Category robots

By Kees Lokhorst, Project Coordinator of the agROBOfood project

During the last decades robots are transforming from simple machines to cognitive collaborators. The distance that has been covered is long, but there are still challenges, as well as opportunities that lie ahead. That was also the main topic of discussion in the agROBOfood event ‘Visioning the future of agri-food robotics’ by a panel of experts of the domain.

The topic was introduced by two inspiring presentations. The first one was by Jérôme Bandry, who shared the vision of CEMA (European Agricultural Machinery). According to their insights digitalization, precision agriculture and robotics will be part or even drive the re-shape of agricultural systems that address the societal challenges. Industrial leadership will be needed to address challenges on investments in the data infrastructure, legislation, and skills development. However, the biggest challenge is to bridge the gap between the development of innovative robotic solutions and the successful uptake of these solutions in practice.

The second one by Dr. Slawomir Sander, Chair of the EU-Robotics AISBL topic group on agriculture robotics showcased the opportunities and challenges for the community involved in the European Robotics for the agri-food production. Those are available in the strategic agenda that was developed by EU-Robotics along with agROBOfood, an H2020 project that aims to build a pan-European network of Digital Innovation Hubs in the agri-food sector. The purpose of this strategic agenda was to contribute to the development of the European Strategic Research and Innovation and Deployment Agenda (SRIDA) of the AI, Data and Robotics PPP, a broad and coherent view of the needs, applications, key challenges for robotics for the agri-food production domain in combination with data and AI, a 360o stakeholder view addressing technology, business, and ecosystem development, and a basis for the vision, alignment, and development of programs, projects, groups, and consortia that aim to contribute to the development and deployment of robotics, AI, and data in the agri-food production network.

The agenda’s vision is well encapsulated in the following sentence: “Future agri-food production networks will be flexible, responsive, and transparent, providing sufficient high-quality and healthy products and services for everyone at a reasonable cost while preserving resources, biodiversity, climate, environment, and cultural differences”. The mission’s respectively in the following: “Stimulate the development and integration of innovative robotic, AI, and Data solutions that can successfully be used in flexible, responsive, and transparent agri-food production networks”.

The current release of the agenda mainly focuses on the food production part. Being a working document though it will serve as a basis for further elaboration to encompass the whole agri-food domain in its full width and depth. With an emphasis on robotics and to a lesser extent on AI and Data, it provides a vision and mission on what robotics should contribute and how to facilitate the transition to a more sustainable agri-food production. Key challenges in terms of technology, ecosystem, and market are derived from 12 use-case themes within the agri-food production domain (table).

In case of questions, please contact Kees.lokhorst@wur.nl or visit https://agrobofood.eu/project/ and https://sparc-robotics-portal.eu/web/agriculture/home

In this fourth release of our series dedicated to IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist, we bring you Peter Corke. He is a distinguished professor of robotic vision at Queensland University of Technology, Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision.

If you’ve ever studied a robotics or computer vision course, you might have read a classic book: Peter Corke’s Robotics, Vision and Control. Moreover, Peter has also released several open-source robotics resources and free courses, all available at his website. If you’d like to hear more about his career in robotics and education, his main challenges and what he learnt from them, and what’s his advice for current robotics students, check out his video below. Have fun!

Machines and robots undoubtedly make life easier. They carry out jobs with precision and speed, and, unlike humans, they do not require breaks as they are never tired.

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society has recently released the list of winners of their best paper awards. Below you can see the list and access the publications. Congratulations to all winners!

IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award

• TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects With Residual Physics. Andy Zeng, Shuran Song, Johnny Lee, Alberto Rodriguez and Thomas Funkhouser. IEEE Transactions on Robotics; vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 1307-1319, August 2020

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award

• A Recursive Watermark Method for Hard Real-Time Industrial Control Systems Cyber Resilience Enhancement. Zhen Song, Antun Skuric, and Kun Ji. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering; vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1030-1043, 2020

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award

• Robotic Batch Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Based on Microfluidic Groove. Yaowei Liu, Xuefeng Wang, Qili Zhao, Xin Zhao, and Mingzhu Sun. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering; vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 2097-2106, 2020

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award

• LIT: Light-Field Inference of Transparency for Refractive Object Localization. Zheming Zhou, Xiaotong Chen, and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters; vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4548-4555, July 2020
• EGAD! An Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset for Diversity and Reproducibility in Robotic Manipulation. Douglas Morrison, Peter Corke, and Jürgen Leitner. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters; vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4368-4375, July 2020
• Inverted and Inclined Climbing Using Capillary Adhesion in a Quadrupedal Insect-Scale Robot. Yufeng Chen, Neel Doshi, and Robert J. Wood. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters; vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4820-4827, July 2020
• Electronics-Free Logic Circuits for Localized Feedback Control of Multi-Actuator Soft Robots. Ke Xu and Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters; vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 3990-3997, July 2020
• Quadrupedal Locomotion on Uneven Terrain With Sensorized Feet. Giorgio Valsecchi, Ruben Grandia, and Marco Hutter. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters; vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1548-1555, April 2020

IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine Best Paper Award

• Vine Robots: Design, Teleoperation, and Deployment for Navigation and Exploration. Margaret M. Coad, Laura H. Blumenschein, Sadie Cutler, Javier A. Reyna Zepeda, Nicholas D. Naclerio, Haitham El-Hussieny, Usman Mehmood, Jee-Hwan Ryu, Elliot W. Hawkes, and Allison M. Okamura. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine; vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 120-132, September 2020

IEEE Transactions on Haptics Best Paper Award

• Proprioceptive Localization of the Fingers: Coarse, Biased, and Context-Sensitive. Bharat Dandu, Irene A. Kuling, and Yon Visell. IEEE Transactions on Haptics, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 259-269, 1 April-June 2020

IEEE Transactions on Haptics Best Application Paper Award

• Soft Exoskeleton Glove with Human Anatomical Architecture: Production of Dexterous Finger Movements and Skillful Piano Performance. Nobuhiro Takahashi, Shinichi Furuya, and Hideki Koike. IEEE Transactions on Haptics, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 679-690, Oct.-Dec. 2020

The so-called ‘no code’ revolution in programming seeks to make the automation industry more autonomous and to democratize the use of robotics at the shop floor level.

Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau deep dive into how Bedrock Ocean is innovating in the world of Marine Surveys. At Bedrock Ocean, they are developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is able to map the seafloor autonomously and at a high resolution. They are also developing a data platform to access, process, and visualize data captured from other companies at the seafloor.

Bedrock Ocean is solving two problems in the industry of Marine Surveying.
1. The vast majority of the seafloor is completely unmapped
2. The data that is captured from the seafloor is not standardized or centralized.

Seafloor data conducted by two different companies with the same or different hardware to capture the data can vary significantly in the calculated seafloor profile

Anthony DiMare
Anthony previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. While at Nautilus, Anthony helped global companies solve challenges with distributed, siloed maritime data systems and built the early team that launched Nautilus Platform into large publicly listed shipping companies.

Charles Chiau
Charles, Bedrock’s CTO, was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a system integration engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he worked on manned submersibles including ones for Tom Perkins, Richard Branson, and Steve Fossett.

Mantis shrimp pack the strongest punch of any creature in the animal kingdom. Their club-like appendages accelerate faster than a bullet out of a gun and just one strike can knock the arm off a crab or break through a snail shell. These small but mighty crustaceans have been known to take on octopus and win.

In this new release of our series showcasing the plenary and keynote talks from the IEEE/RSJ IROS2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) you’ll meet Steve LaValle (University of Oulu) talking about the area of perception, action and control, and Sarah Bergbreiter (Carnegie Mellon University) talking about bio-inspired microrobotics.

Prof. Steve LaValle – Rapidly exploring Random Topics Bio: Steve LaValle is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, in Particular Robotics and Virtual Reality, at the University of Oulu. From 2001 to 2018, he was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He has also held positions at Stanford University and Iowa State University. His research interests include robotics, virtual and augmented reality, sensing, planning algorithms, computational geometry, and control theory. In research, he is mostly known for his introduction of the Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm, which is widely used in robotics and other engineering fields. In industry, he was an early founder and chief scientist of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook in 2014, where he developed patented tracking technology for consumer virtual reality and led a team of perceptual psychologists to provide principled approaches to virtual reality system calibration, health and safety, and the design of comfortable user experiences. From 2016 to 2017 he was Vice President and Chief Scientist of VR/AR/MR at Huawei Technologies, Ltd. He has authored the books Planning Algorithms, Sensing and Filtering, and Virtual Reality.

Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter – Microsystems-inspired Robotics Bio: Sarah Bergbreiter joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of 2018 after spending ten years at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1999. After a short introduction to the challenges of sensor networks at a small startup company, she received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and 2007 with a focus on microrobotics. Prof. Bergbreiter received the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008, the NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award in 2013 for her research bridging microsystems and robotics. She has received several Best Paper awards at conferences like ICRA, IROS, and Hilton Head Workshop. She currently serves as vice-chair of DARPA’s Microsystems Exploratory Council and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

How an integrated hardware and software approach can simplify the development and deployment of robotics applications

To train robots how to work independently but cooperatively, researchers at the University of Cincinnati gave them a relatable task: Move a couch.

Heavy washdown and harsh chemical solutions used to clean robots in FDA and USDA sanitary environments for food processing can impact the robot finish, as well as leave condensation on robotic machinery that could potentially reach food products being handled.

When a robot needs to move across a room, there are several paths, each with curves and multiple potential starting and ending points. How does it decide the most efficient, cost-effective approach? A collaborative team of researchers in the United States may have the answer. They developed a method to determine the optimal solution for this kind of general control problem, which could apply to the decision making needed to move from point A to point B to more complex automated, robotic navigation. They published their results in the August 2021 Issue, IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

Modern transportation wouldn’t be the same without robots, and the future will only serve to solidify this. Here’s how robots are pushing the transportation industry forward and where they could go from here.

Today we continue with our series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist. This time you’ll meet Radhika Nagpal, who is a Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering from Harvard University.

Did you know Rhadika directed the research that led to the creation of the Kilobots, the first open-source, low-cost robots that were specifically designed for large scale experiments with hundreds and thousands of them? You can watch this example or this other one if you’re curious. If you’d like to know more about Rhadika and her achievements, challenges and what she would tell her younger self, below is the whole interview. Enjoy!

By Francois Barthelat

The big idea

Segmented hinges in the long, thin bones of fish fins are critical to the incredible mechanical properties of fins, and this design could inspire improved underwater propulsion systems, new robotic materials and even new aircraft designs.

Fish fins are not simple membranes that fish flap right and left for propulsion. They probably represent one of the most elegant ways to interact with water. Fins are flexible enough to morph into a wide variety of shapes, yet they are stiff enough to push water without collapsing.

The secret is in the structure: Most fish have rays – long, bony spikes that stiffen the thin membranes of collagen that make up their fins. Each of these rays is made of two stiff rows of small bone segments surrounding a softer inner layer. Biologists have long known that fish can change the shape of their fins using muscles and tendons that push or pull on the base of each ray, but very little research has been done looking specifically at the mechanical benefits of the segmented structure.

A pufferfish uses its small but efficient fins to swim against, and maneuver in, a strong current.

To study the mechanical properties of segmented rays, my colleagues and I used theoretical models and 3D-printed fins to compare segmented rays with rays made of a non-segmented flexible material.

We showed that the numerous small, bony segments act as hinge points, making it easy to flex the two bony rows in the ray side to side. This flexibility allows the muscles and tendons at the base of rays to morph a fin using minimal amounts of force. Meanwhile, the hinge design makes it hard to deform the ray along its length. This prevents fins from collapsing when they are subjected to the pressure of water during swimming. In our 3D-printed rays, the segmented designs were four times easier to morph than continuous designs while maintaining the same stiffness.

Why it matters

Morphing materials – materials whose shape can be changed – come in two varieties. Some are very flexible – like hydrogels – but these materials collapse easily when you subject them to external forces. Morphing materials can also be very stiff – like some aerospace composites – but it takes a lot of force to make small changes in their shape.

The segmented structure design of fish fins overcomes this functional trade-off by being highly flexible as well as strong. Materials based on this design could be used in underwater propulsion and improve the agility and speed of fish-inspired submarines. They could also be incredibly valuable in soft robotics and allow tools to change into a wide variety of shapes while still being able to grasp objects with a lot of force. Segmented ray designs could even benefit the aerospace field. Morphing wings that could radically change their geometry, yet carry large aerodynamic forces, could revolutionize the way aircraft take off, maneuver and land.

What still isn’t known

While this research goes a long way in explaining how fish fins work, the mechanics at play when fish fins are bent far from their normal positions are still a bit of a mystery. Collagen tends to get stiffer the more deformed it gets, and my colleagues and I suspect that this stiffening response – together with how collagen fibers are oriented within fish fins – improves the mechanical performance of the fins when they are highly deformed.

What’s next

I am fascinated by the biomechanics of natural fish fins, but my ultimate goal is to develop new materials and devices that are inspired by their mechanical properties. My colleagues and I are currently developing proof-of-concept materials that we hope will convince a broader range of engineers in academia and the private sector that fish fin-inspired designs can provide improved performance for a variety of applications.

Francois Barthelat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article appeared in The Conversation.