Category Robotics Classification

With Boston Dynamics, the Group will create a robotics value chain, from robot component manufacturing to smart logistics solutions

How the brain lets us perceive and navigate the world is one of the most fascinating aspects of cognition. When orienting ourselves, we constantly combine information from all six senses in a seemingly effortless way—a feature that even the most advanced AI systems struggle to replicate.

Cardiac surgeons may be able to better plan operations and improve their surgical field view with the help of a robot. Controlled through a virtual reality parallel system as a digital twin, the robot can accurately image a patient through ultrasound without the hand cramping or radiation exposure that hinder human operators. The international research team published their method in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

For five years, the EPSRC UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network have been holding the UK Robotics Week. This year’s edition kicked off on the 19th of June as the UK Festival of Robotics with the aim of boosting public engagement in robotics and intelligent systems. The festival features online events, special competitions, and interactive activities for robot enthusiasts of all ages. Among them, we chose to recommend you the Robot Lab Live session that will take place online on Wednesday the 23rd of June, 4pm – 6pm (BST).

Robot Lab Live is a virtual robotics showcase featuring 16 of the UK’s top robotics research groups. Each team will show-off their cutting-edge robots and autonomous systems simultaneously to live audiences on YouTube. You can flick between different demos running during the two-hour livestream, ask questions and interact with the research teams in the chat. Here’s the link to watch the livestream.

Apart from Robot Lab Live, there are other interactive (and online!) events that we find of particular interest:

• Mosaix with Swarm Robot Tiles (Tuesday the 22nd of June, 4pm – 6pm BST): In this event, you will be able to remotely control your own Tile at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory to create collective art with other users. Tiles are small, 4-inch screens-on-wheels that users can draw on, colour, and move. ‘Mosaix’ emerges from the interactions between swarms of robot ‘Tiles’.
• Tech Tag (Thursday the 24th of June, 5pm – 7pm BST): Control one of our robots at Harwell campus in Oxford as they play a high-tech version of the schoolyard classic – tag. Visit this website to join one of the four robot teams (blue, purple, red or yellow) and vote for where your robot should go next to avoid being tagged. If you’re it – try to catch one of the other robots as quickly as you can! With live commentary from science communicator and presenter, Sam Langford.
• CSI Robot (Friday the 25th of June, 3pm – 4pm BST): Would you like to try being an accident investigator, finding out the cause of incidents involving humans and social robots? Then join us for this fun, interactive session!

To find out about more events, please visit this website.

The Geek+ RoboShuttle™ bin-to-person picking solution can achieve high-density storage by using the innovative Geek+ C200 narrow aisle design while maintaining high operating and storage efficiency. The robot uses the Geek+ intelligent system, with AI algorithms covering order analysis and robot scheduling to make entire warehouse operations more flexible, scalable, and productive. The RoboShuttle™ can be connected to a variety of automation equipment such as conveyor lines and other robots, which is convenient for integration and customized project deployment.

Preparing food often involves some amount of nuance and reacting on the fly to different variables. This unpredictability is why kitchen robots haven’t seen much use. That is, until now.

Do you remember the time when self-driving cars were upon us? It was almost a decade ago when the Autonomous Vehicle division at Google (now Waymo) promised a world where people would be chauffeured around by self-driving robot cars.

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, clinics and patients alike began canceling all non-urgent appointments and procedures in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. A boom in telemedicine was borne out of necessity as healthcare workers, administrators, and scientists creatively advanced technologies to fill a void in care.

Automation can be seen as a complex area, and it is yet to reach its full potential – the challenge remains for robots to accurately and efficiently ‘pick’ items – but this shouldn’t steer organisations away from making that initial investment.

Siddharth Mayya (University of Pennsylvania), Gennaro Notomista (CNRS Rennes), Roderich Gross (The University of Sheffield) and Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania) were the organisers of this IEEE ICRA 2021 workshop aiming to identify and accelerate developments that help swarm robotics technology transition into the real world. Here we bring you the recordings of the session in case you missed it or would like to re-watch.

As the organisers describe, “in swarm robotics systems, coordinated behaviors emerge via local interactions among the robots as well as between robots and the environment. From Kilobots to Intel Aeros, the last decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of physically instantiated robot swarms. Such deployments can be broadly classified into two categories: in-laboratory swarms designed primarily as research aids, and industry-led efforts, especially in the entertainment and automated warehousing domains. In both of these categories, researchers have accumulated a vast amount of domain-specific knowledge, for example, regarding physical robot design, algorithm and software architecture design, human-swarm interfacing, and the practicalities of deployment.” The workshop brought together swarm roboticists from academia to industry to share their latest developments—from theory to real-world deployment. Enjoy the playlist with all the recordings below!

An innovative underwater robot known as Mesobot is providing researchers with deeper insight into the vast mid-ocean region known as the "twilight zone." Capable of tracking and recording high-resolution images of slow-moving and fragile zooplankton, gelatinous animals, and particles, Mesobot greatly expands scientists' ability to observe creatures in their mesopelagic habitat with minimal disturbance. This advance in engineering will enable greater understanding of the role these creatures play in transporting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the deep sea, as well as how commercial exploitation of twilight zone fisheries might affect the marine ecosystem.

Learn about the Weights and Biases library with a hands-on tutorial on the different features and visualizations.

Robots began handing out bottles of sacred water in Mecca this week in preparation for a socially distanced Hajj pilgrimage in Islam's holiest city, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

We've seen robots take to the air, dive beneath the waves and perform all sorts of maneuvers on land. Now, researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Georgia Institute of Technology are exploring a new frontier: The ground beneath our feet. Taking their cues from plants and animals that have evolved to navigate subterranean spaces, they've developed a fast, controllable soft robot that can burrow through sand. The technology not only enables new applications for fast, precise and minimally invasive movement underground, but also lays mechanical foundations for new types of robots.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and at the University of Boulder in Colorado in the US has found a new way to exploit the principles of spiders' joints to drive articulated robots without any bulky components and connectors, which weigh down the robot and reduce portability and speed. Their slender and lightweight simple structures impress by enabling a robot to jump 10 times its height. At the end of May, the team's work titled "Spider-inspired electrohydraulic actuators for fast, soft-actuated joints" was published in Advanced Science.