3D Reconstruction Firm Paracosm Has Closed $3.3 Million In Seed Funding
From Paracosm:
Paracosm, a cloud-based software company, raised 3.3 million in seed round funding to further its mission to 3D-ify the world. The round, led by Atlas Venture, includes contributions from iRobot, Osage University Partners, BOLDstart Ventures, New World Angels, Deep Fork Capital and a number of angel investors.
Paracosm's advanced three-dimensional reconstruction technologies create digital models of physical spaces. When shared with machines, these models serve as blueprints which provide robots and applications a greater sense of awareness and understanding of the physical world. Such technologies are valuable for robotics, video game development, special effects, indoor navigation applications, and for the improvement of both virtual and augmented reality experiences... (full press release)
MegaBots: Live-Action Giant Robot Combat
From MegaBots Kickstarter:
The mad scientists at MegaBots, Inc. have been zealously working on the prototypes and final design of 15-foot-tall, 15,000-pound, walking humanoid combat robots with giant, modular pneumatic cannons for arms. A driver-and-gunner team pilot each MegaBot in a battle against other MegaBots, vehicles, and a variety of other defenses and obstacles in live-action combat – the likes of which the world has only dreamed of through video games and movies...
...At our minimum funding level ($1.8M), we can build two robots. They’ll duke it out in an epic 1-on-1 deathmatch tournament. At higher funding levels, we can build more MegaBots and unlock the gameplay options you know and love: team deathmatches, free-for-alls, king of the hill, capture the flag, home base capture, escort missions, and more! (Kickstarter)
Meet Lowe's New Robot Retail Workers
From Business Insider:
Lowe's is introducing a fleet of multilingual robots at one of its Orchard Supply Hardware stores to help out with customer service, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The 5-foot-tall robots, called OSHbots, will greet customers at the door and ask them what they need, according to a video posted by Lowe's Orchard Supply Hardware Co. store in San Jose, California, where the first robots will be located... (full stories)
Grabit Inc. Demos Electrostatic Gripper
From Grabit Inc.:
Enhanced Flexibility
Grabit technology eliminates the need for part-specific grippers and minimizes gripper changeover, dramatically reducing costs and downtime.
Gentle Handling
Grabit grippers offer scratch and smudge-free handling with its clean grasping and eliminates the need to remove residue left by vacuum cups. Grabit’s uniform grasping effect eliminates high “point stresses” on large format glass sheets.
Low Energy & Quiet Operations
Grabit products operate at ultra-low energy levels providing cost savings and enabling mobile robot applications, and also offer quiet operations improving factory conditions and supporting the adoption of collaborative robots... (homepage)
Watch That Windows Update: FTDI Drivers Are Killing Fake Chips
From Brian Benchoff at Hack A Day:
The FTDI FT232 chip is found in thousands of electronic baubles, from Arduinos to test equipment, and more than a few bits of consumer electronics. It’s a simple chip, converting USB to a serial port, but very useful and probably one of the most cloned pieces of silicon on Earth. Thanks to a recent Windows update, all those fake FTDI chips are at risk of being bricked. This isn’t a case where fake FTDI chips won’t work if plugged into a machine running the newest FTDI driver; the latest driver bricks the fake chips, rendering them inoperable with any computer.
Reports of problems with FTDI chips surfaced early this month, with an explanation of the behavior showing up in an EEVblog forum thread. The new driver for these chips from FTDI, delivered through a recent Windows update, reprograms the USB PID to 0, something Windows, Linux, and OS X don’t like. This renders the chip inaccessible from any OS, effectively bricking any device that happens to have one of these fake FTDI serial chips... (full story with workaround solution)
At Japan Robot Week, Mechanical Barista Treats Visitors to Coffee
From Japan Times:
iRobot Unveils Its First Multi-Robot Tablet Controller for First Responders, Defense Forces and Industrial Customers
From iRobot:
The uPoint MRC system runs an Android-based app that standardizes the control of any robot within the iRobot family of unmanned vehicles. Utilizing the same intuitive touchscreen technology in use today on millions of digital devices, the uPoint MRC system simplifies robot operations including driving, manipulation and inspection, allowing operators to focus more on the mission at hand... (full press release)
NASA's Free Flying Robot Challenge
From NASA, Google's Project Tango, and Top Coders:
Welcome to the NASA Free Flying Robot Mission Patch & Naming Challenge sponsored by the NASA Tournament Lab!
In 2017, NASA is aiming to launch a robot that will be used on-board the International Space Station (ISS). The robot has been tentatively called the “Free Flying Robot”. Not that catchy, right?
So here’s where NASA needs your help – we need the Topcoder community to help design a custom mission patch AND develop a name for the Free Flying Robot.
So what is a Free Flying Robot? It’s a robot that is capable of functioning autonomously, but can also be controlled by a flight crew on-board the ISS or from Earth. It can conduct zero gravity robotics experiments, carry mobile sensors such as an RFID reader for logging inventory & inspect items using a built in camera
Currently on the ISS there are robotic devices called “SPHERES” (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), and the new Free Flyer Robot program is being seen as a step forward in the use of robotic devices in spaceflight... (submission form)
Deep Learning for Detecting Robotic Grasps
From Ian Lenz, Honglak Lee, Ashutosh Saxena:
Abstract
We consider the problem of detecting robotic grasps in an RGB-D view of a scene containing objects. In this work, we apply a deep learning approach to solve this problem, which avoids time-consuming hand-design of features. This presents two main challenges. First, we need to evaluate a huge number of candidate grasps. In order to make detection fast and robust, we present a two-step cascaded system with two deep networks, where the top detections from the first are re-evaluated by the second. The first network has fewer features, is faster to run, and can effectively prune out unlikely candidate grasps. The second, with more features, is slower but has to run only on the top few detections. Second, we need to handle multimodal inputs effectively, for which we present a method that applies structured regularization on the weights based on multimodal group regularization. We show that our method improves performance on an RGBD robotic grasping dataset, and can be used to successfully execute grasps on two different robotic platforms... (homepage) (full pdf paper)
FPV Forest Quad Racing
From french quad racing association Airgonay:
Soft Robotics Toolkit
From Harvard Biodesign Lab:
The Soft Robotics Toolkit is a collection of shared resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. The toolkit was developed as part of educational research being undertaken in the Harvard Biodesign Lab. The ultimate aim of the toolkit is to advance the field of soft robotics by allowing designers and researchers to build upon each other’s work. The toolkit includes an open source fluidic control board, detailed design documentation describing a wide range of soft robotic components (including actuators and sensors), and related files that can be downloaded and used in the design, manufacture, and operation of soft robots. In combination with low material costs and increasingly accessible rapid prototyping technologies such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC mills, the toolkit enables soft robotic components to be produced easily and affordably... (project's homepage)
Robot Octopus Takes to the Sea
From Evan Ackerman at IEEE Spectrum:
The video below has four parts to it: the first shows the difference between the robotic octopus swimming with just flexible arms, and swimming with just flexible arms in addition to a web. The most obvious difference is the speed: just over 100 millimeters per second with arms only, and up to 180 mm/s (or 0.5 body lengths per second) with the web. This is a significant increase, obviously, but what's more important is the overall cost of transport (CoT), which is a measure of the efficiency of the robot (specifically, the ratio of the energy put in over the resulting speed). The CoT for the arms-only version is 0.85, whereas the web drops that down to 0.62. So yeah, having that web in there is better in almost every way... (cont'd)
Nixie: The First Wearable Camera That Can Fly
From Nixie's homepage:
Nixie is a tiny wearable camera on a wrist band. The wrist straps unfold to create a quadcopter that flies, takes photos or video, then comes back to you... (cont'd)
How To Tell When A Robot Has Written You A Letter
From Clive Thompson:
A few weeks ago I got duped by a robot. In the mail.
I was sifting through my dead-tree postal mail and tossing junk in the recycling bin. Nearly everything that arrives in my mailbox is junk, so I was tossing, tossing, tossing … until suddenly, whoops: A hand-addressed letter. This looked legit, so I ripped it open"Š—"Šonly to find it was an oily invitation to take out a second mortgage on my home. I’d been fooled... (cont'd)
Tiny Humanoid Robot Learning to Fly Real Airplanes
From IEEE Spectrum:
The airplane is initially parked on a runway of an airport. The robot prepares the flight by 1) pulling throttle to zero-point, 2) turning on the battery, 3) the altimeter, 4) the avionics, 5) the fuel pump, and 6) start the engine while pressing the switches on the panel. Then, PIBOT grabs the two control sticks for flight control and brakes are released. When the heading of the airplane aligns with the runway within an error less than 5 degree and its speed exceeds the taxiing speed, the second sequence begins and PIBOT increase the power... (cont'd)
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