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Articles
Drones and satellite imaging to make forest protection pay
Horizon Magazine
16 Dec 2018
by Steve Gillman
Every year 7 million hectares of forest are cut down, chipping away at the 485 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) stored in trees around the world, but low-cost drones and new satell...
Soft actor critic – Deep reinforcement learning with real-world robots
BAIR Blog
16 Dec 2018
By Tuomas Haarnoja, Vitchyr Pong, Kristian Hartikainen, Aurick Zhou, Murtaza Dalal, and Sergey Levine
We are announcing the release of our state-of-the-art off-policy model-free reinforcement learnin...
Visual model-based reinforcement learning as a path towards generalist robots
BAIR Blog
04 Dec 2018
By Chelsea Finn∗, Frederik Ebert∗, Sudeep Dasari, Annie Xie, Alex Lee, and Sergey Levine
With very little explicit supervision and feedback, humans are able to learn a wide range of motor skills ...
AdaSearch: A successive elimination approach to adaptive search
BAIR Blog
14 Nov 2018
By Esther Rolf∗, David Fridovich-Keil∗, and Max Simchowitz
https://youtu.be/a4SPB3VugFI
In many tasks in machine learning, it is common to want to answer questions given fixed, pre-collected...
ANYmal robot tested on offshore platform
Péter Fankhauser
04 Nov 2018
A crucial task for energy providers is the reliable and safe operation of their plants, especially when producing energy offshore. Autonomous mobile robots are able to offer comprehensive support thro...
Small flying robots able to pull objects up to 40 times their weight
NCCR Robotics
04 Nov 2018
Researchers from EPFL and Stanford have developed small drones that can land and then move objects that are 40 times their weight, with the help of powerful winches, gecko adhesives and microspines....
Drilling down on depth sensing and deep learning
BAIR Blog
24 Oct 2018
By Daniel Seita, Jeff Mahler, Mike Danielczuk, Matthew Matl, and Ken Goldberg
This post explores two independent innovations and the potential for combining them in robotics. Two years before the Ale...
Models of dinosaur movement could help us build stronger robots and buildings
Horizon Magazine
19 Oct 2018
By Sandrine Ceurstemont
From about 245 to 66 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Although well-preserved skeletons give us a good idea of what they looked like, the way their limbs worke...
Learning acrobatics by watching YouTube
BAIR Blog
18 Oct 2018
By Xue Bin (Jason) Peng and Angjoo Kanazawa
Whether it’s everyday tasks like washing our hands or stunning feats of acrobatic prowess, humans are able to learn an incredible array of skills by wa...
A fleet of miniature cars for experiments in cooperative driving
The deployment of connected, automated, and autonomous vehicles presents us with transformational opportunities for road transport. These opportunities reach beyond single-vehicle automation: by enabl...
Multi-joint, personalized soft exosuit breaks new ground
Wyss Institute
18 Sep 2018
By Benjamin Boettner
In the future, smart textile-based soft robotic exosuits could be worn by soldiers, fire fighters and rescue workers to help them traverse difficult terrain and arrive fresh at t...
First results of the ROSIN project: Robotics Open-Source Software for Industry
Thilo Zimmermann
18 Sep 2018
Open-Source Software for robots is a de-facto standard in academia, and its advantages can benefit industrial applications as well. The worldwide ROS-Industrial initiative has been using ROS, the Robo...
European robot network helps nurses and home builders
Thilo Zimmermann
10 Sep 2018
Four knowledge institutes across Europe - the Danish Technological Institute (DTI, DK), Fraunhofer IPA (DE), Tecnalia (ES) and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC, UK) - teamed up to offer highly...
Dexterous manipulation with reinforcement learning: Efficient, general, and low-cost
BAIR Blog
10 Sep 2018
In this post, we demonstrate how deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) can be used to learn how to control dexterous hands for a variety of manipulation tasks. We discuss how such methods can learn to...
When recurrent models don’t need to be recurrent
BAIR Blog
09 Aug 2018
By John Miller
An earlier version of this post was published on Off the Convex Path. It is reposted here with the author’s permission. In the last few years, deep learning practitioners have p...
Launch of ROBOTT-NET’s pilot projects
Thilo Zimmermann
24 Jul 2018
Irabia, Linak and Nissan have along with Trumpf, Maser, Piccolo, Weibel and Air Liquide been selected to team up on a real-world case study. Over the next 18 months ROBOTT-NET will take these eight vo...
Innovative programming software used to generate robot welding programs
Thilo Zimmermann
16 Jul 2018
Since programming is an extremely time-consuming business, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are often forced to manage without robots. Researchers from Fraunhofer IPA have therefore developed ...
One-shot imitation from watching videos
BAIR Blog
29 Jun 2018
By Tianhe Yu and Chelsea Finn
Learning a new skill by observing another individual, the ability to imitate, is a key part of intelligence in human and animals. Can we enable a robot to do the same, l...
BDD100K: A large-scale diverse driving video database
BAIR Blog
01 Jun 2018
By Fisher YuTL;DR, we released the largest and most diverse driving video dataset with richannotations called BDD100K. You can access the data for research now at http://bdd-data.berkeley.edu. We ha...
TDM: From model-free to model-based deep reinforcement learning
BAIR Blog
01 Jun 2018
By Vitchyr Pong
You’ve decided that you want to bike from your house by UC Berkeley to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a nice 20 mile ride, but there’s a problem: you’ve never ridden a bike befo...
ANYbotics wins ICRA 2018 Robot Launch competition!
Andra Keay and Silicon Valley Robotics
30 May 2018
ANYbotics led the way in the ICRA 2018 Robot Launch Startup Competition on May 22, 2018 at the Brisbane Conference Center in Australia. Although ANYbotics pitched last out of the 10 startups presentin...
Garbage-collecting aqua drones and jellyfish filters for cleaner oceans
Horizon Magazine
25 May 2018
By Catherine Collins
The cost of sea litter in the EU has been estimated at up to €630 million per year. It is mostly composed of plastics, which take hundreds of years to break down in nature, and...
Videos from European Robotics Forum 2018
SPARC
25 May 2018
The European Robotics Forum 2018 (ERF2018), the most influential meeting of the robotics community in Europe, took place in Tampere on 13-15 March 2018. ERF2018 brought together over 900 leading scien...
Robot transitions from soft to rigid
Wyss Institute
09 May 2018
By Leah Burrows
Even octopuses understand the importance of elbows. When these squishy, loose-limbed cephalopods need to make a precise movement — such as guiding food into their mouth — the musc...
Shared autonomy via deep reinforcement learning
BAIR Blog
24 Apr 2018
By Siddharth Reddy
Imagine a drone pilot remotely flying a quadrotor, using an onboard camera to navigate and land. Unfamiliar flight dynamics, terrain, and network latency can make this system chall...
ROBOTT-NET use case: Danfoss automated assembly line
Thilo Zimmermann
24 Apr 2018
Short delivery time, high flexibility and reduced costs for handling parts before assembly. These are the main goals that Danfoss Drives wanted to achieve by creating an automated assembly line. But w...
Robotic gaits to save energy
RAM-Lab
17 Apr 2018
The choice of gait, that is whether we walk or run, comes to us so naturally that we hardly ever think about it. We walk at slow speeds and run at high speeds. If we get on a treadmill and slowly ...
Towards a virtual stuntman
BAIR Blog
11 Apr 2018
Motion control problems have become standard benchmarks for reinforcement learning, and deep RL methods have been shown to be effective for a diverse suite of tasks ranging from manipulation to locomo...
Five projects make the first cut and receive a ROBOTT-NET pilot
Thilo Zimmermann
11 Apr 2018
It all started with 166 companies spread across 12 European countries appling for a “golden ticket” to ROBOTT-NET’s Voucher Program. 64 companies received a voucher and highly specialized consul...
European digital innovation hub strengthens robotics development
Thilo Zimmermann
30 Mar 2018
Digital innovation hubs are vital to create innovative solutions and employment. ROBOTT-NET is an example of a digital innovation hub, where four leading Research Technology Organizations (RTOs) in Eu...
Projects that will shape the future of robotics win the euRobotics Awards 2018
SPARC
26 Mar 2018
The European Robotics Forum 2018 (ERF2018) in Tampere brought together over 900 attendees from robotics academia and industry. To bridge the two, euRobotics hosted the Georges Giralt PhD Award 2017 &a...
European Robotics League winners revealed at #ERF2018
SPARC
21 Mar 2018
Award winners in robot competitions held by the European Robotics League (ERL) were named on 14 March 2018, during this year's European Robotics Forum (ERF), held in Tampere, Finland on 13–15 March....
SXSW 2018: Protect AI, robots, cars (and us) from bias
Oliver Mitchell
21 Mar 2018
As Mark Hamill humorously shared the behind-the-scenes of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” with a packed SXSW audience, two floors below on the exhibit floor Universal Robots recreated General Grievo...
Soft robots that can sense touch, pressure, movement and temperature
Wyss Institute
02 Mar 2018
By Leah Burrows
Researchers at Harvard University have built soft robots inspired by nature that can crawl, swim, grasp delicate objects and even assist a beating heart, but none of these devices has...
Learning robot objectives from physical human interaction
BAIR Blog
08 Feb 2018
Humans physically interact with each other every day – from grabbing someone’s hand when they are about to spill their drink, to giving your friend a nudge to steer them in the right direction, ph...
The millimeter-scale robot opens new avenues for microsurgery, microassembly and micromanipulation
Wyss Institute
02 Feb 2018
By Benjamin Boettner
Because of their high precision and speed, Delta robots are deployed in many industrial processes, including pick-and-place assemblies, machining, welding and food packaging. ...
