Automaton

Just in case you'd ever lain awake at night wondering to yourself how you might build a robotic hand you could eat... well, wonder no more.

More information can be found at the MAYA Make group's website. Happy fooding.

Brown professor Odest Chadwicke Jenkins and his students have invented a new game: RoombaTag. Here's a first-hand account:

We have currently implemented a robot game server and clients for playing the example game of "RoombaTag." RoombaTag follows the basic format of most first-person tag games, where each player's objective is to "tag'' other robots more than they get tagged. Each player controls a single robot given a video feed from their robot's perspective. A successful tag results in scoring a point for the tagger and a momentary freezing of the controls of the tagged robot.

RoombaTag uses our robotic platform, named "SmURV'' (Small Universal Robot Vehicle) in an iRobot Create with a Mini-ITX form factor computer. The Smurv also has a Unibrain Fire-I camera as a visual sensor and an IR emitter attached to the Create functioning as an "IR cannon.'' The ITX machine runs Linux (SLAS distribution) and Player/Stage robot server from a flash memory card, allowing both control of the robot hardware via TCP/IP over wireless and execution of onboard robot controllers.

Game state shared between multiple Smurvs are implemented in a game server. The game server that acts as a mediator, a referee and a switchboard between the set of physical robots and the users controlling the robots through the internet. Users control a robot through a client-side Java application that communicates with the game server.

The Smurv bots are currently controlled using keyboards, but the Brown group plans to replace them with Wii-mote controllers.

To learn more, check out their Robot Learning through Embodied Gaming page.

Not Leonardo the artist. No, not the ninja turtle, either. Leonardo is a gremlin-like robot at the MIT Media Lab who was the main attraction in a series of user studies a couple of weeks ago, one of which I got to participate in.

Leonardo was built for the Personal Robots group (I seem to recall them being called "Robotic Life" at one point), headed by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, to study social interaction with robots. Leonardo can't walk or talk, but he can make a few facial expressions and manipulate a few objects with his eerily lifelike (though not very dextrous) little hands.

The study I was participating in was part of post-doc Andrea Thomaz's research into how humans understand the learning process and how machines can learn from them. She asked me to see if I could teach Leonardo (and if I recognized when I had taught him) to perform a few tasks on a toy box in front of him: pushing a button to change light colors, flipping two switches, and trying to learn the right combinations to open and close the box. Working with Leonardo was a little strange. I'd seen pictures before, but was surprised to find him almost three feet tall (well taller than me when he was standing on a desk). Interacting with him at first felt awkward, but soon I was learning forward on the desk gently urging him to learn what he needed to learn, much in the same way as I might teach a toddler to tie his shoes. He could only respond to a limited set of commands like "Try to flip the switch right, Leo" and to feedback like "Not quite!" or "Good job, Leo!". In the end, I sent him into an infinite loop of switch-flipping (ah, bugs), so my robot-teaching prowess remains unknown. But it was my first time personally interacting with a "humanoid" robot.

And I just noticed now I've been calling him "he" throughout this whole entry. They must have done a good job anthropomorphizing him for me...

At any rate, the study was less about robots than it was about cognition and learning, but I was thrilled to have the chance to check Leonardo out. His command set is limited to whichever program a Lab researcher happens to have loaded on him for the day, so we won't be seeing Leos in our homes pushing buttons and flipping switches for us any time soon. But it was a fascinating glimpse into how I might some day interact with a robot in my house. Hopefully the infinite loops will have been fixed by then.

Photo: David Clugston for IEEE Spectrum

Last year, Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen of the University of Washington’s BioRobotics Lab wrote an article for Spectrum about their surgical robot, Raven, and a field test in the California rangelands, where a surgeon commanded the robot remotely.

Early this year, Raven headed out to another extreme environment: the Aquarius underwater habitat off Key Largo, Florida. In the experiment, part of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project, surgeons teleoperated the two-armed robot all the way from Seattle.

Automaton spoke with Hannaford to get the details.

Keepon, according to its creators, is:

...designed to interact with children by communicating attention and emotion. It has four degrees of freedom: attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm. In addition to his role as a BeatBot, Keepon is used in research on social development and communication.

This little guy is capable of reacting to visual stimuli and of totally rocking out. The video below is both a neat demo of Keepon in public and an excellent music video in and of itself.

Another music video here, and a simpler video of Keepon in the lab reacting to objects here.

Although some people claim their mouths operate independently of their brains, that's not usually the case. The brain sends neurological signals to the larynx, which converts them into sound. Now, what if we could use those larynx nerve signals to control things?

That's exactly what a company called Ambient is doing. Its Audeo technology basically converts "unspoken speech" (neurological signals flowing through larynx nerves when a person thinks about speaking) into control commands that can be used to guide a motorized wheelchair (video above) or synthesize speech. Pretty amazing!

The company apparently stole the show this month at National Instrument's NI Week in Austin. Ambient's founder and CEO, Michael Callahan, gave a demonstration of the company's "thought-controlled" wheelchair and "thought-to-speech" translation system. (You can see the demo at the NI Week video page; it's the last segment, called "Algorithm Engineering," on the August 7 list.)

To use the system, a person wears a lightweight sensor band around the neck. The band picks up the larynx nerve signals and transmits them wirelessly to a remote computer (don't worry about "mind wiretapping" -- the transmission is encrypted.) The remote computer uses NI LabVIEW and signal processing algorithms to interpret the nerve-impulse patterns and translate them into the right commands.

The system is not plug-and-play. It does require some training until its algorithms learn to "read your mind" (accuracy is above 70 percent). But at least it doesn't require Matrix-style brain interfaces or a tangle of EEG electrodes wrapped around your head.

Callahan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hopes to commercialize the technology to improve the lives of severely disable people with spinal cord injuries or such neurological disorders as ALS and cerebral palsy. (The company is backed by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.)

OK -- not exactly related to robotics, but very cybernetic nonetheless. I wonder what things we might control with this technology one day. Any guesses?

MIT grad student Conor Walsh and the leg exoskeleton he and other researchers have developed. [Photo: Samuel Au / MIT News]

MIT researchers have created a wearable robotic exoskeleton to help soldiers carry heavier loads on their backpacks. Powered legs like those could one day help elderly and disabled people gain more mobility and carry things around more easily, but since this is DARPA funded work soldiers have priority. Sorry, grandma.

The MIT exoskeleton consists of a pair of mechanical legs with a mounted backpack frame. The mechanical legs strap to the user's own legs and support much of the pack's weight by transferring it to the ground. The MIT researchers, led by Hugh Herr at Media Lab's Biomechatronics Group, report in the September issue of the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics that their prototype can take on 80 percent of an 36-kg load carried on a person's back.

And how does it work?

STriDER is a three-legged robot that walks by ... uh, well, the best way to understand its patent-pending "tripedal gait" is to watch the videos below. Basically the robot steps forward by swinging one leg between the other two while flipping over its top body and then doing the same with another leg and so forth. Wicked!

The robot generated quite some buzz at this year's ICAR in Korea [read the excellent paper here, in pdf] and more recently in the robotics blogosphere.

To learn more about the robot, Automaton went straight to the source: Dennis Hong [right], director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, who leads the team developing STriDER (if you're wondering, that's short for Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot).

Next, a Q&A with Hong on STriDER's development and applications, and also videos showing the robot's first step and hypotrochoid-based joint mechanism.

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."

From Automaton correspondent Sally Adee:

New Scientist's blog has an interview with Johann Borenstein, the father of
the OmniTread serpentine robot. Borenstein thinks this could be a new way to find people in collapsed buildings or otherwise disaster areas. The snake configuration lets the robot slither through small holes as well as get over tall obstacles and across extreme terrain. Controlling one, however, requires more than a flute and a basket.

"We currently need three operators," Borenstein told New Scientist. "Each operator controls two joints of our six-joint OmniTread. Typically all joints need to be controlled at all times."

Wing-flapping micro robots, unmanned helicopters, formation flight algorithms -- there were lots of cool UAV projects at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) last week in San Diego, Calif. Too many, in fact, to describe them all here. But Automaton correspondent Marcel Bergerman, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon, has the highlights:

Greetings from San Diego! I am at IROS 2007 looking at the latest developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). IROS is a huge conference, with 132 technical sessions in 11 parallel tracks over three days, plus three plenary sessions and several workshops.

UAVs alone got four sessions, which is an indication of the importance of the field among the myriad of disciplines that comprise robotics today. The weather was great, and luckily the forest fires that abated San Diego did not interfere with the conference. More than 1,000 people registered for and attended IROS, making is one of the premier robotics conferences worldwide.

Instead of covering each UAV paper presented in a succession, which would be just plain boring, I decided to report on those works that I found interesting or novel (in no order of importance). The pictures below were taken from the conference CD-ROM; of course, these carry the IEEE copyright, but since this is an IEEE blog, I figured it would be OK to publish a picture or two (or three).

Under the category "design of micro UAVs" I enjoyed the works of Robert Wood (Harvard) and Xinyan Deng (University of Delaware). Wood is designing insect-size UAVs that actually flap their tiny little wings to generate enough lift to keep the vehicle aloft, with some lift to spare for an onboard processor and sensors.

Transmission system for one of Robert Wood’s micro aerial vehicles.

He described the fabrication process for each of the components, which is rather involved. Videos shot with high-speed cameras show the wings flapping at 110 Hz very robustly. I look forward to some future conference where Wood shows these tiny UAVs flying with some degree of autonomy.

Robert Wood’s 60 mg, 3 cm wingspan micro aerial vehicle.

Deng is also working on insect-like UAVs; although she showed results with "large" wings on the order of several centimeters, she mentioned that her tests are coherent with real insects in terms of Reynolds number and advance ratio (the ratio of flapping frequency to flight speed).

Xinyan Deng’s prototype dragonfly robot.

Talking about bigger machines -- Our group at Carnegie Mellon (yes, I did find our work interesting) :-) presented a novel model-based cascaded controller for the Yamaha RMAX unmanned helicopter. The model is adapted from work published in 2006 by NASA's Mark Tischler in the Journal of the American Helicopter Society; I believe it will slowly replace Mettler's as the basis for small helicopter simulation and controller design models.

A quadrotor built at ETH Zurich also caught my attention, especially the video where the machine avoids people walking towards it.

ETH’s quadrotor in hover.

On a higher level of abstraction I would like to mention Rachid Alami's (from the LAAS/CNRS, France) formation flight algorithm, which allows UAVs to adopt the best possible convoy formation for a given mission profile. The algorithm takes into account threats such as enemy-operated jamming radars which would disrupt communication between the UAVs and between them and a ground control station. Alami’s group has started experimenting with three small fixed-wing airplanes.

Alami’s formation flight algorithm applied to an 8-UAV fleet.

Overall there were 20 UAV-related papers from four continents and eight countries, including Portugal, Germany, France, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. This shows how international is the UAV community!

Thanks, Marcel!

From Automaton correspondent Sally Adee:

Sandia researchers Chris Forsythe and a companion, fitted with EEG caps, test drive a "smart vehicle" that can read their brain activity. Photo: Sandia

If driving next to a semi truck makes you nervous, you're not alone.

Reports are all over the news about how many incentives truck drivers get to push through sleep-deprivation and other impediments. They drive long, monotonous routes with little stimulation, and the results are sometimes fatal.

And it's not always because the driver is distracted—researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, N.M., are looking into what happens to your driving when you're not distracted enough.

Sandia is designing "smart cars" that will alert you when you're approaching that dangerous "twilight zone" between consciousness and sleepiness. They call it the "underload" condition—you're bored, distracted, drowsy, or daydreaming because there's nothing to engage your mind.

The military application to this is convoy driving, but obviously the civilian counterpart is long-haul trucking. The original project was funded by DARPA about five years ago, but now it's been taken over by the Marines. The military often doesn't use brake lights, principal investigator Kevin Dixon told me.

"So if you're a 19-year-old lance corporal driving a 25-ton truck, you're not paying attention, and you don't notice that the car in front of you has slowed down, you're going to do a lot of damage with that vehicle."

But how to detect crushing boredom?

Spectrum ran a feature on exoskeletons two years ago with some interesting details on the Sarcos system's force sensors, power unit, and hydraulic actuators, below:

For its part, the Salt Lake City–based Sarcos team, led by roboticist and inventor Stephen C. Jacobsen, has been working on what may be one of the strongest exoskeletons ever built. Earlier this year, at the demonstration the group did in Fort Belvoir, an engineer wearing the Sarcos robotic system was able to carry 84 kg [185 lb]—about the weight of an average size washing machine—without feeling the payload at all. Jacobsen, Sarcos's CEO and a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Utah, says that the new exoskeleton supports the payload's entire weight even if the wearer stands on one leg.

Like Bleex 2 [the UC Berkeley exo], the latest Sarcos system is a second-generation model that improves substantially over its predecessor. Jacobsen says that while wearing the exoskeleton, you can walk and run, and if you stumble, the system is fast enough to readjust its powered limbs to keep the payload's weight off your body.

The exoskeleton relies on a network of force sensors that are in touch with the wearer's body at certain points, such as underneath the feet. These special sensors, developed by Sarcos, feed data to a control computer that in turn commands the robotic limbs to move in harmony with the wearer's arms and legs without ever obstructing them. Jacobsen calls this method "get out of the way" control, and he says using the robotic suit requires no training. "You can step into the exoskeleton, and you can immediately run it," he says.

According to Jacobsen, what makes an exoskeleton an extremely hard problem is that conventional, off-the-shelf components won't work. Sarcos had to design and fabricate each piece and, in parallel, integrate all of them into its system. The exoskeleton's power unit was one of these many pieces the company had to engineer painstakingly. It's a special internal-combustion engine that can use a variety of fuels and deliver enough hydraulic power to the actuators to meet the great strength and speed the robotic limbs require.

But even more challenging, Jacobsen says, was developing yet another component: the servo valves that control the flow of the hydraulic fluid into the actuators. The valves had to be small, extremely reliable, resistant to high pressures, and highly efficient to preserve precious power, not to mention that som