Swarm of Origami Robots Can Self Assemble Out of a Single Sheet
Evan Ackerman for IEEE Spectrum: One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you’re still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm. If you’ve got more than a few robots to handle, it starts to get all kinds of tedious.
The dream for swarm robotics is to be able to do away with all of that, and just push a button and have your swarm somehow magically appear. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close: At IROS this month, researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard presented a paper demonstrating an autonomous collective robotic swarm that can be manufactured in a single flat composite sheet. On command, they’ll rip themselves apart from each other, fold themselves up into origami structures, and head off on a mission en masse. Cont'd...
Virtual Immortality: Reanimating characters from TV shows
From James Charles, Derek Magee, David Hogg:
The objective of this work is to build virtual talking avatars of characters fully automatically from TV shows. From this unconstrained data, we show how to capture a character’s style of speech, visual appearance and language in an effort to construct an interactive avatar of the person and effectively immortalize them in a computational model. We make three contributions (i) a complete framework for producing a generative model of the audiovisual and language of characters from TV shows; (ii) a novel method for aligning transcripts to video using the audio; and (iii) a fast audio segmentation system for silencing nonspoken audio from TV shows. Our framework is demonstrated using all 236 episodes from the TV series Friends (≈ 97hrs of video) and shown to generate novel sentences as well as character specific speech and video... (full paper)
Mobile Cobots are Coming
A mobile cobot (mobile collaborative robot) is an intelligent, transportable robot that will assist humans in a shared workspace.
As China Invests in Robotics, iRobot and Other Companies Eye Deals
Jeff Engel for Xconomy: China emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse over the past few decades, thanks in large part to a deep pool of cheap labor. Now, the country is investing heavily in factory automation, and Boston-area robotics companies and their allies smell opportunity.
Executives from 11 New England robotics firms will travel to several cities in China later this month on a trade mission aimed at sparking business deals and more technology collaboration between the U.S. and China.
The trip is being organized by InTeahouse, along with local nonprofit robotics support group MassRobotics. Cont'd...
Full Press Release:
This Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Sweats
Evan Ackerman for IEEE Spectrum: When we use our muscles, they produce heat as a byproduct. When we use them a lot, we need to actively cool them, which is why we sweat. By sweating, we pump water out of our bodies, and as that water evaporates, it cools us down. Robots, especially dynamic robots like humanoids that place near-constant high torque demands on their motors, generate enough heat that it regularly becomes a major constraint on their performance. One of the reasons that SCHAFT did so well at the DRC Trials, for example, was their fancy liquid-cooled motors that could put out lots of torque over an extended period of time without overheating.
Engineers solve this heat-generating problem in most mechanical systems by using fans, heat sinks, and radiators, which means that you’ve got all of this dedicated cooling infrastructure that takes up space and adds mass. At the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) this week, Japanese researchers presented a novel idea of how to cool humanoid robots in a much more efficient way: Design them to be able to sweat water straight out of their bones. Cont'd...
What Leading AI, Machine Learning And Robotics Scientists Say About The Future
Jason Lim for Forbes: Every year there is a new hot topic in tech. Today, it’s all about artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality and autonomous vehicles. The difference between now and the past is that everything is becoming interconnected at a faster rate.
We are entering an extremely critical time in history where society will change dramatically – how we work, live and play. Science fiction is morphing into reality. Flying cars exist, cars that drive themselves are on the road, and artificial intelligence that automates our lives is here.
To make all of this amazing science and technology happen, it takes some extremely intelligent and curious people. In many ways, scientists are still at the helm of discovering breakthroughs through research. Cont'd...
Our Concept of an Open-Source Online Platform for Makers and Educators to Share Their Projects in the Robotics Makers Community
This is an outline plan to create and develop an open-source robotics community. If you have some ideas and want to share them, please let me know.
Japan Robot Week 2016 Gearing up to Welcome Visitors from October 19th to 21st
This years event features The 7th Robot Award ceremony and exhibition, joint exhibitions from universities and laboratories, and other fascinating programs related to service robots.
A Look at a Danish Robotics Cluster
Clusters don't just happen by accident. They need knowledge sharing, community spirit and participation by all of the stakeholders.
Omnidirectional Mobile Robot Has Just Two Moving Parts
Byron Spice for Carnegie Mellon University: More than a decade ago, Ralph Hollisinvented the ballbot, an elegantly simple robot whose tall, thin body glides atop a sphere slightly smaller than a bowling ball. The latest version, called SIMbot, has an equally elegant motor with just one moving part: the ball.
The only other active moving part of the robot is the body itself.
The spherical induction motor (SIM) invented by Hollis, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and Masaaki Kumagai, a professor of engineering at Tohoku Gakuin University in Tagajo, Japan, eliminates the mechanical drive systems that each used on previous ballbots. Because of this extreme mechanical simplicity, SIMbot requires less routine maintenance and is less likely to suffer mechanical failures. Cont'd...
Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE Competition
The $7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is a global competition challenging teams to advance deep-sea technologies for autonomous, fast and high-resolution ocean exploration.
Reviving Japan's Dairy Industry, One Milking Robot at a Time
Aya Takada for Bloomberg: Jin Kawaguchiya gave up a career in finance to help revive Japan’s ailing dairy industry -- one robot at a time.
In a country that relies increasingly on imported foods like cheese and butter, Japan’s milk output tumbled over two decades, touching a 30-year low in 2014. Costs rose faster than prices as the economy stagnated, eroding profit, and aging farmers quit the business because they couldn’t find enough young people willing to take on the hard labor of tending to cows every day.
But technology is altering that dynamic. On the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan’s top dairy-producing region, Kawaguchiya transformed the 20-cow farm he inherited from his father-in-law 16 years ago into Asia’s largest automated milking factory. Robots extract the white fluid from 360 cows three times a day and make sure the animals are fed and healthy. The machines even gather up poop and deposits it in a furnace that generates electricity. Cont'd...
Could the future of pizza be in the hands of robots?
CARTER EVANS for CBS: In this emerging age of drone deliveries, anddriverless cars, technology now brings us -- robo-pizza.
Silicon Valley is at the forefront of reinventing the pie. The kitchen at Zume Pizza is where technology and culinary arts collide.
Humans and robots work side-by-side at Zume Pizza in Mountain View, California.
Veteran restaurateur Julia Collins founded the delivery-only pizza company with Alex Garden, the former president of online gaming company, Zynga.
“I saw an opportunity to go after the $40 billion domestic delivery pizza market,” Garden said. Cont'd...
Deep-Diving Robots Zap, Kill Invasive Lionfish
Mindy Weisberger for Live Science: The robotics company iRobot, known for creating the autonomous and endearing Roomba vacuums, is taking steps to make a clean sweep of lionfish in the coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean, with a robot designed to target and dispatch the invasive fish.
A diving robot will enable individuals on the ocean surface to remotely zap and kill lionfish with electrical charges. The effort is meant to help curb the fast-growing populations of these voracious predators, which are recognized by environmental officials as a serious threat to marine ecosystems in the western Atlantic.
The initiative to launch the lionfish-targeting robot is called Robots in Service of the Environment (RISE) and represents an iRobot partnership with organizations and volunteer experts in the fields of robotics, engineering and conservation. Cont'd...
Autonomous mobile robots can accomplish a variety of tasks.
Bob Violino for ZDNet: Autonomous robots can perform actions or complete tasks with a high degree of autonomy, which makes them ideal for applications such as space exploration or cleaning your living room carpet. Mobile robots are capable of moving from place to place.
Put these capabilities together and you got a powerful machine that can handle lots of tasks in industrial environments such as factories, as well as in hospitals, hotels, and other areas. And, in fact, one of the more prominent trends in robotics today is the growing popularity of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), with new vendors jumping into the market and sales on the rise.
AMRs are modular, self-driving mobile robots that can be used for a variety of business applications, such as locomotion, mapping, navigation, and inspection. Cont'd...
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Mobile Robots - Featured Product
ElectroCraft's Motion Control for Mobile Robots
ElectroCraft is showcasing its award-winning mobile robot technology including their powerful and compact wheel drives, high-torque-density brushless DC motors, precision linear actuators as well as servo motor drive technology at a variety of conferences and tradeshows including the Boston Robotics Summit. Robotics Summit is the premier symposium for the sharing of ideas, technology, and market developments for robotic technologies across industries. Beyond a showcase and pitch of product, ElectroCraft is eager to participate in the collaborative discussion of challenges and opportunities that will shape the near and long-term robotic marketplace.
