Category Robots Podcast

Inventor Dr Zeke Steer quit his job and took a PhD at Bristol Robotics Laboratory so he could find a way to help people like his great-grandmother, who became anxious and aggressive because of her dementia.

Milbotix’s smart socks track heart rate, sweat levels and motion to give insights on the wearer’s wellbeing – most importantly how anxious the person is feeling.

They look and feel like normal socks, do not need charging, are machine washable and provide a steady stream of data to carers, who can easily see their patient’s metrics on an app.

Current alternatives to Milbotix’s product are worn on wrist straps, which can stigmatise or even cause more stress.

Dr Steer said: “The foot is actually a great place to collect data about stress, and socks are a familiar piece of clothing that people wear every day.

“Our research shows that the socks can accurately recognise signs of stress – which could really help not just those with dementia and autism, but their carers too.”

Dr Steer was working as a software engineer in the defence industry when his great-grandmother, Kath, began showing the ill effects of dementia.

Once gentle and with a passion for jazz music, Kath became agitated and aggressive, and eventually accused Dr Steer’s grandmother of stealing from her.

Dr Steer decided to investigate how wearable technologies and artificial intelligence could help with his great-grandmother’s symptoms. He studied for a PhD at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, which is jointly run by the University of Bristol and UWE Bristol.

During the research, he volunteered at a dementia care home operated by the St Monica Trust. Garden House Care Home Manager, Fran Ashby said: “Zeke’s passion was clear from his first day with us and he worked closely with staff, relatives and residents to better understand the effects and treatment of dementia.

“We were really impressed at the potential of his assisted technology to predict impending agitation and help alert staff to intervene before it can escalate into distressed behaviours.

“Using modern assistive technology examples like smart socks can help enable people living with dementia to retain their dignity and have better quality outcomes for their day-to-day life.”

While volunteering Dr Steer hit upon the idea of Milbotix, which he launched as a business in February 2020.

“I came to see that my great grandmother wasn’t an isolated episode, and that distressed behaviours are very common,” he explained.

Milbotix are currently looking to work with innovative social care organisations to refine and evaluate the smart socks.

The business recently joined SETsquared Bristol, the University’s world-leading incubator for high growth tech businesses.

Dr Steer was awarded one of their Breakthrough Bursaries, which provides heavily subsidised membership to founders from diverse backgrounds. Dr Steer is also currently on the University’s QUEST programme, which support founders to commercialise their products.

Charity Alzheimer’s Society says there will be 1.6 million people with dementia in the UK by 2040, with one person developing dementia every three minutes. Dementia is thought to cost the UK £34.7 billion a year.

Meanwhile, according to the Government autism affects 1% of the UK population, or some 700,000 people, 15-30% of whom are non-verbal part or all of the time.

Dr Steer is now growing the business: testing the socks with people living with mid to late-stage dementia and developing the tech before bringing the product to market next year. Milbotix will begin a funding round later this year.

Milbotix is currently a team of three, including Jacqui Arnold, who has been working with people living with dementia for 40 years.

She said: “These socks could make such a difference. Having that early indicator of someone’s stress levels rising could provide the early intervention they need to reduce their distress – be that touch, music, pain relief or simply having someone there with them.”

Milbotix will be supported by Alzheimer’s Society through their Accelerator Programme, which is helping fund the smart socks’ development, providing innovation support and helping test what it described as a “brilliant product”.

Natasha Howard-Murray, Senior Innovator at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “Some people with dementia may present behaviours such as aggression, irritability and resistance to care.

“This innovative wearable tech is a fantastic, accessible way for staff to better monitor residents’ distress and agitation.”

Professor Judith Squires, Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bristol, said: “It is fantastic to see Zeke using the skills he learnt with us to improve the wellbeing of some of those most in need.

“The innovative research that Zeke has undertaken has the potential to help millions live better lives. We hope to see Milbotix flourish.”

Robin Murphy, a roboticist at Texas A&M University has published a Focus piece in the journal Science Robotics outlining her views on the robots portrayed in "Star Wars," most particularly those featured in "The Mandalorian" and "The Book of Boba Fett." In her article, she says she believes that the portrayals of robots in both movies are quite creative, but suggests they are not wild enough to compete with robots that are made and used in the real world today.

We’re not just talking about our latest technologies; we’re showing them. At the Honeywell Robotics booth, we’ll have an integrated demo featuring the OTTO Lifter, a new autonomous forklift from our strategic collaborator Clearpath OTTO Motors

The robotic explorer GLIMPSE, created at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, has made it into the final round of a competition for prospecting resources in space. The long-term goal is for the robot to explore the south polar region of the moon.

Because there is such a shortage of fork truck drivers for the foreseeable future, automation has become an imperative. The only alternative is to automate bringing loads of finish goods (or sub-assembly) from docks to warehouses and warehouse to docks.

Inspired by progress in large-scale language modelling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.

Implement and understand byol, a self-supervised computer vision method without negative samples. Learn how BYOL learns robust representations for image classification.

Reconfigurable or "transformer" systems are robots or other systems that can adapt their state, configuration, or morphology to perform different tasks more effectively. In recent years, roboticists and computer scientists worldwide have developed new autonomous and reconfigurable systems for various applications, including surveillance, cleaning, maintenance, and search and rescue.

ABB’s PixelPaint robot recreates child prodigy Advait Kolarkar’s abstract art creation and digital design company Illusorr’s geometric concept.

Ai-Da sits behind a desk, paintbrush in hand. She looks up at the person posing for her, and then back down as she dabs another blob of paint onto the canvas. A lifelike portrait is taking shape. If you didn't know a robot produced it, this portrait could pass as the work of a human artist.

Researchers at University of Bologna and Electrolux have recently developed a new robotic system that could assist humans with one of their most common everyday chores, doing laundry. This system, introduced in a paper published in SpringerLink's Human-Friendly Robotics, was successfully trained to insert items and pick them up from the washing machine once a washing cycle is complete.

With a system that uses both 2D and 3D cameras from IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH, the young entrepreneurs are automating one of the last remaining manual steps in large-scale industrial laundries, the unfolding process.

As the next edition of the Swiss Robotics Day is in preparation in Lausanne, let’s revisit the November 2021 edition, where the vitality and richness of Switzerland’s robotics scene was on full display at StageOne Event and Convention Hall in Zurich. It was the first edition of NCCR Robotics’s flagship event after the pandemic, and it surpassed the scale of previous editions, drawing in almost 500 people. You can see the photo gallery here.

Welcome notes from ETH President Joël Mesot and NCCR Robotics Director Dario Floreano opened a dense conference programme, chaired by NCCR Robotics co-Director Robert Riener and that included scientific presentations from Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), Stéphanie Lacour and Herb Shea (both from EPFL), as well as the industry perspective from ABB’s Marina Bill, Simon Johnson from the Drone Industry Association and Hocoma co-founder Gery Colombo. A final roundtable – including Robert Riener, Hocoma’s Serena Maggioni, Liliana Paredes from Rehaklinik and Georg Rauter from the University of Basel – focused on the potential and the challenges of innovation in healthcare robotics.

Over 50 exhibitors – including scientific laboratories as well as start-ups and large companies – filled the 3,300 square-meter venue, demonstrating technologies ranging from mobile robots to wearable exoskeletons, from safe delivery drones to educational robots and much more. Sixteen young companies presented their innovations in a start-up carousel. Dozens of professional meetings took place throughout the day, allowing a diverse audience of entrepreneurs, funders, academics and policy makers to network and explore possible collaborations. A crowd of young researchers participated in a mentoring session where Marina Bill (ABB), Auke Ijspeert (EPFL) and Iselin Frøybu (Emovo Care) provided advice on academic and industrial careers. Sixteen students participated in the Cybathlon @school competition, experimenting with robotic technologies for disability, and in the end officially announcing CYBATHLON 2024.

During the event, the next chapter for Swiss robotics was also announced: the launch of the NTN Innovation Booster on robotics, which will run from 2022 to 2025 and will be led by EPFL’s Aude Billard. Funded by Innosuisse, the NTN will act as a platform for new ideas and partnerships, supporting innovation through “idea generator bubbles” and specific funding calls.

The 2021 Swiss Robotics Day marked the beginning of NCCR Robotics’s final year. The project, launched in 2010, is on track to meet all its scientific goals in the three areas of wearable, rescue and educational robotics, while continuing to focus on supporting spin-offs, advancing robotics education and improving Swiss Robotics Day showcases innovation equality of opportunities for all robotics researchers. The conclusion of NCCR Robotics will be marked by the next edition of the Swiss Robotics Day as larger, two-days public event that will take place in Lausanne on 4 and 5 November 2022.

Wearable robotics

The goal of the NCCR Grand Challenge on Wearable Robotic is to develop a novel generation of wearable robotic systems, which will be more comfortable for patients and more extensively usable in a clinical environment. These new technological solutions will help in the recovery of movement and grasping after cardiovascular accidents and spinal cord lesions. They can be used to enhance physiotherapy by improving training, thus encouraging the brain to repair networks (neurorehabilitation). And they can be used as assistive devices (e.g. prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons) to support paralysed people in daily life situations.

While current wearable robots are making huge advances in the lab, there is some way to go before they become part of everyday life for people with disabilities. In order to be functional, robots must work with the user and not cause damage or irritation (in the case of externally worn devices) or be rejected by the host (in the case of implants), they must have their own energy source that does not need to be constantly plugged in or re-charged, and they need to be affordable.

Rescue robotics

After a natural disaster such as an earthquake or flood, it is often very dangerous for teams of rescue workers to go into affected areas to look for victims and survivors.

The idea behind robots for rescue activities is to create robust robots that can travel into areas too dangerous for humans and rescue dogs. Robots can be used to assess the situation and to locate people who may be trapped and to relay the location back to the rescue teams, so that all efforts can be concentrated on areas where victims are known to be. Robots are also being developed to carry medical supplies and food, thereby focusing resources where they are most needed.

The main research issues within the field of mobile robotics for search and rescue mission are durability and usability of robots – how to design robots that are easily transported, can function efficiently in all weather conditions and that have long lasting power, and robots that can navigate themselves and have effective enough sensors to pick out victims.

Educational robotics

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, robots were typically introduced in schools as a tool for teaching robotics or other Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. However, this specificity held back their adoption for wider educational purposes. This early failure of adoption of robots in classrooms happened because they were unreliable, expensive and with limited applications.

Nowadays, with robots being cheaper and more easily deployable, applications in education have become easier. In the past fifteen years, there have been an increasing number of extracurricular robotics activities showing the popularity of robotics in an informal educational context. However, robots are still underused in schools for formal education. Although there is no agreement over the exact reasons for this situation, it seems clear, from different studies, that teachers play a key role in the introduction of technology in schools.

During the first two phases of NCCR Robotics two products were developed: the Thymio robot— a mobile robot increasingly used to teach robotics and programming, and Cellulo — a small, inexpensive and robust robot that kids can move with their hands and use in groups.

Current research focuses on two aspects. The first one is inventing new forms of interactions between learners and tangible swarms based on the Cellulo robot, and studying the learning outcomes enabled by these interactions.

The second aspect is investigating teacher adoption of robotics from two points of view: platform usability and teacher training. Research will show how to train teachers and exploit Thymio and Cellulo in their daily activities and how to minimize their orchestration load. Activities relating to computational thinking skills are the main target, with school topics outside the STEM domains also included.

Thousands of emperor penguins waddling around Antarctica have a stalker: A yellow rover tracking their every move.

From direct seeding, pesticide spraying to fertilizer application, XAG's agricultural drones have seen its increasing popularity among rural youth who are keen to earn a decent salary as drone pilot.