#Gecko adhesives allow flying robot to perch on walls The Airburr a lightweight flying robot from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (my Phd lab) at EPFL was designed to fly in cluttered environments.
Unlike most flying robot which avoid contact at all cost the Airburr interacts with its environment to navigate.
Just like you might trail your hand along a wall to find your way in the dark the robot can bounce of walls
or follow them without crashing to the ground. In case of a crash it also has a mechanism to pick itself back up
This work was presented last week and ICRA (read the paper here). The gecko pad can be deployed on demand
and save energy while still providing an aerial perspective that is useful for real-world missions such as search and rescue.
The work was done in collaboration with Mettin Sitti from Carnegie mellon University an expert in dry adhesive materials
or sticky substances to climb up walls geckos use Van der waals forces between the tip of each hair
In America venture and privately-funded Rethink Robotics whose founder and CTO is ex-MIT Professor
developing an adaptive manufacturing robot that can work safely alongside human workers. Brooks is devoted to
but none are offering them at low cost or with user friendly training or the plug and play and safety features.
Rethink Robotics Baxterrethink Robotics##new Baxter robot is getting a software upgrade. Big deal? Actually it is.
Brooks vision was to have a hardware platform frequently enhanced with new software and capabilities#and it is happening as promised and on schedule.
Rethink recently launched an academic version of Baxter with a Software Development Kit (SDK) enabling users to train the robot and share their programs with other Baxter owners.
Just the other day Rethink upgraded their operating system to V1. 1 to make it easier to integrate existing factory machine synchronization
This new update also enables users to coordinate actions across Baxter s two arms. Baxters are being produced at a pace for sales of 500+units in 2013.
or more to get the end price due to safety guarding and expensive programming. None of this is necessary with the new Universal Robots.##
#We believe these new robots will soon cross the chasm between early adopters and mainstream users.##
###Once purchased our users can expect a steady stream of software upgrades giving them access to all the new features on the latest robots to leave the factory.
This makes their investment future-proof.#####UR is building 100+robots a month of which approximately 25-30%are for customers in the U s. Both UR
and Rethink are finding price acceptability and each have provided case studies of how their robots are being utilized.
Features Comparisona Couple of Examples of How These Robots Are Being Usedat a Johnson & johnson factory in Greece a UR5 is used on a production line where it performs repetitive pick
A Baxter robot has been deployed at the Rodon Group a Hatfield PA injection molder and is among the first plastics processors to deploy a Baxter robot.
It is being used for repetitive tasks like picking up parts off a conveyor and placing them into boxes or onto a nearby packaging line.
#DNA TESTING chip delivers results in one hour, paves way for personalized drug treatments Panasonic, together with the Belgium-based research institution IMEC, has developed a DNA TESTING chip that automates all stages of obtaining genetic information,
including preprocessing. This development is expected to enable personalized, tailor-made therapy to become widespread. his is the chip wee actually developed.
As you can see, it less than half the size of a business card. It contains everything needed for testing DNA.
the chip completes the entire process, up to SNP detection. SNPS are variations in a single DNA base among individuals.
whether genetically transmitted diseases are present, evaluate future risks, and identify genes related to illness. y investigating SNPS,
we can determine that this drug will work for this person, or this drug will have severe side-effects on that person.
Investigating SNPS enables tailor-made therapy. But with the current method, it has to be done in a specialized lab,
Testing is done simply by injecting the blood and a chemical into the chip and setting it in the testing system.
Then, a newly developed electrochemical sensor identifies SNPS while the DNA is dissolved in the chemical. o implement this system on one chip,
and make detection easy, the first thing we focused on was the actuators. This system requires a very small, powerful pump.
In our case, we used a conductive polymer for the actuators. A feature of these actuators is theye powerful, yet extremely compact.
we like to make this system battery-powered. We think that would enable genetically modified foods to be tested while still in the warehouse. i
#Parrot AR. Drone app harnesses crowd power to fast-track vision learning in robotic spacecraft Astrodrone is both a simulation game app for the Parrot AR.
Drone and a scientific crowdsourcing experiment that aims to improve landing, obstacle avoidance and docking capabilities in autonomous space probes.
As researchers at the European space agency Advanced Concepts Team, we wanted to study how visual cues could be used by robotic spacecraft to help them navigate unknown, extraterrestrial environments.
One of our main research goals was to explore how robots can share knowledge about their environments
and behaviors to speed up this visual learning process. Similar to the Roboearth project the central idea is that a group of robots sharing visual information such as raw camera images
we needed a very large robotic data set of visually salient image features paired with corresponding robotic state estimates,
and it was simply infeasible to gather all this data by ourselves. That where the Parrot AR.
and the drone is indeed a toy quad rotor meant for playing games. We thought we could develop a game for the Parrot that would serve as a means for crowdsourcing the data we needed.
And because the Parrot was designed to be used in augmented reality games and can be controlled by an ios device,
data-gathering could be done in a gaming context, making it fun for people to participate in the experiment.
To this end, we designed a mission-based game where players simulate docking the Parrot with the International space station as quickly as possible
Drone is uniquely suitable for this purpose because: It is widely available to the public,
It is a real robot with many useful sensors, including two cameras (at the front and on the bottom), sonar, accelerometers, gyrometers,
and (on the Parrot AR drone 2. 0) a pressuremeter and magnetometer. Further, it already uses these sensors to achieve accurate onboard state estimation
and (consequently) stable hovering. It can be controlled by smart devices such as the iphone or Android devices,
which can be used send data over the internet. The code for communicating with Parrot is open source. Methodology The question we faced experimentally was how to couple the real-world object to the virtual space in which the drone would be flying.
Having a reference object of known size was a goal since it would provide some form of ground-truth measurement.
As it happens, the Parrot AR. Drone is delivered with a marker that is recognized in the images by the onboard firmware.
The recognition gives an image position (x, y) and a distance to the marker. Note, however, that this information is not enough to disambiguate both the position and orientation of the drone with respect to the marker.
Figure 1 shows two configurations that give exactly the same marker detection data. In the edcase, the marker is in the left part of the image
because the drone is located on the right of the marker. In the luecase, the marker is in the left part of the image,
because the drone has turned to the right. Note that the distances to the marker are the same.
In order to render the virtual space environment, we perform state estimation on the basis of the drone estimates of its height, speeds, angles,
and its detection of the marker. The docking port of the ISS (the marker) is assumed to be at location (0, 0,
0). The state estimation uses an Extended Kalman filter (EKF), and in the light of the discussion of the marker ambiguity, we decided to only update the position on the basis of the marker readings,
The heading is estimated quite well on board the drone, where the Parrot AR. Drone 2 also uses a magnetometer.
Figure 2 shows what computational processes are happening on which device during the game. The marker detection and the estimation of the drone attitude, height,
and speeds are performed by the firmware on board the drone. The app is running the drone control interface,
sending and receiving data from the drone, performing state estimation (X y z) with respect to the marker and rendering the 3d world.
Of course, for the experiment we also need to process the drone onboard images. Because of the iphone computational constraints, we decided to save 5 subsequent images
while the player is trying to dock and to process the images after the flight.
This processing now happens when the player visits the highscore table and agrees to join the experiment.
After extracting the vision data and concatenating this with the state estimates, the data is encrypted for transmission.
Finally, since some players may use 3g for sending their data we considered that the data should be as compact as possible.
Therefore, the data is compressed on board the iphone before being sent. The data from 5 textured images on average takes around 77 kb.
Testing and Launch Our original plan was to work on the game from February to April 2012,
launch it in May or June, and analyze the data from August to September. In reality, we didn converge on the final code until November 2012.
Of course, when you are developing the app, you know the program inside out and by habit you may avoid playing the game in such a way that would make the program malfunction.
So in November we invited other people try out and rate the app. The ratings and comments were used to perform some final adjustments,
and we sent the app to the Apple store for review in January 2013. At the same time, we began to execute our plans for the launch and related PR-activities.
Parrot also promoted our app on their site. The news was picked soon up by BBC Technology
and 458 of these people had contributed already to our experiment by sending their data. This is a nice start,
For example, if an ipad or ipod is connected to the drone Wifi, it cannot send its data.
There was no message that showed the absence of an internet connection (solved in version 1. 2). At the same time
we have started analyzing all the data that is coming in. In the future, we may also improve our crowdsourcing game in various ways,
in order to make it as fun and easy as possible for players, and as useful as possible for our research.
In any case, it an adventure to work with this exciting new way of gathering robotic data n
factory environments isn easy. When those environments have people in them, they are especially unpredictable and difficult for a robot to navigate.
Enter Rezero: a compact ballbot that can fluidly drive in any direction without prior orientation. Similar in size
making it ideal for navigating crowded environments like tradeshows, restaurants, offices and airports. It easy to imagine it one day being used to unobtrusively serve drinks at a cocktail event,
as a personal mobile device for intravenous equipment at a hospital, or topped with a telepresence device and acting as a museum tour guide.
A sensor called an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measures Rezero tilt angle, which is used by an onboard stabilizing controller to compute what kind of motor action is required to keep the system stable.
Instructions are sent then to electric motors that actuate three special wheels (called omniwheels), which in turn transfer forces to the sphere below:
This process of measuring, computing, and actuating happens 160 times per second, and the underlying controller is key to achieving robust and dynamic movement.
Its ability to quickly respond to a changing environment is what makes Rezero so suitable for human environments,
and according to Rezero creators, achieving this robustness was their most challenging task. Rezero controller is derived from a three-dimensional mathematical model of the system,
and the 13 undergraduate students on the team were responsible for everything from concept to engineering, manufacturing and budgeting.
and work with it and were able to observe how its capabilities improved every day. Michael Neunert, his fellow founding team member agrees:
so that it can better manage obstacles in an everyday environment a
#Desktop PC-sized fully automatic genetic testing device The Genelead from Precision System Science (PSS) is a fully automatic genetic testing device that completely automates the genetic testing process that ordinarily would require manual intervention.
This device which handles the complete process up to genetic amplification has a small form factor at 34 cm tall 41 cm long and 19 cm wide
It is just about the same size as a computer so one of its features is being easily usable in any location.
At this time genetic testing is conducted typically only at large research facilities but PSS aims to create an environment where genetic testing devices can be used at more medium-sized hospitals emergency testing hospitals and even small clinics.
Under the concepts of companion diagnostics and personalized medicine that have recently become popular topics in the US as well as Japan the idea is to use medicine suited to the patient and conduct genetic testing for that purpose.
As these types of devices become widespread even the town doctor will be able to conduct these tests.
so that patients can safely take their medicine. PSS which is searching for a way to roll out the Genelead globally including through OEM sales is
PSS aims to release the Genelead between the end of this year and the beginning of next year at a price as affordable as possible e
announced that the RP-VITA Remote Presence Robot has received 510 (k) clearance by the U s. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in hospitals.
and mobility technologies developed by irobot with state-of-the-art telemedicine and electronic health record integration developed by Intouch Health.
RP-VITA allows remote doctor-to-patient consults ensuring that the physician is in the right place at the right time
It maps its own environment and uses an array of sophisticated sensors to autonomously move about a busy space without interfering with people or other objects.
Using an intuitive ipad interface, a doctor can visit a patient, and communicate with hospital staff and patients with a single click, regardless of their location.
The FDA clearance specifies that RP-VITA can be used for active patient monitoring in preoperative
perioperative and post-surgical settings, including cardiovascular, neurological, prenatal, psychological and critical care assessments and examinations.
RP-VITA is being sold into the healthcare market by Intouch Health as its new flagship remote presence device. irobot will continue to explore adjacent market opportunities for robots like RP-VITA and the irobot
#Quadrocopter Drones from China The market of remote controlled quadrocopter drones is growing fast. The world's first crash avoiding drone comes from Guangzhou Walkera Technology Co. Ltd. a Chinese manufacturer of R c model toys such as helicopters
& aeroplanes that are certified to CE UL and FCC standards. The Walkera Infra X Smart Drone with Crash Avoidance System (CAS) contains a total of 10 sensors 2 Ultrasonic Altitude Sensors on the belly of the drone 8 Infrared Sensors
surrounding the drone body they keep the distance of the Drone from big objects like a Wall or a pile of Big Boxes.
The 2. 4ghz New Generation Radio System is the standard of new generation radio system.
For traditional radio frequency helicopters in same frequency cannot fly together because of interference. With 2. 4ghz radio system many helicopters can fly at the same time without interference.
Mind-controlled quadrotor dronemind controlled drones are a hot area for researchers at Zhejiang University in Hangzou China who have adapted a Parrot AR Drone 2. 0 to be operated by an Emotiv EPOC
electroencephalogram (EEG) headset hooked up to a PC running custom software. By thinking left strongly the mind-pilot can make the drone take off;
thinking left right and push makes it turn clockwise move forward and fly up respectively.
More interestingly clenching teeth makes the drone descend while blinking commands it to take a photo o
In a paper published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics today, a team from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics propose a new kind of flying robot that can also walk.
to force the working point of flight control inside the operating range of the terrestrial actuator,
Researchers hope that in the future the DALER might be used to find victims in dangerous areas after a natural disaster
and then walking through a disaster zone (e g. a damaged building) to locate victims so that human rescue teams can concentrate their efforts where they are needed,
rather than using time to search for victims in a dangerous environment. Future development of the DALER will include the ability to hover
#Revolutionary implant enables broken spinal cord to function again A team from EPFL and NCCR Robotics lead by Profs Stéphanie Lacour Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera published an article in Science today describing their e-dura implant that could revolutionise how we think about
and treat paralysis. Until now implants placed beneath the dura mater of the spinal cord have caused significant tissue damage
Previous work by the team have enabled animals paralysed by spinal cord injury (SCI) to voluntarily walk again using both chemical and electrical stimulation.
and biomedicine there are a number of issues with moving this highly successful laboratory experiment to every day human life as previous iterations used wire electrodes
which were limited to two sites and were difficult to place accurately on the spinal cord. Drug delivery was via an intraperitoneal injection i e. an injection into the body cavity.
While the results were outstanding more work needed to be done before this solution could be taken out of a lab situation and into a real world one.
What is presented in the Science paper is a soft and stretchable implant which can be placed directly beneath the dura mater the nervous system protective casing and onto the spinal cord for months at a time a length of time
which would result in significant tissue damage with all previous surface implants. The e-dura is designed also to carry electrical impulses and chemicals.
Under experimental conditions walking was restored in paralysed rats after implanting followed by two weeks of training using a robotic postural interface also developed as part of NCCR Robotics.
The 200nm thick implant is made predominantly of silicone covered with 35nm thick microcracked gold conducting tracks
which can stretch and rebound without damage. The electrodes contained within the implant are made of a unique mix of silicone
and platinum microbeads allowing the implant to function and conduct electricity when moved in any orientation this combination of the flexible electrodes and conducting tracks mean that electrical impulses can be delivered to the spinal cord.
A complimentary fluidic microchannel (100 m x 50 m in cross section) delivers neurotransmitters to reactivate the nerves within the spinal cord.
E-dura is implanted over the lumbosacral segments below the site of injury and engages with the#dormant#lumbar locomotor circuits.
The effectiveness of the e-dura is down to its mechanical properties which allow it to be soft and elastic
thus ensuring that it does not rub against the spinal cord causing the issues seen in alternative implants.
To create an implant to be so soft and flexible but that is also capable of electrical stimulation and local drug delivery and this over several weeks in vivo was no small task
and involved a team comprising experts in materials science electronics neuroscience medicine and algorithm programming. Co-author Prof.
Grégoire Courtine says of the implant that it the first neuronal surface implant designed from the start for long-term application
#and although it only been tested in animals so far the long term applications and potential implications for the disabled community are clear.
The swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics (NCCR Robotics) is funded a federally programme bringing together robotics laboratories from EPFL ETH Zurich University of Zurich
and University of Lugano to work on wearable rescue and educational robots. A full transcript of the paper will be published in print on 09.01.2015
Supervised traffic jam assist After a short day looking at robocars at CES a more full day was full of the usual equipment cameras TVS audio and the like and visits to several car booths.
Ie expanded my gallery of notable things with captions with cars and other technology. Lots of people were making demonstrations of traffic jam assist at CES simple self-driving at low speeds among other cars.
All the demos were supervised of a traffic jam assist. This style of product (as well as supervised highway cruising) is the first thing that car companies are delivering (though they are also delivering various parking assist
and valet parking systems). This makes sense as it an easy problem to solve. So easy in fact that many of them now admit they are working on making a real traffic jam assist
This is a readily solvable problem today you really just have to follow the other cars
and you are going slow enough that short of a catastrophic error like going full throttle you aren going to hurt people no matter what you do at least on a highway where there are no pedestrians or cyclists.
As such a full auto traffic jam assist should be the first product we see form car companies.
(if you trust them) as cruise control does but they give you little else. A ead a booklevel system would give people back time and signal the true dawn of robocars.
It would probably sell for lots more money too. The most impressive car is Delphi a collaboration with folks out of CMU.
The Delphi car a modified Audi SUV has no fewer than 6 4-plane LIDARS and an even larger number of radars.
It helps if you make the radars as otherwise this is an expensive bill of materials.
With all the radars the vehicle can look left and right and back left and back right as well as forward
#Kubi telemedicine device gets HIPAA clearance for streaming medical data Revolve Robotics and Swymed have collaborated to create a HIPAA compliant telepresence device called Kubi that can stream medical data.
This compliance is a big deal: no longer do MDS have to rely only upon what they see,
to make a diagnosis; they can use data streaming directly to the app to help make decisions.
In smaller rural hospitals or even in ambulances, where a specialist cannot be physically there,
this is going to be the best alternative. HIPAA compliance means that medical data can be streamed. A simple MD telepresence consult,
which is similar to a telephone call, would not require this type of certification. But once you start implementing data,
you enter into a new realm or regulations. While the RP-Vita by irobot/intouch Health has HIPAA compliance as well,
many hospitals cannot afford or implement such a full blown solution. I did a test drive back
While there are other telemedicine apps out there that provide consultations, like Teledoc or Doctor on Demand,
and recovers easily thanks to new algorithm In August 2014 Google x announced that they had been secretly developing a drone delivery program to rival Amazon Prime Air.
Called Project Wing, the system was based on a mechanically simple ailsitterdesign a hybrid vehicle that takes off vertically like a multirotor
however, Google scrapped the design, saying that it was difficult to control and didn perform well in high winds.
Since then, researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new algorithm for robustly controlling a tailsitter flying machine in hover position.
Using the algorithm the tailsitter is able to recover from any orientation, including upside down. ETH has demonstrated not yet its algorithm in real-world conditions (e g.,
, high winds, GPS localization, different payload distributions. However, given the robustness of the solution shown in the video,
perhaps Google should not dismiss the tailsitter design too quickly for its next design iteration.
Robohub Editorsa tailsitter provides hover capability by pointing the nose and thrust direction upwards. For fast forward flight, the vehicle tilts to a near-horizontal orientation,
resulting in efficient lift production due to the conventional wing design. Compared to other fixed-wing,
hover-capable aircraft such as tiltrotors and tiltwings, the major advantage of a tailsitter is its mechanical simplicity:
The algorithm demonstrated in the video is based on Optimal Control. Optimal trajectories for a set of initial orientations are precomputed
While the vehicle is hovering, it is crucial that a large part of the flaps are within the propeller-induced airstream,
Two radios are attached on the bottom side of the vehicle; a Wifly module for high-bandwidth telemetry,
and a low-latency, frequency-hopping 2. 4 GHZ radio link that receives the control commands from the ground station.
and do not provide enough control authority for the hover flight regime. Therefore their area is enlarged by carbon fibre sheets.
if the vehicle does not receive control commands anymore or if the battery voltage is too low are implemented also on the FMU.
The algorithm is presented in research paper Global Strategy for Tailsitter Hover Control submitted to International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2015.
Researchers Robin Ritz and Raffaello Dndreainstitute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurichflying Machine Arenatechnical details Frame:
Robbe Mini Wing RC styrofoam airframe Electronics: Pixhawk PX4 Flight Management Unit Battery: Thunder Power RC G6 Pro Lite 25c Lipo 350mah 2s Motors:
Hacker A05-13s Motor controllers: ZTW Spider 12a ESCS with Simonk firmware Propellers: 5×3 GWS EP-5030 Flap servos:
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