Robots Learning Judo Techniques to Fall Down Without Exploding
By Evan Ackerman for IEEE Spectrum: The best and worst part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals waswatching all of those huge expensive humanoids topple over in a series of epic faceplants. Faceplants are called faceplants because you’re planting your face into the ground as a means of breaking your fall, which usually also breaks your face, among other things. This tends to happen when you’re unprepared for falling, which with most robots, is 100 percent of the time. Now researchers at Georgia Tech want to teach humanoid robots to fall more safely with techniques adapted from judo, which might protect them enough to actually be able to get up again.
Falling safely (or, as safely as you can), assuming that you have very little control over the nature of your fall, is all about controlling exactly when and how your body crashes down. During a fall, your body is busy converting potential energy to kinetic energy, all of which has to go somewhere when you hit the ground. If your face hits the ground first, then that’s where all the energy goes at once, but if you can manage to contact the ground with a bunch of different parts of your body at different times on the way down, the energy will be spread out. Ideally, the energy gets spread out to the point where each individual impact doesn’t do enough damage to hurt you in a permanent sort of way. Cont'd...
Interactive Video Annotation Tool for Computer Vision Research
From University of California, Irvine:
VATIC is a free, online, interactive video annotation tool for computer vision research that crowdsources work to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Our tool makes it easy to build massive, affordable video data sets and can be deployed on a cloud. After three years of research, vatic is now used by labs around the world to annotate the next generation of data sets.
Features
Crowdsource video annotation to Mechanical Turk
Automatic quality assurance for good annotations
Complex payment schedules and bonuses
One-click worker compensation
Optimized interface for video annotation
Offline mode for expert annotator use (no MTurk)
( site ) ( github )
Five Bomb Disposal Robots
Bomb disposal robots will have immeasurable impact on saving innocent lives.
Cyberworks Robotics Announces Re-Entry into Industry it Created 30 Years Earlier
Great Rock Development's (OTC: GROC) wholly owned subsidiary Cyberworks Robotics announces a return to the Robotic Industrial Cleaning market.
As the world's oldest autonomous mobile robotics engineering company, with over 30 years of pioneering experience, Cyberworks has again revolutionized autonomous robotic vision and guidance systems, this time redefining the way industrial space will be cleaned.
"We were the pioneers in this massive market decades ago" explained Vivek Burhanpurkar, President of Great Rock. "Some 25 years ago Cyberworks worked with major companies in this industry to manufacture and sell Autonomous Robots for Industrial cleaning" added Burhanpukar. In the United States alone, commercial cleaning is a $25 billion dollar a year "invisible niche industry" where 50% of costs are attributable to labor. Said Burhanpurkar, "We are not interested in the consumer market where products like Roomba dominate. The industrial market is a totally different animal and we know the major multinational players within it."
"We created this market, in partnership with leading industrial companies, when we developed the world's first industrial robotic sweeper and the technology we have today is once again years ahead of the competition. Industry participants will now be able to retro-fit the Cyberworks Guidance System into existing fielded equipment, creating an inexpensive robotics machine" explained Burhanpurkar. Full Press Release:
Call 911 For A Rescue Robot Near You
Whether there is a necessity to pull someone from a collapsed building, find a survivor trapped in a pile of debris, locate a lost child, or save victims by putting out a fire, robots will be an intrinsic member of the first responders in the future.
Driverless Taxi Experiment to Start in Japan
By JUN HONGO for The Wall Street Journal: Japan’s cabinet office, Kanagawa prefecture and Robot Taxi Inc. on Thursday said they will start experimenting with unmanned taxi service beginning in 2016. The service will be offered for approximately 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, with the auto-driving car carrying them from their homes to local grocery stores.
According to the project organizers, the cabs will drive a distance of about three kilometers (two miles), and part of the course will be on major avenues in the city. Crew members will be aboard the car during the experiment in case there is a need to avoid accidents.
Robot Taxi Inc., a joint venture between mobile Internet company DeNA Co. and vehicle technology developer ZMP Inc., is aiming to commercialize its driverless transportation service by 2020. The company says it will seek to offer unmanned cabs to users including travelers from overseas and locals in areas where buses and trains are not available. Cont'd...
Bigger, Better, Stronger 6DOF Platforms Using AMC1280USB Controller
From Thanos 6DOF Motion Simulator Electronics blog :
Lately we see more and better DIY 6DOF platforms being build. The community is growing strong and the interest in 6DOF systems is bigger than ever. Its the only way to provide full immersion for motion simulation at the moment, that combined with other new technologies like the oculus rift or fully enclosed detailed cockpits can really make the difference. The times that desktop racers or flight enthusiasts were enjoying their simulation games or training for the real thing is past without return. Even older motion systems that provide 2DOF (seat movers) or 3DOF platforms are now the past, offering too little to the immersion of gaming... ( more projects )
Vision-Enabled Robot Replaces Four Conventional Flame Treating Robots
Using vision instead of proximity sensors makes it possible for each fixture to handle a wider range of parts.
Where are the Top Robotics Employers?
The below table shows the location, the number jobs & the key employers. We only searched for jobs that had "Robotics" in the job title.
Era of Drones in Japan and Challenges
In Japan, a few technology experts are calling 2015 "Year One of the Era of the Drone."
Cisco Teams Up with Robotics Firm Fanuc for IoT
by Zacks Equity Research: Technology giant and Dow component Cisco Systems, Inc. recently entered into a strategic alliance with a robotics company Fanuc America, thereby stepping up its efforts to make itself a key player in the Internet of Things (IoT) space.
Per the alliance, Fanuc and Cisco have built an IoT system that enables Fanuc to monitor every robot on the factory floor. This way it can be determined whether a robot is likely to fail, so that a service technician can fix the equipment before it stops working.
This could save companies hundreds of dollars of fixing cost. Per Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, downtime for these robots can cost a business $16,000 per minute. Therefore, the new system that offers predictive maintenance can be a big thing for some operations.
The companies are currently testing the system in a channel that comprises around 1,800 robots and includes Fanuc customer, GM. In this testing period, Fanuc says its customer has saved $38 million. Fanus has plans to expand the system to 2,500 robots by the end of the year. Cont'd...
Three Tiny Robots that Could Change Healthcare
Imagine a world, where Tiny robots can go inside your body, see what's wrong it with and target therapies only for that area. Here are 3 Tiny Robots to make you believe your imagination could come true.
Google robotics to become a separate entity under Alphabet?
By tech2 News Staff: Earlier this year, Google had released an interesting video of Spot, a 160-pound dog robot navigating an office and then heading outside on its own. It is a smaller version of the Big Dog that first popped its head when Google acquired Boston Company. As the new changes come into effect, Boston Company is now Alphabet-owned and not a part of Google.
It will continue to build robots, and falls under Google X Projects (for now), a subsidiary of Alphabet. The other subsidiaries include Google, Nest Labs, Google X, Calico, Google Ventures, Google Capital and Google Life Sciences.
A new report says that the “company will create a separate division for robotics within the renamed umbrella entity Alphabet”, citing a person related to the matter. Google has acquired roughly eight companies related to robotics including military grade robotics company Boston Dynamics. It will likely allow Boston Dynamics to operate with some independence. Cont'd...
Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete
From Alex Churchill:
In the discussion on this site I assemble a Universal Turing Machine from Magic: the Gathering cards.
But doesn't Magic involve the players making lots of choices?
Normally, yes, it does. But occasionally in normal gameplay you get a sequence of three or four events in a row that are forced to happen by the cards and the rules of the game. The machine below just extends this idea to millions of forced choices in a row.
The idea of my Magic Turing machine is that the players do nothing at all, except when the game offers them a choice.
Once the in-game "machine" has started, processing continues without requiring any choices from the players, with one category of exceptions: Some of the cards in the machine say "You may [do X]. If you do, [Y happens]." In these cases, the machine arranges that the players will be able to do X, in precisely one way. It just requires the players to always choose to take the game up on any options they're offered... ( cont'd )
Can Technology be Too Disruptive?
Disruptive innovation creates new markets, disrupts existing markets and replaces prior technology and thereby evolving existing markets to be productive, sustaining and value-driven.
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