Category robots in business

NCCR Researchers are using a new method for digital timber construction in a real project for the first time. The load-bearing timber modules, which are prefabricated by robots, will be assembled on the top two floors at the DFAB HOUSE construction site.

Digitalisation has found its way into timber construction, with entire elements already being fabricated by computer-aided systems. The raw material is cut to size by the machines, but in most cases it still has to be manually assembled to create a plane frame. In the past, this fabrication process came with many geometric restrictions.

Under the auspices of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication, researchers from ETH Zurich’s Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication have developed a new, digital timber construction method that expands the range of possibilities for traditional timber frame construction by enabling the efficient construction and assembly of geometrically complex timber modules. Spatial Timber Assemblies evolved from a close collaboration with Erne AG Holzbau and will be used for the first time in the DFAB HOUSE project at the Empa and Eawag NEST research and innovation construction site in Dübendorf. It is also the first large-scale architectural project to use the construction robots developed by ETH Zurich’s new Robotic Fabrication Laboratory.

With robotic precision
The robot first takes a timber beam and guides it while it is sawed to size. After an automatic tool change, a second robot drills the required holes for connecting the beams. In the final step, the two robots work together and position the beams in the precise spatial arrangement based on the computer layout. To prevent collisions when positioning the individual timber beams, the researchers have developed an algorithm that constantly recalculates the path of motion for the robots according to the current state of construction. Workers then manually bolt the beams together.

Longer lasting, more individual construction
Unlike traditional timber frame construction, Spatial Timber Assemblies can manage without reinforcement plates because the required rigidity and load-bearing result from the geometric structure. Not only does this save material; it also opens up new creative possibilities. A total of six spatial, geometrically unique timber modules will be prefabricated in this way for the first time. Lorries will then transport them to the DFAB HOUSE construction site at the NEST in Dübendorf, where they will be joined to build a two-storey residential unit with more than 100 m2 of floor space. The complex geometry of the timber construction will remain visible behind a transparent membrane façade.

Integrated digital architecture
The robots use information from a computer-aided design model to cut and arrange the timber beams. This method was specially developed during the project and uses various input parameters to create a geometry consisting of 487 timber beams in total.

The fact that Spatial Timber Assemblies is being used for digital fabrication and also in design and planning offers a major advantage according to Matthias Kohler, Professor of Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich and the man spearheading the DFAB HOUSE project: “If any change is made to the project overall, the computer model can be constantly adjusted to meet the new requirements. This kind of integrated digital architecture is closing the gap between design, planning and execution.”

More Information in ETH Zurich Press Release
Detailed information about the building process, quotes as well as image and video material can be found in the extended press release by ETH Zurich.

The European Robotics Forum 2018 (ERF2018) in Tampere brought together over 900 attendees from robotics academia and industry. To bridge the two, euRobotics hosted the Georges Giralt PhD Award 2017 & 2018 and the TechTransfer Award 2018, during a Gala Dinner event on 14 March, in Tampere, Finland.

The aim of the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award (now in its 15th year) is to showcase the impact of robotics research and to raise the profile of technology transfer between science and industry. Outstanding innovations in robot technology and automation that result from cooperative efforts between research and industry are eligible for the prize.

The First prize went to Germany’s Roboception: rc_visard – 3D perception & manipulation for robots made easy team, composed of Michael Suppa, and Heiko Hirschmueller from Roboception GmbH, and Alin Albu-Schaeffer from the Institute of Robotics and German Aerospace Center (DLR).

“This award is a recognition of our institute’s continued efforts of supporting the go-to-market of technologies developed at our institute or – as in this case – derived thereof,” said Prof. Albu-Schaeffer. Dr. Suppa added that “since spinning Roboception off the DLR in 2015, a significant amount of thought, hard work and – first and foremost – unfailing commitment of our team have gone into bringing this technology from a research state to a market-ready product. And we are very proud to see these efforts recognized by the jury, and rewarded with this prestigious award.” The rc_visard is already in operational use in a number of customer projects across a variety of robotic domains. Prof. Albu-Schaeffer, an enthused rc_visard user at his DLR Institute himself, is convinced that “this product is one that will shape the future of robotics, thanks to its unique versatility.”

Watch the an interview with rc_visard filmed at Hannover Messe

The Second prize went to Germany, to the project Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms (MARS), created by a team made up of Timo Blender and Christian Schlegel, from Hochschule Ulm, and Benno Pichlmaier from AGCO GmbH. The MARS experiment aims at the development of small and stream-lined mobile agricultural robot units to fuel a paradigm shift in farming practices. 

The Third prize went to Smart Robots from Italy, a team made up of Paolo Rocco and Andrea Maria Zanchettin, from Politecnico di Milano, and Roberto Rossi, from Smart Robots s.r.l., Italy. Smart robots provides advanced perception and intelligent capabilities to robots, enabling new disruptive forms of collaboration with human beings.

The Finalist was the In situ Fabricator (IF), an autonomous construction robot from Switzerland, with a team made up of Kathrin Dörfler from Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, NCCR Digital Fabrication, Markus Giftthaler and Timothy Sandy from Agile & Dexterous Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich, NCCR Digital Fabrication.

The members of jury of the TechTransfer Award were: Susanne Bieller (Eunited Robotics), Rainer Bischoff (KUKA), Georg von Wichert (Siemens), Herman Bruyninckx (KU Leuven), Martin Haegele (Fraunhofer IPA). The euRobotics TechTransfer Award 2018 is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Programme.

The Georges Giralt PhD Award showcased the best PhD theses defended during 2017 and 2018 in European universities from all areas of robotics

The 2017 edition saw 41 submissions from 11 countries. The jury composed of 26 academics from 16 European countries awarded:

Winner: Johannes Englsberger, Technical University of Munich, Germany – Combining reduced dynamics models and whole-body control for agile humanoid locomotion

Finalists:

• Christian Forster, University of Zurich, Switzerland – Visual Inertial Odometry and Active Dense Reconstruction for Mobile Robots
• Stefan Groothuis, University of Twente, the Netherlands – On the Modeling, Design, and Control of Compliant Robotic Manipulators
• Meng Guo, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden – Hybrid Control of Multi-robot Systems under Complex Temporal Tasks
• Nanda van der Stap, University of Twente, the Netherlands – Image-based endoscope navigation and clinical applications

The 2018 edition saw 27 submissions from 11 countries. The jury composed of 26 academics from 16 European countries awarded:

Winners:

• Frank Bonnet, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland – Shoaling with fish: using miniature robotic agents to close the interaction loop with groups of zebrafish Danior rerio
• Daniel Leidner, University of Bremen, Germany – Cognitive Reasoning for Compliant Robot Manipulation

Finalists:

• Adrià Colomé Figueras, University Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain – Bimanual Robot Skills: MP Encoding and Dimensionality Reduction
• Đula Nađ, University of Zagreb, Croatia – Guidance and control of autonomous underwater agents with acoustically aided navigation
• Angel Santamaria-Navarro, University Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain – Visual Guidance of Unmanned Aerial Manipulators

The Ceremony saw the handing of the European Robotics League (ERL) Awards: ERL Industrial Robots and ERL Service Robots, and ERL Emergency Robots. Points are awarded by attending local and major tournaments, not a central event, with three main objectives: strengthening the European robotics industry, pushing innovative autonomous systems for emergency response, and addressing societal challenges of aging populations in Europe. The European Robotics League is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Programme. 

Read the ERL Awards press release: European Robotics League winners revealed in Tampere, Finland (Season 2017/18)

 

A short electric pulse is all it takes to generate and release a powerful vacuum in the blink of an eye. The novel vacuum gripper developed by the research team led by Professor Stefan Seelecke at Saarland University enables robot arms to pick up objects and move them around freely in space. The system works without the need for compressed air to generate the vacuum, it is energy efficient, quiet and suitable for use in clean rooms. The specialists for intelligent materials systems make use of artificial muscles, which are bundles of ultrafine shape memory wires that are able to tense and relax just as real muscle fibres do. The wires also function as sensors and can sense, for example, when the gripper needs to readjust or tighten its grip.

Today, over 16,000 robots in the automotive industry are operating with ZDT. Since its introduction, FANUC estimates that ZDT has saved customers over 1,300 hours of unexpected production interruptions, which equates to more than $40M.

If a robot is dealing with electronics, it needs to know whether its hand is sliding along a wire or pulling on it. If the robot needs to hold a medical instrument, it needs to know if the object is slipping or in a firm grip.

As manufacturing is increasingly interwoven with automation, companies seek cost-effective options for integrating rotary index drives with a variety of robotic applications such as spray painting, welding, assembly, material handling and more.

An innovative new type of robotic arm that could be useful in outer space or in the orchards has been developed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers.

by Rob Coppinger

Swarms of firefighting drones could one day be deployed to tackle hugely destructive megafires that are becoming increasingly frequent in the Mediterranean region because of climate change, arson and poor landscape management.

It’s one of a number of initiatives looking at how best to fight large fires from the air – a challenge that’s becoming more and more common.

A 2017 report on forest fires by the EU’s Joint Research Centre said that the year would ‘likely be remembered as one of the most devastating wildfire seasons in Europe since records began’, after the destruction of nearly 700,000 hectares of land in the EU by early September.

Such fires are dangerous not only for people who live in the area but also for the crews of people whose job it is to put the fires out. But using intelligent robots to scout the area and drop water can allow humans to stand further back from the danger zone, only looking at the drones’ data to make decisions from the safety of a command and control centre.

Because drones can fly day or night and gain rapid access to previously inaccessible urban or rural fires they can help to save both the lives of the public and first responders.

Torrential

Multiple autonomous drones dropping 600 litres of water every minute during the night while other unmanned vehicles refill to repeat the attack on a raging fire is the vision of Spanish company Drone Hopper. Despite this torrential approach, ‘we are not meant to be competitors with the airplanes and helicopters, we want to be complementary,’ Drone Hopper’s chief executive officer, Pablo Flores, said.

Their drone uses heat cameras to locate the fire, analyse it, send back the data, and identify what type of fire it is. At just over a metre and a half in length, it can be deployed from an aircraft, as well as a ground vehicle.

The drone is like a helicopter and can hover directly over a specific burning area, but it has many propellers. Once over its target it will release its liquid cargo as a mist designed specifically for the fire type identified.

A mist is good at fighting fire because it cools the area by evaporation and it blocks the transfer of heat to anything flammable nearby. To create the right type of mist, the Drone Hopper uses a proprietary magnetic system and the jet wash from its many propellers to direct the released water and nebulise it.

Flores wants to offer his drone, which is still in development, to local authorities for firefighting. ‘They can’t buy a $30 million airplane, but can have this platform and have their own means to (tackle a fire).’ He says that the Drone Hopper UAV costs five times less per litre than a water tanker aircraft.

But, there is a regulatory obstacle. At the moment, it hasn’t been proven that drones can reliably act autonomously, so national rules generally require each one to have a human remote pilot.

Dr Nazim Kemal Ure, an assistant professor in the aerospace department at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, said: ‘With multiple autonomous systems many things can be achieved much more quickly.’

Swarming

He is developing a way of coordinating drones that he hopes could contribute to a change in regulation. By the end of the year, Dr Ure expects to be field testing autonomous drones and their swarming algorithms, developed under the DUF project.

Like Drone Hopper, ‘we are detecting the fire by using vision,’ Dr Ure explained. In initial testing the image processing will not be done by the drones, but eventually in real-world flight-testing the algorithms will be installed onboard.

His drones would fly over a burning area and, by examining the vegetation and wind direction and other factors, predict the fire’s spread and direction. With that information they would then precisely drop retardant to stop the fire.

Dr Ure added that further flight-testing may see cooperation with the Turkish government’s Ministry of Forestry and involve a controlled fire.

However, there is work yet to be done to improve the computer-generated fire images in the simulated environment they are using for training the artificial intelligence. ‘Our models are, in the graphical parts, not state-of-the-art,’ said Dr Ure. He wants to have ‘hyper-realistic’ fire for the drones’ vision analysis software to learn from. For him, that will help ensure the drones will operate well in the real world.

And in the real world, Dr Ure sees many other applications. ‘I would like to extend this algorithm to other scenarios such as search and rescue and planetary exploration,’ he said.

Types of forest fires
Ground fires occur 25 to 50 cm underground and move slowly, burning through peat and roots. They are notoriously difficult to put out and, if the conditions are right, they can smoulder through the winter and then move above ground in spring.

Surface fires move at a speed of between 3 and 300 metres per minute but burn only the lower vegetation and leave the trees unaffected. Of all the fires, they cause the least damage and are usually easy to put out.

Ladder fires climb up the taller trees and engulf smaller vegetation. Vines and invasive plants help the fire gain momentum.

Crown fires burn trees all the way to the canopy and are the hottest and most dangerous of wildfires. They can spread quickly and are very difficult to put out, partly due to the height of the flames. They can spread beyond natural firebreaks such as rivers through a process called spotting, where wind or hot air carries a piece of burning wood elsewhere and starts a new fire.

The research in this article is funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

More info
Drone Hopper
DUF

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In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Justin Werfel, senior research scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Justin talks about what termites can teach us about creating impressive structures using autonomous swarms of robots, as demonstrated in the Termes project. We also hear how Justin was drawn to robotics by the balance between theoretical and practical work.

By Bryant Walker Smith

An automated vehicle in Uber’s fleet fatally struck a woman crossing a street in Arizona. A few points pending more information:

1. This sad incident will test whether Uber is becoming a trustworthy company. Uber needs to be unflinchingly candid and unfailingly helpful in the multiple investigations that are likely to result. It shouldn’t even touch its onboard and offboard systems unless credible observers are present. In this crash, a multitude of data will likely be available to help understand what happened—but only if those data can be believed.
2. The circumstances of this crash certainly suggest that something went wrong. Was the vehicle traveling at a speed appropriate for the conditions? Did the automated driving system and the safety driver recognize the victim, predict her path, and respond appropriately? The lawfulness of the victim’s actions is only marginally relevant to the technical performance of Uber’s testing system (which includes both vehicle and driver).
3. Regardless of whether this crash was unavoidable, serious developers and regulators of automated driving systems understand that tragedies will occur. Automated driving is a challenging work in progress that may never be perfected, and I would be skeptical of anyone who claims that automated driving is a panacea—or who expresses shock that it is not.
4. However, this incident was uncomfortably soon in the history of automated driving. In the United States, there’s about one fatality for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled, and automated vehicles are nowhere close to reaching this many real-world miles. This arguably first fatality may not tell us much statistically, but neither is it reassuring.
5. On the same day that this tragic crash happened, about 100 other people died in crashes in the United States alone. Although they won’t make international news, their deaths are also tragedies. And most of them will have died because of human recklessness, including speeding, drinking, aggression, and distraction. This is a public health crisis, and automated driving may play an important role (though by no means the only role) in addressing it. In short: We should remain concerned about automated driving but terrified about conventional driving.
6. Technologies are understood through stories—both good and bad. I don’t know how this tragic story will play out in the fickle public. Surprisingly, Tesla’s fatal 2016 crash doesn’t seem to have dramatically shifted attitudes toward driving technologies. But that was Tesla, and this is Uber. And whereas few people use Autopilot, almost everyone is a pedestrian.
7. The current tragedy includes a long prologue that does not look good. In 2016, Uber refused to comply with California’s automated vehicle law, the state revoked the company’s vehicle registrations, Arizona’s governor tweeted “This is what OVER-regulation looks like! #ditchcalifornia,” and Uber trucked its vehicles down to his state.
8. Developers need to show that they are worthy of the tremendous trust that regulators and the public necessarily place in them. They need to explain what they’re doing, why they believe it is reasonably safe, and why we should believe them. They need to candidly acknowledge their challenges and failures, and they need to readily mitigate the harms caused by those failures. I expand on these principles in a paper (“The Trustworthy Company”) forthcoming at newlypossible.org.

Award winners in robot competitions held by the were named on 14 March 2018, during this year’s European Robotics Forum (ERF), held in Tampere, Finland on 13–15 March.

Awards for the ERL’s 2017-18 season were presented at a Gala Dinner to winning teams that took part in all ERL competitions: Service Robots (ERL-SR), Industry Robots (ERL-IR) and Emergency Robots (ERL-ER).

ERL-SR is for robots that could provide assistance in homes, particularly for people with reduced mobility. ERL-ER is for robots in simulated emergency situations and ERL-IR tackles automation in industry.

Dozens of teams from around Europe took part in the 2017–18 ERL competitions, which stimulate innovation by and collaboration among robotics researchers by setting tasks in simulated real-life conditions, for completion against the clock.

The challenges include understanding natural speech, finding and retrieving objects, greeting visitors, supplying medical aid kits, and stopping simulated radioactive leaks. The teams’ technical approaches could find their way into future commercial robots and could be suitable for a wide range of non-robotics uses in all areas of life.

ERL teams are ranked on their end-of-year scores for various task and functionality challenges, using the best two participations in tournaments. The following teams were awarded on stage during the ERF2018 Awards Gala Dinner.

ERL Service Robots:

• homer@UniKoblenz, Germany, won the first prize for: Task Benchmark 1 “Getting to Know My Home”; Task Benchmark 2 “Welcoming Visitors”; Task Benchmark 3  “Catering for Granny Annie’s Comfort”; Task Benchmark 5 “General Purpose Service Robot (GPSR)”;
• HEARTS, Bristol, UK, won the first prize for: Task Benchmark 2 “Welcoming Visitors”; Functionality Benchmark 3 “Speech Recognition”;
• IRI@ERL, Barcelona, Spain, won the first prize for: Task Benchmark 2 “Welcoming Visitors”; Task Benchmark 3 “Catering for Granny Annie’s Comfort”;
• RoboticsLab UC3M, Madrid, Spain, won the first prize for Task Benchmark 4 “Visit My Home”;
• SocRob@Home, Lisbon, Portugal, won the first prize for: Task Benchmark 1 “Getting to Know My Home”.

European Robotics League Service Awardees 2017-2018 and Coordinators. Credits: Visual Outcasts

ERL Industry Robots:

• b-it-bots Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University, Bonn, Germany, won the first prize for: Functionality Benchmark 4 “Navigation Functionality”.

European Robotics League Industry Awardees 2017-2018 and Coordinators. Credits: Visual Outcasts

ERL Emergency Robots:

• IMM – Janusz Bedzowski won the first prize for: Task Benchmark 2 (Land + Air) “Survey the building and search for missing workers”; Functionality Benchmark 1 “2D Mapping Functionality” (Land + Air);

The Grand Challenge Task Benchmark 1 (land + sea + air) was won by:

• Universitat de Girona – Eric Pairet who won also the first prize for: Task Benchmark 4 (Land + Sea) “Stem the leak”; Functionality Benchmark 3 (Sea) “Object Detection”; Task Benchmark 3 (Sea + Air) “Pipe inspection & search for missing workers”;
• Telerob – Andreas Ciossek who won also the first prize for: Task Benchmark 4 (Land + Sea) “Stem the leak”; Functionality Benchmark 2 (Land + Air) “Object Recognition”;
• ISEP/INESC – Alfredo Martins who won also the first prize for: Task Benchmark 3 (Sea + Air) “Pipe inspection and search for missing workers”; Functionality Benchmark 2 “Object Recognition” (Land + Air).

European Robotics League Emergency Awardees 2017-2018 and Coordinators. Credits: Visual Outcasts

The ERL-ER prizes for task challenges were awarded during the Awards Ceremony for the emergency robots competition held at Piombino, Italy on 15-23 September 2017.

European Robotics League
The European Robotics League (ERL) is the successor to the RoCKIn, euRathlon and EuRoC robotics competitions, funded by the EU and designed to foster scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and robotics. The ERL is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and runs competitions for service (ERL-SR), industrial (ERL-IR) and emergency robots (ERL-ER). See:
The latest ERL-SR scores can be found here.

The latest ERL-IR scores can be found here

The latest ERL-ER scores can be found here.