Category Robots Podcast

In two volatile spots in the occupied West Bank, Israel has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear gas, stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters.

Beneath our streets lies a maze of pipes, conduits for water, sewage, and gas. Regular inspection of these pipes for leaks or repair normally requires them to be dug up. The latter is not only onerous and expensive—with an estimated annual cost of 5.5 billion pounds in the UK alone—but causes disruption to traffic as well as a nuisance to people living nearby, not to mention damage to the environment.

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Building a responsible approach to data collection with the Partnership on AI...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a ring-shaped soft robot capable of crawling across surfaces when exposed to elevated temperatures or infrared light. The researchers have demonstrated that these "ringbots" are capable of pulling a small payload across the surface—in ambient air or under water, as well as passing through a gap that is narrower than its ring size.

The vision system performs three key tasks: scanning in 3D the raw white vessels; analyzing the 3D scans to establish the vessels’ size, shape, position; and communicating the results to the cobot so it can accurately reach the teacups as they move along the production line.

Robots that can automatically recognize and track specific odors could have a wide range of valuable applications. For instance, they could help to identify the sources of harmful chemical substances in the air after hazardous accidents at power plants, explosions, or other disasters.

6-axis robots in particular, aside from being among the most widely-used industrial machines in general, have become known as the trusted workhorse of injection molding loading and unloading.

Did you have the chance to attend the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022) in Kyoto? Here we bring you the papers that received an award this year in case you missed them. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists!

Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics

Gesture2Vec: Clustering Gestures using Representation Learning Methods for Co-speech Gesture Generation. Payam Jome Yazdian, Mo Chen, and Angelica Lim.

Best RoboCup Paper Award

RCareWorld: A Human-centric Simulation World for Caregiving Robots. Ruolin Ye, Wenqiang Xu, Haoyuan Fu, Rajat Kumar, Jenamani, Vy Nguyen, Cewu Lu, Katherine Dimitropoulou, and Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee.

SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments. Yahav Avigal, Lars Burscheid, Tamim Asfour, Torsten Kroeger, and Ken Goldberg.

Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design

Aerial Grasping and the Velocity Sufficiency Region. Tony G. Chen, Kenneth Hoffmann, JunEn Low, Keiko Nagami, David Lentink, and Mark Cutkosky.

Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award

Robot Learning to Paint from Demonstrations. Younghyo Park, Seunghun Jeon, and Taeyoon Lee.

Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics

Power-based Safety Layer for Aerial Vehicles in Physical Interaction using Lyapunov Exponents. Eugenio Cuniato, Nicholas Lawrance, Marco Tognon, and Roland Siegwart.

Best Paper Award on Agri-Robotics

Explicitly Incorporating Spatial Information to Recurrent Networks for Agriculture. Claus Smitt, Michael Allan Halstead, Alireza Ahmadi, and Christopher Steven McCool.

Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation

Robot Learning of Mobile Manipulation with Reachability Behavior Priors. Snehal Jauhri, Jan Peters, and Georgia Chalvatzaki.

Best Application Paper Award

Soft Tissue Characterisation Using a Novel Robotic Medical Percussion Device with Acoustic Analysis and Neural Networks. Pilar Zhang Qiu, Yongxuan Tan, Oliver Thompson, Bennet Cobley, and Thrishantha Nanayakkara.

Best Paper Award for Industrial Robotics Research for Applications

Absolute Position Detection in 7-Phase Sensorless Electric Stepper Motor. Vincent Groenhuis, Gijs Rolff, Koen Bosman, Leon Abelmann, and Stefano Stramigioli.

ABB Best Student Paper Award

FAR Planner: Fast, Attemptable Route Planner using Dynamic Visibility Update. Fan Yang, Chao Cao, Hongbiao Zhu, Jean Oh, and Ji Zhang.

Best Paper Award

SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments. Yahav Avigal, Lars Berscheid, Tamim Asfour, Torsten Kroeger, and Ken Goldberg.