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Robots in action

From wacky talking Einsteins to clumsy security ‘bots, from speedy drones to the underwater operations at Fukushima, it’s been another busy month. So let’s kick off our July review with a look at robots in action!

Up in the air

You’d be forgiven for missing this first one. Zipping by at a record speed of 179.3 mp/h (288.6 km/h), The Drone Racing League’s new RacerX drone lays claim to the “fastest ground speed by a battery-powered remote-controlled quadcopter.” The team behind the drone buzzed into the Guinness Book of World Records while performing a number of drag races along a 100-meter course in upstate New York. The aircraft, which weighs in at 0.8 kg, recorded an average top speed of 163.5 mp/h (263.1 km/h).

Flying a lot higher and—technically—a lot faster, this next innovation takes the form of a cute, spheroid camera drone that predictably drew comparisons to everyone’s favorite interstellar droid-ball, BB-8. Released aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Japanese-made Int-Ball will not only save crewmembers time by snapping pictures of experiments, but could also improve robotic-human cooperation in future space expeditions according to a statement from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

But if you really don’t want flying robots in your airspace (and you don’t have a trained sparrowhawk on-hand), then check out this testing of anti-drone weapons designed to blow prying eyes out of the sky. Could we be on the cusp of an anti-drone arms race?

In the lab

July saw more researchers challenging the traditional anthropomorphic vision of robot motion. Take a look at these new innovations and you’ll see that the concept of a rickety, two legged android helper is beginning to look rather dated.

For example: a new type of vine-inspired robot created by mechanical engineers at Stanford University could soon be squirming through the rubble of collapsed buildings. Like natural organisms that cover distance by growing—such as fungi and nerve cells—the researchers have made a proof of concept of their soft, growing robot and have run it through some challenging tests. From one end of the cylinder, a tendril can extend into a mass of stones or dirt, like a fast-climbing vine. And a camera at the tip of the tendril can potentially offer rescuers a view of otherwise unreachable places.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University has created battery-free folding robots that are capable of complex, repeatable movements powered and controlled through a wireless magnetic field. There are many applications for this kind of minimalist robotic technology. For example: rather than having an uncomfortable endoscope put down their throat to assist a doctor with surgery, a patient could just swallow a micro-robot that could move around and perform simple tasks like holding tissue or filming—all powered by a coil outside the patient’s body. Furthermore, using large source coils could enable wireless, battery-free communication between multiple “smart” objects in an entire home.

And check this out: a pair of new computational methods developed by a team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Toronto and Adobe Research has taken steps towards automating the design of the dynamic mechanisms behind jumping movements in robots. Their methods generate simulations that match the real-world behaviors of flexible devices at rates 70-times faster than previously possible and provide critical improvements in the accuracy of simulated collisions and rebounds. These methods are both fast and accurate enough to be used to automate the design process used to create dynamic mechanisms for controlled jumping.

Health and rehabilitation

One of the most inspiring and positive applications of robotics and AI is within the field of medicine and rehabilitation. Just take the following story for example. With the assistance of its human handlers, Toyota’s Human Support Robot wheeled into a paralyzed military veteran’s home on a mission: to support the quadriplegic patient and, in the process, pave the way for truly useful care robots. Check out the video below.

Leveraging similar technology to that applied in their self-driving golf buggies and autonomous electric cars, MIT and Singaporean researchers have developed and deployed a self-driving wheelchair at a hospital. Spearheaded by Daniela Rus and Erna Viterbi (professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), this autonomous wheelchair is an extension of the self-driving scooter that launched at MIT last year.

Meanwhile, July also brought some fantastic new developments in robotic driven harness devices designed to improve mobility in disabled people. A team led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine at Columbia Engineering has published a pilot study in Science Robotics that demonstrates a robotic training method that improves posture and walking in children with crouch gait—caused by cerebral palsy—by enhancing their muscle strength and coordination.

Similarly, a recent paper published in Science Translational Medicine by a team lead by Courtine-Lab addresses the issue of regaining movement in spinal chord injury (SPI) and stroke patients. The research focuses on multi-directional gravity assist harnesses to aid in rehabilitation. Check out the video below.

Mapping and exploration

An underwater drone, nicknamed “Little Sunfish”, has captured previously unseen shots of underwater damage at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. The RC marine vehicle, which is about the size of a loaf of bread, has been sent into the primary containment vessel of the Unit 3 reactor in an attempt to locate melted fuel. Tepco spokesman Takahiro Kimoto told the Japan Times that video taken by the robot over three days shows clumps of what is likely to be melted fuel. “This means something of high temperature melted some structural objects and came out. So it is natural to think that melted fuel rods are mixed with them,” he said.

Exemplified by the operation at Fukushima, the need for fast, accurate 3D mapping solutions has quickly become a reality for many industries. As such, Clearpath Robotics decided this month to team up with Mandala Robotics to demonstrate how easily you might implement 3D mapping on a Clearpath robot.

Fun and games

Comedy is subjective. One person’s epic fail is another person’s fit of hilarity. This month, a lot of people were having a good laugh at a suicidal security ‘bot at an office and retail complex in Washington D.C. who drove itself into a fountain. The egg-shaped robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, drew both sympathy and jeers after it stumbled down a set of steps and into the water. The photos were widely shared. Fish that one out.

The K5 security robot fell into a fountain in Washington, D.C.

If expensive punchlines are your thing, then you might also be interested in the $300 USD Professor Einstein robot now available on eBay. Hanson Robotics’ expressive, wacky robotic character can chat about science, tell jokes, check on the weather and, naturally, quote Einstein himself. It connects to a companion app with games, videos, and interactive lessons… And yeah, it’s constantly sticking its tongue out (of course).

https://youtu.be/tGfBPLiNePI

Finally, last month we saw a group of students in England develop a robot to pull the perfect pint. This month, it’s cocktails! The Cocktail Bot 4.0 consists of five robots with one high-level goal: mix more than 20 possible drink combination for you!

Business & politics

Last month saw two robotics-related companies get $50 million each and 17 others raised $248 million for a monthly total of $348 million. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with SoftBank’s acquisition of Google’s robotic properties Boston Dynamics and Schaft plus two others acquisitions.

Indeed, two reputable research resources in July reported that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Meanwhile, Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (ST Engineering) has acquired Pittsburgh, PA-based robotics firm Aethon Inc through Vision Technologies Land Systems, Inc. (VTLS), and its wholly-owned subsidiary, VT Robotics, Inc, for $36 million. The acquisition will be carried out by way of a merger with VT Robotics, a special newly incorporated entity established for the transaction. The merger will see Aethon as the surviving entity that will operate as a subsidiary of VTLS, and will be part of the the ST Group’s Land Systems sector. Aethon’s leadership team and employees will remain in place and the company will continue to operate out of its Pittsburgh, PA location.

And if you’re looking for funding them check this out: The Robotics Hub, in collaboration with Silicon Valley Robotics, is looking to invest up to $500,000 in robotics, AI and sensor startups! Finalists also receive exposure on Robohub and space in the new Silicon Valley Robotics Cowork Space. Plus you get to pitch your startup to an audience of top VCs, investors and experts. Entries close August 31.

Remember Tertill, the weed whacking robot? The response to Tertill’s crowdfunding campaign has amazed and delighted! Pledges totalling over $250,000 have come from 1000+ backers, and Tertill is shipping to all countries, with over a fifth of Tertill’s supporters coming from outside the United States. 11th of July was the last full day of the campaign. The discounted campaign price is no longer available and delivery in time for next year’s—northern hemisphere—growing season cannot be assured.

Self-driving news

In the race to develop self-driving technology, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its 50+ partners in an open source development program, revised its timeline for introducing autonomous driving capabilities on open city roads, described the Project Apollo consortium and its goals, and declared Apollo to be the ‘Android of the autonomous driving industry’.

Staying in China, authorities there are creating roadblocks for U.S. auto makers and tech companies to bringing self-driving cars to the world’s largest auto market by limiting the amount of mapping that can be done by foreign companies.

And there could be more trouble ahead in the Asian market as India—another powerhouse in the region—could say no to self driving cars in general by banning their use entirely. ‘In a country where you have unemployment, you can’t have a technology that ends up taking people’s jobs,’ roads minister Nitin Gadkari says.

Conversely, lawmakers in the USA say self-driving cars are the future and federal law needs updating to ensure they’re developed and deployed in the United States. A panel approved a bill to boost testing of self-driving vehicles. The bill prohibits any state from imposing its own laws related to the design and construction of self-driving cars. Federal officials say 94% of auto accidents are caused by human error, so self-driving technology has the potential to save thousands of lives and improve the mobility of many elderly and disabled Americans. The Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution Act, or SELF DRIVE, bill has hit the House of Representatives.

And you can read Brad Templeton’s take on all the news and commentary from July’s AUVSI/TRB Automated Vehicle Symposium 2017. It’s an odd mix of business and research, but also the oldest self-driving car conference.

Drone News

Drone manufacturers and designers have managed to shrink drone technology in recent years, even creating flying prototypes at a near insect scale. But the toughest task has been shrinking down the brains of the operation. Now, engineers at MIT have taken a first step in designing a computer chip that uses a fraction of the power of larger drone computers and is tailored for a drone as small as a bottlecap. They presented a new methodology and design, which they call “Navion,” at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held at MIT.

Perhaps shrinking UAVs might also go some way to addressing the problem of sonic irritation? A preliminary NASA study has discovered that people find the noise of drones more annoying than that of ground vehicles, even when the sounds are the same volume. “We didn’t go into this test thinking there would be this significant difference,” says Andrew Christian of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Virginia. “It is almost unfortunate the research has turned up this difference in annoyance levels,” he adds, “as its purpose was merely to prove that Langley’s acoustics research facilities could contribute to NASA’s wider efforts to study drones.”

Meanwhile, an unrelated study by the UK government on the danger of drones colliding with aircraft has drawn criticism from manufacturers.  The Department for Transport (DfT) report recommended registration and competency testing, saying helicopters were especially vulnerable to drones. The Drone Manufacturers Alliance Europe (DMAE) has questioned the evidence gathered in the report and says some of the testing is flawed.

In other safety news, DJI has responded to reports of its drones randomly switching off mid-flight and dropping out of the sky. According to at least 14 users, DJI Spark drones have switched off and crashed into various areas ranging from open fields to lakes or forests. But luckily no crowded areas yet. DJI told Fortune in a statement that it is working to address the crash incidents going forward: “DJI is aware of a small number of reports involving Spark drones that have lost power mid-flight. Flight safety and product reliability are top priorities. Our engineers are thoroughly reviewing each customer case and working to address this matter urgently,” the statement read. “We are looking to implement additional safeguards with a firmware update which will be issued soon. When prompted on the DJI GO 4 App, we recommend all customers to connect to the internet and update their aircraft’s firmware to ensure a safe flight when flying their Spark,” the company added.

Learn

An interdisciplinary workshop on self-organization and swarm intelligence in cyber physical systems was held at Lakeside Labs in July. Experts presented their work and discussed open issues in this exciting field. Click here to watch some videos from the workshop.

July also welcomed The Second Edition of the award-winning Springer Handbook of Robotics, edited by Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib. The contents of the first edition have been restructured to achieve four main objectives: the enlargement of foundational topics for robotics, the enlightenment of design of various types of robotic systems, the extension of the treatment on robots moving in the environment, and the enrichment of advanced robotics applications. Most previous chapters have been revised, fifteen new chapters have been introduced on emerging topics, and a new generation of authors have joined the handbook’s team.

Elsewhere, Mike Salem from Udacity’s Robotics Nanodegree is hosting a series of interviews with professional roboticists as part of their free online material. You can watch the interview with Nick Kohut, Co-Founder and CEO of Dash Robotics, below. Stay tuned to Robohub throughout August to see more featured interviews from Udacity.

And finally, check out Peter Feuilherade’s article on rescue robots, and Christoph Salge’s article on how Azimov’s laws might not be sufficient to rescue humanity from robots. I’ll leave it to you to muddle through the implicit dichotomy. Or I’ll just see you next month for all the latest Robot related news and views!

Enjoy.

Upcoming events for August – September 2017

Farm Progress Show: August 29–31, 2017, Decatur, IL

World of Drones Congress (WoDC): August 31–September 2, 2017, Brisbane, Australia

Interdrone: September 6–8, 2017, Las Vegas, NV

FSR 2017: September 12–15, 2017, Zurich, Switzerland

RobotWorld: September 13–16, 2017, Seoul, South Korea

IEEE Africon: September 18–20, 2017, Cape Town, South Africa

ROS Con: September 21–22, 2017, Vancouver, BC

IROS 2017: September 24–28, 2017, Vancouver, BC

RoboBusiness: September 27–28, 2017, Santa Clara, CA

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Robots, drones and AI in action

Let’s kick off our June review by looking at some great new robotics research and development in action: Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Harvard Professor George Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski—a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides’ Harvard lab—have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

And in news from the garden shed, Franklin Robotics has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Tertill, their solar-powered, garden-weeding robot. Tertill lives in your garden, collecting sunlight to power its weed patrol, and cutting down short plants with a string trimmer/weed whacker with almost no intervention required. Available for about $300USD, the fully autonomous Tertill is the first weeding robot available to home gardeners! Check out the video below.

You may have heard that humankind lost another important battle with artificial intelligence last month when AlphaGo beat the world’s leading Go player Ke Jie by three games to zero. AlphaGo is an AI program developed by DeepMind, part of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Last year it beat another leading player, Lee Se-dol, by four games to one, but since then AlphaGo has substantially improved. Ke Jie described AlphaGo’s skill as “like a God of Go”. But AlphaGo will now retire from playing Go, leaving behind a legacy of games played against itself. These games have been described by one Go expert as like “games from far in the future”, which humans will study for years to improve their own play.

Elsewhere, Chinese education authorities have gone high-tech to catch cheaters as millions of high-school students take their “gaokao”, the annual university entrance exam seen as key to landing a lucrative white-collar job. So high are the stakes and so competitive is the exam that some students resort to cheating. But not if these facial recognition drones can help it.

Meanwhile, back in the pub, students from the University of Leeds have created a robot which they claim is capable of pulling the perfect pint. The team, from the School of Mechanical Engineering, worked with local engineering company Quality Bearings, and Saltaire Brewery to come up with the concept. The robot was put through its paceswith a taste test, a consistency test and a wastage test. Check out the clip below.

At ICRA 2017, researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) introduced a small robotic explorer that uses a single solid-fuel rocket to launch itself into the air. What’s new is that their robot includes some braking rockets that help it make pinpoint landings, as well as a clever gyroscopic system to make sure that it flies straight as well as providing a way for the robot to get around after landing.

In other flying news, a team of MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan. The vehicle can carry 4.5 to 9 kg of communications equipment while flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Weighing in at just under 68 kg, the vehicle is powered by a 5-horsepower gasoline engine and can keep itself aloft for more than five days — longer than any gasoline-powered autonomous aircraft has remained in flight, the researchers say. Check out the Jungle Hawk Owl’s maiden flight below.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to develop flying robots that can both drive through a city-like setting with parking spots, no fly zones and landing pads. In a new paper, the team presented a system of eight quadcopter drones that can do all of that and more.

And last but not least: Authors of the ICRA 2017 Best Automation Paper “UAV-Based Crop and Weed Classification for Smart Farming” wrote about their findings for Robohub. Check it out.

Policy and financing

Europe needs a “human in command approach,” says the European Economic and Social Comitte (EESC). The EU must pursue a policy that ensures the development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence in Europe in favor, and not conducive to the detriment, of society and social welfare, the Committee said in an initiative opinion on the social impact of AI which 11 fields are identified for action.

Across the pond, some of the nation’s leading wireless giants and drone makers offered “effusive praise” of President Donald Trump in June as they lobbied his administration to eliminate the federal regulations that stand in the way of their businesses. As part of the White House’s five-day focus on technology, Trump gathered executives from those industries—including AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, PrecisionHawk CEO Michael Chasen and a number of venture capitalists—for a morning of brainstorming sessions devoted to spurring new investments in emerging fields.

And in a long-awaited business transaction, The New York Times Dealbook announced that SoftBank was buying Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (Google). Also included in the deal is the Japanese startup Schaft. Acquisition details were not disclosed. Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were acquired by Google when Andy Rubin was developing Google’s robot group through a series of acquisitions. Both companies have continued to develop innovative mobile robots. And both have been on Google’s “for sale” list.

The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced the closing of a $20 million Series B round of financing, bringing the total amount raised to $32 million. The new round of financing was led by Sky, Liberty Media LMCA +% (owner of Formula 1) and Lux Capital, with involvement by a couple of new investors in Allianz and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Investment from Allianz was expected after it was announced that Allianz signed on to become title sponsor of DRL’s elite racing circuit in February.

Pilots are gearing up to compete in the DRL. Image: Drone Racing League.

Health and medicine

Researchers from MIT’s CSAIL have developed a new system that uses a 3-D camera, a belt with separately controllable vibrational motors distributed around it, and an electronically reconfigurable Braille interface to give visually impaired users more information about their environments.

New algorithms power a prototype system for helping visually impaired users avoid obstacles and identify objects. Courtesy of the researchers.

Elsewhere, a researcher at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) is developing a bio-inspired ‘smart’ knee joint for prosthetic lower limbs. Dr Appolinaire Etoundi, based at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, is leading the research and will analyse the functions, features and mechanisms of the human knee in order to translate this information into a new bio-inspired procedure for designing prosthetics.

And the medical innovations didn’t stop there in June. How about Robot snakes slithering into the delicate field of heart surgery? Or a robotic doctor that can be controlled hundreds of kilometres away by a human counterpart? Getting a check-up from a robot may sound like something from a sci-fi film, but scientists are closing in on this real-life scenario and have already tested a prototype.

An aging population means the age-dependency ratio—the proportion of the elderly compared with the number of workers—will almost double from 28.8 % in 2015 to 51 % in 2080, straining healthcare systems and national budgets. The creators of one humanoid robot (below) under development for the elderly say it can understand people’s actions and learn new behaviors in response, even though it is devoid of arms. Robots can be programmed to understand an elderly person’s preferences and habits to detect changes in behavior: for example if a yoga devotee misses a class, it will ask why, while if an elderly person falls it will automatically alert caregivers or emergency services.

Humanoid robots under development can be programmed to detect changes in an elderly person’s preferences and habits. Image credit: GrowMeUp

Self-driving news

June was a huge month of wheeling and dealing in the self-driving cars industry. NuTonomy, a small Boston startup that makes software for self-driving cars, has launched a research-and-development partnership with San Francisco’s Lyft Inc., the second-largest ride-hailing company in the United States. It’s the latest alliance between Lyft and a maker of autonomous vehicle technology, and could boost nuTonomy’s efforts to become a major force in self-driving vehicles. Lyft chief executive Logan Green said the partnership “could lead to thousands of Lyft cars on the nuTonomy platform.”

Source: Uber

Meanwhile, competitors Uber, the global ride-sharing transportation company, named two replacements to recover from the recent firing of Anthony Levandowski who headed their Advanced Technologies Group, their OTTO trucking unit, and their self-driving team. Levandowski was fired May 30th. Eric Meyhofer and Anthony Levandowski will pick up the slack.

In other high-level firing news, Tesla Inc. has parted ways with another senior leader on its self-driving technology team, adding more turmoil to a program that is under pressure to meet the grand ambitions of Chief Executive Elon Musk. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker said Chris Lattner—head of development of Tesla’s Autopilot program—left his post as after he and Musk failed to see eye to eye on some important issues during Lattner’s six months in post.

Meanwhile, Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post, Waymo leaders write that time has come to “retire our fleet of Fireflies” —their name for the tiny cars—and focus instead of integrating self-driving technology into other vehicles, like the Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo put on the road earlier this year.

Source: Waymo

In the UK, Venturer driverless car project published results of their first trials. Venturer is the first Connected and Autonomous Vehicle project to start in the UK. The results of Venturer’s preliminary trials show that the handover process is a safety critical issue in the development of Autonomous Vehicles. The first Venturer  trials set out to investigate ‘takeover’ (time taken to reengage with vehicle controls) and ‘handover’ (time taken to regain a baseline/normal level of driving behavior and performance) when switching frequently between automated and manual driving modes within urban and extra-urban settings. This trial is believed to be the first to directly compare handover to human driver-control from autonomous mode in both simulator and autonomous road vehicle platforms.

Honda was the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal in June. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan. This news will likely stoke a fire underneath other Japanese self-driving car developers, so stay tuned for lots of new developments.

Auto supplier Robert Bosch GmbH will build a 1 billion-euro ($1.1 billion) semiconductor plant, the biggest single investment in its history, as the maker of brakes and engines prepares for a surge in demand for components used in self-driving vehicles.

Tutorials

Robohub showcased some great tutorials last month. Here’s one: The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology, the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody! So get stuck in.

Florian Enner offered this useful tutorial on programming: “Using MATLAB for hardware-in-the-loop prototyping #1 : Message passing systems”. Check it out here.

And Ricardo Téllez offered an article on “Teaching ROS quickly to students“—a novel method of teaching to class of students in a rapid time frame.

Enjoy!

Upcoming events for July– August 2017

CIROS: July 5, 2017 — July 8, 2017, Shanghai, China

ASCEND Conference and Expo: July 19, 2017 — July 21, 2017, Portland, OR

RoboCup: July 25, 2017 — July 31, 2017, Nagoya, Japan

Farm Progress Show: August 29, 2017 — August 31, 2017, Decatur, IL

World of Drones Congress (WoDC): August 31, 2017 — September 2, 2017, Brisbane, Australia

Robots and jobs: It’s complicated

The debate around robots and jobs has been going for years. It received renewed attention again this April when the Robotics Industries Association (RIA) published a new White Paper saying that 8 in 10 manufacturers are struggling to find skilled workers. Far from suggesting that robots are replacing human workers, the paper suggests that up to 2 million job vacancies in the sector will go unfilled in the US alone in the next 10 years.

But there’s a counter-argument to this debate, with many fearing that robots are taking more jobs, particularly unskilled jobs than they create. But according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), less than 10% of roles could really be fully automated – all others will actually require humans and robots to work together.

Whatever side of the argument you’re on, automation is happening. For example Boxed, an e-commerce retailer, just purchased a bunch of iBots to support the picking process in its warehouses. Instead of losing their jobs, the company’s human ‘pickers’ will all be retrained to work with the robots, their roles changing so that instead of having to retrieve the items themselves, the pickers will be telling the robots what to get.

Unfortunately, not every employer will be as keen to keep and develop their workforce in light of increasing automation. And there is some evidence that, particularly for blue-collar workers in the manufacturing industry, there will be job losses. Curiously, it was predicted this month that women will be less affected by increased automation – at least in the short term. The reason for this is simple: roles that are currently threatened by automation are mainly in the manufacturing and transport industry – which mostly dominated by men. Jobs in healthcare, education and other sectors are harder to automate.

But as we said earlier, it’s not all bad news and there will be increasing need for humans and robots to work together. That includes human-AI collaborative working. This can be particularly useful when it comes to dangerous jobs, such as in the nuclear industry and disaster relief, where artificial intelligence and humans collaborate together to control a remote robot.

The rise of ‘clever’ robots?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are, of course, incredibly powerful tools to make robots more useful. But the way in which AI-technologies are developed and used is critical. In the UK, the Royal Society published a report this month calling for “careful stewardship” to ensure advances in machine learning benefit everyone in society and encouraging research that focuses on public confidence, rather than just technical developments.

To demonstrate how AI is already affecting our daily lives, the Royal Society published an interactive infographic: “Machine learning in the world around you”. And the UK’s Pension watchdog revealed that it has built a machine-learning tool to monitor pension schemes and flag those that may be in breach of its guidelines.

Self-driving revolution

Another area where AI is starting to infiltrate our daily lives is self-driving cars, as several companies are getting ready to move their vehicles onto public roads. After years of testing, Google’s autonomous vehicle spin-off Waymo is now inviting the public to have a go at riding its self-driving cars; Apple put in an application for self-driving care test plates and is going to train experts in driverless vehicles; and in the UK, a consortium of British companies announced that they are planning to test their fleets on London and Oxford roads in 2019.

With autonomous cars set to share the roads with human drivers in the foreseeable future, it is no surprise there are going to be some issues. The crash of an Uber car in driverless mode this month illustrated this once again. While a human driver was legally to blame for the crash, it sparked a debate about safety, regulation and data sharing. But regulation of robotics is a complex and tricky area that still needs to address key issues before there’s a modernised legal system that is truly appropriate for humans, robots and other new technologies.

Meanwhile, a fifth senior leader quit his job at Uber for as yet unknown reasons, and Tesla is facing a lawsuit over their vehicles with a semi-autonomous driving system, which three owners say aren’t functional or safe.

Business & Finance

A substantial robot business deal in April with ABB’s acquisition of Austrian manufacturer B&R (Bernecker & Rainer) for an amount that rumoured to be close to $2 billion. The deal is set to complete in the summer and will strengthen ABB’s position in factory automation.

In other finance news, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced a collaboration with industry partners to create functional human-like systems through machine learning.

Frank at The Robot Report also summarised other acquisition and funding news from earlier this year.

Meanwhile in the lab…

Researchers and engineers have been busy this month with some cool stuff. One group in China built a soft robot fish that can swim just like a real one, NASA has come up with a shape-shifting origami robot and Toyota launched a rehab robot rental service.

And that’s not all. A start-up called RightHand Robotics developed a dexterous new robotic gripper that uses machine learning to enable it to pick up a variety of objects – sharing its new ‘knowledge’ with others via a hive mind in the cloud. And Tecnalia in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) has developed a 3D printing robot that can print a small house and at the same time monitor if its work is drying.

April Fools?

This wouldn’t be a proper robot digest for April if we didn’t bring you a selection of the tech-related April Fools pranks the robotics world had to offer. This year, they included Google windmills, tattooed train tickets, and a cash-printing phone.

But in an interesting twist, pizza giant Domino’s April fool’s gag from 2015 is now set to become a reality. Two years ago the company jokingly announced its Domi-No-Driver campaign, but this year (just a few days before April Fools), they announced that they’ll soon be starting robot pizza deliveries in Germany and the Netherlands.

Spring events: Recaps

To finish off this month’s digest, we had a look back at all the awesome robotics events over the spring.

At Automate 2017, established industry leaders and innovate start-ups met for the Launchpad competition in which eight budding entrepreneurs competed for a $10,000 prize and a chance to make it big. Appelix, a robotic system designed to protect human workers, took the prize, with honourable mentioned for Kinema Systems and SAKE Robotics.

Also, this spring, the 2017 Silicon Valley Robot Block Party and event hosted as part of the US National Robotics Week, attracted more than 1,000 robot enthusiasts and set a new record for attendance. And in Europe, the European Robotics League celebrated a successful first season and started preparations for the 2017/2018 tournaments later this year.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, 160 public and private school students competed in the country’s First Lego League Competition, which aims to introduce children to science and technology. The event was sponsored by the Australian and US Embassies in Nigeria and focused on the relationship between people and animals.

Last but not least, World Book Day 2017 on 23rd of April was a day to celebrate books and reading. To join in the fun, Robohub published a list of 20 great robot-related books to inspire children and teenagers.

Missed any previous Digests? Click here to check them out.

Upcoming events for May – June 2017

AUVSI Xponential: May 8-11, Dallas, TX.

Connected & Autonomous Vehicles: May 15-18, Santa Clara, CA.

Innarobo: May 16-18, Paris, France.

ICRA 2017: May 29-June 03, Singapore.

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition: June 2-5, Rochester, MI.

CES Asia: June 7-9, Shanghai, China.

Unmanned Cargo Ground Vehicle Conference: June 13-14, Maaspoort, Venlo, The Netherlands.

Autonomous machines world: June 26-27, Berlin, Germany.

RoboUniverse: June 28-30, Seoul.

Happy International World Book and Copyright Day! It’s a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and reading, held annually on 23 April—a symbolic date coinciding with the anniversary of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. By celebrating, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of copyright, and will be hosting a series and events and conferences over the coming days.

Here at Robohub, we’re celebrating by sharing our list of 20 robot related books (in no particular order) aimed at engaging kids and/or teens with everything robotics. Ranging from funny fictional narratives to DIY drone building and coding, these books are sure to stoke the imaginations of budding innovators and creators.

If you can think of any other books that deserve inclusion, we’d love to hear about them!

Robot Building for Teens (2014), by Behnam Salemi.

Robot Building for Teens will teach you how to get started in this fascinating hobby. The projects in this book include the “Digital Brain Robot,” the “Bug Bot,” and even a robot on wheels! You will learn how to design your robot, how to create a prototype, where to buy parts, how to program your finished robot to perform tasks, and more. You’ll be led step-by-step through the projects in the book. Along the way, you’ll learn about advanced robotic systems that use the same principles you’re learning, and you’ll get a glimpse into the future of robotics. This book’s companion website includes software program files, parts lists for each project, and links to online parts suppliers. Robot Building for Teens is a fun, easy-to-understand, hands-on guide that will have you building your own robots in no time.

The Wild Robot (2016), by Peter Brown.

When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is–but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island’s unwelcoming animal inhabitants. As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home–until, one day, the robot’s mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

From bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator Peter Brown comes a heartwarming and action-packed novel about what happens when nature and technology collide.

Cinder (2012), by Marissa Meyer.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

Robots in Space (2015), by Jenny Fretland VanVoorst.

In Robots in Space, early fluent readers learn about the many ways robots have expand what’s possible in the field of space exploration. Vibrant, full-color photos and carefully leveled text will engage young readers as they learn about the fascinating world of robots.

Medical Robots (2016), by Daniel Faust.

Can robots save lives? Medical robots save lives every day, and theyre sure to save more as their technology advances. This book describes the amazing work done by medical robots, from surgical robots to nano-robots. Readers will learn about the medical breakthroughs performed by robots, the latest models, and the future of robots in medicine. Accessible descriptions of how medical robots work will engage readers and give them a deep understanding of this burgeoning technology. Color photographs of each robot are provided to give readers an inside look into the operating room and beyond.

How to Build Robots (2017), by Louise Derrington.

How to Build Robots instructs readers on how to make useable robots, including one that will scrub a table! Featuring easy-to-follow instructions, vivid photographs, easily accessible materials, and a handy template, readers will delight in watching their creations come to life!

So, You Want to Be a Coder? (2016), by Jane Bedell.

Covering everything from navigating the maze of computer languages to writing code for games to cyber security and artificial intelligence, So, You Want to Be a Coder? debugs the secrets behind a career in the diverse and state-of-the-art industry.

In addition to tips and interviews from industry professionals, So, You Want to Be a Coder? includes inspiring stories from kids who are working with code right now, plus activities, a glossary, and helpful resources to put you on the path to a fun and rewarding career with computer code today!

The Robot Book: Build & Control 20 Electric Gizmos, Moving Machines, and Hacked Toys (2014), by Bobby Mercer.

Author and physics teacher Bobby Mercer will show you how to turn common household objects and repurposed materials into 20 easy-to-build robots for little or no cost. Turn a toothbrush, an old cell phone or pager, and scrap wire into a Brush Bot, or hack a toy car to hotwire a Not-So-Remote Bot. A small electric fan, several craft sticks, and rubber bands make a Fan-Tastic Dancing Machine, and drinking straws, string, tape, and glue can be used to construct a working model of the human hand.

Every hands-on project contains a materials list and detailed step-by-step instructions with photos for easy assembly. Mercer also explains the science and technology behind each robot, including concepts such as friction, weight and mass, center of gravity, kinetic and potential energy, electric circuitry, DC vs. AC current, and more. These projects are also perfect for science fairs or design competitions.

If You’re a Robot and You Know It (2015), by Musical Robot.

It’s the classic version of If You’re Happy and You Know It as you’ve never seen (or heard!) it before. Sing along to the free downloadable song by the dynamic Musical Robot team, then turn the pages as David Carter’s clever pop-ups show the robot characters going through all of the call-out movements, from clapping hands to shooting laser beams out of your eyes!

Making Simple Robots: Exploring Cutting-Edge Robotics with Everyday Stuff (2015), by Kathy Ceceri.

Written in language that non-engineers can understand, Making Simple Robots helps beginners move beyond basic craft skills and materials to the latest products and tools being used by artists and inventors. Find out how to animate folded paper origami, design a versatile robot wheel-leg for 3D printing, or program a rag doll to blink its cyborg eye. Each project includes step-by-step directions as well as clear diagrams and photographs. And every chapter offers suggestions for modifying and expanding the projects, so that you can return to the projects again and again as your skill set grows.

Everything Robotics: All the Photos, Facts, and Fun to Make You Race for Robots (2016), by Jennifer Swanson.

They fix spacecraft, dance, tell jokes, and even clean your carpet! From the tiniest robo-bees to gigantic factory machines, robotics is all around you. This technology isn’t just for science-fiction anymore — it’s real and more relevant than ever. With stunning visuals and energetic, impactful design, readers won’t stop until they’ve learned everything there is to know about robotics.

Robo-Sauce (2016), by Adam Rubin.

Robots never have to eat steamed beans or take baths, or go to bed. If only there were some sort of magical “Robo-Sauce” that turned squishy little humans into giant awesome robots… Well, now there is. Giggle at the irreverent humor, gasp at the ingenious fold-out surprise ending, and gather the whole family to enjoy a unique story about the power of imagination. It’s picture book technology the likes of which humanity has never seen!

Getting Started with Drones: Build and Customize Your Own Quadcopter (2016), by Terry Kilby and Belinda Kilby.

Want to make something that can fly? How about a flying robot? In this book, you’ll learn how drones work, how to solve some of the engineering challenges a drone presents, and how to build your own–an autonomous quadcopter that you can build, customize, and fly. Your drone will be your eyes in the sky and in places where a human could never get to-much less fit!

Boy and Bot (2012), by Ame Dyckman and Dan Yaccarino.

One day, a boy and a robot meet in the woods. They play. They have fun. But when Bot gets switched off, Boy thinks he’s sick. The usual remedies—applesauce, reading a story—don’t help, so Boy tucks the sick Bot in, then falls asleep.

Bot is worried when he powers on and finds his friend powered off. He takes Boy home with him and tries all his remedies: oil, reading an instruction manual. Nothing revives the malfunctioning Boy! Can the Inventor help fix him? Using the perfect blend of sweetness and humor, this story of an adorable duo will win the hearts of the very youngest readers.

Popular Mechanics Robots: A New Age of Bionics, Drones & Artificial Intelligence (2015), by Popular Mechanics and Daniel H. Wilson.

Thanks to film and literature, the idea of robots and artificial intelligence has long intrigued us. The fascination continues with Popular MechanicsRobots, which gathers the very best of the magazine’s fantastic robotic coverage and examines the way we live with these machines today—and how we will continue to exist with other advanced technologies in the future. Readers can now discover all varieties of robot, including ones that recognize our faces, gestures, and emotions; drive our cars; serve as highly intelligent personal assistants and medical diagnosticians; go into space; and even become embedded in our architecture and homes. Although robots can inspire both fear and wonder, author David H. Wilson shows how they’re an integral part of a wonderful new world.

DIY Drones for the Evil Genius: Design, Build, and Customize Your Own Drones (2016), by  Ian Cinnamon, Romi Kadri and Fitz Tepper.

This fun guide shows, step-by-step, how to construct powerful drones from inexpensive parts, add personalized features, and become a full-fledged pilot. DIY Drones for the Evil Genius: Design, Build, and Customize Your Own Drones not only covers safety, mechanics, drone design, and assembly, but also teaches the basics of Aerospace Engineering. You will discover how to add video transmitters, GPS, first-person view, and virtual reality goggles to your creations. The book walks you through the FAA licensing process and takes a look at advanced concepts, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous flight.

DK Workbooks: Coding with Scratch Workbook (2015), by DK.

Perfect for beginner coders ages 6–9, this highly visual workbook builds basic programming skills using Scratch, a free computer coding programming language, and will take kids from browsing to building. DK Workbooks: Coding with Scratch Workbook explains how computer coding works and teaches kids how to complete simple coding actions with clear, step-by-step instructions and fun pixel art. From conditionals to math equations to animating characters who walk, talk, and dance, young coders will put all these pieces together at the end of the lesson to create a simple “dodge the dragon” game

Sometimes I Forget You’re a Robot (2013) by Sam Brown.

For a little boy who’s always dreamed of having his own robot, actually getting one isn’t what he expected at all. The robot can’t fly, or swim, or even talk. All he does is beep beep beep like a toy. But his robot does have some hidden talents—and one of them is being a great friend. In this unexpectedly poignant story about adjusting expectations, Sam Brown shows that while no one is perfect, a good friend sure comes close.

New Hands, New Life: Robots, Prostheses and Innovation (2017), by  Jan Andrysek and Alex Mihailidis.

Available for pre-order, New Hands, New Life offers young readers the opportunity to learn how our bodies work during physical activity and what happens when they don’t work properly. It shows how exciting advances in technology and science have allowed us to create assistive technologies — from artificial limbs and wheelchairs to exoskeletons and robots — that make it possible for someone with a disability to make new abilities. Assistive technologies are especially life-changing for a child who can overcome the challenges of a missing limb or reduced motor function to enjoy a life of learning and play that would be otherwise out of reach.

Soft Robots: Paper, Silicone, Cloth, and Rubber Bots for All Ages (2017), by Matthew Borgatti.

Popularized by Baymax in the hit movie Big Hero 6, soft robotics is a big, fun field. More than just cloth or silicone robots, soft robotics is all about getting motion out of soft things–paper, silicone, cloth, springs, rubber hoses–all these and more can be combined in different ways to come up with comfortable, friendly, and familiar-feeling solutions to interesting problems. And they can be fun to play with, too. This book is about taking different materials, combining them, and remixing them with 3d printing, laser cutting, mold making, casting, and sewing to create soft robots. You can pre-order your copy now.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 25 holiday gift ideas for RoboGeeks (2014)
• Reading for robot fans: 24 books to inspire, educate and provoke
• 20 great books to hook kids and teens on robotics
• Still looking for last-minute holiday gifts? 15 ideas for robot fans (2013)
• 8 Robotic Gifts for the 2013 Holiday Season

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Changing seasons

March is a month for change and new beginnings. The new UK Budget promised hundreds of millions of pounds to scientists and researchers to develop solutions to hi-tech challenges, including artificial intelligence and robotics, next generation batteries and new techniques for manufacturing medicines. The government is expected to allocate more than £500 million from the National Productivity Investment Fund so that UK companies might lead the way in the new technologies set to transform the world. £270 million will be earmarked for British businesses and universities to meet specific challenges with huge potential, which will include the use of robots to work in nuclear and offshore power generation, space and deep mining.

Intel announced plans to acquire Israel-based Mobileye, a developer of vision technology used in autonomous driving applications, for $15.3 billion. Mobileye share prices jumped from $47 to $61 (the tender offering price is $63.54) on the news, a 30% premium. The purchase marks the largest acquisition of an Israeli hi-tech company ever.

But it can’t be good news for everyone. Google’s robocar lawsuit could show Uber the red-light. Google’s Waymo is accusing the ridesharing giant of stealing a glut of its autonomous driving tech. Amidst political criticisms of CEO Travis Kalanick, and accusations of a sexist corporate culture, Uber must now worry about a legal dispute that could prove costly not only financially, but also kill its self-driving research and land more than one executive in prison.

And in a surprise move which shook Baidu’s stock, Andrew Ng, Baidu’s Chief Scientist resigned. Andrew was partially responsible for expanding Baidu’s AI activities into machine learning, driverless vehicles, advertising, maps, takeout delivery, and voice-activated search. Whilst Andrew’s departure might setback Baidu’s AI efforts, he’s likely to continue innovating the field of artificial intelligence. He commented:

I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.

Meanwhile, a New York Times article reported that two leading economists—Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University—are providing evidence for robots winning the race for US jobs. They reported that for every robot per thousand workers in manufacturing and automation, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots, and is likely spark a lively debate.

Events and awards

March 8th was International Women’s Day. On Robohub, in honor of this, we republished our list of 25 women in robotics that you need to know about, and we discussed the lack of diversity and role models in STEM and the potential negative outcomes of bias and stereotyping in robotics and AI.

Researchers including MIT professor Daniela Rus (left) and research scientist Stephanie Gil (right) have developed a technique for preventing malicious hackers from commandeering robot teams’ communication networks. To verify the theoretical predictions, the researchers implemented their system using a battery of distributed Wi-Fi transmitters and an autonomous helicopter. Image: M. Scott Brauer.

In Edinburgh, over 800 leading scientists, companies, and policymakers working in robotics convened at the European Robotics Forum (#ERF2017), 22-24 March. This year’s theme was “Living and Working With Robots” with a focus on applications in manufacturing, disaster relief, agriculture, healthcare, assistive living, education, and mining. The 3-day programme featured keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, and plenty of robots roaming the exhibit floor. euRobotics hosted an Entrepreneurship and TechTransfer award at the event, where Fotokite and ‘Walk to Beat’ receive the top awards for innovative designs.

In other awards news: “Robot’s Delight – A Lyrical Exposition on Learning by Imitation from Human-Human Interaction” won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017). Watch the video below:

And events to look forward to: The World Robot Summit (WRS) website was launched earlier in the month on March 2nd. WRS will be a commercial robotics Expo and a series of robotics Challenges with the goal of bringing together experts from around the world to advance human focused robotics. The results of tenders for standard robot platforms for the competitions are being announced soon, and the first trials for competition teams should happen in summer 2017. You’ll be hearing all about it here on Robohub.

And this week, the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas (5-7 April) will host ISC West 2017 in what they say is “the largest security industry trade show in the U.S.”, drawing an estimated 29,000+ security professionals. The show will feature ISC West’s first-ever Unmanned Security Expo focused on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Unmanned Ground Vehicles and various systems to support robotic technology. The Expo will include a fully functional flight cage and robotics demonstration area, booth exhibits and free education sessions.

New Research

As swathes of dead robots continue to litter the nuclear disaster site at Fukushima, UWE Bristol announced that it is part of a consortium which has received a £4.6 million grant to build a new generation of robots for use in nuclear sites. The funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will help develop smaller robotics technologies that will be able to operate autonomously and effectively in hazardous environments. Among the contributors will be Robohub contributor Alan Winfield, working alongside top experts from the University of Manchester and the University of Birmingham, as well as industrial partners Sellafield Ltd, EdF Energy, UKAEA and NuGen.

Meanwhile, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University is working on the problem of communicating specific commands from human to robot by creating a feedback system that lets people correct robot mistakes instantly with nothing more than their brains. Check out the video below.

As governments around the world (UK included) push for the introduction of 5G networks, the US based National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $6.1 million, five-year award to accelerate fundamental research on wireless communication and networking technologies through the foundation’s Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program. Award recipients US Ignite, Inc. and Northeastern University will collaborate with NSF and industry partners to establish and oversee multiple city-scale testing platforms across the United States. Smart cities are on the horizon.

New ‘bots on the block

Cobalt Robotics has launched their stylish security robot (below). The robot was designed by Yves Behar and as a fabric covered robot, and puts a new spin on soft robotics aesthetic. Behar’s goal was to create a robot that didn’t conform to Hollywood stereotypes but instead as an augmentation of human ability and an enhancement to the human environment. The Cobalt robot allows security to have a cost-effective, 24hour presence so security officers can remote in, see what’s going on, and look for intruders, amongst other employee focused tasks.

Hungry? The London-based company Starship Technologies has created six-wheeled self-driving delivery robots that will begin bringing customers Domino’s pizzas in Germany and the Netherlands. Starship, launched in July 2014 by two former Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, will whisk pizzas to customers’ doors if they live within a one-mile radius of certain Dominos pizza shops in “select German and Dutch cities,” the company said in a statement.

Fancy a burger instead? You’ll soon be able to have one cooked by a robot at CaliBurger restaurants in the US and worldwide. Cali Group has partnered with Miso Robotics to develop Flippy the burger robot, which made its debut this March at the Pasadena, California CaliBurger.

Or perhaps it’s your appetite for art that needs sating? RoboThespian is currently starring in UK play Spillikin, a love story. In the poignant performance traveling throughout the UK, a robot is co-star and companion to the dementia suffering wife of a (now deceased) robot builder. The play explores very human themes about love, death, and disease, all handled extremely sensitively with RoboThespian playing a large role.

Good news if wheels just aren’t getting you there: Ghost Robotics—a leader in fast and lightweight direct-drive legged robots—announced recently that its Minitaur model has been updated with advanced reactive behaviors for navigating grass, rock, sand, snow and ice fields, urban objects and debris, and vertical terrain. They claim that their legged robots are superior to wheeled and tracked autonomous vehicles in real-world field applications. Take a look at the video below and see what you think:

Lastly, Since their “Best of CES” nominations and awards from Engadget, Wired, PC Magazine, and others., Kuri has been hard at work testing their social robot in lots of different homes, fine tuning hardware details and expanding software capabilities. Kuri’s voice command capabilities are growing. Today, if you say “hey Kuri, I love you”, Kuri responds with an “I love you too”, a dance and a light show. Progress. Expect more updates as Kuri nears shipping their first commercial ‘bots.

Aerial drones

For the first time, a drone operator was jailed for injuring a member of the public. The owner of an aerial photography business was sentenced to 30 days in jail after a drone he was operating knocked a woman unconscious during Seattle’s 2015 Pride Parade. Paul Skinner was found guilty of reckless endangerment by a judge at the Seattle Municipal Court. Related to this, anyone with an eye on flying drone safety and legislation should keep an eye on Virginia Tech’s visceral research, crashing drones into crash-test-dummies:

It’s becoming clear that if we are to incorporate drones into our lives in a good and safe way, we will probably need anti-drone instruments. On 4 December the TU Delft Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) will host the first ever anti-drone competition: DroneClash. During this competition, participants use their own drone(s) to take down as many other drones as possible. They will also need to avoid a whole series of anti-drone interventions. Sounds fun!

Elsewhere, Snapchat owners Snap are rumored to be developing an aerial drone that could help Snap’s users take overhead videos and photographs, and then feed that visual data to the company. Meanwhile, Google has shuttered its own Titan drone project, whilst Facebook Inc. planned to ramp up test flights for its own experimental solar-powered glider. Facebook will begin launching a couple of flights a month of its Aquila drone, Jay Parikh, head of engineering and infrastructure, said in an interview this month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

In UK defense news,  the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Equipment and Support Technology Office has awarded a contract to Italian company Leonardo Helicopters for Phase II of the rotary wing unmanned air system, capability concept demonstrator programme. Under the two-year, jointly-funded, research and development contract, Leonardo will also have to complete R&D works commenced under the RWUAS CCD Phase I programme held between 2013 and 2015.

Do it yourself?

Need some direction with your own robotics projects? Robohub’s got your back. This month, our contributors offered some fantastic tutorials, like Péter Fankhauser’s handy video tutorial course: Introduction to ROS. Or perhaps you need help programming your Sphero robot? If UAV land surveying missions are something you need a guiding hand with, SPH Engineering offered a guide to using its easy-to-use software, UgCS, for planning and flying UAV drone-survey missions. Stay tuned to Robohub for more to learn.

Upcoming events for April – May 2017

Automate: April 3-6, Chicago, IL.

Unmanned Security Expo: April 4-7, Las Vegas, NV.

Robobusiness Europe: April 19-21, The Hague, Netherlands.

ICCAR: April 22-24, Nagoya, Japan.

AUVSI Xponential: May 8-11, Dallas, TX.

Connected & Autonomous Vehicles: May 15-18, Santa Clara, CA.

Innarobo: May 16-18, Paris, France.

ICRA 2017: May 29-June 03, Singapore.

Missed any previous Digests? Click here to check them out.

Ghost Robotics—a leader in fast and lightweight direct-drive legged robots—announced recently that its Minitaur model has been updated with advanced reactive behaviors for navigating grass, rock, sand, snow and ice fields, urban objects and debris, and vertical terrain.

The latest gaits adapt reactively to unstructured environments to maintain balance, ascend steep inclines up to 35º, climb up to 15cm curb-sized steps, crouch to fit under crawl spaces as low as 27cm, and operate at variable speeds and turning rates. Minitaur’s high-force capabilities enable it to leap up to 40cm onto ledges and across gaps of up to 80cm. Its high control bandwidth allows it to actively balance on two legs, and its high speed operation allows its legs to navigate challenging environments rapidly, whilst reacting to unexpected contact.

“Our primary focus since releasing the Minitaur late last year has been expanding its behaviors to traverse a wide range of terrains and real-world operating scenarios,” said Gavin Kenneally, and Avik De, Co-founders of Ghost Robotics. “In a short time, we have shown that legged robots not only have superior baseline mobility over wheels and tracks in a variety of environments and terrains, but also exhibit a diverse set of behaviors that allow them to easily overcome natural obstacles. We are excited to push the envelope with future capabilities, improved hardware, as well as integrated sensing and autonomy.”

Ghost Robotics is designing next-generation legged robots that they claim are superior to wheeled and tracked autonomous vehicles in real-world field applications. They are also attempting to substantially reduce costs to drive adoption and scalable deployments. Whilst a commercial version of the Ghost Minitaur robot is slated for delivery in the future, the current development platform is in high demand, and has been shipped to many top robotics researchers worldwide (Carnegie Mellon, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, U.S. Army Research Labs and Google) for use in a broad range of research and commercialization initiatives.

“We are pleased with our R&D progress towards commercializing the Ghost Minitaur to prove legged robots can surpass the performance of wheel and track UGVs, while keeping the cost model low to support volume adoption—which is certainly not the case with existing bipedal and quadrupedal robot vendors,” said Jiren Parikh, Ghost Robotics, CEO.

In the coming quarters, the company plans to demonstrate further improvements in mobility, built-in manipulation capabilities, integration with more sensors, built-in autonomy for operation with reduced human intervention, as well as increased mechanical robustness and durability for operation in harsh environments. Watch this space.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in:

• Discovering optimal strategies for fast robotic walking and climbing
• QuadBot: The 3D printed crab-bot scuttling beyond its Kickstarter goal
• Design, simulate and build a custom drone
• A new quadrupedal robot, the ANYmal
• mROBerTO: The modular millirobot for swarm behavior studies

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Big Ideas

February is only just gone, and already 2017 is shaping up to be a year full of big ideas and ambitions. The Future of Life Institute, for example, just published the Asilomar AI principles: 23 guidelines to ensure AI developments are beneficial to humanity. They are calling for shared responsibility and caution against an AI arms race. The principles have already been supported by more than 700 researchers, including the likes of Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis and Stephen Hawking.

But February wasn’t just about making new rules, it was also about breaking the mould. In Switzerland, Kickstarter Accelerator launched its second programme, which will help 30 selected international start-ups develop their ideas and products with the ultimate goal of disrupting one of the programme’s chosen verticals to benefit wider society.

Image: Phillipe Rossier

And in Dubai, big plans for passenger drones to carry people through the city’s skies, as early as July this year, were announced. Meanwhile in the UK, the public is invited to take a look back at the history of humanoid robots from the very (very) early days to the present day, and to ask the critical questions, such as ‘will robots bring us closer together or drive us apart’ and ‘how will humanoids impact on our lives’?

Robots – paying their fair share?

Bill Gates suggested robots that are being used to replace human workers should ‘pay taxes’ to ensure there isn’t a gap in tax income due to increased automation. While that might sound like a good idea, the European Parliament this month already rejected a robot tax, instead, calling for new legislation to regulate the rise of robots.

Going mobile

One of the areas in which robots are most definitely on the rise, and could soon be competing with their human counterparts, is in delivery services. Delivery robots are becoming more reliable and more mobile, and many big firms have announced plans to employ some form of a delivery robot in the near future. No wonder then that the states of Georgia and Virginia have brought in legislation for delivery robots and driverless vehicles.

On the innovation front, Agility Robotics showed off their ostrich-inspired robot, which has the potential to be deployed over uneven terrain in disaster relief, and even package delivery (including up steps!). Similarly, Boston Dynamics’ latest addition to its family, 6.5ft tall ‘Handle’, has wheels and legs/arms in a clever combo that enables the robot to be incredibly agile, lift and carry boxes, and even tackle stairs. And Italian company Vespa, most famous for its iconic scooters, announced plans for a small robot called Gita that will carry your groceries for you.

But robots that carry and deliver things aren’t the only mobile robots on the block. The TERESA project is developing semi-autonomous, mobile telepresence robots to enhance social interactions. The robots can autonomously perform low-level behaviours, such as navigating their way through groups of people and maintaining a socially appropriate distance, so that the remote user can focus on high-level decisions such as who to talk to and what to say.

Going nuclear

In Japan, small mobile robots are being used to look inside the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the 2011 tsunami disaster. The latest to take on this task was a scorpion-shaped robot developed by Toshiba Corp.

But while the robot probe did manage to transmit some data, it failed to provide vital information about the location of suspected melted fuel, which is urgently needed to inform clean-up activities at the site. The robot’s left roller-belt failed before it could reach a grate that might have allowed a view of the leaked fuel. Structural damage and higher than expected radiation mean that researchers now need to go back to the drawing board in order to design robots better suited for the harsh environment of the reactors.

The Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant in Austria was completely built but never put into operation. Reactor supervision and decommissioning is one important operational area for robots in the RN domain.

With the lessons learnt from Fukushima and the earlier nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, the European Reference Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection (ERNCIP) has established a group to specifically focus on radiological and nuclear threats, developing protocols and response procedures, including some on the use of robots in various scenarios involving radiation.

Decorative drones and the Super Bowl

On a lighter note, viewers of the Super Bowl on 5 February watched a fabulous light show, thanks to Lady Gaga and a swarm of 300 ‘Shooting Star’ Intel drones that created an airborne image of Old Glory. What most of us probably didn’t realise at the time was that a 34.5 mile radius drone ban during the Super Bowl, put in place by the FAA, meant that the light show had actually been filmed earlier, and was sync’d into Lady Gaga’s performance later.

Lady Gaga performing at Super bowl LI Source: NFL/YouTube

And if you missed that, don’t despair. There’s plenty more drone-related fun to be had. Drone racing, for example? Australian company Freedom Drone Sports is working on a bigger, better drone at the moment, which could soon be seen at ‘giant drone racing’ events. That sounds pretty fun.

And how about drone art? There are plenty of weird and wonderful ways in which drones are being used in the arts, including theatre and musical shows. And at the Imperial War museum in London, visitors can now admire the work of Mahwish Chishty, setting Pakistani folk art against America’s drone warfare.

Military drones

Drone warfare is of course not primarily a matter of art at all. In fact, it’s a very real threat for millions of people. The US has been using drones in conflicts in the Middle East for years. And in Mosul,  the so-called Islamic State recently deployed drones against the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces.

But drone threats are not just relevant in the Middle East. France reported that it’s  monitoring its airspace for any suspicious activity from foreign aircraft and drones, and has been running simulations of potential drone threats since the 2015 Paris attacks.

In the US, the army is keen to integrate an electronic warfare system into its Gray Eagle drones, while the Navy scrapped its unmanned warfare office. And China is planning to use a giant solar-powered drone in the mesosphere as an early warning system, as well as for weather and disaster surveillance, and communication.

Regulating robotics

When it comes to domestic drone use, by companies such as Amazon or individual drone enthusiasts, February was buzzing with regulation chatter, but with few resulting decisions. The long-awaited framework for drone flight over people was delayed and is now caught up in President Trump’s temporary stop on new regulations, meaning it may be some time before there’s more clarity on how drones can and can’t be used near people.

In San Diego, regulations to allow local agencies to enforce safe drone operations were proposed by a working group made up of representatives from emergency services and other agencies. The regulations were passed by a City Council sub-committee, but needs to be voted on by the full Council before becoming law. And a bill barring the use of drones near state prisons and county jails was passed in Senate, but still needs to go to the S.C. House of Representatives before taking effect.

Drones are, of course, not the only type of robot that requires new regulations and laws. In a popular video (above) Polo Sant’Anna Valdera explored legal and ethical challenges of robot regulation, and posed the question: ‘What legal rights should robots have’?

Robocars

It seems every month for the last few years there’s at least one big story on autonomous cars, and February 2017 was no exception. This month, California published a summary of robocar testing in the state, showing that Google/Waymo left its competition far (far) behind by doing around 30 times as much test driving as everyone else put together!

But while Google is clearly in the lead when it comes to distance, Drive.ai released a video showing its self-driving car navigating the rainy streets of the Bay Area, in the middle of night, with ease. This is not a small feat considering that the car’s sensors had to deal with reflected lights from the wet road surface, congestion, and a broken traffic light.

Away from the sunshine state, the self-driving car industry is still booming. Car giant Ford, for example, just invested $1 billion in Pittsburgh based start-up Argo AI, becoming the majority shareholder.

But it’s not just good news and easy rides for the sector. Some have expressed concerns over the risk of hacking and cyber security for autonomous cars. This is a problem that hasn’t been fully resolved by manufacturers yet, and will need more research.

And in a worrying yet slightly amusing twist, companies are finding that their test engineers are falling asleep during test drives. Turns out rides are just too smooth. And with nothing to do, it engineers can’t help but doze off. This could spell trouble for semi-autonomous cars that require human monitoring and intervention, such as those planned by BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi.

Artificial intelligence

February 2017 was a pretty exciting month for those interested in AI. At MIT’s CSAIL lab, they’re working on a  wearable AI that can detect the tone of a conversation and could help people with social anxiety or Asperger’s syndrome understand social interactions better. And Kickstarter campaign  Bots_alive smashed its crowdfunding target, and will offer an app that’ll give Hexbug spider robots a bit of character via machine learning.

Samsung Simband. Image: Jason Dorfman, MIT CSAIL

But it’s not all about developing nifty consumer products: Discussions this month highlighted the potential for  AI to manage the UK’s national power grid at a time when increasing supply by renewables has to be supplemented by occasional boosts from other sources due to variable demand.

And a team at MIT  improved automated planners, with potential applications in flight scheduling and optimisation, by giving them some human intuition, winning the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling’s International Planning Competition.

Finally, Facebook is planning to use  AI to monitor its content for terrorist propaganda materials in a bid to be less dependent on users reporting offensive or worrying content.

Money

Talking of Facebook, the social media giant was also made the news this February when it was told to  pay game development firm ZeniMax $500 million in a lawsuit pertaining to Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset.

In other business news, the International Federation of Robotics forecast  massive growth for the robotic cleaning market, with vacuums clearly in the lead for most sought-after product. But other must-have appliances, such as automated mopping devices, are also increasingly becoming available.

iRobot Braava jet 240. Source: irobot.com

And finally, mobile phone and network provider  Verizon bought drone operations and management company Skyward.

Automation – the end of the human workforce?

The debate about robots replacing workers is almost as old as the field of robotics itself. With new automation technologies coming on the market almost daily, the debate is perhaps even more pressing than ever.

For those who are concerned about increasing automation, the news that internet giant Amazon plans to construct massive two-story supermarkets that could, allegedly, be run by just three human staff, won’t be well received. Similarly, with increasing automation in the farming sector, some may worry that the role of the farmer will never be the same. And with AI technologies becoming ever more intelligent, some have now started talking about  AI-based legal systems.

But despite all these developments, the contribution of human workers will be vital for many years to come, and although robots might replace human workers in some positions, they’re also likely to create new jobs.

Bio-bots and new tech in action

And to wrap up February’s digest, there are also quite a few cool videos that we just didn’t want to keep from you. DARPA showed off their  robot arm as it catches a UAV mid-flight, engineers at MIT developed a  gel robot that can catch (and not hurt) live fish, researchers at CalTech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign  made a flying bat bot, a team of students  designed the NAST OpenHand M2S, and  computer simulations of the running gaits of the fruit fly helped us to understand how robots might walk and climb better.

And if you have a dog, you’ll probably quite like 2015’s Robot Launch start-up winner CleverPet, a robot that’ll  keep your dog entertained while you’re away (or sat on the couch watching TV).

Teach your bot

Last but not least, we’ve published our  educational tutorials on Python programming, which will help you begin programming your NAO. There’s videos, step-by-step guides and lots of helpful hints and tips – so why not have a go?

Upcoming events for March – April 2017

Conf on Human-Robot Interaction: March 6-9, Vienna, Austria.

Age of Drones Expo: March 14-15, Hamburg, Germany.

European Robotics Forum: March 22-24, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Automate: April 3-6, Chicago, IL.

Unmanned Security Expo: April 4-7, Las Vegas, NV.

Robobusiness Europe: April 19-21, The Hague, Netherlands.

ICCAR: April 22-24, Nagoya, Japan.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

New year, new perspectives

2017 ushered in a new batch of fresh-faced game changers, celebrated in the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Amidst the bright young shakers and innovators, some interesting trends in robotics, AI, intelligence energy storage, and automation shone through. Hint: watch out for connected/smart consumer goods, advanced manufacturing, and AI in 2017.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting convened on the 17th of January in an attempt to set the course for 2017, and to address issues of responsive and responsible leadership. World leaders, academics and titans of industry converged on Davos to muse—amongst a plethora other issues—the role AI, cyber security, drone warfare and the role of humans in the fourth industrial revolution.

The WEF weren’t the only ones attempting to comprehend the fast-evolving technological landscape. The Legal Affairs Committee urged the EU Commission to put forward new rules for the robotics sector—for example, compliance with ethical standards and liability for accidents involving driverless cars. And across the pond, a New York Times article imagined how robots and automation might reshape the US manufacturing sector, and potentially impede President Trump’s endeavour to bring jobs back to American factories.

Farewell to a bumper year for startups

2016 was a busy and abundant year for seed, crowd, series A,B,C,D and VC funding of robotics-related startups. 128 companies got funded, some multiple times: $1.95 billion, 50% more than 2015, which was also a phenomenal year with over $1.32 billion funded. Good news for firms like Rethink Robotics: The Boston-based maker of the Baxter and Sawyer robots, founded by iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, raised an additional $18 million in an unfinished $33 million Series E round led by private equity firm Adveq. This brought cumulative funding to $131.5 million, which will be used for Rethink’s global expansion initiatives and new product development.

Baxter – Rethink Robotics

5 privately funded teams received exciting news from Google as they advanced to the final of the Lunar XPrize. To have a shot at $30 million in prizes, the teams must send a robot to the moon, move 500 meters across its surface, and send pictures back to Earth. Contestants have until New Years Eve 2017 to launch, so keep an eye out for developments throughout the year.

Robotics gets down to business

The new Advanced Robotics Manufacturing Innovation Hub (ARM) was awarded $250 million to fund its mission of revitalising American manufacturing by creating and deploying robotics technology. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, the new institute is made up of governments, industry, academia, and non-profit organisations from across the country. Combined, they have contributed $173 million that will be fused with $80 million in federal funding.

In the UK, Open Bionics announced a partnership with the NHS in a feasibility study to develop hands for amputees. Open Bionics is to be awarded to £100,000 through SBRI Healthcare, an NHS England initiative, as part of its new challenge to fund innovations that will support children living with disability and long term conditions.

Predicting 2017 and beyond

Robohub’s Sabine Hauert was on the panel for Brian Cox presents Science Matters. Experts discussed some key issues that will shape our future, and pondered questions such as: How and when will machines be able to explain themselves? Should we worry about an artificial intelligence advancements? Or, are there bigger and more imminent challenges presented by advances in machine learning?

https://youtu.be/IunNpGGt3H8

The Royal Institute wasn’t the only organisation asking questions about the future of AI. The MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University will serve as the founding anchor institutions for a new initiative aimed at bridging the gap between the humanities, the social sciences, and computing by addressing the global challenges of AI from a multidisciplinary perspective. Initially funded with $27 million from the Knight Foundation, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others, the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund’s mission is to catalyse global research that advances AI for the public interest, with an emphasis on applied research and education. The fund will also seek to advance public understanding of AI.

Further, a new study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that the march of automation will displace jobs more gradually than some alarming forecasts suggest. The institute, the research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, concluded that many tasks can be automated and that most jobs have activities ripe for automation, but the near-term impact will be to transform work more than to eliminate jobs.

Robots that learn

Bots_alive launched a Kickstarter campaign involving a smartphone kit that gives simple but lifelike autonomy to a popular RC toy, the Hexbug® Spider. The aim is to pioneer a new form of character AI. Much like motion capture for scripted animation, this new technique may revolutionise how interactive characters are created, through observation of authentic human-generated behaviour.

Elsewhere, employing the techniques that drove their Go playing AI to mastery, Google has developed machines that have learned for themselves how to perform simple tasks like opening doors. Google are keeping their lips tight on many aspects of their AI developments, but it’s likely they’ll be sharing more of their learning machines in 2017.

CES 2017

Las Vegas, Nevada, was fizzing with techno-buzz in January as CES 2017—the global consumer electronics and consumer technology tradeshow—kicked off in style, showcasing the latest innovations and ideas from some of the top companies on the planet.

The eHang 184 had Brad Templeton talking flying cars and the future of personal transport. Mercedes-Benz, meanwhile, showed its intricate vision for the future of deliveries in the form of the “Vision Van”. Their four-wheeled concept is designed to cut down on the amount of time it takes to sort packages for delivery as well as the actual delivery time, utilizing vans with roof-mounted autonomous drones, and robotic package-sorting devices to ferry packages from its vehicles. And Mercedes weren’t the only automotive giants sharing their vision for the future: Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and BMW were amongst others showcasing new concepts in self-driving technology.

But are robots  ready to help? That was the question posed by CNET’s CES 2017 Robotics panel.

Autonomous cars updates

Away from CES, self-driving cars were tested for the first time on the streets of Britain in January. The portentous trial saw a two-seater LUTZ Pathfinder travel 1.25 miles (2km) through pedestrianised areas of Milton Keynes, reaching speeds of up to 15mph whilst having to cope with walkers and cyclists for the first time.

Tesla AutoPilot hit the headlines again in January. NHTSA released the report from their Office of Defects Investigation on the fatal Tesla crash in Florida during the spring of 2016. The ODI report ruled that Tesla properly considered driver distraction risks in its design of the product. It went even further, noting that drivers using Tesla AutoPilot (including those monitoring it properly and those who did not) still had a lower accident rate per mile than drivers of ordinary cars without autopilot. There was also a lot of press speculation swirling around a dashcam video of a car accident in the Netherlands. It showed a Tesla in AutoPilot hitting the brakes around 1.4 seconds before a collision occurred between two other cars. But Brad Templeton attempted to dispel the notion that the Tesla predicted the collision, pointing out that the vehicle merely responded to its radar system and the breaking of the car in front.

Social robots

The social robotics industry is on the rise. But early adopters be warned: It’s going to cost you. Ewaybot Technology’s MoRo robot assistant can grasp and handle objects around your home to help simplify your life, and empty your wallet of $30 thousand. One of the most advanced robotic debutantes at CES 2017, it’s princely price tag will likely limit its use to academic research, rather than domestic service, in the immediate future.

Catalia Health is also leading the surge in social robotics, with Mabu, their patient care management system. Mabu is a cute little robot who engages patients through conversation in an effort to support Catalia’s focus on helping patients adhere to their treatment, whether that be taking medication, or managing chronic disease over the long term. Such systems, augmented with cultural awareness and good bedside manner, are great news for ameliorating the elderly healthcare crisis, according to academics. An international team is working on a £2 million project to develop versatile robots to help look after older people in care homes or sheltered accommodation. The robots will offer support with everyday tasks, like taking tablets, as well as offering companionship in an effort to alleviate pressures on care homes and hospitals.

Drones and the government

An effort is underway, led by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, aimed at tackling the threat to civilians posed by fully autonomous weapons systems. The Campaign is calling for an international treaty pre-emptively banning the development, production, and use of such weapons. Is this a predictor of a growing movement against this new generation of decision making drones?

An Air Force Special Operations Logistics Readiness Squadron refuels an MQ-9 Reaper during Exercise Emerald Warrior at Hurlburt Field, FL on May 9, 2016. Credit: Staff Sgt. Paul Labbe / USAF

The Hill took offered a more optimistic interaction between drones and government, outlining 3 ways the Trump administration can help the drone industry “take off”. Some have predicted that the USA’s domestic UAS industry will grow to be an $82 billion market while creating more than 100,000 new jobs. And the FAA recently estimated that by 2020, 11 million commercial drones will have been sold in the United States. So how can Trump help?

1. Enable the growth of commercial drones through expansion of the operating envelope.
2. Streamline policymaking through coordinated government approach.
3. Enhance government-industry collaboration.

We’ll see if he takes the advice on-board.

Drones and consumers

January was a tough time for the consumer drone industry: Parrot struggled, and Google closed its Titan Project as the drone industry appeared to disunite. But, arguably, none had it harder than failed drone startup Lily. The Silicon Valley startup, with a stylish camera drone and presentation, announced that although it had $34 million in pre-sales, it couldn’t get additional funds to meet production demands and was closing down. Bad news after bad, a Forbes article stated that law enforcement agents had raided the company’s San Francisco headquarters for a potential criminal investigation against the company. Doubtless, this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Lily’s legal woes.

On the humanitarian side, a passenger drone, which completed its first flight over low terrain in November, could be in use by 2020. Developed over 15 years for rescue or military use, the $14 million Cormorant (formerly AirMule) can carry 500kg at 185km/h. Urban Aeronautics says internal rotors make it safer than a helicopter. And as well as taking off and landing vertically, it can fly between buildings and below power lines!

Agriculture and robotics

Multiple research reports forecast significant overall growth in the agricultural robotics industry over the coming years, even decades. Grace Market Data predicts the global agricultural drones market to grow phenomenally at 37.1% per annum by unit shipment, and 28.9% yearly by annual sales revenue generated from agricultural UAV hardware, drone software and servicing section over the next ten years.

John Payne outlined how augmented reality technology can help farmers stay relevant, and augment the introduction of robotic technology on farms, worldwide. In another article, John introduced the concept of regenerative agriculture working in harmony with robotics and automation.

And finally… picture this:

Robohub’s Kassie Perlongo was on the convention floor at CES 2017, and you can see what she saw in her gallery article #CES2017 in pictures. Meanwhile, design innovators After the Flood introduced us to the Robot Life Survey: An alternative history series that visualises Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog, Prox Dynamics’ Black Hornet Nano, and Harvard University’s Kilobot Swarm as if witnessed by an early explorer.

First-time contributor Alistair Wick offered a fledgeling computer scientist’s guide to inverse kinematics, complete with codes and illustrations.

The BBC released Spy in the Wild in January. The series employs robots mounted with cameras, disguised as wildlife, to bring audiences up close and personal with wildlife.

Upcoming events for February – March 2017

IEEE- International Conference on MECHATRONICS: February 14-17, Gippsland, Australia.

MIT Tech Conference: February 18, Cambridge, MA.

Robotics Alley: February 28-March 1, Minneapolis, MN.

Conf on Human-Robot Interaction: March 6-9, Vienna, Austria.

Age of Drones Expo: March 14-15, Hamburg, Germany.

European Robotics Forum: March 22-24, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Image: IEEE

On the 15th November 2016, the IEEE’s AI and Ethics Summit posed the question: “Who does the thinking?” In a series of key-note speeches and lively panel discussions, leading technologists, legal thinkers, philosophers, social scientists, manufacturers and policy makers considered such issues as:

• The social, technological and philosophical questions orbiting AI.
• Proposals to program ethical algorithms with human values to machines.
• The social implications of the applications of AI.

Click here to read the final report, and enjoy a selection of videos from the conference below.

Welcome: Marko Delimar
Keynote Speaker: Wojciech Wiewiórowski

Panel 1: Autonomous Systems – Managing Risk and Reward
Panel Members: Raja Chatila, Kay Firth-Butterfield, Juha Heikkilä, Jérôme Perrin

Panel 2: Programming Human Ethics: Cui Bono?
Panel Members: Joanna Bryson, Mady Delvaux, Sarah Spiekermann, Corrine Cath

Panel 3: Social Implications – Perils & Promises of AI
Panel Members: Greg Adamson, Nikolaos Mavridis, Paul Nemitz, Aurélie Pols

Closing Remarks: John C. Havens

You might also enjoy the following articles about AI and AI/robotics policy:

• MIT Media Lab to participate in $27 million initiative on AI ethics and governance
• How artificial intelligence is changing our Christmas shop
• White House report: Artificial intelligence, automation, and the economy
• White House launches public workshops on AI issues
• White House releases reports focusing on opportunities and challenges of AI

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The population of the scenic ski-resort Davos, nestled in the Swiss Alps, swelled by nearly +3,000 people between the 17^th and 20^th of January. World leaders, academics, business tycoons, press and interlopers of all varieties were drawn to the 2017 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting. The WEF is the foremost creative force for engaging the world’s top leaders in collaborative activities to shape the global, regional and industry agendas for the coming year and beyond. Perhaps unsurprisingly given recent geopolitical events, the theme of this year’s forum was Responsive and Responsible Leadership.

With the onset of the fourth industrial revolution, increasingly discontented segments of society not experiencing congruous economic and social progress are in danger of existential uncertainty and exclusion. Responsive and Responsible Leadership entails inclusive development and equitable growth, both nationally and globally. It also involves working rapidly to close generational divides by exercising shared stewardship of those systems that are critical to our prosperity.

In the end, leaders from all walks of life at the Annual Meeting 2017 must be ready to react credibly and responsibly to societal and global concerns that have been neglected for too long.”

Developing last year’s theme—“The fourth industrial revolution”—this year’s luminaries posited questions, among many others, concerning incipient robotics and artificial intelligence technologies set to have a pronounced impact on the global economy and global consciousness alike. What can we learn from the first wave of AI? How can the humanitarian sector benefit from big data algorithms? How will drone technology change the face of warfare? Can AI and computational tech help foster responsive and responsible leadership? What are the downsides of technology in the fourth industrial revolution?

Enjoy a selection of tech-themed videos below.

And a bit about global science including big data, open source science and education.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

2017 predictions

Amongst other things, December was a month to look to the future and guess what it holds. So what did people predict will happen in the world of robotics in 2017? Well, there were certainly some exciting prophesies, including the prospect of voice interface becoming mainstream with Amazon’s Echo, augmented reality replacing virtual reality, and machine learning changing computing forever.

Image credit: Parrot/YouTube

And the prognoses didn’t stop there. The economy is often a hot topic at the end of a year, and 2016 wasn’t any different. Automation and AI are set to continue their seemingly unstoppable and widespread rise to prominence; taxi company Uber, for example, just launched its very own AI lab to ensure it can keep up with the competition.

On Robohub, Frank Tobe explained why robots may potentially save the economy by providing social assistance as well as buttressing a shrinking labour pool in industrial production. And in a panel discussion at November’s European Robotics Week, experts discussed the important contribution robots with AI could make to elderly care.

But despite AI coming on leaps and bounds in 2016, there’s still much to learn. And what we see in the news and read in the papers may not always give us the clearest idea of where the field really is because, when it comes to AI, there’s a lot of hype. Robohub president Sabine Hauert explained why accurate, reliable and balanced information about robotics and AI is so important.

Robocar evolution

From AI to robocars, 2016 has seen a whole range of exciting developments and fascinating new tech making its way out of labs and onto our streets. To ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles, US auto-safety regulators just proposed new rules under which automakers must allow cars to communicate with each other.

Google – one of the biggest players in the robocar field – just announced that its robocar division will now be its own subsidiary company called ‘Waymo’. This is a huge step which acknowledges the importance of the division, giving it more opportunities to act independently and be more innovative.

Source: Waymo

Whilst Google is refashioning its autonomous car division as a stand-alone start-up, former Google employee and robocar guru Chris Urmson appears to be working on his own self-driving company. He was seen recently talking to a number of top engineers – stay tuned for more on this in 2017.

And Uber had some bad news this month as the California Department of Motor Vehicles claimed that the company was breaking the law, using test vehicles that didn’t comply with requirements under automated driving law. Despite Uber denying any wrong doing, the claims could hinder their testing plans in California for the foreseeable future.

New EU roadmap

After last month’s US robotics roadmap, December saw the latest edition of the Multi-Annual European Roadmap for Horizon 2020. Whilst there weren’t many changes from the 2015 edition, the annual update ensures that changing priorities, technologies and strategic developments continue to shape European research development and innovation in the area of robotics.

In other news from Europe, the EU just revealed its biggest ever defence funding and research plan. This new investment isn’t focused on robotics per se, nevertheless drones form a crucial part of the defence plans, along with advanced cyber warfare systems and hi-tech gear. Definitely an exciting opportunity for companies working on defence systems for 2017.

Drones evolving beyond just hardware

The coming year will undoubtedly offer plenty of fascinating stories on drone regulation and innovation, not least because giants such as Amazon are pushing forward with their plans for drone deliveries – this despite a slight fall in drone investments in the last two quarters of 2016.

And 2017 won’t all be about corporate drone operations. The video above shows a new drone-set, developed by a team at MIT, allowing users to design, simulate and build their very own drone, custom made to their personal requirements.

Challenging the status quo

The end of 2016 was about more than simply looking to the future of technology, it was about challenging the status quo in robotics, and paving the way for more inclusivity.

The ‘Girls of Steel’ have been successfully engaging girls in engineering activities, exciting them to consider careers in STEM, and challenging the archaic fallacy that engineering is ‘just for boys’. Robotics currently remains a male dominated field, but more and more women are joining forces with their male colleagues in labs around the world. Let’s hope this trend continues in 2017!

Photo: Outreach at the 2016 Pittsburgh Maker Faire.

But it’s not just the gender balance in labs we need to think about. Research by James Zou suggests that AI systems may be inheriting gender bias via language data sets. Zou introduced a way to remove this bias, challenging entrenched linguistic gender dynamics that we unintentionally pass to our AI systems.

New perspectives on roboethics, such as the ‘one being two origins’ idea could also summon us to question our traditional understanding of robots and robotic design. How do we ensure robots are used for good? Do we need to redesign our own mindsets, as well as future robotic technology?

Robotics funding landscape

Frank Tobe offered a comprehensive overview of the end-of-year funding landscape, citing seventeen robotics companies who were funded for a combined total of more than $225million. Four more companies got acquired in November 2016, three went public to raise funds, and one failed. Overall, 2016 was the best year so far for robotics startup funding, and hopefully this trend can continue onward into 2017.

Aerospace and defence giants Boeing acquired Liquid Robotics. The company is set to be swallowed up by Boeing’s Autonomous Systems for Defense, Space & Security division. Financial terms weren’t provided for the deal, but it was the second acquisition of an unmanned undersea vehicle maker by a major defense firm in 2016, after General Dynamics Mission Systems acquired robot maker Bluefin Robotics during February (also for an undisclosed amount).

In the lab

Even wintry festivities couldn’t slow down the pace of robotics innovation in labs around the world. Roboticists at UC Berkeley designed a small robot that can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded. The agility of the robot opened new pathways of locomotion that were not previously attainable. It’s hoped that such vertically agile robots might be developed with the aim of jumping around rubble in search and rescue missions.

Meanwhile, a group of astro-minded Norwegian researchers were looking into how a snake robot might carry out maintenance work on the International Space Station, study comets, and explore the possibility of living and working in lava tunnels on the Moon. Such innovations have fueled imaginings of human colonies beyond Earthly realms, and how robotics might be incorporated into space architecture.

And if that sounds like science fiction, then check this out: A South Korean company has been working with a former Starcraft concept artist to create a real-life giant robot, and it’s already got a working prototype. Korea Future Technology has designed and built the METHOD-1 mecha – a bipedal robot that’s fully articulated, capable of movement, and houses a human pilot. Put the manga down, and stay tuned to Robohub instead!

https://youtu.be/NCrBC_V92hY

Happy Holidays!

And finally, at the end of the year Robohub usually invites readers to submit their robotics-related festive season videos. From robots that help Santa make the perfect gift for every child to robots that can pour your mug of mulled wine. Watch our first batch of videos here.

Upcoming events for January – February 2017

CES: January 5-8, Las Vegas, NV.

The 10th Annual Crunchies Awards: January 6th, San Francisco, CA.

The Innovation Summit: January 10-12, Santa Barbara, CA.

9th Global Deep Learning Summit: January 26-27, San Francisco, CA.

Momentum Tech Conference: February 6-7. Karachi, PK.

Webstock: February 13-17, Wellington, NZ.

MIT Tech Conference: February 18th, Cambridge, MA.

In this roundtable edition, we watched the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” and asked our Robohub team members: with many institutions focused on developing aerial drone technology, and in light of the pressing reality of climate change and bee colony collapse, do we see robotic bees in our future? Would swarms of artificial insects even be desirable?

In her book “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, Alice Calaprice asserted that Einstein probably never said anything close to: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Still. Whoever said it, it’s a haunting prophecy. With climate change thought to be forcing colony collapse disorder and threatening the existence of many pollinators, might swarm robotics hold the key to humanity’s survival? Could these robot bees ever be hacked to spy and become weaponised? In our roundtable we discussed the technology in the Black Mirror episode “Hate the Nation” and some of the pitfalls.

Swarms of autonomous, 3D printed drone bees pollinating the nation. Hackable AI, vulnerable to attack. Flying tools turned aerial enemy. Do our experts think any of this could happen? Is this type of technology likely or even feasible?

Our team share their thoughts:

Sabine: What’s interesting is that not everything in the episode is entirely crazy. We do want to create technology that addresses a specific need. If there are fewer pollinators, we might want to create artificial pollinators, though not necessarily artificial bees, to help us along the path to addressing the issue. But I think the technology in Black Mirror is very far from something we can do today.

There was a project called RoboBees, that was Harvard-based, that was all about creating artificial bees for pollination—so exactly this scenario.  There were multiple parts and problems: how do you make very small flyers; how do you drive them in a controlled way; and how do they sustain enough energy. All these things are extremely hard to address. They’ve managed to make some of the world’s best miniature flyers that can flap their wings and take off, and are making some great steps in controlling them. But when I say control, I really mean turning left and right in a laboratory setting. If you were to put them outside in a windy environments, it’d be a completely different story, and they don’t really have the energy to go very far.

And then there’s the algorithms. It’s not just the bees in this episode, they’re all connected to hives and they have all these control algorithms implemented that allow them to find flowers and people with image processing. How do you get such large numbers of drones to communicate with each other and their hubs? There are multiple communication issues that are very hard to address. What is interesting is that [Black Mirror] put together these bees with the swarm approach, and the pollinate in a way that’s very bio-inspired.

Kassie: Does anyone think that this episode did a disservice to swarm robotics in that someone was able to hack into the mainframe and essentially attack and kill people? That’s a very real fear that people have with regards to robotics and AI.

Sabine: For years we had to answer the question: Have you read “Prey”? Is this likely to happen? And now it’s: Have you seen “Dark Mirror”?

Ioannis: In fairness, there is some justification for this, as opposed to questions about terminators and things.

Sabine: And it’s not the technology [in Black Mirror] that’s the problem, it’s the humans. The technology starts by being portrayed as a real positive. All the tech in this episode, like the autonomous cars, is actually really cool and helpful. It’s the people who screwed up, ultimately, and the system got hacked. So I think the key message is that we need to make the technology secure.

Ioannis: Did you think it was a little short-sighted in the way it portrayed swarm robotics? It sounds very inefficient to me to have a central control that’s required to monitor the flight of every bee. All the bad guy needed to do was hack the central control to manipulate every bee. A swarm is something different than a million drones. In the episode, it looks like a swarm, but in reality it’s actually a lot of remotely operated robots.

Sabine: That’s right. And if it was properly decentralised, it would have been harder to hack because you wouldn’t be downloading massive amounts of code on every one of these bees.

Ioannis: To make the swarm go from controlled to bad, the hacker could have introduced some kind of memory or code to enable the swarm to evolve rapidly, and from that point on it’s out of control. That would have been interesting. Instead, the hacker just uses the bees as lots of tele-operated robots. I found the episode a little disappointing in this aspect.

Kassie: If you’re doubting robotics in any way, this episode is perhaps something you could look at and think: “Oh my God, this is something that could happen.” But I took some positives from this [with robotics] then only negatives.

Sabine: I felt the autonomous cars were positive; similar to what you’d expect them to be like in 30 years or so.

Ioannis: They portray autonomous cars as being cool, also, which is one aspect. But the fact that the cars are autonomous is nothing [to the story], the characters just use them, which I think is quite cool actually. They ignore the fact that these could be anything futuristic which I think is good.

Kassie: It was almost a precursor to something that could actually happen soon, in that some people were still driving, but the people with money had autonomous systems. And it wasn’t portrayed as scary! So I agree that that was a good aspect.

Sabine: I think the point of Black Mirror is very often not the technology but that people misuse it, and they make a very good point about online bullying [in this episode].

Ioannis: Yes, and they do not portray online bullies in a stereotypical way. For example, there is a teacher character who is a very nice lady in reality, but online is something completely different. Sabine, I’d like to ask you what you think about the potential of a weaponized swarm for defense purposes?

Sabine: I think it’s a very bad idea to weaponize swarms. You have to think about such things as stability and payload, accounting for wind and conditions etc. How would you do that? And why use a swarm as opposed to another type of robot with another type of payload?

Ioannis: I don’t have any specific examples for swarm robotics, but in nature a lion is dangerous, and so is a mosquito. Both in different way. So there could be an application.

Sabine: In that sense, you can weaponize anything. It’s just so much harder to weaponize a swarm than a more capable system, at least today.

Ioannis: What did you think of the robo-bee design?

Sabine: I think it was pretty cool, but too complex. If you were to design a robo-bee you would design something like a mini-copter that would sit on a plant, rather than something that looked like a bee. Or you might have an agriculture robot that simply goes across fields and does the pollination. Although the nice thing about the bee design is that the infrastructure is still already in place—plants etc.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read our other Roundtables:

• Robohub roundtable: Public perceptions of robotics and AI, what’s your pet peeve?
• Robohub roundtable: Why do robotics crowdfunding projects fail?
• Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics
• Robohub roundtable: Job loss through automation, Foxconn controversy
• Robohub roundtable: Why is it so difficult to define ‘robot’?

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the “Quela” drilling location in the “Murray Buttes” area on lower Mount Sharp. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Late morning, red skies over Mars, and the first human interloper emerges from her landing craft to review the dusty expanse. As she eases carefully down the ladder towards the alien earth, her mind spins with the words that, like Armstrong’s, will echo forever in the human conscious. She speaks and, when her signal reaches home just over three minutes later, 11 billion hearts skip a beat. It’s a powerful image, oft perpetuated in such media as the upcoming National Geographic “global event series” MARS. But below is another, far realer image: the crater left by Schiaparelli after its parachute jettisoned too early and it ploughed into the Martian surface, fatally. Images like this illustrate the truly difficult, dangerous and costly business of spaceflight.

Schiaparelli crash site in colour. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Losing robots is dramatically less costly—both existentially and financially—than losing humans, hence the push to design robots here on Earth capable of performing in harsh environments considered to pose an unsatisfactory risk to humans. But when it comes to the globally harsh environment of Mars, we tend to accept unanimously, axiomatically, that the end goal must be to send humans to conquer it, and soon! Advocates of a Martian human spaceflight goal—such as Elon Musk, Explore Mars Inc, and The Mars Society—are pushing for a human presence on the Red Planet by the 2030s, arguably underestimating the difficulty of achieving such a horizon in just two decades, and offering little to no justification for colonization other than the vague hero myth of manifest destiny. At the very least, if we’re to send our covered wagons rolling and ruining across a new celestial frontier, should we not first qualify why the $10¹⁰ it’d likely cost wouldn’t be better spent on further robotics-lead research missions?

The massive achievements of humanity’s still primitive and variable robot explorers have surely justified continued funding over infinitely more complex manned missions. Could a human have done such a better job than Curiosity, Spirit or Opportunity, so as to justify the inordinately higher risks? And what could more multifaceted, technologically advanced robot explorers achieve on humanity’s behalf, given time and funding? And whether they’re successful in their missions, or rain down like silvery chaff from the thin, Martian skies, the lessons we learn are invaluable. It’s never too soon for robots. And it’s always worth the risk. Can we say the same about human spaceflight missions?

Closer to home

Preferring also to focus on the horizon goal of humans on Mars by the 2030s, NASA currently has no plans to return to the moon. Or so we thought. However, at the end of October this year, NASA announced it was “seeking information from potential partners” who were interested in designing small robotic payloads that could be launched and sent to the surface of the moon within a 2017-2020 timeframe. NASA’s primarily interested in understanding how future missions to Mars might use robot technology to generate resources like water and oxygen, create usable fuel for spacecraft, conduct in-space and extraterrestrial manufacturing and construction, and other operations relevant to making a future Martian colony work. It’s clear NASA see the moon as a mere technological proving ground, a springboard to Mars. But other experts in the field (even at NASA) argue for something a little more permanent on the Lunar surface.

Artist’s impression of a permanent moon colony. Image credit: NASA

Commenting in a recent Popular Science article, NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay concluded: “We’re not going to have a research base on Mars until we can learn how to do it on the Moon first.” He pointed out how new technologies here on Earth, such as self-driving cars and waste-recycling technologies, can make establishing a Lunar colony cheaper and more achievable than ever before. Taking the time and resources to first establish a permanent moon base might push back the timeline for manned Mars missions, but offers a multitude of advantages in the long run: it’s a cheaper, safer, more achievable goal, closer to home, that can potentially offer a blueprint to how human-robot interaction might evolve outside of Earth’s protective shield. It’d be a big deal to see human’s living on the moon. Equally, wouldn’t it be a big deal to see the first robot manufactured on another planetary body?

Together forever, as one

I’m not saying that humans should stay Earthbound forever, never leaving for Mars. I’m simply advocating a deeper, more informed conversation. Let’s not run 225 million kilometers away before we’re ready. Let’s set achievable, affordable goals and learn all the lessons we can from our robot partners, our canaries in the coal mine.

But I get it. I’m pooping the party aren’t I?

I can empathise with the visceral, reflexive response I provoke in fellow enthusiasts—akin to chewing on sour cud—when I allude to the notion that humans shouldn’t necessarily emigrate to a dead and deadly desert planet just yet. I too was raised in the West by “the greatest generation”, and their “baby boomer” offspring, to whom human spaceflight was far more personal, less justified by scientific enquiry and more inspired by geopolitical, socioeconomic factors. The cardboard-box suited astro-child in me gasps, enthralled at the thought of humans living on Mars. Ah, the wonder, the excellence of the human spirit…

Artist’s impression of Martian colony. Image credit: NASA

But that isn’t a rational response. What’s rational is weighing realist human spaceflight goals against what can first be achieved with cheaper, expendable robot alternatives. Should we not curb our enthusiasm, our collective delusion of achieveability, and concentrate on paving the way, gradually, for more established and long-lasting spaceflight architecture? Or, to a greater extreme, could and should humanity’s lasting impression on the Universe be not boot prints in dust and regolith, but the intrepid robot ambassadors we created and sent forth to better our understanding of ourselves?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in:

• Schiaparelli, are you there? The high risks of space robotics again crash home
• Drone learns to see in zero-gravity
• Robots Podcast #217: LunaRoo, with Jürgen Leitner
• The four coolest NASA robots
• Exoskeletons: From helping people walk to controlling robots in space
• NASA Space Robotics Challenge prepares robots for the journey to Mars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Image: ESA/ATG medialab

In Darmstadt, Germany, European Space Agency (ESA) teams are scrambling to confirm contact with the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), Schiaparelli—the spectre of Philae still haunting the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). Whether or not ESA ever speak to Schiaparelli again, the risky business of space robotics is once more laid bare.

Editors note: Since this article was written, ESA are attempting to decode a partial signal from the EDM

After Schiaparelli’s release from its mothership—The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)—the 577 kg EDM was programmed to autonomously perform an automated landing sequence, with parachute deployment and front heat shield release between 11 and 7 km above the Martian surface, all the time collecting data on the pressure, surface temperature and heat flux on its back cover as it passed through the atmosphere.  Then, 1100 m from the ground, retrorocket braking was supposed to slow the EDM before a final fall from a height of 2 m, protected by a crushable structure. But sometime during this process the signal was lost. ESA_Shiaparelli’s twitter feed soon fell silent also.

If Schiaparelli reached the surface safely, its batteries should be able to support operations for three to ten days, offering multiple opportunities to re-establish a communication link and collect data from its suite of sensors designed to measure wind speed and direction, humidity, pressure, atmospheric temperature, transparency of the atmosphere, and atmospheric electrification. But if contact is never restored, it’ll be a hefty blow to ExoMars and ESA’s aim of testing key technologies in preparation for their contribution to subsequent missions to Mars, including a planned 2020 rover that will carry a drill and a suite of instruments dedicated to exobiology and geochemistry research.

Image: ESA/ATG medialab

Such robotic technology has the potential to stretch our cosmological horizon, and perhaps even detect traces of extra-terrestrial life. But there’s a cost.  The ExoMars program runs up a bill totaling €1.3 billion, and such failures (if a failure it be) naturally raise questions of risk versus reward, particularly in tight economic times. Michael Johnson of the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, and founder of PocketSpacecraft.com, once told me during an interview: “About 50% of space missions fail after launch.” He shrugged. “That’s life… This is a high risk, high reward activity.”

In no other field of robotics is the potential of catastrophic failure so present and accepted. But how long can this attitude be maintained? The consensual public funding of—and indeed existence of—future space missions is parasitic upon the success of space robots and automated technology, and vice versa. Can you hear us Schiaparelli?

…

Come in, Schiaparelli.

…?

Image: ESA/ATG medialab

BUT ALL IS NOT LOST. The difficulties surrounding the mission’s EDM might potentially overshadow the successes of its TGO, which successfully performed the long 139-minute burn required to be captured by Mars, and has entered an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet. TGO’s Mars orbit Insertion burn lasted from 13:05 to 15:24 GMT on 19 October, reducing the spacecraft’s speed and direction by more than 1.5 km/s. The TGO is now on its planned orbit around Mars, primed with a suit of scientific equipment to measure the Martian atmosphere from on high. You win some, you lose some. This 50:50 success rate exemplifies the apparent nature of space robotics.

Click here to keep up to date with the latest ExoMars developments.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in:

• Drone learns to see in zero-gravity
• Robots Podcast #217: LunaRoo, with Jürgen Leitner
• The four coolest NASA robots
• Exoskeletons: From helping people walk to controlling robots in space
• NASA Space Robotics Challenge prepares robots for the journey to Mars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.