Driverless car merging into traffic. How big of a gap between vehicles is acceptable? Image credit: Jordan Collver

I’m examining the perception of autonomous cars using hypothetical scenarios. Each of the hypothetical scenarios is accompanied with an image to help illustrate the scene — using grey tones and nondescript human-like features — along with the option to listen to the question spoken out loud to fully visualise an association. 

If you live in the UK, you can take this survey and help contribute to my research!

Public perception has the potential to impact on the timescale and adoption of autonomous vehicles (AV). As the development of the technology advances, understanding attitudes and wider public acceptability is critical. It’s no longer a question of if, but when we will transition. Long range autonomous vehicles are expected between 2020 and 2025, with some estimates suggesting fully autonomous vehicles will take over by 2030. Currently, most modern cars are sold with automated features: automatic braking, autonomous parking, advanced lane assist, advanced cruise control, queue assist, for example. Adopting fully AV has the potential to improve significant societal aspects: efficient road safety, reducing pollution and congestion, and providing another type of transportation for the mobility impaired.

The project’s aim is to add to the conversation about public perception of AV. Survey experiments can be extremely useful tools for studying public attitudes, especially if researchers are fascinated by the “effects of describing or presenting a scenario in a particular way.”  This unusual and creative method may provide a model for other types of research surveys in the future where it’s difficult to visualise future technologies. An online survey was chosen to remove small sample bias and maximise responses by participants in the UK.

You can take this survey by clicking above, or alternatively, click the following link:

https://uwe.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/visualise-this

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20 years of RoboCup

20 years in the books! RoboCup, which first started in 1997, was originally established to bring forth a team of robots that could beat the human soccer World Cup champions. Twenty years on, RoboCup is so more than just a soccer competition. In fact, the competition has grown into an international movement with a variety of leagues. Teams compete against each other in four different leagues and many sub-competitions, including home, work, and rescue missions. The complexity of missions in RoboCup requires intelligent, dynamic, sensing robots that can react to chaotic and changing environments. And in its 20-year history, the competition has brought forth numerous winners who have gone on to achieve great things.

Without robot competitions like RoboCup, the field of robotics wouldn’t be where it is today. So to celebrate 20 years of RoboCup, the Federation launched a video series featuring each of the leagues with one short video for those who just want a taster, and one long video for the full story. Robohub will be featuring one league every week leading up to RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan. You can watch all videos from the playlist here.

ICRA 2017 in Singapore

While we have RoboCup 2017 to look forward to, the IEEE 2017 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) took place in Singapore. Under the conference theme “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Real-world Solutions”, the event brought together engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs and industry to address some of the major challenges of our times.

This year’s keynote speakers included Louis Phee, who described development and implementation of a surgical robot called EndoMaster, and Peter Luh, giving an overview of Industry 4.0. Alongside the speeches, the event included 25 workshops and tutorials, various exhibitions, as well as four Robot Challenges.

Self-driving cars: Competition heats up

May wasn’t just events and competitions. In the world of autonomous vehicles, French Groupe PSA, the second largest car manufacturer in Europe which owns brands such as Peugeot and Citroen, have teamed up with autonomous car maker nuTonomy. The collaboration will seek to build a self-driving Peugeot 3008, which they hope will hit the roads of Singapore in the not-too-distant future.

Groupe PSA and other well-known car manufacturers, including Ford Motors, who are just starting their bid to enter the autonomous car market, are lagging way behind Waymo (the self-driving car developed by Google’s parent Alphabet) when it comes to putting their cars on actual roads. And with Waymo about to team up with ride-hailing start-up Lyft, Google is getting ever closer to making their autonomous car part of mainstream traffic.

Another player in the self-driving car game we haven’t mentioned yet is cab service Uber. The company is locked in a dispute with Google over allegedly stolen design secrets and will likely be going to public trial later in the year. Linked to the lawsuit, Uber fired the engineer at the heart of the dispute, Anthony Levandowski, who is suspected of having stolen company secrets when he left Google and founded his own company, Otto, which was acquired by Uber last year. The information war continues.

Self-driving cars: Innovation

Meanwhile, a group of veterans previously linked with Alphabet founded their own company – DeepMap Inc. – which aims to develop systems that allow cars to navigate complex cityscapes.

It’s not just cityscapes that are complex to navigate. Considering other vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians on busy roads form part of the difficult environment a self-driving car has to cope with due to its unpredictable nature. It will, therefore, become necessary for autonomous cars to understand and predict behaviour. Here, machine learning will be key, as Dr Nathan Griffiths explains in The Royal Society’s blog on machine learning in research.

And with so much interest and research into autonomous, intelligent cars, it’s not surprising that some, like Chris Urmson in a recent lecture at CMU, predict we will see a shift from the traditional transport model where people own their cars to a more dynamic, responsive model of “Transportation as a Service”, in which, companies own fleets of cars that can be used by anyone when and where they’re needed.

Robots in the fields

Much of the innovations that have enabled autonomous cars are transferable to industrial, commercial and agricultural vehicles. In the case of the latter, self-driving tractors and precision agribots have already increased productivity and made 24-hour autonomous, high-yield farming a possibility.

In Salinas Valley, California, robots are already used to pick lettuce, and to help vineyard owners decide when they need to water their plants. And GV (formerly Google Ventures) just invested $10 million into Abundant Robotics to build a picking robot, initially to pick apples but with potential for adaptation to support the harvest of other fruit.

It is believed the uptake of farming technologies is not progressing as quickly as it could be, due to farmers being slow to accept precision agriculture products, software, equipment and practices. But the farming (r)evolution is well underway, as agricultural robotics are already a 3 billion dollar industry set to grow to an impressive 12 billion by 2026.

Robots in the skies

While robots are still waiting to be fully accepted in agriculture, it’s no secret that the US military uses drones extensively. What came as a surprise was the strange video feed that surfaced in May from what appeared to be a drone flying over Florida’s panhandle, apparently sponsored by the National Reconnaissance Office – a body that doesn’t usually publicise its drone-related activities. The footage, now believed to have been shot in February, was likely uploaded as a demo video by a contractor.

While the Florida video caused quite a bit of confusion this month, another drone was making headlines for very different reasons. Previously used in military operations, the ArcticShark (a modified version of the military TigerShark) drone is now helping to fight climate change. And it’s now on a scientific mission to help scientists understand cloud formation and other atmospheric processes.

In other drone-related news, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities has allowed some of its employees to receive licenses to operate drones to support projects involving roads, bridged and other structures. And a report has shown that drone funding fell by 64% in 2016 compared to 2015, with DJI dominating the market and issues such as battery life, connectivity problems and drone regulations stifling development efforts.

Robots in the water

From the skies to the sea: this May, NATO Nations agreed to use JANUS for their digital underwater communications. JANUS has the potential to make military and civilian, NATO and non-NATO, devices fully interoperable, doing away with the communication problems between systems and models by different manufacturers that have made underwater communication difficult up to this point.

Robots in the lab

Researchers at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida, have developed a two-legged robot that can run without using sensors and a computer. The robot, called Planar Elliptical Runner, is stable through its physical design, which makes it different to other two or four-legged robots.

Meanwhile, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with a nimble-fingered robot that is able to pick up a wide range of objects using a 3D sensor and a deep learning neural network. It may not be perfect, but it’s the most nimble-fingered robot yet and the technology may find applications in picking and manufacturing in future.

Human-Machine Interaction

Most of the robots we interact with are practical helpers, offering support in the home, on the road or at work. Innovations some of us may have interacted with are autonomous lawn mowers, cars with self-driving features, or Amazon’s Alexa. With there plenty more robots in the pipeline.

A four-wheeled, waterproof, battery-powered robot inspector developed by a team in Nevada, may soon be supporting civil engineers and safety inspectors with bridge checks to reduce the chance of human error and omissions that could lead to a collapse such as the I-35W bridge disaster in Minnesota on 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXC7vMjEa8

And finally, engineers in Germany have built a robot priest called BlessU-2 that can beam light from its hands and deliver blessings in five languages. The robot is meant to spark discussions about faith, the church and the potential of AI.

Learning resources: Robot Academy

And to finish off our digest for May, we wanted to highlight a new open online resource for robotics education: the Robot Academy. Developed by Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Academy offers more than 200 lessons from robot joint control architecture to limits of electric motor performance. So if you find yourself with a bit of time on your hands, why not try a Robot Academy Masterclass?

Or if you’re after something a little bit different, there’s a new toolkit on “Computational Abstractions for Interactive Design of Robotic Devices” that allows you to drag and drop parts of a virtual robot on screen without the need to know exactly what needs to connect to what as a complex physics engine ensures your robot won’t fail or fall over.

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

Upcoming events for June – July 2017

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.

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 

Call for papers:

1st Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2017): Call for papers deadline 28 June.

524th plenary session, Main debating chamber, European Parliament. Credit: EESC

Today, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is going to debate its stance in the European discussion on AI and will express conflicting views on certain issues, especially on the question of legal personality for robots. The report, which has been drawn up by a Dutch rapporteur, Ms Catelijne Muller, member of the Workers’ Group, will be debated at the EESC’s plenary in Brussels on 31 May.

Click here to watch the livestream. Live coverage will begin at 14:30 with the debate on AI at 16:30 CEST.

You can also download and read referral related documents about the consequences of artificial intelligence on the (digital) single market, production, consumption, employment and society here.

From the EESC website:

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies offer the potential for creating new and innovative solutions to improve people’s lives, grow the economy, and address challenges in health and wellbeing, climate change, safety and security. Like any disruptive technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex societal challenges in several areas such as labour, safety, privacy, ethics, skills and so on.

A broad approach towards AI, covering all its effects (good and bad) on society as a whole, is crucial. Especially in a time where developments are accelerating.”

Musculoskeletal robots may one day assist the growth of replacement tissue grafts for transplant patients.

Researchers at the University of Oxford are beginning to investigate a potentially groundbreaking method for replacing damaged musculoskeletal tissues (such as muscle, tendons and ligaments), which remain unmet needs in regenerative medicine. The proposed approach, which involves growing tissue grafts directly on humanoid musculoskeletal robots, could result in healthier, stronger tissue prior to transplantation on a patient.

Tissue engineering aims to produce biological tissue in vitro by a combination of cells, scaffolds, or matrices to support new tissue growth and bioreactors. Bioreactors are growth chambers where tissue constructs are grown and provide some form of mechanical stimulation. Mechanical stimulation in vitro needs to closely mimic normal stresses experienced in the body – twists and strains – to produce functional tissues, which is needed for cellular development. However, most bioreactors in operation remain unsophisticated with regard to the way they replicate those stresses.

Musculoskeletal humanoid robots, which aim to copy human joints, provide better range of motion and multiple degrees of freedom compared to the linear actuators used in basic bioreactors. They could provide realistic physical exercises for nurturing growing tendons, ligaments, and even cartilage. Researchers could then monitor how tissue is forming through the use of various sensors embedded in the humanoid bioreactor system.

Dr Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy of the Oxford Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, who is leading the study in collaboration with Professor Andrew Carr, said: “The nature of this research is to combine tissue engineering strategies and state-of-the-art robotics systems, in particular, musculoskeletal humanoid robots.”

“Existing tissue engineering bioreactors mostly subject constructs to uniaxial stresses, such as tension or compression. However, these stresses experienced poorly represent what they would undergo in vivo, as movements are involved with three-dimensions. This may prevent achieving the right phenotype and form the right extracellular matrix, resulting in engineered constructs that may lack functionality. Improved bioreactor systems are needed.”

Ineffective tissue transplants pose economic, social, and health problems with musculoskeletal tissue disorders and injuries becoming a growing concern among ageing populations—pain and lack of mobility being the two most common problems due to tissue failure. Further exploration may lead to future cross-disciplinary applications in medicine and robotics.

The full paper, Growing tissue grafts on humanoid robots: A future strategy in regenerative medicine?,’ can be read in the journal Science Robotics.

If you liked this article, you can read more about health and robotics below:

• Sports-concussion dilemma: Robot doctors could be the answer in rural America
• Open Bionics partners with NHS for feasibility study to develop hands for amputees
• Catalia Health uses social robots to improve health outcomes
• Putting humanoid robots in contact with their environment

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

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.

Over 800 leading scientists, companies, and policymakers working in robotics will convene at the European Robotics Forum (#ERF2017) in Edinburgh, 22-24 March. This year’s theme is “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 features keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, and plenty of robots roaming the exhibit floor. Visitors may encounter a humanoid from Pal Robotics, a bartender robot from KUKA, Shadow’s human-like hands, or the latest state-of-the-art robots from European research. Success stories from Horizon 2020, the European Union’s framework programme for research and innovation, and FP7 European projects will be on display.

Dr Cécile Huet Deputy Head of European Commission Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Unit, said, “A set of EU projects will demonstrate the broad impact of the EU funding programme in robotics: from progress in foundational research in robot learning, to in touch sensing for a new dimension in intuitive Human-Robot cooperation, to inspection in the oil-and-gas industry, security, care, manufacturing for SMEs, or the vast applications enabled by the progress in drones autonomous navigation.”

Reinhard Lafrenz, Secretary General of euRobotics said, “A rise in sales in robotics is driving the industry forward, and it’s not just benefiting companies who sell robots, but also SMEs and larger industries that use robots to increase their productivity and adopt new ways of thinking about their business. Around 80 robotics start-ups were created last year in Europe, which is truly remarkable. At euRobotics, we nurture the robotics industry ecosystem in Europe; keep an eye out for the Tech Transfer award and the Entrepreneurship award we’ll be giving out at ERF.”

Projects presented will include:

• FUTURA – Focused Ultrasound Therapy Using Robotic Approaches
• PETROBOT – Use cases for inspection robots opening up the oil-, gas- and petrochemical markets
• sFly – Swarm of Micro Flying Robots
• SMErobotics – The European Robotics Initiative for Strengthening the Competitiveness of SMEs in Manufacturing by Integrating aspects of Cognitive Systems
• STRANDS – Spatio-Temporal Representations and Activities For Cognitive Control in Long-Term Scenarios
• WEARHAP – WEARable HAPtics for Humans and Robots
• Xperience – Robots Bootstrapped through Learning from Experience

The increased use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in robotics will be highlighted in two keynote presentations. Raia Hadsell, Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind will focus on deep learning, and strategies to make robots that can continuously learn and improve over time. Stan Boland, CEO of FiveAI, will talk about his company’s aim to accelerate the arrival of fully autonomous vehicles.

Professor David Lane, ERF2017 General Chair and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, said,  “We’re delighted this year to have two invited keynotes of outstanding quality and relevance from the UK, representing both research and disruptive industrial application of robotics and artificial intelligence. EURobotics and its members are committed to the innovation that translates technology from research to new products and services. New industries are being created, with robotics providing the essential arms, legs and sensors that bring big data and artificial intelligence out of the laboratory and into the real world.”

Throughout ERF2017, emphasis will be given to the impact of robots on society and the economy. Keith Brown MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Jobs and Fair Work, will open the event, said, “The European Robotics Forum provides an opportunity for Scotland to showcase our world-leading research and expertise in robotics, artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction. This event will shine a light on some of the outstanding developments being pioneered and demonstrates Scotland’s vital role in this globally significant area.”

In discussing robots and society, Dr Patricia A. Vargas, ERF2017 General Chair and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University, said, “As robots gradually move to our homes and workplace, we must make sure they are fully ethical. A potential morality code for robots should include human responsibilities, and take into account how humans can interact with robots in a safe way. The European Robotics Forum is the ideal place to drive these discussions.”

Ultimately, the forum aims to understand how robots can benefit small and medium-sized businesses, and how links between industry and academia can be improved to better exploit the strength of European robotics and AI research. As robots start leaving the lab to enter our home and work environments, it becomes increasingly important to understand how they will best work alongside human co-workers and users. Issues of policy, the law, and ethics will be debated during dedicated workshops.

Dr Katrin Lohan, General Chair and Deputy Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University said, “It is important how to integrate robotics into the workflow so that it support and not disrupt the human workers. The potential of natural interaction interfaces and non-verbal communication cues needs to be further explored. The synergies of robots and human workers could make all the difference for small and medium-sized businesses to discuss this the European Robotics Forum is the ideal place as it joins industry and academia community. ”

______________________

Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Keith Brown, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work, Member of the Scottish Parliament
Raia Hadsell, Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind
Stan Boland, CEO of FiveAI

The full programme can be found here.

Dates: 22 – 24 March
Venue: EICC, The Exchange, 150 Morrison St., EH3 8EE Edinburgh, Scotland
Participants: 800+ participants expected
Website: http://www.erf2017.eu/

Press Passes:
Journalists may request free press badges, or support with interviews, by emailing publicity.chairs@erf2017.eu. Please see the website for additional information.

Organisers
The European Robotics Forum is organised by euRobotics under SPARC, the Public-Private partnership for Robotics in Europe. This year’s conference is hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

About euRobotics and SPARC
euRobotics is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels with the objective to make robotics beneficial for Europe’s economy and society.  With more than 250 member organisations, euRobotics also provides the European Robotics Community with a legal entity to engage in a public/private partnership with the European Commission, named SPARC.

SPARC, the public-private partnership (PPP) between the European Commission and euRobotics, is a European initiative to maintain and extend Europe’s leadership in civilian robotics. Its aim is to strategically position European robotics in the world thereby securing major benefits for the European economy and the society at large.

SPARC is the largest research and innovation programme in civilian robotics in the world, with 700 million euro in funding from the European Commission between 2014 to 2020, which is tripled by European industry to yield a total investment of 2.1 billion euro. SPARC will stimulate an ever more vibrant and effective robotics community that collaborates in the successful development of technical transfer and commercial exploitation.

www.eu-robotics.net
www.eu-robotics.net/sparc

Press contact details:

Sabine Hauert, Robohub President
Sabine.Hauert@robohub.org

OR

Kassie Perlongo, Managing Editor
Kassie.Perlongo@robohub.org

Yesterday, the UK government announced their budget plans to invest in robotics, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, and faster broadband. The spending commitments include:

• £16m to create a 5G hub to trial the forthcoming mobile data technology. In particular, the government wants there to better mobile network coverage over the country’s roads and railway lines
• £200m to support local “full-fibre” broadband network projects that are designed to bring in further private sector investment
• £270m towards disruptive technologies to put the UK “at the forefront” including cutting-edge artificial intelligence and robotics systems that will operate in extreme and hazardous environments, including off-shore energy, nuclear energy, space and deep mining; batteries for the next generation of electric vehicles; and biotech.
• Investing £300 million to further develop the UK’s research talent, including through creating an additional 1,000 PhD places.

The entire budget can be reviewed here.

Several experts in the robotics community agree that progress is shifting in the right direction, however, more needs to happen if the UK is to remain competitive in the robotics sector:

Prof Paul Newman, Founder, Oxbotica:

“The UK understand the very real positive impact that RAS [robotics & autonomous systems] will have on our society from now, of all time. It continues to see the big picture and today’s announcement by the Chancellor is a clear indication of that. We can have better roads, cleaner cities, healthier oceans and bodies, safer skies, deeper mines, better jobs and more opportunity. That’s what machines are for.”

Dr Graeme Smith, CEO, Oxbotica:

“We are at a real inflection point in the development of autonomous technology. The UK has a number of nascent world class companies in the area of self-driving vehicles, which have a huge potential to change the world, whilst creating jobs and producing exportable UK goods and services. We have a head start and now we need to take advantage of it.” [from FT]

Dominic Keen, Founder of Britbots:

“Some of the great robotics companies of the future are being launched by British entrepreneurs and the support announced in today’s budget will to strengthen their impact and global competitiveness.  We’re currently seeing strong appetite from private investors to back locally-grown robotics businesses and this money will help bring even more interest in this space”

Dr Rob Buckingham, Director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s RACE robotics centre:

“This is welcome news for the many research organisations developing robotics applications. As a leading UK robotics research group specialising in extreme and challenging environments, we welcome the allocation of significant funding in this field as part of the Government’s evolving Industrial Strategy. RACE and the rest of the robotics R&D sector are looking forward to working with industry to fully utilise this funding.”

Dr Sabine Hauert, University of Bristol:

“Robotics and AI is set to be a driving force in increasing productivity, but also in solving societal and environmental challenges. It’s opening new frontiers in off-shore and nuclear energy, space and deep mining. Investment from government will be key in helping the UK stay at the forefront of this field.” [from BBC]

Prof Noel Sharkey, University of Sheffield:

“We lost our best machine learning group to Amazon just recently. The money means there will be more resources for universities, which may help them retain their staff. But it’s not nearly enough for all of the disruptive technologies being developed in the UK. The government says it want this to be the leading robotics country in the world, but Google and others are spending far more, so it’s ultimately chicken feed by comparison.” [from BBC]

Prof Alan Winfield, UWE Bristol:

“I’m pleased by the additional funding, and, in fact, my group is a partner in a new £4.6M EPSRC grant to develop robots for nuclear decommissioning announced last week.

“I, like many others, was pleased to hear more money going into robotics and AI research, but I was disappointed – though completely unsurprised – to see nothing about how to restructure the economy to deal with the consequences of increasing research into and use of robots and AI. Hammond’s blunder on the relationship of productivity to wages – and it can’t be seen as anything other than a blunder – means that he doesn’t even seem to appreciate that there is a problem.

The truth is that increased automation means fewer jobs and lower wages and this needs to be addressed with some concrete measures. There will be benefits to society with increased automation, but we need to start thinking now (and taking action now) to ensure that those benefits aren’t solely economic gain for the already-wealthy. The ‘robot dividend’ needs to be shared across society, as it can have far-reaching consequences beyond economics: improving our quality of life, our standard of living, education, health and accessibility.”

Frank Tobe, Editor at The Robot Report:

“America has the American Manufacturing Initiative which, in 2015, was expanded to establish Fraunhofer-like research facilities around the US (on university campuses) that focus on particular aspects of the science of manufacturing.

Robotics were given $50 million of the $500 million for the initiative and one of the research facilities was to focus on robotics. Under the initiative, efforts from the SBIR, NSF, NASA and DoD/DARPA were to be coordinated in their disbursement of fundings for science in robotics. None of these fundings comes anywhere close to the coordinated funding programs and P-P-Ps found in the EU, Korea and Japan, nor the top-down incentivized directives of China’s 5-year plans. Essentially American robotic funding is (and has been) predominantly entrepreneurial with token support from the government.

In the new Trump Administration, there is no indication of any direction nor continuation (funding) of what little existing programs we have. At a NY Times editorial board sit-down with Trump after his election, he was quoted as saying that “Robotics is becoming very big and we’re going to do that. We’re going to have more factories. We can’t lose 70,000 factories. Just can’t do it. We’re going to start making things.” Thus far there is no followup to those statements nor has Trump hired replacements for the top executives at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, all of which are presently vacant.”

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And finally, a few comments from the business sector on Twitter:

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Robotics Innovation Facilities, or RIFs, are robotic labs, financed via the ECHORD++ project by the European Commission. They offer access to high-tech robotic equipment and expertise at zero risk; using the RIF is not only free of charge, they also safeguard their users’ intellectual property. Companies, institutions, and organisations can apply to use RIFs.

Currently, there are three RIFs within the ECHORD++ project located in Italy, France, and the UK. Two 360° Lab Tours are now available, the last video will be released late March.

RIF@Bristol, United Kingdom

The Bristol Robotics Laboratory is a joint lab of the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol) and the University of Bristol, and is the largest academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research in the UK. View the 360° Lab Tour:

RIF@Pisa-Peccioli, Italy

The BioRobotics Institute is a research park created by Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna to house the research activities of outdoor and indoor settings. It is located at the Polo Sant’Anna Valdera, near Pisa. View the 360° Lab Tour:

RIF@Paris-Saclay, France

The Interactive Robotics Laboratory in Saclay is located within the premises of CEA LIST, about 20km southwestern from Paris. The 360° Lab Tour video will be available late March.

About ECHORD++ (The European Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development)

The aim of ECHORD++ is to strengthen the knowledge transfer between scientific research, industry and users in robotics and to stimulate their cooperation. The EU-funded project with a runtime of five years (2013 – 2018) funds small-scale research projects called experiments, Public end-user Driven Technological Innovation (PDTI) and established Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs), open labs which provide state-of-the-art robotic hardware and software as well as scientific and technical support.

More information on the RIFs is available on the ECHORD++ website.

Credit: Boston Dynamics

Handle is a research robot standing 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the other quadruped and biped robots Boston Dynamics’ build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

Watch below:

Two wonderful moments: tackling stairs like it’s no one’s business and the appropriate jumping freeze frame at the end.

Cassie is an advanced legged mobility robot. Created by Oregon State University spin-off, Agility Robotics, Cassie’s engineering team has big plans for this robot to assist rescuers in disaster relief and go the extra mile when delivering packages right to our doors, potentially helping to revolutionise the retail market.

If bipedal robots are not especially efficient why do we keep trying to build them? Simply put, these types of robots are useful in navigating around in human-created environments. Just watching the, albeit, slightly hilarious, compilation video from the DARPA competition makes you realise that creating efficient mobility in robotics is incredibly difficult; indeed, it’s nowhere near good enough. Cassie’s design may change how we utilise mobility in robots in the future.

Jonathan Hurst, Associate Professor of Robotics and CTO at Agility Robotics, says that robots with legs are able to “go to a lot of places that wheels cannot.” In doing so, this “will be key to deliveries that can be made 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by a fleet of autonomous vans that pull up to your curb and an onboard robot that delivers to your doorstep.”

Photo: Agility Robotics

What makes this robot different? To start, they added more motors giving it 3 degrees of freedom in the hip joints, allowing human-like movement. It can sit down, squat, and crouch. Powered ankles provide support for Cassie to stand in place and balance or walk on uneven ground. Although bipedal, the legs weren’t specifically designed to look like an animal (although it does look quite ostrich-like), the team simply wanted the robot to be robust, agile, and efficient. The particular issue of motors working against one another prompted some extensive theoretical research, to create the mathematical frameworks needed to solve the problem. In the video below, one of the co-founders pushes his body weight onto Cassie yet it still manages to keep its balance effortlessly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWVci9qS7Ds

Many of the components used in Cassie were custom made, including its lithium-ion battery pack. The robot can take a pretty good fall without breaking, and, its half the weight and much more capable than earlier robots developed at OSU.

“Our previous robot, ATRIAS, had motors that would work against either other, which was inefficient,” Hurst said. “With Cassie, we’ve fixed this problem and added steering, feet, and a sealed system, so it will work outdoors in the rain and snow as we continue with our controller testing.”

Agility Robotics already has several of its first customers and will license some technologies first developed at OSU. They plan to build on this scientific foundation in their product research and development. One leading application for this mobility technology is package delivery, as we mentioned earlier, but it could also be used in military applications like scouting into unknown spaces and search and rescue by enabling live, real-time sensing with human-like mobility.

What legal rights should a robot have? In this video, Polo Sant’Anna Valdera, one of the leading research centres for robotics, raises this important question. Innovation raises new legal and ethical issues. The European Parliament wants to address these issues so robotics continues to flourish in 2017.

You may also be interested in:

• RoboLaw: Why and how to regulate robotics
• Law-abiding robots? What should the legal status of robots be?
• Hot topic: Regulating robotics
• Robots Podcast #128: Ethical, social and legal issues, with Pericle Salvini
• EU needs to take the lead on regulating robots and artificial intelligence, MEPs suggest

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.

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.

Forbes “30 under 30″ list celebrates the achievements of 30 game changers in 20 different industries — 600 in total — of the brightest young entrepreneurs and innovators who are challenging conventional wisdom. The list highlights some interesting trends in robotics, AI, intelligence energy storage, and automation. Connected/smart consumer goods, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence are big ticket items for 2017. Forbes also unveiled its second annual “30 Under 30 Europe” list, featuring 300 young innovators, covering 10 categories. The entire list can be viewed here. 

You may also recognise some of these bright young minds from their contributions on Robohub:

Smart design / connected devices / energy storage

• Amrit Robbins & Anthony Diamond, Cofounders, Axiom Exergy
  An industry first, the Refrigeration Battery makes it possible for supermarkets, cold-storage facilities, and food processors to intelligently store and deploy refrigeration. The battery plugs into your refrigeration system, just like a display case. It stores thermal energy produced by your refrigeration system during off-peak hours and deploys it during on-peak hours. As a result, electricity demand is reduced by up to 40 percent during peak hours—a significant cost saving.
• Paige Kassalen, Engineer, Solar Impulse
  Kassalen was an electrical engineer on the ground crew of Solar Impulse, the first airplane to circle the globe powered by the sun. At 22, Paige was the youngest member and only American on the ground crew.
• Justin Barozie, Associate Manager of Manufacturing Engineering, Battery, Tesla Motors
  Barozie is lead manufacturing engineer for Tesla’s energy products and Model 3 battery modules. He leads a team of nine manufacturing engineers, and has designed and delivered more than 50 mass-production, multi-million dollar state-of-the-art automation projects.
• Nishant Garg & Jimit Shah, Cofounders, Flow Labs
  Flow Labs has devised a small wireless-enabled sensor that attaches to water pipes and measures the amount of water flowing through them — ideal for homes and businesses looking for ways to save water and save money.
• Ravi Kurani, CEO, Sutro
  Kurani has built a sensor connected app that monitors the health of your swimming pool, notifies you if maintenance is required and orders pool supplies. Automating water system maintenance saves chemicals, water and energy.
• Maanasa Mendu, student, Mason High school
  On family visits to India, Mendu saw the challenges of energy scarcity. A high school freshman in Ohio, she created a piezoelectric “leaf” device that harvests energy from sun, wind and rain. She’s working to commercialize her device.
• Colin Touhey, CEO, Pvilion
  Touhey’s Pvilion makes flexible photovoltaic solar products. He has led the development of solar-powered fabric for Google, built a sustainable 6,000-square-foot building on the roof of Carnegie Hall, and devised self-erecting robotic Army shelters.
• Richard Wang, CEO, Cuberg
  Wang’s Cuberg is developing a safer and more energy-dense battery to improve the affordability and range of electric vehicles. Wang studied battery degradation mechanisms Tesla Motors and has a PhD in materials science from Stanford.

Manufacturing & Industry

• Rhae Adams, Director of Energy & Mining, Planetary Resources
  Adams is helping to develop a market for mined materials from asteroids including water and industrial metals. Planetary Resources has raised more than $30 million in 2016 for its asteroid prospecting system.
• Chad Ammon, Cofounder, Inovdrone
  INOVA Drone is a TechStars company developing small drones for commercial and governmental applications, including public safety and critical infrastructure inspection. It was one of the first companies in Qualcomm’s Robotics Accelerator. Before founding the company, Amonn was one of the lead drone designers at 3D Robotics.
• Jeremy Blum, Head of Electrical Engineering, Shaper Tools
  Blum is head of electrical engineering at Shaper, a company looking to improve old-fashioned power tools with cutting-edge technology like machine vision. Prior to Shaper, Blum worked as a lead electrical system engineer at GoogleX, and did prototyping on Google Glass. He’s a prolific inventor, with three patents, and hosts a popular YouTube channel where he shows off his electrical engineering projects.
• Stefanie Mueller, Assistant Professor, MIT
  Mueller’s work focuses on the computer science of “physical data,” such as that involved in 3D printing. She leads the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL, which works on hardware and software that advance personal fabrication technologies, and is the conference General Co-Chair at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computational Fabrication 2017.
• Anurag Garg, CEO, Dattus
  Garg is cofounder and CEO of Dattus, an industrial Internet of things company that transforms old manufacturing facilities into smarter factories.
• Hasier Larrea, CEO, Ori [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Larrea is the founder of Ori (which derives its name from origami), a robotic, flexible furniture system for small apartments. The system allows for a number of configurations, from bedroom to office to living room, and back again, all controlled from one control panel.
• Ladislas de Toldi and Marine Couteau, cofounders, Leka [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Couteau and de Toldi’s company, Leka, has a solution for helping children with special needs engage with their education. They manufacture a multi-sensory robotic ball with lights, sounds and vibrations to engage children while tracking their progress.
• Marco Mascorro, Cofounder, Fellow Robots [featured on Robohub HERE]
  Retailers regularly struggle with inventory shrinkage and discrepancies in pricing and product that can cost a small fortune. Mascorro, who previously worked on robotics for BMW Group, cofounded Fellow Robots, which is developing robots that can help retailers with inventory management by scanning the shelves and keeping tabs on product. The company is rolling out its robots at American home improvement chain Lowe’s and Japanese electronics retailer Yamada Denki, among others.

Healthcare / wearables / brain-computer interfaces

• Alessandro Babini, Cofounder, Humon
  Alessandro’s company is building a wearable device that measures oxygen levels in muscles to determine how hard athletes should push themselves, when muscles have recovered and when training can resume. The company has received $1 million in funding.
• Huanyu Cheng, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  Cheng researches biologically-inspired electronics for use in robotics, biomedicine and energy. One of his more notable projects was being part of the research team that developed wearable electronic tattoos that can eventually dissolve in the human body.
• Prarthna Desai, Operations, Zipline
  Desai left her Harvard grad school program to use drones to get medication to people in the developing world. In her operations role at Zipline, she is leading efforts to integrate the medicine-delivery-by-drone service with the healthcare system in Rwanda.
• Nicole Moskowitz & Jessica Traver, Cofounders, IntuiTap Medical
  IntuiTap wants to streamline the process by using imaging technology, pressure sensors and predictive analytics not only to make spinal taps more accurate, but also to make the process more pleasant for patients.
• Param Shah and Alex Matthews, Cofounders, Fusiform
  Shah and Mathews are co-founders of Fusiform, which is building an infrastructure for custom fabrication for orthopedic devices. Rather than cast a patient with plaster, Fusiform has developed a way to take a 3D scan and design the orthopedics digitally.
• Lydia Kisley, Postdoc fellow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  Kisley focuses on using new technologies to take pictures of chemicals at a nanoscale level in order to better manipulate them. A few projects: showing that proteins clump in the presence of gold nanoparticles only when they are in low concentrations; and new efforts to understand how drug molecules fit together – an effort that could allow scientists to find the porous spaces in any nanotech particle.
• Ashwin Pushpala, Founder, Sano
  Pushpala thinks traditional preventive health is “fundamentally wrong” in its approach.His company, Sano, combines personalized health with a Fitbit approach. It has raised $18.75 million to develop a wearable sensor that, instead of counting steps, assesses things like blood sugar so users can see the impact of dietary changes on individual bodies.
• Niko Skievaski, Cofounder, Redox
  One of the biggest problems in healthcare: getting data from one place to another. Skievaski’s company, Redox, has raised $4 million to make an API that works as a bridge between healthcare data and the software that uses it, translating patients’ records across platforms. So far the company has partnered with more than 1,000 software vendors.
• Daniel Szafir, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
  Szafir’s research sounds almost like science fiction. It’s focused on human-robot interaction and human-computer interaction. Specifically, he’s developing ways to improve the performance of small flying robots so they can operate by themselves. He’s also worked on better ways to interact with computers, including brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality.
• TowerView Health, Cofounders
  After he was diagnosed with cancer, Nick Valilis was surprised by how difficult it was to remember to take his pills. So he teamed up with his college roommates to found TowerView Health, which sells a smart pill box with custom trays of medication.

Big data / machine learning / algorithms

• Michelle Atallah, PhD candidate, Stanford University
  Atallah is designing algorithms to identify mechanisms in tumor-driven immunosuppression as part of her PhD candidacy in the Cancer Biology program at Stanford. Utilizing a new technology called Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging, she is collecting data about immune cells within tumors in order to better apply therapeutic intervention.
• Xi Chen, Assistant Professor, New York University
  Chen studies machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and operations research. These lead to new learning methods and approaches for big data analysis, with applications for business, medicine, and more.
• Korin Reid, Senior Data Scientist, McKesson
  Reid uses big data technologies to scale predictive modeling and machine learning on billions of healthcare records, reaching over 160 million people. Named one of McKesson’s 2016 Distinguished Technologists, she also mentors youth in STEM skills.
• Justin Solomon, Assistant Professor, MIT
  Solomon researches geometric problems in computer graphics, computer vision and machine learning. Co-inventor of three patents, he also spent five years doing computer research for Pixar, developing new algorithms for image processing in movies.
• Katharina Volz, Founder, Razor, Inc.
  Volz’s company, OccamzRazor, hopes to speed up the processes behind scientific research by addressing information fragmentation and data validation. This, in turn, should make collaboration easier and help build an institutional knowledge base. The company is running pilots at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and biotech companies.

Artificial intelligence and VR

• Marta Jamrozik & Misha Laskin, Cofounders, Claire
  Marta Jamrozik and Misha Laskin built an artificially intelligent chatbot that allows millions of users to provide product feedback in real-time. This helps companies get valuable pre-launch insight, and identify their bestsellers and worst performers early on — which is why Kohl’s, Alex And Ani, Rebecca Minkoff, and Rent the Runway are all Claire customers.
• Scott Britton, Cofounder, Troops.ai
  Britton cofounded Troops.ai with the goal of making work easier for sales teams by providing them with an artificially intelligent assistant that helps them perform their CRM functions in messaging interfaces like Slack.
• Ben Aneesh & Natalie Gray, Cofounders, Cover
  The entrepreneurs behind fashion app Stylekick are back with a less sexy but very useful startup. Mobile app Cover allows you to buy insurance as easily as you’d take a photo: send a snap of your jewelry, car, or home and get a quote.
• Beatty & Scranton, Cofounders, IrisVR
  Beatty and Scranton cofounded New York City-based IrisVR in 2014 to help companies transition their assets to virtual reality (VR) by making software to easily create, share and interact with 3D models on all major VR platforms, like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
• Arruda and Dall’Oglio and Ovbiagele, Cofounders, ROSS intelligence.
  A legal research engine that uses artificial intelligence to automate legal processes making them more efficient and less expensive. Leveraging IBM’s Watson, ROSS uses natural language processing to search and provide legal information from citations to full legal briefs.

Read the entire list here.

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.

Launched in 2014, Open Bionics is a start-up company based at the University of the West of England’s Bristol Robotics Lab that develops low-cost bionic hands for amputees, using 3D scanning and printing technology.

Samantha Payne, Chief Operating Officer at Open Bionics said: “We’re thrilled to be a part of this development contract with the NHS. We see the public health service as a key customer channel in our development so it’s great to be testing out these channels to deliver to amputees.”

“We’re excited and nervous,” she added. “We think this will be the first 3D printed wearable device to receive CE marking and medical certification. It’ll certainly be the first 3D printed artificial limb to be offered through a public health care system so we’re looking forward to learning a lot.”

The partnership involves a feasibility study with the NHS through SBRI Healthcare to see if Open Bionics can provide a multi-grip bionic hand to amputees for significantly less money, possibly saving the NHS millions of pounds. Using 3D printed technology, Open Bionics can produce robotic hands quickly and inexpensively — in a matter of days to create and costing only several thousand dollars. A big improvement considering hospital-grade myoelectric hands and limbs can cost up to $100,000 and in some cases don’t fit well.

From all of us at Robohub, congrats to Sam and her extraordinary team! We’re looking forward to your future developments.

To learn more about robotic advancements in prosthetics, you may also want to read:

• Living with a prosthesis that learns: A case-study in translational medicine
• A bionic model is born
• Robots Podcast #215: Human 2.0: Exoskeletons and Orthoses, with Hugh Herr
• HAPTIX program underway to create prosthetic hand system that moves and feels like a real hand
• Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics

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CES 2017 has come and gone. As a first-timer in attendance, I couldn’t help but marvel at the featured robots and all robotics related gadgets, toys, start-ups, wearables, and AI coming to market. I’ll conduct a post-event wrap up shortly, but in the meantime, please enjoy a selection of images seen on the floor.

Divergent 3D supercar

The connected home and car, Alexa and Ford working in partnership to streamline and connect your life.

LG’s Helper Guide Robot to help you find your gate and remind you when your plane is scheduled.

LG’s Hub Robot helper that can control your smart home devices, play music, and offer advice on commuting times.

Home helper robot in the Chinese market.

Denso’s robotics cafe made sure everyone got through the day well caffeinated at CES.

Jade Le Maître with HEASY hospitality robot, from Hease robotics.

Kuri home robot saying hello!

Meet the dream team of women at Mayfield Robotics who made Kuri possible! (left to right: Kaijen Hsiao, CTO; Stephanie Lee, Engineer; and Sarah Osentoski, COO).

TechCrunch speaking with Mike Beebe from Mayfield Robotics.

Silas Adekunle presents his gaming robot, MekaMon.

VR gaming at the Dell experience.

Robart AI solutions in your home.

In the startup area, robot teacher to help children learn.

WowWee chip robot dog toy.

Robotic toys and gear are getting better every year! Need some gift ideas for that special robot geek in your life? We put together some favourite gift ideas, from stocking stuffers, amazing robot toys, and fingers-crossed wish list items. There’s something on this list for every budget! Don’t see what you’re looking for? Check out our gift list from last year and browse from our recommendations of 20 great books to hook kids and teens on robotics. Happy shopping!

Holiday gear
Toys, games, and fun
Kits and learning bits

Holiday gear

Star Trek TOS Ships Holiday Sweater

$38.99 at ThinkGeek

Sock It To Me TRIFECTA OF ALL THAT IS AWESOME Womens Knee Socks

$12.00 at Amazon

Shiny Christmas

$14.99 at TeeFury

Star Wars: AT-AT Hoth Unisex Knitted Christmas Sweater/Jumper

£36.99 at Merchoid.

Circuit Board Custom Christmas Stocking (Personalized – Single Sided)

$19.95 (plus shipping) at Amazon

Who’s Sweater

$14.99 at TeeFury

Toys, games, and fun

MekaMon

A single costs $279 and a two-pack is $499. Mekamon: There are 500 limited edition MekaMon that can be pre-ordered today and will ship in January (after Christmas surprise?). Later in 2017 there will be more products released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEo7D2fwJ3Q

3DOODLER PEN – 3D printing pen

$49 – 249 at 3Doodler

Sphero SPRK+

$129.99 at Sphero+

Kamigami robots

$99 – 149 at Kamigami

Robotis Play

$89.95 at Robotis

UBTECH Alpha 2 Intelligent Robot Voice System With HD 8MP Camera

£1926 at HobbyWOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbXtyklmaBc

BB-8 App-Enabled Droid || Built by Sphero

$129.99 at Sphero

Propel’s Star Wars drone

pre-order: $299.99 at Propel

Wonder Workshop Dash Robot

$124.99 on Amazon

Amazon Echo

Currently the number one best seller and the price has dropped:

$139.99 at Amazon.

Anki Cozmo Robot

Pretty much the hottest toy item this year. Unfortunately, the last time I checked it seems to be sold out in most places!

$179.99 at Anki

Kits and learning bits

Little Bits Gizmo & Gadgets

$199.95 at Amazon or their website.

SparkFun Inventor’s Kit – Special Edition

$89.95 at SparkFun

MaKey MaKey Classic and Makey Makey GO – An invention kit for everyone

Classic: $ 49.95 – 59.95

GO: $19.95

Elegoo UNO Project Smart Robot Car Kit with Four-wheel Drives

£67.99 on Amazon

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.

Politics and robotics – are we going to see a shift in 2017?

Big news in November. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock or actively avoiding the news, Donald Trump is now president-elect. Since the November 8th election, there has been speculation regarding future plans in the manufacturing sector, retaining jobs in the US, and what exactly that will entail for the robotics industry.

In his interview with the NY Times, Mr Trump outlined his plans to introduce big tax cuts to tempt companies (such as Apple) to relocate their manufacturing processes to the US. Asked whether he was worried that companies that already manufacture in the US might replace human workers with robots, he answered that he wanted to bring robot manufacturing back to the US, creating more jobs.

On Robohub, Frank Tobe (Editor for The Robot Report) summarised Trump’s thoughts on robotics from the NY Times interview – and outlined why it would be good if the president-elect does what he said he would do regarding robots and robotics.

Others voiced concerns that Trump may revert many of the National Security policies introduced by President Obama, which could mean a lift of the ban on torture and a change in the rules designed to minimise civilian casualties in drone strikes.

Trump’s policies on drone warfare are also not very clear. How, and if, the new president will use drone strikes is still a matter of much debate, and while he has spoken about plans to use more surveillance drones on the borders to Mexico and Canada how he will implement these programmes remains to be seen.

New US robotics roadmap

Just prior to the election a group of researchers led by Henrik I. Christensen, director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, released the third edition of the US Robotics Roadmap. The document, first published in 2009 then later updated in 2013, outlines how researchers can solve societal problems with robotics in a wide range of areas, including healthcare, consumer services and defense.

The 2016 edition of the Robotics Roadmap highlights the need for better policy frameworks to help guide the integration of robots into everyday life and calls for more research into human-robot interaction, as well as, more education in STEM subjects.

One area the report notes is particularly promising is home companion robots for the elderly to enable people to stay in their homes. Another important research field, according to the report, will be the development of more flexible robotic systems for manufacturing. Read the full report here.

With their report, the researchers hope to showcase the potential of robotics to help society and to guide the new president’s policies regarding robotics.

But the Robotics Roadmap is not the only robotics related report Mr Trump needs to consider. A recent publication by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission examined the progress China is making in the development of unmanned industrial, service and military robotics systems – and highlighted opportunities for collaboration, but also concerns that China’s quick progress could erode the US military advantage.

Others are worried that increased use of robots in manufacturing will mean job losses for workers in the US, but a report by the International Federation of Robotics showed that while in the last six years US industry installed 135,000 new industrial robots, mainly in the automotive sector, at the same time 230,000 more jobs opened up in this sector. So the robotics industry is booming and it job prospects in manufacturing. For manufacturing-focused Mr Trump this must be welcome news.

Robotics startup community

In the start-up community there was quite a bit of exciting news. Two start-ups managed to raise vital funds for their projects: Zoox secured $50 million for their self-driving cars and Zipline raised $25 million to deliver medical supplies by drones. Australia’s Fastbrick Robotics walked away with the WA Innovator of the Year award and a $75,000 prize for their bricklaying robot Hadrian X – which could take up to eight weeks off in home building time. You may recognize this start-up: Robots podcast spoke with Mark Pivoc from FastBrick about their Hadrian the bricklaying robot — listen here.

November also wrapped up Robot Launch 2016 with Silicon Valley Robotics. Winners include Robohub readers pick UniExo, a Ukrainian startup developing low-cost modular exoskeletons, and grand prize winner Swiss company ViDi systems, a company that develops deep learning vision software. The judges praised the grand prize winner for their “great early traction, impressive customers, strong team and large market potential”, beating stiff competition from other start-ups competitors.

European Robotics Week 2016

European Robotics Week (ERW) took place from 18 – 27 November with participants taking part in record-breaking numbers, over 830 events in 30 countries across Europe. A full list of all the activities can be found here. ERW was conceived with the desire of the European Robotics community to bring robotics research and development closer to the public and to build the future Robotics Society. Many more than 400,000 people across Europe have been part of ERW in its six years of existence.

The night of Friday the 18^th November saw the opening of the Hack for Healthy Ageing, an elderly-centric, 48-hour hackathon, tackling this societal challenge. The winner was a group inventing the dog collar Snoop which is able to remind the dog’s owner to feed or walk the dog. “The idea stemmed from the fact that dogs are the perfect animal for active elderlies. Snoop combines the familiarity of a household pet with robotic sensors, connectivity and data processing to introduce lifestyle improvement technologies to the elderly and initiate positive changes in their behaviour”, explains Jurjen Söhne, co-organiser of the central event and founder of the Hackitarians.

Read our report from two of the featured panels here.

Drone updates

Drone industry news this November varied across industries. Near Earth Autonomy secured a prestigious NASA award to develop technologies for safer drone operation with a view to support NASA’s plans to use drones in National Airspace. Less positive news came from Alphabet Inc’s ‘Project Wing’ which axed its planned partnership with coffee giant Starbucks Corp. over disagreements about access to Starbuck’s customer data.

Drones are not all about flying; if you’re one of the people more interested in underwater drones Dan Gettinger has updated an in-depth report on what’s happening in this particular field.

Multidisciplinary robotics and collaborations

Robotics isn’t a field that’s completely independent and separate from other disciplines. In fact, roboticists often find themselves working with people from all kinds of fields, such as biology, policy, medicine and agriculture.

The complex nature of robot swarm systems is a perfect example of a robotics field that requires collaboration across disciplines. But this isn’t always easy. Chih-Chun Chen and Nathan Crilly from Cambridge University are looking to make collaboration easier by developing a primer and attempting to explain difficult concepts from swarm robotics to others who wish to engage with the field.

Another area with collaboration is in agricultural robotics. From driverless tractors to soil sensors and monitoring drones – the robotic applications in agriculture need to work in real-life farming context and require input from engineers, biologists and farmers.

Deep learning and AI

When people think of artificial intelligence they often think of sci-fi movies and shows, such as Ex Machina, Her or Westworld. And as a result they might be forgiven if they believe that intelligent, sentient machines are almost here.  Most people familiar with the real world of robotics know that this isn’t the case. We’re making great progress, but we’re still far off a sentient machine – on Robohub, Arend Hintze took a look at the different kinds of AI Arend Hintze took a look at the different kinds of AI and where we’re at right now.

For instance, as humans, we effortlessly understand our surroundings and we automatically predict what will happen next – we’re able to know that the car on the road will drive past for example, or that a soccer player running towards a ball will kick it next. Machines currently aren’t very good at predicting how scenes will change and objects interact. At MIT, researchers are working to resolve this problem and published a paper this month describing their work using deep learning with predictive videos.

And while we watch and wait what will happen next in the world of AI, it’ll be important to consider the ethical implications of sentient machines.

Research

Meanwhile, in laboratories across the globe, researchers are hard at work developing new and exciting robotic technologies. Researchers at Tufts University are investigating the need for machines to be able to ‘disobey’ orders by humans and how humans react when they do.

A team at Utrecht University in the Netherlands reported a breakthrough communication system which uses a brain-computer interface and successfully enabled a paralyzed woman with locked-in syndrome to share her thoughts.

And finally, the University of Michigan announced that it will be providing access to its automated cars and real-world testing facility for developers of self-driving vehicle technologies to accelerate progress in the field.

Good news

In closing for our Digest, on November 30th Onalytica announced the top 100 influencers and brands in robotics – with Robohub not only featuring on the list, but coming in 10th – meaning we’re one of the top 10 robotics-focused blogs! Thanks to all our contributors and readers for keeping us going!

Upcoming events for December 2016 – January 2017

ROBIO 2016- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics: December 3-7, Qingdao, China.

NIPS 2016: December 5-10, Barcelona, Spain.

IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things: 12-14 December, Reston, VA.

SIMPAR 2016 – IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots: December 13-16, San Francisco, CA.

RoboUniverse San Diego 2016: December 13- 15, San Diego, CA.

CES: January 5-8, 2017, Las Vegas, NV.

Yesterday, Onalytica released a report “Robotics: Top 100 Influencers and their Brands” that analysed interactions between robotics influencers and brands on Twitter over a period of 90 days. What they found was pretty interesting:

“… we analysed over 551K tweets mentioning the keywords: “Robotics OR Robotic from 18th September – 18th November 2016. We then identified the top 100 most influential brands and individuals leading the discussion on Twitter. What we discovered was a very engaged community, with much discussion between individuals and brands.”

We’re proud to say that Robohub, as a brand, was ranked #10 out of 100. That makes us one of the top robotics-focused blogs. Not too shabby for a non-profit organisation that started 4 years ago!

Source: Onalytica

Contributing Robohub experts were also on the list, namely: Ryan Calo, Andra Keay, Sammy Payne, Sabine Hauert, and Hallie Siegel.

You can download the full report for free here, which describes their PageRank methodology, data, and rankings.

In this Roundtable edition, we asked our experts: When it comes to public perceptions of robotics and AI, what are your pet peeves? Are there things you wish people would listen to a little more closely? Check out the answers below.

This Roundtable features Sabine Hauert, Audrow Nash, AJung Moon, Samantha Payne, Frank Tobe, Kassie Perlongo, and John Payne, all providing a range of perspectives across the board from academia, research, business, and the general public.

You just can’t get away from it. As the field of robotics makes incremental steps towards better understanding and evolving more useful technology, headlines and hackneyed hype creep back onto the front pages. You’ve heard it all before: Will robots take over? Robots will take your job. The Terminator could become real soon enough.

Loyal Robohub readers know that our mission is to promote high-quality, balanced, robotics related news, research, opinions, and everything in between, on what’s happening globally as this discipline continues to challenge the boundaries of technology. We look to experts for the vast majority of our content and provide scientists a platform to discuss their research in their words, without media spin.

It can be stressful and upsetting when a carefully crafted piece, interview, or discussion is misquoted, or “spun” a certain way. Hours of carefully constructed work gone, and the focus is diverted from research towards damage control. Or perhaps the time spent planning an informative lecture on how robotics can be instrumental to fill gaps in health care (for example, in nursing) is undone when a two-way dialogue devolves into anxiety and ranting about how robots are stealing jobs from people.

Our experts share their thoughts:

Sabine, President of Robohub

“Number one – hype: The portrayal of robotics and AI in the media often does not correspond to the reality of what is achievable today. There is too much science fiction, too few facts.

Number two- opportunism: Robotics is used as a sales gimmick to do everything from raise money for institutions that would like to prevent a robopocalypse, to sell conferences, media, and products that are often disconnected from robotics.

Number three – difficulty: It’s still so hard to make robots that are useful outside of the lab. I always feel things should be moving quicker, yet we are still solving one problem at a time in a laboratory setting. As an example, I recently tried to purchase off-the-shelf aerial robots to do swarm work, assuming the technology had advanced enough since my PhD, 6 years ago, for this to work out of the box. Wrong – the problems were exactly the same as when I was studying this, even though the single robot platforms are much better than before. Note that the difficulty also makes this field so exciting to research!

Number four – lack of diversity: There aren’t enough of women and minorities in robotics, although we’re working on it!”

AJung Moon, PhD Student at CARIS lab

“I agree with Sabine. And I’d also like to add that there’s too much emphasis on the job question. There’s plenty of other societal impact, issues of normative nature that are all very much part of pushing the robotics technologies forward.”

John Payne, Agricultural Robotics

“My pet peeve is the widespread focus on designing machines to do the obvious things, what people already do pretty well and don’t mind doing, when the greatest benefits to be had from robotics are likely to come from designing machines for less obvious needed tasks that are currently neglected, because people either can’t or won’t do them.

Take for example the maintenance of waterways to bring erosion under control.  It involves careful placement of materials like cobblestones, tightly together, so they won’t wash away with the next heavy rain.  You could use a backhoe for this, but it would be tedious, since you want to use stones that are small enough so they don’t pack the soil and so enough light penetrates between them for grass to grow through the cracks.  A few people are willing to do this work, but not nearly enough to address the problem.”

Samantha Payne, COO Open Bionics

“Hype. Robotics is used a buzzword used by marketers and journalists to make eye-catching copy. Often they’re not interested in reporting the actual way a robotic device works, they want to paint a simple picture and hint at possible implications for the future. It’s annoying because journalists are medium and should report accurate information about technology. We often hear people expecting terminator bionic arms because of stories they’ve read reporting with inaccurate details. Key point is the number of ‘mind-controlled’ bionic arms reported in the news when they all rely on muscle sensing.

Jobs. ‘When will the robots take all our jobs? What will happen when the robots take our jobs?’ I don’t know why we jump to these assumptions. Robots are tools, here to help, here to work alongside us and make life easier. This topic wouldn’t be a pet peeve if the topic was measured and not always presented in terms of extremist outcomes.”

Frank Tobe, Editor for The Robot Report

“Media spin is my pet peeve. If you look at what is happening in AI, the real thing is deep learning and in particular the ability for software to write new software. When you see that process work, it’s really a combination of threatening, fascinating, and disruptive. Unfortunately, the media defines it as threatening because it makes for better headlines.”

Audrow Nash, Director Robots Podcast

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding that comes from ignorance. If you implement anything using state of the art machine learning techniques, you’ll see how far away we are from making anything generally intelligent. A lot of these misconceptions may come from when we listen to people we perceive as being really smart, and they speak outside of their confidences. This is more of a general frustration for me, I suppose. I’m not saying everyone should become an expert on machine learning, or take a course on machines learning, of course, we need to specialise to a certain extent to get anywhere as a society. But what I do think is that we should chose our experts carefully.”

Kassie Perlongo, Managing Editor of Robohub

“I have two. My biggest is that whenever something new and exciting in robotics comes out it can be disheartening to see the stories accompanied with Terminator images. We’ve had enough of this and I think it’s unfair that new advancements should accompany a doom-and-gloom mental image. The second is that whenever I speak to people who are interested in robotics, but not directly involved, they think their opinion doesn’t matter. That’s not true at all! Robotics is crossing into so many different areas, it’s good to remember even if you’re not directly involved in the research you can be an informed citizen and offer productive contributions, or thoughtful commentary.”

Do you feel we covered a number of the aspects? Anything else you would you add? Let us know in the comments!

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

• 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’?
• Robohub roundtable: Robotics and space exploration

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.

Robo-Politics?

In October, the presidential race for the White House entered its final stretch that will culminate on Tuesday, November 8th (no doubt, to the relief of many Americans). While the majority of the political spotlight is on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, current “geek-in-chief” President Barack Obama sat with MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito to discuss hopes, goals, and challenges of artificial intelligence in society. The conversation, covered by Wired magazine, focussed on cyber security, autonomous cars, and even Star Trek – as well as the roles government, academia, industry and the public should be part of in developing, using, and regulating AI.

In a fitting move with Obama’s interview, the White House published two reports outlining the Administration’s thoughts on the future of AI. Rather than pushing for broad regulation, the reports explore opportunities for AI to better society if developers pay “thoughtful attention to its potential and to managing its risks.”

They call upon practitioners to ensure their technologies are “open, transparent, and understandable; that they can work effectively with people; and that their operation will remain consistent with human values and aspirations.” The government’s role is described as a provider of vital funding, as well as a user of technologies who must ensure AI benefits the people, and the economy is ethical, fair and safe.

But only a few weeks after the reports were published, an article in the New York Times flagged that the Defense Department is spending billions of US dollars on AI technology that is at the “center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power.” The Pentagon argues this is essential to compete with rivaling nations who are also investing in AI technology, but many fear that the government’s call to use AI for good won’t apply to the autonomous weapons being built for the military.

It’s a brave new ‘Westworld’

Those who followed the sci-fi drama ‘Person of Interest’, which sadly concluded in June, may find solace in the new alternative sci-fi show HBO’s ‘Westworld’. Many of the people involved in writing and producing Westworld were also behind Person of Interest (Jonathan Nolan, JJ Abrams, Bryan Burk), and this science fiction thriller isn’t afraid to ask big philosophical questions about ourselves and robotics, pushing the limits of how we define humanity.

Can artificially intelligent humanoids become sentient? If so, what would happen? And how would we – the real humans – compare? Research fellow at Sheffield Robotics Michael Szollosy, summed up his thoughts about Westworld, wondering whether this new series will live up to what it promises in episode 1. Many have also taken to YouTube and Reddit to discuss each episode in detail.

Meanwhile in today’s world, DeepMind’s latest AI (the Differentiable Neural Computer or DNC) learned how to read the London tube map. We all know programmes like Google maps and Citymapper can do this already, but the way the DNC tackles the problem is a little more impressive because it has no prior knowledge of the tube network. By separating processing and memory DeepMind have come up with a system that can learn what it has to do to solve a problem – and remember it for later.

Mixing it up – diversity in robotics research

At the Wall Street Journal WJSDLive conference in Laguna Beach this month, two leading ladies in robotics, Maja Matarić and Cynthia Breazeal, made a strong case for diversity in the research field, arguing that robotics is for everyone and therefore needs to engage everyone.

Their remarks came just a few days after Ada Lovelace Day on the 11th of October, a day that celebrates the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths around the world. Joining in the celebrations, Robohub published 25 women in robotics you need to know about, our annual list showcasing women working in research, development, and commercialization of robotics to celebrate women leading the way in future developments within this field. And a new international community, Women in Robotics, was launched, giving female roboticists the opportunity to network locally and globally, and improve the visibility of women in the field.

Diversity is not just about gender but also about different backgrounds and so events, such as the innovation tour offered by Silicon Valley Robotics to its global partners, brought together global leaders to foster greater understanding and looking at ways to further international collaboration and partnerships.

Space robotics heats up in Europe

Meanwhile in Europe, the European Space Agency (ESA) is analysing what went wrong when its Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), Schiaparelli, apparently crashed on Mars. The BBC reported that data so far indicate that the descent systems did not work as they should have. But ESA experts in Darmstadt, Germany, are reviewing what happened exactly.

On a more positive note, the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of the ESA reported that a joint experiment with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Micro Air Vehicles lab (MAV-lab) of Delft University of Technology on the ISS was successful. In the experiment, a small done learned to ‘see’ distances with just one ‘eye’ (camera) using a self-supervised learning algorithm. This kind of advanced AI could in future be used to develop truly autonomous space systems.

Driving technology forward (or back) with autonomous cars

Back on Earth, autonomous cars made the headlines once again this October. Tesla announced that it would build and sell its cars with fully autonomous driving technology, but also said that drivers wouldn’t actually be able to use the technology yet. The company plans to calibrate and improve the system before actually enabling it – so those eager to try out this new piece of tech may have to wait just a little while longer.

Meanwhile, small start-up company comma.ai made a complete U-turn on starting sales of their self-driving system designed as an add-on to Hondas and some Acuras after receiving a stern letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The letter points out a number of issues with the suggested technology that applies beyond comma.ai’s proposed system and could also pose problems for bigger companies, such as Tesla, as they plan to build self-driving technology.

A solution to at least some of the issues currently facing developers of autonomous cars could be the technology highlighted by Carol Reiley in the MIT Technology Review. She explains how deep learning could help cars see and make sense of their surroundings (including moving cars, buses, and people as well as fixed items such as lamp posts), enabling them to be more responsive and flexible in the ever-changing context of road traffic  – possibly even making a more ‘human’ driving experience.

Funding and acquisitions

Also in October, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) released its industrial and service robotics reports, predicting double-digit growth for the rest of this decade, and investments in agricultural tech hit a record $25 billion in 2015. So it’s looking good in the world of robot business. No wonder then that Member of European Parliament Mady Delvaux believes that robots will positively impact the economy.

Also this month, CB Insights named the seven most active robotics investors over the last 5 years – among them Eclipse Ventures, Lux, and Intel Capital. And among the big business news in October were Samsung’s acquisition of Viv and Zymergen’s venture capital injection of $130 million to produce industrial chemicals.

But in the world of drone funding, a report revealed a change in the kinds of ventures getting funded – moving away from funding construction of drones and towards funding for applications. Many of the companies that are now being funded use DJI drones to develop their applications, prompting Franke Tobe to discuss  how DJI beat its competition in the drone manufacturing market.

Know your drones

Sticking with the topic of drones, Amazon’s and other companies’ plans to use delivery drones in the near future took a hit when expert aviation safety advisors revealed that they didn’t expect drone deliveries to take off until 2020.

Don’t expect Uber’s latest idea to become reality any time soon either. Thecab hailing service is exploring whether they could use autonomous drone people carriers to get customers from A to B. As of right now, US regulations don’t permit autonomous flight for delivery drones, let alone massive drones that carry people in them. As reported, Uber would need to “develop an entirely new type of aircraft and have it approved by a country’s aviation authority.” Too futuristic? Maybe.

Back in the real world of drones today at a military base in Florida, the Department of Defence was hosting its annual two-week Black Dart event, where developers can show off their latest anti-drone tech. Much of the event happens in secret, but John Knefel from Inverse allowed us a rare look behind the scenes of Black Dart.

And finally, a film shot entirely by autonomous, pre-programmed drones premiered at the London Film Festival in the UK this month.

Meanwhile in the lab

Researchers in labs around the world were also keeping busy this October with a number of exciting and fascinating stories making the headlines. In Bristol, UK, engineers are using swarms of robots to help fight cancer; a team from EPFL in Switzerland developed a self-healing stiffness fibre; researchers at the University of California, Riverside, designed a highly reliable navigation system that doesn’t need GPS; in Italy, roboticists are working on precision agriculture robots to help farmers; and finally, engineers in Japan have developed a robot that can sweat.

And in a new European project, led by the Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience (LOCEN), researchers are planning to use open-ended learning in autonomous robots to solve increasingly challenging tasks.

Robot Launch

It’s that time of year again when Robot Launch announces its shortlist of interesting, ambitious start-ups competing for the prestigious Robot Launch awards. Every week in November you’ll be able to ‘meet’ a number of short-listed start-ups and cast your vote. And Robohub readers can also vote for their very own Robohub Readers’ Pick. Winners will be announced at the end of November.

And finally…

Ever wondered how many quadcopters it would take to screw in a lightbulb? The answer may surprise you.

Upcoming events in November-December

Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS): November 6-9, Natural History Museum, London UK.

GCC Manufacturing Excellence and Technology Summit: November 14-15, Dubai, U.A.E.

Humanoids 2016 – IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics: November 15-17, Cancun, Mexico.

European Robotics Week 2016: November 18-22, Amsterdam, Marine Base.

ROBIO 2016- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics: December 3-7, Qingdao, China.

SIMPAR 2016 – IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots: December 13-16, San Francisco, CA.

Source: RoboGabby/YouTube

Gabby has five goals to achieve this school year. The first goal sounds like any other young middle schooler: get straight As in her classes. Goal number two: get accepted into her school’s robotics team, followed closely by number three: to own her first VEX IQ Robotics kit. That’s when you may realize, Gabby is an extraordinary middle schooler!

Gabby, or “RoboGabby,” is a budding science communicator and roboticist, aspiring to be a role model and STEM ambassador. She began creating tutorial videos to encourage girls to give robotics a try, born from her own experience witnessing the lack of girls involved with STEM at her school, and specifically after an all-girls robotics camp was cancelled due to lack of sign-ups.

“My dad found other robotics camps for me to attend, but there were only about 4 girls who participated, in total, of all the camps I attended — including myself,” she said. “I constantly asked my parents ‘why aren’t more girls involved in STEM? My dad suggested that I try to inspire other girls to get involved. I was very nervous when I first started and scared that people would not like my videos. But everyone online and at my school seems to love my videos,” she said.

Gabby was introduced to programming and robotics by her dad at the age of 8 and enjoyed being able to “explore what a robot can do through code.” She loves working with her hands, having now been to several computer and technology camps, as well as, three robotics camps.

“I started out learning the Python programming language, and I did not quite understand why he was making me learn it.” she said. “Eventually, I started doing fun things with code and began to like it. From 8 to 10 years old, I learned how to program in Python, a little bit of Java, and learned block programming with Scratch. When I was 10 years old, I purchased my first robotic arm using my own Christmas money.”

“I now consider myself a role model, because I am getting recognition from girls and boys all the time,” she said. “I am still making tutorial videos with Robot Virtual Worlds, by Robomatter, and I’m working on making tutorial videos for another robot simulation software called CoderZ. I also plan on making Java programming tutorial videos in the future.”

“I still do not have an actual physical robot, but I’m hoping to get a Vex Programming or Dual Control Starter Kit some day and start making tutorial videos with that, as well. I’ve discovered that being different was something cool, rather than something to be embarrassed about,” she said.

From all of us here at Robohub, we look forward to seeing more of your creative tutorials Gabby! Keep creating!

You can follow RoboGabby’s tutorials on her YouTube channel, or on any of her social media channels, like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.

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

• Work, play and STEM: How robotics will bridge the gap
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2016
• Motivational posters with a clever robotics twist
• Teaching the teachers: Study focuses on how teachers perceive educational robots in classrooms
• Adjust how you learn and quickly pick up robotics programming

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

Editor’s note:

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we’re reposting our latest ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. Over the last four years, Robohub has featured 100 inspiring women leading future developments within robotics, with plenty more for the years to come!

Our next edition will be released on Ada Lovelace Day.

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled our fourth annual ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. That’s 100 women who have been featured to date. We’re showcasing women working in research, development, and commercialization of robotics. The role models are diverse, ranging from emeritus to early career stage. Even though the total number of women in robotics is still relatively small, we’re celebrating that women are leading the way within this field.

Role models are important. Countess Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer and an extraordinary mathematician, faced an uphill battle in the days when women were not encouraged to pursue a career in science. Fast forward 200 years, there are still not enough women in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). One key reason is clear: a severe lack of visible female role models. Women in STEM need to be equally represented at conferences, keynotes, magazine covers, or stories about technology. Although this is starting to change, it’s not happening quick enough.

To address that challenge, Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 in response to the lack of visibility of women in STEM (not the lack of women). It’s an international day celebrating the achievements of women in STEM. Everyone is encouraged to add an event or a story to the Finding Ada site.

A recent study from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford found that visibility was the missing factor preventing women from moving into leadership positions within their organization. This has a cumulative effect on career progression and earnings. These findings support an earlier study with the Anita Borg Institute, who interviewed 1800 women in technology companies. According to the authors, women reported being less likely than male counterparts to be assigned to high visibility projects, which in turn, has a negative impact on their chances for future promotions.

We’d like to think that this annual list is opening eyes from within the robotics community, and beyond. One of our 2015 listees Spring Berman wrote to Robohub and said, “I’m so grateful for the mention in Robohub’s 25 women in robotics!  The president of ASU saw the article about it in our university news, and now he wants to visit our lab in mid-April to see our work. Hopefully we can get together a cool demo to show him!”

Without further ado, here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2016. Enjoy!

Nora Ayanian Assistant Professor and Director of the ACT lab at USC Nora Ayanian’s research focuses on creating end-to-end solutions for multirobot coordination, to enable people to use teams of robots. Ayanian is the recipient of the 2016 Okawa Foundation Research Grant and is an MIT Technology Review TR25 Top Innovator.

Catherine Ball Founder & CEO, Remote Research Ranges / Managing Director, Elemental Strategy Catherine Ball won Telstra Queensland Business Woman of Year (2015) for her drone work. She is an environmental scientist, author and now the CEO of an Australian startup working with the application of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) across remote communities, schools, industry, and citizen scientists. Dr. Ball is leading the call for discussions around the ethics of spatial data, aka geo-ethics.

Margarita Chli SNF Assistant Professor at ETHZ, Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh Margarita Chli is an SNF Assistant Professor leading the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Previously, she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and before that, she was at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) of ETH Zurich, where she held the post of Deputy Director, Senior Researcher and Lecturer. Her research interest is in Computer Vision for Robotics, focusing on real-time perception for micro-aerial vehicles. Over the years, she’s been involved in a number of European projects (AEROWORKS, SHERPA, myCopter,sFly).

Vivian Chu Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology Vivian Chu is a Graduate Student Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology, studying perception, AI and cognition, and interaction. Chu’s paper on “Using Robotic Exploratory Procedures to Learn the Meaning of Haptic Adjectives” was awarded the Best Cognitive Robotics Paper at ICRA 2013.

Mady Delvaux European Parliament MEP Mady Delvaux (S&D, LU) is a Member of the European Parliament. Alongside an extensive draft report on “Civil Law Rules on Robotics,” Delvaux proposes the creation of a legal framework for automation and ways to promote European industry.

Bernardine Dias Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University M. Bernardine Dias, Ph.D., served as a member of the faculty at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, primarily affiliated with the Field Robotics Center where Dias developed Trader Bots, a robotic task allocation system. Dias is currently founder and CEO of Diyunu Consulting, dedicated to bringing robotics to marginalized populations.

Sanja Dogramadzi Associate Professor / Reader in Robotics at UWE Bristol Sanja Dogramadzi develops medical and assistive robots at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research focuses on the multidisciplinary use of robotics technologies in healthcare settings. Dogramadzi has been awarded funding in the range of £2.4M since 2009, currently supervising/managing a team of 15 post-doctoral and doctoral researchers and junior lecturers. Her team won the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award at ICRA 2016.

Anca Dragan Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Anca Dragan runs the InterACT Lab at Berkeley, which focusses on algorithms for human-robot interaction. The lab works across different applications, from assistive robots, to manufacturing, to autonomous cars, and draws from optimal control, planning, estimation, learning, and cognitive science. Dragan also helped fund and servee on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

Kimberley Hambuchen Human Robotic Systems Deputy Project Manager at NASA Johnson Space Center Kimberly Hambuchen is an expert in developing novel methods for remote supervision of space robots over intermediate time delays. She has proven the validity of these methods through multiple NASA analog field tests with robots, including the JSC Space Exploration Vehicles, Centaur platforms and Robonaut 2, the ATHLETE rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Ames Research Center K-10s. She was the User Interface Lead for JSC’s entry into the DARPA Robotics Challenge, using her expertise in remote supervision of robots to guide operator interface development for the DRC robot, Valkyrie. She currently oversees NASA JSC’s participation in the collaboration of the Robot Operations Portal (ROP), which seeks to provide non-expert, web-based interfaces for operating remote robots unavailable to the greater public.

Kaijen Hsiao CTO at Mayfield Robotics Kaijen Hsiao has been leading innovations in robotics, artificial intelligence, and hardware/software design and development for over 15 years. Hsiao has a history of working on robotics projects that turn into well-funded startup enterprises in the US & Europe. Some of her credits include designing components for agricultural robots, home security and companion robots, service robots, and assistive robots for people with disabilities. Kaijen has worked on high-profile projects at Willow Garage, MIT (CSAIL and Media Lab), Bosch, iRobot, and now Mayfield Robotics.

M.Ani Hsieh Associate Professor at Drexel University Ani Hsieh focuses on bridging the gap between geophysical fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and control, and distributed multi-agent robotic systems. Hsieh currently works in the Scalable Autonomous System Laboratory at Drexel University. She is a 2011 ONR Summer Faculty Fellow, the recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, and the recipient of of 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

Wendy Ju Executive Director and Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Center for Design Research at Stanford University and California College of the Arts Wendy Ju works in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces, highlighting the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

Angelica Lim Making Pepper Sociable / Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics Angelica Lim builds artificial intelligence for robots to interact with humans in a smart, fun, way by combining neuroscience, machine learning, and developmental psychology to model emotion. She currently works as a Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics in Paris, France. Her previous creations include robots that play music in a human ensemble, speak and gesture with expression, and recognize emotion in movement.

Gudrun Litzenberger General Secretary and Director of Statistics at International Federation of Robotics Gudrun Litzenberger is on the Executive Board of the International Federation of Robotics, the global not-for-profit industry association for robotics formed in 1987. The purpose of IFR is to promote and strengthen the robotics industry worldwide, to protect its business interests, to cause public awareness about robotics technologies and to deal with other matters of relevance to its members. Litzenberger also oversees the collection and interpretation of market relevant data for world-wide surveys, studies, statistics and other data on the world-wide use of robotics.

Rosanna Myers Cofounder of Carbon Robotics Rosanna Myers is cofounder of Carbon Robotics, building Katia – a Kick-Ass Trainable Intelligent Arm. Myers is a self-taught software developer with a background in building innovative high tech startups. Carbon Robotics was recently named as one of the Top 50 “most influential public & private companies in the global robotics industry” by the Robotics Business Review.

Erin Rapacki Business Development at Pneubotics Erin Rapacki is a product storyteller with robotics experience across academia and industry, in both the Boston and Silicon Valley hotspots, with projects ranging from flexible logistics, supply chain, FDA approval, consumer products, military casualty extraction, assistive devices, robotic tele-presence, and warehousing. Rapacki finds ways to catalyze the robotics market by identifying unique value propositions for new robotic products, and by creating community and cooperation between companies and thought leaders.

Carol Reiley Co-founder / President at drive.ai Carol Reiley is the cofounder and President of drive.ai, an artificial intelligence self-driving car startup. Reiley is also a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in robotics and computer vision, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow researching strategies for improving human and robotic interaction. Her previous works include underwater and industrial robotics at Santa Clara University, space satellites at Lockheed Martin, people detection at GE Research, and clinical development engineering as a consultant at Intuitive Surgical.

Simone Schürle Research Fellow at Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, MIT Simone Schürle studies Micro- and Nanosystems Technologies with a focus on cancer research. In 2005 she completed a research stay at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in the field of Bio Mechanical Engineering. She gained further practical experience during internships in R&D and marketing in Nano Imprint Lithography at SUSS MicroTec in Munich, Germany. Schürle was awarded the ETH Zurich Medal for distinguished doctoral thesis in 2014 for her PhD work on the magnetic control of microrobots. She was then awared a fellowship to go to MIT working at the interface between robotics and nanomedicine. Schürle was recently awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship to work on merging wireless control of magnetic nanosystems with the engineering potential of synthetic biology. She is also co-founder of the microrobotics company MagnebotiX.

Katia Sycara Research Professor, Director of Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University / University of Aberdeen Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and holds the Sixth Century Chair (part time) in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. She is also the Director of the Laboratory for Agents Technology and Semantic Web Technologies at CMU, researching multi-agent systems. Prof. Sycara is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She is also the recipient of the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2005. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Greek National Center of Scientific Research “Demokritos” Information Technology Division.

Adriana Tapus Vice Provost / Professor at INTERFACES Graduate School, UPSay / ENSTA-ParisTech Adriana Tapus researches the personalization of assistive robots, with a focus on life-long learning and adaptive robot behaviors. Tapus develops different models of personalized interaction applied to health-related applications, cooperation and driving tasks. Tapus currently has a HEROES grant for “Haptic Emotional Robot Experiments with Sensitive Body” as well as a DGA Fellowship, and is active as an academic journal editor, conference program chair and general chair.

Stefanie Tellex Assistant Professor at Brown University Stefanie Tellex works on constructing robots that seamlessly use natural language to communicate with humans, by applying probabilistic methods, corpus-based training, and decision theory to develop interactive robotic systems that can understand and generate natural language. Tellex has published at SIGIR, HRI, RSS, AAAI, IROS, and ICMI, winning Best Student Paper at SIGIR and ICMI and was named one of IEEE Spectrum’s AI’s 10 to Watch. Stefanie won the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University and recently won a NASA Early Career Faculty Award for Human-Robot Collaboration on Complex tasks.

Patricia Vargas Associate Professor / Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University, UK Patricia Vargas is the Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Science (MACS) at the Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is particularly interested in: Human-Robot Interaction, Evolutionary Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience and Memory Modelling, Biologically-inspired algorithms in general, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Artificial Endocrine Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, and Learning Classifier Systems, and Data Mining and Machine Learning.

Hanna Wallach Senior Researcher / Assistant Professor / Cofounder at Microsoft Research / UMass Amherst / Women in Machine Learning Hanna Wallach develops machine learning methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. Her work is inherently interdisciplinary: she collaborates with political scientists, sociologists, and journalists to understand how organizations work by analyzing publicly available interaction data, such as email networks, document collections, press releases, meeting transcripts, and news articles. She also studies issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency as they relate to machine learning. Wallach’s research has had broad impact in machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. In 2014, she was named one of Glamour magazine’s “35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry”; in 2015, she was elected to the International Machine Learning Society’s Board of Trustees; and in 2016, she was named co-winner of the 2016 Borg Early Career Award. Hanna is committed to increasing diversity and has worked for over a decade to address the underrepresentation of women in computing. She co-founded the annual Women in Machine Learning Workshop, which is now in its eleventh year.

Lisa Winter Product Design Engineer at Mattel, Inc. A roboticist since childhood, Lisa Winter has 20 years experience designing and building robots. She was crowned the Robot Wars Middleweight World Champion and has been in many publications, including MAKE magazine. In 2012, Winter cofounded smart toy company Robot 11, building smart wearables and Bluetooth connected toys. She has been inventing and rapid prototyping connected devices since the beginning of the IoT movement. Winter is currently the Product Design Engineer at Mattel, developing a smart wearable baby monitor. At night she builds combat robots for ABC’s BattleBots, and dreams of ways to help animals and the environment.

Rosalie Wang Assistant Professor at Intelligent and Assistive Technology and Systems Lab, University of Toronto / Toronto Rehabilitative Institute Rosalie Wang’s focus is on developing and clinically evaluating intelligent systems for rehabilitation, and as clinical Occupational Therapist, she brings a unique approach to evaluating user-centered and context-relevant design for robotic assistive technologies.

Do you have a story to tell about how visibility helped your robotics career? Would you like to nominate someone for next year’s list? Do you want to help organize Women in Robotics events or join the Women in Robotics network? We’d love to hear from you. You can ask for an invitation to the Women in Robotics network here. Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013, 2014, and 2015), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at info [at] robohub.org.

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

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2015)
• Five women robotics experts from Silicon Valley share their stories
• Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound

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

Oxbotica testing Selenium. Credit: Oxbotica/YouTube

Oxbotica, a UK technology company with a focus on mobile robotics and driverless vehicles, has created Selenium, an autonomous software system acting similar to a ‘brain’ for a vehicle. Selenium can work in pedestrianised environments as well as roads and motorways, and is not reliant on GPS to operate – meaning it can transition between indoor and outdoor settings, overground or underground. The system has been developed to be “vehicle agnostic” and can be applied to cars, self-driving pods (e.g. for campuses and airports), and warehouse truck fleets.

The software developed by Oxbotica’s team of scientists, mathematicians and engineers gives any vehicle an awareness of where it is, what surrounds it, and how it should move to complete a task.

Selenium’s system uses patented algorithms giving vehicles a next generation level of intelligence to autonomously perform a range of mobility tasks, including motion control, braking, calibration, navigation, static and dynamic obstacle detection. One of the main focusses at the moment is low-speed autonomous transport, using low-cost vision sensors, explains Dirk Gorissen, Senior Engineer at Oxbotica.

“While you are travelling at a fairly low speed, it is a much more unstructured and unpredictable environment than, say, a highway. There is a lot of talk of level 4 or even 5 autonomy but, to our knowledge, nobody has reached this reliably yet. Even Google with their millions of autonomously driven miles still needs a safety driver. There is a lot of work to get there, and we have our own roadmaps in place that will enable our customers to be class leading,” he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfTst2AV6M8

“Robotics outside of simulation is difficult and getting fully reliable solutions that work anytime and any place are where many others have failed,” said Gorissen. “Many components need to work together seamlessly in order to create a safe, reliable system. Particularly in the context of autonomous vehicles where you have to deal with human behaviour from other drivers and road users. In our launch projects in Greenwich and Milton Keynes, we are working in pedestrianised areas and working amongst pedestrians, cyclists, cats and dogs, as well as, regular road users.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Io1JMalSo

Selenium is set to be deployed at a series of autonomy trials where Oxbotica is the sole supplier of autonomy software, including the £8 million GATEway project in Greenwich and the LUTZ Pathfinder self-driving pod project in Milton Keynes. The company is also working with manufacturers in a broad spectrum of mobile autonomy domains, driverless cars.

“A key strength of the Oxford heritage is our focus on systems that learn from experience. The more often a vehicle traverses a given route the more it learns about its environment and how it changes over time (rain, fog, snow, road works, etc.),” said Gorissen. “We don’t believe in building a single all-encompassing model of the world or that autonomy is a binary on/off switch that is either active all the time or never. Rather we believe in a system that will offer autonomy as and when it is confident enough to do so. Scaling can then be achieved by sharing experiences of the world between vehicles.”

“We are very carefully focused – intentionally – on the things that we do well. For the applications and domains we have set our sights on we are fully on track and you will be able to see our Selenium autonomous control system running public demos of pods around Greenwich in East London from early 2017,” he said.

Oxbotica is a spin-off from Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group.

If you liked this article, you may also want to read:

• What to expect from autonomous cars
• Autonomous truck platoons travel across Europe
• How much can customers test robocars?
• The inevitability of the global march toward self-driving vehicles
• Two New Year’s resolutions for developers of automated vehicles
• comma.ai’s neural network car and new technology in robocars

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.

AI100: Big announcement in artificial intelligence

September was all about AI and lots of big, exciting announcements that’ll keep us on our toes for years to come. Eric Horvitz at Stanford University invited leading thinkers to join him to begin a 100-year effort to study the effects of artificial intelligence on society. The group plans to produce a report every five years to track the impact of AI on all aspects of work, family and social life – for a century! The studies are expected to develop assessments that provide expert-informed guidance for directions in AI research, development, systems design, as well as programs and policies to help ensure that these systems broadly benefit individuals and society. Soon, it’s set to penetrate nearly every area of our lives, with experts trying to forecast what AI will look like in 2030. Despite the abundance of AI research, we don’t quite have all the answers to the complex ethical and legal questions that arise from the use of such technologies.

You can read and download the 2016 report here.

This kind of work will be vital, as ‘clever software’ has become more and more mainstream, with programmes like Siri, and as AI is starting to be used routinely by many big companies now.

It’s a good thing, then, that a group of the world’s largest tech companies, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are coming together to create a standard of ethics for the creation of artificial intelligence, to ensure AI is developed to benefit and not harm humans.

Law of Robotics, 2.0

And while the tech and internet giants are just about to start their discussions on ethical issues in robotics, the British Standards Institute just issued an official version of what constitutes ‘good behaviour’ in robots, based on the original rules formulated by Isaac Asimov. The guidance outlines potential hazards researchers and makers of robots need to consider in their work – including sci-fi-like scenarios, such as robots capable of deception and robot addiction.

Conducting dangerous work? Get help from a robot

Meanwhile, in the real world, robots are being used for good – taking on dangerous, sometimes deadly jobs, and keeping humans from harm. In the recent bomb attacks in New York, police used robots to disarm explosive devices they found, one which did detonate. And Los Angeles county police used a robot to disarm a suspected murderer, ending a six-hour stand-off.

Elsewhere, a robot-human disaster response team (TRADR) were able to assist the post-earthquake response in Amatrice, Italy. The robots helped to create models of two churches that were at risk of collapsing, to provide vital information about how to support the structures to prevent additional damage.

Cybathlon, advancements in healthcare robotics

As mentioned briefly in last month’s digest, 2016 is the year for the very first Cybathlon – an event for people with disabilities to compete against each other with the help of assistive technologies. In the lead-up to the event, we conducted a Robohub Roundtable discussion with our experts and discussed current and future advancements in prosthetics. And our Robots Podcast explored the use of exoskeletons for rehabilitation and people with disabilities.

But robotic technologies have applications in healthcare beyond rehab and disability support, of course, and this was once again demonstrated when surgeons in the UK performed the first robotic eye surgery. “With a robotic system, we open up a whole new chapter of eye operations that currently cannot be performed”, said Professor Robert MacLaren of John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford in the Guardian.

And in another world first, researchers at the University of California Irvine reported on a first-of-its-kind study that allowed chronically ill children to use telepresence robots to attend school. The research found that children felt more socially connected and academically involved when they could go to school virtually. Although more research is needed before telepresence in schools can become mainstream, the success of the study shows great promise for those unable to attend school due to chronic illness or disability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJNGY5FJ24

Robots in the water

Outside of the healthcare field, robots are currently being used in several bioconservation efforts across the globe – and not just on land. We mentioned the use of airborne drones for conservation before, and now autonomous robot sailboats are also sailing the Bering Sea counting fish and monitoring seals, all without the need for a sailor on board.

And in Amsterdam, researchers from MIT and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) are developing a fleet of autonomous boats for the city’s canals. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, the US Navy is providing funding to develop more versatile underwater vehicles by studying the locomotion of fish.

Robots on the farm

In agriculture, the use of robots has the potential to transform how farming works – and there’s a whole bunch of technologies already available, including GPS, precision irrigation, and autonomous grain cart systems. The latest addition to this arsenal of farming tech may be a driverless tractor, which had its first outing at the annual Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. It’s only a concept vehicle at this stage, but its makers are hoping that it will become commercially available in the not too distant future.

Drone watch: Responsible drone journalism

September also marked the long awaited unveiling of GoPro’s Karma – a new stabilized drone kit and system that’ll allow users to capture engaging, wide-angle video from the air. “This is a game-changing experience that we will continue to build upon”, said Nicholas Woodman, founder and CEO of GoPro, at the unveiling ceremony. And for those with a smaller budget keen to produce content for social media, there’s the latest drone from Yuneec, which allows users to take 4K video and 13MP images.

With the growing capability of drones to take high quality pictures and video, it’s no wonder that many journalists are among the first to take the test to become licensed drone pilots. But being able to fly a drone isn’t quite the same as good drone journalism, so the Drone Journalism Lab has just released an operations manual to help media outlets operate responsible drone journalism from the newsroom.

With the dawn of drone journalism looming, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy advocacy organization in Washington, has voiced concerns that increased use of drones could threaten people’s right to privacy which the FAA regulations do not cover, according to the organization.

And in a final piece of drone news, Amazon has secretly been testing its delivery drones in the UK, hiding their activities behind ‘a wall of haybales’, while students on Virginia Tech’s campus could observe drones delivering small white parcels, rumoured to contain burritos in a test-run of Google’s food deliver service.

Robocars news and updates

In the world of autonomous vehicles, Drive.ai has announced that it’s going to use deep learning to teach self-driving cars, and the US Department of Transportation has released guidance on automated driving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=800&v=YSYjxXfdBcs

Meanwhile, some companies are sending their vehicles out onto the roads. Cab service Uber will be offering some of their Pittsburgh users the option of being picked up by a self-driving car, and nuTonomy just launched their first autonomous taxi pilot on the streets of Singapore.

Car manufacturer Tesla released an update for their cars with improved autopilot radar and more ‘human-like’ lane positioning. The update also features a time out warning that’ll come on when a driver has taken their hands off the wheel for a while (exact time depends on speed and road conditions). It’s meant as a reminder that the Tesla system isn’t actually a full autopilot, but rather a sophisticated cruise control system, and comes after the death of a Tesla enthusiast earlier this year.

Sadly though, this month news emerged that another Tesla vehicle had been involved in a fatal crash in China back in January, and that the autopilot is thought to have played a role in the collision. This lead to further questions about whether the company is doing enough to ensure driver safety.

While it’s still not quite clear whether autonomous cars are in fact ‘robots’, research reports have traditionally looked at them together with other robots – seeing advances in the robocar industry as part of the wider developments in robotics.

Developments in the lab

In the research world, Boston Dynamics posted a pretty cool video of their Atlas robot balancing on a 2cm thick plywood edge, in Austria, engineers are working to deliver energy to explorer robots through improved coordination, and researchers at the University of Sheffield developed a new machine learning method that allows machines to simply observe and learn, without being told what to look for.

Lastly, a team at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a small quadruped robot, called Minitaur, that can conquer doors and stairs thanks to four direct-drive legs.

Fun robotics news

New Zealand phone provider Spark had a great idea to help their customers get their hands on the new iPhone 7 without having to wait in line – they allowed tech fans to have a robot take their place in the queue. One hundred Alpha 1 robots, controlled through phone apps, patiently waited in line, moving, dancing and live-streaming the experience to their human ‘handlers’. We think that’s a pretty nifty marketing idea!

In memoriam

Finally, we were sad to hear that Victor Scheinman, inventor of the first robotic arm, passed away this month, aged 73. He was one of the fathers of industrial robotics and his ‘Stanford Arm’, commercialized as the PUMA robotic arm, is still used in almost every industry application today.

Upcoming October-November events

Workshop on Brain-Machine Interface Systems 2016: October 9-12, Budapest, Hungary.

Cybathlon 2016: 8 October, SWISS Arena, Kloten.

IROS 2016: October 9-14, Daejeon, Korea.

World Robot Conference 2016: October 21-25, Beijing, China

SSRR 2016 – IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics: October 23-27, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Minesweepers Competition: Towards a landmine-free world: October 27-30, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Egypt.

Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS): November 6-9, Natural History Museum, London UK.

GCC Manufacturing Excellence and Technology Summit: November 14-15, Dubai, U.A.E.

Humanoids 2016 – IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics: November 15-17, Cancun, Mexico.

The Olympics in Rio may be over, but athletes around the world are gearing up for a new type of competition. Cybathlon, known as the cyborg Olympics, coming up on 8 October in the SWISS Arena in Kloten, will focus on tech advancements in prosthetics and on improving the lives of disabled people. The competition celebrates human technological achievements, honoring the teams behind the technology and innovation, and athletes (or, as they say, pilots!) wearing them. Everyday tasks being tested at Cybathlon help raise awareness that robotics is much more difficult than it may appear. The hope is that these devices being trialled in the games will help “accelerate technology development and eventually be used by people around the world.”

It got us thinking here at Robohub about the technology of tomorrow, starting to happen today. For example, recent research about how brain-controlled robots combined with virtual reality could help paraplegic patients feel and move their limbs, or that hand prosthetics and sensory feedback will provide amputees with the ability to manipulate objects. Not only will these advancements improve lives for the disabled, but some of the tech (like advancements in exoskeletons) could contribute to sports rehabilitation and preventative care, maybe even eliminate sports or work related-related injuries completely.

In our Roundtable, we discussed how advancements in prosthetics could maybe help sports evolve, the importance of exoskeletons being used today, and difficulties that remain when trying to test new advancements. This Roundtable features Sabine Hauert, Kassie Perlongo, Ioannis Erripis, Frank Tobe, Maciej Pietrusinski, and Samantha Payne, all providing a range of perspectives across the board from academia, research, business, and the general public.

Cybathlon is quickly approaching in October, how will the sports of tomorrow look?

“Cybathlon is an exciting competition,” said Sabine Hauert, President at Robohub. “Especially in terms of showing how robotics can be helpful for people with disabilities, like in our SPARC/EURobotics article about exoskeletons. I think the goal is not to surpass human performance, as the general goal is not to provide superhuman powers,” she said.

“It’s great that the Cybathlon is here! It’s a place to celebrate advances in assistive technologies and, at the same time, it’s a place that will highlight the shortcomings of technology,” said Samantha, COO Open Bionics. “Ultimately, Cybathlon will educate the greater public about the problems people with mobility face every day and the problems engineers are working hard to solve. I think it’s important to remember the research, engineering, and money that goes into creating these assistive devices. Whilst their functionality may seem limited, they are actually a vast improvement and it’s a great insight into what is coming,” she said.

A glimpse of something to come in the future when it comes to training or rehabilitation?

“Cybathlon will be a good exercise in expectation management,” says Samantha. “Creating life-changing robotic devices takes time. It takes investment, research and development, and lots of iteration. I think sometimes the greater public associates bionic hands and exoskeletons to movies like the Terminator. It’s going to be incredibly educational for everyone to see where development stands at the moment. However, technology is advancing so quickly that it is already exciting to think about the next Cybathlon!”

“Another area of interest is whether using exoskeletons would give an unfair advantage to certain competitors, in the sports of the future. How can we make sure everyone is on the same playing field? But, I can see how this could really help players who are injured, or substantially reduce recovery time,” said Kassie Perlongo, Managing Editor at Robohub.

“In a recent interview podcast with Hugh Herr, he mentions a type of exoskeleton in the future that should enable us to conduct higher athletic performance without the threat of human injury,” said Audrow Nash, Robohub Podcast Director. (Reference below)

Robots Podcast #215: Human 2.0: Exoskeletons and Orthoses, with Hugh Herr

From the podcast: “They would have to detect high levels of stress and fatigue in biological structures and then tell the human to stop or to move in a different way. Imagine a world where our top athletes never injure. Imagine the impact to human athletic performance. Performance would just go through the roof, because often what mitigates top performance is injury and recovering from injury and not training harder because you might injure,” said Hugh Herr.

Where does the technology stand today, what can we do well and what is still difficult?

“When the greater public thinks about exoskeletons, they generally think of the robotic suits you might find in a Marvel comic,” said Samantha. “The reality is that with exoskeletons, we are just scratching the surface of this technology! Whilst they might look bulky and heavy now, it could be that in the near future exoskeletons become as subtle and as common as wearables are today,” she said.

“It’s interesting. The designers of these devices are always having to compromise. Ideally, a robotic suit would be light, strong, flexible, agile, affordable, and have hours worth of power. However, this isn’t realistic at the moment. If you want a strong robotic device, you need decent motors which are heavier and expensive. If you have strong motors, you need decent power, but batteries are also heavy, take up room, and they won’t last for hours. So, your suit can’t be light. For the exoskeleton in the Marvel comic to exist in reality a number of technologies will need to advance and improve. The ultimate exoskeleton is dependent upon the progression of other technologies,” said Samantha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYulyhYkH5s

“In the public sector, these technologies are driven by the market. There is a large ageing population in the rich world, this will drive the development of assistive devices, so the elderly can keep and retain their independence and mobility longer,” said Audrow.

“Also, large manufacturing companies like Boeing are interested in exoskeletons because they see that they can make their workers more efficient. I think that these forces will improve the technology allowing exoskeletons to enter other markets, such as fitness and recreation (e.g., super-human-powers),” he said.

Robots Podcast #215: Human 2.0: Exoskeletons and Orthoses, with Hugh Herr

This is also something Hugh Herr speaks about in the podcast, with his definition of an exoskeleton, and problems relating to ‘design’ for the human body:

From the podcast: “I’m not sure there are technological bottlenecks. I think that largely the components are sufficient. It’s really a problem with design and architecture. The human machine interaction is something that’s unknown, so putting a bionic structure on a human and adapting its control in real time in a kind of human machine optimization is critically important to the future of this area of design. Imagine putting on a device and you just starting to walk and run and it adjusts its behavior to optimize its performance with you in a collaborative effort,” said Hugh Herr.

From the podcast: “My definition of an exoskeleton is a device that attaches to the body, intimately to the body, that augments physicality. What I mean by augments, it enables a human being to do something that’s beyond natural capability for an innate, healthy body. The word orthoses is a medical term for a robot that attaches to the body that enables a person with a disability or some condition to move more naturally. Exoskeletons are wearable robots that augment,” said Hugh Herr.

“My 2 cents about the exoskeleton/prostheses market is less on rehab and enabling the disabled, but instead on augmenting either in full (skeletons) or in part (gloves, fingers, feet, legs),” said Frank Tobe, Editor for The Robot Report. “The disabled market is difficult whereas worker augmentation represents big money – the gloves alone could be a multi-billion dollar business very soon.”

“For example, General Motors, which has been trying to adapt their NASA Robonaut hand to factory worker assistance, has partnered with BioServo Technologies, who developed a therapeutic glove, to make a factory-worker glove for workers who regularly grasp things. There are many other glove makers doing the same thing. Another example is Japan’s health ministry through Cyberdyne and other agencies attempting to empower seniors with exoskeletons to help them garden (squatting, reaching, kneeling and lifting) and be mobile with non-medical partial skeletons. Many university labs are working on variations on this,” said Frank.

“The other thing to remember is the benefit that these assistive devices have for people outside of this artificial setting,” said Samantha. “Just because a person using a bionic hand fails the wire-following tasks doesn’t mean that the hand fails to provide them value at home, in the kitchen, at school or at work. The tasks at the Cybathlon will push devices to the extreme, but they are not a good measure of how useful a device currently is to a person in a day-to-day context.”

“This is similar for the psychological value assistive devices may provide users. There is no measure for how a device can bring confidence back to a user,” she said.

Are these technologies about human augmentation (read super-human powers), or really about empowering those that are disabled, weakened.

“I don’t see how it makes sense to give people super-human powers, aside from improving endurance (when carrying loads – HULC is an example),” said Maciej Pietrusinski, President and Founder for AndrosRobotics. “We already have examples of exoskeletons (non-antropomorphic) which give people the ability to traverse the landscape and cover 150 km in 2 hours (bicycle), and it does so without exposing our bodies to harm (except when we fall off the bike).

“An exoskeleton that is meant to give us faster-running abilities would also subject our body to injury. Our bones get stronger with time as they are subject to higher stresses, partially as a response to our muscles growing stronger as we mature, and donning an exoskeleton to give us super-human speed or strength could result in an injury. So empowering the disabled is a much better use of exoskeletons,” said Maciej.

“These technologies are about restoring functionality to the human body,” said Samantha. “They are robotic tools designed to offer a greater degree of independence and a higher quality of life to people who are differently able. However, some of these devices enhance or go beyond the abilities of the human body. For example, some of the bionic wrists at the Cybathlon will be able to turn 360 degrees. This is an interesting area of augmentation and indicative of future artificial limbs that will go beyond merely offering to restore functionality.”

Restoring functionality and living “as a normal two armed person” is what amputee Melissa Loomis states, in an interview on Motherboard. The technology being looked at called Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL), interprets and converts signals from the body’s nervous system to motion. When the MPF interacts with an object, signals from over 100 sensors sends info back to the brain, creating a sense of touch. The pay-off is that Melissa will be able to access sensory information in her prosthetic. The arm learns how to understand what you want to do, as opposed to, you learning how to control the arm.

What are the markets for this technology?

Frank Tobe provided an extensive list of companies in the business of advancing prosthetics, please find below:

• Axo Suits (RO)
• Bama Teknoloji (TR)
• BiOM Personal Bionics (prev iWalk)
• Bionik Labs (CA)
• BioServo Technologies
• Catholic University of America
• Cyberdyne Inc. (JP)
• Dexta Robotics (CN)
• Ekso Bionics
• Equipois (acq by Granite State Mfg)
• ExoAtlet (RU)
• Handy Hand GmbH
• Horus Technology (IT)
• Integrum AB (SE)
• Iuvo S.r.l. (IT)
• Kubota (JP)
• Marsi-Bionics (ES)
• MedicoRobotics (TH)
• Neofect (KR)
• Noonee (CH)
• Parker Corp (prev Parker Hannifin)
• Prensilia s.r.l. (IT)
• Rays of the Rising Sun Electric (JP)
• RB3D (FR)
• ReWalk Robotics (prev Argo Med Tech) (IL)
• Rex Bionics
• Rise Robotics
• RSLSteeper (bebionic)
• Sarcos
• SensArs (CH)
• SpringActive
• Technaid S.L. (SP)
• US Bionics (suitX)
• Wandercraft SAS (FR)
• Wearable Robotics srl (IT)

The Roundtable thinks that areas in Industrial; Healthcare 1) rehabilitation 2) disabilities; Military; Entertainment (sports); and Services (renting exoskeletons to help at home) are all areas that could be considered for applicable for advancements in prosthetics, especially exoskeletons.

Read some of our previous Robohub roundtables below:

• Robohub roundtable: Why do robotics crowdfunding projects fail?
• Robohub roundtable: Job loss through automation, Foxconn controversy
• Robohub roundtable: Why is it so difficult to define ‘robot’?
• Robohub roundtable: Robotics and space exploration

Read some of the latest news about Cybathlon and advanced prosthetics:

• Cybathlon: A bionics competition for people with disabilities
• HAPTIX program underway to create prosthetic hand system that moves and feels like a real hand
• New video shows bionic athletes rehearsing for upcoming Cybathlon competition
• Exoskeletons: From helping people walk to controlling robots in space
• Body-enhancing exoskeletons could be stepping into industrial trials next year
• Are skintight suits the future of robotic exoskeletons?
• Robots Podcast #215: Human 2.0: Exoskeletons and Orthoses, with Hugh Herr

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.

Olympics coverage, courtesy of robots

The big event in August was, of course, the 2016 Rio Olympics. As millions watched sporting legends like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps make history, those behind the scenes were bringing all of us the stellar Olympics coverage by an army of cameramen, photographers, and yes, robots. Getty Images, the official photo agency of the International Olympic Committee, used Mark Roberts Motion Control’s robotic rig, which allows photographers to change a camera’s vantage point and move a full 360 degrees – all via remote control – bringing us closer to the action.

The Washington Post utilised AI software, Heliograph, to cover the Rio Games – writing some of the ‘simpler’ news, such as: who won which event, which country is now first on the medal board. Having the AI conduct point-by-point updates freed up their human reporter counterparts to cover in-depth and more exciting stories. Pretty cool, right?

Looking ahead to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, we can expect to see robots take on even more roles, from greeting you at the airport, checking you into your hotel and showing you to your seat in the stadium.

But first, we have the Rio Paralympics to look forward to, followed by the first ever Cybathlon this October in Zurich, Switzerland. While the use of technology by athletes in the Paralympics can be a contentious matter (due to issues of accessibility and affordability of such technologies for athletes from some countries), the Cybathlon will be celebrating the many ways in which robots can assist disabled people. Dubbed the ‘Cyborg Olympics’ by some, the event will include an exoskeleton obstacle course and a virtual race using a brain control interface.

Hello, Dr Robot!

The difference robots can make to the lives of people with disabilities is astounding – enabling people to regain lost functions by lending a helping hand, or providing more independence. Exoskeletons, in particular, are at the forefront of such assistive technologies, with a number of products going through FDA approval at the moment. In the US this month, Dakota Privette, who suffers from cerebral palsy, got to experience his first ever steps with one such product, made by Rex Bionics. And he won’t be the only one to benefit once exoskeletons become available to patients. We also covered this topic in our Robots Podcast, with Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics Group at MIT.

But exoskeletons are not the only robots used in healthcare – Intuitive Surgical’s machines (like the da Vinci) are increasingly used in hospital theatres around the world to make surgery safer and minimally invasive. And now, competitors are beginning to produce similar devices. Lastly, AI could eventually help doctors diagnose patients, but only if patients and doctors are willing to accept this technology, as argued by Owen Johnson from the University of Leeds.

How human should they be?

This topic of acceptance of – and trust in – robots can also be a concern for those creating humanoid robots for home environments. Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have developed R1, a cheaper and more accessible version of iCub. The question of how ‘human’ robot companions should or shouldn’t be is an important one in this context. How much intelligence is too much? How much personality is too much?

Interesting research about expressive communication with robots was conducted by Robohub’s own, Adriana Hamacher. The research indicated that human-like attributes, such as regret, can be “powerful tools in negating dissatisfaction.” The testing found that people tend to prefer robot with expressive features, despite it taking 50 per cent longer to complete the task. The research notes that: “if there are no ground rules then we may end up with robots with different personalities, just like the people designing them.”

In addition, ever improving AI technologies could enable us to build robots that are more cooperative and more considerate, what we would consider as more human. But whether we are ready to accept such robots and trust them remains to be seen.

The road to autonomous vehicles

Lots of big, big changes in autonomous vehicles happened over the month. Top roboticist Chris Urmson quit Google’s self-driving car division, making him the latest in a string of high-profile resignations that could become a problem for the autonomous car division of the company and could cost them their status as a leader in the field.

Meanwhile, others working on autonomous cars are making preparations to get their vehicles out onto the roads. In Singapore, Delphi Automotive is testing on-demand self-driving taxis, while in the US, cab service Uber’s autonomous cars are arriving in Pittsburgh. Not to be outdone, Ford has promised it’ll have fleets of driverless cars out on the roads by 2021 and Airbus has announced plans to build helicopter-like autonomous flying taxis to tackle city traffic. Truly, the autonomous vehicle competition has been dynamic to watch. We can only wait and see what will happen in the next few years.

Others benefitting from the race to get autonomous vehicles out onto the roads include companies Velodyne and Quanergy, both of which received funding this month to improve their LiDAR technologies – an essential component for most assistive steering and self-driving tech. Meanwhile, at MIT, a team has managed to pack their LiDAR sensor onto a single chip smaller than a dime, which could eventually be mass-produced at low cost.

For a summary of what’s been happening in robocars, Brad Templeton’s Robocar Recap is a great once-stop-shop.

Problems with robotics crowdfunding

Crowdfunding can be a good way to make things happen in robotics – but it doesn’t always work. With lots of stories of crowdfunding success, it’s easy to forget that less than half of projects on Kickstarter (for example) manage to reach their funding goal. And even among those that hit their target, not all actually manage to deliver on their promise.

For instance, Jibo, originally crowdfunded in 2014, announced it won’t be able to ship the social robot to any investors outside of the US and Canada. While affected investors will receive a full refund, the disappointment and anger at the group’s failure to deliver Jibo became clear in Twitter responses following the announcement.

So while crowdfunding can be a fantastic investment, there’s no guarantee of success. Robohub’s roundtable discussion focused on problems with crowdfunding, unrealistic expectations, improbable timeframes, and what to look out for.

But it’s not all doom and gloom because when crowdfunding works it’s a wonderful way to get a project off the ground. FarmBot.io just finished its Genesis launch with more than eight times of its fundraising goal and they clearly have investors excited at the prospect of having an open-source farming machine in the not too distant future.

Big funding in robotics

In the world of big business – and big money – there’s rarely a month without at least a few announcements about new investments and acquisitions. Recently (to name a few!), German robot maker Kuka was bought by China’s Midea; Google acquired French company Moodstocks; Cambridge Medical Robotics raised $20 million in Series A funding; FiveAI got $2.7 million in equity funding; and Autonomous Marine Systems secured $1.6 million in seed funding plus $1.9 million in matched funding. For a summary of this summer’s big funding, acquisitions, and failures be sure to check out Frank Tobe’s Robot Report.

And Professor Alan Winfield discussed the debate about the robot economy. In the media, we tend to see people picking sides (robots will take jobs, or, no they won’t), but really, there is no single answer to all this he says, stating: “the extent to which robots replace jobs depends on the specific robot and the job. You need to unpick the context on a case-by-case basis. It’s quite a nuanced question. As a result, it’s very hard to figure out how this will average out in terms of net number of jobs gained or lost.”

On the flip side, robots can also , in turn, be affected by the economy, as is evident in the field of underwater drones. These robots are typically used by fossil fuel companies to support exploration, drilling, construction and maintenance, but some have now been mothballed as a consequence of the slump in oil prices.

Drone news around the world

Sticking with the topic of drones, the FAA’s new regulations, that finally clarifies how media companies are allowed to use drones, led to a bout of enthusiasm for the use of such technologies. CNN launched CNNAir, their new drone division which will be dedicated to aerial imagery and reporting.

It’s not just media companies enthusiastic about drones – private users are excited that these technologies and new consumer drones are entering the market regularly. The next addition, due to be launched soon, is Parrot’s “Disco”, a fixed wing drone that can fly for up to 45 minutes and reaches top speeds of 70 kilometres per hour.

In other drone news, researchers in Hawaii used drones to help them count whales from the air, without having to disturb the animals, and a team in Switzerland performed a 26-hour search-and-rescue flight with their AtlantikSolar UAV, which could ultimately help tackle the European refugee crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FciTmU6inf4

Race to space

NASA is one of the key funders and supporters for space robotics and its sample return robot challenge has now reached the final stage. Seven teams will compete for the £1.36 million prize by showing off their robot’s ability to locate and collect samples in a three-day event to be held in September. We wish them luck and will let you know who won as soon as the announcement is made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-7VUhBk3Xs

And another NASA-sponsored competition, the Space Robotics Challenge has now kicked off! The challenge promises a potential $1 million award for teams to develop abilities of an R5 robot to contribute to NASA missions to Mars in future.

There’ve been announcements from other space robotics companies, as well. California-based private space company Moon Express has been granted permission to land a robot on the moon – and is planning to do so as soon as next year. And Deep Space Industries announced that it plans to fly the first commercial interplanetary mining mission before the end of this decade.

Research in the lab

August saw a few reports on soft robotics, including news that a research team from Harvard University had demonstrated the first 3D-printed autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot, and a team at the University of Warsaw designed a bioinspired caterpillar soft robot that is powered and controlled by light.

And, non-profit company RISE (Robots in Service of the Environment) is creating an underwater robot that can hunt lionfish, which are invasive to the Atlantic ocean and are causing damage to coral reefs.

Upcoming September-October events

Mechatronics 2016: September 5-8, Loughborough, UK.

COSUR 2016 – 1st bi-annual summer school on control of surgical robots: September 5-9, University of Verona, Italy.

Robobusiness: September 28-29, San Jose, California.

Workshop on Brain-Machine Interface Systems 2016: October 9-12, Budapest, Hungary.

Cybathlon 2016: 8 October, SWISS Arena, Kloten.

IROS 2016: October 9-14, Daejeon, Korea.

World Robot Conference 2016: October 21-25, Beijing, China

SSRR 2016 – IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics: October 23-27, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Minesweepers Competition: Towards a landmine-free world: October 27-30, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Egypt.

Harvester Prototype Lionfish Hunter side iso photo render — This 3D rendering of a lionfish harvester robot being developed by Robots in Service of the Environment (RISE). The prototype would use a robot arm with two metal electrodes on the end to electrocute invasive lionfish. The stunned fish would then be collected in a central chamber for use as food. Photo by Ed Williams, Robo Nautica (via PBS/YouTube).

Lionfish are invasive to the Atlantic Ocean and their voracious appetites are destroying coral reef ecosystems. RISE (Robots in Service of the Environment) is a new non-profit company looking to restore the balance by building a robot to ‘zap’ these predators.

From their website: “The complete robot is a collection of component systems. These include the ROV platform, capture mechanism, control system, vision system, user interface, and more. Luckily each one of these components exists today in some form but they have never been assembled specifically as a device to hunt lionfish, nor designed to be produced in large numbers at low cost and operated by a non-professional. Nonetheless, the experience learned from these existing components and efforts will allow for the rapid development of the RISE robot and gives confidence that it can be done.”

More information about the project and robot can be found on the PBS website.

Why do many robotic crowdfunding campaigns fail?

In this Robohub roundtable edition, we are joined by Sabine Hauert, Kassie Perlongo, John Payne, Audrow Nash, Yannis Erripis, with commentary by Andra Keay and Travis Deyle, to discuss the viability, practicality, and (to a degree) healthy scepticism when it comes to robotic crowdfunding. While there have been a number of successful crowdfunded campaigns, there’s no question others are failing to live up to their hype. Should we be holding crowdfunding, especially crowdfunding for robots, to a higher standard?

It begins with good intentions. And as eager, supportive, tech-minded fans, we want to believe. The video marketing, graphics, and technology all look enticing. The prototype when in mass production seems affordable. We, as crowdfunding investors, are intrigued. The campaign does well — congrats, you’ve made it happen!

Some campaigns don’t even make it that far. According to Kickstarter’s stats, only 44 percent of projects meet their funding goal. Of roughly 60,000 unsuccessful projects, nearly 40,000 failed to reach even 20 percent of their goal. Some projects crash-and-burn by over promising and under delivering. Others do make it through crowdfunding, only to lose steam in the manufacturing process.

Why does this seem to happen? Is there a better formula, or better way to future-proof robotic crowdfunding campaigns to prevent it from happening? Or do we call it what it is: a high-risk investment, a gamble. And investments, even robot ones, can fail.

Being honest and truthful is a crucial factor, according to the Roundtable. “You have to be truthful to your customers,” said Yannis. “It’s acceptable to present something as a prototype. You can say: ‘we didn’t have a working camera at the time.’ But, it’s important to not deceive your funders.”

“It is incredibly difficult to design and produce robots,” said Sabine. “It’s not necessarily about getting funded, as we’ve seen in previous examples, it’s about being able to deliver what you promise. Sometimes hype is necessary to get the funding. But there’s a bit of a vicious cycle in which you need to have great marketing, but still need to be able to deliver,” she said.

Understandably, people feel cheated if a crowdfunded project shuts down. One example recently involved CyPhy Works and their six-rotor LVL 1 drone campaign. Despite an incredibly successful Kickstarter raising nearly $900,000 in 2015, plus a $22 million boost from Bessemer Venture Partners, they decided to close and refund Kickstarter investors April 2016 stating (via their Kickstarter):

“After a successful KickStarter tour featuring showings at The White House, TechCrunch Disrupt, DARPA Robotics Challenge and countless flights around the US, CyPhy Works LVL1 Kickstarter has come to an end. We were unable to make the even a delayed delivery schedule due to the maturity of the sourced video components, especially EIS (Electronic Image Stabilization). All money and associated credit card and Kickstarter fees were returned.

LVL 1 was the first gimbal-free hexacopter enabling true-level flight, a user-friendly geofence capability, and real-time photo sharing. This Kickstarter campaign demonstrated the market pull shattered its $250,000 goal reaching almost $900K in backing.”

 Listen to Robots Podcast #184: CyPhy LVL 1 Drone, with Helen Griener 

Funder James, on Kickstarter, commented: “[they] deceived us to use our money to get to where they need to be which is a global interest for large investors or buyers.” Adding that “[it was] such a shame for such a soundly great team of experts” and feeling like “it left with nothing, absolutely NOTHING.”

Funder Richard Whitehead echoed similar thoughts, saying it felt like “a distinct lack of respect for their backers.”

A Twitter post by Helen Greiner on April 5, 2016, confirmed the Kickstarter campaign closure was due to “component sourcing delays” and that it “didn’t seem right to make folks wait til 2017.”

Unrealistic timeframes and hardware startup concerns

So is the real issue unpredictability with components and timeframes? In CyPhy’s case, they cancelled the project due to a delay in the availability of a component. This is not the first time a company has needed more time to complete a project.

Jibo is experiencing issues with timeframes being pushed back, as they have delayed their initial December 2015 release to March/April 2016, and now October 2016.

Now, in an email update to its international backers Jibo writes they will not be able to ship outside the U.S. and Canada, saying: “After exploring all the options, we have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to deliver Jibo to your country”, adding this is because the bot “won’t function up to our standards in your country”.

It’s a bit like the chicken and egg philosophy. On the one hand, crowdfunding should help bolster and encourage start-up innovation. On the other hand, setting unrealistic deadlines could mean alienating and upsetting funders, possibly even damaging your brand. Is there any way to maximise a carefully constructed balance between the two?

“There’s a leap of faith on the part of the backers,” said Kassie. “Some of the campaigns may not even have long-term plans. Are we, as funders, asking for too much and stifling creative innovation?”

“There’s a degree of underestimation, so it’s crucial for [backers] to understand the risks,” said Audrow. “For example, [in our robots podcast], we try to ask the hard questions. Most likely if the company has thought about it, they should be able to articulate appropriate answers about their campaign.”

Another example is with AirDroids, a drone that was said to have the “longest flight time of any multicopter under $500,” as it became a victim of its own success after their Kickstarter project resulted in 20 times more orders than they anticipated, and couldn’t keep up with the manufacturing process. Despite sending some units out to backers, they eventually shut down. This can be viewed as yet another cautionary tale.

Ben Einstein, founder and VC at Bolt.io, provided some great advice on hardware startups looking to crowdfund, “Kickstarter is very appealing but extremely dangerous if you don’t use it correctly. You are amplifying all the decisions you made — in a cowboy style with long shadows everywhere. You’re broadcasting to the world and you haven’t figured out what your retail price is going to be, what your bottom-line costs are, how and where will you manufacture, and so on. Go through product development and early manufacturing first, and then use Kickstarter to launch. That works much better.”

“Kickstarter is increasingly seen as ‘risky’ by many founders,” said Travis Deyle. “Like it or not, recent failures make people inherently skeptical. The skepticism and cheapening of your brand will rub off on your company, by association. Also, the signalling effect this has on your product (eg. for market segmentation) matters a lot,” he says.

“I rarely hear crowdfunding discussed as a go-to option in startup circles anymore,” said Travis. “But to be fair, it seems more like early-stage startups are increasingly moving away from consumer hardware. Even the big publicly-traded consumer hardware companies are suffering right now — eg. GoPro is down 80% this year & FitBit is down 60% this year. Many of the big drone companies (eg. 3DR & DJI) are also transitioning away from the consumer space.”

Is there a model or “start-up style” of success for people to follow?

If there’s something practical that be taken away from these cautionary tales it’s that hardware delays are, to a certain extent, to be expected. But, “if you are promising one thing and cannot deliver on that promise, this can be viewed as incredibly deceptive,” said Yannis.

Read more: Mecha Monsters 

So, what is good practice for startups? “A good example is Reach Robotics, educational monsters,” said Sabine. “It is a hugely complex platform to design. They decided not to crowdfund because they felt that they needed to figure out how to produce it. They needed a good extra year and half, and they haven’t launched it yet, to figure out how they were going to build it.”

We reached out to Silas Adekunle, Co-founder and CEO for Reach Robotics, for a comment and he offered this advice: “I think more hardware startups owe it to the consumers and the startup community in general to do their due diligence on how to manufacture their product fully before offering it for sale. This will help with consumer confidence issues that we are now seeing in hardware startups.”

While there’s no way to be 100% sure, the Roundtable has come up with a checklist that start-ups may find valuable. Please bear in mind this isn’t inclusive, nor should it be used as the only means to crowdfund, but could provide a valuable guide prior to introducing your campaign to the world. We also recommend reading Hardware by the numbers, by Ben Einstein:

Checklist (a guide, of sorts) for future robotic crowdfunders:

1. Do you have a fully working prototype?
2. Do you know how to produce said prototype? How much will this cost?
3. Is the prototype robust?
4. If you have a marketing video, is everything you are showing in your video doable with your prototype?
5. Who is your target market? Is that clear in your campaign?
6. Do you have beta testers in the field? What have they said about your product?
7. Do you have a clear path to production and distribution at scale?
8. Does your project contribute to the advancement of robotic technology? Is that clear in your campaign?
9. What happens if an angel funder or venture capital fund takes equity in exchange for putting money into the project? Is that transparent in your campaign?
10. (Should go without saying) Are you being clear with the language you are using in your campaign (ie. not a lot of marketing spin?)

Please note the checklist doesn’t include things necessary for a successful campaign, just for building a successful product.

“Being able to build a successful product is just the start of the crowdfunding journey,” says Andra. “You can’t rely on a ‘build it and they will crowdfund it‘ approach. Running a successful campaign these days can involve a significant investment of funds, time and the skills of many experienced marketing professionals, from writers and videographers to community managers and PR specialists. A good rule of thumb is to have 33% of your campaign funds already lined up ahead of launch, so as to be able to hit strong milestones in the first days of your campaign.”

“Crowdfunding is just an amplifier, not an investor or a magic remedy,” she said.

Should companies crowdfund?

“It does provide good klout, getting the word out there,” said Sabine.

“It does show traction to raise money, plus, it’s a way to get interest-free “debt” financing to fund manufacturing and inventory,” said Travis.

While one can make a clear argument that it is a case of “buyer beware” (crowdfunding = investment, and investments are inherently risky) there’s also the way crowdfunding platforms, like Kickstarter, is currently set up as a business model that could be problematic for hardware specific projects.

Tech journalist Mark Harris, in his piece on Medium, says that: “Kickstarter, and other crowdfunding platforms, should reconsider the way that they deal with projects involving complex hardware, massive overfunding, or large sums of money. There should be better mechanisms to identify weak projects before they fund, as well as new processes to provide mentorship, support and expert advice to newly-funded projects.”

Maybe he’s right.

To our readers: What do you think? Is our guide a fair representation? Anything else you think we should add?

Read some of our previous Robohub roundtables below:

• Robohub roundtable: Job loss through automation, Foxconn controversy
• Robohub roundtable: Why is it so difficult to define ‘robot’?
• Robohub roundtable: Robotics and space exploration

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.

Tesla crash and the ‘AutoPilot’ question

Earlier this year, Tesla announced that Joshua Brown was in a fatal car crash driving his Model S while the Autopilot system was activated. This tragic news eventually sparked a debate in July on whether Tesla should continue to allow their customers to use the Autopilot system, or whether they should disable the feature if a driver is not being diligent enough, with some questioning whether calling it ‘Autopilot’ was misleading and luring drivers into a false sense of security by thinking the car can drive itself. Autopilot is meant as driver assistance (a more sophisticated form of cruise control), not driver replacement.

Tesla’s Autopilot driven cars are still a long way off truly autonomous robocars – and drivers need to be aware of this. Nevertheless, rumours are afoot that the company may be working on their next big step: Autopilot 2.0 with LIDAR – a more advanced and safer self-driving system, possibly for their new Model 3, Model S, and X cars. And it seems Tesla is not about to stop there, as Elon Musk laid out the company’s master plan (Part Deux) in a blog post.

Tesla isn’t the only company thinking about autonomous cars. Numerous companies are racing to build the first real and successful generation of driverless cars. But taking autonomous cars from research labs and testing grounds to roads isn’t a simple process, as Karl Iagnemma from nuTonomy explained in the recent Robots Podcast, and it may be a while yet until we see driverless vehicles on our roads.

Legal and ethical debate: Can and should police use lethal robots?

Autonomous cars aren’t quite here yet but people in Dallas were starkly reminded that other types of robots are in use on our streets — when police used a bomb-defusing robot to kill a suspect who had already shot several officers. As it turns out, law enforcement has over 1,000 robots in use already across the US.

What happened in Dallas was not illegal, as police are allowed to use lethal force and the way in which the robot was used was probably the best of several bad options given the situation. But, it sparked numerous debates about the militarization of the police force and the legality of using remote controlled robots to kill. These ethical questions are justified and important, as there has been little discussion of the use of robots by police. Now, people are asking questions about accountability, about regulation, and about the use of robots by police in less extreme circumstances, too. A discussion that’s essential if robots, including bomb-diffusion units and drones, become standard tools in law enforcement.

The discussions around police use of robots come at the same time as a report revealing the civilian death toll from US drone airstrikes outside war zones – another controversial use of robots.

Know your drone

In other drone news, the (not quite so controversial) use of commercial drones for deliveries is going ahead – at least in the UK. Amazon has announced that it’ll start making test deliveries soon, while in the US FAA regulation still hinders the company from introducing AmazonPrime drone service. But there was some exciting drone news in the US too, when DJI, the world’s leading commercial drone manufacturer, and Washington State University announced they are working to develop UAV systems for agriculture. Plus, the 3rd annual International Drone Photography Contest crowned its worthy winners this month, providing us some stunning aerial videos and photos to enjoy.

Lastly, we were once again reminded that drones aren’t necessarily just for the air as two young engineers from start-up OpenROV used their Trident submarine drone to explore Lake Tahoe – broadcasting their dives over social media. What a great idea!

Making your life and home smarter, with robots

While Amazon is just about to test its drone delivery systems in the UK, self-driving delivery bots are about to hit the streets. People in Germany and the city of London may soon have their parcels and take-away meals delivered by Starship robots. So if you live in Germany or London, next time your doorbell rings there may well be a delivery bot waiting outside!

And robots won’t just come to your doorstep. If Jibo Inc. has their way they’ll be in your home, too. The company just brought on veteran researcher Michael I Jordan as an advisory board member to help their home robot Jibo have better conversations with human owners through machine learning, so it can really ‘lend a helping hand’ in the household.

Advancements in AI

Machine learning and AI have developed in leaps and bounds since its early inception – and Google’s DeepMind proved this once again as it made Google’s data centers more efficient by effectively cutting electricity costs by 50 percent! There is still a long way to go of course and challenges to be met, not least when it comes to testing how clever our AIs really are.

A study published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence exposed a major flaw in the standard test for AI – the Turing test. The researchers found that by remaining silent, robots could essentially outsmart the test and pass it without ever uttering a word, as judges wouldn’t be able to determine whether they were interacting with a robot or a human. While many had previously pointed out various issues with the Turing test, the findings from this study essentially call into question what passing the test really means and how limited its potential is to answer any deeper questions about AI.

So, do we need a new test? Probably. But for now, there aren’t many alternatives. However, challenges that maybe combine AI with the need to perform reactive physical tasks could be one answer, as Daniel Polani explored whether soccer may be the final frontier for robotic AI.

RoboCup and other competitions

Speaking of soccer, hundreds of teams from countries around the world entered their smart, autonomous bots into the soccer competition, hoping to take away this year’s RoboCup soccer crown. With eight different soccer categories, there were a lot of entries and of course eight final winners, but Robohub thinks with such an amazing show that everyone won!

Also at Robocup “Team Delft” from the Netherlands took home $50,000 after winning the Amazon Picking Challenge at RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig, Germany. Their robot used a combination of an off-the-shelf robotic arm and deep learning techniques to beat its competitors.

Winning the competition is of course not the same as getting the robot into Amazon warehouses (yet), as the speed of the robot is still four times slower (100 items per hour) compared to human workers (400 items per hour). But the improvement between last year’s and this year’s entries was astonishing. We can’t wait for next year’s event – where we’ll undoubtedly see an impressive range of new robots on the soccer fields. But RoboCup 2017 won’t just be about soccer of course, as we’ll see more picking robots as well as a new competition for domestic helpers, for which Toyota’s HSR was just selected as the standard robot.

But RoboCup was not the only big event – far away from the robot soccer fields, the 2016 China International Robot Show (CIROS) crowned Rethink Robotic’s Sawyer robot winner of Best Industrial Robot 2016 in the CIROS Golden Finger Awards. This high-performance collaborative robot is designed to work alongside humans in manufacturing environments – something the judges felt was highly relevant in China’s ambitious economy.

Are we there yet? Turning points and revolutions

AUTOMATICA, the world’s largest robot and automation event, took place at the end of June, but the debates it stimulated about the future of industry carried over into July. Robohub Associate Editor, Adriana Hamacher, and SPARC robotics explored the promise of Industry 4.0 and how close we really are to ‘a turning point in the robotics and automation marketplace’.

And while Industry 4.0 may or may not be here yet (depending on your point of view), robots are certainly no longer just science fiction, and questions of robot ethics are becoming more relevant. Dr Yueh-Hsuan Weng interviewed European Parliment MEP Mady Delvaux-Stehres about the importance of new robot laws as the robot revolution continues.

Getting down to Robot Business

July robotics business news saw Softbank’s move to buy UK company ARM holdings for £24 billion and Midea’s confirmed majority ownership (85.69%) of KUKA shares. But while some other big acquisitions (such as Toyota’s plans to purchase Boston Dynamics) haven’t quite come to fruition, the ever increasing popularity of robotics is reflected in not just one, but more than a hundred reports looking at the robotics industry – with reports on drones making up a third (35)!

Robotics startups making waves

But of course, it’s not just about the big names – robotics start-ups make a huge contribution to the industry and often have some of the most exciting and innovative ideas and products for direct-to-consumer marketing. Success stories include consumer robot maker Anki with their Cozmo SDK toy robots that are more than just toys, Iran-based Ikap Robotics’ Olive, the world’s first intelligent suitcase, and the first ever open-source CNC farming machine by FarmBot, which just reached its $100,000 pre-order goal.

Start-up competition Robot Launch (by Silicon Valley Robotics and Robohub) has an open call to find the world’s best robotics and AI start-ups for 2016. Past winners of this competition have continued on winning public support and more awards, as well as, getting their product ready for market. It’s a prize that could change a start-up’s future – entries close on 15 August!

In the lab

Meanwhile in the lab, researchers are working on some seriously cool stuff. Engineers at the University of Michigan took their bipedal robot MARLO for a walk across the wave field (a patch of grass with an uneven, wavy surface). While the robot may have a looked a little unsteady, the algorithms it uses to keep its balance will be useful in other types of robotics, including prosthetics.

In Lausanne, Switzerland, researchers developed a salamander robot that can help to understand the evolution of vertebrates. And in the US, a team is working to recreate ancient vertebrate’s first step on dry land with a robot. Lastly, researchers at Harvard have designed a robotic stingray that could help our understanding of the human heart.

Research like this is fascinating and important if we want to make progress in robotics. But how good is the robotics community at communicating with the publics? And how can it ensure that people do not distrust or fear progress being made? In the aftermath of Brexit, Michael Szollosy explored on Robohub what lessons the robotics community can learn about communication and how the science community can engage people now.

Fun stories in robotics

To finish our Digest, we like to take a look back at a couple of happy robotics stories of the month, one of which, must be the story of 10 year old Eva, whose fascination with robots and determination to make the world a better place landed her a spot on the Paris Summer Innovation Fellowship programme. A summary of her pitch: “The streets of Paris are sad. I want to build a robot that will make them happy again. I’ve already starting learning how to code on Thymio robots, but I have trouble making it work. I want to join the program so the mentors can help me.” Well done, Eva!

Another great story is Verity Studios of Zurich in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil using flying robot lampshades as performance pieces on Broadway. Paramour just surpassed its 100th performance, still astonishing audience members with a spectacle of colours and lights. Some readers may recognise them as the direct siblings of the similarly dressed quadcopters in Sparked: A Live Interaction Between Humans and Quadcopters.

Upcoming events in August

ICMA 2016 – IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation: August 7-10, Harbin, China

DISCOVER 2016: IEEE Distributed Computing, VLSI, Electrical Circuits and Robotics: August 13-14, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.

Next-Generation Collaborative Robotics & Automation Technologies Automotive Manufacturing 2016: August 17-18, Detroit, MI.

URAI 2016 – International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots and Ambient Intelligence: August 19-22, Renmin Square, Xian, China.

CASE 2016 – IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering: August 21-25, Fort Worth, TX.

ICRAE 2016- International Conference on Robotics and Automation Engineering: August 27-31, Jeju Island, Korea.

RO-MAN 2016 – IEEE International Symposium on Human and Robot Interactive Communication: August 26-31, Columbia University, New York.

MMAR 2016 – 21st International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics: August 29 – September 1, Miedzyzdroje, Poland.

Robolliance is a new forum for technology partners and industry experts. Sponsored by Sharp Electronics Corporation, the program is a place for partners and experts in “robotics, surveillance and security to advance the understanding and awareness of the Autonomous Robotics marketplace.” The Robolliance program was created to bridge the gap between end-users, sales channel technology providers, and finding information in security solutions as they relate to emerging robotics technology.

Cliff Quiroga, Vice President & Deputy General Manager for Sharp Electronics Corporation (SEC), states, “There is a growing understanding that ‘Business Robotics’ will play an expanding role in the future of automation and how companies operate. The demands on the security industry, both from a manpower and technological standpoint, are growing exponentially. Robotics is a solution for organisations to expand their surveillance coverage in a safe, reliable way and liberate manpower to focus on the more demanding, intellectual aspects of security.”

“There’s no doubt, technology is disruptive,” says Alice DiSanto, Director of Marketing for SRBD. “Simplistically, every time I upgrade my smartphone there is a feature I must get comfortable using or a glitch I may have to work through. In the case of robotics for security and surveillance, the technology will be highly disruptive and we as sponsors need to be ahead of the curve in building understanding to ease adoption, streamline implementation and help organizations in search of a security solution find answers. Robolliance can be their resource.”

More information about Robolliance can be found on their website.

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.

Celebrating success through collaboration

June was a time for celebrations in the US, as this month marked the fifth anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative – a collaboration of multiple US agencies who promote the development and use of robots that work alongside, or collaboratively, with humans. Since its inception, the Initiative has provided funding for fundamental research and contributed to major developments in robotics technology, so its fifth anniversary is certainly reason for celebrations. But it wasn’t the only US collaborative to shout about this June as the White House is running a series of workshops and plans the creation of a new collaborative interagency working group on AI to investigate and promote the use of this technology for the social good.

Meanwhile in Europe, ROBOTT-NET, an EU-funded robot technology transfer partnership, was created to provide support and expertise for companies who want to use or develop robots.

And while we’re on the topic of collaboration, Robohub would like to congratulate the winning team of the Airbus Shopfloor challenge this year. The team (officially a Japanese team despite none of the members being from Japan) was made up of researchers from all over the world, who worked together to create a precision drilling robot. We say: well done!

Acquisition, competition and automation

With all the collaborations and friendly celebrations going on, it’s easy to forget that robotics is also a competitive industry, but we were reminded of that by car giant Toyota’s move to purchase not one but two companies from Google this month: Boston Dynamics as well as Japanese start-up Shaft. While the deal hasn’t been made just yet, the offer on the table is certainly impressive.

Recent acquisitions made by Chinese investors, who seem to snap up many of the leading international robotics companies (including Gimatic and KraussMaffe Group), are also a sign that the global interest in robotics is huge. And some in Germany and Belgium have now voiced concerns over another bid by the Chinese, this time, to purchase German robot maker Kuka. In late June, Chinese Midea made a $2.5 billion bid up to 49% (instead of a full takeover) for Kuka.

The field is definitely booming, highlighted this month by the International Robotics Foundation figures showing industrial robot sales set a new record in 2015. However, it’s not all rosy news as many fear the increase in automation may come with job losses and poverty. In May, Foxconn announced it would replace 60,000 factory workers with robots – a controversial decision that inspired an in-depth Robohub Round Table discussion this month about what it could mean for the jobs of tomorrow.

Better together: working with robots

The use of robots in the workplace may not necessarily indicate future job losses, rather, it could create better incentives for retraining human workers for more fulfilling and versatile work. And in some instances, robots can take on jobs that humans either couldn’t do or could only do if willing to risk their health or even their lives. In these instances, the robot revolution can’t come soon enough. Examples include strenuous, dangerous and dirty jobs in nuclear decommissioning and mining, including space mining (which admittedly is still some way off, but an exciting idea).

‘We’re out’ – UK votes to leave the EU

On June 23^rd the UK population voted to leave the European Union. As something that has never happened in the EU before there is speculation for unpredictable consequences in science, and robotics projects in particular. Early discussions within the robotics community focused on how ‘Brexit’ could affect funding for robotics research, but there may also be other consequences. For instance, UK robots could lose out on a bill of rights being debated in the EU as Oliva Goldhill of Quartz pointed out. As of right now, it’s too early to tell how things are going to shape for the robotics community within the UK.

Good robot?

The bill of rights (mentioned previously) refers to a proposal put forward to the European Parliament asking to classify robots as ‘electronic persons’ and to address issues of taxation and legal liability – the latter being a much-debated topic among roboticists. Who is ultimately responsible for the ‘actions’ of a robot and any harm caused? And, how can we ensure that robots act ethically as far as possible? Despite AI still lagging behind human intelligence, these questions are hugely important. Benjamin Kuipers looked back on Asimov’s law and explored how we may plan for ethical robots of the future.

When it comes to robot-related ethics questions, the robocar industry (alongside killer robots) is often at the forefront of public scrutiny, not least because of the widely publicised trolley problem. So, maybe it’s time to create a panel of experts to rule on driving ethics and then advise robocar developers on ethical questions. While some are still debating the ethical side of robocars, others are making very practical decisions. UK insurer AdrianFlux launched the country’s first driverless car insurance policy, setting out (in their view) who or what is liable for any damage or harm under which circumstances.

But, these debates and forward steps in the area of driverless vehicles were overshadowed this month by the announcement that Tesla fan Joshua Brown sadly died after a tragic accident in a Model S autopilot driven vehicle. This sad news is a stark reminder that while the industry is moving forward rapidly, driverless technology is still relatively new and that while we may be able to purchase cars with autopilots it’s essential to be vigilant on the road.

Our future human-robot world

Let’s now move from robots on our roads to robots in our homes. Social robotics is booming and robots are set to play a big part in our future according to experts at the Bloomberg Technology Conference. And those who think social robots are just a Japanese oddity at present are mistaken: Belgium, for example, now boasts service bots in over 300 institutions.

Social robots are here to stay, but it won’t just be them supporting and serving us. It’s likely that we’ll have to serve and support them, too – especially when it comes to adapting environments allowing them to better function. From our homes to shops, restaurants and hotels, the environments of the future in a hybrid human-robot world will look a little different from what we’re used to now. But maybe that’snot necessarily a bad thing. Watch this space.

Drones

Our monthly Robohub digest wouldn’t be complete without us mentioning drones. Recently, the FAA released its new rules for commercially used small UAVs. This long-awaited decision was greeted with enthusiasm by many US companies hoping to use drones commercially. They will come into effect in August 2016 and will mean that, among other things, commercial drones that fit within the framework of Part 107 no longer require approval by exemption and operators no longer need a manned aircraft pilot’s license.

In other drone news, Chinese start-up Xiaomi entered the drone market with an affordable personal HD drone that seeks to take some of the market space current occupied by DJI’s Phantom drones. On the other end of the drone spectrum, Airobotics secured $28.5 million to develop autonomous drone platforms for heavy industry. And finally, Cape Town based photographer Johnny Miller used his drone to capture fascinating images of the thin lines dividing rich and poor in South Africa.

Stories from the lab

June was also a busy month for researchers across the globe with a number of pretty cool announcements, particularly from the US. Researchers at Harvard developed a new actuator that can mimic movements of skeletal muscles, a team at the University of Nevada is working on a novel polymer-based material to create artificial muscles, and MIT’s AI passed the Turing Test for sound. Outside academia, CSIC and its spin-off, Marsi Bionics, patented the world’s first exoskeleton for children with spinal muscular atrophy, Boston Dynamics presented their new SpotMini robot, and Japanese company YSEC developed a small jet engine for use in UAVs.

A bit of a laugh

On a lighter note, robots also caused quite a few laughs this June. ‘Sunspring’, a movie written entirely by an AI that calls itself Benjamin, turned out to be a great hit at the annual film festival Sci-Fi London. The plot and stage instructions Benjamin came up with may be a bit hard to follow at times (one stage instruction allegedly read “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor”), but the movie had cast, crew and audience in fits of laughter.

And finally, in Russia, a runaway robot ended up causing a traffic jam on a busy road when it escaped from Promobot laboratories and spent 40 minutes exploring the city of Perm before being recaptured.

Upcoming events for July

CIROS China Intel Robot Show: 6-9 July, Shanghai, China.

Conference on Artificial Intelligence: 9-15 July, New York City, NY.

ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop: 14-15 July, Singapore.

Autonomous Vehicles Symposium: 19-21 July, San Francisco, CA.

National Geographic’s new movie, Robots 3D, proves that robots don’t need to be sci-fi to be compelling.

The team behind RoboThespian, a life-sized humanoid robot designed for human interaction in a public environment, have launched a new YouTube channel: Robot’s World. The robot is very much real and enjoys a bit of profanity in its first episode about the confusion between AI and robots.

Watch here:

Engineered Arts was founded in October 2004 by Will Jackson, to produce mixed media installations for UK science centres and museums, many of which involved simple mechanical figures, animated by standard industrial controllers.

In early in 2005, the Company began work on the Mechanical Theatre for the Eden Project. This involved three figures, with storylines focused on genetic modification. Rather than designing another set of figures for this new commission, Engineered Arts decided to develop a generic programmable figure that would be used for the Mechanical Theatre, and the succession of similar commissions that would hopefully follow. The result was RoboThespian Mark 1 (RT1).

RoboThespian being assembled in the Engineered Arts’ workshop. Source: Engineered Arts

“After 10 years designing and building full sized humanoids, similar questions kept coming up again and again. So, in part, this is a way to address those,” said Will. “The first episode is to try and dispel some myths about AI, for example, a talking robot tells the audience it is stupid — talking does not automatically equivolate intelligence. Also, just because a machine looks like a person does not mean it has any human qualities.”

Each episode takes about 2-3 weeks to create. The team programmes the movement in their virtual simulation software, and films in their workshop.

“I wanted to focus a little more on creative uses for our robots, rather than always leaving the fun part to someone else,” said Will. “We are now making episode 2, which looks at robots as domestic servants. Humanoids are not at all likely to be useful for utility tasks around the home in the foreseeable future.”

And the comical profanity?

“Well … Robot’s ranting personality is somewhat a proxy for myself,” said Will. “The second episode is a lot less profanity-laden — I think I just needed to get that rant out!”

“Most of all, we are not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We do some extremely difficult engineering. The 4th iteration of our dynamic biped, Byrun, will be completed soon — at the same time, we know primarily that using humanoid robots is for entertainment value and communication. We are looking to push the boundaries in that space.”

You can subscribe to Robot’s World on their YouTube channel.

If you liked this post, you may also like reading:

• Robots Podcast #173: RoboThespian, with Will Jackson
• Robots at #ERW2015: From imagination to market 
• RoboThespian co-hosts new robot documentary from CBC – “Roboticize Me”

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.

Robotics funding going strong

May proved to be another strong month for robotics funding. According to The Robot Report, “13 companies were funded to the tune of $111 million.  Four companies were acquired with two of the four reporting selling prices totaling $422 million.” Chinese company Midea offered a $5.2 billion bid for Kuka, to grow their robotics industry. For Kuka, stronger ties to Midea could help lift its revenues in China, one of the cornerstones of the company’s growth strategy. Kuka overall aims to roughly double its revenue to between €4 billion and €4.5 billion by 2020, compared with 2014. European Robotics is also performing well, with EU’s Horizon 2020 funding $179 million in robotics PPPs (Private Public Partnership), according to Europe’s Digital Progress Report.

Let’s not forget the highly anticipated purchase involving Boston Dynamics. Rumours swirled that Toyota was in the bidding, with the price of the deal fiercely under wraps despite the rumour of the ‘ink nearly dry’ … then recent news surfaced that Toyota was also in discussions for purchasing Schaft, a Japanese startup company that won the DARPA Robotics Challenge. So potentially a two-company sale on the horizon.

The media has also taken notice of this upward trend, with the Financial Times commenting that robotics and artificial intelligence are hot new markets for the financing boom, as more and more robots move from labs into public spheres like hospitals, retail centres. Growth is also taking place in Asia with countries like Japan and China in the early stages of retooling their manufacturing sector, accounting for 69 percent of all robot spending.

Preparing for artificial intelligence

Speaking of AI investments, the race is on to create better enhanced virtual assistants. At Techcrunch Disrupt, the creators of Siri unveiled their latest AI virtual assistant technology, Viv. Tech giants Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have all invested heavily in artificially intelligent assistants in recent years giving us a preview of what is to come. The technology is the new frontier in how we will use our devices and interact with the digital world.

The White House also recognises this shift happening in technology and announced a series of public workshops on artificial intelligence and the creation of an interagency working group that plans to examine benefits and risks posed by artificial intelligence. All events are livestreamed, with workshops hosting artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a forward-thinking and effective policy framework.

Like the term “robot” itself, artificial intelligence is hard to define (what is intelligence after all?). Robohub hosted a Roundtable examining the evolving nature of the language, deciding that ‘robot’ by definition is fluid, however, there is a tendency to overuse the term robot, which causes confusion in the public about robot capabilities. For example, bots in the media called ‘chatbots’. Most technologists would agree that these software bots are in fact not RObots.

To help sort out the confusion, The Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington created two animations offering an easy-to-digest explanation between ‘robots’ and ‘bots’. Watch below:

Self-driving trucks and Uber autonomous testing

The march towards autonomous vehicles continues, now with testing and research of self-driving trucks on highways. Start-up company Otto, led by 15 former Google employees, including eight engineers, think that automating trucks rather than passenger vehicles could be more palatable financially and to regulators. However, automating commercial driving is still controversial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK76W1kH4jA

Uber showed off its first self-driving car, with its hybrid Ford Fusion hit the streets of Pittsburgh. In a blog post, Uber says that the development of its self-driving technology will mean “less congestion, more affordable and accessible transportation, and far fewer lives lost in car accidents.”

It’s the summer of ‘robotic competition’ love

Summer is also time for student challenges and competitions. FIRST (for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Championship hosted a 4-day event with more than 20,000 students competing from around the globe, in front of more than 40,000 spectators.

MIT hosted a head-to-head battle in the annual Course 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing) undergraduate course in mechanical engineering. Hundreds of spectators watched 32 finalists (from 153) perform. Robots completed various tasks, such as hanging small lanterns on the North Church steeple, pushing bags of tea off the wooden ship, scaling a steep hill to simulate Paul Revere’s ride, and hiding cannonballs under the Old North Bridge.

Robohub covered the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge at ICRA in Stockholm, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers. Spectators watched as finalists finished 1-hour rounds drilling into sheets of metal, similar to aircraft panels. As reported by Airbus, “In what turned out to be a suspense-loaded two days, spectators saw the whole gamut of emotions driven by catastrophic failures, live coding of new solutions, sheer joy when the drills powered through, and the exhaustion of pulling all-nighters to compete in what was a very tight race.” You can read the winning team story and their ups and downs of the competition while creating their robot.

Drones for public good and/or health

A Canadian drone services firm plans to use drones for surveying damage after the recent earthquake in Ecuador, with AeroVision’s general manager Trevor Bergmann remarking that, “It’s important to show that drones can be used for good.”

Speaking of ‘drones for good’, The Lancet published a report by Dinsa Sachan on using drones in the health sector that explores a similar theme: looking at the dual nature involving drones in war. As drones are used for surveillance and bombings can these same drones save people, too?

It appears drones will be utilised further in public health, potentially revolutionising transportation networks and connecting people to what they need. In a TED blog post, Matternet, UNICEF and Malawi’s Ministry of Information hosted hands-on sessions and a Community Demo Day so the locals could see how the drones work and learn what they’d be carrying. These demos also stressed the importance of HIV awareness, getting tested, and taking antiretrovirals.

In public policy news, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta announced the agency is establishing a broad-based advisory committee. The committee will provide advice on the main unmanned aircraft integration issues. He also announced plans to make it easier for students to fly unmanned aircraft (PDF) as part of their coursework, so they will no longer need a Section 333 exemption or authorisation to operate.

And lastly, let’s end with something that, at first glance, appears to have taken a page out of a conspiracy theory handbook: a drone seeding rain clouds. Drone America, AviSight and the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems explain that using silver iodide particles in the air encourages water molecules to stick together and become rain, with seeding clouds able to increase precipitation by up to 10 percent. However, this isn’t the end of expansive deserts as we know it, as moisture needs to be present in the first place, making it unsuitable for ending drought or stopping wildfires.

Farming 2.0 with robotics

Robotics in agriculture will be the integral tech on farms as farmers are increasingly under pressure to feed more people. Robots handling crops will not be a strange sight in the years to come, in fact, robots will improve production yield, reduce resources required, and could make farming an exciting high-tech profession. In the EU alone, the organic market grew by 7.4% in 2014 with sales valued at €24 billion.

Let’s not overlook the wine! The VINBOT project designed an all-terrain, autonomous rover to improve the accuracy of measurements, scanning leaves in vineyards with greater precision. Also, other emerging technologies, like biological agriculture for roboticists, will contribute to agriculture, or to land management.

And to help pollinate this food, researchers are studying bees to make robotic versions that can help beekeepers look after their hives. And in a recent article in Science, Harvard roboticists demonstrate that their flying microrobots, nicknamed the RoboBees can perch during flight to save energy — like bats, birds or butterflies.

Building and innovating + robots in the lab

Researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule. It can also be steered by external magnetic fields, and crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

A team of researchers at the University of Washington developed an artificial hand that’s built by robotics and trained by artificial intelligence. So far, it’s looking like it may be the most sophisticated artificial hand ever created.

Students at University of California San Diego launched a rocket with an entirely 3D-printed engine, beating NASA to the punch.

NCCR Digital Fabrication is researching multi-robotic assembly strategies. To create elaborate structures, the robots alternate the order of positioning construction elements, that at the same time also serve as support structures.

Out of Germany comes the FRANKA cobot, a robot that can assemble another version of itself right out of the box. According to their website, the FRANKA is the first robot that builds itself. It can assemble its body, connect the pieces, lift up and test its functionalities.

Researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and ETH Zurich developed the cool looking Monospinner, a mechanically simple, controllable, flying machine. It has only one moving part, the rotating propeller, and has no additional actuators or aerodynamic surfaces. However, it can still fully control its position in space.

And finally, an exciting collaborative initiative in autonomy and robotics between MIT and Lockheed Martin was launched. Teams will focus on innovations and how to improve human/machine teaming and navigation in complex environments. This could be a great indication of more industry/academic joint partnerships in robotics to come.

European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake captured this photograph of the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft as it undocked from the International Space Station on May 11, 2016. Image Credit: ESA/NASA:

Every few weeks, Robohub will post a roundtable chat and discuss an engaging topic relating to robotics. In this edition, we looked at how can robotics can be part of space exploration. Privatisation has certainly been a boon for companies, like SpaceX. What can we expect in the future? We strongly encourage our Robohub readers to chime in and be part of the conversation!

This chat features Sabine Hauert, Andra Keay, Kassie Perlongo, Yannis Erripis, John Payne and Audrow Nash, providing a range of perspectives from research, business, technical and the general public.

Robotic exploration is critical to help support any future human exploration. You only have to read the latest science/tech headlines to get an idea of the excitement happening in space robotics. Recently, UK astronaut Tim Peak remote controlled a “space-robot” on Earth from the International Space Station, as part of European Space Agency’s (ESA) project to learn how astronauts can control remote systems on other worlds. Privately funded SpaceX landed the Falcon 9 Stage 2 rocket on a drone ship at sea for the first time, and then recently did it again after sending the JCSAT-14 satellite to Geostationary Transfer Orbit.

Beyond providing regular cargo resupply missions for NASA, SpaceX is planning an unmanned mission to Mars in 2018 — 10 years ahead of NASA’s planned mission. How feasible is this? Are we launching into a new commercialised space era?

The roundtable got underway by discussing privatisation in space robotics. Largely this is viewed positively, as it has progressed tech innovation and healthy competition, integral pieces for a space programme if we expect to further space exploration. But, there were concerns we are too goal driven and not concentrating on current issues or robotic tech at home.

“I think it’s exciting to have massive, audacious goals, especially in the development of technology,” said Andra. “We’ve been missing that for a while. However on a pragmatic level, maybe looking to solve the global food supply is more achievable.”

“The private sector is [definitely] helping to drive innovation”, said Sabine. “It helps shorten timelines, gets new tech into space. Competition, bigger goals, this drives technology forward’, said Sabine. “Look at the Google Lunar X Prize. It does require a certain amount of new tech, plus, it’s exciting for the younger generation to get involved in STEM.”

“Would you say private companies are disruptors?” said Kassie. “Are companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin challenging the status quo, and helping big changes happen to space exploration quickly?”

“Maybe not as disruptors, space is a private game now.” said Andra. “It’s been accepted that space exploration has been privatised. Space contracts are being awarded, with NASA, in part, driving this. I don’t think the speed at which this is happening is very exciting. If anything, it can make it seem less impactful.”

“Private companies were always a major part of space exploration, usually under the leadership of a public administration like NASA or ESA,” said Yannis.  “These were usually big companies that moved at a slow pace, reluctant to change. Since the dot.com boom a lot of startups appeared in the space exploration sector. Most didn’t last, but the few that did moved at a much quicker pace. So, not only did they catch up with the establishment, they have become major competitors to force the legacy companies to change.”

“The fact that it is being privatised is interesting,” said Sabine. “What is it that these companies are going to want to do? Is it about mining resources on other planets? Is it tourism? What are these [commercial] companies most interested in?”

“There’s a company, Planetary Resources, who are trying to conduct asteroid mining,” said Audrow. “They are putting satellites around Earth, looking at a wide range of wavelengths with sophisticated sensing, and selling the information to help agriculture. It’s privatised, so they need to be commercially viable.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJBiZnVsJ7g

“Automation and robotics is a necessity for space exploration, the environment demands it,” said Yannis. “More goals and more far fetched goals will push innovation forward. Also the need to send more people into space and especially people that will be either tourists or simply not extensively trained astronauts will pose the demand of more and more automation and robotised vehicles.”

“Also,” added Sabine, “we considered robotics as the tech that’s going to go into space. But if you look at SpaceX, the drone ship they used is robotics. ”

“The new manned space vehicles under development are, for the most part, robotic spacecrafts. There’s room for chasing many goals, big or small. The private sector is largely unregulated so every team can follow its path and the product is a greatly increased variety of endeavors.” said Yannis.

Space robotics and tech integration

“People say, isn’t it fantastic all these improvements in technology? Aren’t these going to start influencing robotics? But every single advance they are describing: artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, inverted pendulum, all of this has come from robotics. So in many ways, the technologies of today are reaping the dividends of robotics research. But we’re starting to see more complex, yet affordable, robotics at the end point.”

“Space has to be so safe”, said Sabine. “I don’t think they are developing anything absolutely crazy. They are mostly good at integrating and making existing technology space-ready.”

“They do modular design towards this. The R2 is modular design and they can upgrade it. They can make smaller more fundamental changes. The technology can progress incrementally,” said Audrow.

“Most new companies follow the technological path already explored decades ago. Macroscopically there’s evolution (incremental at most), not revolution, however the procedures and the approach is vastly different.” said Yannis. “The new companies usually follow practices developed very far from the military cold war programs or the current aerospace and defence sector. Even if NASA is a major client, it’s not the main one, nor is it defining the direction. The result is companies like SpaceX with a product that follows the same general architecture of many other projects before it (for example propulsive landing has been demonstrated years before in a smaller scale) but vastly cheaper and developing at a vastly faster rate.”

Mars landing in 2018 — hype? What about regulations?

“Is the SpaceX press about their plans to land on Mars in 2018 all hype?” asked Kassie. “It doesn’t seem like enough time, given that’s only in a couple of years.”

Is this something to look forward to in 2018? Source: SpaceX

“Both SpaceX and Blue Origin started from scratch. It was a lot faster than what all the other companies were doing. There has been risk and there have been failures but not as many as one would expect.” said Yannis. “Usually their announcements are neither optimistic or pessimistic, SpaceX usually fulfills all the goals they announce, even with the occasional delay or mishap.”

“With the machine learning field, people worry there are few companies owning and sharing most of the data and the algorithm,” said Sabine. “This may give a lot of power to a handful of companies. Do we need to worry about the same thing happening in space robotics?”

“We already have this in air travel with Boeing and Airbus,” said Andra. “It doesn’t seem to have as big of an impact. With SpaceX it is all about a space rocket.”

“No, I don’t think so. Monopolies are usually formed from the environment created by the regulations. SpaceX may have a great pace, and it may be a media favourite, but there are other companies showing progress (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Orbital ATK and the legacy companies like Boeing or Airbus) and more will definitely follow.”

The roundtable agreed that many of the changes happening are definitely having an impact on accessibility and financing of future space exploration.

“The main application (and robotics is a big part of it) is making space cheaper and more accessible.” said Yannis. “Given that, everything else will follow. A great example is the smaller and cheaper satellites. Through the last decades satellites have become cheaper, smaller, and more affordable. A startup or a university can afford to launch a cubesat that will be capable of performing a substantial mission.” said Yannis.

Where do you think space robotics will lead into the future? Let us know in the comments!

Also listed below are people to watch who are involved in space robotics:

Dr Terry Fong is the Director of the Intelligent Robotics group at the NASA Ames Research Center and is Project Manager of the NASA Human Exploration Telerobotics (HET) project, which tests advanced telerobotic systems on the International Space Station. Dr. Fong is also Deputy Lead for the NASA Resource Prospector Mission lunar rover.

Joe Parrish is Deputy Manager, Mars Program Formulation Office, Mars Exploration Directorate at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and deeply involved in the development of the external manipulators on the International Space Station.

John Lymer is Chief Robotics Engineer, Space Systems Loral and formerly Chief Engineer for the International Space Station Robotics. SSL design and build satellites and spacecraft systems for commercial and government customers around the world. He leads the development and deployment of microsurgical robotics that operate inside an MRI scanner and nuclear reactor restoration robotics, all enabled by the reuse of space robotics technology.

Marco Pavone is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Stanford and is a NASA Early Career Faculty. The Autonomous Systems Laboratory develops methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomus systems, with a particular emphasis on large-scale robotic networks and autonomous aerospace vehicles.

Kevin Peterson is the Chief Technology Officer at Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Astrobotic is developing space robotics technology for planetary missions. It was founded in 2007 by Carnegie Mellon professor Red Whittaker, with the vision of lunar exploration through the development affordable and innovative robotic technologies. With its partner Carnegie Mellon University, Astrobotic is pursuing the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

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.

Spotlight: US National Robotics Week

Source: nationalroboticsweek.org

April was a big month for robotics in the US as those working in the field hosted the seventh annual National Robotics Week, with numerous robotics activities, talks and workshops for anyone with an interest in robotics. The aim of Robotics Week is to engage and inspire people at a time when the field is moving forward so quickly that many struggle to keep up. For kids in particular the different activities offer a rare insight into what robotics is all about – and how much fun it can be.

Events took place across the country and one group in California, Robot Garden, stood out as the group that hosted the most activities, ranging from a Lego Robotics Club to a robot swap event. And don’t worry if you missed it – Robot Garden hosts events all year round, just check out their website.

April’s Fools’ Day robot fun

In many countries 1 April is known as April Fools’ Day – a day you get creative and think of ways to fool those around you with made-up stories and practical jokes. The robotics community joined in the fun once again this year with a number of crazy ideas, including: robotic note takers, remote pizza slicers, and levitating speakers. Robohub summarised some of the best robotics-related April Fools’ Day jokes here. And don’t worry if you fell prey to any of those jokes – with the astonishing advances being made in robotics every day, it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

Showcasing Industry 4.0

People may think the idea of multi-purpose robotic arms or cells – much discussed in industry circles – is still more fiction than fact. But in Belgium a collective centre for technology industry called Sirris is now showcasing what industry 4.0 could look like. Dutch-German partnership, SInBot, have developed an operating system that will allow low cost, small-scale production with industrial robots. Smart factories are certainly not just fiction any more! No wonder then that the International Federation for Robotics reported that industrial robot sales were higher than ever in 2015.

Investments, Acquisitions, Mergers

Dmitry Grishin at the Skolkovo Robotics conference in Russia.

Competition is heating up for venture capital with Grishin Robotics announcing a new $100 million fund open to hardware and software companies to support the Hardware Revolution, expanding their geographical focus to include Europe. Meanwhile San Francisco based startup Dispatch secured $2 million to build a fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles.

But it’s not just venture capital investments that fuel the interest and excitement in new technologies – acquisitions and mergers can have a similar effect. GM’s acquisition of Cruise Automation has led to a renewed interest in kits for self-driving cars – essentially kits that allow conversion of normal cars into (more) autonomous ones. And Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva in 2012 left a void that paved the way for several smaller companies to develop novel warehouse robotic systems, many of which were showcased this April at MODEX 2016.

Drones vs. FAA

While researchers and industry are excited about new applications for robotics, lawmakers are thinking about how these applications should be regulated. The best example for this is the regulation of drones, a hot topic for many months (or possibly years) and has been making headlines once again in April. This is because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), responsible for the regulation of drones at a national level, has to be (re-)authorized every few years – a process happening right now.

Two of the major bills being debated by US Congress in relation to FAA authorization are focused on drones that could have a profound effect on the future of the US drone industry. Some are worried that the wording in the bills could curtail local drone laws and law enforcement in relation to drones, something lawmakers are seeking to change before the bill is passed. While Congress continues to deliberate, drones are still being used around the globe for a variety of tasks.

A view from above

It has only been five years since the devastating earthquake off the east coast of Japan that caused a tsunami and massive destruction March 2011, and on 16 April 2016 the earth in Kumamoto and Ōita Prefectures shook again. Soon after it happened, drones were used to assess the aftermath of this quake, helping to map the destruction and devastation caused.

And mapping the impact of natural disasters is not the only way in which drones may monitor environments – they’ve also been used in bio-conservation to help monitor wildlife, as is the case in the Bornean jungle where Dirk Gorissen is tracking orangutans with python and react.js.

Drone racing

With the popularity of drones ever increasing, it’s no wonder that racing drones against one another is a new ‘sport’ that’s moving from backyards, fields, and abandoned buildings to mainstream media – more precisely to ESPN. This upcoming August, ESPN will broadcast the US National Drone Racing Championships online. And who knows – drone racing may soon be on our TV’s soon enough.

Robots take to the high seas

Clownfish BIV

But robots are not just conquering the air(waves) – they’re also taking to the seas. This month DARPA celebrated the naming of their remote controlled submarine hunting vessel, Sea Hunter. The unmanned ship can track and follow submarines and may spell a new era for naval seafaring. But DARPA weren’t the only ones celebrating in April as SpaceX successfully landed their Falcon 9 rocket on their drone ship off the Florida coast for the first time. And where SpaceX’s drone ship leads, commercial shipping might soon follow – at least according to Oskar Levander, head of innovation for Rolls Royce’s marine unit, who is expecting commercial drone ships to sail the seas in the not too distant future.

Robots are not just conquering the sea’s surface. In an effort to support conservation for example, South African inventor Simeon Pieterkosky developed a bio-inspired robotic fish that can monitor water quality, clean up debris, and save fish from illegal fishing nets – fully immersible and mainly under water, of course.

Autonomous cars on public roads

Platooning. Photo: Dan Boman

Unmanned vehicles at sea and on land are still somewhat of a rarity at the moment, so in a bid to speed up the introduction of autonomous truck platoons in Europe, Daimler let three of its autonomous trucks loose on German and Dutch roads as part of the European Truck Platooning Challenge. The trucks drove from Stuttgart to Rotterdam using the company’s Connected Highway Pilot system and reached their destination without incident on 7 April.

While the successful completion of this challenge may have been great for Daimler, it’s likely that the appearance of fully autonomous cars on our roads are still years away. In the US, car manufacturers have asked the government to slow down the introduction of such vehicles, and there are practical challenges to consider, such as insurance covers and city infrastructure, as SPARC explained on Robohub.

3-D printing blowing our minds

Source: The Next Rembrandt/YouTube

And finally: We’ve known for a while that the possibilities of 3D printing are seemingly endless – April astonished us once again with the limitless imagination using this technology. Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL have developed a way to print solid and liquid materials simultaneously, allowing them to produce dynamic robots in one step, abolishing the need for assembly and paving the way for rapid production of fully functional robots.

Lastly, a team at the Smithsonian used a mixture of 3D printing, scanning, and AI to create a new Rembrandt-style painting. We can’t wait to see what this technology, and the people behind it, will create next!

Upcoming events

International Collaborative Robots Workshop (RIA ICRW 2016): 3-4 May, Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016): 16-21 May, Stockholm, Sweden

International Conference on Real-time Computing and Robotics (RCAR 2016): 6-9 June, Angkor Wat, Cambodia

International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, (ICUAS 2016): 7-10 June, Arlington, VA, USA

Automatica: 21-24 June,  Messe München, Germany

IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob 2016): 26-29 June, University Town, Singapore

9th IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV 2016): 29 June – 1 July, Messe Leipzig, Germany

Put on your thinking caps. Every few weeks, Robohub will conduct a roundtable discussion. In this edition, we discuss the challenges and limitations in defining the word ‘robot’. We strongly encourage our Robohub readers to chime in and be part of the conversation!

This week had Sabine Hauert, Andra Keay, Alan Winfield, Kassie Perlongo, Yannis Erripis, John Payne and Audrow Nash together to provide a variety of perspectives from research, ethics, business, and the general public.

The great debate – what is a robot? Ask a roboticist and you’ll likely get a dozen different responses. If we were to look at robotics as a set of enabling technologies (machine learning, internet of things, sensors, computation, hardware), we’d end up with nearly everything being a “robot”: from your toaster to your home. Not to mention, technology is constantly changing over time, which can easily be forgotten. Instead of having a rigid, well-defined easy answer, it appears we’re forced to accept the definition is fluid, depending on the purpose it serves. Defining what a robot is will be uniquely different if you’re a lawyer, philosopher, researcher, or a company.

Not an easy sell, nor something most people want to hear. So, ultimately, should we even try to define robot?

The old term for robot, from Czech, was from robota and meant ‘forced labour’. The term was coined in K. Čapek’s play R.U.R. ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (1920). And dictionary.com defines it as, “a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.” But these definitions no longer seem good enough as robots don’t need to be complex, and we probably shouldn’t think of them as slaves.

As the roundtable got underway, Alan said that one could define a robot as: 1) an artificial device that can sense its environment and purposefully act on or in that environment; 2) an embodied Artificial Intelligence, or 3) a machine that can automatically carry out useful work, as stated in the book “Robotics: A Very Short Introduction.”

The fact that it can act on its environment, and is embodied, is an important factor in determining if something is a robot, as opposed to just a computer sitting on a desk. Going further, Alan mentioned that “robotics is the physically substantiated bit of AI.”

The roundtable then discussed robots in terms of autonomy. There is a spectrum between remote controlled robots and full autonomy. Most robots are semi-autonomous, or rather, have supervised autonomy. In fact, “it’s hard to imagine having a robot without any supervision whatsoever,” says Alan.

“Some parts should be autonomous,” said Sabine. “However, you can have a remote-controlled telepresence robot, which has autonomous parts for it to navigate. If there is human input, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a robot.”

Sabine and the rest of the group also voiced concerns about limiting the definition of robotics and its impact on cross-disciplinary research. “If you make a basic micro-machine out of DNA that can sense, and react to its environment by changing shape, is that a robot? And does it matter? In the end, research should be open and unrestricted by definitions,” said Sabine.

Looking at its definition from a business perspective, “robot” is often used as a “marketing term” and not a “technical term”, said Andra. Half-jokingly, she mentions that “a robot is anything that doesn’t work well, yet”. As soon as the robot fulfills its role, it will lose the moniker and become a vacuum cleaner, or a car. “After looking at this question across many disciplines, I came to the conclusion that there could be no general definition of robot that was separate to the field and the stage of technology,” said Andra.

Do we need field-specific definitions?

“Inevitably, if you want to regulate robotics, having a precise definition becomes important. Regulation will be domain specific and, of course, we’ll need definitions inside those domains. We will need to define what an autonomous cars is,” says Alan. “There’s a lot of psychology in perceptions of what is a robot and what is not.”

The roundtable discussed who should determine what a robot is? Should society be involved or should it be left up to roboticists? Everyone agreed the public ultimately defines robotics based on their own perception of the word. It’s therefore important to have a greater discussion amongst technologists, philosophers, ethicists, regulators, and the public to all arrive at a societal understanding of the term.

Recent examples in the media involve ‘chatbots’. Most technologists would agree that these software bots that captured public attention are in fact not RObots. “Saying “Bot, without the Ro, is the common term for software agents,” said Andra. ” If it’s data-in / data-out, it’s a ‘bot’. There’s a weekly podcast called Robot or Not which is dealing with robots, not bots necessarily, people arguing over whether or not things are robots. ”

“There’s a tendency to overuse the term robot, which causes confusion in the public about robot capabilities. Imagine a headline saying ‘new robot does the cooking’ – if you’re talking about a software bot, the skills will be very different than a hardware robot with the necessary sensory readings, manipulation, and cognition,” said Sabine.

Help with connecting the dots
It’s clear that robotics is the result of many different spaces coming together. As an exercise, we tried to plot some of these spaces which are seemingly related, but ultimately different. We would love to see your “robot definition diagrams” as well, please send them to editors@robohub.org. Note: the roundtable does not all agree on this one.

There are obvious connections to fields outside of robotics, so you could also draw connections to the internet of things, or connected cities, and many more.

Finally, we’d love it if you could tell us what you think is a robot by filling in the survey below.

“What do you think are robots” survey

EDIT: Thank you for your participation in our survey, ‘What do you think are robots’. We had a total of 78 responses from everyone.

Here are the results:

• 94% agreed that cell phones are not robots
• 89% agreed that driverless trucks are robots
• 79% agreed that washing machines are not robots
• 65% agreed that AlphaGo is not a robot
• 92% agreed that industrial robotic arms are robots
• 93% agreed that alarm clocks are not robots
• 89% agreed that Roomba’s are robots
• 88% agreed that humanoids are robots
• 66% agreed that synthetic bacteria are not robots

SpaceX Falcon 9 landed on the drone ship. Source: SpaceX/flickr

After several unsuccessful attempts, SpaceX finally made a perfect touchdown with its Falcon 9 rocket on the drone ship, aptly named: ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’  A historic moment with the help of a drone ship.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 4:43 p.m. EDT (2043 GMT) on 8 April from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SpaceX streamed live video of the historic rocket landing during the launch, a feat that capped a smooth cargo launch for NASA:

After separating from Dragon a few minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s first stage performed several flyback engine burns, then eventually lowered itself vertically onto a SpaceX drone ship that was stationed off the Florida coast. Having reusable rockets is a big component of SpaceX’s plan to drive down the cost of space flights. That includes reducing the payload of re-fuelling.

The 1st stage of the Falcon 9 just landed on our Of Course I Still Love You droneship. Dragon in good orbit pic.twitter.com/SYyUCDZE3k

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 8, 2016

Why land on a floating drone ship?

The drone ships are capable of maneuvering autonomously, using GPS information for precision positioning, but they can also be remotely controlled by an accompanying support ship with a crew of technicians standing by. The reason for moving the landing site from land to the ocean is because of fuel. Having different rockets and payloads will require different amounts of fuel. For a ground landing, the rocket needs extra fuel to slow its arc, completely flip around, and then retread its horizontal and vertical distance to land safely. But with an ocean landing the drone can place itself down range, in the ideal place to catch the rocket booster on a more natural path when it comes down, decreasing how much fuel it needs to maneuver for a safe landing.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said a launch with a previously used first stage could be priced 30 percent less than the current Falcon 9 rockets.

The “Of Course I Still Love You,” which received the first successful Falcon 9 landing April 8th, 2016. Photo: SpaceX

But it’s not without difficulties. During the post-launch press conference SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented: “It’s quite a tiny target. It’s like trying to land on a postage stamp there,” Musk said. “It’s like a carrier landing versus a land landing.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNygOavo2mY

However SpaceX proved, if nothing else, that it can be done:

Onboard view of landing in high winds pic.twitter.com/FedRzjYYyQ — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 9, 2016

Here are a few more images from the historic landing. 

Falcon 9 positioning itself over drone ship. Source: SpaceX/Flickr

Falcon 9 landing on drone ship. Source: SpaceX/Flickr

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

• Despite hard landing, Falcon 9 recovery attempt bodes well for future of reusable spacecraft
• Blue Origin successfully tests autonomous suborbital system
• SpaceX delivers 11 satellites and successfully lands a first stage on land

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

Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Amsterdam-based photographer Wanda Tuerlinckx feels inspired by the slow style of classic photography. So influenced, in fact, you can find her observing all her subjects through an old-fashioned lens, an authentic 19^th century ‘camera obscura’ (Latin for “dark chamber”).

Initially, she began by taking portraits of people. Now she concentrates her artistic endeavours photographing robots, cleverly juxtaposing these unlikely high/low tech companions, to create visually stunning black and white images.

“Robots through the eye of a very old camera can be an extreme combination. It gives the robots a type of personality, or soul. Robots are not typically defined as being ‘romantic,’ but looking at these images the robots feel more alive,” said Tuerlinckx.

“I find it fascinating how people in the tech world react; they find the robots beautiful. The lens doesn’t have a hard effect, like with digital cameras, the focus is softer. The camera I use is not a cold camera, it’s a warm camera made out of wood.”

Wanda hopes to document robots in their evolution over the next 10, 20+ years using her portrait method. “With a camera this old you need to have patience — not always easy to find in our fast-paced world.”

Check out a collection of her photographs below. All images copyright Wanda Tuerlinckx.

Interact Centaur Rover. European Space Agency. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

SERGIO. Second Edition Robot for Generic Indoor Operations. Tech United/ University of Technology Eindhoven. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Dual-hemi Continuously Variable Transmission. Project: ROSE, University of Twente, RaM. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

KASPAR. Therapeutic robot for children with autism. EIZT/Zuyd Hogeschool. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Robird Jerrie. Clear Flight Solutions. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) Demonstrator Module. European Space Agency. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Nao. Robots.nu. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

ReflexLeg. Project: ReflexLeg, University of Twent, RaM. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

TUlip: Tech United/ University of Technology Eindhoven. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Underactuated hand prosthesis with compliant control. Project: MyoPro, University of Twente, RaM. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

PARO. Seal robot for people with psycho geriatric disorders. EIZT/ Zuyd Hogeschool. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

TURTLE. Tech United RoboCup Team Limited Edition. Tech United/ University of Technology Eindhoven. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Cheetah, Fast Running Energy Efficient Quadruped Project: FREEQ. University of Twente, RaM. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

AMIGO. Autonomous Mate for IntelliGent Operations. Tech United/University of Technology Eindhoven. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

Aerialtronics Altura. Clear Flight Solutions. Copyright: Wanda Tuerlinckx

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.

Rise of AI gaming

Exciting game news this month with DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI match-up against human pro player Lee Se-dol, from South Korea. Human and AI played Go: an ancient, complex, and abstract strategy board game, in a bid to win best of five. AlphaGo ended up beating his human rival, but Lee Se-dol managed to snatch one game for a final score of 1-4 in favour of AlphaGo. Whilst AI may outwit humans in chess and now Go, it still cannot compete in games like blackjack and poker, which require intuition and judgement for bluffing, value-betting, and re-steal– so humans are not a beaten race quite yet.

In other AI news, Microsoft’s internet chat bot Tay had to be shut down just a few hours after launching as the innocent AI quickly became racist and abusive as it ‘learned’ from other users on Twitter. Microsoft reacted by shutting it down and deleting the most offensive tweets, but not before the media picked up on what happened, making this a very public AI flop. For Microsoft, it’s back to the drawing board.

Taking to the skies

photo: FAA

It has been a long time coming, but start-up Flirtey reported their six rotor drone made the first ever fully autonomous urban delivery. The drone delivered bottled water, food, and a first-aid kit to a house in a small town in Nevada. While Flirtey is making headlines with their drone delivery success, pizza company Domino’s is trialling an unmanned ground vehicle in Australia for their pizza delivery service.

The Centre for the Study of the Drone released a report analysing 2,732 Section 333 exemption documents issued by the FAA between September 25, 2014 and December 31, 2015 to individuals, companies, and other institutions wishing to use drones for non-recreational purposes in U.S. airspace. The report indicates the rate of exemptions for non-recreational purposes of drones are on the rise, pointing towards the emergence of a ‘Various Uses’ drone business model. It appears not only are drones here to stay, but they will become an even more common sight in our skies.

Lastly, the New York City Drone Film Festival announced its winners this month – publishing visually stunning pieces of aerial cinematography well worth a watch. And if videos shot by robots aren’t your thing, there’s also a nine-part documentary by Academy Award®-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel and Executive Producer J.J. Abrams called ‘Moon Shot’. The documentary follows teams competing for $30 million in a race to land a privately-funded robot on the moon.

Losses, gains – and robotics’ first unicorn

The Atlas robot, created by Boston Dynamics and DARPA, used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

It wasn’t all good news on the business front as drone-maker 3D robotics announced they would be cutting jobs and focus more on the corporate market in an effort to avoid the growing competition in the direct-to-consumer market.

There was also a shake-up in the robotics world when Google announced they were putting Boston Dynamics up for sale. The previously successful maker of humanoid and four-legged robots was acquired by Google in 2013. However, after a series of high-profile resignations and failed collaborations Google does not believe the company will “produce a marketable product in the next few years”. When and for how much Boston Dynamics may be sold is a matter of debate – we’ll keep our eyes peeled.

In the meantime, small San Francisco-based start-up Cruise Automation made history as it was bought by GM for what is rumoured to be a sum exceeding $1 billion – the first time more than $1 billion has been invested in a robotics start-up.

European Robotics Forum, #ERF2016

Official opening for ERF2016, with representatives on the panel.

March also saw the annual ERF take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with a record number of delegates in attendance. There were lots of new and exciting showcases and engaging discussions focused on the European robotics industry.

Innovation, skills, and regulation were at the heart of the opening panel discussion, with government and industry officials discussing greater efforts to continue leading in the robotics industry and remain at the forefront of robotics advancement.

Autonomous cars

Microsoft wasn’t the only big company with some embarrassing news as Google revealed one of its self-driving cars caused a crash (with no injuries) that – for the first time – was not directly linked to human error, but an incorrect assumption the car made. On the positive front, having this type of low speed crash was actually a good chance to learn and improve safety for autonomous car programming.

Meanwhile in Singapore, MIT spinout nuTonomy is developing a fleet of unmanned taxis to roam the streets of the island nation and hoping this will solve mobility issues. Singapore’s population is projected to increase by 30 per cent in the next 20 years.

Swarm robots on the farm

Source: swarmfarm

It’s not just the streets that may soon see unmanned autonomous vehicles, they may also be operating on a field near your house. At least that’s what Australia-based company SwarmFarm Robotics hopes. The company has developed a swarm of collision-avoiding robots that work together to spray a field with fertiliser or pesticides, potentially saving farmers time and money. A programme built into the robots means the machines can also detect when they are running out of water, chemicals or fuel, and go to a nearby tanker to refuel. They can dock with the tank without aid, fill up and return to their midnight spraying.

Meanwhile in the lab…

Researchers at Stanford University built six microrobots modelled on ants, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, and pulled a car weighing 3,900 pounds. You can watch the impressive video here.

At MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), researchers developed a phone-based laser rangefinder that works outdoors – something current depth sensors (such as Microsoft Kinect) struggle to do. The team plans to present their new rangefinder at ICRA in May.

Finally, an exoskeleton built by Indego was granted FDA approval after successfully completing a large US clinical trial. The company joins only a handful of others who have FDA or CE certified exoskeletons on the market.

In Memoriam

Photo courtesy: We Robot 2015.

We could not end this digest without a nod to Professor Tony Dyson – builder of the original R2-D2 robot for Star Wars – who sadly died on 4th March. The special effects expert designed robots for many big tech companies such as Sony and Toshiba, and worked on Superman II, Moonraker and Dragon Slayer. Rest in peace.

Upcoming events

• 7th Annual National Robotics Week: April 2-10
• AISB 2016: University of Sheffield, UK, April 4-6
• IEEE Haptics Symposium 2016: Philadelphia, PA, April 8-11
• Drone Dealer Expo: Orlando, FL, April 11- 13
• RoboUniverse: New York, April 11-12

Opening panel at ERF2016.

The opportunities for building “digital” environments where robots are integral parts, such as in manufacturing and processing industries, transport, health and environment, smart cities and regions, was the theme of the opening session at the 2016 European Robotics Forum (ERF), which kicked off in Ljubljana, Slovenia on Monday.

ERF is the largest robotics networking event in Europe and this year attracted a record number of delegates. Over 600 were in attendance, including industrialists, researchers, investors, politicians and media.

The opening session was introduced by Bernd Liepert, President of euRobotics aisbl, and featured a panel discussion with representatives from Slovenian, European Commission, Committee of Regions, European Investment Bank, European Parliament, euRobotics.

Here’s a selection of some of the best live tweets.

Innovation

Europe has a huge potential in research and innovation #ERF2016. We need to maintain excellence in #robotics – J. Heikkila, EC

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

We need more concrete #robot prototyping and testing of robots, we need more action – M. Markkula, CoR #ERF2016

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

Beyond manufacturing

We have to show what robots can do outside manufacturing, this is the future – J. Wesseling #ERF2016

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

Bernd Liepert asking What are the future scenarios in robotics? How will robots be used? Can we create new businesses? #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

Policy and regulation

“Cut the red-tape – create favorable conditions for industries who want to use automation and robotics" – Markku Markkula #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

Are legal barriers blocking the opportunities offered by robotics? We need a flexible legal framework for Europe says @mady_delvaux #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

Member states are working on regulation for autonomous cars, drones. We need common principles across Europe. @mady_delvaux #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

Wise words from wonderful @mady_delvaux at #ERF2016 – keen for EU to be first and innovate in robotics regulation. #robolaw #roboethics

— Alan Winfield (@alan_winfield) March 21, 2016

Skills

Robotics requires new changes in the way we think of our jobs & training. 700 million Euros from EC to support innovation #ERF2016

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

Innovation and skills play an important role in making Europe more competitive, Matteo Fusari, EIB #ERF2016

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

"This is a changing landscape. Advancements in technology may need retraining, diverse digital skills will be crucial." #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

The human element

Robots should be there in the interest of the humans – Mady Delvaux #ERF2016

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) March 21, 2016

"We have to make sure that those who need this technology have ACCESS to it" – Head of Robotics Unit – European Commission #ERF2016

— Robohub (@Robohub) March 21, 2016

#ERF2016 panel: @mady_delvaux says we need more @WomenInRobotics :)

— Mary Ellen Foster (@MaryEllenFoster) March 21, 2016

Artificial Intelligence

Interesting that #ERF2016 panellists very frequently mentioning #AI. Good to see discussion broadened to robotics and AI.

— Alan Winfield (@alan_winfield) March 21, 2016

In closing, the panel agreed there is still a lot more work to be done. “Robotics is the future, and industries, businesses, academics, should consider how to help close the innovation gap in Europe,” said Mr Markkula. “Labor force, industry, academia all have a role to play.”

“There is still a lot of work to do to make robotics faster and more reliable. We need to have robotics be partners to humans” said Mr Liepert.

Check out photos from day one at the exhibition hall below!

Stop by the euRobotics / Robohub booth and talk science communication, write tweets, and give a three-minute pitch about your latest research!

Academy Award®-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. Source: Google Lunar XPRIZE/YouTube

The nine-part documentary web series about the Google Lunar XPRIZE that first launched on Google Play is now available YouTube.

‘Moon Shot’, directed by Academy Award nominated filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel and executive producer J.J. Abrams, follows the journey of the different teams who are competing to win $30M in a race to land a privately-funded robot on the moon.

Here’s the trailer:

It’s certainly a moving web series. The character-driven stories focus on the motivations and eccentricities of the people competing, rather than the technology of building the robots themselves. The first film is about roboticist Red Whittaker, a professor who splits his time between teaching future engineers at Carnegie Mellon and owning/operating a working cattle farm in rural Pennsylvania.

Watch here:

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.

Artificial Intelligence raising the bar

AlphaGo playing challenger. Source: Google DeepMind

In a battle of wits, AlphaGo showed off its potential for advancing machine learning by defeating European Go champion Fan Hui, 5-0. This was the first time AI software defeated a top-level human Go player. AlphaGo will next play against Lee Sedol – the world’s top Go player – in Seoul. The matches will be live streamed on YouTube as well as broadcast on TV in March.

The goal for smarter AI is one step closer thanks to a $28 million grant to Harvard. The computer system being developed will identify brain processes that make humans good at recognising patterns.

Stretchy skin renaissance

Soft robots are flexing (sorry) their way in the news as researchers discover new ways to enhance robotic skin that is soft and flexible. The skin can also display colours as it bends or stretches.

Meanwhile enhancements made by combining flexible silicone sheets with electrodes led to the creation of a gripper that’s strong enough to pick up heavy objects—while also being gentle enough to pick up the most delicate.

Not for the squeamish, malleable robotic roaches could be the way of the future for search and rescue teams trying to locate survivors and safe entry points for first responders in disaster zones.

Researchers at NCCR Robotics also reported a new electrical film that is both solid and liquid and able to function when stressed or in pressurised positions.

Redefining ‘driver’ in driverless vehicles

photo: Mercedes-Benz

In response to a question from Google, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says in six months they will write guidelines for self-driving cars. The question of ‘who’ ultimately is responsible will be an important starting point for legal, insurance, and safety considerations and is likely to influence other judicial, regulatory, and legislative bodies in the future.

Coinciding the legal proceedings with autonomous vehicles, Professor Ryan Calo from University of Washington – School of Law, released a paper examining half a century of case law involving robots. Professor Calo mentions that courts are not the only place where robotics law and policy can be created, as shown in the recent example with NHTSA.

Meanwhile, GM and Lyft are teaming up to build a network of self-driving cars. While there are no specific examples of how it will work or when it will arrive, the plan does involve GM investing $500 million in Lyft and becoming a preferred provider of cars for short-term use to drivers.

The military continues to investigate autonomous options with the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) testing convoys of self-driving vehicles that could be ideal for humanitarian relief missions or resupplying troops in the field. 

Looking to the future of robotics

Quite a number of reports have generated media attention. In the Economic Report of the President released to Congress, robots are highlighted as a way to increase productivity and jobs.

The International Federation of Robotics (IRF) report demonstrated that worldwide robot sales grew by 15% with explosive growth in the automotive industry and technological advances enabling small and medium size manufacturers (SMEs) to compete using collaborative robots.

Robotics Business Review (RBR) unveiled its fifth annual RBR50 list comprised of the most noteworthy public and private companies in the global robotics industry for 2016. The list outlines those who should be kept on the business radar and are pushing ahead in the future of robotics.

And lastly in mergers and acquisitions, iRobot sold its Defence and Security division to Arlington Capital Partners for around $45 million. Arlington and iRobot Defence & Security are looking to create a new and focused robotics platform.

Robotic versatility

It’s enough to make any serious golfer seriously envious. A golfing robot sunk a hole in one at the 2016 Waste Management Phoenix Open in Arizona, with odds of hitting the shot about 12,500 to 1.

Boston Dynamics’ family of robots continues to evolve with the company releasing a video of the latest version of its Atlas humanoid robot. Not only can the tetherless robot operate under internal power, but it can work indoors and out, and boasts greatly improved balance.

Professor Matthew Johnson-Robertson, University of Michigan, is investigating new robotic approaches to underwater mapping by creating a proposal for drastic cost reduction in deep water monitoring. In his talk, he showed the results from the monitoring of Australia’s Coral Reefs and the archaeological mapping of a 5,000 year-old submerged city, and brand new work in underwater grasping and manipulation.

Japanese exoskeleton start-up, Cyberdene, is building a city of robots that will feature robot helpers working in the medical, industrial and agricultural industries. Called Cybernic City, it will include homes for elderly, a research city, hospital, park and plaza, sitting on 84,000+ square meters of land.

Whilst still pricer than motorised wheelchairs, SuitX’s Phoenix exoskeleton weighs 27 pounds and is custom-fit to the user’s body. But exoskeletons could be covered by health insurance providers in the US sooner rather than later. A medical review board ruled that a health insurance provider in the United States is obligated to provide coverage and reimbursement for a $69,500 ReWalk robotic exoskeleton. This ruling implies that walking is not a luxury for patients with spinal injuries, but a right—and that if the technology exists and is mechanically sound, insurance companies must cover them.

Drones making headlines

A group of Swiss researchers from the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the University of Zurich and NCCR Robotics has developed Artificial Intelligence software to teach a small quadrocopter to recognise and follow forest trails. The video was also submitted to the AAAI Video Competition which features the best videos in AI contributed by our community. You can view all the videos from the AAAI competition here. 

A 72-minute voyage across the English channel may seem beyond drone technology’s capabilities. But UK commercial drone operator Ocuair has defied the odds, traversing the waterway with a custom-built quadcopter in a first for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Registered drones now outnumber all registered manned aircraft in the U.S. And finally, the Dutch National Police have partnered with Guard from Above to see if eagles can safely take down illegal drones.

Events to watch for this March:

•  HRI — 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Christchurch, New Zealand — 7-10 March
• ICSDRI2016 — 2016 the International Conference on Sensor Design and Robot Intelligence, Jeju Island, South Korea — 19-20 March
• EU Robotics Forum, Ljubljana, Slovenia — 21-23 March

Miss a previous digest? Don’t worry! Check out our archives. 

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. 

Off to a flying start

It’s the beginning of the New Year, what will happen in the robotics world in 2016? Whilst no one really knows for sure, popular discussions and trends in robotics over the past months feature exciting developments. For example, substantial growth in robotic startups, progress in connected autonomous cars and drones, more prominent roles for social robots, and a boost in industrial and agricultural robot use. The latter in particular is predicted to see big changes in supply chains and the world’s first farm run entirely by robots, which by 2017 aims to harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce daily.

YuMi robot | photo ABB

Collaborative robots (co-bots) working jointly with humans are rapidly advancing, thanks to affordable sensors and computer power. It’s no wonder this sector is expected to grow and reach over $1 billion in 2020 with collaborative lightweight robots becoming the top seller in the industry in about 2 years.

Another trend we haven’t discussed — but it tends to come up again and again — is the Internet of Things. Whilst this area isn’t actually ‘new’ it is worth watching as we’re shifting away from building devices to designing services.

Forbes also expanded their ’30 under 30’ list, highlighting more trends in advanced manufacturing, conversational systems and human-augmented AI.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos discussed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the technological revolution that will alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. To stimulate further discussion along these lines, topics focused on powerful new technologies and concepts — from artificial intelligence to advanced analytics — along with philosophical questions about human values and human traits.

With eminent speakers, including Alan Winfield and Vanessa Evers, attendees tackled a range of topics from the future of jobs in times of increasing automation, to the impact of robotics on the car industry, and the fear of robots rising up against us.

How friendly is your AI?

Artificial intelligence was another hot topic at the WEF with discussions on the current state of AI and debates around emotional intelligence. January saw several interesting articles about this area. On Robohub we asked ‘how friendly is your AI?’ and whether AI and humans can learn to collaborate, or are destined to compete. Researchers believe it is imperative to carefully define rewards in order to avoid costly surprises. In addition, we published an interview with New York Times reporter John Markoff about his career and views on the quickly evolving AI sector.

Big investments in robotics

Whilst the start of the New Year is a time to look forward it is also a time to reflect. 2015 was a year of great successes for robotics, including record investments in drone technology. Frank Tobe looked back at robotics funding, IPOs, acquisitions and failures in 2015 to see what we can learn from the past and how it might help us predict what will happen in the future.

2016 looks set to continue with the upward trend, as Horizon 2020 earmarked almost €100 million for European robotics, and Savioke, developer of service robot ‘Relay’, secured $17.6 million in funding from Intel Capital, EDBI, Northern Light Venture Capital. Autonomous and connected cars continue seeing investments, with the White House putting forward a $4 billion proposal to speed up the deployment of robocars, and GM combining forces with Lyft to bring forward the day when your taxi is a driverless car.

Consumer electronics

Autonomous vehicles were all the rage at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. But the time robocars – and only robocars – roam our streets won’t be for quite a while as there are still a number of issues that need to be resolved, according to Google’s intervention rate reports.

CES is not just robocars, there were plenty of other exciting talks and news from the event, like the CEOs of IBM and Intel describing the ways in which purchasing has been transformed by technology, Aldebaran’s chief of innovation outlining the rise of the social robot, and Toyota’s announcement of their all-star leadership team for AI and robotics research. But not all the cool stuff shown and discussed at CES is ready for the market, as Farhad Manjoo argued in the New York Times, describing the ‘awkward adolescence’ of  consumer tech. If you’d like to learn more, there’s a brief CES round-up available online, where you can also watch a replay of the keynote speech given by Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel Corporation.

Service robots are growing up

It’s no secret that service and social robots are gaining in popularity (as the success of Pepper’s presentation at CES showed once again) and becoming more affordable. On 27 December another batch of Pepper robots sold out in just one minute and researchers are working on various improvements. In Germany, roboticists are training robots to predict your organisation preferences. And in the US, Savioke is trialling its service robot in real-world settings to find out whether and how it impacts on service. Several companies are working to implement and improve telepresence, by improving natural language recognition. It’s exciting for service robotics, certainly an area to watch.

 Robot’s podcast: 200th episode special

We couldn’t end this digest without a nod to the Robots Podcast, which celebrated its 200^th episode on 22 January with a look back at nearly 8 years of podcasting. Run entirely by volunteers, the podcast has featured many of the great names in robotics, including Rodney Brooks (who also appears in the celebratory 200^th episode) and Alan Winfield.

In memoriam

Marvin Minsky visiting the OLPC office. Photo credit: Sethwoodworth, Wikimedia Commons

There was also sad news at the start of the New Year with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky passing away at the age of 88. This comes after the father of robotics, Joseph F Engelberger, recently passed at 90, just one month prior. Minsky was the first to explore the use of common-sense reasoning in computer programming and paved the way for the fields we now know as AI and machine learning.

Coming up in February

• Unmanned Systems Expo 2016, The Hague, Netherlands, 2 February
• Quark 2016, K.K. Birla Goa Campus (India), 5 February
• WearRAcon 16, Phoenix, AZ, 10-12 February
• AAAI-16, Phoenix, AZ, 12-17 February

Another year gone as the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos draws to a close. Experts weighed in about upcoming global changes for robotics, AI, internet of things, and the rise of digital transformation across industry.

Global leaders across business, government, international organizations, and academia gathered at the World Economic Forum to discuss political, business, and social aspects around the world. The Forum’s Executive Chairman and Founder, Professor Klaus Schwab, wrote about The Fourth Industrial Revolution and its potential to raise global income levels and improve quality of life for populations across the globe. As an economics forum, central messages in the talks involved future impact of robotics in business and, interestingly, why technology actually makes us more human.

This emerging theme of the next “cultural renassiance” with powerful new technologies and concepts — from artificial intelligence to advanced analytics — converged nicely with deep philosophical questions about human values and human traits, like belonging and creativity. How do we continue to make technology work for us and ensuring that our humanity and humanness are not lost?

Speakers included Alan Winfield, Stuart Russell, Vanessa Evers and many others. Videos and posts about these central themes can be found below.

The Future of Jobs
Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

• The next revolution in the car industry
• What happens when robots take our jobs?
• The next industrial revolution will not be televised
• What the Fourth Industrial Revolution will do for people with disabilities

On the agenda: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

• Why you shouldn’t fear robots
• No, the robots are not about to rise up and destroy us all
• What will the home of the future look like?
• Is technological change creating a new global economy?
• 6 disruptive technologies that will shape how we do business
• How wearing a robot suit could help us understand ageing