Atlas, The Next Generation
From Boston Dynamics: A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.
Roving robot 'ground drones' take to streets for deliveries
MARK BLUNDEN for Evening Standard: A delivery robot tested among the crowds of central London is set to start being deployed in the capital.
The self-driving, battery-powered box on wheels is poised to undertake local delivery trials in Greenwich following 3,000 hours of testing.
The robots by Starship Technologies have been described as “ground drones” and were created by former Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis.
Their invention is expected to be popular at smaller local businesses, such as bakeries and corner shops, that could send out the robot containing goods in its tub body costing only a pound or two. Cont'd...
DARPA - FLA Program Takes Flight
They may not have zoomed flawlessly around obstacles like the Millennium Falcon did as it careened through the hull of a crashed Star Destroyer in Star Wars VII. But the sensor-loaded quadcopters that recently got tested in a cluttered hangar in Massachusetts did manage to edge their way around obstacles and achieve their target speeds of 20 meters per second. Moreover, the quadcopters were unmanned … and real. Thus was the initial phase of data collection for DARPA's Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program recently deemed an encouraging success.
DARPA’s FLA program aims to develop and test algorithms that could reduce the amount of processing power, communications, and human intervention needed for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to accomplish low-level tasks, such as navigation around obstacles in a cluttered environment. If successful, FLA would reduce operator workload and stress and allow humans to focus on higher-level supervision of multiple formations of manned and unmanned platforms as part of a single system. Cont'd...
Earthbound Robots Today Need to Take Flight
Neil Tardella for IEEE Spectrum: The DARPA Robotics Challenge this past summer showcased how far humanoid robots have come—but also how far they have yet to go before they can tackle real-world practical applications. Even the best of the DRC behemoths stumbled and fell down, proving, as IEEE Spectrum noted at the time, that “not walking is a big advantage.”
There is, in fact, a new not-walking way for robots to perform many kinds of tasks better and faster: the dexterous drone.
A lightweight flying platform with a robotic arm combines the strengths of two rapidly developing, parallel industries. Aerial drones like quadcopters and octocopters have in just the past few years emerged as a viable industrial and consumer product with substantial maneuverability, versatility, and durability. Yet the drones of today are mostly just flying bodies with no arms or hands. Cont'd...
SkyTech 2016 Post-Event Report
With SkyTech wrapped up again for another year take a look at the highlights from this year's conference.
The Inevitability Of The Global March Toward Self-driving Vehicles
I look forward to watching this transformation from the comfort of my Mercedes sedan... today, from the driver's seat; a few years from now as a passenger; and a few years later as a passenger in some service provider's Mercedes.
SoftBank's Pepper Robots to Staff Tokyo Cell Phone Store
BY ANGELA MOSCARITOLO for PCMAG: SoftBank is giving its Pepper robot a new job with some big responsibilities. The Japanese telecom giant is planning to open a cell phone store in Tokyo this spring staffed primarily by Pepper robots, according to a report from The Japan Times. About five to six Pepper robots will run the store from March 28 through April 3, and be responsible for helping customers and making sales. "I don't know how this will turn out, but it should be a quite interesting experiment," SoftBank CEO Ken Miyauchi told the newspaper. The robots will be able to answer questions about different cell phone options, and when someone's ready to buy, they'll even attempt to complete the sale. SoftBank does plan to have humans at the ready to handle tasks Pepper can't yet do — like checking customer IDs when drawing up a new contract. Cont'd...
HACKLET 93 - ROBOTICS TOOLKIT AND ESP8266 PACKET INJECTION
Adam Fabio for Hackaday: [Kevin Harrington] loves robots, but hates reinventing the wheel every time he creates a new machine. He’s built BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform to combat this problem. BowlerStudio was asemifinalist in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. BowlerStudio is a soup-to-nuts platform for creating all sorts of robots. [Kevin] has integrated Computer Aided Design (CAD), 3D modeling, kinematics, machine vision, and a simulation engine complete with physics modeling into one whopper of a software package. To prove how versatile the system is, he designed a hexapod robot in the CAD portion of the program. The robot then taught itself to walk in the simulation. Once the design was 3D printed, the real robot walked right off the bread board. [Kevin] linked the hardware and software with DyIO, another of his projects.
BowlerStudio is a huge boon for just about any robotics hacker, as well as educators. An entire curriculum could be created around the system. Thanks to its Java roots, BowlerStudio is also a multi-platform. [Kevin] has binaries ready to go for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. Cont'd...
Greenbot: Driverless Tractor
From Greenbot:
The Greenbot was introduced at the Agritechnica 2015 trade fair. The Greenbot is the first driverless machine to be developed especially for professionals working in the green sector who have to carry out repetitive tasks on a regular basis, such as working in fruit cultivation, horticulture, agriculture, or the municipal sector.
The software that controls the fourwheel steering and hydraulic four-wheel drive system is userfriendly, safe and reliable. The Greenbot can be programmed to function fully independent and can be used to replicate tasks recorded in advance using a tractor with a driver. Programs can also be activated using the remote control, and then the Greenbot repeats the instructions. This mode is called ‘Teach & Playback’. The Greenbot is furthermore able to independently plan its own route and operations for specific applications, such as spraying orchards or mowing public green areas... ( site )
Is Velo3D Plotting a 3-D Printed Robot Revolution?
Tekla S. Perry for IEEE Spectrum: Velo3D, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has $22.1 million in venture investment to do something in 3-D printing: That makes it fourth among 2015’s best-funded stealth-mode tech companies in the United States, according to CB Insights. This dollar number is about all the hard news that has come out of this startup, founded in 2014 by Benyamin Butler and Erel Milshtein. But job postings, talks at conferences, and other breadcrumbs left along Velo3D's development trail—has created a sketchy outline of this company’s plans.
Consider which 3-D printing technology is ready for disruption: metal. 3-D printing of plastics took off after 2009, when a key patent that covered the deposition technology expired; we now have desktop printers for 3-D plastic objects as cheap as $350. Printing of metal objects—done regularly in industry, particularly aerospace—uses a different, and, to date, far more expensive technology: selective laser sintering. This technology melts metal powders into solid shapes; it requires high temperatures, and far more complicated equipment than what’s found in the layering sort of printers used for plastic. The patent for this technology expired in early 2014—just before the formation of Velo3D. At the time, industry experts indicated that there wouldn’t be cheap metal printers coming anytime soon, but rather, would only come after “a significant breakthrough on the materials side,” OpenSLS’s Andreas Bastian told GigaOm in 2014. Could Velo3D’s founders have that breakthrough figured out? Cont'd...
Driverless Tractors and Drones to be Among the Key Applications for Agricultural Robots
The worldwide market for the agricultural robot has seen a boost in 2015 and many new products that are in field tests are expected to be commercially available by 2016.
Safely Bonding with Drones
Gimball model drone eliminates the peril of flying close to people and potentially damaging structures.
How To Sell Robots To The Military
By and large the people you encounter in the military and Defense are smart, dedicated, and honest. They are haunted by the specter that the equipment they procure may result in the death of American servicemen. If you have a product that can save lives, then you might just have yourself a sale.
Drones' Good, Bad: Keep Your Eyes to the Skies as Drones Fly Out of Stores
Drones were sold by the squadron this past holiday as intelligent machines but they're really just tricked out remote-control planes. Few have the common-sense necessary to detect/avoid obstacles, figure out where they're at or how to get home.
Fighting for Life: Why Drones are Infiltrating Emergency Services
If machines are a reflection of their creator, then their ability to save the imperilled arises from our pursuit of empathy, our willingness to throw our chips behind the right cause when and where the money matters.
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