This short film documents some of the most innovative projects that emerged from the work of NCCR Robotics, the Swiss-wide consortium coordinated from 2010 to 2022 by EPFL professor Dario Floreano and ETHZ professor Robert Riener, including other major research institutions across Switzerland.

Shot over the course of six months in Lausanne, Geneva, Zurich, Wangen an der Aare, Leysin, Lugano, the documentary is a unique look at the state of the art of medical, educational and rescue robotics, and at the specific contributions that Swiss researchers have given to the field over the last decade. In addition to showing the robots in action, the film features extended interviews with top experts including Stéphanie Lacour, Silvestro Micera, Davide Scaramuzza, Robert Riener, Pierre Dillenbourg, Margarita Chli, Dario Floreano.

Produced by NCCR Robotics and Viven.

We can proudly say that NCCR Robotics has had a truly transformational effect on the national robotics research landscape, creating novel synergies, strengthening key areas, and adding a unique signature that made Switzerland prominent and attractive at the international level.

In its 12 years of activity, NCCR Robotics has had a transformational effect on the national robotics research landscape.

Our highlights include:

• Achieving several breakthroughs in wearable, rescue and educational robotics
• Creating new master’s and doctoral programmes that will train generations of future robotics engineers
• Graduating more than 200 PhD students and 100 postdocs, with more than 1’000 peer-reviewed publications
• Spinning out several projects into companies, many of which have become international leaders and generated more than 400 jobs
• Improving awareness of gender balance in robotics and substantially increasing the percentage of women in robotics in Switzerland
• Kick-starting large outreach programs, such as Cybathlon, Swiss Drone Days, and Swiss Robotics Days, which will continue to increase public awareness of robotics for good

It is not the end of the story though: our partner institutions – EPFL, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, the University of Bern, the University of Basel, Università della Svizzera Italiana, EMPA – will continue to collaborate through the Innovation Booster Robotics, a new national program aimed at developing technology transfer activities and maintaining the network.

Research

The research programme of NCCR Robotics has been articulated around three Grand Challenges for future intelligent robots that can improve the quality of life: Wearable Robotics, Rescue Robotics, and Educational Robotics.

In the Wearable Robotics Grand Challenge, NCCR Robotics studied and developed a large range of novel prosthetic and orthotic robots, implantable sensors, and artificial intelligence algorithms to restore the capabilities of persons with disabilities and neurological disorders.

For example, researchers developed implantable and assistive technologies that allowed patients with completely paralyzed legs to walk again thanks to a combination of assistive robots (such as Rysen), implantable microdevices that read brain signals and stimulate spinal cord nerves, and artificial intelligence that translate neural signals into gait patterns.

They also developed prosthetic hands with soft sensors and implantable neural stimulators that enable people to feel again the haptic qualities of objects. Along this line, they also studied and developed prototypes of an extra arm and artificial intelligence that could allow humans to control the additional artificial limb in combination with their natural arms for situations that normally require more than one person.

Researchers also developed the MyoSuit textile soft exoskeletons that allow persons on wheelchairs to stand up, take a few steps, and then sit back on the wheelchair without external help.

In the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge, researchers developed and deployed legged and flying robots with self-learning capabilities for use in disaster mitigation as well as in civil and industrial inspection.

Among the most notable results are ANYMal, a quadruped robot that won the first prize in the international DARPA challenge, by exploring underground tunnels and identifying a number of objects; K-rock, an amphibious robot inspired by salamanders and crocodiles that can swim, walk, and squat under narrow passages; a collision-resilient drone that has become the most widely used robot in the world by rescue teams, governments, and companies for inspection of confined spaces, bridges, boilers, and ship tankers, to mention a few; a whole family of foldable drones that can change shape to squeeze through narrow passage, protect nearby persons from propellers, carry cargo of various size and weight, and twist their arms to get close to surfaces and perform repair operations; an avian-inspired drone with artificial feathers that can approximate the flight agility of birds of prey.

In addition, researchers developed powerful learning algorithms that enabled legged robots to walk up mountains and grassy land by adapting their gait, and flying robots that learn to fly and avoid high-speed moving objects using bio-inspired vision systems, and even learned to race through a circuit beating world-champion humans. Researchers also proposed new methods to let inexperienced humans and rescue officers interact with, and easily control, drones as if they were an extension of their own body.

In the Educational Robotics Grand Challenge, NCCR researchers created Thymio, a mobile robot for teaching programming and elements of robotics that has been deployed in more than 80’000 units in classrooms across Switzerland, and Cellulo, a smaller modular robot that allows richer forms of interaction with pupils, as wells as a broad range of learning activities (physics, mathematics, geography, games) and training methods for teaching teachers how to integrate robots in their lectures.

Researchers also teamed with Canton Vaud on a large-scale project to introduce robotics and computer science into all primary-school classes and have already trained more than one thousand teachers.

Outreach

Communication, knowledge (and technology) transfer to society and the economy

Over 12 years, NCCR Robotics researchers published approximately 500 articles in peer-review journals and 500 articles in peer-reviewed conferences and filed approximately 50 patents (one third of which have already been granted). They also developed a tech-transfer support programme to help young researchers translate research results into commercially viable products. As a result, 16 spin-offs were supported, out of which 14 have been incorporated and are still active. Some of these start-ups have become full scale-up companies with products sold all over the world, have raised more than five times capital than the total funds of the NCCR over 12 years, and generated several hundreds of new high-tech jobs in Switzerland.

Several initiatives were aimed at the public to communicate the importance of robotics for the quality of life.

• For example, during the first phase NCCR Robotics organized an annual Robotics Festival at EPFL that attracted at its peak 17’000 visitors in one day.
• In the second phase, Cybathlon was launched, a world-first Olympic-style competition for athletes with disabilities and supported by assistive devices, which was later taken over by ETH Zurich that will ensure its continuation.
• Additionally, NCCR Robotics launched the Swiss Drone Days at EPFL that combine drone exhibitions, drone races, and public presentations, and were later taken over by EPFL and most recently by University of Zurich.
• NCCR Robotics also organized the annual Swiss Robotics Day with the aim of bringing together researchers and industry representatives in a full day of high-profile technology presentations from top Swiss and international speakers, demonstrations of research prototypes and robotics products, carousel of pitch presentations by young spin-offs, and several panel discussions and networking events.

Promotion of young scientists and of academic careers of women

The NCCR Robotics helped develop a new master’s programme and a new PhD programme in robotics at EPFL, created exchange programmes and fellowships with ETH Zurich and top international universities with a program in robotics, and issued several awards for excellence in study, research, technology transfer, and societal impact.

NCCR Robotics has also been very active in addressing equal opportunities. Activities aimed at improving gender balance included dedicated exchange and travel grants, awards for supporting career development, master study fellowships, outreach campaigns, promotional movies and surveys for continuous assessment of the effectiveness of actions. As a result, the percentage of women in the EPFL robotics masters almost doubled in four years, and the number of women postgraduate and assistant professors doubled too. Although much remains to be done in Switzerland, the initial results of these actions are promising and the awareness of the importance of equal opportunity has become pervasive throughout the NCCR Robotics community and in all its research, outreach, and educational activities.

Beyond NCCR Robotics

In order to sustain the long-term impact of NCCR Robotics, EPFL launched a new Center of Intelligent Systems where robotics is a major research pillar and ETH Zurich created a Center for Robotics that includes large research facilities, annual summer schools, and activities to favor collaborations with industry.

Furthermore, EPFL built on NCCR Robotics’ educational technologies and further programmes to create the LEARN Center that will continue training teachers in the use of robots and digital technologies in schools. Similarly, ETH Zurich built on the research and competence developed in the Wearable Robotics Grand Challenge to create the Competence Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Science with the goal of restoring and maintaining independence, productivity, and quality of life for people with physical disabilities and contribute towards an inclusive society.

As the project approaches its conclusion, NCCR Robotics members applied for additional funding for the National Thematic Network Innovation Booster Robotics that was launched in 2022 and will continue supporting networking activities and technology transfer in medical and mobile robotics for the next 4 years. Finally, a Swiss Robotics Association comprising stakeholders from academia and industry will be created in order to manage the Innovation Booster programme and offer a communication and collaboration platform for the transformed and enlarged robotics community that NCCR Robotics has contributed to create.

This year’s Swiss Robotics Day – an annual event run by the EPFL-led National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics – will be held at the Beaulieu convention center in Lausanne. For the first time, this annual event will take place over two days: the first day, on 4 November, will be reserved for industry professionals, while the second, on 5 November, will be open to the public.

Visitors at this year’s Swiss Robotics Day are in for a glimpse of some exciting new technology: a robotic exoskeleton that enables paralyzed patients to ski, a device the width of a strand of hair that can be guided through a human vein, a four-legged robot that can walk over obstacles, an artificial skin that can diagnose early-stage Parkinson’s, a swarm of flying drones, and more.

The event, now in its seventh year, was created by NCCR Robotics in 2015. It has expanded into a leading conference for the Swiss robotics industry, bringing together university researchers, businesses and citizens from across the country. For Swiss robotics experts, the event provides a chance to meet with peers, share ideas, explore new business opportunities and look for promising new hires. That’s what they’ll do on Friday, 4 November – the day reserved for industry professionals.

On Saturday, 5 November, the doors will open to the general public. Visitors of all ages can discover the latest inventions coming out of Swiss R&D labs and fabricated by local companies – including some startups. The event will feature talks and panel discussions on topics such as ethics in robotics, space robotics, robotics in art and how artificial intelligence can be used to promote sustainable development – all issues that will shape the future of the industry. PhD students will provide a snapshot of where robotics research stands today, while school-age children can sign up for robot-building workshops. Teachers can take part in workshops given by the Roteco robot teaching community and see how robotics technology can support learning in the classroom.

In the convention center’s 5,000 m² exhibit hall, some 70 booths will be set up with all sorts of robot demonstrations, complete with an area for flying drones. Technology developed as part of the Cybathlon international competition will be on display; this competition was introduced by NCCR Robotics in 2016 to encourage research on assistance systems for people with disabilities. Silke Pan will give a dance performance with a robotic exoskeleton, choregraphed by Antoine Le Moal of the Béjart ballet company. Talks will be given in French and English. Entrance is free of charge but registration is required.

Laying the foundation for future success

The 2022 Swiss Robotics Day will mark the end of NCCR Robotics, capping 12 years of cutting-edge research. The center was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and has sponsored R&D at over 30 labs in seven Swiss institutions: EPFL, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, IDSIA-SUPSI-USI in Lugano, the University of Bern, EMPA and the University of Basel. NCCR Robotics has given rise to 16 spin-offs in high-impact fields like portable robots, drones, search-and-rescue systems and education. Together the spin-offs have raised over CHF 100 million in funding and some of them, like Flyability and ANYbotics, have grown into established businesses creating hundreds of high-tech jobs. The center has also rolled out several educational and community initiatives to further the teaching of robotics in Switzerland.

After the center closes, some of its activities – especially those related to technology transfer – will be carried out by the Innovation Booster Robotics program sponsored by Innosuisse and housed at EPFL. This program, initially funded for three years, is designed to promote robotics in universities and the business world.

A day for industry professionals only

The first day of the event, 4 November, is intended for robotics-industry businesses, investors, researchers, students and journalists. It will kick off with a talk by Robin Murphy, a world-renowned expert in rescue robotics and a professor at Texas A&M University; she will be followed by Auke Ijspeert from EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory, Elena García Armada from the Center for Automation and Robotics in Spain, Raffaello D’Andrea (a pioneer in robotics-based inventory management) from ETH Zurich, Thierry Golliard from Swiss Post and Adrien Briod, the co-founder of Flyability.

In the afternoon, a panel discussion will explore how robots and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace. Experts will include Dario Floreano from NCCR Robotics and EPFL, Rafael Lalive from the University of Lausanne, Alisa Rupenyan-Vasileva from ETH Zurich, Agnès Petit Markowski from Mobbot and Pierre Dillenbourg from EPFL. Event participants will also have a chance to network that afternoon. The day will conclude with an awards ceremony to designate Switzerland’s best Master’s thesis on robotics. The booths and robot demonstrations will take place on both days of the event.

A virtual glimpse of NCCR Robotics research

At NCCR Robotics, a new generation of robots that can work side by side with humans (fighting disabilities, facing emergencies and transforming education) is developed. Check out the videos below to see them in more detail.

As the next edition of the Swiss Robotics Day is in preparation in Lausanne, let’s revisit the November 2021 edition, where the vitality and richness of Switzerland’s robotics scene was on full display at StageOne Event and Convention Hall in Zurich. It was the first edition of NCCR Robotics’s flagship event after the pandemic, and it surpassed the scale of previous editions, drawing in almost 500 people. You can see the photo gallery here.

Welcome notes from ETH President Joël Mesot and NCCR Robotics Director Dario Floreano opened a dense conference programme, chaired by NCCR Robotics co-Director Robert Riener and that included scientific presentations from Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), Stéphanie Lacour and Herb Shea (both from EPFL), as well as the industry perspective from ABB’s Marina Bill, Simon Johnson from the Drone Industry Association and Hocoma co-founder Gery Colombo. A final roundtable – including Robert Riener, Hocoma’s Serena Maggioni, Liliana Paredes from Rehaklinik and Georg Rauter from the University of Basel – focused on the potential and the challenges of innovation in healthcare robotics.

Over 50 exhibitors – including scientific laboratories as well as start-ups and large companies – filled the 3,300 square-meter venue, demonstrating technologies ranging from mobile robots to wearable exoskeletons, from safe delivery drones to educational robots and much more. Sixteen young companies presented their innovations in a start-up carousel. Dozens of professional meetings took place throughout the day, allowing a diverse audience of entrepreneurs, funders, academics and policy makers to network and explore possible collaborations. A crowd of young researchers participated in a mentoring session where Marina Bill (ABB), Auke Ijspeert (EPFL) and Iselin Frøybu (Emovo Care) provided advice on academic and industrial careers. Sixteen students participated in the Cybathlon @school competition, experimenting with robotic technologies for disability, and in the end officially announcing CYBATHLON 2024.

During the event, the next chapter for Swiss robotics was also announced: the launch of the NTN Innovation Booster on robotics, which will run from 2022 to 2025 and will be led by EPFL’s Aude Billard. Funded by Innosuisse, the NTN will act as a platform for new ideas and partnerships, supporting innovation through “idea generator bubbles” and specific funding calls.

The 2021 Swiss Robotics Day marked the beginning of NCCR Robotics’s final year. The project, launched in 2010, is on track to meet all its scientific goals in the three areas of wearable, rescue and educational robotics, while continuing to focus on supporting spin-offs, advancing robotics education and improving Swiss Robotics Day showcases innovation equality of opportunities for all robotics researchers. The conclusion of NCCR Robotics will be marked by the next edition of the Swiss Robotics Day as larger, two-days public event that will take place in Lausanne on 4 and 5 November 2022.

Wearable robotics

The goal of the NCCR Grand Challenge on Wearable Robotic is to develop a novel generation of wearable robotic systems, which will be more comfortable for patients and more extensively usable in a clinical environment. These new technological solutions will help in the recovery of movement and grasping after cardiovascular accidents and spinal cord lesions. They can be used to enhance physiotherapy by improving training, thus encouraging the brain to repair networks (neurorehabilitation). And they can be used as assistive devices (e.g. prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons) to support paralysed people in daily life situations.

While current wearable robots are making huge advances in the lab, there is some way to go before they become part of everyday life for people with disabilities. In order to be functional, robots must work with the user and not cause damage or irritation (in the case of externally worn devices) or be rejected by the host (in the case of implants), they must have their own energy source that does not need to be constantly plugged in or re-charged, and they need to be affordable.

Rescue robotics

After a natural disaster such as an earthquake or flood, it is often very dangerous for teams of rescue workers to go into affected areas to look for victims and survivors.

The idea behind robots for rescue activities is to create robust robots that can travel into areas too dangerous for humans and rescue dogs. Robots can be used to assess the situation and to locate people who may be trapped and to relay the location back to the rescue teams, so that all efforts can be concentrated on areas where victims are known to be. Robots are also being developed to carry medical supplies and food, thereby focusing resources where they are most needed.

The main research issues within the field of mobile robotics for search and rescue mission are durability and usability of robots – how to design robots that are easily transported, can function efficiently in all weather conditions and that have long lasting power, and robots that can navigate themselves and have effective enough sensors to pick out victims.

Educational robotics

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, robots were typically introduced in schools as a tool for teaching robotics or other Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. However, this specificity held back their adoption for wider educational purposes. This early failure of adoption of robots in classrooms happened because they were unreliable, expensive and with limited applications.

Nowadays, with robots being cheaper and more easily deployable, applications in education have become easier. In the past fifteen years, there have been an increasing number of extracurricular robotics activities showing the popularity of robotics in an informal educational context. However, robots are still underused in schools for formal education. Although there is no agreement over the exact reasons for this situation, it seems clear, from different studies, that teachers play a key role in the introduction of technology in schools.

During the first two phases of NCCR Robotics two products were developed: the Thymio robot— a mobile robot increasingly used to teach robotics and programming, and Cellulo — a small, inexpensive and robust robot that kids can move with their hands and use in groups.

Current research focuses on two aspects. The first one is inventing new forms of interactions between learners and tangible swarms based on the Cellulo robot, and studying the learning outcomes enabled by these interactions.

The second aspect is investigating teacher adoption of robotics from two points of view: platform usability and teacher training. Research will show how to train teachers and exploit Thymio and Cellulo in their daily activities and how to minimize their orchestration load. Activities relating to computational thinking skills are the main target, with school topics outside the STEM domains also included.

Michel Roccati stands up and walks in Lausanne. © EPFL / Alain Herzog 2021

The images made headlines around the world in late 2018. David Mzee, who had been left paralyzed by a partial spinal cord injury suffered in a sports accident, got up from his wheelchair and began to walk with the help of a walker. This was the first proof that Courtine and Bloch’s system – which uses electrical stimulation to reactivate spinal neurons – could work effectively in patients.

Fast forward three years, and a new milestone has just been reached. The research team led by both Courtine, a professor at EPFL and member of NCCR Robotics, and Bloch, a professor and neurosurgeon at CHUV, has enhanced their system with more sophisticated implants controlled by artificial-intelligence software. These implants can stimulate the region of the spinal cord that activates the trunk and leg muscles. Thanks to this new technology, three patients with complete spinal cord injury were able to walk again outside the lab. “Our stimulation algorithms are still based on imitating nature,” says Courtine. “And our new, soft implanted leads are designed to be placed underneath the vertebrae, directly on the spinal cord. They can modulate the neurons regulating specific muscle groups. By controlling these implants, we can activate the spinal cord like the brain would do naturally to have the patient stand, walk, swim or ride a bike, for example.”

Patient with complete spinal cord injury (left) and incomplete spinal cord injury (right) walking in Lausanne, Switzerland. ©NeuroRestore – Jimmy Ravier

The new system is described in an article appearing in Nature Medicine that was also co-authored by Silvestro Micera, who leads the NCCR Robotics Wearable Robotics Grand Challenge. “Our breakthrough here is the longer, wider implanted leads with electrodes arranged in a way that corresponds exactly to the spinal nerve roots,” says Bloch. “That gives us precise control over the neurons regulating specific muscles.” Ultimately, it allows for greater selectivity and accuracy in controlling the motor sequences for a given activity.

Extensive training is obviously necessary for patients to get comfortable using the device. But the pace and scope of rehabilitation is amazing. “All three patients were able to stand, walk, pedal, swim and control their torso movements in just one day, after their implants were activated!” says Courtine. “That’s thanks to the specific stimulation programs we wrote for each type of activity. Patients can select the desired activity on the tablet, and the corresponding protocols are relayed to the pacemaker in the abdomen.”

Read the full story on the EPFL website.

When it comes to exploring complex and unknown environments such as forests, buildings or caves, drones are hard to beat. They are fast, agile and small, and they can carry sensors and payloads virtually everywhere. However, autonomous drones can hardly find their way through an unknown environment without a map. For the moment, expert human pilots are needed to release the full potential of drones.

“To master autonomous agile flight, you need to understand the environment in a split second to fly the drone along collision-free paths,” says Davide Scaramuzza, who leads the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and the NCCR Robotics Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge. “This is very difficult both for humans and for machines. Expert human pilots can reach this level after years of perseverance and training. But machines still struggle.”

The AI algorithm learns to fly in the real world from a simulated expert

In a new study, Scaramuzza and his team have trained an autonomous quadrotor to fly through previously unseen environments such as forests, buildings, ruins and trains, keeping speeds of up to 40 km/h and without crashing into trees, walls or other obstacles. All this was achieved relying only on the quadrotor’s on-board cameras and computation.

The drone’s neural network learned to fly by watching a sort of “simulated expert” – an algorithm that flew a computer-generated drone through a simulated environment full of complex obstacles. At all times, the algorithm had complete information on the state of the quadrotor and readings from its sensors, and could rely on enough time and computational power to always find the best trajectory.

Such a “simulated expert” could not be used outside of simulation, but its data were used to teach the neural network how to predict the best trajectory based only on the data from the sensors. This is a considerable advantage over existing systems, which first use sensor data to create a map of the environment and then plan trajectories within the map – two steps that require time and make it impossible to fly at high-speeds.

No exact replica of the real world needed

After being trained in simulation, the system was tested in the real world, where it was able to fly in a variety of environments without collisions at speeds of up to 40 km/h. “While humans require years to train, the AI, leveraging high-performance simulators, can reach comparable navigation abilities much faster, basically overnight,” says Antonio Loquercio, a PhD student and co-author of the paper. “Interestingly these simulators do not need to be an exact replica of the real world. If using the right approach, even simplistic simulators are sufficient,” adds Elia Kaufmann, another PhD student and co-author.

The applications are not limited to quadrotors. The researchers explain that the same approach could be useful for improving the performance of autonomous cars, or could even open the door to a new way of training AI systems for operations in domains where collecting data is difficult or impossible, for example on other planets.

According to the researchers, the next steps will be to make the drone improve from experience, as well as to develop faster sensors that can provide more information about the environment in a smaller amount of time – thus allowing drones to fly safely even at speeds above 40 km/h.

Literature

• Learning High-speed Flight in the Wild. Antonio Loquercio, Elia Kaufmann, René Ranftl, Matthias Müller, Vladlen Koltun and Davide Scaramuzza. Science Robotics, October 6, 2021. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abg5810

An open-source version of the paper can be found here.

Media contacts

Prof. Dr. Davide Scaramuzza – Robotics and Perception Group
Department of Informatics
University of Zurich
Phone +41 44 635 24 09
E-mail: sdavide@ifi.uzh.ch

Antonio Loquercio – Robotics and Perception Group
Department of Informatics
University of Zurich
Phone +41 44 635 43 73
E-mail: loquercio@ifi.uzh.ch

Elia Kaufmann – Robotics and Perception Group
Institut für Informatik
Universität Zürich
Tel. +41 44 635 43 73
E-Mail: ekaufmann@ifi.uzh.ch

Media Relations University of Zurich
Phone +41 44 634 44 67
E-mail: mediarelations@kommunikation.uzh.ch

Scientists at the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob) in EPFL’s School of Engineering are developing innovative robots in order to study locomotion in animals and, ultimately, gain a better understanding of the neuroscience behind the generation of movement. One such robot is AgnathaX, a swimming robot employed in an international study with researchers from EPFL as well as Tohoku University in Japan, Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique in Nantes, France, and Université de Sherbrooke in Canada. The study has just been published in Science Robotics.

A long, undulating swimming robot

“Our goal with this robot was to examine how the nervous system processes sensory information so as to produce a given kind of movement,” says Prof. Auke Ijspeert, the head of BioRob and a member of the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge at NCCR Robotics. “This mechanism is hard to study in living organisms because the different components of the central and peripheral nervous systems* are highly interconnected within the spinal cord. That makes it hard to understand their dynamics and the influence they have on each other.”

AgnathaX is a long, undulating swimming robot designed to mimic a lamprey, which is a primitive eel-like fish. It contains a series of motors that actuate the robot’s ten segments, which replicate the muscles along a lamprey’s body. The robot also has force sensors distributed laterally along its segments that work like the pressure-sensitive cells on a lamprey’s skin and detect the force of the water against the animal.

The research team ran mathematical models with their robot to simulate the different components of the nervous system and better understand its intricate dynamics. “We had AgnathaX swim in a pool equipped with a motion tracking system so that we could measure the robot’s movements,” says Laura Paez, a PhD student at BioRob. “As it swam, we selectively activated and deactivated the central and peripheral inputs and outputs of the nervous system at each segment, so that we could test our hypotheses about the neuroscience involved.”

Two systems working in tandem

The scientists found that both the central and peripheral nervous systems contribute to the generation of robust locomotion. The benefit of having the two systems work in tandem is that it provides increased resilience against neural disruptions, such as failures in the communication between body segments or muted sensing mechanisms. “In other words, by drawing on a combination of central and peripheral components, the robot could resist a larger number of neural disruptions and keep swimming at high speeds, as opposed to robots with only one kind of component,” says Kamilo Melo, a co-author of the study. “We also found that the force sensors in the skin of the robot, along with the physical interactions of the robot’s body and the water, provide useful signals for generating and synchronizing the rhythmic muscle activity necessary for locomotion.” As a result, when the scientists cut communication between the different segments of the robot to simulate a spinal cord lesion, the signals from the pressure sensors measuring the pressure of the water pushing against the robot’s body were enough to maintain its undulating motion.

These findings can be used to design more effective swimming robots for search and rescue missions and environmental monitoring. For instance, the controllers and force sensors developed by the scientists can help such robots navigate through flow perturbations and better withstand damage to their technical components. The study also has ramifications in the field of neuroscience. It confirms that peripheral mechanisms provide an important function which is possibly being overshadowed by the well-known central mechanisms. “These peripheral mechanisms could play an important role in the recovery of motor function after spinal cord injury, because, in principle, no connections between different parts of the spinal cord are needed to maintain a traveling wave along the body,” says Robin Thandiackal, a co-author of the study. “That could explain why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion.”

Literature

• R. Thandiackal, K. Melo, L. Paez, J. Herault, T. Kano, K. Akiyama, F. Boyer, D. Ryczko, A. Ishiguro, and A. J. Ijspeert. “Emergence of Robust Self-Organized Undulatory Swimming Based on Local Hydrodynamic Force Sensing.” Science Robotics. (2021)

To be useful, drones need to be quick. Because of their limited battery life they must complete whatever task they have – searching for survivors on a disaster site, inspecting a building, delivering cargo – in the shortest possible time. And they may have to do it by going through a series of waypoints like windows, rooms, or specific locations to inspect, adopting the best trajectory and the right acceleration or deceleration at each segment.

Algorithm outperforms professional pilots

The best human drone pilots are very good at doing this and have so far always outperformed autonomous systems in drone racing. Now, a research group at the University of Zurich (UZH) has created an algorithm that can find the quickest trajectory to guide a quadrotor – a drone with four propellers – through a series of waypoints on a circuit. “Our drone beat the fastest lap of two world-class human pilots on an experimental race track”, says Davide Scaramuzza, who heads the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH and the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge of the NCCR Robotics, which funded the research.

“The novelty of the algorithm is that it is the first to generate time-optimal trajectories that fully consider the drones’ limitations”, says Scaramuzza. Previous works relied on simplifications of either the quadrotor system or the description of the flight path, and thus they were sub-optimal. “The key idea is, rather than assigning sections of the flight path to specific waypoints, that our algorithm just tells the drone to pass through all waypoints, but not how or when to do that”, adds Philipp Foehn, PhD student and first author of the paper in Science Robotics.

External cameras provide position information in real-time

The researchers had the algorithm and two human pilots fly the same quadrotor through a race circuit. They employed external cameras to precisely capture the motion of the drones and – in the case of the autonomous drone – to give real-time information to the algorithm on where the drone was at any moment. To ensure a fair comparison, the human pilots were given the opportunity to train on the circuit before the race. But the algorithm won: all its laps were faster than the human ones, and the performance was more consistent. This is not surprising, because once the algorithm has found the best trajectory it can reproduce it faithfully many times, unlike human pilots.

Before commercial applications, the algorithm will need to become less computationally demanding, as it now takes up to an hour for the computer to calculate the time-optimal trajectory for the drone. Also, at the moment, the drone relies on external cameras to compute where it was at any moment. In future work, the scientists want to use onboard cameras. But the demonstration that an autonomous drone can in principle fly faster than human pilots is promising. “This algorithm can have huge applications in package delivery with drones, inspection, search and rescue, and more”, says Scaramuzza.

Literature

Philipp Foehn, Angel Romero, Davide Scaramuzza. “Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight”. Science Robotics. July 21, 2021. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abh1221

Robotics researchers at the University of Zurich show how onboard cameras can be used to keep damaged quadcopters in the air and flying stably – even without GPS.

As anxious passengers are often reassured, commercial aircrafts can easily continue to fly even if one of the engines stops working. But for drones with four propellers – also known as quadcopters – the failure of one motor is a bigger problem. With only three rotors working, the drone loses stability and inevitably crashes unless an emergency control strategy sets in.

Researchers at the University of Zurich and the Delft University of Technology have now found a solution to this problem: They show that information from onboard cameras can be used to stabilize the drone and keep it flying autonomously after one rotor suddenly gives out.

Spinning like a ballerina

“When one rotor fails, the drone begins to spin on itself like a ballerina,” explains Davide Scaramuzza, head of the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH and of the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge at NCCR Robotics, which funded the research. “This high-speed rotational motion causes standard controllers to fail unless the drone has access to very accurate position measurements.” In other words, once it starts spinning, the drone is no longer able to estimate its position in space and eventually crashes.

One way to solve this problem is to provide the drone with a reference position through GPS. But there are many places where GPS signals are unavailable. In their study, the researchers solved this issue for the first time without relying on GPS, instead using visual information from different types of onboard cameras.

Event cameras work well in low light

The researchers equipped their quadcopters with two types of cameras: standard ones, which record images several times per second at a fixed rate, and event cameras, which are based on independent pixels that are only activated when they detect a change in the light that reaches them.

The research team developed algorithms that combine information from the two sensors and use it to track the quadrotor’s position relative to its surroundings. This enables the onboard computer to control the drone as it flies – and spins – with only three rotors. The researchers found that both types of cameras perform well in normal light conditions. “When illumination decreases, however, standard cameras begin to experience motion blur that ultimately disorients the drone and crashes it, whereas event cameras also work well in very low light,” says first author Sihao Sun, a postdoc in Scaramuzza’s lab.

Increased safety to avoid accidents

The problem addressed by this study is a relevant one, because quadcopters are becoming widespread and rotor failure may cause accidents. The researchers believe that this work can improve quadrotor flight safety in all areas where GPS signal is weak or absent.

• PUBLICATION – Autonomous Quadrotor Flight despite Rotor Failure with Onboard Vision Sensors: Frames vs. Events. Sihao Sun, Giovanni Cioffi, Coen de Visser and Davide Scaramuzza. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter. January 5, 2021. DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2020.3048875

NCCR Robotics researchers at EPFL have developed a drone with a feathered wing and tail that give it unprecedented flight agility.

The northern goshawk is a fast, powerful raptor that flies effortlessly through forests. This bird was the design inspiration for the next-generation drone developed by scientists of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems of EPFL led by Dario Floreano. They carefully studied the shape of the bird’s wings and tail and its flight behavior, and used that information to develop a drone with similar characteristics.

“Goshawks move their wings and tails in tandem to carry out the desired motion, whether it is rapid changes of direction when hunting in forests, fast flight when chasing prey in the open terrain, or when efficiently gliding to save energy,” says Enrico Ajanic, the first author and PhD student in Floreano’s lab. Floreano adds: “our design extracts principles of avian agile flight to create a drone that can approximate the flight performance of raptors, but also tests the biological hypothesis that a morphing tail plays an important role in achieving faster turns, decelerations, and even slow flight.”

A drone that moves its wings and tail

The engineers already designed a bird-inspired drone with morphing wing back in 2016. In a step forward, their new model can adjust the shape of its wing and tail thanks to its artificial feathers. “It was fairly complicated to design and build these mechanisms, but we were able to improve the wing so that it behaves more like that of a goshawk,” says Ajanic. “Now that the drone includes a feathered tail that morphs in synergy with the wing, it delivers unparalleled agility.” The drone changes the shape of its wing and tail to change direction faster, fly slower without falling to the ground, and reduce air resistance when flying fast. It uses a propeller for forward thrust instead of flapping wings because it is more efficient and makes the new wing and tail system applicable to other winged drones and airplanes.

The advantage of winged drones over quadrotor designs is that they have a longer flight time for the same weight. However, quadrotors tend to have greater dexterity, as they can hover in place and make sharp turns. “The drone we just developed is somewhere in the middle. It can fly for a long time yet is almost as agile as quadrotors,” says Floreano. This combination of features is especially useful for flying in forests or in cities between buildings, as it can be necessary during rescue operation. The project is part of the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge of NCCR Robotics.

Opportunities for artificial intelligence

Flying this new type of drone isn’t easy, due to the large number of wing and tail configurations possible. To take full advantage of the drone’s flight capabilities, Floreano’s team plans to incorporate artificial intelligence into the drone’s flight system so that it can fly semi-automatically. The team’s research has been published in Science Robotics.

• PUBLICATION – Bioinspired wing and tail morphing extends drone flight capabilities. E. Ajanic, M. Feroskhan, S. Mintchev, F. Noca, D. Floreano. Science Robotics, 5, eabc2897 (2020)

Now a collaboration between researchers from the University of Zurich (part of the NCCR Robotics consortium) and Intel has developed a quadcopter that can learn to fly acrobatics autonomously, paving the way to drones that can fully exploit their agility and speed, and cover more distance within their battery life. Though no drone mission will probably ever require a power loop or a Matty flip – the typical acrobatic maneuvers – a drone that can perform them autonomously is likely to be more efficient at all times.

A step forward towards integrating drones in our everyday life

Researchers of the University of Zurich and Intel developed a novel algorithm that pushes autonomous drones with only on-board sensing and computation close to their physical limits. To prove the efficiency of the developed algorithm, the researchers made an autonomous quadrotor fly acrobatic maneuvers such as the Power Loop, the Barrel Roll, and the Matty Flip, during which the drone incurs accelerations of up to 3g. “Several applications of drones, such as search-and-rescue or delivery, will strongly benefit from faster drones, which can cover large distances in limited time. With this algorithm we have taken a step forward towards integrating autonomously navigating drones into our everyday life”, says Davide Scaramuzza, Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, and head of the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge for NCCR Robotics.

Simulation for training, real-world for testing
The navigation algorithm that allows drones to fly acrobatic maneuvers is represented by an artificial neural network that directly converts observations from the on-board camera and inertial sensors, to control commands. This neural network is trained exclusively in simulation. Learning agile maneuvers entirely in simulation has several advantages: (i) Maneuvers can be simply specified by reference trajectories in simulation and do not require expensive demonstrations by a human pilot, (ii) training is safe and does not pose any physical risk to the quadrotor, and (iii) the approach can scale to a large number of diverse maneuvers, including ones that can only be performed by the very best human pilots.

The algorithm transfers its knowledge to reality by using appropriate abstractions of the visual and inertial inputs (i.e., feature tracks and integrated inertial measurements), which decreases the gap between the simulated and physical world. Indeed, without physically-accurate modeling of the world or any fine-tuning on real-world data, the trained neural network can be deployed on a real quadrotor to perform acrobatic maneuvers.

Towards fully autonomous drones
Within a few hours of training in simulation, our algorithm learns to fly acrobatic maneuvers with an accuracy comparable to professional human pilots. Nevertheless, the research team warns that there is still a significant gap between what human pilots and autonomous drones can do. “The best human pilots still have an edge over autonomous drones given their ability to quickly interpret and adapt to unexpected situations and changes in the environment,” says Prof. Scaramuzza.

Paper: E. Kaufmann*, A. Loquercio*, R. Ranftl, M. Müller, V. Koltun, D. Scaramuzza “Deep Drone Acrobatics”, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020
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By Nicola Nosengo

Drones can do many things, but avoiding obstacles is not their strongest suit yet – especially when they move quickly. Although many flying robots are equipped with cameras that can detect obstacles, it typically takes from 20 to 40 milliseconds for the drone to process the image and react. It may seem quick, but it is not enough to avoid a bird or another drone, or even a static obstacle when the drone itself is flying at high speed. This can be a problem when drones are used in unpredictable environments, or when there are many of them flying in the same area.

Reaction of a few milliseconds
In order to solve this problem, researchers at the University of Zurich have equipped a quadcopter (a drone with four propellers) with special cameras and algorithms that reduced its reaction time down to a few milliseconds – enough to avoid a ball thrown at it from a short distance. The results, published in Science Robotics, can make drones more effective in situations such as the aftermath of a natural disaster. The work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics.

“For search and rescue applications, such as after an earthquake, time is very critical, so we need drones that can navigate as fast as possible in order to accomplish more within their limited battery life” explains Davide Scaramuzza, who leads the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich as well as the NCCR Robotics Search and Rescue Grand Challenge. “However, by navigating fast drones are also more exposed to the risk of colliding with obstacles, and even more if these are moving. We realised that a novel type of camera, called Event Camera, are a perfect fit for this purpose”.

Event cameras have smart pixels
Traditional video cameras, such as the ones found in every smartphone, work by regularly taking snapshots of the whole scene. This is done by exposing the pixels of the image all at the same time. This way, though, a moving object can only be detected after all the pixels have been analysed by the on-board computer. Event cameras, on the other hand, have smart pixels that work independently of each other. The pixels that detect no changes remain silent, while the ones that see a change in light intensity immediately send out the information. This means that only a tiny fraction of the all pixels of the image will need to be processed by the onboard computer, therefore speeding up the computation a lot.

Event cameras are a recent innovation, and existing object-detection algorithms for drones do not work well with them. So the researchers had to invent their own algorithms that collect all the events recorded by the camera over a very short time, then subtracts the effect of the drone’s own movement – which typically account for most of the changes in what the camera sees.

Only 3.5 milliseconds to detect incoming objects
Scaramuzza and his team first tested the cameras and algorithms alone. They threw objects of various shapes and sizes towards the camera, and measured how efficient the algorithm was in detecting them. The success rate varied between 81 and 97 per cent, depending on the size of the object and the distance of the throw, and the system only took 3.5 milliseconds to detect incoming objects.

Then the most serious test began: putting cameras on an actual drone, flying it both indoor and outdoor and throwing objects directly at it. The drone was able to avoid the objects – including a ball thrown from a 3-meter distance and travelling at 10 meters per second – more than 90 per cent of the time. When the drone “knew” the size of the object in advance, one camera was enough. When, instead, it had to face objects of varying size, two cameras were used to give it stereoscopic vision.

According to Scaramuzza, these results show that event cameras can increase the speed at which drones can navigate by up to ten times, thus expanding their possible applications. “One day drones will be used for a large variety of applications, such as delivery of goods, transportation of people, aerial filmography and, of course, search and rescue,” he says. “But enabling robots to perceive and make decision faster can be a game changer for also for other domains where reliably detecting incoming obstacles plays a crucial role, such as automotive, good delivery, transportation, mining, and remote inspection with robots”.

Nearly as reliable as human pilots
In the future, the team aims to test this system on an even more agile quadrotor. “Our ultimate goal is to make one day autonomous drones navigate as good as human drone pilots. Currently, in all search and rescue applications where drones are involved, the human is actually in control. If we could have autonomous drones navigate as reliable as human pilots we would then be able to use them for missions that fall beyond line of sight or beyond the reach of the remote control”, says Davide Falanga, the PhD student who is the primary author of the article.

When browsing an e-commerce site on your smartphone, or a music streaming service on your laptop, you can see pictures and hear sound snippets of what you are going to buy. But sometimes it would be great to touch it too – for example to feel the texture of a garment, or the stiffness of a material. The problem is that there are no miniaturized devices that can render touch sensations the way screens and loudspeakers render sight and sound, and that can easily be coupled to a computer or a mobile device.

Researchers in Professor Jamie Paik’s lab at EPFL have made a step towards creating just that – a foldable device that can fit in a pocket and can transmit touch stimuli when used in a human-machine interface. Called Foldaway, this miniature robot is based on the origami robotic technology, which makes it easy to miniaturize and manufacture. Because it starts off as a flat structure, it can be printed with a technique similar to the one employed for electronic circuits, and can be easily stored and transported. At the time of deployment, the flat structure folds along a pre-defined pattern of joints to take the desired 3D, button-like shape. The device includes three actuators that generate movements, forces and vibrations in various directions; a moving origami mechanism on the tip that transmit sensations to the user’s finger; sensors that track the movements of the finger and electronics to control the whole system. This way the device can render different touch sensations that reproduce the physical interaction with objects or forms.

The Foldaway device, that is described in an article in the December issue of Nature Machine Intelligence and is featured on the journal’s cover, comes in two versions, called Delta and Pushbutton. “The first one is more suitable for applications that require large movements of the user’s finger as input” says Stefano Mintchev, a member of Jamie Paik’s lab and co-author of the paper. “The second one is smaller, therefore pushing portability even further without sacrificing the force sensations transmitted to the user’s finger”.

Education, virtual reality and drone control
The researchers have tested their devices in three situations. In an educational context, they have shown that a portable interface, measuring less than 10 cm in length and width and 3 cm in height, can be used to navigate an atlas of human anatomy: the Foldaway device gives the user different sensations upon passing on various organs: the different stiffness of soft lungs and hard bones at the rib cage; the up-and-down movement of the heartbeat; sharp variations of stiffness on the trachea.

As a virtual reality joystick, the Foldaway can give the user the sensation of grasping virtual objects and perceiving their stiffness, modulating the force generated when the interface is pressed 


As a control interface for drones, the device can contribute to solve the sensory mismatch created when users control the drone with their hands, but can perceive the response of drones only through visual feedback. Two Pushbuttons can be combined, and their rotation can be mapped into commands for altitude, lateral and forward/backward movements. The interface also provides force feedback to the user’s fingertips in order to increase the pilot’s awareness on drone’s behaviour and of the effects of wind or other environmental factors.

The Foldaway device was developed by the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at EPFL, and is currently being developed for commercialisation by a spin-off (called FOLDAWAY Haptics) that was supported by NCCR Robotics’s Spin Fund grant.

“Now that computing devices and robots are more ubiquitous than ever, the quest for human machine-interactions is growing rapidly” adds Marco Salerno, a member of Jamie Paik’s lab and co-author of the paper. “The miniaturization offered by origami robots can finally allow the integration of rich touch feedback into everyday interfaces, from smartphones to joysticks, or the development of completely new ones such as interactive morphing surfaces”.

Literature
Mintchev, S., Salerno, M., Cherpillod, A. et al., “A portable three-degrees-of-freedom force feedback origami robot for human–robot interactions“, Nature Machine Intelligence 1, 584–593 (2019) doi:10.1038/s42256-019-0125-1

By Laure-Anne Pessina and Nicola Nosengo
Scientists at EPFL have developed a tiny pump that could play a big role in the development of autonomous soft robots, lightweight exoskeletons and smart clothing. Flexible, silent and weighing only one gram, it is poised to replace the rigid, noisy and bulky pumps currently used. The scientists’ work has just been published in Nature.

Soft robots have a distinct advantage over their rigid forebears: they can adapt to complex environments, handle fragile objects and interact safely with humans. Made from silicone, rubber or other stretchable polymers, they are ideal for use in rehabilitation exoskeletons – such as the ones being developed in the NCCR Robotics “Wearable Robotics” research line – and robotic clothing. Soft bio-inspired robots could one day be deployed to explore remote or dangerous environments.

Most soft robots are actuated by rigid, noisy pumps that push fluids into the machines’ moving parts. Because they are connected to these bulky pumps by tubes, these robots have limited autonomy and are cumbersome to wear at best.

Cutting soft robots’ tether
Researchers in EPFL’s Soft Transducers Laboratory (LMTS) and Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS – led by NCCR Robotics Director Dario Floreano), in collaboration with researchers at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo, Japan, have developed the first entirely soft pump – even the electrodes are flexible. Weighing just one gram, the pump is completely silent and consumes very little power, which it gets from a 2 cm by 2 cm circuit that includes a rechargeable battery. “If we want to actuate larger robots, we connect several pumps together,” says Herbert Shea, the director of the LMTS.
This innovative pump could rid soft robots of their tethers. “We consider this a paradigm shift in the field of soft robotics,” adds Shea.

Soft pumps can also be used to circulate liquids in thin flexible tubes embedded in smart clothing, leading to garments that can actively cool or heat different regions of the body. That would meet the needs of surgeons, athletes and pilots, for example.

How does it work?
The soft and stretchable pump is based on the physical mechanism used today to circulate the cooling liquid in systems like supercomputers. The pump has a tube-shaped channel, 1mm in diameter, inside of which rows of electrodes are printed. The pump is filled with a dielectric liquid. When a voltage is applied, electrons jump from the electrodes to the liquid, giving some of the molecules an electrical charge. These molecules are subsequently attracted to other electrodes, pulling along the rest of the fluid through the tube with them. “We can speed up the flow by adjusting the electric field, yet it remains completely silent,” says Vito Cacucciolo, a post-doc at the LMTS and the lead author of the study.

Developing artificial muscles in Japan
The researchers have successfully implanted their pump in a type of robotic finger widely used in soft robotics labs. They are now collaborating with Koichi Suzumori’s laboratory in Japan, which is developing fluid-driven artificial muscles and flexible exoskeletons.

The EPFL team has also fitted a fabric glove with tubes and shown that it is possible to heat or cool regions of the glove as desired using the pump. “It works a little like your home heating and cooling system” says Cacucciolo. This application has already sparked interest from a number of companies.

Literature
V. Cacucciolo, J. Shintake, Y. Kuwajima, S. Maeda, D. Floreano, H. Shea, “Stretchable pumps for soft machines”, Nature, vol. 572, no 7769, Aug. 2019.
doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1479-6

Current research is aligned with the need of rescue workers but robustness and ease of use remain significant barriers to adoption, NCCR Robotics researchers find after reviewing the field and consulting with field operators.

Robots for search and rescue are developing at an impressive pace, but they must become more robust and easier to use in order to be widely adopted, and researchers in the field must devote more effort to these aspects in the future. This is one of the main findings by a group of NCCR Robotics researchers who focus on search-and-rescue applications. After reviewing the recent developments in technology and interviewing rescue workers, they have found that the work by the robotics research community is well aligned with the needs of those who work in the field. Consequently, although current adoption of state-of-the-art robotics in disaster response is still limited, it is expected to grow quickly in the future. However, more work is needed from the research community to overcome some key barriers to adoption.
The analysis is the result of a group effort from researchers who participate in the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge, one of the main research units of NCCR Robotics, and has been published in the Journal of Field Robotics.

With this paper, the researchers wanted to take stock of the current state-of-the-art of research on rescue robotics, and in particular of the advancements published between 2014 and 2018, a period that had not yet been covered by previous scientific reviews.

“Although previous surveys were only a few years old, the rapid pace of development in robotics research and robotic deployment in search and rescue means that the state-of-the-art is already very different than these earlier assessments” says Jeff Delmerico, first author of the paper and formerly a NCCR Robotics member in Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich. “More importantly, rather than just documenting the current state of the research, or the history of robot deployments after real-world disasters, we were trying to analyze what is missing from the output of the research community in order to target real-world needs and provide the maximum benefit to actual rescuers”.

The paper offers a comprehensive review of research on legged, wheeled, flying and amphibious robots, as well as of perception, control systems and human-robot interfaces. Among many recent advancements, it highlights how learning algorithms and modular designs have been applied to legged robots to make them capable of adapting to different missions and of being resilient to damages; how wheeled and tracked robots are being tested in new applications such as telepresence for interacting with victims or for remote firefighting; how a number of strategies are being investigated for making drones more easily transportable and able to change locomotion mode when necessary. It details advancements in using cameras for localization and mapping in areas not covered by GPS signals, and new strategies for human-robot interaction that allow users to pilot a drone by pointing a finger or with the movements of the torso.
In order to confirm whether these research directions are aligned with the demands coming from the field, the study authors have interviewed seven rescue experts from key agencies in the USA, Italy, Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands. The interviews have revealed that the key factors guiding adoption decisions are robustness and ease of use.

“Disaster response workers are reluctant to adopt new technologies unless they can really depend on them in critical situations, and even then, these tools need to add new capabilities or outperform humans at the same task” Delmerico explains. “So the bar is very high for technology before it will be deployed in a real disaster. Our goal with this article was to understand the gap between where our research is now and where it needs to be to reach that bar. This is critical to understand in order to work towards the technologies that rescue workers actually need, and to ensure that new developments from our NCCR labs, and the robotics research community in general, can move quickly out of the lab and into the hands of rescue professionals”.

Robotic research platforms have features that are absent from commercial platforms and that are highly appreciated by rescue workers, such as the possibility to generate 3D maps of a disaster scene. Academic efforts to develop new human-robot interfaces that reduce the operator’s attention load are also consistent with the needs of stakeholder. Another key finding is that field operators see robotic systems as tools to support and enhance their performance rather than as autonomous systems to replace them. Finally, an important aspect of existing research work is the emphasis on human-robot teams, which meets the desire of stakeholders to maintain a human in the loop during deployments in situations where priorities may change quickly.

On the critical side, though, robustness keeps rescuers from adopting technologies that are “hot” for researchers but are not yet considered reliable enough, such as Artificial Intelligence. Similarly, the development of integrated, centrally organized robot teams is interesting for researchers, but not so much for SAR personnel, who prefer individual systems that can more easily be deployed independently of each other.

NCCR Robotics researchers note that efforts to develop systems that are robust and capable enough for real-world rescue scenarios have been hitherto insufficient. “While it is unrealistic to expect robotic systems with a high technology readiness level to come directly from the academic domain without involvement from other organizations” they write, “more emphasis on robustness during the research phase may accelerate the process of reaching a high level for use in deployment”. The ease of use, endurance, and the capabilities to collection and quickly transmit data to rescuers are also important barriers to adoption that the research community must focus on in the future.

Literature
J. Delmerico, S. Mintchev, A. Giusti, B. Gromov, K. Melo, T. Horvat, C. Cadena, M. Hutter, A. Ijspeert, D. Floreano, L. M. Gambardella, R. Siegwart, D. Scaramuzza, “The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics“, Journal of Field Robotics, DOI: 10.1002/rob.21887

Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies for achieving sophisticated tasks to survive their larger predators.
At EPFL, researchers in NCCR Robotics Professor Jamie Paik’s Laboratory have reproduced this phenomenon, developing tiny robots that display minimal physical intelligence on an individual level but that are able to communicate and act collectively. Despite being simple in design and weighing only 10 grams, each robot has multiple locomotion modes to navigate any type of surface. Collectively, they can quickly detect and overcome obstacles, pass them and move objects much larger and heavier than themselves. The related research has been published in Nature.

Robots modeled on trap-jaw ants
These three-legged, T-shaped origami robots are called Tribots. They can be assembled in only a few minutes by folding a stack of thin, multi-material sheets, making them suitable for mass production. Completely autonomous and untethered, Tribots are equipped with infrared and proximity sensors for detection and communication purposes. They could accommodate even more sensors depending on the application.

“Their movements are modeled on those of Odontomachus ants. These insects normally crawl, but to escape a predator, they snap their powerful jaws together to jump from leaf to leaf”, says Zhenishbek Zhakypov, the first author. The Tribots replicate this catapult mechanism through an elegant origami robot design that combines multiple shape-memory alloy actuators. As a result, a single robot can produce three distinctive locomotive motions – crawling, rolling and jumping both vertically and horizontally – just like these creatively resilient ants.

Roles: leader, worker and explorer
Despite having the same “anatomy”, each robot is assigned a specific role depending on the situation. ‘Explorers’ detect physical obstacles in their path, such as objects, valleys and mountains. After detecting an obstacle, they inform the rest of the group. Then, the “leader” gives the instructions. The ‘workers’, meanwhile, pool their strength to move objects. “Each Tribot, just like Odontomachus ants, can have different roles. However, they can also take on new roles instantaneously when faced with a new mission or an unknown environment, or even when other members get lost. This goes beyond what the real ants can do” says Paik.

Future applications
In practical situations, such as in an emergency search mission, Tribots could be deployed en masse. And thanks to their multi-locomotive and multi-agent communication capabilities, they could locate a target quickly over a large surface without relying on GPS or visual feedback. “Since they can be manufactured and deployed in large numbers, having some ‘casualties’ would not affect the success of the mission,” adds Paik. “With their unique collective intelligence, our tiny robots are better equipped to adapt to unknown environments. Therefore, for certain missions, they would outperform larger, more powerful robots.” The development of robots for search-and-rescue applications and the study of collective robotics are key research areas within the NCCR Robotics consortium, of which Jamie Paik’s lab is part.
In April, Jamie Paik has presented her reconfigurable robots at the TED2019 Conference in Vancouver. Her talk is available here.

Literature
Zhenishbek Zhakypov, Kazuaki Mori, Koh Hosoda and Jamie Paik, Designing minimal and scalable insect-inspired multi-locomotion millirobots, Nature
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1388-8

The next-generation bionic hand, developed by researchers from EPFL, the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and the A. Gemelli University Polyclinic in Rome, enables amputees to regain a very subtle, close-to-natural sense of touch. The scientists managed to reproduce the feeling of proprioception, which is our brain’s capacity to instantly and accurately sense the position of our limbs during and after movement – even in the dark or with our eyes closed.

The new device allows patients to reach out for an object on a table and to ascertain an item’s consistency, shape, position and size without having to look at it. The prosthesis has been successfully tested on several patients and works by stimulating the nerves in the amputee’s stump. The nerves can then provide sensory feedback to the patients in real time – almost like they do in a natural hand.

The findings have been published in the journal Science Robotics. They are the result of ten years of scientific research coordinated by NCCR Professor Silvestro Micera, who teaches bioengineering at EPFL and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, and Paolo Maria Rossini, director of neuroscience at the A. Gemelli University Polyclinic in Rome. NCCR Robotics supported the research, together with the European Commission and the Bertarelli Foundation.

Sensory feedback

Current myoelectric prostheses allow amputees to regain voluntary motor control of their artificial limb by exploiting residual muscle function in the forearm. However, the lack of any sensory feedback means that patients have to rely heavily on visual cues. This can prevent them from feeling that their artificial limb is part of their body and make it more unnatural to use.

Recently, a number of research groups have managed to provide tactile feedback in amputees, leading to improved function and prosthesis embodiment. But this latest study has taken things one step further.

“Our study shows that sensory substitution based on intraneural stimulation can deliver both position feedback and tactile feedback simultaneously and in real time,” explains Micera. “The brain has no problem combining this information, and patients can process both types in real time with excellent results.”

Intraneural stimulation re-establishes the flow of external information using electric pulses sent by electrodes inserted directly into the amputee’s stump. Patients then have to undergo training to gradually learn how to translate those pulses into proprioceptive and tactile sensations.

This technique enabled two amputees to regain high proprioceptive acuity, with results comparable to those obtained in healthy subjects. The simultaneous delivery of position information and tactile feedback allowed the two amputees to determine the size and shape of four objects with a high level of accuracy (75.5%).

“These results show that amputees can effectively process tactile and position information received simultaneously via intraneural stimulation,” says Edoardo D’Anna, EPFL researcher and lead author of the study.

The technologies pioneered by this study will be further explored during the third and final phase of NCCR Robotics, which will run until 2022 with Micera leading the Wearable Robotics research programme. “During the next phase, we plan to expand the use of implanted systems for prosthetics and rehabilitation, and the implants we used in this experiment will be tested in combination with different wearable devices and for different applications” explains Micera.

Literature
E. D’Anna, G. Valle, A. Mazzoni, I. Strauss, F. Iberite, J. Patton, F. Petrini, S. Raspopovic, G. Granata, R. Di Iorio, M. Controzzi, C. Cipriani, T. Stieglitz, P. M. Rossini, and S. Micera, “A closed-loop hand prosthesis with simultaneous intraneural tactile and position feedback”, Science Robotics.

OroBOT – Credit: Maxime Marendaz

Using the fossil and fossilized footprints of a 300-million-year-old animal, scientists from EPFL and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have identified the most likely gaits of extinct animals and designed a robot that can recreate an extinct animal’s walk. This study can help researchers better understand how vertebrate locomotion evolved over time.

How did vertebrates walk 300 million years ago? Could they already stand upright on their legs? Did they move in a balanced, energy-efficient way? Scientists at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory – supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics – and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin set out to answer these questions. Using the fossilized skeleton and footprints of Orobates pabsti – a vertebrate that, on the evolutionary tree, comes between amphibians on one hand and reptiles and mammals on the other – the scientists created computer simulations and a robot. Drawing on experimental studies of four living amphibian and reptile species, they used these tools to gauge how plausible different ways of walking were for the fossilized animal.

“Orobates is an ideal candidate for understanding how land vertebrates evolved because it is in the lineage leading to modern amniotes. These animals formed in eggs laid on land and became largely independent of water,” says John Nyakatura, a professor at Humboldt-Universität. What’s more, Orobates is the oldest-known vertebrate for which scientists have been able to link a fossil with its fossilized footprints. “This combination is what enabled us to carry out our unique quantitative study, which paves the way to replicating the walk of other fossilized animals,” says NCCR Robotics Professor Auke Ijspeert. The researchers’ findings appear in Nature.

A motion-based model and then a robotic one

To better understand how Orobates walked and pinpoint just how advanced its locomotion was, the scientists at Humboldt-Universität developed a digital model of its skeleton based on the animal’s fossil and the biomechanics of modern animals with sprawling postures. They used this model to carry out the first kinematic computer simulation of Orobates’ gait as it walks on its digitalized footprints. This simulation focuses on movements (rather than forces) and identifies gaits where the animal’s bones do not collide or come out of their joints.

In parallel, two scientists at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory – post-doctoral researcher Kamilo Melo and PhD student Tomislav Horvat, both members of NCCR Robotics at the time of the study – used the fossilized animal anatomy to build a robot called OroBOT. Designed and scaled to match the shape and movements of the extinct animal, OroBOT was used to calculate the physics of how Orobates walked. “We tested our hypotheses about the animal’s locomotion dynamics with our robotic model, which factors in the real-world physics of the animal’s gait,” says Melo.

Tomislav Horvat and Kamilo Melo – Credit: Maxime Marendaz

Testing hundreds of different gaits, based on contemporary animals

The interdisciplinary team of scientists tested hundreds of different gaits with their robot in order to determine which ones Orobates could have used – and those that it clearly did not. The gaits they tested were based on biomechanical principles extracted from similar modern-day animals such as caimans, salamanders, iguanas and skinks, which they analyzed through X-ray videos and force measurements. “We studied the biomechanics of their movements and determined which mechanical principles they all followed”, says Nyakatura. The research team looked at three features in particular: how erect the animal stood on its legs; how its backbone bent; and how much its elbow or shoulder joints bent as it walked. These three features determine what the researchers call the animal’s “sprawling gait space”. They created a powerful interactive website where fellow scientists – and the wider public – can explore the universe of movements that Orobates could have used.

With these results, they came up with the most likely ways that Orobates may have walked. They scored the gaits based on how much energy was required, how stable the movements were, how the leg forces compared with those of other sprawling animals, and how closely the movements aligned with the fossilized footprints. The gaits with good scores appear quite athletic and most closely resemble the movements of caimans. This suggests that Orobates probably already held itself a little upright on its legs – unlike salamanders and skinks. Its locomotion was thus more advanced — more upright, balanced and mechanically power-saving — than had been previously thought.

The study concludes that advanced locomotion, as in Orobates, may have evolved before the common ancestor of reptiles and mammals lived. The novel approach developed for this study can be applied by other scientists in their work, and it could be modified to study other evolutionary transitions, such as the origins of flight or galloping gaits in mammals. Last but not least, being able to select the most efficient gait for any given morphology is of fundamental importance for the walking robots that NCCR Robotics researchers are developing, in particular for search-and-rescue applications.

Orobates fossil – Credit: Maxime Marendaz

Literature

John A. Nyakatura, Kamilo Melo, Tomislav Horvat, Kostas Karakasiliotis, Vivian R. Allen, Amir Andikfar, Emanuel Andrada, Patrick Arnold, Jonas Lauströer, John R. Hutchinson, Martin S. Fischer and Auke J. Ijspeert. “Reverse-engineering the locomotion of a stem amniote“, Nature, 17 January 2019.

Inspecting a damaged building after an earthquake or during a fire is exactly the kind of job that human rescuers would like drones to do for them. A flying robot could look for people trapped inside and guide the rescue team towards them. But the drone would often have to enter the building through a crack in a wall, a partially open window, or through bars – something the typi-cal size of a drone does not allow.
To solve this problem, researchers from Scaramuzza lab at the University of Zurich and Floreano lab at EPFL created a new kind of drone. Both groups are part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Inspired by birds that fold their wings in mid-air to cross narrow passages, the new drone can squeeze itself to pass through gaps and then go back to its previous shape, all the while continuing to fly. And it can even hold and transport objects along the way.

Mobile arms can fold around the main frame
“Our solution is quite simple from a mechanical point of view, but it is very versatile and very au-tonomous, with onboard perception and control systems,” explains Davide Falanga, researcher at the University of Zurich and the paper’s first author. In comparison to other drones, this morphing drone can maneuver in tight spaces and guarantee a stable flight at all times.
The Zurich and Lausanne teams worked in collaboration and designed a quadrotor with four pro-pellers that rotate independently, mounted on mobile arms that can fold around the main frame thanks to servo-motors. The ace in the hole is a control system that adapts in real time to any new position of the arms, adjusting the thrust of the propellers as the center of gravity shifts.
“The morphing drone can adopt different configurations according to what is needed in the field,” adds Stefano Mintchev, co-author and researcher at EPFL. The standard configuration is X-shaped, with the four arms stretched out and the propellers at the widest possible distance from each other. When faced with a narrow passage, the drone can switch to a “H” shape, with all arms lined up along one axis or to a “O” shape, with all arms folded as close as possible to the body. A “T” shape can be used to bring the onboard camera mounted on the central frame as close as possible to objects that the drone needs to inspect.

First step to fully autonomous rescue searches
In the future, the researchers hope to further improve the drone structure so that it can fold in all three dimensions. Most importantly, they want to develop algorithms that will make the drone truly autonomous, allowing it to look for passages in a real disaster scenario and automatically choose the best way to pass through them. “The final goal is to give the drone a high-level instruction such as ‘enter that building, inspect every room and come back’ and let it figure out by itself how to do it,” says Falanga.

Literature
Davide Falanga, Kevin Kleber, Stefano Mintchev, Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza. The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly. IEEE Robotics and Auto-mation Letter, 10 December 2018. DOI:10.1109/LRA.2018.2885575

A closed door is just one of many obstacles that no longer pose a barrier to the small flying robots developed jointly by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Stanford University. Equipped with advanced gripping technology – inspired by gecko and insect feet – and able to interact with the world around them, these robots can work together to lasso a door handle and tug the door open.

These FlyCroTugs – flying, micro, tugging robots – came out of the laboratories run by Dario Floreano, NCCR Robotics Director, at EPFL’s School of Engineering, and Mark Cutkosky, the Fletcher Jones Chair in the School of Engineering at Stanford University.

FlyCroTugs are micro air vehicles that the researchers modified so that they can anchor themselves to various surfaces using gecko adhesives and microspines. Thanks to these mechanisms, FlyCroTugs can pull objects up to 40 times their weight, such as door handles or, in a rescue scenario, cameras and water bottles. Similar vehicles produced by other researchers can tug objects only about twice their weight.

“When you’re a small robot, the world is full of large obstacles,” says Matthew Estrada, a graduate student at Stanford. Estrada worked on this project in Floreano’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL and is the lead author of a paper published in Science Robotics. “By combining the aerodynamic forces of our vehicle and the interactive forces generated by the attachment mechanisms, we were able to come up with something that is very mobile, very strong and very small.”

The researchers note that the FlyCroTugs, because of their size, can safely navigate through tight spaces and fairly close to people. This makes them a good candidate for search and rescue missions. And by holding on tightly to surfaces as they tug, the tiny robots could potentially move pieces of debris or position a camera to evaluate a dangerous situation.

Taking a cue from nature

FlyCroTugs were inspired by nature. When the researchers began working on an air vehicle that would be fast, small, highly maneuverable and able to move large loads, they first looked at wasps.

“Wasps fly quickly to a piece of food, and if it’s too heavy to carry off, they drag it along the ground. This observation was the genesis of our approach,” said Cutkosky, a co-author of the paper.

By analyzing studies on how wasps capture and transport prey, the researchers were able to identify the ratio of flight-related muscle to total mass that determines whether a wasp carries its prey or drags it. Wasps also inspired them to develop various attachment options depending on where the FlyCroTugs land. For smooth surfaces, the robots have gecko grippers, a non-sticky adhesive that mimics a gecko’s intricate toe structures. They hold on by creating intermolecular forces between the adhesive and the surface.

For rough surfaces, these robots are equipped with 32 microspines, a series of fish-hook-like metal spikes that can individually latch onto small pits in a surface. In order to tug a payload, each FlyCroTug has a winch with a cable and either microspines or gecko grippers. Those are its only fixed features; the rest are highly modifiable. The location of the grippers can be moved, depending on the expected landing surface, and the researchers can add parts – such as wheels – for ground locomotion. Packing all these features onto a small air vehicle that weighs just a few ounces was not easy.

“People tend to think of drones as machines that fly and observe the world. But flying insects do many other things, such as walking, climbing, grasping and building. Social insects can even work together and combine their strength,” says Floreano, the study’s lead senior author. “Through our research, we show that small drones are capable of anchoring themselves to surfaces around them and cooperating with fellow drones. This enables them to perform tasks typically assigned to humanoid robots or much larger machines.”

Interacting with the world

At a time when drones and other small flying robots are all the rage, the FlyCroTugs – with their ability to perch, climb, push and pull – really stand out, according to Cutkosky. Using two FlyCroTugs, the researchers were able to open a door. They also had one of them haul a camera to the top of a crumbling structure to peer inside. Next, they hope to work on autonomous control and the logistics of flying several vehicles at once.

This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics, and the United States Army Research Laboratory MAST program.

Useful links:

Reference: M. A. Estrada, S. Mintchev, D. Christensen, M. R. Cutkosky, D. Floreano, “Forceful Manipulation with Micro Air Vehicles”, Science Robotics.

The field of drone delivery is currently a big topic in robotics. However, the reason that your internet shopping doesn’t yet arrive via drone is that current flying robots can prove a safety risk to people and are difficult to transport and store.

A team from the Floreano Lab, NCCR Robotics and EPFL present a new type of cargo drone that is inspired by origami, is lightweight and easily manoeuvrable and uses a foldaway cage to ensure safety and transportability.

A foldable protective cage sits around a multicopter and around the package to be carried, shielding spinning propellers and ensuring safety of all people around it. When the folding cage is opened in order to either load or unload the drone, a safety mechanism ensures that the engine is cut off, meaning that safety is ensured, even with completely untrained users.

But where this drone takes a step forward is in the folding cage, ensuring that it can be easily stowed away and transported. The team took inspiration from the origami folding shelters that have been developed for space exploration and adapted them to create a chinese lantern shape, and instead of using paper, a skeletal structure is created using carbon fibre tubes and 3D printed flexible joints. The cage is opened and closed using a joint mechanism on the top and bottom and pushing apart the resulting gap – in fact, both opening and closing of the cage and be performed in just 1.2 seconds.

By adding such a cage to a multicopter, the team ensure safety for those who come into contact with the drone. The drone can be caught while it’s flying, meaning that it can deliver to people caught in places where landing is hard or even impossible, such as a collapsed building during search and rescue missions, where first aid, medication, water or food may need to be delivered quickly.

Currently, the drone is able to carry 0.5 kg cargo for 2 km, and any visitors to EPFL over this summer would have noticed it being used to transport small items across campus 150 times, but it is hoped that by scaling, it may be able to carry as much as 2 kg over 15 km, a weight and distance that would allow for longer distance deliveries.

Reference:
P.M. Kornatowski, S. Mintchev, and D. Floreano, “An origami-inspired cargo drone”, in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2017.

The new vacuum-powered Soft Pneumatic Actuator (V-SPA) is soft, lightweight and very easy to fabricate. By using foam and coating it with layers of silicone-rubber, the team have created an actuator that can be made using off the shelf parts without the need for molds – in fact, it takes just two hours to manufacture the V-SPA.

Once produced, the actuators were combined into plug-and-play “V-SPA Modules” which created a simplified design of soft pneumatic robots with many degrees of freedom. In fact, the team created reconfigurable, modular robots using these modules, where every function of the robot was powered by a single shared vacuum source, enabling many different types of capabilities, such as multiple forms of ground locomotion, vertical climbing, object manipulation and stiffness changing.

To test the new modular robot, the team added a suction arm which used the vacuum pump to pick up and move a series of objects, a task that was completed by turning on suction when an object should be carried and allowing the arm to refill with air when the object should be released. Further validation came through attaching suction cups to the robot and using it to climb up a vertical window and using the robot to walk using a number of different gaits (either through use of waves, like a snake, or rolling).

By creating a soft, lightweight actuator that can move in any direction the team hope to enable a new generation of truly soft, compliant robots that can interact safely with the humans that use them.

Reference

M. A. Robertson and J. Paik, “New soft robots really suck: vacuum powered systems empower diverse capabilities,” Science Robotics. doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aan6357

Using Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) as a way to give people with locked-in syndrome back reliable communication and control capabilities has long been a futuristic trope of medical dramas and sci-fi. A team from NCCR Robotics and CNBI, EPFL have recently published a paper detailing work as a step towards taking this technique into everyday lives of those affected by extreme paralysis.

BCIs measure brainwaves using sensors placed outside of the head. With careful training and calibration, these brainwaves can be used to understand the intention of the person they are recorded from. However, one of the challenges of using BCIs in everyday life is the variation in the BCI performance over time. This issue is particularly important for motor-restricted end-users, as they usually suffer from even higher fluctuations of their brain signals and resulting performance. One approach to tackle this issue is to use shared control approaches for BCI, which has so far been mostly based on predefined settings, providing a fixed level of assistance to the user.

The team tackled the issue of performance variation by developing a system capable of dynamically matching the user’s evolving capabilities with the appropriate level of assistance. The key element of this adaptive shared control framework is to incorporate the user’s brain state and signal reliability while the user is trying to deliver a BCI command.

The team tested their novel strategy with one person with incomplete locked-in syndrome, multiple times over the course of a year. The person was asked to imagine moving the right hand to trigger a “right command”, and the left hand for a “left command” to control an avatar in a computer game. They demonstrated how adaptive shared control can exploit an estimation of the BCI performance (in terms of command delivery time) to adjust online the level of assistance in a BCI game by regulating its speed. Remarkably, the results exhibited a stable performance over several months without recalibration of the BCI classifier or the performance estimator.

This work marks the first time that this design has been successfully tested with an end-user with incomplete locked-in syndrome and successfully replicates the results of earlier tests with able bodied subjects.

Reference:

S. Saeedi, R. Chavarriage and J. del R. Millán, “Long-Term Stable Control of Motor-Imagery BCI by a Locked-In User Through Adaptive Assistance,” IEEE Transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering,” Vol. 25, no. 4, 380-391.

Credit: EPFL

When training to regain movement after stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI), patients must once again learn how to keep their balance during walking movements. Current clinical methods support the weight of the patient during movement, while setting the body off balance. This means that when patients are ready to walk without mechanical assistance, it can be hard to re-train the body to balance against gravity. This is the issue addressed in a recent paper published in Science Translational Medicine by a team lead by Courtine-Lab, and featuring Ijspeert Lab, NCCR Robotics and EPFL.

During walking, a combination of forces move the human body forward. In fact, the interaction of feet with the ground creates the majority of forward propulsion, but with every step, multiple muscles in the body are engaged to maintain movement and prevent falls. In order to fully regain the ability to walk, patients must develop both the muscles and the neural pathways required in these movements.

During partial body weight-supported gait therapy (whereby a patient trains on a treadmill while a robotic support system prevents them from falling), a patient is merely lifted upwards, with no support for forward or sideways movements, massively altering how the person within the support system moves. In fact, those within the training system use shorter steps, slower movements and less body rotation than the same people tested walking unaided.

In an effort to reduce these limitations of current therapy methods, the team developed a multi-directional gravity assist mechanism, meaning that the system supports patients not only in remaining upright, but also in moving forwards. This individually tailored support allows patients to walk in a natural and comfortable way, training the body to counterbalance against gravity and repositioning the torso in a natural position for walking.

The team developed a system, RYSEN, which allows patients to operate within a wide area, and in a range of activities, from standing and walking to walking along a slalom or horizontal ladder light projected onto the floor. They developed an algorithm to take measurements of how the patient is walking, and update the support given to them as they complete their training. The team found that all patients required the system to be tailored to them before use, but that by configuring the upward and forward forces applied during training, almost all subjects experienced significant improvements in movement with even small upward and forward forces on their torso. In fact, patients who experienced paralysis after SCI and stroke, found that by using the system, they were able to walk and thus begin to rebuild muscles and neurological pathways.

This work exists within a larger framework at NCCR Robotics, whereby researchers are using gravity-assisted technologies to play a key role in clinical trials on electrical spinal cord stimulation with the ultimate aim of creating technologies that will improve rehabilitation after spinal cord injury and stroke.

Reference:
Mignardot, J.-B., Le Goff, C. G., van den Brand, R., Capogrosso, M., Fumeaux, N., Vallery, H., Anil, S., Lanini, J., Fodor, I., Eberle, G., Ijspeert, A., Schurch, B., Curt, A., Carda, S., Bloch, J., von Zitzewitz, J. and Courtine, G., “A multidirectional gravity-assist algorithm that enhances locomotor control in patients with stroke or spinal cord injury“, Science Translational Medicine, 2017.

Image: EPFL

Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg and the team from the Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction (CHILI) Lab, explain how they are building robots to use in the classrooms of tomorrow. It is CHILI’s goal to deeply integrate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and learning sciences, especially in addressing practical problems in learning, teaching, and instruction.

If you enjoyed this ‘meet the lab’ video, you can also watch another in the NCCR Robotics series below:

• Meet the labs of NCCR Robotics: Paik Lab
• Meet the labs of NCCR Robotics: Auke Ijspeert and BioRob

The fields of modular and origami robotics have become increasingly popular in recent years, with both approaches presenting particular benefits, as well as limitations, to the end user. Christoph Belke and Jamie Paik from RRL, EPFL and NCCR Robotics have recently proposed an elegant new solution that integrates both types of robotics in order to overcome their individual limitations: Mori, a modular origami robot.

Mori is the first example of a robot that combines the concepts behind both origami robots and reconfigurable, modular robots. Origami robotics utilises folding of thin structures to produce single robots that can change their shape, while modular robotics uses large numbers of individual entities to reconfigure the overall shape and address diverse tasks. Origami robots are compact and light-weight but have functional restrictions related to the size and shape of the sheet and how many folds can be created. By contrast, modular robots are more flexible when it comes to shape and configuration, but they are generally bulky and complex.

Mori, an origami robot that is modular, merges the benefits of these two approaches and eliminates some of their drawbacks. The presented prototype has the quasi-2D profile of an origami robot (meaning that it is very thin) and the flexibility of a modular robot. By developing a small and symmetrical coupling mechanism with a rotating pivot that provides actuation, each module can be attached to another in any formation. Once connected, the modules can fold up into any desirable shape.

The individual modules have a triangular structure with dimensions of just 6 mm in thickness, 70 mm in width and 26 g in weight. Contained within this slender structure are actuators, sensors and an on-board controller. This means that the only external input required for full functionality is a power source. The researchers at EPFL have thereby managed to create a robot that has the thin structure of an origami robot as well as the functional flexibility of a modular system.

The prototype presents a highly adaptive modular robot and has been tested in three scenarios that demonstrate the system’s flexibility. Firstly, the robots are assembled into a reconfigurable surface, which changes its shape according to the user’s input. Secondly, a single module is manoeuvred through a small gap, using rubber rings embedded into the rotating pivot as wheels, and assembled on the other side into a container. Thirdly the robot is coupled with feedback from an external camera, allowing the system to manipulate objects with closed-loop control.

With Mori, the researchers have created the first robotic system that can represent reconfigurable surfaces of any size in three dimensions by using quasi-2D modules. The system’s design is adaptable to whatever task required, be that modulating its shape to repair damage to a structure in space, moulding to a limb weakened after injury in order to provide selective support or reconfiguring user interfaces, such as changing a table’s surface to represent geographical data. The opportunities are truly endless.

Reference

Christoph H. Belke and Jamie Paik, “Mori: A Modular Origami Robot“, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, doi:10.1109/TMECH.2017.2697310

Jamie Paik with a robot. Credit: NCCR Robotics

Meet the NCCR Robotics Paik Lab (RRL, EPFL) – headed by Professor Jamie Paik, the lab is dedicated to creating interactive robotic systems using cutting edge manufacturing techniques. The lab specialises in creating soft, foldable robots for use in a variety of situations, including creating compliant robotic assistive devices for people with disabilities.

If you enjoyed this ‘meet the lab’ video, you can also watch another in the NCCR Robotics series below:

Last month, Swiss start-up and NCCR Robotics and ETH Zurich spin-off noonee, announced the start of series production and sales launch of their Chairless Chair. The company was founded in 2014 and since then has been working on creating and testing a prototype of the Chairless Chair – an ergonomic solution to health issues that affects factory workers.

Out of 215 million industry sector workers in the EU, 85 million report work-related health problems. Any job that requires long periods of standing, bending or crouching, such as those on car assembly lines, can lead to substantial back and other muscle problems. Current solutions are often too bulky to be practical or lead to muscle wasting due to taking all the weight of the worker and not requiring them to hold themselves up. noonee have worked closely with partners across the motoring industry to test their exoskeleton with production line workers and have created a completely unique lower limb exoskeleton that supports, rather than holds, the body of the worker, meaning that they can hold awkward positions for a long time, but that they must continue to engage their muscles to do so, reducing the risk of muscle wastage.

During trials with end users, the company received valuable feedback, interestingly a lot of it contradictory. What the team discovered was that it was necessary to clearly explain what it should feel like to use the Chairless Chair, as for most people the word exoskeleton conjures up ideas of a system that takes all the body weight of the user. This idea of shared control of the Chair did cause some hesitance in uptake as some perceived that there could be safety issues. However, after careful dialogue noonee found that those involved gave very positive feedback and no longer had safety concerns.

noonee’s Chairless Chair is another great example of technology’s ability to positively impact our health and we can’t wait to see it in action!

Credit: NCCR Robotics

The Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob) is part of the Institute of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In this video, meet Professor Auke Ijspeert and his NCCR Robotics team, Kamilo Melo and Tomislav Horvat, along with some of the bioinspired robots they are working on.

Watch the video here:

Over recent years the explosion in popularity of drones, both professionally and for amateur use, has inspired researchers to consider how to make flying robots as safe and robust as possible. Previous design methods have included producing bulky protective cages or making them as unlikely to crash as possible. Recently, researchers from Floreano Lab, NCCR Robotics and EPFL have presented a new approach to making crash resilient quadcopters – making them soft, so it doesn’t matter if they come into contact with their surrounding environment.

Improving on a previous iteration of a folding quadcopter, Stefano Mintchev, the lead researcher on the project, developed a quadcopter utilising the dual stiffness properties seen in insect wings. Insect wings are composed of sections made of cuticle, a stiff material that takes the load bearing portion of the wing, connected with flexible joints made of the protein resilin that have evolved to be shock absorbent and compliant. These two factors together allow insect wings to be both strong and load-bearing, and compliant and durable.

The presented drone is made of a central case and a thin fibreglass external frame with four arms held together by four magnetic joints. As this fibreglass frame is only 0.3mm thick, it is soft and flexible, making it able to withstand collisions without permanent deformation. The four magnetic joints connect the frame to the central case (modelled after hard insect exoskeletons, just to complete the inspiration from nature) and rigidly hold the frame in place during flight. Where these magnets come into their own, is that during a collision they break, meaning that the drone transition to a soft state where the frame becomes disengaged and can safely deform without damaging itself or the inner core. Soft elastic bands ensure that the frame is held close enough in place that the magnets snap back after the collision, allowing the frame to realign and thus ensuring that the drone is once again ready to fly.

The collision resistant drone was tested by dropping it from a height of 2m whereby it completely disengaged the magnetic joints and automatically restored to its pre-crash configuration. In fact, the drone was dropped over 50 times with no permanent damage. On top of that, the design means that the drones can have as many rotators as desired and is not limited to a quadcopter configuration.

Reference

S. Mintchev, S.D. De Rivas and D. Floreano. Insect-Inspired Mechanical Resilience for Multicopters, In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2017.

Chances are that you’ve never given much thought to how insects walk, or what combination of leg movements–or gaits–is most stable or fastest, but, if like a group of scientists from Ramdya, Floreano and Ijspeert labs, NCCR Robotics, you are trying to create fast and robust robots, taking inspiration some of nature’s most agile movers might give you just the inspiration you need.

Multiple insect species walk fastest using a tripod gait, that means that three “feet” are on the ground and three are moving at any given time. Because insects find food and mates by walking around on leaves and climbing up trees, it has long been thought that evolutionary processes discovered the tripod gait to best achieve this kind of climbing over challenging terrain. In contrast, when moving quickly, quadruped vertebrates like dogs and horses tend to only keep one or two legs on the ground at a time. This difference in fast locomotor strategies between insects and vertebrates was puzzling to the researchers and suggested that the tripod gait might not be the best to use in ground-based bioinspired six-legged robots. To test this possibility, the team used computer simulations to model the running gaits of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The team then used a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm on the in-silico insect model to discover optimally fast gaits in different environmental scenarios and configurations (e.g. climbing, walking on flat ground).

Indeed, they discovered that the tripod gait is best used for fast climbing while new, unexpected bipod gaits with two legs on the ground were faster during ground locomotion – the typical requirement of six-legged robots. To move beyond the simulation, the then tested these new bipod gaits in a hexapod robot. They found that it also moved faster than when using the tripod gait. Finally, the team discovered that when leg adhesion was blocked in real Drosophila melanogaster, insects used gaits more similar to those discovered in the simulation. These results reveal the importance of environmental and biomechanical context in designing locomotor control strategies. Bioinspired methods are finely tuned to the biological challenges they address and may not be appropriate for all robotics applications.

Why does this interest roboticists? In creating previous bioinspired robots, the group from NCCR Robotics have developed robots that are capable of accessing multiple types of environments to locate victims and better focus rescue efforts. One failing of legged robots thus far, however, is that they are not quick as their biological, or flying, counterparts. By discovering how walking robots can more efficiently move, they can make the robots more robust and also reduce the energy requirements for a mission.

Reference

P. Ramdya, R. Thandiackal, R. Cherney, T. Asselborn, R. Benton, A. Ijspeert, and D. Floreano. Climbing favors the tripod gait over alternative faster insect gaits. Nature Communications. DOI 10.1038/NCOMMS14494.

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

• QuadBot: The 3D printed crab-bot scuttling beyond its Kickstarter goal
• Design, simulate and build a custom drone
• A new quadrupedal robot, the ANYmal
• Make your own Dtto Modular Robot – Assembly instructions (Part 1 of 3)
• mROBerTO: The modular millirobot for swarm behavior studies

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Crocodile with young in her mouth. Uganda – (C) John Downer Productions – Photographer: Richard Jones

Tune in and watch Spy in the Wild on BBC 1 on Thursday 26 January at 20:00 GMT to see NCCR Robotics’ newest robot in action.

Producers from John Downer productions for BBC One’s Spy in the Wild first approached Ijspeert Lab, EPFL in 2015 to ask them to create two robots, a crocodile and a monitor lizard, to be used to get closer to crocodiles in the wild for filming purposes. NCCR Robotics postdoctoral researcher Kamilo Melo relished the challenge and after watching hours upon hours of footage of the movements of the real animals, produced a torso and legs that could be used for both animals, with different modules for the head and tail for both, within the space of one month.

Spy Crocodile – (C) John Downer Productions – Photographer: Steve Downer

In designing the robots, Kamilo and his PhD student collaborator Tomislav Horvat were charged with two main issues – the first being that the robot must be fully controllable from a distance of 500m in order to avoid disturbing the crocodiles or putting human operators at risk, and the second that it must walk and behave realistically enough to fool the real crocodiles. Despite previous success in designing and controlling salamander robots in the Ijspeert Lab, Kamilo decided to start the robot design from scratch.

As the robots were going to be in close contact with dangerous animals, it was important for them to be more robust than their predecessors. The robot was made of a mixture of aluminium and carbon fibre, making it stronger and robust, but light and reliable at the same time. It was controlled by a transmitter that connects with a computer that used Bluetooth and RF to communicate with a tiny onboard computer. These then communicate with the motors at the same time to produce the motion.

Spy Croc keeps cool under the umbrella (photo: Kamilo Melo)

After creating the inner mechanics in the K-Rock, the robot was then sent to animatronics experts, John Nolan Studios, to develop and fit a lifelike, flexible and waterproof skin and create the final, lifelike Spy Crocodile. Spy Crocodile spent two weeks by the Nile river in Uganda searching out their real-life counterparts by walking on the banks and swimming in the river, but for the team from BIOROB, the experience was a little less glamorous, having to spend their days protecting the robot from the eye-watering 38C heat, humidity, mud and dust!

Fieldwork isn’t always glamorous! (Photo: Kamilo Melo)

K-Rock has now returned from his travels and his future will see him being improved and developed as part of the search and rescue work on mobile robots within NCCR Robotics, with the aim of sending him into disaster areas in order to inspect the infrastructure and to locate and assist victims.

On 8 October 2016, the world’s first Cybathlon took place in Zurich, Switzerland. The event, organised by ETH Zurich with NCCR Robotics as presenting sponsor, offered the opportunity for people with disabilities to work with technology providers to create solutions that would help them to complete a series of tasks of daily life.

Teams were invited to compete in one of six disciplines, BCI Race, FES Bike Race, Powered Arm Prosthesis Race, Powered Leg Prosthesis Race, Powered Exoskeleton Race and Powered Wheelchair Race and 400 contestants took part in one of the races.

If you weren’t able to attend the Cybathlon in person, or want a look back, this video from the organisers is the next best thing.

Source: École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Bioinspired robots that take their designs from biology has been a big research area in recent years, but a team from NCCR Robotics, Floreano Lab have just gone one step further and designed a feathered drone to fully replicate the agile flight of birds.

Small winged drones can experience sudden and extreme variations in aerodynamic conditions, for example from winds or air disturbances coming from passing obstacles or other moving objects. Birds adapt to these changing environmental conditions by changing the shape of their wings. Their feathered wings can quickly change shape mid-flight, for example, folding the outer layer of feathers, a bird significantly reduces the surface area of its wing and the aerodynamic drag allowing high-speed flight.

It is this folding and simple reduction of wing span that the team wished to exploit. By having a wing that can easily change size and shape, a drone can adapt to nippy manoeuvres (larger wing span required), or can reduce its drag at high speeds to fly in strong headwinds (short wing span required).

Birds can dramatically alter the shape and size of their wings because they are composed of an articulated skeleton controlled by muscles and covered with feathers that can overlap. Similarly, the presented drone has a wing equipped with artificial feathers that can be folded to actively change the surface. The wing contains two artificial tendons that can either rotate or straighten the front edge of the wing, thus splaying or storing the feathers. By enabling the drone to reduce its wingspan, the surface area is decreased by 41%, thus significantly reducing drag giving the possibility to fly against strong headwinds. On the other hand, when the wing is fully deployed, the drone can perform turns that are 40% sharper. Since the two foldable wings act independently of each other, the mechanism can also be used to control roll eliminating the need of additional ailerons with advantages in terms of reduced weight and mechanical complexity.

This new advent means that the drones of the future may not only manoeuvre like birds, but may also look like them too!

Reference:

M. Di Luca, S. Mintchev, G. Heitz, F. Noca, and D. Floreano, Bio-inspired morphing wings for extended flight envelope and roll control of small drones, Journal of the Royal Society, Interface Focus, 16 December 2016. DOI – http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0092

The year is 2032 and a meteorite has damaged a power station on Mars. 16 teams of school-aged children spread across the world have each been given control of a robot based on Mars and have been commanded to work together to assess the damage and restart the main generator.

The teams will need to programme the robots taking into account the time lag taken for instructions to travel from planet Earth to Mars (between three and 21 minutes depending on the orbit) in order to get the generator restarted in time. Teams will programme their robots and send in their expertise from across the world, including Switzerland, France, South Africa, Russia and Italy.

You can watch along live and see the future of space travel at https://www.thymio.org/en:thymio-r2t2 from 13:30 (CET) today.

Watch the live stream

About the Thymio robot

A group from Floreano Lab, EPFL and NCCR Robotics has today published their novel variable stiffness fibre with self-healing capability.

Soft “hardware” components are becoming more and more popular solutions within the field of robotics. In fact softness, compliance and foldability bring significant advantages to devices by allowing conformability and safe interactions with users, objects and unstructured environments. However for some applications, the softness of components adversely reduces the range of forces those devices can apply or sustain. An optimal solution would be having components able to vary their softness according to the needed task.

The fibre has a metal core, consisting of low melting point alloys (LMPA), which is contained within a pre-stretched silicone tube. At room temperatures the LMPA is a solid, thus, the fibre is stiff and behaves like a thin metal wire. But when an electrical current is passed through a copper wire coiled around the tube, the LMPA inner core is warmed above 62 ^oC and melts, thus, the fibre becomes up to 700 times softer and 400 times more deformable.

The second advantage is that if the metallic core breaks it just needs to be heated and — voila! The fibre is fixed! And to top it off, the changing of states occurs in tens of seconds (depending on the current injected and the dimension of the LMPA core).

The fibre has a myriad of real-world applications in the fields of mobile robots, wearable devices and soft systems. Currently, the team is using the fibre to create multi-purpose foldable drones. In fact, the fibre can be morphed into different shapes that are preserved after cooling, ie the four arms of the drone can take different functional morphologies, i.e. deployed in a quadrotor-like configuration for aerial locomotion or bent towards the ground in a four-wheeled configuration for terrestrial locomotion.

Future applications that the team is investigating include in endoscopes and other medical applications, where instruments need to be soft and pliable as they are exploring delicate body cavities, but then need to be able to penetrate resistive biological tissues (e.g. for a biopsy) once they have reached their desired location.

Reference

Tonazzini, A., Mintchev, S., Schubert, B., Mazzolai, B., Shintake, J. and Floreano, D. (2016), Variable Stiffness Fiber with Self-Healing Capability. Adv. Mater.. doi:10.1002/adma.201602580

In our privileged position as presenting sponsor we are also proud to have NCCR Robotics represented by two teams: In the Powered Arm Prosthesis Race, by the team LeMano, and in the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) race, by the team EPFL Brain Tweakers.

LeMano is a team from EPFL, which recently pioneered natural feeling restoration in people with upper limb amputations through functioning artificial arms – in fact, you may have read about them back in 2014 when they first published the results of their Lifehand2 bionic hand. LeMano are currently expanding their technology and testing it with new patients. For the Cybathlon they have developed new control algorithms in order to enable more accurate and easier control of the prosthesis, to help with the precise and adaptive object manipulation required for the Cybathlon tasks, e.g. hanging up washing on a clothes line. Their pilot is called Almerina, a proud wife and mother who wants to help society by giving her time to testing of innovative technologies, which she hopes will be an everyday reality in the future. Team is leaded by Stanisa, and composed by Giacomo, Ivo and Francesco.

The goal of LeMano is to show that a non-athlete can participate and complete tasks in such a competition. This would really show that their technology is not only for Super Heroes, but for all persons with disabilities.

Attend the Cybathlon in person or watch along live on the Cybathlon website to cheer along for LeMano!

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

• Virtual race: Competing in Brain Computer Interface at Cybathlon
• New video shows bionic athletes rehearsing for upcoming Cybathlon competition
• Cybathlon: A bionics competition for people with disabilities
• Meet the pilots preparing for Cybathlon: Claudia Breidbach
• Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics

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

This week the world’s first Cybathlon will take place in Zurich, Switzerland. Cybathlon is the brainchild of NCCR Robotics co-director and ETH Zurich professor Robert Riener, and is designed to facilitate discussion between academics, industry and end users of assistive aids, to promote the position of people with disabilities within society and to push development of assistive technology towards solutions that are suitable for use all-day, every day.

In our privileged position as presenting sponsor we are also proud to have NCCR Robotics represented by two teams: In the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) race, by the team EPFL Brain Tweakers, and in the Powered Arm Prosthesis Race, by the team LeMano.

The BCI race is a virtual race, whereby the pilots use BCIs to control an avatar running through a computer game – the pilots may only use their thoughts as no other commands (e.g. head movements) will affect the actions of the avatar. As the Brain Tweakers are a team of researchers representing the Chair in Brain-Machine Interface (CNBI) laboratory led by Prof. José del R. Millán at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne and NCCR Robotics, they jumped at the chance to participate in this race, which plays to their experience and expertise. Indeed, the focus of their research is on the direct use of human brain signals to control devices and interact with the environment around the user.

At Cybathlon, the Brain Tweakers will race with two pilots, 30-year-old Numa Poujouly and 48-year-old Eric Anselmo, both of whom have been practicing over the summer during weekly and bi-weekly two hour sessions. The BCI system that they will use translates brain patterns, as captured in real-time by Electroencephalography (EEG, a completely safe, non-invasive and minimally obtrusive approach), into game commands.

This is possible by means of what is called a Motor Imagery (MI) BCI. EEG signals (i.e., electrical activity on the user’s scalp, which occurs naturally in everyone as part of the process of using one’s brain), which are monitored through 16 electrodes placed in specific locations on the pilot’s head. Distinct spatio-spectral cortical patterns (patterns of brainwaves) are known to emerge and persist when someone either makes or thinks about making a movement (i.e., movements of the hands, arms and/or feet). It is this pattern of brainwaves when a person imagines making a movement that makes this technology usable by and attractive to people with severe disabilities. These cortical patterns are not only specific to which limb is being thought about, but also tend to be fairly user-specific. Therefore the first of the objectives of the sessions that the team have been using to train this summer have been to identify the MI tasks that are “optimal” (i.e., more easily distinguishable) for each of the two pilots. These then feed into a set of processing modules, consisting of signal processing and machine learning algorithms, that allow the online, real-time detection of the type of movement being executed. The latter is straightforwardly translated into a predetermined command to the pilot’s avatar in the game (speed-up, roll, slide).

While BCI technology is not in and of its self very new, what the Brain Tweakers hope will give them the winning edge is this introduction of machine learning techniques. For the Brain Tweakers, the Cybathlon provides an excellent opportunity for their team to rapidly advance and test their research outcomes in real-world conditions, exchange expertise and foster collaborations with other groups, as well as to push BCI technology out of the lab to provide practical daily service for end-users in their homes.

Attend the Cybathlon in person or watch along live on the Cybathlon website to cheer along for the Brain Tweakers.

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

• New video shows bionic athletes rehearsing for upcoming Cybathlon competition
• Cybathlon: A bionics competition for people with disabilities
• Meet the pilots preparing for Cybathlon: Claudia Breidbach
• Robohub roundtable: Cybathlon and advancements in prosthetics

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

What makes these wings different to previous solutions is the origami techniques used to produce it, creating the perfect folding structure. First, the research team looked for examples from nature which exhibit folding patterns with a high size reduction and one degree of freedom to fold the wing with single and intuitive movement in a short amount of time. Coleopterans (beetles) were found to not only have the perfect wings, but also control wing deployment from the base of the wing, making them easier to artificially replicate.

Through prototyping and modelling, the original coleopteran blueprints were adapted and updated. The artificial crease pattern achieves a significant size reduction. In the stowed configuration the wingspan is 43% and the surface is 26% of the respective dimensions in the deployed configuration. Despite the complexity of the patterns, the wing has a single degree of freedom and can be folded using only one simple movement.

Finding the crease pattern was only one of the issues that the research team hoped to solve. When using paper for origami, the thickness is negligible, however, when creating a wing, a thicker material must be employed in order to sustain the stresses created during flight. The thicker material is accounted for by creating a 3D folding pattern with tiles of different thickness. The addition of compliant and bistable folds made of pre-stretched latex ensures maximum durability and a smooth deployment.

The presented wings are 26g in weight, with dimensions of 115 x 215 x 40 mm when folded and 200 x 500 x 16 mm when deployed, giving 160 cm² surface area and 989 cm³ volume when folded and 620 cm² surface area and 1600 cm³ when deployed. The resulting drone has been tested against a comparable rigid wing in a wind-tunnel, and showed only marginally less good performance when considering lift/drag values.

The ability to create a lightweight, durable drone that is capable of being easily transported and quickly deployed moves us not only closer to commonplace use of robots in locating victims after natural disasters, but also in land and space exploration, aeronautics and civil inspections.

Reference:

Dufour, Louis; Owen, Kevin; Mintchev, Stefano; Floreano, Dario, A Drone with Insect-Inspired Folding Wings, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS, Daejeon, Korea, October 9-14, 2016

Claudia Breidbach is pilot with Touch Bionics in the Powered Arm Prosthesis Race. When Claudia isn’t preparing for the Cybathlon, she can be found competing with her skydiving team, KARMA.

Tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live? How old are you?

I am Claudia Breidbach. I am 45 years and live in Koblenz, Germany. I was born without my left arm but this has never stopped me in perusing my dreams. I am a sports enthusiast, always happy, fun, content and ambitious person that isn’t afraid of challenges. I love to inspire and motivate others to do better. I am also a certified skydiver with my 4-way team KARMA with whom I was able to take part at the 2015 German Skydiving Championship.

Credit: Claudia Breidbach

Claudia with the team. Credit: NCCR

How / when did you first hear about the Cybathlon?

I first heard about the Cybathlon during the Swiss Handicap Exhibition in Switzerland in 2014.

What was your motivation to get involved?

I have a variety of things that motivate me to take part. Firstly I want to show what is possible nowadays thanks to amazing technology and want to motivate as many people as possible to thrive for more. I set my goal at finishing every task with the correct posture and grips. Also, I am a highly motivated and ambitious person who loves challenges but the biggest motivation is that there was NO woman in the Category of Powered Arm Prosthesis and this was an absolute no go.

Which race are you competing in?

Powered Arm Prosthesis Race

How did you get involved with your technology team?

Since discovering Touch Bionics and their great technology in 2010 I followed the developments and in 2014 I started working with Touch Bionics as an Ambassador in my leisure time. In October 2014 I was able to fulfil another dream, to work in a field close to my heart, when I started as Training Manager for Germany for Touch Bionics.

Do you have a long standing relationship with them or are you new to each other?

Yes, my first contact was established when I visited the OT World exhibition in Leipzig in 2010 with my Technician. I saw the prosthesis and knew that this was my hand. I finally received my first Touch Bionics hand, then the i-limb^TM pulse in 2011 and had my upgrade at the beginning of 2014. At this time I also started to work with Touch Bionics as their ambassador and was blessed to take part at many exhibitions like the CeBit 2014 where I met England’s then Prime Minister David Cameron and our Chancellor Angela Merkel and shook their hands – the left hand of course! During this time I met Bert (Pot, also competing in the Powered Arm Prosthesis Race for Touch Bionics) and since then we have established a strong working relationship during various events and have become friends. In October 2014 decided to change my career and quit my job as an architect at the City of Koblenz to work as Training Manager at Touch Bionics’ German office. In June 2015 work supplied me with an i-limb^TM quantum ‘Extra Small’ for training purposes; this is the hand that I am allowed to showcase at the Cybathlon 2016.

How is this relationship working? Have you started training with the technology yet? How often do you see each other?

The relationship has thrived and evolved over time to a strong connection – it has become my life. My daily activities offer me many possibilities to improve my skills and bring me new challenges to master. Bert and I started training in May and meet up every now and again to check on grip positions and decide on a game plan for the Cybathlon. We work together, it makes us stronger and we will reach our goal. This is our Team spirit.

What are you most looking forward to about the Cybathlon and what do you hope to get out of the experience?

I look forward to meeting other pilots and companies as well as interested people and make new contacts. I hope to showcase to people what it means to master life with a prosthesis and to gain a new and valuable experience. I also want to show what is possible today with technology.

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

• Cybathlon: A bionics competition for people with disabilities
• 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.

Thymio in the classroom. Source: YouTube

Despite phenomenal advances in the field of robotics in recent years and specifically the field of robots for use in the classroom, there is still a large shortfall in the number of teachers who actively involve robots in their lessons. In order to try to understand this gap in the usage of teaching robots, a group from NCCR Robotics and LSRO, EPFL completed a study focusing on teachers who had completed training sessions for the Thymio educational robot.

Where most previous studies on robots used in schools have concentrated on acceptance by students, this study focused on their teachers, with the idea that teachers are those who decide what to include in their lessons, and thus are those who need to be convinced of the value of robots in classrooms. The study found that not only did teachers tend to be more sure of the abilities of their students to use the robots than of their own, meaning that they did not always feel comfortable to include robots in their lessons, but also that they were more likely to incorporate robots into teaching plans if they felt that they would also learn something about robotics themselves. This “soif de connaissance” and desire to transmit it highlights the need for specific teacher training sessions, allowing teachers to feel more comfortable in their own abilities and to increase their knowledge of a certain field area.

The research also showed that more teachers were put off from using educational robots by the perception that set-up of exercises will take a significant amount of time. It therefore has been shown that in order for robots to progress fully into the classroom, resources and turn-key practice exercises need to be made not only freely available, but also be well publicised.

Recent exercises have shown that a concerted effort to create fun, educational activities can result in Thymio being used for a wide variety of teaching goals. One example took place in April 2016, where a group of NCCR Robotics and LSRO, EPFL researchers went to the Cambridge, UK science festival and worked with researchers at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge to explain the concept of stem cells using Thymio at a public education event. Thymio has also recently been included in a new set of exercises distributed to 10’000 French schools and is to be adopted for the 2016-2017 school year. Robots need not only be used to explain robotics and computer science, but can be used for a wide variety of subjects such as geography, biology and art.

It is generally understood that robotics is a significant part of the future of society, and this latest paper addresses not just the acceptance of robots by the children who we aim to teach, but the acceptance of those who will be teaching them. With this in hand, NCCR Robotics can tailor aspects of its research in the Transversal Educational Activity (TEA) to create an affordable teaching robot and accessible exercises to facilitate the entry of robots into the classroom.

Thymio has a number of exercises designed for teachers to use during classes on their website, along with a tutorial written by Prof. Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari, an expert in educational science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, to show teachers how the exercises work.

Reference:

M. Chevalier, F. Riedo and F. Mondada, “How do teachers perceive educational robots in formal education? A study based on the Thymio robot*”, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 23, no. 2, pp.16-23, 2016.

Cybathlon provides a platform for the development of novel assistive technologies that are useful for daily life. There are races for athletes with powered arm and leg prostheses, for those wearing a robotic exoskeleton, and for powered wheelchairs. There’s also a race for cyclists using electrical muscle stimulation and a brain-computer interface race.

On the day, there will be experts and moderators to present the events along with hands-on-demos so that visitors can try out some of the technologies on show at Cybathlon.

Through the organisation of the Cybathlon, we want to remove barriers between people with disabilities, the public and technology developers.

Hardware experiments on motion planning for the the ballbot Rezero using direct transcription. Source: ADRLab ETH/youtube

When you walk across a room or down a path, your brain is making thousands of decisions on how best to move. For example, how best to use your weight, scanning for any obstacles or uneven surfaces, and how rigid (or soft) your limbs and joints should be. Teaching a robot to conduct the same decision-making process is ongoing in robotics, and a team from ADRL, ETH Zurich and NCCR Robotics is studying existing direct transcription methods for trajectory optimization applied to robot motion planning.

Rezero, the dancing ballbot. Source: ETH Zurich.

Using a method of control called direct transcription (where complex mathematical problems are broken down into smaller problems and each solved individually), the team uses direct transcription to enable an unstable ball-balancing robot to perform a series of tasks with increasing complexity. The common issue with direct optimisation methods, which are used to allow the robots to obtain more natural movements, is that they require computers to continuously run multiple algorithms at once, meaning that planning a path in real time, like the human brain does, has not yet been achieved. Simply put, the computers working online with a robot are nowhere near as fast, efficient and robust as your brain, and that’s before considering how heavy such a computer might need to be, or how much bandwidth this communication requires.

First, by using computer models, the team tested the unstable ball balancing robot (see video below) with three variations of a simple task where the robot had to move from one location to another while avoiding fixed obstacles. By allowing the robot to use the best solution it found for previous tasks, coupled with a feedback controller to stabilise the system, the simulated robot was able to find a path through two obstacles in under a second. When using the real robot, the same paths and trajectories were followed, with the robot reaching the planned destination safely and in the same period of time as the virtual robot, thus validating the hypothesis.

The speed with which the robot is able to assess its scenario and follow a path that it has decided for itself without falling is a positive step forward that can be transported onto more complex robots (such as quadrupedal robots) in more uneven environments.

If a quadrupedal robot, such as HyQ or StarlETH, are able to understand obstacles in its path and successfully avoid or modify a movement to accommodate, such as softening joints when walking over rocks, then robots have made one step further towards regularly being sent to disaster zones to locate victims and save more lives.

Today, a team from LSBI, EPFL and NCCR Robotics present their latest stretchable biphasic (solid-liquid) thin metal film in the journal Advanced Materials. To build the films, first a substrate (a base that the film will be built upon) of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is lain. On top of this, a metallic bilayer is formed by evaporating gallium onto a 60nm thick sputtered gold film. The resulting metallic film has two distinct phases: a solid AuGa₂ alloy immersed in liquid gallium that has a melting point of 29.8 ^oC. The thinness and deposition method of the biphasic film allow for fine and complex shape patterning using lithography techniques, similar to those obtained in metal films on rigid substrates.

The idea of using biphasic (i.e. solid and liquid) elements within the film is that when it is bent or stretched, small cracks form within the solid alloy layer, but the liquid layer is on hand to seep into the gaps and ensure continued electrical conductivity. This elegant solution really seems to work – when tested in the lab under repeated strain and tension, the films retained low sheet resistance (< 0.5 Ω/sq), low gauge factor (sensitivity to strain) (≈ 1) and the ability to stretch by 400 % a million times without affecting function.

Reference

A. Hirsch, H.O.Michaud, A.P. Gerratt, S. de Mulatier and S.P. Lacour, “Intrinsically stretchable biphasic (solid-liquid) thin metal films,” Advanced Materials, 2016. Doi: 10.1002/adma.201506234

ANYmal walking. photo source: ETH Zurich, RSL

ANYmal is a quadrupedal robot designed for autonomous operation in difficult terrains. It is capable of running and climbing, and with its incorporated laser sensors and cameras, the robot can perceive its environment to continuously create maps and accurately localize.

Following the successes of StarlETH, ETH Zurich’s bioinspired walking robot, Marco Hutter (RSL, ETH Zurich and NCCR Robotics) explains how ANYmal has been upgraded and why this robot is important for search and rescue platforms.

And here you can watch the AnyMal robot in action:

Photos courtesy: RRL, EPFL and NCCR Robotics

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are an up and coming solution to the contradictory design criteria that many robotic systems have – high torque/force often means greater weight and volume, which is impractical and often specifically against the purpose of wearable robots. Taking the principles of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) which have been used for powering orthoses since the 1960s, SPAs are a soft solution for creating a bending motion while not being limited to a single direction of movement, and as such can be used for a wider range of applications.

Orthoses (exoekeletons) used for training to regain movement in patients after stroke suffer from a number of common problems; they are uncomfortable and bulky and thus have not yet been integrated into common usage. To make a truly practical device that is useable on a day-to-day basis, tactile interfaces on the surface need to be lightweight, compliant, safe and have multiple points of sensing and actuation. A team from RRL, EPFL and NCCR Robotics presents a Soft Pneumatic Actuator (SPA)-skin embedded with piezo electric (PZT) sensors to tackle these problems and provide vibrotactile feedback.

SPA-based skin allows bidirectional tactile information transfer to facilitate simpler and responsive wearable interface. By creating an interface made from SPAs and designed to be worn over the skin, it is possible to create a synthetic “second skin” that is thin, lightweight and flexible, meaning that sensors can be placed across all points of the hand (like nerves across your skin) but when the wearer bends their hand, the skin and the integrated tactile feedback system both follow it.

Photos courtesy: RRL, EPFL and NCCR Robotics

SPA-skin is made of two layers, a lower sensor layer and an upper actuator layer. The actuator layer is made of two silicone sheets with a mask between them to prevent the layers sticking. The final design is 1.4 mm-thick including the integrated sensor layer. To create actuation (or movement) air is pumped into a 3-4mm diameter bubble between the layers, which creates forces of up to 0.3N, which may sound small, but is comparable to pressures experienced by the human hand on a daily basis. The sensor layer is created using piezoelectric ceramic elements embedded into silicone sheets which convert mechanical stress (the pressure exerted by touching something) into an electrical voltage. This voltage is then used to measure the strength of vibrations that come from both the actuator and the external interaction forces faced by SPA skin.

Photos courtesy: RRL, EPFL and NCCR Robotics

The presented SPA-skin produces vibrotactile feedback (a vibration is initiated to facilitate haptic feedback) over a range of frequencies. Sensors embedded inside can detect vibrations from actuators at the same time as external interaction forces applied by something touching the skin. This measured sensor information is then used to actively control vibration strength from the actuators. In other words, the “skin” can detect that it is touching something, and also, modulate the vibration accordingly so that the sense of feeling (the haptic sensation) is consistent.

SPA-skin provides a highly customisable and a wearable physical interface with facility of the closed-loop control for multiple vibrotactile signals. It may find uses anywhere that requires a wearable device for vibrotactile feedback across the human body. As described above, it can be used as a plug and play component for a feedback mechanism in rehabilitation devices for training patients with loss of movement e.g. after stroke, or for providing a sense of touch in virtual reality games.

Reference

H.A. Sonar and J. Paik, “Soft Pneumatic Actuator Skin with Piezoelectric Sensors for Vibrotactile Feedback“, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, doi:10.3389/frobt.2015.00038

Every year people get lost in the wild worldwide. In Switzerland alone, around 1000 emergency calls per year come from hikers, most of whom are injured or have lost their way. Drones are an efficient complement to human rescuers and can be deployed in large numbers, are inexpensive and prompt, and thus minimise the response time and the risk of injury for those who are lost or work in rescue teams.

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. This research is a premiere in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics and could soon be used in parallel with rescue teams to search for people lost in the wild faster than would be achievable by human rescuers alone.

“While drones flying at high altitudes are already being used commercially (see Amazon or DHL), drones cannot yet fly autonomously in complex environments, such as dense forests. In these environments, any little error may result in a crash, and robots need a powerful brain in order to make sense of the complex world around them.”, says Prof. Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich.

The drone used by the Swiss researchers observes the environment through a pair of small cameras, similar to those in your smartphone. Instead of relying on sophisticated sensors, their drone uses very powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms to interpret the images to recognise man-made trails. If a trail is visible, the software steers the drone in the corresponding direction.

Interpreting an image taken in a complex environment such as a forest is incredibly difficult for a computer; sometimes even humans struggle to find out where the trail is!”, says Dr. Alessandro Giusti from “Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence”.

The Swiss team solved the problem using a so-called Deep Neural Network, a computer algorithm that learns to solve complex tasks from a set of “training examples”, much like a brain learns from experience. In order to gather enough data to “train” their algorithms, the team hiked several hours along different trails in the Swiss Alps and took more than 20 thousand images of trails using cameras attached to a helmet. The effort paid off: when tested on a new, previously-unseen trail, the deep neural network was able to find the correct direction in 85% of cases; in comparison, humans faced with the same task guessed correctly 82% of the time.

Dr. Dan Ciresan at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence comments: “In the last eight years we have developed huge Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to solve difficult problems from the fields of biology, automation and document processing. This is our first attempt at creating a small but performant DNN capable of running on a computer on our drone. I am happy to see that the same networks we have used to analyse biological brains, detect cancerous cells and diagnose retinal disorders can also be used to drive autonomous quadcopters.”

Prof. Juergen Schmidhuber, Scientific Director at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence says: “Our lab has worked on deep learning in neural networks since the early 1990s when only a few labs were interested in the topic. Today I am happy to find our lab’s methods not only in numerous real-world applications such as speech recognition on your smartphone, but also in lightweight robots such as drones. Robotics will see an explosion of applications of deep neural networks in coming years.”

The research team warns that much work is still needed before a fully autonomous fleet will be able to swarm forests in search of missing people. Prof. Luca Maria Gambardella, director of the “Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence” in Lugano, remarks: “Many technological issues must be overcome before the most ambitious applications can become a reality. But small flying robots are incredibly versatile, and the field is advancing at an unseen pace. One day robots will work side by side with human rescuers to make our lives safer: this is a small but important step in that direction!”. Prof. Davide Scaramuzza from the University of Zurich says: “Now that our drones have learned to recognise and follow forest trails, our next step will be teach them to recognise humans!”.

Reference:

A. Giusti, J, Guzzi, D. C. Ciresan, F-L He , J. P. Rodríguez, F. Fontana, M. Faessler, C. Forster, J. Schmidhuber, G. Di Caro, D. Scaramuzza and L. M. Gambardella, “A Machine Learning Approach to Visual Perception of Forest Trails for Mobile Robots“, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, DOI 10.1109/LRA.2015.2509024.

Testing knee perturbator. Photo source: ETH Zürich, RELab, Stefan Schneller

When designing exoskeletons for rehabilitation of patients after spinal cord injury or stroke, a constant concern is creating them to be as natural as possible to best enable user training to rebuild both muscles and neural networks.

Stefan Schrade from the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, RELab, at ETH Zurich and NCCR Robotics, Switzerland, explains how the ETH knee perturbator is exploring the mechanical properties of the human knee and also helping understand how we recover from everyday stumbles.

And here’s a video of one of the experiments.

Credit: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella

In 21 countries across the globe, hundreds of people are preparing for Cybathlon 2016, where cutting edge robotic assistive technologies will help people with disabilities to compete in a series of races. This summer the Cybathlon practice session took place at the Swiss Arena in Kloten so that the teams could test out the courses. Watch the trailer for the rehearsal games!

Cybathlon 2016 is organised by ETH Zurich and will showcase six disciplines:

• BCI Race Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) Bike Race
• Powered Arm Prosthesis Race
• Powered Leg Prosthesis Race
• Powered Exoskeleton Race
• Powered Wheelchair Race

The finals will take place on October 8, 2016.

Find out more at www.cybathlon.com

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

• Exoskeleton with haptic sensors helps paralysed man to kick off World Cup
• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Control strategies for active lower extremity prosthetics and orthotics
• Registration now open for Cybathlon 2016
• Noonee: The chairless Chair

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

From early childhood, when a person picks up an object using their hands they use haptic feedback to automatically adjust the force of their grip according to the object they are lifting. A completely different grip is required when holding a soft piece of fruit or a glass ornament – both very delicate in their own ways. Your body will automatically adjust to the appropriate grip by sensing small shear movements and exploiting the natural compliance of the soft, fleshy pads of your finger tips to do so. Equipping robotic grippers with this level of compliance and versatility has long been a problem, but in a paper published in Advanced Materials, a team from LMTS and LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics proposes a solution with a simple control input that has been used to pick up diverse objects including a raw chicken egg, a water balloon and a flat piece of paper.

While most robotic grippers are designed for the type of object they will pick up, the versatility of this two-fingered version comes from its ability to maximise electroadhesion and electrostatic actuation while allowing self-sensing through newly designed bending dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). Electroadhesion force alternates holding force to pick up heavier objects, and minimises required mechanical grasping force generated from electrostatic actuation, allowing the gripper to handle very fragile and deformable objects and a wide variety of shapes.

The key novelty that allows this new gripper to behave differently is the arrangement of electrodes within the DEA. Traditionally, DEAs function through a thin elastomer membrane sandwiched between two highly compliant, uniform parallel electrodes. When a voltage is applied across the membrane the opposing charges on the electrodes generate electrostatic pressure, which in turn leads to thickness reduction and area expansion, resulting in bending actuation.

For DEA actuation, electric fields inside the membrane normal to the surface are usually the only ones considered, but not the only ones produced: Fringe electrical fields are created at the electrode edge, which can bring about electroadhesion in nearby objects.

In order to exploit the electroadhesion and the electrostatic actuation of the DEA, four compliant electrodes are interwoven in a way that causes adjacent electrode segments on the same planar surface to orientate with the opposite polarity nearest. Thus, when a voltage is applied, the fringe electric fields are experienced across the whole DEA, rather than just at the edges, leading to electroactuation forces being increased tenfold.

The simple structure of the gripper means that it is lightweight (approx. 1.5g), fast functioning (approx. 100ms to close the fingers), and has a design flexibility for potential applications such as small transportation drones, the food industry and medical robotics.

References

J. Shintake, S. Rosset, B. Schubert, D. Floreano and H. Shea, “Versatile soft grippers with intrinsic electroadhesion based on multifunctional polymer actuators,” Advanced Materials, 2015. doi:10.1002/adma.201504264

All photographs courtesy of Alain Herzog and NCCR Robotics.

Using a BCI the robot was able to find targets that the person could see but the robot could not (Photo: Iturrate et al., 2015).

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) — where brain waves captured by electrodes on the skin are used to control external devices such as a robotic prosthetic — are a promising tool for helping people who have lost motor control due to injury or illness. However, learning to operate a BMI can be very time consuming. In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, a group from CNBI, EPFL and NCCR Robotics show how their new feedback system can speed up the training process by detecting error messages from the brain and adapting accordingly.

One issue that bars the use of BMIs in everyday life for those with disabilities is the amount of time required to train users, who must learn to modulate their thought processes before their brain signals are clear enough to control an external machine. For example, to move a robotic prosthetic arm, a person must actively think about moving their arm — a thought process that uses significantly more brainpower than the subconscious thought required to move a natural arm. Furthermore, even with extensive training, users are often not able to perform complex movements.

It has been observed, however, that the brain emits very different waves when it experiences success at controlling a BMI than when it experiences failure. With this in mind, the research team developed a new feedback system that records error signals from the brain (called ‘error-related potentials’, or ErrPs) and uses these to evaluate whether or not the correct movement has been achieved. The system then adapts the movement until it finds the correct one, becoming more accurate the longer it is in use.

In order to determine the ErrP, twelve subjects were asked to watch a machine perform 350 separate movements, where the machine was programmed to make the wrong movement in 20% of cases. This step took an average of 25 minutes. After this first training stage, each subject performed three experiments where they attempted to locate a specific target using the robotic arm. As expected, the time taken to locate a target reduced as the experiment continued.

Three experiments showed that a robot improved its ability to find the position of a fixed point using error-related brain activity. (Iturrate et al. 2015)

https://youtu.be/jAtcVlTqxeA

This new approach finds obvious applicability in the field of neuroprosthesis, particularly for those with degenerative neurological conditions who find that their requirements change over time. The system also has the potential to automatically adapt itself without the need for retraining or reprogramming.

Reference

I. Iturrate, R. Chavarriaga, L. Montesano, J.  Minguez and J. del R. Millán, “Teaching brain-machine interfaces as an alternative paradigm to neuroprosthetics control,” Nature Scientific Reports, vol. 5, Article number: 13893, 2015. doi:10.1038/srep13893

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

• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch
• Lifehand 2 prosthetic grips and senses like a real hand
• Control strategies for active lower extremity prosthetics and orthotics
• The gateway to advanced neuroprosthetics: Jessica Feldman talks BrainGate and BCI
• Bionic athletes compete in disciplines drawn from everyday life

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

Fruit Fly – drosophila melanogaster. Source: Francis Prior/flickr

Taking cues from the natural world is growing ever more popular in robotics. This week, in a paper published by the Royal Society, a team from NCCR Robotics and LIS, EPFL present a revolutionary new artificial compound eye, created with the fruit fly in mind.

Evolution has cleverly equipped the arthropods’ compound eye with key features that enable these insects to react instantly to danger, even in cluttered environments.Their eyes are able to create low-resolution images with wide fields of view, high sensitivity to motion and a near infinite depth of field, all at low energy cost. The insect’s eye is made up of many thousands of ommatidia and each is an individual sight receptor. Every ommatidia is positioned slightly differently in relation to its neighbours, allowing the brain to collect and compare information from all and piece together a complete image of the surrounding area. These quick functioning, simple eyes are what allow insects to react so quickly when you try to swat them.

Each small eye can be used individually or combined with others. Source: Pericet-Camara et al., 2015.

With all these advantages in mind, the team, led by Prof. Dario Floreano, has created an artificial version of an ommatidium that functions through three hexagonal photodetectors arranged in a triangular shape, underneath a single lens. These photodetectors work together and combine perceived changes in structured light (optic flow), to present a 3D image that shows what is moving in the scene, and in which direction the movement is happening. This means that even when the eye is moving and the environment remains stationary, relative movement is picked up. With three sensors each receiving and combining optic flow in different directions, the eye is able to function as a stand alone sensor so that the multiple, perfectly aligned single eyes used in previous solutions are no longer required.

The eye has been tested in a wide range of lighting conditions and has been shown to function in environments ranging from a poorly lit room to bright sunshine. It even works three times faster than the insect eyes that it is modelled on, with 300 frames per second recorded during testing. This allows an image of a given environment to build up as the robot is moving, enabling it to spot obstacles and react quickly. The ability to rapidly extract data offline and provide an image suitable for navigation, without the need for high energy expenditure, is what allows this eye to be truly versatile.

Eyes can be arranged on a flexible array Source: Pericet-Camara et al., 2015).

This new sensor is 1925 x 475 x 860 μm in size and weighs only 2mg, making it ideal for a micro air vehicle (MAV), or other flying robots where both speed and payload are of high importance. A further advantage of this method is that multiple sensors may be used together, each pointing in different directions, to provide a miniature omnidirectional camera for motion detection. Since the sensors work independently, they can be mounted in any configuration, even on flexible substrates. The team has demonstrated the operation of their compositional eye in the shape of a bendable strip (which Prof. Floreano calls Vision Tape) because it can be attached to any planar or curved object.

Future work could see the sensor embedded onto the surface of soft and flexible robots or in smart clothing to allow blind people to “see” obstacles; it could be used in medical endoscopes, enabling more precise operations. The fact that it can also be arranged in layers, allowing for adaptation to arbitrary shapes, makes the possibilities for its use endless.

Reference

R. Pericet-Camara, M.K. Dobrzynski, R. Juston, S. Viollet, R. Leitel, H.A. Mallot, D. Floreano, “An artificial elementary eye with optic flow detection and compositional properties,” J. R. Soc. Interface, vol. 12: 20150414, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0414

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

• Robots Podcast: Curved Artificial Compound Eye
• TED talk with Davide Scaramuzza on visual control of MAVs
• DALER: A bio-inspired robot that can both fly and walk
• Robots Podcast: A robot fly at Harvard and at the MoMA
• Developing Jibo: Animating the eye

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

Telepresence robots give the disabled a sense of independence (Photo: Alain Herzog, EPFL)

For those with extreme mobility problems, such as paralysis following spinal cord injury or neurological disease, telepresence can greatly help to offset social isolation. However, controlling a mobile telepresence device through obstacles like doorways can be difficult when fine motor skills have been compromised. Researchers from CNBI, EPFL and NCCR Robotics this week published a cunning solution that uses brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to enable patients to share control with the robot, making it far easier to navigate.

The idea  is for patients to use BCIs to remotely control a mobile telepresence robot, through which the user can move and communicate with friends using a bidirectional audio/video connection.

The study tested nine end users and 10 healthy participants using a BCI and telepresence robot. The aim was to study both the BCI configuration and shared control of the robot when used in tandem with this.

The system was tested using a non-invasive BCI to record brain impulses from a cap placed over the head on the sensorimotor complex, with 16 electroencephalogram (EEG) channels transmitting to the robot via Skype. Healthy participants, who were at home, were then asked to remotely manoeuvre the robot in the CNBI lab along a set path with obstacles (such as doorways and tables) and under four separate conditions: BCI shared control; BCI no shared control; manual shared control and manual no shared control. Two separate conditions (BCI shared control and BCI no shared control) were used with end-users.

https://youtu.be/I1KvtNhv9Yc

In the shared control condition, the robot uses sensors to avoid obstacles without instruction from the driver, this has two advantages:

Firstly, inaccuracies in the system are reduced. For example, if a participant instructs the robot to turn left, this can result in a hard turn or a gentle turn; the system isn’t able to detect which. With shared control, if the user wishes to travel through a doorway to the left, they instruct the robot to turn in that direction, and the robot uses its sensors to avoid the doorframe and travels safely through it.

The second advantage is that less information needs to be communicated from the user, thus reducing the cognitive workload. In shared control, participants were able to complete tasks in shorter time periods and with fewer commands.

Of the 19 participants, all were able to pilot the robot after training. There was no discernable difference in ability between disabled and able-bodied users. “Each of the nine subjects with disabilities managed to remotely control the robot with ease after less than 10 days of training,” said Prof. José del R. Millán, who was in charge of the study.

Where possible, patients were also allowed to control the robot through small residual movements, such as head leans that someone might perform while playing a video game, or pressing a button with their head. It was remarkable that these movements were shown to be no more effective in controlling the robot than using the information transmitted over the BCI alone.

Reference:

R. Leeb, L. Tonin, M. Rohm, L. Desideri, T. Carlson and J. Millán, “Towards Independence: A BCI Telepresence Robot for People with Severe Motor Disabilities,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 103, no. 6, pp. 969-982, Jun 2015. A

The foldable quadrotor is small enough to fit in a hand (Photo: LIS, EPFL, NCCR Robotics).

The use of robots to find victims after natural disasters is fast becoming commonplace, with well documented cases where robots have been sent into areas too dangerous for rescue workers.  While the issues surrounding robustness, control and autonomy are frequently cited as key areas for research, a  team from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics is working on another important aspect, how to make flying robots easily transportable and quick to deploy.

In a paper, which will be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2015, the team describes how they made a quadrotor with rapidly self-deploying, folding arms. Foldable aerial platforms currently use either beams or detachable appendages (e.g. DJI spreading wings series and SenseFly eBee), which require manipulation by the user, slowing the process down and introducing the possibility of human error. The presented prototype has self-deploying arms that go from completely stowed to ready-to-use in 0.3 seconds, meaning that multiple drones can be utilized at once in a very short period of time.

The origami arms are stored using a system of strategically placed magnets, which can use the torque and thrust generated by the propellers to break the magnetic seal, thus allowing the arms to deploy when the quadrotor is switched on. In order to make use of such a simple mechanism, the design team carefully considered the placement of the folds in the arms; to take advantage of the propeller’s torque, folds are parallel to the its axis.

The origami structures that make up the arms allow them to fold around the central core, reducing its volume to about a third of commercial quadrotors of a similar weight. To make the origami structures, the arms are constructed from a 0.3mm layer of fiberglass over Icarex, a lightweight and inextensible fabric. Two vertical folds in the 2D structure allow the arms to lie in the wrapped configuration. When the motor begins, the action of the propellers forces the magnets apart and allows the arm to straighten in its flat configuration, whereupon a second set of magnets attract and pull the horizontal fold (down the centre of the arm) closed, creating a stiff, 3D structure with no need for heavy locking mechanisms.

First author Stefano Mintchev holds the quadrotor (Photo: LIS, EPFL, Alain Herzog).

The folding quadrotor currently doesn’t have an automatic “putting away” mode, meaning that the arms must be manually returned to the wrapped configuration. However, at the deployment stage, where speed is of the essence when trying to locate vulnerable people, this mechanism may just be a lifesaver.

Reference

S. Mintchev, L. Daler, G. L’Eplattenier, L. Saint-Raymond & D. Floreano, “Foldable and Self-Deployable Pocket Sized Quadrotor,” In 2015 IEEE International conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015), Seattle, Washington, USA, May 26-30, 2015.  A pdf of the full article can be downloaded from infoscience.

Photo: Courtesy Audi.

Last month, Swiss startup noonee completed the first round of testing for their Chairless Chair with German car manufacturer Audi. The Chairless Chair is a wearable sitting exoskeleton for people working on construction lines that is designed to allow movement while still providing enough support to prevent the repetitive stress and health problems that are so common in this kind of work. 

Rather than just providing a chair to sit in, noonee avoids the issue of muscle wastage by designing the exoskeleton to support the wearer in such a way that they continue to use their muscles.

The version of the Chairless Chair tested at Audi is called TITAN, which made out of titanium. The next stage of development will be to create a version manufactured from carbon.

noonee CEO Keith Gunura said, “With the user feedback we collected we are now stepping up development of the Chairless Chair to bring it to an amazing product that provides the support needed while working. Our target is that early Q1 2016 there will be a ready product to push forward the ‘Chair-olution’ to the rest of the world!” noonee is a spin-off from the Swiss NCCR Robotics.

Dr. Mathias Keil, Head of Industrial Engineering Methods at AUDI AG added “With the use of the chairless chair, we are continuously improving ergonomics in assembly operations. We also anticipate new applications for colleagues with reduced physical capabilities.”

Interested companies can register their interest by sending an email.

• Noonee: The chairless Chair
• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Unpowered exoskeleton improves efficiency of human walking
• 3 exoskeleton companies go public

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

Sensory-Motor Tissues for Soft Robots

In this video, PhD student at LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics Jun Shintake explains his project “Sensory-Motor tissues for Soft Robots”.

For more information on this project please see:

The project’s website

New soft antagonistic actuator enables robots to fold

A foldable antagonistic actuator (academic paper)

Variable stiffness material based on rigid low-melting-point-alloy microstructures embedded in soft poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) (academic paper)

Ground-Air collaboration between robots (Photo: RPG and Alain Herzog).

Working in the field of rescue robotics, the Robotics Perception Group (UZH and NCCR Robotics) works on how to get air robots communicating with ground robots, with the aim of exploiting the strengths of each by working in a team.  In the video below, student Elias Müggler explains how he is doing this.

For further information:

Robotics Perception Group website

Aerial-guided Navigation of a Ground Robot among Movable Obstacles (paper by Elias Müggler)

Autonomous flying robots – Davide Scaramuzza at TedxZurich:

Demonstration of the project, winning the Kuka innovation award 2014:

The Pleurobot (Photo: Hillary Sanctuary & BioRob).

The Pleurobot is a bioinspired robot being developed by the BioRob at EPFL and NCCR Robotics. Taking it’s cues from the salamander, the Pleurobot is a walking robot that can change its gait to help it to navigate uneven terrain, and is currently learning to swim.  Watch the video to see the researchers discuss what they are doing with the Pleurobot and how they hope to improve it in future.

For further information on the Pleurobot please see:

The project’s homepage

Introducing Pleurobot (video)

Flyability, a spin off company from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics, has won the $1M inaugural UAE Drones for Good competition with Gimball, the world’s first crash resilient drone.

The award was initiated by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai with the aim of “transforming these exciting technologies into practical solutions for improving people’s lives today”.  Referred to by some as “the World Cup of Drones”, the competition involved the 39 semi finalists showcasing their technology in front of a panel of international judges. Flyability impressed observers with its ability to fly in disaster tight and cluttered disaster zones, outside a pilot’s direct line of sight. Also noted was the Gimball’s unique design, which actively invites collisions rather than trying to avoid them. Its rotating gimbal system and protective wire cage not only keep the drone safe from crashes, but also protect humans working in close proximity to the device. The team was awarded $1M USD in prize money.

Flyability SA is one year old and its founders, Adrien Briod and Patrick Thévoz, are working to bring the Gimball to market. Their first aim is to use it for industrial inspection and to locate victims after natural disasters, but they plan to tackle the security and entertainment markets at some point too.

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

• UAE launches “Robotics for Good” competition on the heals of Drones for Good success
• Drones For Good Award announces semi-finalists
• Minesweepers 2014: Outdoor robotic competition on humanitarian demining
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• The latest in ultra-affordable robots: AFRON competition announces winners
• Fukushima photo essay: A drone’s eye view

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

Knee orthosis as worn by first author Mike Tucker (photo: ReLab, ETHZ and Alain Herzog).

Much has been made of the numerous advances in robotic prosthetics and orthotics (P/O) over recent years, and the question of how to control these devices so that they work in accordance with the intention of the user is a continuing dilemma for roboticists. 

A team from four labs within NCCR Robotics, across ETH Zurich and EPFL (ReLab, ETH Zurich; LSRO, EPFL; SMS, ETH Zurich and CNBI, EPFL) have recently published a joint paper in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, in which 10 experts from the field review the state of the art in control approaches for active lower limb P/Os. They argue that for P/Os to be fully viable and to advance further, they must be treated as part of a framework whereby the control system becomes integrated with the user’s sensorimotor system.

Traditionally, the fields of orthotics and prosthetics have been viewed separately, with hardware and controllers developed with a specific portion of the body in mind (i.e. knee, ankle and hips). By taking a broad survey that includes research for all joints of the lower limbs across the different fields (rather than just looking at a small subset), it is hoped that future developments can blur the lines between fields and create technologies that can ultimately restore walking to those with physical or neurological impairments.

This open access review pieces together where the state of the art is now and what work still needs to be done, providing valuable background about the field.

The authors behind the paper have been working to enhance communication between research groups, and to promote a more holistic approach to P/O devices. One of the co-authors is organizing next year’s Cybathlon, where teams comprised of bionic technology developers and a pilot will compete in one of six races.The competition’s ultimate aim is to increase discussion between academia, industry and end users through friendly competition.

The DALER is a winged robot that can also walk.

The issue of how to use one robot across multiple terrains is an ongoing question in robotics research. In a paper published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics today, a team from LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics propose a new kind of flying robot that can also walk. Called the DALER (Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot), the robot uses adaptive morphology inspired by the common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, meaning that the wings have been actuated using a foldable skeleton mechanism covered with a soft fabric so that they can be used both as wings and as legs (whegs).

The DALER is being designed to be used in search and rescue operations, and its dual modes of locomotion will enable it to fly long distances to survey large spaces in a short timespan, and then to walk into dangerous or inaccessible areas.

One of the main problems in trying to get a flying robot to walk in small spaces is the surface areas of the wings. The wings of a flying robot must be wide in order to maintain flight, but this makes it difficult for them to fit into smaller spaces. After observing D. rotundus, the research team used a foldable actuator that allows the wings to fold into a smaller space, and to rotate around a hinge that attaches the whegs to the body in order to enable walking. D. rotundus doesn’t look very pretty when it walks, but it has certainly perfected the art of using all four limbs for two purposes.

The DALER using its wings to walk. Wingerons at the end of the wings rotate to facilitate walking.

To design the robot, the team had to first designate the primary mode of locomotion – in this case flight, as the DALER will cover the longest distances this way. The wings were then adapted for walking, taking into consideration the need to not add extra weight when the DALER is in flight mode. The resulting wing is equipped with wingerons, with an axis of rotation close to their centre of aerodynamic pressure and physical centre, so as to satisfy the constraints of both ground locomotion and flight. The best shape found for these wingerons is a triangular one.

The addition of wingerons poses a problem regarding the use of actuators. Flight maneuverability requires rapid wingeron movements and low torque, whereas walking requires the opposite conditions. To cope with this problem, the DALER uses a terrestrial actuator configuration, but with an optimized wingeron size, to force the working point of flight control inside the operating range of the terrestrial actuator, while not compromising flight maneuverability.

A second issue in creating a fixed wing drone capable of walking on the ground is with the morphology, thanks to the different centre of mass requirements for the two modes of locomotion. For this reason the DALER is equipped with foldable wings, so, much like the bat that inspired it, the DALER can walk on its haunches. These adaptations mean that the DALER can reach 20m/s in the air and 6cm/s on the ground, with a maximum step distance of 6cm.

Researchers hope that in the future the DALER might be used to find victims in dangerous areas after a natural disaster, for example. They envision the DALER being remotely deployed to fly to an affected area, and then walking through a disaster zone (e.g. a damaged building) to locate victims so that human rescue teams can concentrate their efforts where they are needed, rather than using time to search for victims in a dangerous environment. Future development of the DALER will include the ability to hover and to take off autonomously from the ground – necessary features if the robot is to return safely to its home base after a mission.

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

• Multi-purpose wings allow flying robot to walk across rough terrain
• Robots Podcast: Origami robots
• Robot bodies and how to evolve them
• ShanghAI Lectures: Josh Bongard “Morphological Change in Machines Accelerates the Evolution of Robust Behavior”
• Robots Podcast: Bio-inspired locomotion

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

The e-dura is able to function while being bent (photo: © EPFL 2015)

A team from EPFL and NCCR Robotics lead by Profs Stéphanie Lacour, Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera published an article in Science today describing their e-dura implant that could revolutionise how we think about and treat paralysis. Until now, implants placed beneath the dura mater of the spinal cord have caused significant tissue damage when used over long periods. Research shows that the new e-dura implant is viable for months at a time in animal subjects. The team is now moving on to clinical trials in human subjects and is developing their prototype to take to market.

Previous work by the team have enabled animals paralysed by spinal cord injury (SCI) to voluntarily walk again using both chemical and electrical stimulation. While this was a huge advancement in both engineering and biomedicine, there are a number of issues with moving this highly successful laboratory experiment to every day human life, as previous iterations used wire electrodes which were limited to two sites and were difficult to place accurately on the spinal cord. Drug delivery was via an intraperitoneal injection, i.e. an injection into the body cavity. While the results were outstanding, more work needed to be done before this solution could be taken out of a lab situation and into a real world one.

The cracked gold conducting tracks carry impulses, while the fluidic channel provides chemical stimulation (Photo: © EPFL 2015).

What is presented in the Science paper is a soft and stretchable implant which can be directly placed beneath the dura mater, the nervous system’s protective casing, and onto the spinal cord for months at a time, a length of time which would result in significant tissue damage with all previous surface implants. The e-dura is also designed to carry electrical impulses and chemicals. Under experimental conditions, walking was restored in paralysed rats after implanting followed by two weeks of training using a robotic postural interface also developed as part of NCCR Robotics.

The 200nm thick implant is predominantly made of silicone covered with 35nm thick microcracked gold conducting tracks which can stretch and rebound without damage. The electrodes contained within the implant are made of a unique mix of silicone and platinum microbeads, allowing the implant to function and conduct electricity when moved in any orientation, this combination of the flexible electrodes and conducting tracks mean that electrical impulses can be delivered to the spinal cord. A complimentary fluidic microchannel (100μm x 50μm in cross section) delivers neurotransmitters to reactivate the nerves within the spinal cord. E-dura is implanted over the lumbosacral segments below the site of injury and engages with the “dormant” lumbar locomotor circuits.

The unique implant is able to sit directly on the spinal cord or brain.

The effectiveness of the e-dura is down to its mechanical properties which allow it to be soft and elastic, thus ensuring that it does not rub against the spinal cord causing the issues seen in alternative implants. To create an implant to be so soft and flexible but that is also capable of electrical stimulation and local drug delivery, and this over several weeks in vivo was no small task and involved a team comprising experts in materials science, electronics, neuroscience, medicine and algorithm programming.

Co-author Prof. Grégoire Courtine says of the implant that it’s “ the first neuronal surface implant designed from the start for long-term application ”, and, although it’s only been tested in animals so far, the long term applications and potential implications for the disabled community are clear. As the dura mater also surrounds the brain, it is not just SCI patients who could benefit, but also potentially those with neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s. The team is now moving on to clinical trials in human subjects and are developing their prototype to take to market.

The Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics (NCCR Robotics) is a federally funded programme bringing together robotics laboratories from EPFL, ETH Zurich, University of Zurich and University of Lugano to work on wearable, rescue and educational robots.

A full transcript of the paper will be published in print on 09.01.2015 and is available online at sciencemag.org: Minev, I.R., Musienko, P., Hirsch, A., Barraud, Q., Wenger, N., Moraud, E.M., Gandar, J., Campogrosso, M., Milekovic, T., Asboth, L., Torres, R.F., Vachicouras, N., Liu, Q., Pavlova, N., Duis, S., Larmagnac, A., Vörös, J., Micera, S., Suo, Z., Courtine, G. and Lacour, S., “Electric dura mater for long-term multimodal neural interfaces,” Science, Vol. 347 (6218), pp. 159-163, 2015.

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Working out the mechanics of walking is a major step towards creating assistive technologies.

When thinking about robots that can be used to care for the elderly, most people imagine humanoid robots that are meant to help with cooking, cleaning and socializing. But what if robots could be used to keep elderly people from needing help in the first place? Walking assistive devices could be just the tool.

A key element of life quality for the ageing population is preservation of mobility. Being able to walk unassisted is essential for independent living and a crucial driver in maintaining quality of life and self-autonomy. In elderly populations, a wide variety of medical issues lead to loss of mobility, from stroke (CVA) to poorly healed fractures and general loss of muscle mass. Loss of mobility is therefore a key driver in the commonly reported issue of loneliness in elderly people – it makes sense that if it is a struggle to leave your house, you will do so less.

The first requirement for free walking is sufficient muscle strength, not just for walking but also for the associated tasks of day to day life, such as sitting-to-standing motions (and visa-versa) and ascending and descending stairs. For various reasons, the elderly population is subject to weakening muscular power and this is a larger driver in the difficulties that this population begins to face with such tasks.

LSRO (EPFL) in association with NCCR Robotics, propose an assistive device targeted for exactly this situation. Based on an exoskeleton, it is being designed to be usable at home, without permanent human assistance. It should allow normal walking without any impediment. It should provide assistive muscular power only when needed and without any specific command action other than natural motion of the legs.

For a first prototype, the focus has been on the hip joint, a key joint for walking assistance, and an assumption has been made that ankles and knees can still perform their normal functions. “Partial devices” such as those proposed by the Swiss team may offer promising solutions to issues faced by the elderly, who may experience excessive weakness in one joint (here, the hips), by providing a lighter weight and less invasive solution to full exoskeletons. Translating these needs into engineering specifications leads to the following requirements: A single motorised degree of freedom (pivoting of the femur in the sagittal plane), preserving the full mobility of the remaining degrees-of-freedom, high power and low weight, “transparency” for normal walking, no specific control action (such as a “joystick” command) of any kind.

The exoskeleton is designed to be easy to wear, without impeding movement.

The kinematic design of our device is such that torque is intrinsically high around the horizontal position of the femur (typical for sitting-to-standing, stair climbing) and is backdrivable in standing or walking posture (high compliance, “transparence”), thus allowing effortless and swift walking motion. The transmission ratio between motor and end-effector is thus intrinsically, by design, continuously adapted at an optimal value.

Our new types of actuators have been developed so as to fit the requirements of common activities of daily life. For instance, a variable reduction using a ball-screw and bar mechanism to assist different activities such as standing up from a sitting position or standard walking has been evaluated. A high torque is required during the sit-to-stand transitions when the flexion angle of the hip is around 70° from vertical. During walking, less torque is required but higher dynamics is needed. A smaller reduction ratio is therefore better adapted when the flexion angle is less important (i.e. in the walking range of motion). In order to create this specific transmission a ball-screw with an excavator-like mechanism was implemented.

The influence on gait of this kind of robotic hip orthoses are now being assembled and tested in a collaboration between LSRO at EPFL, SMS Lab at ETH Zurich and several clinical centres of elderly care. As the users are able to move on their own, it is very important that the exoskeletons do not. Indeed the added limitations imposed by a sub-optimally designed device may overshadow the benefits that it is intended to provide. The influence of different design parameters such as kinematic configuration, overall mass or user interface are therefore evaluated in collaboration with the Sensory-Motor Systems Lab (SMS) at ETH Zurich.

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A new foldable actuator has been successfully used to fly a MAV.

Traditionally, many key robot components (including sensors and actuators) are rigid, and this makes it difficult for researchers and industry to make them truly compliant with their surroundings. It’s with this problem in mind that a team from NCCR Robotics in the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and the Microsystems for Space Technologies Laboratory both at EPFL in Switzerland have developed a new soft actuator that enables robots to fold.

To use hard actuators requires a complex design and can make the final structure fragile – and this is a problem when developing robots for use in cluttered environments such as search and rescue or surveying. Recent solutions have used shape memory alloys (SMAs), pneumatic actuators and electroactive polymers – each with their own advantages but also with disadvantages.

The actuator uses two DEAs

To get around these issues, the NCCR team placed two stacked or single dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) on top of each other in an antagonistic configuration in order to create an actuator that allows bidirectional actuation and passive folding. Each DEA consists of a thin elastomer membrane between two compliant electrodes – the opposing charges on each electrode generate an electrostatic force (Maxwell stress), which squeezes the membrane causing thinning and expansion in the direction of free boundary conditions and therefore results in actuation stretch.

The actuator itself consists of two rigid arms connected via elastic hinges, and two sets of DEAs in an antagonistic configuration. When an electric current is applied to one of the DEAs it creates a biased stress between the two DEAs, thus bending the actuator. What is particularly exciting is that this actuator can be literally bent in half without being damaged in any way .

The actuator can be folded completely in half without being damaged

As a result of this robustness, the team behind the actuator have tested it as an elevon (surface used to control pitch and roll) on a remotely controlled, fixed-wing MAV. The elevons were used successfully for numerous flights, with a hand launch and a ground landing (landing is a particularly dangerous time for hardware). The elevon must sustain an angle during flight, meaning that the aerodynamic force acts on its surface, another a common reason for failure in flying robots. A good correlation found between the control signal and movement of the robot illustrates the high performance of the actuator.

What is particularly striking about this actuator is how simply it can be designed and made. By using this structure without additional mechanical parts, transmission loss is prevented. Further, by using a silicon type elastomer, a fast response speed and good positioning control can be achieved.

Fully foldable machines
The possibilities for this kind of compliant actuator are endless – from handling fragile goods in manufacturing to safe human-robot interactions. Future uses may also enable robots to self-deploy without the need for further actuation, leading to a generation of robots capable of programmable shape change and reconfiguration.

The full paper by Shintake, J., Rosset, S., Schubert, B. E., Floreano, D. and Shea, H.R. will be published in an upcoming edition of IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics and can be downloaded ahead of printing here.

Full registration for the Cybathlon, a sporting event for disabled athletes using robotic assistive technologies is now open. The event will take place in Zurich, Switzerland on 8^th October 2016.

Technological teams and pilots are encouraged to make use of earlybird registration, which is now open until 31.12.2014. A team must be comprised of a technology provider and a pilot, however teams without pilots and pilots without teams are invited to contact the Cybathlon organisational team, who will be happy to put together collaborations.

http://youtu.be/U9wVgi-em9s

The Cybathlon is organised in six races: arm prosthesis, BCI, FES bike, leg prosthetic, powered exoskeleton and powered wheelchair. A series of new videos aimed at introducing the concepts to the general public have been published on the Cybathlon Youtube channel – you can watch these videos below.

The finalised rules and regulations for the event have also been published on the website, including information on the types of allowed devices, the inclusion criteria for both technologies and pilots and information about each race and the obstacles which will allow teams to move into the next stage of development in preparation for the event.

We look forward to seeing pilots, technology providers and keen spectators in Zurich in 2016!

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Noonee® is a new Start Up company coming out of research in robotics in Switzerland. Aimed at solving healthcare problems within the manufacturing industry, noonee adopts a Chairless Chair® approach.

Within the manufacturing industry, keeping employees healthy has been a major concern and challenge for many companies around the world for a long time. Jobs often involve spending long periods of time bending and crouching and as a result can leave staff with substantial back and knee problems. Of 215 million industry sector workers in the EU, a staggering 85 million are reported to suffer from muscle related disorders. Market solutions that are currently available may also pose problems as they limit short term tiredness by taking all the weight of the user, which can lead to muscle weakening. What is needed is a product that can support staff working on production lines while keeping them healthy.

Coming out of NCCR Robotics lab, the Bio-Inspired Robotics laboratory at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, noonee® is a revolutionary start-up business aiming to address this significant social issue that previous solutions have not dealt with successfully. The idea is to provide an exoskeleton that supports the weight of the user only when they feel tired , rather than continuously taking on this weight – meaning that the wearer is using their muscles and actively, rather than passively, sitting.

The “chair” is not a chair as we know it, but more of an exoskeleton for the legs with a belt to attach it to the hips and straps that wrap around the thighs. The slim structure has joints that allow the wearer to move freely, but when the wearer is in a position they wish to stay in for a long time (e.g. crouching under a car on a production line), this position can be fixed, meaning that the wearer does not need to use the same muscle groups for long periods of time to hold the position. The advantage of such a structure is that it can be worn anywhere and can also be used when standing and walking. This reduces the space required as compared to a traditional chair and reduces the hassle when compared to other solutions, such as chairs that are strapped to the user. The Chairless Chair® is currently still in prototype and the current version requires the user to fix a position by crouching down into the required position and pushing a button. It is hoped that future iterations of the Chairless Chair® will be actuated to allow the system to become intelligent and understand the intention of the user, allowing it to be fixed into position without any additional input from the wearer.

If you’re interested and want to be a part of prototype testing, check out their website and get in touch. Feel free to also ask questions in the comment section below.

Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world. Learn more about us here. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

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VIDEO UPDATE 06/13 It’s June 2014 and all eyes are on Brazil. If you’re a football fan then June 12^th is the day you’ve been waiting for, but eagle-eyed technophiles are likely to have noticed one very exciting addition to the opening ceremony.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZrvdODe1QI

Given that the World Cup is a celebration of all things football, it seems only right that this event should showcase some emerging technologies that could help a disabled patient to achieve a dream that so many have – taking the first kick at the World Cup.

The Walk Again Project is a large collaborative project headed by Prof. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and featuring researchers in the USA, Brazil, Germany and Switzerland. It aims to give movement back to a paralysed person by means of an exoskeleton using a wide range of technologies.

The exoskeleton is controlled through an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap placed over the head – the sensors on the cap read brain activity from the scalp. The cap then deciphers the intention of the user and transmits the instruction to the exoskeleton, which produces the gait movement using a set of hydraulic actuators. While EEG is less sensitive than implanting sensors on the brain, it has the advantage of being non-invasive, meaning that the teenager was not required to undergo surgery for this one-off event.

Despite being made from alloys and polymers to make it as light and flexible as possible, the exoskeleton weighs in at around 60kg.

For someone who is paraplegic, a major issue when using an exoskeleton is that the person is not able to feel their legs and therefore cannot know what position they are in. Think for a second how hard walking would be if you had absolutely no sensation in your legs – even if your muscles were able to do it, the physical stimuli that we all receive and process without active thought would not be there – so the mental struggle that you would feel – along with the lack of haptic feedback that able-bodied people take for granted – would probably stop you from being able to walk effectively.

This is where the haptic sleeve system comes in to play. The exoskeleton user wears sleeves created by a team lead by Prof. Hannes Bleuler at LSRO, EPFL and NCCR Robotics and stemming from the ongoing PhD work of Simon Gallo. The sleeves are embedded with vibrators that are spread over the forearm – these vibrators then give a haptic feedback to the wearer as they indicate not only if the foot is on the floor (from sensors on the foot), but which part of the foot is on the floor, giving a proprioceptive effect and allowing the user to walk upright. Thus the wearer can sense what feels like an artificial footprint on their arm as the sensors roll from heel to toe. It is for this part of the technology that the team have spent months training with volunteers, trying out different arrangements of actuators on the arms, trying epsilateral and contralateral arrangements and using virtual reality and an avatar to allow the user to see real time limb positioning.

One of the major challenges of the project was the training process for the eight volunteers (males and females), to enable them to master control of an exoskeleton directly with their brain in a stressful environment like a stadium. The hopeful volunteers have trained in a realistic virtual environment mimicking the real stadium while receiving feedback from the tactile sleeves for the past 8 months with the final decision on who would take the kick made only last week.

The second worry for the project was that electromagnetic fields from cell phones carried by people in the stadium would block electronic signals in the exoskeleton – however testing in a comparable stadium showed that this would not be a problem.

The researchers hope that by using such a high profile event as the World Cup, the general public will gain a greater understanding and a greater tolerance of what wearable technologies can do, along with giving those with disabilities a hope for the future.

To keep up to date with NCCR Robotics, please sign up to our monthly infoletter and news bulletins, and follow us on Twitter @NCCRRobotics.

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Four researchers from Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, have won the prestigious KUKA Innovation Award (20.000 EUR) for their project “Collaboration of Flying and Ground Robots for Search-And-Rescue Missions” at the AUTOMATICA trade fair in Munich.

The ongoing project is part of the “Rescue Scenario” of NCCR Robotics, where researchers across Switzerland work together to develop robots that can be used to make disaster relief efforts safer and more efficient. This specific element of the Rescue Scenario involves teams of flying robots working together with ground robots. The idea behind the project is that, in a cluttered environment after a disaster, it may be too dangerous for human rescuers to enter a building, and so robots may be utilized. However, in such environments both flying and ground robots suffer from limitations: by working together, the flying robots can be used as the eye for the ground robot.

For the competition last week, the team presented the collaboration of a quadrotor and a KUKA youBot in a mock-up disaster scenario. The quadrotor is first sent to make a map of the scene, i.e., detecting obstacles and people who need help. Then, it commands the youBot to these people to deliver a first-aid package. From the air, it can tell the youBot where to go and which obstacles to remove on the way.

Have a look at the demo showed at AUTOMATICA!

The word “robot” conjures up many different things to many people, but how many of them immediately think of furniture? It sounds futuristic but the Biorobotics laboratory at EPFL, sponsored by NCCR Robotics is working on exactly that – robotic furniture, or Roombots.

Roombots are a modular self-reconfiguring robotic system, and are a direct response to the pressure on space that is so common within large cities today. Each Roombots module is made of two spheres, approximately the size of a grapefruit, and contains three motors (for rotational movements), on-board computation, and a battery that allows for at least one hour of operating time. Modules also contain a latch-based connection mechanism that allows them to connect to each other or to connector ports in the environment.  The rotational movements and the dynamic connectors allow the modules to form any shape that may be desired – this means that you could have breakfast on a table, but while you are at work during the day, the Roombots transform into a series of chairs for a party that you are hosting that evening.

Using connector ports embedded in the floor, walls and ceiling, Roombots can crawl and climb on any surface, meaning that furniture does not need to be connected only to the floor, but can also hang from the ceiling or stick to the wall.  As it may not always be possible to embed ports everywhere in the room, the Roombots have also been designed to be able to “walk” using an oscillating motion controlled by a network of coupled oscillators in the modules, to allow them to travel across a room. The net result is that the modules appear to walk like a turtle or wiggle like a worm until they reach their intended point and fix on to a connector port.

The team behind the Roombots have had to overcome a series of research challenges in terms of hardware and control. For the dynamic connector for instance, the locking mechanism must be strong but flexible, and must be able to lock in any position and arrangement with no translation or rotation of the structure after locking. Next, grippers must be large enough that even when modules do not match up perfectly, the locking mechanism must still be able to fit into place, but small enough so as to still be fully contained within the robot. The connection mechanism has been designed to deal with both issues by employing a scooping mechanism, which researchers say allows up to 3.5 mm misalignment. Many other problems had to be solved for the Roombots to work properly as demonstrated on a series of videos found here.

So far, Roombots modules have been used to walk, negotiate corners and autonomously create simple table structures by connecting with each other and using connections to lift the tabletop, but researchers are still working on research and technical challenges such as compensating unwanted bending in the mechanical structure (related to building larger complex 3D structures), developing the best-suited algorithms for reconfiguration or locomotion control, and finding the most appropriate interaction strategy for the end-users.

As we have been enjoying amazing scenes from Sochi, Russia where disabled athletes have been completing in the winter Paralympics, researchers in Switzerland have been considering a new route for athletes for whom normal devices such as prosthetic feet and modified wheelchairs are not suitable. For these athletes, robotic technology that can interface with the user, such as powered exoskeletons, may be better adapted to allow fair and exciting competitions.

On 8th October 2016 Zurich, Switzerland will host the Cybathlon, a championship for athletes using robotic assistive devices. Teams consisting of one or more “pilots” and a technology provider (academia or industry) will compete in one of six disciplines:

• Brain Computer Interface (BCI) race: BCIs will be used to enable pilots to control avatars in a racing game on a computer screen.
• Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) bike race: FES devices will be used to help pilots with complete spinal chord injuries to perform pedaling movements, thus enabling a short bike race to take place on a circular track.
• Leg prosthetics race: Amputees fitted with actuated exoprosthetic devices will compete in a short obstacle course.
• Powered exoskeleton race: Actuated exoskeleton devices will enable pilots with complete spinal chord injuries to complete a short obstacle course.
• Powered wheelchair race: Pilots will steer powered wheelchairs around an obstacle course.
• Arm prosthetics race: Actuated exoprosthetic hands and arms will be used by pilots to complete a coordination race.

Each race has its own set course complete with obstacles and activities (e.g. sitting and standing) that have been specially designed to test the compatibility of prosthetics with their pilot.

Teams will work together in advance of the race to create assistive devices that are functional and practical for the specially designed courses, and it is hoped that not only will the event deepen relations between the disabled and research robotics community, but also strengthen ties between research in industry and academia.

This event will open up athletics to individuals who had previously been barred by the rules governing prosthetics in international sport. One key group are those suffering from motor conditions where reflexes and control of limbs may not be sufficient to allow individuals to have the competitive edge over rivals. To enable participation of this group any robotic assistance is allowed, the only limits are that devices must be controlled by the wearer and carry their own power supply.

Sport is commonly understood to be a great unifier, and the organisers at NCCR Robotics in Switzerland see no reason why this can’t be extended to groups who have not been previously included.

Register to become a pilot or technological team and learn all the details on the Cybathlon website. or see the Cybathlon’s Facebook for regular updates. Please note that pilots and technological teams do not need to know each other before the competition – organisers will pair up those who enter alone. Bursaries covering travel expenses will be made available for pilots and academic teams on application.

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Roboticists and doctors working in Switzerland and Italy have come together to develop a bionic hand that provides sensory feedback in real time, meaning that an amputee can be given back the ability to feel and modify grip like someone with a “real” hand. Using a combination of surgically implanted electrodes (connected at one end to the nervous system, and at the other end to sensors) and an algorithm to convert signals, the team has produced a hand that sends information back to the brain that is so detailed that the wearer could even tell the hardness of objects he was given to hold.

In a paper published in Science Translational Medicine in Feb. 2014, the team from EPFL (Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy) headed by Prof. Micera of EPFL and NCCR-Robotics presented an entirely new type of prosthetic hand, Lifehand 2, that is capable of interfacing with the nervous system of the wearer in order to give the ability to grip and sense like a real hand – including being able to feel shape and hardness of an object. This life-like sensation of feeling is something that has never before been achieved in prosthetics.

Using a combination of the basic concepts from TMR (targeted muscle reinnervation) – a new but increasingly sophisticated technique where nerves are rerouted across the chest and can allow a sense of touch when stimulated with tactile traces – and new robotic techniques, the team has allowed an amputee to feel as though his old hand was back during a series of 700 tests.

In order for the hand to function, a looped sensory feedback mechanism is employed. The first step of this mechanism involves transverse intrafascicular multichannel electrodes (TIMEs) being surgically implanted in the median and ulna nerves in the arm – those that control the sensory fields of the palm and fingers. The electrodes are then connected to a number of sensors distributed across the prosthetic hand in locations that mimic the locations of tendons on a real hand. The signals from the sensors are then relayed to an external unit where they are processed before being passed back to the nerves in a format that allows the brain to understand how much pressure is being exerted on the sensors, much like how information is passed from a real hand to the brain.

Residual muscular signals are then taken from 5 positions on the forearm and are used to decode the intentions of the user, and a power source is used to activate the hand in one of four different grasping motions.

Results of the 700 tests performed during the study were positive, showing that even when the subject was tested under audio and visual deprivation he was able to modify his grip according to what he was holding – so a soft object such as a sponge or an orange was naturally held with a softer grip than a hard object such as a cricket ball. By the end of four weeks of testing, 93% accuracy was recorded for pressure control in the index finger and it was found that the brain automatically assimilated data from multiple sensors in the palm of the hand. The subject was able to distinguish the stiffness of the object within 3 seconds, a response comparable to that of a natural hand, and said “When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square”.

For many years medical scientists have used prosthetics to replace the lost hands of amputees. Over time, these hands have become more and more sophisticated, using materials that are lighter, more flexible and that look more and more realistic. Such prosthetics are considered invaluable by some amputees but do not have a high uptake within the community due to issues with use and comfort – if a prosthetic is heavy, uncomfortable and cannot move like a real hand it might not be practical for everyday life.

While prosthetics is not new, just the idea of a technique that allows sensors, motors and human nerves to communicate so easily with each other in real time would have been unthinkable a few years ago. For this to have now been developed into a method that supports the ability of the brain to assimilate impulses from 2 different areas to allow the subject to feel the neurologically complex action of palm closure is something exceptional.

Another particularly encouraging aspect of the study was the level of success despite it being 8 years since the chosen subject’s hand was amputated. The team were concerned that because of the long timescales involved, the nerves would be too degraded for use. However, the tests indicated that this was not the case, thus opening up the technology to a wide range of potential users.

As with any other science or technology project, the work is still ongoing. Although the functionality of the hand has been demonstrated to be lifelike, the appearance of a hand made of plastics, iron, tendons and electrical circuits is not, so the team is working on creating a sensitive polymer skin to make the appearance of the hand more realistic and more usable in everyday life situations. In a parallel line of work, in order for the hand to be made portable the electronics required for the sensory feedback system must be miniaturized so that they can be implanted into the prosthetic.