A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China has developed a soft robot that can successfully swim in the Mariana Trench. In their paper published in the journal Nature,, the group describes their soft robot and its capabilities. Cecilia Laschi and Marcello Calisti with the National University of Singapore and the University of Lincoln, respectively, have published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the team in China.
A University of Texas at Dallas research group has developed an autonomous robotic team of devices that can be used at hazardous or difficult-to-reach sites to make surveys and collect data—providing more and faster insights than human beings are able to deliver.
Healthcare has a long way to go before it reaches the level of digitalisation the manufacturing industry possesses. However, this slower pace doesn’t mean digitalisation isn’t already beginning to show its benefits in the medical sector.
The reddit r/robotics subreddit is a global online community of 138,000 users, ranging from hobbyists and students to academics and industry professionals. This year, we have invited our community to share their work as part of an online showcase. No matter how big or small, all projects are welcome, and a work in progress is valid. The showcase is as much about people sharing their robotics experiences as their projects, hence this is not a formal conference or symposium.
The showcase date is planned for the weekend of July 31st. On the day, successful applicants will join a video call on the official discord and to give a brief presentation (5 or 10mins) about their work, followed by a short question and answer session. Presentations will be livestreamed To Robohub’s YouTube channel, to allow for larger audience participation, and to create a publication (arXiv) of the showcase, available for everyone. If you would like to find out more about the event, click here.
So with that being said, we are looking for potential keynote speakers, to give a 20-40 minutes public friendly presentation, followed by a Q&A. It could be of your own research, or an overview of the research lab of business that you work for.
If you are interested in giving a keynote presentation, please email Olly Smith at olly.smith1994@gmail.com
There’s a misconception that industrial robots are reserved for manufacturing giants. But, according to the Robotics Industries Association (RIA), more enterprises with fewer than 100 employees now own up to ten robots — and this is a growing trend.
In this illustration, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter stands on the Red Planet’s surface as NASA’s Perseverance rover (partially visible on the left) rolls away. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The difference between robotics and automation is almost nonexistent and yet has a huge difference in everything from trade shows, marketing, publications to academic conferences and journals. This week, the difference was expressed as an opportunity in the Dear Colleague Letter below from Professor Ken Goldberg, CITRIS CPAR and UC Berkeley, who suggested that students whose papers were rejected from ICRA, revise them for CASE, the Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. This opportunity was expressed beautifully in the title quote from Professor Raja Chatila, ex President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and current President of IEEE Global Society on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. “One robot on Mars is robotics, ten robots on Mars is automation.”
Dear Colleagues,
Over 2000 papers were declined by ICRA today, including many that can be
effectively revised for another conference such as IEEE CASE (deadline 15
March).
IEEE CASE, the annual Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, is
a major IEEE conference that is one of three fully-supported IEEE
conferences in our field (with ICRA and IROS).
In 2021 CASE will be held 23-27 August. It will be hybrid, with a live
component in Lyon France and an online component: https://case2021.sciencesconf.org/
IEEE CASE was founded in 2006 so is smaller but growing quickly. The
acceptance rate for the last CASE was about 56%, higher than ICRA 2021
(48%), IROS, or RSS. I consider this a feature not a bug: it is an
excellent venue for exploratory and novel projects.
IEEE CASE continues the classic conference model of featuring a 10-15 min
oral presentation of each paper in contrast to poster sessions. This is
particularly exciting for students, who get the valuable experience of
lecturing and fielding questions in front of an audience of peers.
IEEE CASE also has a tradition of spotlighting papers nominated for awards
such as Best Paper, Best Student Paper, etc. Each nominated paper is
presented in special single session track on Day 1, where everyone at the
conference attends and there is a lively Q&A led by judges.
IEEE CASE emphasizes Automation. Automation is very closely related to
Robotics. There is substantial overlap, but Automation emphasizes
efficiency, robustness, durability, safety, cost effectiveness. Automation
also includes topics such as optimization and applications such as
transportation and mfg. I like how RAS President Raj Chatila summed up the
relationship 10 years ago: “One robot on Mars is robotics, ten robots on
Mars is automation.”
In China there are over 100 university departments
focused on Automation. The impact factor for the IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) this year is on par with T-RO
and higher than IJRR. Automation is important to put robotics into
practice.
A technological and biological development that is unprecedented in Israel and the world has been achieved at Tel Aviv University. For the first time, the ear of a dead locust has been connected to a robot that receives the ear's electrical signals and responds accordingly. The result is extraordinary: When the researchers clap once, the locust's ear hears the sound and the robot moves forward; when the researchers clap twice, the robot moves backwards.
Researchers from Skoltech's Intelligent Space Robotics Lab have proposed a novel method for customer behavior analytics and demand distribution based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) stocktaking. Their research was published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV).
If you've ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects' agility.
If we’re learning anything from 5G implementations, it’s that the demand for connectivity is increasing at an exponential rate as wireless communication is becoming more and more essential to our daily lives.
Insects’ remarkable acrobatic traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Image: courtesy of Kevin Yufeng Chen
By Daniel Ackerman
If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.
Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.
Chen’s work appears this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics. His co-authors include MIT PhD student Zhijian Ren, Harvard University PhD student Siyi Xu, and City University of Hong Kong roboticist Pakpong Chirarattananon.
Typically, drones require wide open spaces because they’re neither nimble enough to navigate confined spaces nor robust enough to withstand collisions in a crowd. “If we look at most drones today, they’re usually quite big,” says Chen. “Most of their applications involve flying outdoors. The question is: Can you create insect-scale robots that can move around in very complex, cluttered spaces?”
According to Chen, “The challenge of building small aerial robots is immense.” Pint-sized drones require a fundamentally different construction from larger ones. Large drones are usually powered by motors, but motors lose efficiency as you shrink them. So, Chen says, for insect-like robots “you need to look for alternatives.”
The principal alternative until now has been employing a small, rigid actuator built from piezoelectric ceramic materials. While piezoelectric ceramics allowed the first generation of tiny robots to take flight, they’re quite fragile. And that’s a problem when you’re building a robot to mimic an insect — foraging bumblebees endure a collision about once every second.
Chen designed a more resilient tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard, fragile ones. The soft actuators are made of thin rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. Repeated elongation and contraction causes the drone’s wings to beat — fast.
Chen’s actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. “You can hit it when it’s flying, and it can recover,” says Chen. “It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air.” And it weighs in at just 0.6 grams, approximately the mass of a large bumble bee. The drone looks a bit like a tiny cassette tape with wings, though Chen is working on a new prototype shaped like a dragonfly.
“Achieving flight with a centimeter-scale robot is always an impressive feat,” says Farrell Helbling, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, who was not involved in the research. “Because of the soft actuators’ inherent compliance, the robot can safely run into obstacles without greatly inhibiting flight. This feature is well-suited for flight in cluttered, dynamic environments and could be very useful for any number of real-world applications.”
Helbling adds that a key step toward those applications will be untethering the robots from a wired power source, which is currently required by the actuators’ high operating voltage. “I’m excited to see how the authors will reduce operating voltage so that they may one day be able to achieve untethered flight in real-world environments.”
Building insect-like robots can provide a window into the biology and physics of insect flight, a longstanding avenue of inquiry for researchers. Chen’s work addresses these questions through a kind of reverse engineering. “If you want to learn how insects fly, it is very instructive to build a scale robot model,” he says. “You can perturb a few things and see how it affects the kinematics or how the fluid forces change. That will help you understand how those things fly.” But Chen aims to do more than add to entomology textbooks. His drones can also be useful in industry and agriculture.
Chen says his mini-aerialists could navigate complex machinery to ensure safety and functionality. “Think about the inspection of a turbine engine. You’d want a drone to move around [an enclosed space] with a small camera to check for cracks on the turbine plates.”
Other potential applications include artificial pollination of crops or completing search-and-rescue missions following a disaster. “All those things can be very challenging for existing large-scale robots,” says Chen. Sometimes, bigger isn’t better.
Many swimming pools in Germany do not have enough trained lifeguards and in many places, this skilled labor shortage is even leading to closures. The solution could be a floating underwater rescue robot, which is intended to support rescue staff in emergencies in the future. A research team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Ilmenau developed the underwater vehicle with the help of Halle's water rescue service, Wasserrettungsdienstes Halle e.V.
