Archive 07.09.2022

Currently, industry news is utterly humming with stimulating updates on machine vision developments from across the globe.

In recent years, roboticists and material scientists worldwide have been trying to create artificial systems that resemble human body parts and reproduce their functions. These include artificial skins, protective layers that could also enhance the sensing capabilities of robots.

IMTS 2022 takes place September 12th - 17th in Chicago, Illinois. The Exhibit hall floor will be loaded with new products and services. Here is a preview of some things to look forward to at this years event.

By Redwan Dahmouche

Speed and precision are two major issues in robotics and in Industry of the Future (also known as Industry 4.0). Within this framework, RoMoCo research team of AS2M department at FEMTO-ST Institute has developed MiGriBot, a miniature robot able to perform 720 pick-and-place operations of sub-millimeter objects per minute. The results of this research work have been published in Science Robotics.

These performances are made possible thanks to its architecture, that allows it to grip and manipulate micro-objects barely visible to the naked eye (from 40 micrometers to several hundred micrometers). In fact, where other microrobots have a rigid end-effector, MiGriBot is based on a principle with an articulated end. This articulated end allows to drive a microgripper without any wire or embedded actuator. The second advantage of this robot is that all its degrees of mobility, including the ones from the microgripper on the articulated end, are operated from the base of the robot, making its mobile parts very lightweight. Finally, its robotic structure occupies a surface of only 20x20mm2. This level of compactness is achieved by using Silicon for the rigid elements, a polymer (Polydimethylsiloxane – PDMS) as flexible joints and piezoelectric actuators equipped with position sensors. MiGriBot is therefore lighter, more compact and faster than existing robotic micro-manipulators.

While the fastest industrial pick-and-place robots do not exceed 250 cycles per minute, the combination of all the features of this robot: soft joints, small footprint, integrated gripping, lightweight structure and closed-loop control of the fast actuators allows MiGriBot to reach 720 pick-and-place operations per minute with about one micrometer accuracy. In the blink of an eye, MiGRiBot will have manipulated 5 micro-objects, which means that it will have approached, grabbed, moved and released an object 5 times successively.

This robot will be used to assemble Micro-Electro-Mechanical and Optical Systems (MEMS/MOEMS) used in the electronics industry, where the production throughput is increasingly high. Thanks to its speed and compactness, more than 2000 robots can be placed in 1m2 to perform more than one million operations per second. Increasing work rates will improve the productivity and competitiveness of manufacturers, which may encourage the relocation of production to Europe, America and countries with high labor costs. Applications in watch industry, medical instrumentation, aerospace, and other fields are also possible.

This work was funded by the ANR MiniSoRo project (ANR-19-CE10-0004) and by Grand Besançon Métropole.

Research team: Maxence LEVEZIEL, Wissem HAOUAS, Michaël GAUTHIER, Guillaume J. LAURENT, Redwan DAHMOUCHE (associate professor at université de Franche-Comté, project leader and head of the research team: redwan.dahmouche@univ-fcomte.fr / 06 29 24 19 81).

• PAPER – MiGriBot: A miniature parallel robot with integrated gripping for high-throughput micromanipulation. Maxence Leveziel, Wissem Haouas, Guillaume J. Laurent, Michaël Gauthier, and Redwan Dahmouche. Science Robotics, 7(69).

Our new paper, In conversation with AI: aligning language models with human values, explores a different approach, asking what successful communication between humans and an artificial conversational agent might look like and what values should guide conversation in these contexts.

Our new paper, In conversation with AI: aligning language models with human values, explores a different approach, asking what successful communication between humans and an artificial conversational agent might look like and what values should guide conversation in these contexts.

People have been fascinated by bird flight for centuries, but exactly how birds can be so agile in the air remains mysterious. A new study, published Sept. 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses modeling and aerodynamics to describe how gulls can change the shape of their wings to control their response to gusts or other disturbances. The lessons could one day apply to uncrewed aerial vehicles or other flying machines.

The physics of walking for multi-legged animals and robots is simpler than previously thought. That is the finding described by a team of roboticists, physicists and biologists in the Sept. 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper titled "Walking is like slithering: a unifying, data-driven view of locomotion."

Student teams are an underappreciated resource in much of the scientific community. Joining a team working toward a goal while at university, whether for racing solar-powered cars or digging fish ponds in Africa, is an excellent way to sharpen technical and project skills while improving communication and teamwork. The space industry is starting to catch on to these strengths, with student teams developing exciting projects all over the world. A recent entry comes from students at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands—a six-legged robot called Lunar Zebro with a unique take on wheels.

An international team led by researchers at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) has engineered a system for creating remote controlled cyborg cockroaches, equipped with a tiny wireless control module that is powered by a rechargeable battery attached to a solar cell. Despite the mechanic devices, ultrathin electronics and flexible materials allow the insects to move freely. These achievements, reported in the scientific journal npj Flexible Electronics on September 5, will help make the use of cyborg insects a practical reality.

Anton Grabolle / Better Images of AI / Human-AI collaboration / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

The 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2022) took place from 23-29 July, in Vienna. In this post, we summarise the presentation by Ana Paiva, University of Lisbon and INESC-ID. The title of her talk was “Engineering sociality and collaboration in AI systems”.

Robots are widely used in industrial settings, but what happens when they enter our everyday world, and, specifically, social situations? Ana believes that social robots, chatbots and social agents have the potential to change the way we interact with technology. She envisages a hybrid society where humans and AI systems work in tandem. However, for this to be realised we need to carefully consider how such robots will interact with us socially and collaboratively. In essence, our world is social, so when machines enter they need to have some capabilities to interact with this social world.

Ana took us through the theory of what it means to the social. There are three aspects to this:

1. Social understanding: the capacity to perceive others, exhibit theory of mind and respond appropriately.
2. Intrapersonal competencies: the capability to communicate socially, establish relationships and adapt to others.
3. Social responsibility: the capability to take actions towards the social environment, follow norms and adopt morally appropriate actions.

Screenshot from Ana’s talk.

Ana wants to go from this notion of social intelligence to what is called artificial social intelligence, which can be defined as: “the capability to perceive and understand social signals, manage and participate in social interactions, act appropriately in social settings, establish social relations, adapt to others, and exhibit social responsibility.”

As an engineer, she likes to build things, and, on seeing the definition above, wonders how she can pass from said definition to a model that will allow her to build social machines. This means looking at social perception, social modelling and decision making, and social acting. A lot of Ana’s work revolves around design, study and development for achieving this kind of architecture.

Ana gave us a flavour of some of the projects that she and her groups have carried out with regards to trying to engineer sociality and collaboration in robots and other agents.

One of these projects was called “Teach me how to write”, and it centres on using robots to improve the handwriting abilities of children. In this project the team wanted to create a robot that kids could teach to write. Through teaching the robot it was hypothesised that they would, in turn, improve their own skills.

The first step was to create and train a robot that could learn how to write. They used learning from demonstration to train a robotic arm to draw characters. The team realised that if they wanted to teach the kids to write, the robot had to learn and improve, and it had to make mistakes in order to be able to improve. They studied the taxonomy of handwriting mistakes that are made by children, so that they could put those mistakes into the system, and so that the robot could learn from the kids how to fix the mistakes.

You can see the system architecture in the figure below, and it includes the handwriting task element, and social behaviours. To add these social behaviours they used a toolkit developed in Ana’s lab, called FAtiMA. This toolkit can be integrated into a framework and is an affective agent architecture for creating autonomous characters that can evoke empathic responses.

Screenshot from Ana’s talk. System architecture.

In terms of actually using and evaluating the effectiveness of the robot, they couldn’t actually put the robot arm in the classroom as it was too big, unwieldy and dangerous. Therefore, they had to use a Nao robot, which moved its arms like it was writing, but it didn’t actually write.

Taking part in the study were 24 Portuguese-speaking children, and they participated in four sessions over the course of a few weeks. They assigned the robot two contrasting competencies: “learning” (where the robot improved over the course of the sessions) and “non-learning” (where the robot’s abilities remained constant). They measured the kids’ writing ability and improvement, and they used questionnaires to find out what the children thought about the friendliness of the robot, and their own teaching abilities.

They found that the children who worked with learning robot significantly improved their own abilities. They also found that the robot’s poor writing abilities did not affect the children’s fondness for it.

You can find out more about this project, and others, on Ana’s website.

Attendees at North America’s leading machine tool show will experience how the all-new collaborative, industrial cobot delivers the longest reach and payload in its class, offering the ability to automate even more hard-to-staff tasks in a market struggling to hire.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, working with a pair of colleagues from the Harbin Institute of Technology, has developed a tiny actuated gearbox that can be used to give very tiny robots more power. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how their gearbox works and the power improvements observed in several types of tiny robots.

Have you ever wondered how we are able to have an accurate online map to use to get to anywhere we want to go? The answer lies in a process called mobile mapping. Mobile mapping allows users to visualize, record and understand environments, wherever they may be.

A small robot with a clip-like hand and enough smarts to know which drinks are popular is part of an effort to make convenience stores even more convenient.