Category robots

Underwater vehicles haven't changed much since the submarines of World War II. They're rigid, fairly boxy and use propellers to move. And whether they are large manned vessels or small robots, most underwater vehicles have one cruising speed where they are most energy efficient.

Trust is a very important aspect of human-robot interactions, as it could play a crucial role in the widespread implementation of robots in real-world settings. Nonetheless, trust is a considerably complex construct that can depend on psychological and environmental factors.

Octopus tentacles can move in many directions, but also form stiff joint-like structures for more precise movements. Caterpillars can travel by using inchworm movements, as well as coil up and propel themselves away from predators. Such capabilities allow organisms to thrive in the natural, unstructured world. Creating robots with that kind of fluidity of movement, though, has been a challenge.

Robotic grasping and manipulation has historically been dominated by rigid grippers, force/form closure constraints, and extensive grasp trajectory planning. The advent of soft robotics offers new avenues to diverge from this paradigm by using strategic compliance to passively conform to grasped objects in the absence of active control, and with minimal chance of damage to the object or surrounding environment. However, while the reduced emphasis on sensing, planning, and control complexity simplifies grasping and manipulation tasks, precision and dexterity are often lost.

This talk will discuss efforts to increase the robustness of soft grasping and the dexterity of soft robotic manipulators, with particular emphasis on grasping tasks that are challenging for more traditional robot hands. This includes compliant objects, thin flexible sheets, and delicate organisms. Examples will be drawn from manipulation of everyday objects and field studies of deep sea sampling using soft end effectors

Bio: Robert Wood is the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a National Geographic Explorer. Prof. Wood completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research interests include new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, bioinspired microrobots, biomedical microrobots, control of sensor-limited and computation-limited systems, active soft materials, wearable robots, and soft grasping and manipulation. He is the winner of multiple awards for his
work including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, Technology Review’s TR35, and multiple best paper awards. In 2010 Wood received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama for his work in microrobotics. In 2012 he was selected for the Alan T. Waterman award, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious early career award. In 2014 he was named one of National Geographic’s “Emerging Explorers”, and in 2018 he was an inaugural recipient of the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal. Wood’s group is also dedicated to STEM education by using novel robots to motivate young students to pursue careers in science and engineering.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Dave Coleman, Chief Executive Officer at PickNik Robotics. Dave speaks at a high level about what MoveIt is and what problems it helps roboticists solve, they talk about supervised autonomy, including a collaboration with NASA and MoveIt Studio, and Dave talks about MoveIt 3.0.

 

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• Download the episode
• Dave Coleman’s LinkedIn profile
• PickNik’s website
• MoveIt’s website
• MoveIt Studio’s website

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Over the past few decades, roboticists have developed systems for a variety of real-world settings, including healthcare facilities. Among their many possible uses in healthcare, robots could help to assist patients in nursing homes or hospitals; for instance, administering medication, food or helping patients to walk.

IoT and mobile app development are two such prospects that industry analysts believe can reshape our lives in significant ways. Collectively, these technologies are expected to dominate the future and bring a never-seen change in enterprises across the niches.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge planned to develop novel approaches to rapidly map, explore and search underground environments in time-sensitive operations critical for the civilian and military domains alike. In the Final Event, DARPA designed an environment involving branches representing all three challenges of the “Tunnel Circuit”, the “Urban Circuit” and the “Cave Circuit”. Robots had to explore, search for objects (“artifacts”) of interest, and report their accurate location within underground tunnels, infrastructure similar to a subway, and natural caves and paths with extremely confined geometries, tough terrain, and severe visual degradation (including dense smoke).

Team CERBERUS deployed a diverse set of robots with the prime systems being four ANYmal C legged systems. In the Prize Round of the Final Event, the team won the competition and scored 23 points by correctly detecting and localizing 23 of 40 of the artifacts DARPA had placed inside the environment. The second team, “CSIRO Data61” also scored 23 points but reported the last artifact with a slight further delay to DARPA thus the tiebraker was in favor of Team CERBERUS. The third team, “MARBLE” scored 18 points.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was one of the rare types of global robotic competition events pushing the frontiers for resilient autonomy and calling teams to develop novel and innovative solutions with the capacity to help critical sectors such as search and rescue personnel and the industry in domains such as mining and beyond. The level of achievement of Team CERBERUS is best understood by looking at all the competitors in the “Systems Competition” of the Final Event. The participating teams including members from top international institutions, namely:

• CERBERUS (Score = 23): University of Nevada, Reno, ETH Zurich, NTNU, University of California Berkeley, Oxford Robotics Institute, Flyability, Sierra Nevada Corporation
• CSIRO Data61 (Score = 23): CSIRO, Emesent, Georgia Institute of Technology
• MARBLE (Score = 18): University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Denver, Scientific Systems Company, University of California Santa Cruz
• Explorer (Score = 17): Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University
• CoSTAR (Score = 13): NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, MIT, KAIST, Lulea University of Technology
• CTU-CRAS-NORLAB (Score = 7): Czech Technological University, Université Laval
• Coordinated Robotics (Score = 2): Coordinated Robotics, California State University Channel Islands, Oke Onwuka, Sequoia Middle School
• Robotika (Score = 2): Robotika International, Robotika.cz, Czech University of Life Science, Centre for Field Robotics, Cogito Team

We congratulate all members of the team and we are proud of this incredible and historic achievement! Most importantly, we are excited to be part of this amazing community pushing the frontier of resilient robotic autonomy in extreme environments.

Researchers at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona have recently developed Baby Robot, a robotic toy that could be used to enhance the motor skills of toddlers. This system, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can interact with toddlers in ways that encourage them to move around, either to try grasping the robot or to run away from it.

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity's final one.

As part of a focus project at ETH Zurich, eight Bachelor students built a flying manipulator that can hover in any orientation and grasp objects. The drone is more maneuverable than a quadrocopter and has been designed with the aim of pushing aerial robotics to new heights.

Exoskeleton devices work, researchers say, for a variety of uses such as speeding up our walking or making running easier. Yet they don't know what exactly makes exoskeletons effective. What is the benefit of customization, for example? And how much does simply getting used to the exoskeleton matter? Researchers in the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory at Stanford University examined these questions and found that training plays a remarkably significant role in how well exoskeletons provide assistance.

For any Offline Robot Programming solution to be effective, the virtual robot cell set up in the software must be identical to the existing physical robot cell. OCTOPUZ refers to this process as “implementation”.

In this final video of our focus series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist, you’ll meet Dennis Hong speaking about the robots he and his team have created (locomotion and new ways of moving; an autonomous car for the visually impaired; disaster relief robots), Star Wars and cooking. All in all, ingredients from different worlds that Dennis is using to benefit society.

Dennis Hong is a Professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. If you’d like to find out more about how Star Wars influenced his professional career in robotics, how his experience taking a cooking assistant robot to MasterChef USA inspired a multi-million research project, and all the robots he is creating, check out his video below!

Amazon's new robot can hear, see and follow you around the the home, but its no Rosey the Robot.