Archive 25.07.2022

A chess-playing robot grabbed the finger of its 7-year-old opponent and broke it during last week's Moscow Chess Open tournament, Russian media reported Monday.

AGV’s and AMR’s address a number of key manufacturing process and facility-related concerns as well as key cost-related metrics in the migration towards continuous improvement philosophies such as lean manufacturing and six sigma.

Teams of mobile robots could be highly effective in helping humans to complete straining manual tasks, such as manufacturing processes or the transportation of heavy objects. In recent years, some of these robots have already been tested and introduced in real-world settings, attaining very promising results.

Dr. Akira Kakugo and his team from Hokkaido University in Japan sent us a video presentation of his recent paper ‘Cooperative cargo transportation by a swarm of molecular machines’, published in Science Robotics.

‘Despite the advancements in macro-scale robots, the development of a large number of small-size robots is still challenging, which is crucial to enhance the scalability of swarm robots,’ says Dr. Kakugo. In the paper, researchers showed it is possible to collectively transport molecular cargo by a swarm of artificial molecular robots (engineered systems with biological/molecular sensors, processors and actuators) responding to light.

• PAPER – Cooperative cargo transportation by a swarm of molecular machines. M. Akter, J. J. Keya, K. Kayano, A. M. R. Kabir, D. Inoue, H. Hess, K. Sada, A. Kuzuya, H. Asanuma, and A. Kakugo. Science Robotics, 7(65), p.eabm0677.

How do people communicate when they are underwater? With body language, of course.

Marine environments present a unique set of challenges that render several technologies that were developed for land applications completely useless. Communicating using sound, or at least as people use sound to communicate, is one of them.

Michael Fulton tackles this challenge with his presentation at ICRA 2022 by using body language to communicate with an AUV underwater. Tune in for more.

His poster can be viewed here.

Michael Fulton

Michael Fulton is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His research focuses primarily on underwater robotics with a focus on applications where robots work with humans. Specifically, human-robot interaction and robot perception using computer vision and deep learning, with the intent of creating systems that can work collaboratively with humans in challenging environments.

Simulation models show that this new mode of transport could have huge cost advantages, with savings between 20 and 50 per cent compared to traditional multi-tiered land transport systems.

When we announced AlphaFold 2 last December, it was hailed as a solution to the 50-year old protein folding problem. Last week, we published the scientific paper and source code explaining how we created this highly innovative system, and today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms that scientists rely on for their research.

When we announced AlphaFold 2 last December, it was hailed as a solution to the 50-year old protein folding problem. Last week, we published the scientific paper and source code explaining how we created this highly innovative system, and today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body, as well as for the proteins of 20 additional organisms that scientists rely on for their research.

As the underwater robot OceanOneK carefully navigated toward the upper deck railing of the sunken Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi about 500 m below the Mediterranean's surface this month (roughly a third of a mile), Stanford University roboticist Oussama Khatib felt as though he himself was there.

The traditional portfolio mix of heavy hardware-orientation with associated software is transitioning to application and non-control software. The move to solutions combining hardware, software, and services is real.

The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what Bahl had done.

When communication lines are open, individual agents such as robots or drones can work together to collaborate and complete a task. But what if they aren't equipped with the right hardware or the signals are blocked, making communication impossible? University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers started with this more difficult challenge. They developed a method to train multiple agents to work together using multi-agent reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

By Gareth Willmer

In a city in the future, a fire breaks out in a skyscraper. An alarm is triggered and a swarm of drones swoops in, surrounds the building and uses antennas to locate people inside, enabling firefighters to go straight to the stricken individuals. Just in the nick of time – no deaths are recorded.

Elsewhere in the city, drones fly back and forth delivering tissue samples from hospitals to specialist labs for analysis, while another rushes a defibrillator to someone who has suffered a suspected cardiac arrest on a football pitch. The patient lives, with the saved minutes proving critical.

At the time of writing, drones have already been used in search-and-rescue situations to save more than 880 people worldwide, according to drone company DJI. Drones are also being used for medical purposes, such as to transport medicines and samples, and take vaccines to remote areas.

Drones for such uses are still a relatively new development, meaning there is plenty of room to make them more effective and improve supporting infrastructure. This is particularly true when it comes to urban environments, where navigation is complex and requires safety regulations.

Flying firefighters

The IDEAL DRONE project developed a system to aid in firefighting and other emergencies to demonstrate the potential for using swarms of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in such situations. Equipped with antennas, the drones use a radio-frequency system to detect the location of ‘nodes’ – or tags – worn by people inside a building.

“By knowing how many people are inside the building and where they are located, it will optimise the search-and-rescue operation.”

– Prof Gian Paolo Cimellaro, IDEAL DRONE

Making use of an Italian aircraft hangar, the tests involved pilots on the ground flying three drones around the outside of a building. The idea is that the drones triangulate the position of people inside where their signals intersect, as well as detecting information about their health condition. The details can then be mapped to optimise and accelerate rescue operations, and enhance safety for firefighters by allowing them to avoid searching all over a burning building without knowing where people are.

‘You create a sort of temporary network from outside the building through which you can detect the people inside,’ said Professor Gian Paolo Cimellaro, an engineer at the Polytechnic University of Turin and project lead on IDEAL DRONE.

‘By knowing how many people are inside the building and where they are located, it will optimise the search-and-rescue operation.’

He added: ‘A unique characteristic of this project is that it allows indoor tracking without communication networks such as Wi-Fi or GPS, which might not be available if you are in an emergency like a disaster or post-earthquake situation.’

There are some challenges in terms of accuracy and battery life, while another obvious drawback is that people in the building need to already be wearing trackers.

However, said Prof Cimellaro, current thinking is that this can be unintrusive if tags are incorporated in existing technology that people often already carry such as smartwatches, mobile phones or ID cards. They can also be used by organisations that mandate their use for staff working in hazardous environments, such as factories or offshore oil rigs.

Looking beyond the challenges, Prof Cimellaro thinks such systems could be a reality within five years, with drones holding significant future promise for avoiding ‘putting human lives in danger’.

Medical networks

Another area in which drones can be used to save lives is medical emergencies. This is the focus of the SAFIR-Med project.

Belgian medical drone operator Helicus has established a command-and-control (C2C) centre in Antwerp to coordinate drone flights. The idea is that the C2C automatically creates flight plans using artificial intelligence, navigating within a digital twin – or virtual representation – of the real world. These plans are then relayed to the relevant air traffic authorities for flight authorisation.

‘We foresee drone cargo ports on the rooftops of hospitals, integrated as much as possible with the hospital’s logistical system so that transport can be on demand,’ added Geert Vanhandenhove, manager of flight operations at Helicus.

So far, SAFIR-Med has successfully carried out remote virtual demonstrations, simulations, flights controlled from the C2C at test sites, and other tests such as that of a ‘detect-and-avoid’ system to help drones take evasive action when others are flying in the vicinity.

The next step will be to validate the concepts in real-life demonstrations in several countries, including Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. The trials envisage scenarios including transfers of medical equipment and tissue samples between hospitals and labs, delivery of a defibrillator to treat a cardiac patient outside a hospital, and transport of a physician to an emergency site by passenger drone.

“We foresee drone cargo ports on the rooftops of hospitals.”

– Geert Vanhandenhove, SAFIR-Med

Additional simulations in Greece and the Czech Republic will show the potential for extending such systems across Europe.

SAFIR-Med is part of a wider initiative known as U-space. It’s co-funded by the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR) Joint Undertaking which is a public-private effort for safer drone operations under the Digital European Sky.

Making rules

Much of the technology is already there for such uses of drones, says Vanhandenhove. However, he highlights that there are regulatory challenges involved in drone flights in cities, especially with larger models flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). This includes authorisations for demonstrations within SAFIR-Med itself.

‘The fact that this is the first time this is being done is posing significant hurdles,’ he said. ‘It will depend on the authorisations granted as to which scenarios can be executed.’

But regulations are set to open up over time, with European Commission rules facilitating a framework for use of BVLOS UAVs in low-level airspace due to come into force next January.

Vanhandenhove emphasises that the development of more robust drone infrastructure will be a gradual process of learning and improvement. Eventually, he hopes that through well-coordinated systems with authorities, emergency flights can be mobilised in seconds in smart cities of the future. ‘For us, it’s very important that we can get an authorisation in sub-minute time,’ he said.

He believes commercial flights could even begin within a couple of years, though it may not be until post-2025 that widely integrated, robust uncrewed medical systems come into play in cities. ‘It’s about making the logistics of delivering whatever medical treatment faster and more efficient, and taking out as much as possible the constraints and limitations that we have on the route,’ said Vanhandenhove.

Research in this article was funded via the EU’s European Research Council.

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This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine.

A number of vendors were displaying robotic solutions at Greentech this year. These solutions ranged from newly introduced mobile harvesting robots, to more traditional stationary robots used for processes like transplanting, grading, and sorting.

Penn State agricultural engineers have developed, for the first time, a prototype "end-effector" capable of deftly removing unwanted apples from trees—the first step toward robotic, green-fruit thinning.