Category Robotics Classification

Somewhere in the labyrinth of Patrick F. Taylor Hall, there sits a disembodied head that will provide the answers to life's greatest mysteries, provided he is presented with the proper offering. His glowing eyes change color as he rewards you or disappoints you in a booming voice at the end of your long quest in search of knowledge.

A team of researchers led by University of Toronto Professor Tim Barfoot is using a new strategy that allows robots to avoid colliding with people by predicting the future locations of dynamic obstacles in their path.

Automate is the largest and most inspiring showcase of robotics, motion control, vision, artificial intelligence and related automation technologies in North America. Bringing together 550+ exhibiting automation innovators, manufacturers and suppliers.

The Bovay Civil Infrastructure Laboratory Complex, located in the basement of Thurston Hall, has a new tenant: a roughly 6,000-pound industrial robot capable of 3D printing the kind of large-scale structures that could potentially transform the construction industry, making it more efficient and sustainable by eliminating the waste of traditional material manufacturing.

They function as normal hives, but apiaries built at a kibbutz in Israel's Galilee are decked out with high-tech artificial intelligence systems set to ensure longevity for these vital pollinators.

Knight Optical (KO) has provided discerning engineers, designers, and the like from the automation sector with dependable, premium-quality optics for over three decades. Throughout this time, the leading supplier has helped refine the precision of some of the world's most innovative technologies and partnered with a wide range of companies throughout the industry. In this article, Automation talks to KO about its involvement in the sector and, ultimately, finds out more about how the optical brand can help your supply chain process.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Oxford, and the Tencent Robotics X Lab have recently introduced a configuration-aware policy for safely controlling mobile robotic arms. This policy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can help to better guide the movements of a robotic arm, while also reducing the risk that it will collide with objects and other obstacles in its vicinity.

The popularity of machine vision for quality assurance (QA) is increasing, but conventional systems lack the flexibility that most manufacturers need.

We can now offer you a telepresence robot tour of the ICRA 2022 expo hall, competitions and poster sessions, thanks to generous support from our friends at OhmniLabs. OhmniLabs build human-centric robots that elevate quality of life for billions of people worldwide, and they build all the robots right here in Silicon Valley using advanced additive manufacturing.

Join more than 5000 roboticists, researchers and industry from 89 different countries in Pennsylvania for a fascinating showcase of robotics thought leadership. There will be 12 keynote speakers, 6 industry and entrepreneurial forums, 10 competitions, almost 60 workshops and 1500 papers presented. And on top of that there are more than 80 robotics companies demoing their technologies, ranging from Agility Robotics to Zebra Technologies/Fetch Robotics. 

There are many things that can make it difficult to attend an in person conference in the United States and so the ICRA Organizing Committee, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and OhmniLabs would like to help you attend ICRA virtually. Priority of access will be for robotics researchers and students who are unable to travel, particularly if you are an author of a paper or poster, but we welcome applications from people who are simply curious about robots as well. 

Three OhmniBots will be in the main exhibition hall (with all the other robots) from opening to closing on Tuesday May 24th, Wednesday May 25th and Thursday May 26th, with time slots aligning with Poster Sessions, networking breaks and Expo Hall hours. The application form allows you to select several time slots, and we’ll give you feedback as soon as possible about your application, but we won’t be able to confirm your final booking time(s) until Monday May 23.

Telepresence Robot access is also available for media tours, ICRA sponsors, and members of Black in Robotics, Women in Robotics or Open Robotics who’d like to join the networking events. Generally, the robots are limited to the Expo Floor but we might be able to make special arrangements  

Contact one of the Accessibility Chairs: AndraKeay@ieee.org with subject [telepresence tour]

Or one of the Media Chairs: danicarzap@scientificagitation.com with subject [media]

Let us know why you need to tour ICRA by telepresence robot!

At ICRA 2022, Competitions are a core part of the conference. We shine a spotlight on influential competitions in Robotics. In this episode, Dr Liam Paull talks about the Duckietown Competition, where robots drive around Rubber Ducky passengers in an autonomous driving track.

Dr. Liam Paull

Liam Paull is an assistant professor at l’Université de Montréal and the head of the Montreal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL). His lab focuses on robotics problems including building representations of the world (such as for simultaneous localization and mapping), modeling of uncertainty, and building better workflows to teach robotic agents new tasks (such as through simulation or demonstration). Previous to this, Liam was a research scientist at CSAIL MIT where he led the TRI funded autonomous car project. He was also a postdoc in the marine robotics lab at MIT where he worked on SLAM for underwater robots. He obtained his PhD from the University of New Brunswick in 2013 where he worked on robust and adaptive planning for underwater vehicles. He is a co-founder and director of the Duckietown Foundation, which is dedicated to making engaging robotics learning experiences accessible to everyone. The Duckietown class was originally taught at MIT but now the platform is used at numerous institutions worldwide.

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The robot grippers designed by Professor Stefan Seelecke and his team at Saarland University can grip and manipulate objects with complex geometries. The system can adapt almost instantaneously to changes in form, switching seamlessly between differently shaped parts. The articulated gripper is driven electrically, is lightweight and accelerates rapidly and is even able to tell whether it is holding the object securely enough. The ultrafine nickel-titanium wires that control the motion of the four fingers of the prototype can rapidly generate and release a powerful vacuum via suction cups located on the fingertips of the artificial hand. The engineers will be showcasing the potential of their technology at Hannover Messe (30 May—2 June, Hall 2, Stand B28).

When developing new technologies, computer scientists and roboticists often draw inspiration from animals and other living organisms. This allows them to artificially replicate complex behaviors and locomotion patterns to enhance their systems' performance, efficiency and capabilities.

A trio of researchers at City University of Hong Kong has developed a tiny drone based on the maple seed pod. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Songnan Bai, Qingning He and Pakpong Chirarattananon, describe how they used the maple seed pod as an inspiration for increasing flight time in under 100-gram drones.

Now, G2P is evolving. The latest tote-to-person AMR (T2P AMR) solutions enable robots to bring individual totes to pickers, instead of whole racks.

In our recent paper, we explore how populations of deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) agents can learn microeconomic behaviours, such as production, consumption, and trading of goods. We find that artificial agents learn to make economically rational decisions about production, consumption, and prices, and react appropriately to supply and demand changes.