can undertake long-haul flights.

The team expect the LAZA to be adopted as a fundamental building block for a range of autonomous insect-like flying robots.

Dr Tim Helps, lead author and developer of the LAZA system said: “With the LAZA, we apply electrostatic forces directly on the wing, rather than through a complex, inefficient transmission system. This leads to better performance, simpler design, and will unlock a new class of low-cost, lightweight flapping micro-air vehicles for future applications, like autonomous inspection of off-shore wind turbines.”

Professor Rossiter added: “Making smaller and better performing flapping wing micro robots is a huge challenge. LAZA is an important step toward autonomous flying robots that could be as small as insects and perform environmentally critical tasks such as plant pollination and exciting emerging roles such as finding people in collapsed buildings.”

• PAPER – Liquid-amplified zipping actuators for micro-air vehicles with transmission-free flapping. T. Helps, C. Romero, M. Taghavi, A. Conn and J. Rossiter. Science Robotics, vol. 7 (63)

The lettuce’s outer, or ‘wrapper’, leaves will be mechanically removed to expose the stem. Machine vision and artificial intelligence are then used to identify a precise cut point on the stem to neatly separate the head of lettuce.

People are more comfortable talking to female rather than male robots working in service roles in hotels, according to a study by Washington State University researcher Soobin Seo.

A new drive system for flapping wing autonomous robots has been developed by a University of Bristol team, using a new method of electromechanical zipping that does away with the need for conventional motors and gears.

The implementation of robotics in various aspects of life is becoming increasingly widespread, but nevertheless leads to conflicting opinions. Positive factors and arguments based on innovation, efficiency, precision and cost reduction have not yet succeeded in breaking down negative connotations and aspects such as the destruction of jobs, the investment required, difficulties in implementation and the training necessary for its use. These controversies are heightened in the field of health, which is a reflection of this social trend of conflicting opinions.

Science fiction novelists couldn't have come up with a crazier plot: microrobots streaming through blood or through other body fluids that are driven by light, can carry drugs to cancer cells and drop off the medication on the spot. What sounds like a far-fetched fantasy, it is the short summary of a research project now published in Science Robotics. The microswimmers presented in the work could one day perform tasks in living organisms or biological environments that are not easily accessible. Looking even further ahead, the swimmers could perhaps one day treat cancer or other diseases.

This article looks at private 5G (known as P5G) and how it supports advanced and emerging technologies, including AI cameras, enabling manufacturers to drive more functionality closer to the edge.

In the age of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, intralogistics plays an increasingly important role. The precise transport of goods and materials will become a key factor in efficient production.

The 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. In this post, we give a flavour of the final presentation.

The collective intelligence of army ants, and the robots they inspire

Radhika Nagpal

Radhika’s research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, with local interaction rules, can cooperate to achieve globally complex behaviour. These are fascinating systems. Each individual is miniscule compared to the massive phenomena that they create, and, with a limited view of the actions of the rest of the swarm, they achieve striking coordination.

Looking at collective intelligence from an algorithmic point-of-view, the phenomenon emerges from many individuals interacting using simple rules. When run by these large, decentralised groups, these simple rules result in highly intelligent behaviour.

The subject of Radhika’s talk was army ants, a species which spectacularly demonstrate collective intelligence. Without any leader, millions of ants work together to self-assemble nests and build bridge structures using their own bodies.

One particular aspect of study concerned self-assembly of such bridges. Radhika’s research team, which comprised three roboticists and two biologists, found that the ants created bridges adapt to traffic flow and terrain. The ants also disassembled the bridge when the flow of ants had stopped and it wasn’t needed any more.

The team proposed the following simple hypothesis to explain this behaviour using local rules: if an ant is walking along, and experiences congestion (i.e. another ant steps on it), then it becomes stationary and turns into a bridge, allowing other ants to walk over it. Then, if no ants are walking on it any more, it can get up and leave.

These observations, and this hypothesis, led the team to consider two research questions:

• Could they build a robot swarm with soft robots that can self-assemble amorphous structures, just like the ant bridges?
• Could they formulate rules which allowed these robots to self-assemble temporary and adaptive bridge structures?

There were two motivations for these questions. Firstly, the goal of moving closer to realising robot swarms that can solve problems in a particular environment. Secondly, the use of a synthetic system to better understand the collective intelligence of army ants.

Screenshot from Radhika’s talk

Radhika showed a demonstration of the soft robot designed by her group. It has two feet and a soft body, and moves by flipping – one foot remains attached, while the other detaches from the surface and flips to attach in a different place. This allows movement in any orientation. Upon detaching, a foot searches through space to find somewhere to attach. By using grippers on the feet that can hook onto textured surfaces, and having a stretchable Velcro skin, the robots can climb over each other, like the ants. The robot pulses, and uses a vibration sensor, to detect whether it is in contact with another robot. A video demonstration of two robots interacting showed that they have successfully created a system that can recreate the simple hypothesis outlined above.

In order to investigate the high-level properties of army ant bridges, which would require a vast number of robots, the team created a simulation. Modelling the ants to have the same characteristics as their physical robots, they were able to replicate the high level properties of army ant bridges with their hypothesized rules.

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You can read the round-ups of the other NeurIPS invited talks at these links:
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part one – Duolingo, the banality of scale and estimating the mean
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part two – benign overfitting, optimal transport, and human and machine intelligence