IIT’s teams will compete in the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category showing two different robotic arm prostheses made in Italy: SoftHandPro and Hannes. The race course is about 30 metres long and will see the pilots compete in three races on 6 stations reproducing daily tasks. 60 teams from 23 countries will be involved in the event “remotely”, streamed on Cybathlon website starting from November 13th.
Maria Fossati interview. Credits: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
The IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) will participate in the Cybathlon Global Edition 2020, an international event organised by the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, and dedicated to new prosthetic devices. People with physical disabilities from all over the world will compete, as pilots, in different disciplines that reproduce daily useful tasks, using the latest discoveries in technology such as robotic prostheses, exoskeletons and new generation wheelchairs. IIT will participate by presenting two robotic arm prostheses: the SoftHand Pro, stemming from a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and the Hannes robotic hand developed together with the Italian Centro Protesi INAIL (the prosthetic unit of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work).
Cybathlon 2020 should have taken place in May at the Letzigrund Stadium in Zurich. However, this year for the first time, due to the current global health crisis, it will take place remotely in 23 countries around the world, from Genoa to Hong Kong, Cleveland to Paris and Melbourne to Tokyo. These countries will transmit their own races to the control center in Zurich where a single programming video will be created and streamed online on 13 November. The competition will be available on Cybathlon website.
The event aims to raise awareness among the general public on the needs of people living with a disability, and to showcase the state-of-the-art of technologies developed in this area also promoting collaboration between research centers.
Preparing for Cybathlon 2020 Credits: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
IIT will vie with two made-in-Italy robotics solutions in the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category, lining up two different teams: Rehab Tech and SoftHand Pro. The two teams belongs to different IIT research groups, both engaged in research on the movements of the human hand and robotics. They will face competition along the same race track prepared at the IIT’s Center for Human Technologies (CHT-IIT) based in Genova (Italy).
The two teams will use two independent devices that have a common history: they were created in IIT starting from the Pisa/IIT SoftHand robotic hand technology, initially developed for humanoid robots and supported by European Research Council (ERC)’s grant.
Rehab Tech team
This team will use the biomimetic prosthetic hand Hannes, developed in the joint laboratory IIT-INAIL Rehab Technologies Lab, a Class 1 CE product which this year was awarded the Compasso d’Oro Award for design, with the goal of reaching the market in the short-term. The pilot is Colian Rossi, a technical designer who had a work accident in 2015, causing him an arm amputation. He is now an INAIL patient.
SoftHand Pro team
They will use the SoftHand Pro realized in the IIT’s Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation laboratory in collaboration with the University of Pisa. SoftHand Pro ensues from the ERC SoftHand project and it is now at the center of an ERC’s Synergy Grant (Natural Bionics) which, in future, aims to directly integrate the prosthesis with the subjects’ spinal circuits via neurosurgery. The pilot is Maria Fossati, industrial designer and IIT researcher, who constantly wears the prosthesis.
Each team consists of a pilot and her/his entourage made up of researchers having the role of coaches, athletic trainers and real race mechanics, just as in motor racing competitions.
The race course for the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category is about 30 metres long and will see the pilots compete in three races on six stations: preparing the table for breakfast, laundry, re-setting a table, using domestic tools (hammer, scissors, etc.), recognising shapes blindly and arranging glasses in the shape of a pyramid. The race will have a maximum duration of 8 minutes. The score is assigned on the basis of the number of completed tasks and the completion time.
Competing teams in this category are 14, from Italy, Sweden, India, South Africa, Russia, Croatia, Great Britain, China, Germany and Switzerland. Teams achieving the 4 best times in their discipline will receive an award on Saturday, 14 November.
Cybathlon 2020 will have a total of 60 teams divided into 6 race disciplines, identified by the pilot’s disability and technology in use. Besides the Power Arm Prosthesis category there is: The Powered Leg Prosthesis, the Powered Exoskeleton, the Powered Wheel Chair, the Brain Computer Interface and the Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike. The event will kick off at 3pm UTC. You can read more information about it in this post and on their website.
On Friday the 13th of November, Talking Robotics hosted an online talk with PhD student Natalia Calvo from Uppsala University in Sweden. Now you can watch the recorded seminar.
Talking Robotics is a series of virtual seminars about Robotics and its interaction with other relevant fields, such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Design Research, Human-Robot Interaction, among others. The aim is to promote reflections, dialogues, and a place to network. Talking Robotics happens virtually and bi-weekly, i.e., every other week, allocating 30 min for presentation and 30 min for Q&A and networking. Sessions have a roundtable format where everyone is welcome to share ideas. Recordings and materials are shared in this website.
The talk discussed several literature approaches to assess children’s trust towards robots. Calvo argues that the perceived first impression of a social robot’s likability and competence are predictors of children’s judgments of trust in social robots.
Natalia Calvo is a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University in Sweden. She obtained her master’s degree in Robotics Engineering from the University of Genoa in Italy, and her bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics Engineering from the Nueva Granada Military University in Colombia. She is part of the EU ITN ANIMATAS project. Her research focuses on modelling trust in child-robot educational interactions. Natalia is interested in implementing machine learning models for the understanding of children’s perception of trust in robots. You can read more details about the speaker on this website.
Involving potential users of a particular technology in the research and development (R&D) process is a very powerful way to maximise success when such technology is deployed in the real world. In addition, this can speed up the R&D process because the researchers’ perspective to the problem is combined with that of end-users. The non-profit project CYBATHLON was created by ETH Zurich as a way to advance R&D of assistive technology through competitions that involve developers, people with disabilities, and the general public.
This 13th and 14th of November, the CYBATHLON 2020 edition is taking place. The event will be live-streamed, and it is completely open to the public. You can access it through their website. Here’s the full programme for the two days:
4pm CET (3pm UTC): Brain-Computer Interface Race
The power of thoughts
5pm CET (4pm UTC): Powered Arm Prosthesis Race
Grasping and feeling
6pm CET (5pm UTC): Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike Race
Power to the muscles
7pm CET (6pm UTC): Inside CYBATHLON – Stories, recap and outlook
Insights of the protagonists and organisers – the journey of CYBATHLON
The medical checks
Focus: Inclusion
Recap and outlook
1pm CET (12pm UTC): Powered Wheelchair Race
Overcoming stairs and ramps
2pm CET (1pm UTC): Powered Leg Prosthesis Race
Watch your step
3pm CET (2pm UTC): Powered Exoskeleton Race
Walking in robotic suits
4pm CET (3pm UTC): Inside CYBATHLON – Stories, recap and outlook
Insights of the protagonists and organisers – the future of CYBATHLON and social inclusion
New systems
Recap and outlook – the CYBATHLON @school and the next CYBATHLON
The next CYBATHLON
A few days ago, Robotics Today hosted an online seminar with Professor Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich. The seminar was recorded, so you can watch it now in case you missed it.
“Robotics Today – A series of technical talks” is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times. The seminars are open to the public. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web and Twitter, followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions.
Autonomous quadrotors will soon play a major role in search-and-rescue, delivery, and inspection missions, where a fast response is crucial. However, their speed and maneuverability are still far from those of birds and human pilots. High speed is particularly important: since drone battery life is usually limited to 20-30 minutes, drones need to fly faster to cover longer distances. However, to do so, they need faster sensors and algorithms. Human pilots take years to learn the skills to navigate drones. What does it take to make drones navigate as good or even better than human pilots? Autonomous, agile navigation through unknown, GPS-denied environments poses several challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. In this talk, I will show how the combination of both model-based and machine learning methods united with the power of new, low-latency sensors, such as event cameras, can allow drones to achieve unprecedented speed and robustness by relying solely on onboard computing.
Davide Scaramuzza (Italian) is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones in search and rescue applications. After a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart) and a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis), from 2009 to 2012, he led the European project sFly, which introduced the PX4 autopilot and pioneered visual-SLAM-based autonomous navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments. From 2015 to 2018, he was part of the DARPA FLA program (Fast Lightweight Autonomy) to research autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments. In 2018, his team won the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race, and in 2019 it ranked second in the AlphaPilot Drone Racing world championship. For his research contributions to autonomous, vision-based, drone navigation and event cameras, he won prestigious awards, such as a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, an SNSF-ERC Starting Grant, a Google Research Award, the KUKA Innovation Award, two Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships, the European Young Research Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, and several paper awards. He co-authored the book “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots” (published by MIT Press; 10,000 copies sold) and more than 100 papers on robotics and perception published in top-ranked journals (Science Robotics, TRO, T-PAMI, IJCV, IJRR) and conferences (RSS, ICRA, CVPR, ICCV, CORL, NeurIPS). He has served as a consultant for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety and several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results. In 2015, he cofounded Zurich-Eye, today Facebook Zurich, which developed the visual-inertial SLAM system running in Oculus Quest VR headsets. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, today Magic Leap Zurich. In 2020, he cofounded SUIND, which develops camera-based safety solutions for commercial drones. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media, such as The New York Times, BBC News, Discovery Channel, La Repubblica, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, and also in technology-focused media, such as IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Tech Crunch, Wired, The Verge.
You can also view past seminars on the Robotics Today YouTube Channel.