Archive 07.06.2023

This easy-to-make sponge-jamming device can help stiff robots handle delicate items carefully by mimicking the nuanced touch, or variable stiffness, of a human.

Robots can skip, jump and do somersaults, but they’re too rigid to hold an egg easily. Variable-stiffness devices are potential solutions for contact compliance on hard robots to reduce damage, or for improving the load capacity of soft robots.

This study, published at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023, shows that variable stiffness can be achieved by a silicone sponge.

Lead author Tianqi Yue from Bristol’s Department of Engineering Mathematics explained: “Stiffness, also known as softness, is important in contact scenarios.

“Robotic arms are too rigid so they cannot make such a soft human-like grasp on delicate objects, for example, an egg.

“What makes humans different from robotic arms is that we have soft tissues enclosing rigid bones, which act as a natural mitigating mechanism.

“In this paper, we managed to develop a soft device with variable stiffness, to be mounted on the end robotic arm for making the robot-object contact safe.”

Robot sponge in action. Video Credit: Tianqi Yue.

Silicone sponge is a cheap and easy-to-fabricate material. It is a porous elastomer just like the cleaning sponge used in everyday tasks.

By squeezing the sponge, the sponge stiffens which is why it can be transformed into a variable-stiffness device.

This device could be used in industrial robots in scenarios including gripping jellies, eggs and other fragile substances. It can also be used in service robots to make human-robot interaction safer.

Mr Yue added: “We managed to use a sponge to make a cheap and nimble but effective device that can help robots achieve soft contact with objects. The great potential comes from its low cost and light weight.

“We believe this silicone-sponge based variable-stiffness device will provide a novel solution in industry and healthcare, for example, tunable-stiffness requirement on robotic polishing and ultrasound imaging.”

The team will now look at making the device achieve variable stiffness in multiple directions, including rotation.

Paper: “A Silicone-sponge-based Variable-stiffness Device” by Tianqi Yue at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023.

New algorithms will transform the foundations of computing

A simple sponge has improved how robots grasp, scientists from the University of Bristol have found.   

New algorithms will transform the foundations of computing

-Automate 2023 set record attendance with more than 30,000 registrants -Automate is heading to Chicago in 2024 and will return to Detroit in 2025

If the OEM uses well-designed, proven components, the mobile platform will provide many years of service, handling cumbersome, heavy loads efficiently with minimal downtime for maintenance.

A research collaboration between Cornell and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has found an efficient way to expand the collective behavior of swarming microrobots: Mixing different sizes of the micron-scale 'bots enables them to self-organize into diverse patterns that can be manipulated when a magnetic field is applied. The technique even allows the swarm to "cage" passive objects and then expel them.

Our newsfeeds are filled with talk about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in software such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, which can quickly—albeit haphazardly—generate works such as essays and photographs from a text prompt. Reading these, you might be excused for thinking that writers and photographers are soon to go the way of the elevator operator, automated out of existence.

Learning from one's past mistakes is not limited to humans. Computers do it, too. In industries, this is done via computer-based control systems that help operate production systems. For industrial robots that perform specific tasks in batches, say producing clothing, computer chips, or baked goods, the most commonly used control technique is iterative learning control (ILC). Most industries still rely on ILC systems that use a learning strategy called the proportional-type update rule (PTUR). This technique improves the performance of ILC systems by repeating the same task over and over and updating its control input based on errors encountered in previous iterations.

Many existing robotics systems draw inspiration from nature, artificially reproducing biological processes, natural structures or animal behaviors to achieve specific goals. This is because animals and plants are innately equipped with abilities that help them to survive in their respective environments, and that could thus also improve the performance of robots outside of laboratory settings.

The Un-carrier helps Valmont capture mission-critical data in industry-first beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone inspection operation

In this post we bring you all the paper awards finalists and winners presented during the 2023 edition of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Congratulations to the winners and finalists!

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Paper

• Distributed Data-Driven Predictive Control for Multi-Agent Collaborative Legged Locomotion, by Fawcett, Randall; Amanzadeh, Leila; Kim, Jeeseop; Ames, Aaron; Akbari Hamed, Kaveh. (WINNER)
• Proficiency Self-Assessment without Breaking the Robot: Anomaly Detection using Assumption-Alignment Tracking from Safe Experiments, by Cao, Xuan; Crandall, Jacob W.; Pedersen, Ethan; Gautam, Alvika; Goodrich, Michael A.
• In-Hand Manipulation in Power Grasp: Design of an Adaptive Robot Hand with Active Surfaces, by Cai, Yilin; Yuan, Shenli.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Automation Paper

• Towards Open-Set Material Recognition Using Robot Tactile Sensing, by Liu, Kun-Hong; Yang, Qianhui; Xie, Yu; Huang, Xiangyi.
• Target-Aware Implicit Mapping for Agricultural Crop Inspection, by Kelly, Shane; Riccardi, Alessandro; Marks, Elias Ariel; Magistri, Federico; Guadagnino, Tiziano; Chli, Margarita; Stachniss, Cyrill. (WINNER)
• Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists, by Adebola, Simeon Oluwafunmilore; Parikh, Rishi; Presten, Mark; Sharma, Satvik; Aeron, Shrey; Rao, Ananth; Mukherjee, Sandeep; Qu, Tomson; Wistrom, Tina; Solowjow, Eugen; Goldberg, Ken.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Student Paper

• M-EMBER: Tackling Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation Via Factorized Domain Transfer, by Wu, Bohan; Martin-Martin, Roberto; Fei-Fei, Li.
• Robust Locomotion on Legged Robots through Planning on Motion Primitive Graphs, by Ubellacker, Wyatt; Ames, Aaron. (WINNER)
• Occlusion Reasoning for Skeleton Extraction of Self-Occluded Tree Canopies, by Kim, Chung Hee; Kantor, George.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Deployed Systems Paper

• GUTS: Generalized Uncertainty-Aware Thompson Sampling for Multi-Agent Active Search, by Bakshi, Nikhil Angad; Gupta, Tejus; Ghods, Ramina; Schneider, Jeff. (WINNER)
• FRIDA: A Collaborative Robot Painter with a Differentiable, Real2Sim2Real Planning Environment, by Schaldenbrand, Peter; McCann, James; Oh, Jean.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Dynamics and Control Paper

• Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a 3D Hopping Robot: Leveraging Lie Group Integrators for Dynamically Stable Behaviors, by Csomay-Shanklin, Noel; Dorobantu, Victor; Ames, Aaron. (WINNER)
• Robust, High-Rate Trajectory Tracking on Insect-Scale Soft-Actuated Aerial Robots with Deep-Learned Tube MPC, by Tagliabue, Andrea; Hsiao, Yi-Hsuan; Fasel, Urban; Kutz, J. Nathan; Brunton, Steven; Chen, YuFeng; How, Jonathan.
• Autonomous Drifting with 3 Minutes of Data Via Learned Tire Models, by Djeumou, Franck; Goh, Jon; Topcu, Ufuk; Balachandran, Avinash.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Healthcare and Medical Robotics Paper

• MRI-Powered Magnetic Miniature Capsule Robot with HIFU-Controlled On-Demand Drug Delivery, by Tiryaki, Mehmet Efe; Doğangün, Fatih; Dayan, Cem Balda; Wrede, Paul; Sitti, Metin.
• Real-Time Constrained 6D Object-Pose Tracking of an In-Hand Suture Needle for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery, by Chiu, Zih-Yun; Richter, Florian; Yip, Michael C. (WINNER)
• Exploring Robot-Assisted Optical Coherence Elastography for Surgical Palpation, by Chang, Yeonhee; Ahronovich, Elan; Simaan, Nabil; Song, Cheol.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Locomotion Paper

• RAMP: Reaction-Aware Motion Planning of Multi-Legged Robots for Locomotion in Microgravity, by Ribeiro, Warley Francisco Rocha; Uno, Kentaro; Imai, Masazumi; Murase, Koki; Yoshida, Kazuya.
• Robust Locomotion on Legged Robots through Planning on Motion Primitive Graphs, by Ubellacker, Wyatt; Ames, Aaron.
• Multi-Segmented, Adaptive Feet for Versatile Legged Locomotion in Natural Terrain, by Chatterjee, Abhishek; Mo, An; Kiss, Bernadett; Gönen, Emre Cemal; Badri-Spröwitz, Alexander. (WINNER)

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Manipulation Paper

• M-EMBER: Tackling Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation Via Factorized Domain Transfer, by Wu, Bohan; Martin-Martin, Roberto; Fei-Fei, Li.
• DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation, by Wang, Ruicheng; Zhang, Jialiang; Chen, Jiayi; Xu, Yinzhen; Li, Puhao; Liu, Tengyu; Wang, He.
• In-Hand Manipulation in Power Grasp: Design of an Adaptive Robot Hand with Active Surfaces, by Cai, Yilin; Yuan, Shenli. (WINNER)

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Mechanisms and Design Paper

• New Bracket Polynomials Associated with the General Gough-Stewart Parallel Robot Singularities, by Thomas, Federico.
• A Compact, Two-Part Torsion Spring Architecture, by Bons, Zachary P; Thomas, Gray; Mooney, Luke; Rouse, Elliott.
• Contact Force Control with Continuously Compliant Robotic Legs, by Bendfeld, Robin; Remy, C. David. (WINNER)

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Multi-Robot Systems Paper

• Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Robot Active Information Acquisition, by Tzes, Mariliza; Bousias, Nikolaos; Chatzipantazis, Evangelos; Pappas, George J. (WINNER)
• Distributed Data-Driven Predictive Control for Multi-Agent Collaborative Legged Locomotion, by Fawcett, Randall; Amanzadeh, Leila; Kim, Jeeseop; Ames, Aaron; Akbari Hamed, Kaveh.
• GoRela: Go Relative for Viewpoint-Invariant Motion Forecasting, by Cui, Alexander; Casas Romero, Sergio; Wong, Kelvin; Suo, Simon; Urtasun, Raquel.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Navigation Paper

• IMODE: Real-Time Incremental Monocular Dense Mapping Using Neural Field, by Matsuki, Hidenobu; Sucar, Edgar; Laidlow, Tristan; Wada, Kentaro; Scona, Raluca; Davison, Andrew J.
• SmartRainNet: Uncertainty Estimation for Laser Measurement in Rain, by Zhang, Chen; Huang, Zefan; Tung, Beatrix; Ang Jr, Marcelo H; Rus, Daniela. (WINNER)
• Online Whole-Body Motion Planning for Quadrotor Using Multi-Resolution Search, by Ren, Yunfan; Liang, Siqi; Zhu, Fangcheng; Lu, Guozheng; Zhang, Fu.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Physical Human-Robot Interaction Paper

• A Control Approach for Human-Robot Ergonomic Payload Lifting, by Rapetti, Lorenzo; Sartore, Carlotta; Elobaid, Mohamed; Tirupachuri, Yeshasvi; Draicchio, Francesco; Kawakami, Tomohiro; Yoshiike, Takahide; Pucci, Daniele.
• Learning from Physical Human Feedback: An Object-Centric One-Shot Adaptation Method, by Shek, Alvin; Su, Bo Ying; Chn Rui; Liu, Changliu. (WINNER)
• Interactive Object Segmentation in 3D Point Clouds, by Kontogianni, Theodora; Celikkan, Ekin; Tang, Siyu; Schindler, Konrad.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Planning Paper

• Obstacle-Aware Topological Planning Over Polyhedral Representation for Quadrotors, by Gao, Junjie; He, Fenghua; Zhang, Wei; Yao, Yu.
• Learning-Based Initialization of Trajectory Optimization for Path-Following Problems of Redundant Manipulators, by Yoon, Minsung; Kang, Mincheul; Park, Daehyung; Yoon, Sung-eui. (WINNER)
• A Multi-Step Dynamics Modeling Framework for Autonomous Driving in Multiple Environments, by Gibson, Jason; Vlahov, Bogdan; Fan, David D; Spieler, Patrick; Pastor, Daniel; Agha-mohammadi, Ali-akbar; Theodorou, Evangelos.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Robot Learning Paper

• Code As Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control, by Liang, Jacky; Huang, Wenlong; Xia, Fei; Xu, Peng; Hausman, Karol; Ichter, Brian; Florence, Peter; Zeng, Andy. (WINNER)
• Grounding Language with Visual Affordances Over Unstructured Data, by Mees, Oier; Borja Diaz, Jessica; Burgard, Wolfram.
• NeRF2Real: Sim2real Transfer of Vision-Guided Bipedal Motion Skills Using Neural Radiance Fields, by Byravan, Arunkumar; Humplik, Jan; Hasenclever, Leonard; Brussee, Arthur; Nori, Francesco; Haarnoja, Tuomas; Moran, Ben; Bohez, Steven; Sadeghi, Fereshteh; Vujatovic, Bojan; Heess, Nicolas.

ICRA 2023 Outstanding Sensors and Perception Paper

• Towards Consistent Batch State Estimation Using a Time-Correlated Measurement Noise Model, by Yoon, David Juny; Barfoot, Timothy.
• GMCR: Graph-Based Maximum Consensus Estimation for Point Cloud Registration, by Gentner, Michael; Murali, Prajval Kumar; Kaboli, Mohsen.
• Occlusion Reasoning for Skeleton Extraction of Self-Occluded Tree Canopies, by Kim, Chung Hee; Kantor, George. (WINNER)

Researchers have trained a robotic 'chef' to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself.

Stanford scientists have developed a soft and stretchable electronic skin that can directly talk to the brain, imitating the sensory feedback of real skin using a strategy that, if improved, could offer hope to millions of people with prosthetic limbs.

Is Rosie the Robot Maid from the Jetsons here yet? Several different types of humanoid are currently deployed commercially or in trials. We’ve come along way since the DARPA Robotics Challenge of 2015/2016, where the most popular footage was the blooper reels of robots falling over and failing to open doors or climb stairs.

The Avatar XPrize of 2019-2022 showcased some extremely sophisticated humanoids that certainly advanced the state of the art but the holy grail of humanoid robots is combining incredible sophistication into a sub $50,000 package. Why $50,000? Wouldn’t some companies pay a lot more? Then again, can’t we buy a car, also a very sophisticated device capable of partial autonomy that is 5 times the size of a humanoid, for less than $50,000? Why is this the benchmark for humanoids?

$50,000 is the annual wage for a single shift of labor at slightly more than $18/hour or minimum wage in every low wage industry. There is a terrible labor shortage and it is the dirty dull and dangerous jobs that are hardest for employers to fill. Companies that can afford to run two or more shifts a day also have more alternatives when it comes to filling their labor gaps. It’s the small to medium size enterprise that is suffering the most in our current economic and demographic conditions.

We don’t need a Six Million Dollar Man.

We need a $50,000 humanoid.

The roll out of sophisticated new robots and how we integrate them into society is at the heart of my early research and my current roles as the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics (explain), VP of Global Robotics for AMT (explain) and the VP of Industrial Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (explain).

As more and more companies announce their work towards the affordable humanoid robot, I wanted to create a reference chart for myself, and realized that it might be of interest to others as well. The ranking system is just my own opinion and it will be fascinating to see who succeeds and progresses over the next few years. Enjoy this overview and make up your own minds as to which humanoid robot is really the best.

Who’s in the running? (in alphabetical order by company not robot)

• 1x – Eve
• Aeolus Robotics – Eva
• Agility Robotics – Digit
• Apptronik – Astra
• Boston Dynamics – Atlas
• Comma.ai – body
• Devanthro – Robody
• Engineered Arts – Ameca
• Figure – Figure01
• Giant.ai – Universal Worker
• IIT – ErgoCub
• PAL – Reem-C
• Prosper Robotics – Alfie
• Sanctuary – Phoenix
• Tesla – Optimus
• Toyota – T-HR3

Who isn’t in the running?

Hollywood Humanoids
Hollywood Humanoids are one off robots for the purpose of entertainment, like Sophia from Hanson Robotics, Xoxe from AI Life, or Beonmi from Beyond Imagination. ….

Chinese robots
It’s too hard for me to validate that they exist, work as advertized, and what the specifications are.

Research robots
Love them but they have a different purpose. Only robots with commercial deployment plans, and ideally, a price tag and a date in 2023 or 2024 when they’ll be available for purchase, if they aren’t already being sold.

Not humanoid
I also love robots that work like a humanoid but don’t look human-like. We saw some examples in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, most notably RoboSimian. Once we go down that route, all quadrupeds, and multi-armed robots or wheeled humanlike robots, would qualify. Who knew there were so many robots!

Who have I missed?

I’m hoping to crowdsource some more great robots :)

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Read the original article on Substack.