Category Robots Podcast

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics about the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo. Both ROS and Gazebo are open source and are widely used in the robotics community. ROS is a set of software libraries and tools, and Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator. Gerkey explains ROS and Gazebo and talks about how they are used in robotics, as well as some of the design decisions of the second version of ROS, ROS2.

Brian Gerkey

Brian Gerkey is the CEO of Open Robotics, which seeks to develop and drive the adoption of open source software in robotics. Before Open Robotics, Brian was the Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, a computer scientist in the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center, a post-doctoral scholar in Sebastian Thrun‘s group in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.  Brian did his PhD with Maja Matarić in the USC Interaction Lab.

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Piab’s Kenos KCS gripper enables a collaborative robot to handle just about anything at any time. Combining Piab's proprietary air-driven COAX vacuum technology with an easily replaceable technical foam that molds itself around any surface or shape, the gripper can be used to safely grip, lift and handle any object. Standard interface (ISO) adapters enable the whole unit to be attached to any cobot type on the market with a body made in a lightweight 3D printed material. Approved by Universal Robots as a UR+ end effector.

The role of robots is increasing in the automation of business processes. Robots are even touching human life and are also being used in customer-facing roles.

As it is clear that industrial robotics would continue to transform every sector in several ways, here are some of the prominent trends that would play a vital role in the coming years.

Each of the four types of collaborative robot operation permit varying amounts of interaction between people and robots. Based on the risk assessment, each type will also allow you to remove a portion or all of the safety fencing.

The traditional vision architecture is changing, with an evolution from cameras and sensors to networked and smart-enabled, compact embedded devices with the processing power required for real-time analysis.

The good news is that space-based exploration, travel and research are all ramping up not just at renowned organizations like NASA, but also at privatized operations such as Space-X and Made In Space.

The challenge is that traditional robots have been designed to perform a single task extremely efficiently. But when the item or the task changes these traditional machines need to be reintegrated and reprogrammed.

"Inside PMC" is an all-access pass to one of the world's most advanced manufacturing facilities and home of the second-generation Acura NSX supercar

PhD candidate Michelle A. Lee from the Stanford AI Lab won the best paper award at ICRA 2019 with her work “Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks”. You can read the paper on arxiv here.

Audrow Nash was there to capture her pitch.

And here’s the official video about the work.

Full reference
Lee, Michelle A., Yuke Zhu, Krishnan Srinivasan, Parth Shah, Silvio Savarese, Li Fei-Fei, Animesh Garg, and Jeannette Bohg. “Making sense of vision and touch: Self-supervised learning of multimodal representations for contact-rich tasks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10191 (2018).

Our concentration is to develop a surgical robot to go where it is needed the most, bringing the best competencies to where the injury happened. After all, if we can pilot a drone we should be able to operate a surgical robot.

The terms accuracy and repeatability are often used interchangeably. However, accuracy is not possible without repeatability, but repeatability is achievable without accuracy. There are other errors, too, non-linearity errors, and linearity errors caused by thermal effects.

In order for electrical vacuum generators, grippers and compact ejectors to be visible to the smart factory, they must provide digital energy and process data in real time.

Hirth Engines Head of International Business Development, Peter Lietz, highlights the importance for engine manufacturers to advance endurance capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in extreme terrains.

In France’s Bordeaux region, robots ensure that the wine is organically good. They autonomously eliminate grass and weeds between the vines, making pesticides unnecessary. To enable the robots to navigate the hilly terrain, the developers took some cues from Mars rovers.