By Anne Trafton
During the current coronavirus pandemic, one of the riskiest parts of a health care worker’s job is assessing people who have symptoms of Covid-19. Researchers from MIT, Boston Dynamics, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital hope to reduce that risk by using robots to remotely measure patients’ vital signs.
By Misha Laskin, Aravind Srinivas, Kimin Lee, Adam Stooke, Lerrel Pinto, Pieter Abbeel
A remarkable characteristic of human intelligence is our ability to learn tasks quickly. Most humans can learn reasonably complex skills like tool-use and gameplay within just a few hours, and understand the basics after only a few attempts. This suggests that data-efficient learning may be a meaningful part of developing broader intelligence.
Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS) at Georgia Tech
In this episode, Lauren Klein interviews Ayanna Howard, Professor and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Professor Howard describes her wide range of work in robotics, from robots that assist children with special needs to trust in autonomous systems. She also discusses her path through the field of robotics in both academia and business, and the importance of conducting in-the-wild robotics research.
By Lindsay Brownell
Minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, in which a surgeon uses tools and a tiny camera inserted into small incisions to perform operations, has made surgical procedures safer for both patients and doctors over the last half-century. Recently, surgical robots have started to appear in operating rooms to further assist surgeons by allowing them to manipulate multiple tools at once with greater precision, flexibility, and control than is possible with traditional techniques. However, these robotic systems are extremely large, often taking up an entire room, and their tools can be much larger than the delicate tissues and structures on which they operate.
Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech
In this episode, Lauren Klein interviews Gennaro Notimista, a robotics PhD student in the Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Gennaro discusses the SlothBot, a solar-powered robot that slowly traverses wires, like its animal namesake, to monitor the environment.
By Adam Conner-Simons
Big data has gotten really, really big: By 2025, all the world’s data will add up to an estimated 175 trillion gigabytes. For a visual, if you stored that amount of data on DVDs, it would stack up tall enough to circle the Earth 222 times.
In this episode, Lilly interviews Nathan Michael, Professor and Director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at the Robotics Institute within Carnegie Mellon University. They discuss introspection, adaptation, and evolvement in robotics. Michael speaks about topics in state estimation and distributed perception, and other challenges in control, perception, and cognition for both single and multi-robot systems.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Repeated activity wears on soft robotic actuators, but these machines’ moving parts need to be reliable and easily fixed. Now a team of researchers has a biosynthetic polymer, patterned after squid ring teeth, that is self-healing and biodegradable, creating a material not only good for actuators, but also for hazmat suits and other applications where tiny holes could cause a danger.
The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground. On July 20, Dr Timothy Chung, the DARPA SubTChallenge Program Manager, joined Silicon Valley Robotics to discuss the upcoming Cave Circuit and Subterranean Challenge Finals, and the opportunities that still exist for individual and team entries in both Virtual and Systems Challenges, as per the video below.
By Akhil Padmanabha and Frederik Ebert
Touch has been shown to be important for dexterous manipulation in robotics. Recently, the GelSight sensor has caught significant interest for learning-based robotics due to its low cost and rich signal. For example, GelSight sensors have been used for learning inserting USB cables (Li et al, 2014), rolling a die (Tian et al. 2019) or grasping objects (Calandra et al. 2017).
RSS 2020 was held virtually this year, from the RSS Pioneers Workshop on July 11 to the Paper Awards and Farewell on July 16. Many talks are now available online, including 103 accepted papers, each presented as an online Spotlight Talk on the RSS Youtube channel, and of course the plenaries and much of the workshop content as well. We’ve tried to link here to all of the goodness from RSS 2020.
By Rachel Gordon
The opposing fingers are lightweight and quick moving, allowing nimble, real-time adjustments of force and position.
Photo courtesy of MIT CSAIL.
For humans, it can be challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects like ropes, wires, or cables. But if these problems are hard for humans, they are nearly impossible for robots. As a cable slides between the fingers, its shape is constantly changing, and the robot’s fingers must be constantly sensing and adjusting the cable’s position and motion.
This year the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is being run as a virtual event. One interesting feature of this conference is that it has been extended to run from 31 May to 31 August. A number of workshops were held on the opening day and here we focus on two of them: “Learning of manual skills in humans and robots” and “Emerging learning and algorithmic methods for data association in robotics”.
