Automaton

German researchers are exploring a new dimension of human-robot interaction: the "interaction" that occurs when a 200-kilogram industrial robot accidentally strikes a 90-kilogram person in the head, torso, or pelvis.

Susanne Oberer and Rolf Dieter Schraft at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart are conducting human-robot "crash tests" to understand what kind of injuries result in such cases and how safety could be improved.

An article in today's WaPo discusses some odd dragonflies seen in New York City recently, which some of the witnesses say look "large for dragonflies" and suspiciously mechanical. Speculation is that they're robotic bugs spying for the US government -- of course, there's other speculation that they're just plain dragonflies, too. Don't be misled by the photo in the article (reproduced here); that's a picture from a lab at Harvard.

But after all the apparent warnings for the tinfoil hat brigade, the article does a nice of highlighting some of the ongoing research into robotic insects. Here's an interesting bit:

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths."

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic 'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support," DARPA program manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, "this science fiction vision is within the realm of reality."

Raytheon is a large, well-known defense contractor with divisions all over the world. Sarcos Robotics is a small company in Utah that makes, among other things, animatronic and robotic characters for movies and amusement parks. And now Raytheon has bought Sarcos.

This article in Mass High Tech describes how Sarcos will be folded into the Integrated Defense Systems division in Massachusetts. In addition to its business of animatronics, Sarcos works on some medical devices and MEMS. Undoubtedly the MEMS technology will come in handy as part of Raytheon's defense systems, but perhaps there is another reason: Sarcos makes a robotic butterfly (link goes to Quicktime video). Perhaps Americans should be suspicious of military butterfly spies?

At any rate, take a look at Sarcos's website (especially their mildly intimidating jobs page). They do an excellent job of posting videos of their animals, humanoids, and other products. I like the juggling robot, below. I can't even do that.

Cars aren't enough for Toyota -- just like Honda, they're making robots. Both Honda and Toyota, based in Japan, are trying to address the concerns of the aging populace and relatively low birthrates that will result in lots of elderly needing care, and not enough people to provide it. Both companies are focusing on development of humanoid robots with a lot of dexterity, which Toyota consistently demonstrates by having the robots play musical instruments.

The newest addition to Toyota's line of Partner Robots is a violin-playing bot that demonstrates new developments in manipulation and dexterity, which are essentially to working with small objects in a standard human environment. Many of the partner robots can walk, though one is wheeled, and some can carry on simple conversations. Eventually the goal is to have these piloted in nursing homes and hospitals with the elderly to see how they do, and Toyota says they want to have them in homes in 2010.

How realistic is that? The Partner robots (and Asimo) are both still largely tele-operated and incredibly expensive. So much work goes into recreating human balance, manipulation, size, shape, and aesthetics that getting a product to market is delayed perhaps much further than a robot less humanoid and more specialized -- is that the right path to be taking? Will the humanoid form make adoption easier or more difficult?

Here's a video with a good closeup of the robotic hand on the violin. It is definitely impressive. Incidentally, it may not be as much of a robot, but I have to say also that the way the wheelchair deals with the bump in the road is amazing as well.

This New York Times article describes how Mars Rover Spirit's wheel, which hasn't worked since March 2006, ended up scraping Martian dust off a patch of silica -- and when silica is found naturally on Earth, it is in one of two environments that "teem with microbial life." Scientists are still investigating the silica patch it found to see what we can learn from it.

Also of note, this January will mark the rovers' fourth birthday on Mars, well in excess of their original 90 day mission.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In this month's issue of Spectrum magazine, Erico covered the dispute between iRobot and Robotic FX bidding on the US Army xBot contract. Though the lawsuit is still in court, the Army has already moved: iRobot issued a press release this morning announcing that they had been awarded the contract. While iRobot's press release doesn't mention Robotic FX, they do acknowledge that they weren't just the lowest bidder:

"iRobot was selected to fulfill the contract as the lowest priced, technically qualified bidder deemed able to deliver as a responsible contractor."

This is a huge contract for iRobot. To date they've delivered about 1200 PackBots, and this contract could mean an order of up to 3000 over the next few years.

I found out just recently about Vision Robotics, a company in California with a pretty broad range of products (or eventual products), but all of them are based on computer vision and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) navigation technology.

Their agricultural products look pretty interesting; they're looking at developing a robot that can go through an orchard and pick ripe oranges off of trees, as well as one that can prune grape vines. The concept appears to be that one robot will scan the trees in each orchard row with its vision system, mapping out where each fruit is, while a second robot (I can't tell from the renderings if it's attached to the first one or not -- though they do like like two discrete modules) with the picking arms follows it and picks the fruit it has identified. I have to say, if anyone else is familiar with the Boomers from the anime Bubblegum Crisis, this thing looks terrifying.

I found out about Vision Robotics through a student at Olin College (my alma mater), where the company is sponsoring a senior project to develop an end-effector that can gently grasp and pick an orange off a tree without breaking the skin. The student also compared apples to oranges, pointing out that oranges contrast with the tree, while apples tend to blend in with the green leaves, making oranges an easier target for a vision system. Still, Vision Robotics does appear to be designing an apple picker as well.

On the home robots side, they've got patents on a vacuuming and mopping robot. Even though iRobot beat them to the punch on the concepts, Vision Robotics patented a design that uses a remote cleaning head that is much smaller and more mobile than the Roomba body; a module carrying power and other large, heavy components can stay out of the way while the connected cleaning head does its work. Unlike the Roomba, this robot (as conceived) also maps the room before vacuuming.

They also list an elder care "personal service" robot, though as with all of these elder care concepts developed in the US and Japan, their feasibility remains to be seen. The floor cleaning model is much better proven.

For anyone interested in moving to San Diego (or anyone already there), they list an open development position on their Careers page (linked at the bottom of their site).

Image source: www.visionrobotics.com

The United States Department of Defense has released its roadmap through 2032 (link to actual report at the bottom of the page; large PDF warning) for unmanned systems in the military. For this first time, this report includes not only unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) but also unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned underwater and surface vehicles (UUVs and USVs); previous reports had focused primarily on UGVs.

This is a very long but pretty fascinating read, particularly the president's budget through 2013 for funding in the three areas (section 2.4). It's really interesting to see that the UGVs like PackBots and Talons seem to be way ahead of other unmanned systems, with the R&D budget drastically decreasing over the next several years as the procurement budget skyrockets. The UAVs and UUVs, on the other hand, will still have a lot of R&D money pumped into them over the next several years. UAVs seem to be most popular with the highest overall procurement budget.

The report also goes into a nice explanation of the Dull/Dirty/Dangerous mantra that is so popular with American robotics development:

• For the dull, allows the ability to give operators normal mission cycles and crew rest.
• For the dirty, increases the probability of a successful mission and minimizes human exposure.
• For the dangerous, lowers the political and human cost if the mission is lost.

Lower downside risk and higher confidence in mission success are two strong motivators for continued expansion of unmanned systems across a broad spectrum of warfighting and peacetime missions.

There's also some good stuff on standardization and interoperability within the industries, including things like message format and processor speed. This will be good reading for the CTOs and budding entrepreneurs out there.

Wired has a neat gallery that looks into the robotics labs at SPAWAR in San Diego. There's a wide array of ground-based humanoids, vehicles, and other machines, which all appear to be armed. On one of the bots:

This prototype robotic weapon platform is designed to be buried underground for camouflaged deployment. When called to action, the robotic gun pops up and starts shooting. If you're the unlucky soul on the business end of this gun, it's likely curtains for you -- this robot is an extremely accurate shooter. A high-tech night-vision scope (bottom right) permits dead-on targeting even during moonless nights.

Via BoingBoing

Given what I last wrote about, this article from Network World is well timed: a startup called Willow Garage out in California is working on an open-source personal robot. From the article:

One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them available to university researchers as a common platform that can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also supply "an open-source code base integrated from the best open-source robotics software available"

Cousins reminisced about the time when a teenager might spend all day tinkering with his car. Stricter automobile-safety rules have made that practice a bit risky, but anyone with enough expertise will be encouraged to build on the Willow Garage robotic platform and find new uses for it, just as software developers constantly find new uses for the personal computer.

"We don’t know what the killer applications will be," Cousins said.

This sounds exactly like what the Forbes article was talking about: a personal robot that will enable hackers to find the new uses and abilities that will define the next decades of robotics. This is a more directed approach than other "hacker" robots like the iRobot Create or the LEGO Mindstorm, which are more about education and learning than they are new applications.

Willow Garage looks like an interesting company even beyond this program -- in addition to this personal robot, they're working on autonomous cars and surface craft. That's a pretty broad range of research, but there are enough similarities between the technologies that if they've got the right team of experts, I think some really cool stuff will come out of this.

Image from willowgarage.com/

Whew! I have just recovered from helping out at the Boston FIRST Regional that took place over the weekend (see our previous coverage of FIRST). The Regional was a celebration of science and technology, and especially of robotics -- we had air, land, and sea unmanned vehicles stationed in the lobby, Roombas cleaning the floors between matches, and of course, the 51 competing robots. There was also a special entrance by MIT Professor Woodie Flowers, one of the co-founders of the FIRST program and an all around excellent guy.

What Woodie is hanging on to is a robot from Atlas Devices. It's designed for the military to use to rapidly ascend and descend ropes safely -- from their website, "Its powerful lifting capacity can directly hoist fully-loaded soldiers or firefighters at unprecedented speeds. Utilizing the ATLAS with standard rescue equipement can magnify its capacity even more, enabling effective lifting and towing capacities in excess of 1,000 lbs." Woodie was trained on it on Wednesday evening and it seemed like a pretty shallow learning curve. It's all fun and games watching it descend, but it's when it ascends (so smoothly and quickly) that it looks really impressive. Here are a few more videos for your pleasure.

If you missed it Friday, NPR's Science Friday last week had a show called "Building a More Sociable Robot." Guests include Helen Greiner (chair and co-founder of iRobot), Peter McOwen (a computer science professor from Queen Mary, University of London), Dean Kamen (inventor of the iBot, Segway, and founder of FIRST), and Grant Cox (member of FIRST champion team The Thunder Chickens). Greiner and McOwen talk about what average people expect out of robots in terms of interaction, the relationship between interactive technology, price, and consumer demand, and what the state of technology is to get robots interacting with the environment and with us in a "natural" way. Kamen and Cox, meanwhile, talk about the FIRST program, how it's encouraging people to follow science, engineering, and technology as careers, and why robotics is so effective in doing this. (They also give a nod to former President Bush's thought that FIRST is like "the WWF, but for smart people," which he observed while giving a speech at FIRST's closing ceremonies two weeks ago)

You can download the podcast here.

In the US, the three big robotics centers are Boston, Pittsburgh, and Silicon Valley, all in large part thanks to the great universities in those areas that have spun their research out into industry (for that reason, Georgia Tech is growing the industry in Georgia). Yesterday Boston business news site Xconomy took a look at the Boston industry and gave an overview of all the robotics companies in the greater Boston area.

From the article:

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales[...]

Looking at the list, a few things leaped out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications.

That company list is a great resource and the industry overview is really interesting. I wonder if this kind of analysis and overview exists for the other major cities?

Thanks, Janet!

Automaton's own Markus Waibel is part of the team that produces the Robots podcast, and they've just given their site and their podcasts a makeover.

The first of their new series focuses on the technology that's come out of the DARPA Grand Challenges (which we talked about a bit last fall), and they promise a compelling lineup of robotics researchers, professionals, and hobbyists in future episodes. Who knows -- maybe you'll even hear my melodic voice coming to you over the intertubes!

Look for new eps every other Friday morning on a computer near you.