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Articles
Centipede microrobots
Sabine Hauert
12 Nov 2011
Improvements in microfabricaton techniques and an increased understanding of insect locomotion has led to the development of impressive centimeter-sized legged robots. The cockroach-like robots seen i...
Underwater ROV keeps its eye on the target
Sabine Hauert
09 Nov 2011
Underwater robots can be used to inspect water-bound structures such as ship hulls. Remote-operating these vehicles can be tricky if they are under-actuated, meaning you can’t fully control thei...
Learning hand motions from humans
Sabine Hauert
08 Nov 2011
Although human hands have lots of degrees of freedom, we typically don’t use most configurations. For example, we usually don’t move the last two joints of our fingers independently. Now l...
From iCub to artist
Sabine Hauert
12 Oct 2011
Learning how to perceive shapes and act on them is what allows us to interact with our world. Whether it’s grasping for an object, drawing or dancing.
With this in mind, Mohan et al. have been ...
Compliant actuator for 1DOF hopper
Sabine Hauert
26 Sep 2011
For a long time, robots were seen as rigid machines driven by sturdy motors. This raised worries concerning the safety of people interacting with them. One option to make robots safer is to equip them...
Data-driven grasping
Sabine Hauert
12 Sep 2011
As robots enter our industries and homes, they will be required to manipulate a large diversity of objects with unknown shapes, sizes and orientations. One approach would be to have the robot spend ti...
Building topological maps to get around
Sabine Hauert
31 Aug 2011
Service robots entering our homes will need to map their environment and figure out their location as they move around. Previous articles discussed Self-Localization And Mapping (SLAM) approaches that...
Yeti robot avoids snow traps
Sabine Hauert
24 Jul 2011
Have you ever skied down an immaculate white slope? Hard to see the bumps, right?
The same is true for the Yeti robot that needs to drive through polar regions that feature obstacles, slopes and diffe...
Internal models of robot bodies
Sabine Hauert
06 Jul 2011
Robots that have an internal model of their body could potentially use it to predict how a motor action will affect their position and what sequence of actions will bring them to a desired configurati...
Bipedal walker adapts to passenger weight
Sabine Hauert
14 Jun 2011
The HUBO FX-1 is a two-legged robot with a cockpit area to carry passengers. Besides being very entertaining to ride around in, the robot could also be used to help wheelchair-bound people regain mobi...
Any-shape robot formations
Sabine Hauert
02 Jun 2011
Groups of robots that move in precise formations could be used to sense an environment from multiple points of view or navigate a warehouse in a compact manner. The challenge is to build formations in...
Underwater 3D mapping
Sabine Hauert
13 May 2011
We saw the need for good underwater robots during the Deepwater spill last summer. In such scenarios, a remote operator controls a robot equipped with a camera and means to build a 2D map of the envir...
Place recognition and localization with omnidirectional vision
Sabine Hauert
09 May 2011
Let’s say you just purchased a new service robot and you want it to be able to know its way in your apartment. The obvious thing to do would be to show it around, going from room to room saying ...
Stable visual navigation
Sabine Hauert
20 Apr 2011
If you’re trying to get from the couch to the fridge, you’ll probably be using vision to navigate and home-in on your fresh drink.
To make your camera-equipped robot do something similar, ...
Finding outdoor odor sources using particle filters
Sabine Hauert
05 Apr 2011
Robots with smell could be used to find sources of toxic gas, search for drugs, locate survivors under rubble or hidden mines. Robots have an advantage over sniffer dogs since they can enter dangerous...
Robots get students motivated to pursue STEM careers
Sabine Hauert
17 Mar 2011
Robotics is a great way to engage young students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. With this in mind, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML)...
Integrating path planning and robot control
Sabine Hauert
07 Mar 2011
There is often a conflict between planning the path a robot should take to achieve a desired task (high-level control) and the motion control needed for the robot to follow this path (low-level contro...
Real-time behavior-based control
Sabine Hauert
22 Feb 2011
Using behavior-based controllers, robots are theoretically able to rapidly react to their environment. This is typically done by having several behaviors, that map sensory input to actuator commands, ...
Simulated pronking robots move like springboks
Sabine Hauert
14 Feb 2011
If you’ve never seen a video of springboks gracefully pronking, have a look below.
Pronking is a gait where all legs are used in synchrony, usually resulting in relatively slow speeds but lo...
High-speed walkers pretend to go downhill
Sabine Hauert
03 Feb 2011
The typical way to make a bipedal robot walk is to actuate its leg joints, strap a bunch of sensors to measure its state and add a tight control loop to make sure it is performing the desired steps.
I...
Learning Bayesian filters without precise ground truth
Sabine Hauert
21 Jan 2011
As seen in a previous post, Bayes filters such as Kalman filters can be used to estimate the state of a robot. Usually, this requires having a model of how the robot’s sensor measurements relate...
Shared control for wheelchairs
Sabine Hauert
08 Jan 2011
To help aging populations with mobility, researchers are developing robotic wheelchairs. Typically, control switches between the user of the wheelchair and the robot when tasks become difficult or dan...
Learning behavioral models
Sabine Hauert
21 Dec 2010
It is often difficult to predict the high-level behavior of a robot given low-level models about sensors, actuators and controllers. You might know your robot will turn in response to obstacles but n...
Flying robot actors
Sabine Hauert
08 Dec 2010
Around a year ago, theater-goers at Texas A&M discovered Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The plot unfolds in a magical forest inhabited by fairies. To add to th...
Cooperative localization using Kalman filtering
Sabine Hauert
26 Nov 2010
Kalman filters are used in robotics to correct measurement errors. Imagine trying to precisely predict the position of an outdoor robot. The robot is equipped with a GPS and is able to measure the spe...
Cooperative payload transport with quadrotors
Sabine Hauert
18 Nov 2010
Just the other day, a noisy helicopter was flying above campus, carrying large batches of solar panels to hard to reach rooftops. You might have also seen people dangling from helicopters in rescue mi...
Adaptive walking using oscillators
Sabine Hauert
10 Nov 2010
Animal walking is thought to be driven by rhythmic signals sent through the spinal cord. These signals are translated to motions of the limbs. For a bipedal walker, such patterns would force leg swing...
Human motion database
Sabine Hauert
30 Oct 2010
By creating a database of human motions, Yamane et al. hope to allow robots to recognize human behaviors or move like humans. To do this, they analyze motion clips of people performing all sorts of ac...
Robotic chemistry
Sabine Hauert
18 Oct 2010
Stochastic self-assembly is a hot topic in chemistry and biology. The general idea is that if you pour building blocks into a recipient and stir, your blocks will eventually react with one another to ...
Robot coordination for fire response
Sabine Hauert
12 Oct 2010
Robots can work together to cooperatively execute tasks much faster than a single robot. In the scenario proposed by Jones et al. fire trucks are sent out to extinguish fires caused by a large-scale d...
SLAM with aerial images
Sabine Hauert
02 Oct 2010
Imagine arriving in a new city without a map. Starting from the train station, you might take a walk around the block before returning to your starting point. As you go you’ll probably start bui...
Exploration using Voronoi diagrams
Sabine Hauert
21 Sep 2010
How can a robot explore and make maps of new environments while avoiding obstacles?
One way is to let the robot remain at equal distance from its two nearest obstacles, thereby navigating exactly in b...
Robot formations that avoid obstacles
Sabine Hauert
13 Sep 2010
In formations, robots are positioned at a precise distance and sometimes angle from one another to form shapes. Robots that advance in formations can share communication, computation and sensing resou...
Adaptive bipedal walking on slopes
Sabine Hauert
06 Sep 2010
Imagine walking on a flat surface with your eyes blinded. If the slope below your feet changes, you’ll most likely change your posture to keep moving. To explain this, an idea from the 1950s say...
Social learning
Sabine Hauert
29 Aug 2010
Robots are portrayed as tomorrows helpers, be it in schools, hospitals, workplaces or homes. Unfortunately, such robots won’t be truly useful out-of-the-box because of the complexity of real-wor...
Local visual homing
Sabine Hauert
24 Aug 2010
How can a robot, using vision, go back to a previously visited location?
Möller et al. look at this research question, tagged “Local Visual Homing” in an intuitive manner inspired from so...
